Google's Paranoid Android

1. The essence
As you've probably heard, Google has announced a partnership (Open Handset Alliance) with mobile and chipset manufacturer companies, to design and implement a new mobile plaform, Android.
While most general public hoped for a Google-branded handset announcement, the Android platform instead had been announced.

2. Why another platform?
Some might say - why try one more time?
Is there a place in the [rather small] smart mobile market preoccupied by Symbian, Windows Mobile, and multiple custom-built OS?
First of all, most current smartphone platforms have their own 'wrongs'.


Symbian is hard to develop for.



WinMobile is not reliable and hard on CPU.

Many others are too small to comment on.

3. Possible impact
The plaftorm will gain a significant (40-60%) share of the smartphone market, which is estimated to grow to 1 Billion devices by year 2010.
More manufacturers may join the alliance, and there might be some in-fight.

Remember the PowerPC alliance?





MS-OS/2, anyone?





4. Things to do
Watch Google closely, develop outstanding products independently.

Join the OHA when the timing is right.

5. Things to not do

Ignore Android.

Delude yourself it's not going to be a viable competitor to your current smartphone software.

6. Current reaction
There seems to be a common disappointment due to devices (mobile handsets) not currently available.
People got used to observe hardware and oversee the overall usability of a product.
They are left to oversee the beauty and convenience of Android Development tools instead.
Not every smartphone user wants that.
Google seems to be clearly focused on getting the best developers in its camp first.


Ten Million dollars says they may succeed.
Google tries to cater well to developers, giving them easy, simple and free development environment.
This will help create multitude of good applications, fast, when the time comes and the shipments start.

7. An Epilogue. Or is it just a Prologue?
What I want to offer you is my private view on the future of Android.

If all goes well for Google, it will swipe all other smartphone platforms into oblivion within 5-10 years.
Only Apple will stand out (probably in a niche market, like their Mac computers).
By that time Nokia will probably have the same smartphone market share as Apple.

I believe Google hopes to become to mobile industry what Microsoft had become to PC industry.
Google does all the same steps - refuse to tie their own resources in hardware development, while focusing purely on the software architecture and applications.
The handset companies would create a unified and compatible smartphone software market, allowing a single binary be run on all smartphones, thus creating a well-leveled field for software developers, as well as consistent experience for the end users.
The effects of such conditions are well known from the history of the PC.

The smart mobile usage will boom. No, I mean

This will be good for both the cell service providers and the Open Handset Alliance.

Three kings will rule the mobile software world - usability, compatibility and rich features.

What Google may currently lack is the whole ecosystem for smart mobile usage - something like Media Store, Social Networking, or the Nokia Ovi portal.

But with Google's web competence it shall not be hard to do, given they sign up the content producing companies.

On a side note, I especially like the way they focus on the builders of all that goodness.
10M bucks offered to a developer, not a manager! :)
How many companies we know that try to stimulate their engineers (not top managers!) in a similar way?

P1i user interface - is it any better?

I've finally had some time to spend it with SonyEricsson P1i, the avant-garde of "serious" SE smartphones. As I have previously confessed, their previous generation flagship product had been my device of choice for almost 3 years.
Must I say I had been quite excited and I had some expectations of increased usability, robustness and stability of the new runner-up P1i.
But it turned out, that the P1i device (again! after the lackluster P990i) is not up to pretty high usability/ergonomics standards that I had enjoyed on my trustworthy P910i.
And here's why.

1. First off, they left off the 5-way JogDial wheel.

This wheel alone is an "interface" on its own.
The whole menu structure in UIQ2.1 has been fully accessible with just your left thumb on jog dial!
You could open menus, close them, navigate within, select items, run them with only a thumb, single-handedly, even with the flip closed!



Now all that goodness is gone, since the P990...






2. They also left off the phone buttons.

P1i contains only qwerty keyboard, no "Answer"/"End Call" or other phone-related buttons.
What this means is that you have to use a mixed interface - you dial numbers on keyboard, then press on-screen "Call Button" (or press the jog dial inside). Switching from virtual keys for control, to physical buttons for numbers.

Sometimes the on-screen buttons are small and you need stylus... Needless to say - one hand/on-the-go operation becomes cumbersome. In P910i it was solved by a flip-closed mode, which beautifully shifted the complexity away, switching display sensors off while on-the-go. But here in P1i - another step back and dispersion of your attention.




3. The ubiquitous "More" button.

This is the most annoying and cumbersome feature of all UIQ3 user interface.
Whenever some application designers feel some "need of space" for all the menu features that don't fit into the 3 soft-buttons in the lower bar, they hide all the goodness into a single and impenetrable "More" button, behind which hell only knows how many useful (or completely not) features are hidden.
User often is compelled to press that button just to see what else that application can provide.

This is so inferior to the UIQ2 and MacOS paradigm of top-bar pull-down menus that I have nothing else to say. Just check the screenshots. This would have been OK for your dumb phones with buttons only, but on a touch-based smartphone! Duh.
How could hiding part of UI help user productivity and UI transparency I just can't imagine! I think we've been there already with Microsoft's "Personalized Menus".






4. The 3 ways of input.

User may interact with P1i using either:

-- keyboard,
-- side buttons and jog dial,
-- touchscreen+stylus,
-- touchscreen+fingers.

Having many options for control could sound as advantage, but those inputs methods are complementary throughout the UI, not replaceable!
For some features you HAVE to use on-screen soft-buttons, which are easiest and most conveniently pressed with just a finger; for others, such as very basic CLOSE button in the upper right, you better be holding a stylus since the button itself is quite small; for still others (CAMERA) there's no way but to press a side button.
This makes user experience tattered into pieces of using different input methods.
Especially funny when you see several "Close" buttons on the screen - one for the stylus (top right corner) and one for non-existing in P1i "three buttons row" (lower right)!

5. "Do you want 5, 15 or all of your apps?"

The paradigm of "More", "Even more" and "All" continues in the application strip at the bottom of the Home screen.








With touch screen, there could have been a better solution - a scrollable "infinite" ribbon of icons, with "inertia", like a wheel that would roll for some time after you clicked and dragged it. Such ribbon would effectively allow to do away with the application menu and the 12-icon mode. Customization would be accomodated by re-arranging icons order on the launch ribbon.
Instead, user sees 5 icons, by clicking on a divider a user can see 15 icons (with peculiar diamonds replacing empty spaces!) or, finally, the whole application menu.
Now what if I want space just for 7 or 19 icons? :)

6. The Ulimate Goal.

So what it is, the ultimate goal of such conformist UIQ3 UI design?

Compatibility with buttons-only phones.

And while I can agree that it serves them well (take MOTO RIZR Z8 for example), at the same time it denies the usability achievements of the past platform, UIQ2.1.
Such situation derails old-time users from UIQ and drives them in hordes to Windows Mobile in search of 'new cool' stuff and 'powerfull specs' stuff.
I have seen this situation en-masse in a well-known Russian online forum which used to be alive with the joyful sounds of P910i users, but not anymore. Most people left, only occasional newbies ask for a solution and some old-timers file their report on migration to Windows Mobile world. Some also express intent to migrate there since they did not like what they saw in UIQ3 devices from SonyEricsson either.

Would it not have been possible to create a separate, simpler version of UIQ, like Nokia S60's cousin, Series40?

'One size fits all' strategy failed, at least in the usability plane. And that means a lot nowadays.

What's most annoying is that SonyEricsson had 3 years since the P910i launch to improve and polish the highly valued hardware ergonomics and interface before iPhone hit the shelves! This very strategic blunder seems oh so familiar...

They were the closest shot to the "simplest stuff", the bread and butter of Apple Inc.
This may be also testified by the fact that Apple went as far to help SonyEricsson to write UIQ-based "iSync agent" for P910i, which installs on the phone the first time you try to sync it with a Mac. The sync support is full, up to the contacts pictures.

And yet SonyEricsson pursued some other goals [comments are welcome] and basically slipped down on the software, while mucking the hardware with a non-optional keyboard, and a shorter screen.
Yes, 3G, yes, WiFi, but why go away from marvels of past technology? Would you buy a PC with a faster WiFi but smaller screen and less convenient (and non-removable) keyboard and mouse?
I loved P910i and seeing SonyEricsson fall was a pain.

Such is my completely personal and biased old-timer SonyEricsson hardcore smartphone user opinion.

All comments with no offensive meaning will be published.

PC Suites revisited

Hello my patient reader,

In a previous blog entry "An Ideal PC Suite" I expressed my vision and hopes for a better PC Suite - and Nokia delivers! What I mostly wished for, is "smart auto-sync" feature, is at the core of the Nokia LifeBlog application!
If you never heard or tried the application, now's the best time to do so. Honestly, I believe this app has all the potential to become a key component of the upcoming Nokia Ovi stuff.
It lets you have and manage offline copy of your phone's content - all the MMS, SMS, photos and videos. On a horizontal "Time roll", easily scrollable!
LifeBlog-compatible phones stamp all new items with smart "location tags" that let you differentiate between cell network areas. You can later rename those tags - say, after city names - and with a simple click in LifeBlog you can see all items that were created in that same area! At the very rough, you automatically get a new location for every country you've been in while using the phone.
The LifeBlog UI "scrolls like butter"! It's a true "Nokia iLife", highly usable and very easy to learn. Amazingly enough, you may use it straight off the phone, no PC required! Capture and blog online, on-the-go.

There's more exciting news - there's now a new "Nokia Photos" application, delivered as part of N-series PC Suite 2.0
This one has also a very good UI and it allows you to import all your pre-existing photos from either a hard drive or a cell phone, should you want to use it as your photo organizer.
Nokia Photos has a Timeline View, which looks very much like the LifeBlog.
Here's one important thing to notice about those apps.

They do not require you to have a phone!!!

You can use them just as your digital life organizers.This strategy mirrors what Apple, Inc. has done to iTunes - you may use it without an iPod, just for ripping/storing/playing/burning your data.
Once you get used to a blissful user experience, you might as well start looking out for a compatible device, to streamline your "digital life management" experience even more ;)

Of course, these new applications allow you to upload the content to your blogs!

Those apps are essentially the Nokia i-Apps. If this is what Ovi will be like, I am all in!

The only strange thing is that those "web accounts" need to be set up independently in both programs.
Another small issue that I noticed is that LifeBlog does not correctly "play" animated GIFs in MMS. Such graphic files take single MMS slide, but this slide should not be still. On a phone they play fine.

Did you notice there are many Nokia PC Suites out there?
There are "normal" PC Suite, which work even with S40 devices (the moest recent version is 6.85). There are also E-series PC Suite (which I have not yet seen), the Vertu PC Suite, the PC Suite Express, and, most importantly, N-Series PC Suite (most recent version 2.0).

The battle of PC Suites continues!

I took part of a Nokia PC Suite Beta test for version 6.85.
Of the 3 errors I reported, none were fixed.

I still hope for the next version
I uninstalled 6.85 and downloaded another flavor of Nokia PC Suite , aka N-Series PC Suite. As the name suggests, this would work only with Nokia N-series smartphones.
It features a very slick black 'batman' design and cool in-focus transitions. It worked really well for me and never crashed once. It has less clutter on main page since the main page is broken into 4 categories: Music, Photo/Video, Internet, and Tools.



The good part about it is that it did away with kludgy Nokia Media Player which became almost dysfunctional in the latest 6.85 release. The media player of choice is now ... ta da!...the Microsoft Media Player 11 (which was not a hard choice on PC, I suspect).
Now there's hope for playability of stuff...
BUT (there must always be "but") - the N-series does not have the corresponding messaging part - you can not send SMS/MMS, there's no browser entry for your phone in Explorer anymore. Once they add the missing functionality, there's no turning back for me.
Meanwhile - I came up with another idea regarding PC Suite UI - why They have not changed the INTERFACE much, they changed the LOOK. IMHO the less of "interface" we have, the better. For instance, is there really a need for the main window since we have the same apps in the systray launcher?
Could not they have moved

"5 new messages"
"3 missed calls"

- notifications into the Windows system tray notification area?
You'd click there and see the messages and the Call Log.
Windows has the API just for that. I hardly foresee users keeping the main window open just to see the new SMS.

(6.85 rants)
The new and controversial (from usability standpoint) feature of 6.85 is the small messages pane in the lower left corner of the main window. In few seconds after start, it shows you the three most recent SMS (and only short parts of them).
You may click and close the pane, though.
This feature look like "blind innovation" and it brings only questions:

"Why only three?"
"Why only SMS (not e-mails)?"

If you'd get serious to read more behind those short excepts from SMS, you'd click into the area, and PC Suite would still bring you to the Messages entry in the windows Explorer. You'd have to click once more on the Inbox hive to see the message list. One more double-click and you finally see the whole message.
The fact that there's still no decent UI to the communicative core of the product is quite amazing.
Completely usable and convenient solutions is what we all need. They should take preference in development resources, not those ad-hoc, not-well-thought out, features, that look like they're there just to show off... Otherwise the product may fall down sick of 'featuritis'...I never wish this to happen to a Nokia product.

Microsoft Office:mac2008

Microsoft Office could be a target of a separate essay on how low one could go with usability when they not only try to cram more features, but also try to ADVERTISE them to user. Remember Clippy, the Office Assistant? That little "friend" apparently got so bad feedback from business-minded folks that they finally stopped advertizing it and switched it off by default. Now MS wants mac users to get ready to buy the upcoming Office:mac2008.
Simply have a look at their running ad: www.macoffice2008.com

Now let's see how many menus they present to a user:


1. The standard Mac OS menu in the top line on the screen.
2. The toolbar menu (with text labels) below the document title.
3. The "ribbon" menu top line of tabs.
4. The "ribbon" menu lower line of tabs.
5. The "ribbon" menu icons
6. The Formatting palette, floating.

This ribbon menu is the "New & Improved" stuff, and I think it's not done properly.
Just look at how all those menus took 1/3 of your screen, in vertical dimension!
I think it should've been made into a floating palette (MacOS X "drawer" UI concept comes to mind), since the ribbon menu is not needed all the time.
Or, at least, make the menu vertical, not horizontal.
The new DVD-aspect-ratio displays invite you to explore the width, not the height.
Had they made the ribbon menu a vertically floating palette, things would look much better and less cluttered.
To sum it up, current MS UI philosophy seems to be

"First - our Product, then - your Document".

They put the document you work on into a corner of what's left after their "new feature marketing" people put all those new shiny icons in the "prime space" which should be well reserved for your document.

They forget that [their] Tools are less important than [your] Trade.
Luckily to them, the Corporations world is deep entrenched in their legacy.
But as for the Personal world, it's high time to think of alternatives.
Apple's iWork package is something to be in terms of UI and usability, while maybe lacking more advanced features and complexity required in daily Corporate business.

iPhone user experience comments

iGot iPhone :)
And so I spent some time figuring out if there are some blunders in it's UI.
There were none. Good job Apple!
There are some functionalities missing, such as MMS or on-the-go media management, but I believe they are dropped by intent, to execute along a clear strategy.
Mac now is the digital hub. ("Oh, sorry PC, you too!")



The only obvious point I would improve is in the Mail client:
- if you happen to have many mailbox accounts (as you can see, I have three), you must go to each other Inbox separately, because the e-mail does not aggregate them into one place like Apple Mail on Mac does.
And so it takes 10 taps just to look into headers in all three mailboxes. This would be reduced to 2 taps if Apple chose to accept the Apple Mail's approach. Maybe this will be fixed soon, in the iPhone Firmware update 1.1.1.







<--- iPhone Mail









That's how Apple mail aggregates mailboxes --->


Another thing I noticed is that there's no task switcher aside from the Home Button, that would take you to the main program menu. Although this initially feels as a drawback, this way the user has only one way to start a program, and the icons are always fixed in the same places, which decreases time-to-launch for every program as the user becomes acquainted to their location on screen.


There are some 3rd party utilities that allow you to have alternative task switcher (SummerBoard). You press in the lower right corner and drag to the centre some analog of "Sun wheel" whith all the programs sitting on it's "rays". The further you drag, the bigger the icons. Moving along the circle selects the program icon.
There appears a separate button for lauching the selected application.
Quite innovative, but clunky and requires to use both hands for a faily basic task.



It happened so that Apple products had never had lack of style.
And this one is not an exception. The company has a track of setting trends for few industries already. All-in-one, translucent colors, USB, floppy-less, IEEE1394, OOP, media management and distribution, now cellphones...They are the true creative power, and have the guts to follow their vision, through the years.
To be competitive, just market share is not enough. One has to be as bold and creative as Apple, not just foresee the Future, but create it. And they made it.
Now the multi-touch UI is Present.

So if you are in UI field, or "just browsing", by all means check out this new level of usability.
I also welcome your comments.

An Ideal PC Suite for a cell phone

I've thought hard about different PC Suite products from all the major cell phone vendors, taking into consideration their usability and features.
I also tested them all in real situations.

"What's not right? What's there to add?"

So I finally came up with my own vision of a PC Suite product, and I will share it here.

I will not go into detailed comments on the current status-quo in this arena, instead let's envision how this is to be done.

Why use a PC Suite, before all?
I know many people who do not. Many of them stopped calling me, and then I phoned them only to find that they lost their phone WITH THEIR ADDRESS BOOK!
Omitting unwise comment on their unwise behaviour, isn't there something that does not welcome them to go ahead and install a PC Suite?
Oh wait, then I found out that many of them HAD their PC suite installed!
So what happened? They forgot to sync regularly enough.

This brings in a Point1 - an Ideal PC Suite must auto-sync smartly.

Sony Ericsson's product lets you set an option to sync each time you put your phone into cradle. What's wrong? The quality of sync and the fault protection.
It's simply not resilient to failures (you take the phone off the cradle while it syncs and you're up to big problem).

So - what is this "smart auto-sync"?
To me, it's when you "set it & forget it". Think of how Outlook(tm) smartly syncs to your Exchange server at work.

You get home, you're offline, and - here's your mail.
This very fucntionality should be at the core of a modern communication product.
You lose your phone - and here are your SMS, MMS, phonebook, media, bookmarks, e-mails, other files, applications. All at your PC.
Right now this is done quite clumsily by either a full backup (takes quite some time, requires launching an app, cannot be done smartly with no user intervention), or by the Syncronise function - this one does not save your media, nor your document files, nor Messages, nor applications, and the feature also must be launched as a separate app.
Think of how Outlook(tm) DOES NOT require you to press "Get New Mail" button each time you want to see new mail.
Right now user has to operate the product all the time...
The answer to this clumsiness - replace the current UI and function with more "daemon-like", "service" behaviour, when you select once - which data you want to have synced to your PC, and the daemon "does the right thing".
You come home - the home PC sees your phone via BlueTooth, connects to it and syncs all your Messages, Contacts, Bookmarks and (if you chose so) - Media, Documents, Application settings. With you touching no buttons. Of course, you might be given a chance to know this is happening - by means of a slight "beep" on your phone.
What you would see on a PC is a rolling wheel somewhere in the System Tray.

So here's the chance to make an even better experience than what's provided by Apple, Inc. and it's products:
iPod can be set to synced when you plug it in.
But cell phones have BlueTooth! The don't even need to be plugged in, so there could be one step less! This would allow for an exquisitely simple user experience.

"Just bring it home!" and voila - you're covered with the newest gen of PC Suite.
Go lose you phone - and keep all the data.
Leave your PC Suite Backup function and all the waiting for fanatics and geeks who like to tinker-shminker with software.
The newest PC Suite would first ask you what to "cover" in the auto-backup cycles when you run the software installation process (right after the device pairing), and then - you might as well forget it's there, but you'll remember and you'll be glad you set everything right (again - smart setup defaults) when you come home crying over a lost or broken cell phone.

And sync the Contact Pictures to Outlook, both ways, already!
Right now the only positive experience I've had of preserving the contact pictures is using iSync on a Mac with SE P910i. Everything else sucks. I'm sorry but it does.
No wonder people rarely use pictures in contacts, it's so easy to lose them.
Apple even wrote an iSync Agent for P910i!

Speaking NOKIA formulas, Backup+Sync+Store Images=AutoSync.
Two icons less, a sea of usefulness more.

So much for a Backup, there are other parts of functionality, like Messaging and Contacts.
What's wrong? Point2 - No offline mode. Unless you sync, you only see Messages and Contacts when you have the phone connected. Yes, this setup allows you to have many phones connected and managed independently, but why no offline mode?
Think of how Outlook would allow you to have offline access to many separate mailboxes and Contacts.
The messaging interface has to be very email-like, with all the usual New, Reply, Forward buttons in their places, so that people find it really convenient to start and use it. On the left - the usual Folder list, with folders like SMS, MMS, Sent, Outbox. Drafts. Integrated with MMS studio, so that when you press New - MMS, you have a chance to select a template, or Insert Objects, or Record Objects on-the-go.

Offtopic: I have heard that a Fly mobile SX210 supports USB webcam mode in the firmware - that's a cool improvement, others might like to follow.

In NOKIA PC Suite the Messages in built into Phone Browser, I think this is a very dubious design solution. Users just don't expect to write e-mails or messages when they go browsing files. Give them a CommCenter, that looks and feels like an e-mail app, and accessible in offline mode.

So what's left? The Internet Connection?
Honestly, I think it should be done without a separate client software, there's no UI needed beside the normal OS UI for a modem connection.
But the reality is - you need proper drivers, init strings and CellOP-specific APN settings. Those are very nicely covered by NOKIA PC Suite Internet Connect applet.
To eliminate the need for it - that would take quite some innovation in cellular operator business.
There could be such phone modem drivers that would be able to read APNs off the phone, transfer their titles to PC and from there (in an Ideal PC Suite) you would just select which APN you want to use for PC->phone->internet access.
MMS messaging would be seamlessly blended into e-mail, with support for HTML-MMS conversion. All accessible from the same single CommCenter window.

Interfaces usability significantly drops if similar parts of functionality are accessibly from separate windows. The common and well-tested approach to this is using "tabs" by the edge of a single window.
With their new initiative NOKIA tries to renew their current S60 UI lineup, by replacing legacy "mesh" design menu with "panes" menu, giving up some screen real estate. This gives user a real "2-D" feel, because the two direction of the 5-way joystick are used complementary to each other. This is a step in the right direction, but only one of the many steps required to rev up the aged S60 UI to be competitive in modern market.

Why don't I shave with a RAZR?

I did another wild thing and swapped cell phones with my girlfriend for a week. Or two.


And here's my MOTOROLA RAZR UI analysis.

Here I go again, focusing only on points which could be improved, given due attention to detail and a good sense of usability.

May I call it my "6 steps to make RAZR sharper" guide? :)

Point 1. Right-to-Left.

Okay, this is very obvious for everybody. MOTO sticks to its tradition (against everybody else) of putting affirmative buttons on the right, negative action button on the left. It would have been memorizable, had they also chose to reverse the red&green call buttons. But they had not! So to Accept a Call, bear to left. But to Accept an Action, bear to the opposite side :)

Point 2. Scrolling.

MOTO has it's own way of fast scrolling. You do it by pressing numbers! So 1-2-3-ish, from early 80s era! Yes, you need to estimate on the numbers of lines you don't even see!
Or else - press'n'hold'n'wait while watching the lines slowly click by, along with the precious seconds of your life.
A simple scroll acceleration after a certain amount of press time would be so much better!

Point 3. Personal Tones.

If you set a personal call tone, say, for a friend, you also get it for the SMS from the friend.

So, setting and mp3 tune gives you whole lotta noiz at SMS arrival! Fun fun fun!

(Some SMS are sent at night, not to disturb with a call and a ring. Or across timezones.)

Point 4. Your e-mail is too long and will be deleted.

I know it sounds funny but it's not so when you wait for an important e-mail, and you finally get it, and you see:

Looks like some arhitecture limitation?

Point 5. Bleeps and moans.

The phone uses sound signals profusely.

It will not let you ignore an unread message, unanswered call, low battery.

You're better off fix it now or switch off sound.

There should have been an option to turn off such signals, akin to Service Jingle and others, that are controlled in Settings - Network.

Point 6. No repeated alarms.

You may set the alarms only as 1-time events.

Minor things:

There's a menu called Initial Settings. Hmm? Sounds like a place you only go once you turn it on the very first time. The right wording would be Basic Settings. Anyway, the only way to set up text entry modes is when you go to a place where you can enter some text and there you may invoke a context menu with Entry Mode and Entry Setup.

Oh, and don't forget! Your settings may change depending on the text field settings -try to go to e-mail setup and you'll see that now dot is not where it was, but @ ate it's lunch.

Themes are not in Settings - Phone, but are in Multimedia menu.

Okay, maybe 2 weeks was not enough to adapt myself? My answer is - the phone has to be supportive, not distractive.

All-in-all, I think this phone has rather impressive and solid UI, it is totally less cumbersome than on smartphones - and here we get to the point - either MOTO pays more attention or ... the phone is plainly simpler than the smartphones.

Whichever you think matters more in the case?