Should I Get A Nexus 7?

I recently responded to a question from a friend of mine who wanted to know about getting a Nexus 7 tablet. He already has an iPhone and thought the Nexus 7 looked nice, seemed to do what he needed from a tablet, and at $230 was a more attractive price than an iPad Mini ($100 more). He said he needs to read books, Nook textbooks and PDF textbooks, create documents in Word/Excel, stream videos and music, and web surfing.

My take

First of all, when comparing with iOS, the Nexus 7 running Android can have only one app can on screen at a time. There are handwritten note-taking apps available on Android in the Play Store and they work with a standard touchscreen stylus pen; but beware, not all apps are created equal.

My concern is would be around the quality of Android's note taking apps. The absolute best apps debut on iOS before eventually being ported to Android if they are not exclusive to iOS. For example:

The best handwriting and note-taking app I've seen is an iOS exclusive called Notability: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/notabili ... 93530?mt=8
Evernote's Penultimate is good too, but mainly because it syncs with Evernote. The handwriting engine on Penultimate is one of the nicer ones available but still not quite as nice as Notability. If handwriting notes is important, there are apps on Android that will get it done, but the best will be on iOS.

I already own an iOS device

For someone who already owns an iOS device, there is also the obvious lack of "native compatibility" between the tablet and an existing iOS device. Although an Android tablet would do everything needed in this case, if I were making this decision I would keep things iOS because of the simplicity of things like iMessage, Reminders, Airdrop, iCloud, and Photostream. Taking a picture from an iPhone and having it almost immediately available on your tablet is very handy. I have been in many sessions when I’ve been taking notes and added pictures to them from whiteboards, charts, etc…

Can cross-platform can be done?

There are several cloud-services like Dropbox, Skydrive, and Google+ Photo Backup available as Photostream or Airdrop substitutes. Google Hangouts can substitute iMessage and Google Docs can substitute for iCloud. Again though, generally apps available on iOS are better than their counterparts on Android – even some of Google’s own apps have seen better versions released on iOS than Android.

Are iOS apps are better?

Developers have said that the Android toolkit for developing apps is lacking in certain areas when compared to iOS tools. Apple has seemingly just put more effort into enabling developers to build quality apps. Apple also maintains application uniformity and holds developers to strict approval standards.

In the end it comes down to how important the apps are to your everyday use. For simplicity in the connectivity between devices, stay with the same OS. For people who are a little more tech savvy, using cross-platform apps may not be much of a hassle at all.

Flickr vs Instagram – Instagram still king

VS

As part of its mission to build up the brand and become valid again, Yahoo! is releasing some great apps recently. The Yahoo! Mail app has received some good reviews and the Flickr App seems to have been labeled by some folks across the net as an Instagram killer. Not so fast…

After using both apps fairly extensively, well as extensive as it gets in the case of Flickr and my one week with it, I have found many things that make Instagram better.

Vintage Cameras Look Cool!

First, I love that Instagram locks images to a square format. The idea at Instagram is that photos are supposed to be in the old square film format of yesteryear when vintage camera were all the rage. Although people continuously do it wrong, resulting in a fail pic with big black bars on the top and bottom, the square format does a lot in my opinion to force some artistic quality to the simplest pics. It requires the photographer to choose the most artistic sectional capture. This is more of a personal preference, and people who have been annoyed by the square requirement (“INSTAGRAM WON’T LET ME POST MY FULL SIZE PIC!!!”) will find this as a non-issue affecting neither performance or effectiveness.

Application Speed

On to the real stuff – the Flickr app is just too slow for me. The photo filters lag for a brief second and everything from loading a new pic to uploading the finalized pic just takes longer in Flickr. Also, since Instagram rides on Facebook for the most part, there is a much larger community on Instagram and my friends list is enough to keep me entertained for a few minutes when I check my feed. Flickr is a ghost-town on my feed. It’s like Google+ but with pics.

Social Network Tie-Ins

At least the Flickr app allows users to tie in Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter accounts, there is no tie-in for Four Square and definitely not for Instagram. One of the pics I uploaded to Facebook from Flickr didn’t include my description and took away from the joke I was making.

Instagram FTW!

Overall I think the Flickr app has potential and the value of Instagram is diminishing with the release of the Flickr app and Twitter’s recent updates that allow photo filters to be applied to pics being tweeted. Even Facebook Camera is a usable alternative to Instagram and I think it’s only a matter of time before that site isn’t nearly as relevant as it has been over the last year.

What do you think? Have you had time with the new Flickr App? Does it work better than Instagram for you? Answer in the comments section below!

Would you buy a $60 tablet?

If it worked decently, I would.

And by 'decently' I mean, if I can do the core features I would demand from a 7" tablet and do them without frustrating me with lags, delays, crashes, and unresponsiveness, then I'm in.

This is quite an impressive spec list for any cheap device, let alone one with an approximate $60 price tag in India where it is being sold :

• 7 inch, 800 x 432 capacitive touchscreen
• Android 4.04 Ice Cream Sandwich
• 1GHz Cortex A8 ARMv7 CPU
• 512MB RAM, 4GB storage
• Wi-Fi (a version with GPRS cellular capability is also available)
• VGA front-facing camera
• Micro SD slot
• Power, micro-USB, and headphone connectors

Check out the Ubislate Website for more info.

I really don't know if this is going to be made available in America, or what the price will be if it does come. It's doubfull that this thing will ever be considered even a competitor in the tablet market, especially here in the US, but I think if it's successful in any way it can demonstrate a couple things:

1. A functional electronics device can be built for a very affordable price.
2. The market is no longer as dependent on specific hardware/software combinations to get what they want.

Is Android Really Open Source?

Recently VisionMobile published a report called The Open Governance Index. It looked at the relative openness of Android, Qt, Symbian, MeeGo, Mozilla, WebKit, Linux, and Exclipse.  The report suggests that Android’s success has less to do with open source licensing and more to do with Google’s financial power.

In an almost conclusive tone, the report states that Google’s size, a huge amount of marketing dollars from carriers and vendors, and the need to counter Apple are all more responsible for Android’s success than the actual OS or the open source licensing.

“Android would not have risen were it not for the billions of dollars that OEMs and network operators poured into Android in order to compete with Apple’s iconic devices,” the firm wrote. “As Stephen Elop, Nokia’s CEO, said in June, 2011, ‘Apple created the conditions necessary for Android.’ (bgr.com, 2011).

Here is a copy of the infographic from visionmobile.com. Be sure to head over to BGR.com to read the entire article by Zach Epstein on December 13th, 2011.

Widespread Battery Issues with iOS5

iPhone users everywhere are complaining about much weaker battery life in the iPhone since upgrading to iOS 5.

There’s been many theories as to why, but it seems that Apple is either avoiding or not willing to give a definitive answer to the actual issue. It is generally understood that iOS5 is going to use more battery than iOS4 based simply on the nature of the upgrade and all the things it’s doing in the background that never happened before. Things like backing up data and documents to iCloud, automatically downloading apps, music, and books, the notification center running, iMessage services running. There is a lot of new stuff going on in iOS5 and it seems to be impacting batteries everywhere.

The strange thing is – it’s not happening to everyone. I have personally worked on at least three devices where people complained about bad battery life. I’ve done things like start with removing the email profile and re-adding it, leading all the way up to completely wiping the device and manually piecing it back together, still get less life. I even deployed a brand new 4S on a Friday and on Saturday the executive spent time at the Apple store getting it replaced.

Apparently it’s quite a problem. A thread on Apple’s message board is up to more than 2,300 messages and 160 pages. It’s been viewed over 160,000 times, and it’s full of people getting noticeably terrible battery life. Some people even report actually being able to watch the drain and every few seconds the percentage drops.

The latest report I got from one of the higher ups says that my most recent fix seems to have fixed the problem completely. I disabled location services, and disabled the iPhone from being able to back up documents and data over 3G. This seems to have significantly improved battery life. Yesterday he got about 20% drain in 2.5 hours, today he’s only lost 4% after the same amount of time.

Looks like Apple decided to copy something from Android this time. “Terrible battery life: a new feature of iOS5!” (jokes.)

Source: Computerworld

Why do people still use Blackberry?

Keyboards, security, and IT requirements seem to top the list.

According to an article written by Jon Brodkin of Arstechnica.com, there are a few reasons people still use Blackberry and will likely continue to use Blackberry for some time to come. There are still 70 million Blackberry users, so to anticipate them going away soon is a bit unrealistic. The market share for Blackberry has fallen from 18.7% to 11.7% in the second quarter alone. Despite their financial problems, service problems, dying investor confidence, the consumerization of IT, and lack of any new device capable of the advanced user experience iOS and Android users get, Blackberry still has some very strong things going their way.

“If it were up to IT managers there would still be only one solution out there and it would be called Blackberry”, says Dan Croft, CEO of Mission Critical Wireless, which helps businesses manage mobile deployments. What is being seen is not a removal of RIM from enterprises, but an addition of non-Blackberry devices. Even though iOS and Android support encryption, ActiveSync security policies, remote wipes, and tracking services, RIM security is more robust and easier to implement – especially after a company invests in a BES server. All Blackberry communications are routed through RIM’s Network Operations Center which adds a layer of encryption and tracking/logging of Blackberry communications – sometimes essential for corporations who need to comply with regulations around archiving such as those included with Sarbanes Oxley. But this also presents another layer for failure as seen with Blackberry’s global outage earlier this month.

There are also questions around the iOS and Android platform when it comes to securing the contents of a device. Being able to install apps can present a problem when users have their way with Dropbox, Box.net, and other “cloud” storage solutions. The legal department in most enterprises (Newmont included) usually are completely against putting company documents on a server they have no control over. Failing to present documents during an audit because the company did not know where they were stored could be a legal nightmare.

The article goes on to mention some other things like the desire for hard keyboards and the fact that there are people who use Blackberry simply because they have no choice, their IT department forces them into one device only with little regard to the alleged boost in efficiency that iOS and Android offers.

Read the article here: Why people still use BlackBerry: keyboards, security, and IT requirements – 10/24/2011