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.

List of Commands for Siri

I’ve had lots of people ask about what exactly Siri can do. There’s quite a bit that the computer AI we call Siri can do, but here’s a list of known commands and questions Siri can handle.

If you know of any more, please drop them in the comments section!

Phone

• Call (name)
• Call (name) home
• Call (name) on his work phone
• Call (number)
• Call home
• Call 911
• Get my call history

Facetime

• Facetime (name)
• Make Facetime audio call

App Launching

• Launch photos
• Play Infinity Blade II
• Open Facebook
• Post a Tweet

Messaging

• Tell (name) I’ll be right there
• Send a message to (name)
• Send a message t0 (name) saying ‘How about tomorrow?’
• Send message to (number)
• Text (name) and (name), ‘where are you?’
• Tell my wife I’m on my way home

Calendar

• Set up a meeting at (time)
• Set up a meeting with (name) at (time)
• Meet with (name) at (time)
• Set up a meeting about (description & time)
• Move 3pm meeting to 4:30
• Reschedule appointment with (name) to (date)
• What does the rest of my day look like?
• What’s on my calendar?
• Cancel (event)
• When is my next appointment?

Sports

• Did (team name) win?
• How did (team name) do last night?
• What was the score last time (team name) played (team name)?
• Show me the football scores from last night
• When do (team name) play next?
• What does the Premier League table look like?
• Who is the highest goal scorer in the Premier League?

Navigation

• Navigate to (destination)
• Navigate home
• Navigate to work
• Walking directions to (destination)
• What’s my next turn?
• Are we there yet?
• What’s my ETA?
• Find (place)
• Show me (place)
• Where is the closest (store)?

Twitter

• Tweet (whatever you would like to tweet)
• Tweet (whatever you would like to tweet) with my location
• Search Twitter for (your search terms)
• Show me my tweets
• What’s trending on Twitter?

Facebook

• Post to Facebook (whatever you would like to post)

Movies

• Where is my closest cinema?
• What’s playing at my closest cinema?
• Show me reviews for (film)

Music

• Play (name of song)
• Play (artist)
• Play (album)
• Play (playlist
• Play
• Pause
• Skip
• Play iTunes Radio
• Play more songs like this one
• Don’t play this song again

Reminders

• Add (whatever you want) to (name of list)
• Remind me to call (name) at (time)
• Remind me to take my medication at (time)
• Read my to-do list
• Remind me to call (name) when I get (destination)

Email

• Email (name) about (whatever you like)
• New email to (name)
• Check email
• Any new emails from (name)
• Reply to (name)

Weather

• What’s the weather for today?
• What’s the weather for tomorrow?
• How’s the weather in (place)?
• What’s the weather for this evening?
• Is it windy?
• When is sunrise/sunset?

Clock

• Wake me up at (time)
• Set an alarm for (time)
• Turn off alarm
• Delete alarm
• What time is it in (place)
• What is today’s date?
• What’s the date this Saturday?

Timer

• Set time for five minutes
• Set a timer for (amount of time)
• Show timer
• Pause timer
• Resume timer

Contacts

• What’s (name) address?
• What is (name) number?
• When is my wife’s birthday?
• Show (name)
• My mum is (name)
• My brother is (name)
• Call mum

Find Friends

• Where is (Find Friends contact)
• Is my wife at home?

Notes

• Note (whatever you’d like to note)
• Find meeting notes
• Show my notes from last week
• Read my last note

Settings

• Turn on airplane mode
• Turn on bluetooth
• Make screen brighter
• Go to Twitter settings
• Show me privacy settings
• Enable Wi-Fi
• Turn on Do Not Disturb
• Open mail settings (or Bluetooth, Wireless, iCloud, and a lot of other settings on the device)

iOS7 Improve Battery Life Without Turning ‘Everything’ Off.

I’m personally not a fan of turning off key features to save battery life. That’s like not driving to save gas, or unplugging your internet to avoid viruses. Well…maybe it’s not that extreme, but I just don’t know why we would want to spend money on this bad@$$ phone just to decide that it’s best to turn off some of the best features.

Regardless, battery life is very important to lots of people. And until someone makes a battery that doesn’t die, we’ll all do what we can to get around our battery woes.

Here’s a quick list I put together of some things you can do to improve battery life a little bit with iOS 7.

1. Turn off Wi-Fi searching

Wifi capable devices are constantly searching for Wifi networks to connect to. This is not an exception for the iPhone as the device is always trying to find a Wifi network to connect to. You’ve no doubt seen the pesky pop up informing you of “Networks in range”.

Go into Settings > Wifi:

Turn off the switch to “Ask to Join Networks”

A quick note on this: Turning this off will disable the “open network” messages from popping up. I am not certain that this “stops” the device from actively searching for wireless networks though.

My recommendation for managing Wifi: Turn wifi OFF when you know you will not be connected to a Wifi network. Turn it back on when you are in Wifi range. This is super-simple now and done with a tap of one button from the new control center.

Remember this though: Absolutely use Wifi whenever you can!!!  Using Wifi always saves battery over using cellular data.

2. Fine-tune location services

Location services are what iOS uses to get information like the weather, navigation/maps/GPS data, traffic information, photo geodata, geo-reminders, and other location specific information. Disabling it completely results in a huge disconnect from useful data and features. Instead of turning it off altogether, just fine-tune the apps that truly need location services.

Go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services

This lists all applications currently installed that use location services. Turn off anything that does not need to know location.

BEWARE! Turning off location services can make an application stop working. For example, turning off location services on a Run-tracking app will stop that app from being able to track your route.

My advice is to leave apps on if they are for: Weather, social networking, navigation, photo taking, and any apps that use locations to trigger other events (i.e. walk-in coupons, shopping apps, etc…)

3. Fine-tune Background App Refresh

iOS 7 expanded background app functionality. In plain English, this basically  means that essentially any app can function when it’s not on your screen. Facebook might update your feed, AP Mobile and CNN might update the main news stories page, your task list might refresh itself looking for status. All these tasks are great when you go into the app and the latest info is right there. However….

It uses the battery.

Turn off all background refreshes for apps you do not care to have “up-to-the-minute” refreshes on. If you’re perfectly fine with refreshing Evernote when you open it as opposed to letting it update on it’s own, then turn off background refresh for it. If you don’t mind the brief 30 seconds it takes to refresh your Facebook feed when you launch the app, turn off background updates. Don’t care about having the latest weather report ‘instantly’ when launching the app? Turn off background refresh.

4. Turn off parallax/motion effects

This may have the least affect on the OS, but if you are not a fan of the motion effects of iOS 7, just turn it off. You may also save some battery juice in the process.

Go to: Settings > General > Accessibility > turn “Reduce Motion” to “On”.

My Take On iOS 7

I see that there may still be some some people out there a little apprehensive about downloading and installing the latest redesigned operating system for Apple’s mobile devices. Maybe I can help a little.

Here’s my quick opinion on iOS 7 for those who have not upgraded yet.

Improvements

The photos, contacts, spotlight search, music, calendars, reminders, and Siri are much improved. There are nice improvements in how users access important information. I especially like the improvements to Safari. It’s far better in every way now.

Multitasking now uses a nice card view of all open apps. Double-click the home button and see a preview/history of all apps that have been launched.

Swipe an app off the screen towards the top to “close” it.

The new layout of the Calendar works real well, as I use both it and reminders a lot.

The notification center is much improved, and works excellent with the calendar. Swipe down from the top and immediately see messages about the weather, meetings, and drive times.

For example, it may say "Your first meeting is at 9 AM with 'such and such' at 'such and such location'". In the morning it may tell you that, "It would take you about 22 minutes to drive to work". Later in the day it might say "Right now there is unusually heavy traffic and it will take about 33 minutes to get home." It's pretty awesome.

Shared Photostreams

The new shared photostreams and the "Activity Stream" within Photos is almost like a cool, private, mini-social network for you and your friends. Sharing an entire photostream is so much easier and more efficient that sending multiple text messages to those people who want you to “send me a copy of that photo!”.

CREATE A SHARED PHOTOSTREAM:

To create a shared photostream, simply go into photos and tap the Shared tab at the bottom:

1. Tap the + in the upper-left corner to create a new photostream
   
2. Give the photostream a name (i.e. ‘Birthday party’, ‘Sunday Game’, etc…)
3. Select the contacts you want to share it with, and then…
   
4. …tap Create

The photostream has been created!

Go into the new photostream and tap the + icon to add photos:

Your photo collection will come up and photos can be selected individually for sharing!

Select the photos you want to share, and just tap “Done”. Now your friends will see all the pictures you shared in their photos!

Other Features

Automatic app updates are also great, and the new control center (shown below) is something we should have had years ago.

Is it stable? What about my battery??

During the early stages of upgrading to iOS7 keep in mind that pretty much ALL existing apps will need to be updated to the "iOS 7 compatible version". Because updates happen automatically and in the background users may experience battery drain while all your apps update. I had 76+ apps update in one day!

There is also a lot more stuff going on in iOS 7 than in previous versions so don't be surprised if your battery starts draining a little quicker. These software updates are really intended to work best with the new hardware (quicker processor, better battery, etc...). It’s nice that Apple makes it available to older devices, but ultimately they want you to purchase the latest and greatest in order to get the best experience.

There are several things you can switch off to improve battery life, but I tend to think of that like the idea of saving gas by not driving the car. Sure, turning features off saves battery life, but it also cripples features of the phone designed to make it as useful as it is. Of course, if you have no desire for these features, then turning them off is pure benefit. If that’s the case though, you could probably just get a cheaper, less functional device anyway…

Yes, you should update!

If for no other reason, the security framework improvements alone make it worth updating. Throw in the new APIs that developers and apps will be using, and soon your iOS 6 compatible apps may stop working. If they don’t stop working, they may start chewing through your battery as they try desperately to do what the outdated code is telling them to do.

While some might think it will take some “getting used to” the fact is, it’s the same iOS you already know. Most of the difference from a user standpoint are just with visuals and icons. Remember: Just because the buttons and icons you’re used to look a bit different doesn’t mean they don’t do the same things they used to do.

Your iPhone, or iPad will still function the same as it did before, so don’t be afraid to no longer know how to use it. After about a week or less you should be back to feeling 100% comfortable and you’ll probably have mastered a lot of the new features.

So get to updating, if you haven’t already, and feel free to ask me any questions you might run into. I’ll do my best to reply to you!

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!

Apple to Bring Manufacturing to the US?

Looks like Apple is set to bring manufacturing for one of their product lines here to the US. Which product line hasn’t been confirmed by Apple, but my speculation is that it’s Apple TV.

While Tim Cook didn’t exactly say so, he did say this, “When I go into my living room and turn on the TV, I feel like I have gone backwards in time by 20 to 30 years,” Cook told Williams. “It’s an area of intense interest. I can’t say more than that.”

Apple will eventually bring manufacturing for more product lines to the US and this may be just the type of thing American citizens want to see their US based corporations do more of.

Read more at Forbes.com

51% of iPhone Accidents Happen Around the Home–Infographic

If you’ve ever fallen victim to a chipped corner, a scuffed up bezel, and the all-too-glorious shattered screen, then you might have also been in one of the situations below.

Here’s a breakdown of how iPhone damage happens at home according to the good folks over at extended-warranty provider Squaretrade.com.

Introducing iPhone 5

http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/12/iphone-5-officially-announced/

• Thinner, longer, and 4” screen
• A6 processor
• iOS6
• Better camera (including panoramic mode)
• LTE 4G
• Turn by turn navigation
• 720p front facing camera
• Lightning port (new USB connector)
• Starting at $199 for 16 Gig

 

iPhone 5 vs iPhone 4s

iPhone 4 for free and iPhone 4s for $99

http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/12/apple-discounts-iphone-4s-$99/

Apple Removes YouTube App From iOS

The YouTube app on iOS has been one of the native apps since the iPhone first came out. That is no more. Starting with iOS6 Beta 4, YouTube is not included on the device.

According to Apple’s official statement, “our license to include the YouTube app in iOS has ended, customers can use YouTube in the Safari browser and Google is working on a new YouTube app to be on the App Store.”

The YouTube app was created and kept up (or not kept up) by Apple, not Google. Users can still go to YouTube.com to watch videos and I have no doubt that the Google app will be far better than Apple’s version. This could turn out to be a good thing for iOS users who don’t have to live with a sub-par YouTube app that never gets updated and is outshined by the web version of YouTube.

Depending on what you believe, this could be more of Apple’s crusade to eliminate Google from the picture. Or it could be Google wanting to monetize their YouTube videos, which they can’t do through an app built by Apple. Either way, the iPhone seems to be just one step away from becoming an entirely Google free phone by default.

Apple Considered Creating An iCar?

Loads of crazy stuff coming out of the Samsung vs. Apple trial. Basically Apple says Samsung has ripped off their designs and the court proceedings are to either prove that or to show that Samsung products are not, in fact, Apple clones.

One of the more interesting pieces of information was revealed by Phil Schiller on the stand. According to Nick Bilton’s tweet, Schiller said Apple was having discussions around making a camera or a car – quote, “crazy stuff.”

What would an iCar look like? Maybe a car will fully integrated electronic links between computers, iPods, and radio? Something similar to Sync technology?

-Designer, Franco Grassi, Concept Design

Interesting to think about…and probably a better business strategy to get into iPhones instead.

Hood ornament image borrowed from: DVICE.com

iTunes Match

I got myself signed up for iTunes Match this weekend. The basic idea; store all your iTunes music in the cloud and have access to your entire library from virtually anywhere on your iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad. All this for $29.99 a year! Upon signing up, the service scans your entire iTunes library – regardless of the source – and matches music to high-quality copies from the iTunes store. The songs that can’t be matched are then uploaded to iCloud and are limited to 25,000 songs. Bear in mind, if you have over 25,000 tracks in your library, the limit only applies to tracks that could not be matched.

One of the features that made it so desirable for me was the ability to replace low-quality copies of songs with high-quality copies offered by iTunes. I tried it with a few tracks already.

The easiest way to check for low quality copies:
1. Make a smart playlist and match Bit Rate is less than 256
2. Make the iCloud status is Matched

After making the playlist, I deleted a song, making sure not to check the box to "also delete from iCloud".

The song stays listed in iTunes, but has a cloud logo next to it where you can download it from iTunes in full 256 Kbps glory.

Problem is, I have a ton of albums for whatever reason or another matched only most of the album and left 3-8 tracks that had to be uploaded. In the example here, you can see tracks that didn’t match even though they’re from the same album:

On those tracks that were uploaded, deleting it and re-downloading from iTunes just gives you the same quality MP3. Also, some songs are ineligible and will not match or upload because they were under 56 Kbps or something. With those, users can right-click and “convert to MP3” and they may then upload or match...well, the ones I tried did.

Another hitch I had. I activated iTunes Match on my iPod Touch before my PC was done being analyzing my library and uploading songs. As a result, when I turned on iTunes Match, the iPod thought I had nothing in my Match library so my iPod was stripped of about 22 gigs of local files. This left me with my entire library showing up on the iPod, but I had to download any songs I wanted. (You can also just select them to stream/listen to them and I think it downloads as well)

All the songs showed an iCloud logo next to them that could be tapped to download. You can also download all tracks from an artist, an entire album, and an entire playlist, it's pretty cool. At first I didn't think it would be a big deal that my iPod was wiped, I just made sure to download some essential playlists and albums I thought I would need. Grabbed about 5 gigs in maybe an hour or so.

Well...wouldn't you know it, as soon as I was out and about I wanted to listen to a song I hadn't downloaded to my iPod yet. With no Wifi I couldn't stream it or download it. Sucked, but wouldn't be a problem with an iPhone since there's no dependency on Wifi.

Next problem, Watch The Throne would not download completely. There were three tracks that just would not complete. No matter what I did, the same three tracks would download to about 90% and stay there. I disabled iTunes match, re-enabled it, no luck. Disabled iTunes Match, copied the files locally to my iPod, turned back on iTunes Match...same deal, those three tracks were removed and would not download from iTunes.

After a lot of troubleshooting on my own I was able to figure out a couple things. 1. the original digital files I had were “owned by” two different iTunes accounts, the three tracks that wouldn't download were from a different account than the rest. I just deleted the whole album from my PC and from iCloud, re-ripped the album, and re-matched with iTunes. Downloading worked fine then.

Moving on to my iPad, when I turned iTunes Match on my iPad I was expecting the same thing to happen (all music deleted). I actually wanted all the music deleted on my iPad. Low and behold - that didn't happen. I'm assuming that once I let iTunes complete the matching/uploading process it built my iCloud library. Turning on iTunes Match on the iPad at that point left all the local files intact because they were listed in my iCloud library, and only added the rest of songs in the cloud with options to download them.

Knowing my iCloud library was all good to go, I couldn't understand though why when I removed iTunes Match from my iPod, added 22 gigs of music, turned iTunes Match back on, it still deleted my local files, unlike what happened on my iPad. Even if I turned off iTunes Match, all my songs still had the cloud logo and allowed/forced me to download them in order to listen.

I looked in Settings > Store and tapped on my account to "View Account". There was an option to "delete this device from iCloud" so I picked it. After that, my songs still showed the cloud icon (??). I ended up wiping it completely and starting over from scratch. Added 22 gigs of music, turned on iTunes Match, and now my iPod is perfect. I set it up on my youngest son's iPod Touch and got the same successful results. It left his local files intact aand gave him access to the entire library.

Footnotes: If you want to keep the local music files on your device, do not activate iTunes Match on your device until the entire iTunes library has been analyzed and uploaded. Your library will be wiped out and replaced with an iTunes Match library specific to that device.

Is the iPad the Most Hated Gadget Ever?

Mike Elgan from cultofmac.com seems to think so. In an interesting article on the cultofmac website he gives his reasoning for this suggestion.

Tablet makers hate the iPad because they can’t compete with the numbers unless they sell tablets for prices so cheap it comes as a loss. Other tablet markets like those found in aviation and medical industries hate the iPad because it costs a fraction of what their devices do and works far better. The toy industry hates the iPad because all the kids want one. And finally, the PC industry hates the iPad because more people are realizing that they don’t need a PC as much as they used to.

Elgan brings up some good points and even shares my feelings towards Amazon and their soon-to-be reasons for hating the iPad as well. With growing rumors of a 7.85-inch iPad replacing the iPod Touch, things don’t look so good for the Kindle Fire. About the only appealing thing about that device is the obvious low price point.

Head on over to check out the full article:
Mike Elgan - Why the iPad Is the Most Hated Gadget Ever

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