Use Smartphone, Internet Wisely and Productivity Jumps.

                       Many are using internet and smartphones today. But here in India, many use internet for Facebook and Smartphones with out an internet connectivity to it. Internet has may things to help in our daily lives. As a Student or a Professional, not using internet productively is a wrong thing to do because Internet has many uses.

                   

                  

                            Any thing of your interest can be found on the internet today. Then why waste time asking others? If you are interested in technology then there are a lot of sites waiting for you like Engadget, Gizmodo, etc... If you are an automobile lover then there are driveinside, autoexpo, etc... Likewise you can find hundreds of sites on whichever field you are interested on. And many don't know the potential of google today. Whichever information you want, google keeps in front of you in a matter of seconds. And you cant believe, google searches an answer for every question that exists. Thanks to Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Also use Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha well for any sort of information and mathematics. Wikipedia has the largest collection of articles to read on whichever topic or whatever person you want and wolfram alpha solves every mathematical equation(at least the ones Aryabhatta, Euclid or Newton can!) 

              

                            Having said that, Smart phones without internet connectivity is the biggest dumb thing to do. You've invested some money, got a smartphone and will you use it just for listening to music and playing games? Thats just insane! Smartphones with internet connectivity opens up a whole new world for you because all the above things mentioned can be done anywhere you are if you feed your smartphone with a internet plan. Its a great thing to have because all your doubts can be clarified then and there on the go and so you don't have any half-thoughts on any topic. This is great because many of us find ourselves forgetting lots of things. Moreover you can have the information up to date on all the happenings around the world on the go! 

                            

                                

                              So, go start browsing, feed your brain with such content and have the feeling of missing all these before. In few days there will be lot of websites sitting on you which you follow and they constantly scorch you to read them and you'll have scarcity for time while doing productive work! So students, never join a college that doesn't offer speed, reliable Wi-Fi. check this particular thing twice before you join a college. :-)

P.S: I don't mean fb is a waste of time. Fb too is productive if you start commenting and having debates which build your character.

Apple TV - What I think its going to be like!

                  It all started with the statement of late Steve Jobs claiming that he had 'cracked the TV problem' in the biography of walter Isaacson. Lets get into insight of what I think its going to be like.

Present day TV experience: 

       Some people are content with what TV has to offer today. But lately with the invasion of world wide web, many internet things are creeping in to television sets and many are now slightly dissatisfied with the interface and connecting procedures of TV and Internet. TVs today offer Wi-Fi connectivity and a little browser is attached to them but on the whole the experience sucks. So what's available today is not enough for a seamless way of having browsing experience for the user and more importantly the interaction device remote has lot of space to improve. 

Apple TV:

                  Then came a little hobby thing Apple TV. Though they called this as hobby thing, it proved to be productive for lot of people. Apple TV is now being used in offices and class rooms for Air-Playing iPad screens for teaching and presentations. Air-Play is a very little hyped technology today but it would prove to be a key technology for future Apple products. Apple TV streams all your content present in the computer to a TV and it even shows videos in YouTube, Netflix, Vimeo, etc... Apple is making profits from these but not as much as main stream products like iPhone or iPad. 

Apple iTV speculations:

             After the statement of Steve Jobs, speculations started to take rounds that Apple is building the whole TV not just streaming box like Apple TV. When asked about this to Tim Cook by Walt Mossberg at D conference, Cook didn't say a definitive no. So there may be some works going on as there is a saying 'There will be no smoke if there is no fire.' 

      Naming pattern in Apple:

                   Apple Computers Inc. is the name before Apple entered to iPod and iTunes business. But after they invaded this market, they have changed the name to Apple Inc.. iPhone had iPhone OS in it at first. But after invasion of iPad, they have changed the name of its iPhone OS to just iOS. And now they have changed Mac OS X to just OS X. Is it an indication of adopting OS X to Apple TV? I don't t think so but this naming would be a long time merging plan of OS X and iOS. 

iTV:

                  So I think Apple TV will be built around Airplay technology. That means many apps will be built that use TV as a display and iPad or iPhone as remote. Problem in front of Apple is that they are a hardware driven company and they make most money on their hardware products sold. And problem with Apple TV is that people don't change their TVs more often as much as they do with phone or a tablet. 

                   

                   Solution is that Apple TV would be a smaller device like iPad which streams the content from TV. That means you would have one Apple TV per room and they stream content from Cable network. Any one can watch any channel on their choice. Personalisation would be possible with this kind of approach. But  they have a harder task in their hands pleasing people with small screens with this kind of approach. The best thing to do is build the displays with utmost care as they did with the iPhone 4 because Colour saturation is on the spot and there is lesser glare which are the main things that please the user. And sure Siri would be a part of whole experience.

                   Knowing Apple that its concentration is on end user experience and integration of hardware and software and knowing that everybody hates present day TVs, they would not leave this TV space to others. All this is just imaginative thinking of me and I would be completely wrong if Apple makes a full sized TV but not small screens as I've claimed. Lets see what Apple has in its product pipeline!

NFC Tags - For an automated life.

                     NFC is the latest short-range radio communications standard taking the mobile world by storm. NFC stands for Near Field Communication and its a standard that allow devices to establish radio connection whenever brought within close proximity of one another.

                      Majority of users use NFC to "beam" contact info, use them for payment services like Google Wallet and to transfer media in high-speeds. But we can now use NFC tags for automating the mobile.

                    With a simple touch of your device with this NFC tag, you can launch apps; set alarms; switch Bluetooth, WiFi, Navigation; and much more. With this small tag you can automate your tasks by just tapping your NFC-enabled Phone with it and have time saved and yes you can configure your tag. In the sense, you can configure your tag - which task to perform when tapped with a Phone.

                   NFC tags have a plethora of use case scenarios and that’s where the app NFC Task Launcher comes in. This application which is present in Google's Play Store supports NFC Forum Type 1, Type 2, Type 3 and Type 4 Tags as well as third party NFC Enabled tags like the MIFARE Classic, DESFire, Ultralight and Ultralight C and allows any NFC enabled device to create and perform tasks such as:

Create:

• Task Tags
• Switch Tasks – use 1 NFC tag to toggle between two Task tags
• vCard Tags
• Smart URL Tags
• Text Tags
• URI Tags (Tel, SMS, Mailto)

Task Tags currently support the configure or execute the following tasks:

• Turn Wifi on or off
• Turn Bluetooth on or off
• Make Bluetooth Discoverable
• Turn Air-plane mode on or off
• Launch any installed Application
• Configure a new Wifi connection and connect
• Configure and enable Portable Hotspot
• Turn Auto-sync on or off
• Turn Auto-rotation on or off
• Turn Notificaiton light on or off
• Set Display brightness and auto-brightness
• Launch any Tasker Task (for users of Tasker)
• Chang Ringtone
• Change Notification Tone
• Changing Ringer Mode (Normal/Silent/Vibrate)
• Changing Ringer Volume
• Changing Media Volume
• Changing Alarm Volume
• Changing Notification Volume
• Set vibration
• Set Alarm (both a fixed time and as a timer)
• Check in with Google Latitude, Foursquare, Facebook and Google Places
• Send a tweet on Twitter directly from the tag
• Start / Stop media playback
• Turn GPS on or off (root Required)
• Turn Mobile Data on or off (root required)
• Changing Display Timeout
• Changing Auto-Rotation
• Changing Notification Light  

                      And this list goes on. But for all this to perform, you should have a NFC-Powered Mobile and if you have, start automation and save time.

Example 1:

            We can create a simple Silent/Vibrate mode to a NFC tag and add it to a key chain. So whenever we see a board "Switch of your Mobile phones" in places like Movie theatres, Hospitals or at College, we can simply tap our mobile to this tag present in our pocket to keep the mobile in Silent/Vibrate mode.

Example 2:

          We can create a NFC tag to just open Google maps app and stick this tag to a mobile stand in the car. So whenever we sit in the car and place the phone in the stand, it automatically opens maps App and its a little time saver.

                  So there will be no end to the imagination if you start thinking. All you need is a NFC-Powered Mobile, a few NFC badges and a little geeky coolness!

                 

                      

Android - A Fragmented Market

Android is mobile OS designed by google corporation that sees 12 activations per second. It is the most adopted OS in the world ( Though some of it's users don't know what an app is and what an app market is.) Android has an advantage of adoptability- It is open and can be adopted by any manufacturer. But the result is many apps undergo crashes and many apps needs updates like once every 2 weeks (mostly). This drives user crazy. For example, I have 100 apps in my phone and I want them to be up to date. So I update all my apps and in just a week, I get 15+ updates. So as they are not divided into crash-updates or feature-updates,I have to go to every app and should read the description to find out whether that app is worth upgrade or not.

          Actually we see this many updates because devices are more,screen resolution is different and skin used varies from manufacturer to manufacturer. This becomes hard for a developer to write apps bug-free. Because one app would work perfectly well on a device and the same app would crash on the start on an another device though they both run the same version of Android. If they run different versions,thats an another story.

          Talking about software-updates, here is where Android is broken. You get a phone with some version out of the box and chances are more that you might end-up with the same software for years till you purchase a new phone. This is because liberty of Android to make manufacturers and carriers to run their custom skins. My strong view is that many phones today can run the next version of pure vanilla Android. But adding a skin to would slow down the phone and so manufacturers are not willing to update their phones. The reason for my belief is- a 600 MHz processor powered X10 Mini can run ics if rooted and ported with custom rom but why not an unrooted Xperia Play which is powered with more than a GHz processor?

           And if you are lucky enough to get a software update, you will be using the latest version for a maximum of 3-5 months. Because, after Android releases a software update, manufacturers play with that version add new skins, test that for at-least 6 months and then start the roll out. This rollout would take at-least 2 months to reach the users according to their carriers and SI numbers and all. Then 2-3 months after the update of your phone Android releases the next version of their OS making the last version obsolete. ( In Google I/O this year, in the demonstration of 'Project Butter', they made ICS obsolete by showing how fast their latest version is and how laggy the ICS is captured in a high speed camera though. The reason for me mentioning this is Xperia Mini has received the update just the day before I/O event and users are content that they are using the latest version for just a day )

             Team Android had promised a partnership with OEMs to provide software support for at-least 18 months after the user has purchased a phone in last I/O conference. No discussion on that has taken place in this year's I/O.  

              Keeping users' aspects aside, developer community is the one that is affected the most. Because, though Android has great APIs to offer for developers in the newer iterations of versions, they can't make use of them because they can't write Apps for a significantly smaller portion of that pie. Today, according to stats released by google according to traffic in play store in 2 weeks, 64 % of users use GingerBread, 10% users use ICS and the others use still previous versions. A developer can't opt to write apps for just 10% of users. Instead he opts for 74% (Gingerbread and ICS) and so he cant use new APIs which ICS has to offer. So quality of Apps is significantly reduced. But in iOS which is hated by most tinkerers who doesn't like control of manufacturers, more than 80% use the latest version iOS 5. 3 year old iPhone 3GS runs the latest version and there's a planned upgrade to iOS 6 though some features are eliminated. So developer feels very happy because the Apps he writes making use of the latest APIs can run on more than 80% of devices. And as there's just a single store in iOS, developers need not fear for App piracy.

           
Finally, as it is better late than never, Android should concentrate on fewer models and fewer resolutions as Microsoft did with Windows phone 8. Android has defeated iOS on market share but there is not a single Android phone that competes directly with iPhone. And more over phones running the latest software of iOS are more than the phones that are running the latest software of Android. So Android, address the issue of fragmentation!