Android 2.3 & My Droid X

I've owned my Motorola Droid X Android phone for just under a year now. In that time I've had three different versions of Android with the latest being 2.3 which arrived a week or so back. It's been like getting a new phone with each upgrade. Based on the age of the phone and Google's assertion that all Android devices must be supported with new OS releases for at least 18 months I should get at least one more update. The Droid X isn't state of the art at this point but it does have a 1GHz processor and a reasonably powerful GPU plus a half gig of RAM so it is still a very capable platform.

The upgrade from 2.2 to 2.3 was relatively painless and quick, though a few settings were lost along the way. For instance I had to login to Amazon again and my wireless hot spot settings needed to be reentered.

The overall look and feel of the GUI is more refined and at least as peppy as previous releases. I've noticed many little changes like the addition of profiles which I haven't actually used yet. Profiles apparently allow you to have up to three (and possibly more) different icon arrangements.

The built in camera support has been enhanced. Panorama assist used to require the user to enter left to right or right to left. Now it just figures it out based on the motion of the camera.

It's hard to judge battery life since my battery has been showing signs that it needs to be replaced recently so I have a new one on the way.

The biggest thing I've noticed though is the improvements in the wireless hot spot function. Prior to the 2.3 update I've never been very happy with the reliability of this feature. I've frequently had to power cycle my phone to get it to work and dropped connections were common. In limited testing with 2.3 I've had none of those problems. Hopefully I didn't just get lucky in my initial testing but I don't think that is the case. I've used the wireless hot spot regularly and never had as good an experience before. It's also nice that I had the option of telling the phone to never warn me again about the dangers of enabling the hot spot function.

As much as I like Android, prior to 2.3 Apple's iOS was a more refined experience. Google has made impressive strides with this release and at this point I don't feel like there is a significant gap. Having Apple and Google do their best to out innovate the other is going to be good for consumers and that really is becoming a two way street as the new notifications functionality in iOS 5 looks a lot like the one Android has had for awhile now.

Application stability has been good though I did notice one or two minor glitches right after the update. Downloading the latest releases of my apps seems to have resolved those. Overall phone stability has been as good or better than prior releases. I don't see any reason to delay in doing this update. The UI tweaks are subtle enough that there really isn't any noticeable learning curve in my experience.

Overall this phone has held up well. I've dropped it a few times along the way and even without a case it's survived. The screen has some minor scratches but nothing I notice normally. I'm kind of tough on phones so this is an impressive track record.

I don't feel any urge to upgrade to the second generation Droid X but I'll certainly take a very serious look at the third generation if Motorola produces one.

Image via Wikipedia

Related Articles

• Android This Week: iOS 5 vs Android; Sprint adds Droids; Market improves (gigaom.com)
• Android 2.3 officially ready for all Motorola Droid X users (electronista.com)

2010 Year End Wrap-up and Predictions

Looking Back

I covered a number of different topics over the past six months.  NVidia & Apple were mentioned frequently as were the Motorola Droid X, Kindle and the IPhone .  I also did a series of three articles that analyzed Martin Guitars apparent pricing strategy.  Here are brief followup comments on some of these companies & products.

• Nvidia: Discreet graphic sales have rebounded in recent months and their embedded GPU's are finally gaining some traction.  Publicity wins in the HPC space have been impressive.  They've obviously decided to punt on the X86 market long term since they don't appear to have any plans to develop an Intel compatible processor of their own or acquire VIA for theirs.  I don't see PC's or Windows vanishing any time soon but it's clear that in the future people will primarily interact with the Internet via mobile devices and ARM based solutions fill this space nicely and the NVidia Tegra product is an increasingly credible offering in this space.  With both Intel & AMD offering products with GPU's integrated onto the same packaging as the main processor the discreet GPU is going to be an increasingly niche product.
• Apple: The IPhone 4 woes have pretty much blown over.   Apple has continued to establish themselves as a premium brand with innovative design wins and great marketing.  This company more than any other understands that the technology is secondary to putting out compelling products that customers feel a connection to.
• Motorola Droid X: I'm still happy with my Droid X.  The Froyo update added some nice capabilities and overall it's been a very good experience.  Inevitably though it seems like the longer I have a device the more unstable it becomes.  Adding and removing software is always a crap shot.  In theory it shouldn't make a difference but perceptually anyway it certainly seems to.  On the plus side, when I do need to pull the battery to clear the phone I only have to wait a couple of minutes for it to boot up, which is much better than the past couple of RIM Blackberry phones I've used or owned.  In regards to stability, I'm less inclined to blame Android than I am the fact that the more complex a device is, the more difficult it is to get everything to work properly together.  Today's smart phone's are essentially palm sized personal computers and all that functionality comes at a price in terms of reliability.  This is likely one of the reasons Apple is so draconian in how they approach 3rd party Apps for their mobile platforms.  
• Kindle: Which brings me to the Kindle.  Within the limitations I discussed in earlier BLOG entries it continues to be a pleasure to use.  The recently announced ability to loan books  was a pleasant surprise; as with the text to speech function Amazon has left it up to content providers to say yes or no to enabling this feature on a book by book basis. Simplicity is a wonderful thing in some cases and this is one of those.  There is increasing evidence that the Kindle and IPad fill different enough niches that there isn't currently a lot of overlap.  This is particularly true given the relatively low price of ~ $140 for the entry level Kindle.  If you can afford $500 or more for an IPad you can probably come up with the money for a Kindle as well.  .  

Looking Forward

Here are some fearless predictions on various products and companies and what the new year might hold.

• IPhone: This is a device that may have reached maturity.  I'm not saying that Apple won't continue to try to innovate, but future functional changes are likely to be much less revolutionary.  Stylistically I'd expect a fairly radical departure from the IPhone 4, likely to a form factor with softer edges like the latest Touch & the first generation IPad.  I also expect a CDMA capable IPhone.  Adding a CDMA IPhone will clear the technological hurdle that has prevented Verizon from selling IPhone's in the past.  I believe the contractual hurdle ends January 1 2011.  
• IPad: On the IPad front the most likely change is the addition of a back facing camera.   I expect to see some modest price drops and enhancements but nothing earth shattering.  I'm not even convinced that we'll see a substantial increase in the resolution of the display.  Fragmentation is something that Apple has been criticizing Android for recently and with every new device they come out with that has a different display resolution their fragmentation increases.Other credible rumors include a mini USB port. Less likely, at least in the short term is some sort of hybrid display that works both in bright light and darkness.  There is at least one option.  The technology used in the OLPC is available from a company called "Pixel Qi" and features both a color mode similar to LCD's and a black and white mode that shares many properties with E-Ink.  If Apple adopts this or a similar technology for the IPad then Amazon and other companies producing E-Book readers are going to see their sales drop primarily on the high end since there would no longer be a compelling reason for people to buy an E-Book reader in addition to their IPad.
• Kindle: I don't see dual mode displays being as big a boost for E-Book readers such as the Kindle.  Yes, they would add some nice capabilities but much of the appeal of these devices, particularly the Kindle is their simplicity and cost.  A color display would be a plus, but if it adds significantly to the initial purchase cost or tempts Amazon to try to go head to head with Apple and other tablet producers it is likely to be a net negative long term.  There are no clear answers here but I'd be inclined to move to a hybrid display and keep the functionality of future Kindle's focused on books and possibly other media.  I'd also want to keep the price of the entry level model below $150. 
• Amazon: In theory Amazon can cut and run at any time in regards to the Kindle.  They already support reader software on the majority of platforms that people care about and it's hard to believe that the margins on the Kindle are very high, or even positive when all costs are taken into account.  However, no other platform makes it easier to buy books from Amazon.  If you're making the bulk of your money selling "media" as most companies do in this situation than clearly facilitating purchases is in your best interest.  
• Software Patents: I'd like to think that this is the year that software patents will become saner but there is plenty of evidence to argue to the contrary.  Here's just one example.  This is why I'm not a fan of software patents.  The concept of double clicking initiating an action has been around for a long time.  probably decades.  The trivial differences described in this patent required no innovation and little thought.  I don't think it is productive or beneficial to have entities going around filing for and being granted these kinds of patents.  If software patents are legitimate at all than the bar should be MUCH higher than this.
• Paying For Online Content:  It seems like we've finally turned the corner in regards to paying for online content.  I'm not going to claim that piracy does not exist or that there isn't room for improvement but I'm seeing things happen in this space that I wouldn't have just a few years back.  Minecraft is a simple yet addictive game that is currently in Beta but available for sale.  As I write this they have managed to sell nearly a million copies at about $20 per.  In the bad old days we essentially had a situation where legitimate access to digital content was nearly non existent and expensive while illegitimate copies were readily available and free.  This created a culture of entitlement that has been very slow to subside.  Apple made the first significant dent with the ITunes store and others have followed. Making online payments and purchases easy and reasonably secure by way of services such as PayPal has also helped.  The cost of creating and delivering digital content is almost entirely in the creation part of the process.  The per unit variable costs are essentially nil.  As people become increasingly willing to pay for online content we're going to see more business models that are based off of customers paying directly, rather than indirectly by way of ad revenues.  

Closing Musings

As 2010 comes to a close I've been writing this BLOG for almost exactly six months.  I've had a lot of fun and am looking forward to continuing to make updates in 2011 as time and inspiration allows.

I'm grateful for a lot of things this year, one of which is the fact that at least a few people have apparently taken the time to read some of my musings.  While I'm not writing here to become rich or famous I'd be lying if I claimed that I don't get a bit of pleasure out of every single hit this BLOG gets.  Thank you to everyone who has read even one word I've written.

Photo Credits

• Past Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
• Future Image: Pixomar / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Related Articles

• West Coast Entrepreneurial Hub Lands Babson College Commitment (bostonkayakguy.wordpress.com)
• Amazon: Third-gen Kindle is all-time bestseller (news.cnet.com)
• Nvidia Tegra 2 hailed as Honeycomb CPU of choice (go.theregister.com)
• Motorola Disputes 'Exploding' Droid X Incident (pocketnow.com)
• Amazon: iPad owners buying Kindle, too (intomobile.com)
• You Can Now Borrow/Lend Kindle Books (techie-buzz.com)
• Amazon set to sell 8 million Kindles this year (telegraph.co.uk)

Google By The Borders

In my last post I speculated a bit about what Google might be doing with all that data they are gathering from Android phones.  Earlier this evening Rea and I were heading to Borders books to purchase the book that the movie Secretariat is based on.  Borders sends us coupons regularly in email and as we were getting close to the store I decided to search for the coupon in my GMail app so I'd have it handy.  Before I'd typed a single character the helpful search feature had put up three options.  I don't recall the other two, but one of them was Borders.  I touched that option and within seconds I had located the latest coupon in my saved mail.

On the one hand I loved the convenience and speed of the experience.  On the other, it was a little spooky.  Was it just a coincidence or did Google make a quick guess where we were going based on where we were and our previous destinations in that area?

Artificial Intelligence has been around as a field since at least the 1960's.  I have a set of books I bought used in a box somewhere.  They are from the early 70's and outline the state of the art and history of the field up until that time. It's interesting to contemplate the hubris of those early pioneers.  They thought that translating between human languages would be trivial.  Even today relatively simple translations between English & Spanish are imperfect and as the two languages being translated diverge errors tend to become more common and occasionally very amusing.  What Google has now isn't really AI but there are times when it sure seems that way.  Essentially Google's tools are very good at tracking and understanding context and making associations.  This isn't intelligence per say but it can sure look that way at times.

My mother was born before the first electronic computer was built.  I've sometimes wondered what it is like to have lived through that much change.  If I live another couple of decades I strongly suspect I'll get to see more change than she has over the course of her life.  I find that thought both a little scary and very exciting.

Image via Wikipedia

Google/NVidia/Word of Mouth

(Google)

One of the things I really like about my Droid X phone is the navigation app. It's essentially eliminated the need for me to worry about having a navigation system in any car I buy or rent. I'm highly prone to making wrong turns, so having an electronic genie available at all times that can instruct me in minute detail on what to do is excellent. On thing that occurred to me earlier this week as I was driving home from a meeting about thirty miles from my home is that Google is getting all sorts of interesting information by providing that App. They can get a pretty good real time perspective on how slowly traffic is moving on a particular freeway. Over time they can get an idea of traffic flow on surface streets and where stop signs and traffic lights are. As Android based phones become more common they are going to have more and more data points to look at. I wonder what all those clever people at Google are planning on doing with this information? One thing they could do is reroute in real time based on traffic flows. That information is already available for most freeways and some major roads, at least hear in the SF Bay area, but coverage seems to be a lot less common for surface streets. You wouldn't even need to be in the navigation application. All it would take is the GPS being enabled. Even without the GPS they can make a pretty good guess based on cell tower triangulation and the maps of wireless hot spots that they've built.

Google started out with a fairly simple idea, to help organize the worlds information. Even a fairly simple idea can lead in an amazing number of directions.

(NVidia)
The big news on the the NVidia front recently has been their decision to directly sell finished boards.  Historically NVidia has sold GPU's to partners who have then created boards that were in turn sold to customers.  It's nearly always the case that being closer to the final sale means higher margins, but undermining your partners in this way can be  a very bad thing as they tend to take such changes in the way the world works very negatively.  Several years ago NVidia acquired the assets of a competitor called 3Dfx for song after 3Dfx essentially did the same thing, thus alienating their partners and accelerating their demise.

So, is this an act of desperation or a change in business strategy with potential risks and rewards?  I've seen both theories advocated by various technology pundits.  I'm honestly not sure which side is right.  Having signed up Best Buy to sell their cards certainly wasn't a bad move.


(Word of Mouth)
Recently my wife and I have been shopping for an alarm company.   Some friends of ours have a more immediate need and have thus been a bit more aggressive in pursuing a solution.  We've been sharing information during the search and one thing that struck me is how common this is and how positive or negative information about a particular company is magnified.  Our friend got a big time hard sell and bad attitude from one of the major national players in this space.  Instantly I removed that company from our list of prospects.  Another company that I heard about while having lunch with some coworkers faired much better when our friend contacted them by being professional and customer focused.  Rather than trying to sell our friend as much equipment as they could they made suggestions on how to get the best possible coverage without spending too much up front.  It's probably not a surprise that this second company is currently the odds on favorite to get both our friends business and ours.

Word of mouth is hard to measure, but it is likely a significant factor, particularly in situations where a company is trying to acquire new customers.  It's kind of amazing to me how many businesses drop the ball in this area.  Bad interactions multiply.  Customer facing employees are extremely important to the long term health of any enterprise.  This concept is often ignored by companies that are looking for a short term improvement in their bottom line by outsourcing.  I suspect that most of us have had sub par experiences as a result of such efforts.

Really though, outsourcing isn't the problem here.  The problem is the fact that some companies don't seem to value the contribution that customer facing portions of their business provide to their bottom line.  Bad customer experiences can come just as easily from employees who are some combination of badly trained, badly treated or badly paid.

In general it seems to me that companies don't always have a very good idea of where value is created.

Image via Wikipedia