Tag: iphone

Is Apple’s one-size-fits-all approach starting to fail?

My mother-in-law cracked me up when she asked “What’s the matter with Apple, how come they only make things in one or two sizes?” She’s as non-techie as they come and I think she nailed an important point. I’ve joked about this with friends and colleagues and even mocked about it in presentations. Yet, ever since the Apple September 10th announcement I’ve been wondering: can Apple innovate enough to stay a true technological leader, or are they starting to enter an era of simply copying others and wrapping ‘improvements’ under a luxury brand umbrella? I’m leaning towards to latter. After seeing Tim Cook’s presentation on September 10th, my opinion has started to solidify even more.

Factoid: Everyone will agree, for better or for worse, we are in an era of choice. Look at the variety of Androids. Think about the sheer number of cable and satellite TV channels, the variety of TV shows aimed at a dizzying variety of demographics, music has splintered from the days of major rock bands into hundreds of niche, self published indie groups.  Satellite radio. Most major car manufacturers now have dozens of car models and many of them you can significantly customize. And, even grocery stores now have a ridiculous number of choices for a lot of items that use to only have several manufacturers or producers.

So, what about Apple?

Apple has so far resisted playing to the status quo set by IBM, Microsoft and now Android of allowing endless variations of their products to fit a variety of needs and wants. It wasn’t that long ago, for example, that Dell Computer was a leader in selling desktop and laptop computers. That era has passed and I don’t believe Apple wants to follow in these giants footsteps. Perhaps there is some sort of evolutionary cycle that these leading public tech companies follow, like natural boom and bust cycles that we see in economics, neighborhoods, cities and world economies that Apple won’t be able to escape.

This leads me right back to the September 10th announcement.  Apple seems to have entered an era of incremental improvements in hardware and software: new colors (big whoop), finger print reader (Moto Atrix had that) and faster hardware.  But, the biggest pressure I think they’ll start facing is they are now behind the curve in allowing people to have choices. Real choices…not just new colors for custom cases made of soft silicon rubber. Choices are the way they world is headed right now. Case in point, how long have iPhones had 4-inch screens? How many tens of millions of larger Android screen phones have been sold? Can Apple simply ignore this and stick to their one-size-fits-all guns if the board of directors starts seeing missed opportunities and potentially lower sales?

Android, in comparison to iOS, has more varieties of sizes, manufacturers, shapes and colors than there are grapes for making wine. Buying an Android is like shopping for clothes at any mainstream department store. In addition to a bijillion patterns and colors, you have sizes like XS, SM, M, L, XL, XXL, etc. And then there is relaxed fit, straight fit and athletic fit along with different collar sizes.  This is brilliant from a consumer standpoint, and yes it’s a nightmare for application developers and IT shops that support them. But, developers and IT folks only represent a small fraction of an enormous world-wide porous marketplace full of more consumers, cultures and tastes than perhaps existed in history.

Buying a Mac is like walking into a top-notch art gallery. As you glide along into the next majestic room, shuffling your feet in hushed respect you can hear the mac genius say in an elegant foreign accent, “…and here on this masterfully carved solid white marble pedestal, fabulously embellished with an aluminum case and crystal clear retina view screen, and protected from theft by 12 visible and hidden security features is, ladies and gentlemen…the (audience gasps) Apple Macbook Pro.”

But, at some point even art galleries change up their exhibits as people’s tastes and interests change.  Even galleries have to innovate to stay ahead of the times. Can Apple change? Can Apple adapt to a new era of endless choices? Can Apple reinvent itself?

Smartphones aren’t getting any smarter

As an Android and mobile web developer, I feel compelled asking people I know or meet a lot of questions about their phones. One trend I’ve been seeing is feedback that smartphones, themselves, aren’t really getting any smarter. The ironman/crossfit marathon to add new features at warp speed has left behind a trail of cool phones that have some fundamental issues. So, I’m going to take a look at some of these here.

To put things in perspective, at Google I/O 2013, Sundar Pichai announced that there have now been 900 million Android activations world-wide to date. That’s not including iPhone activations, of course. But, Yeow, that’s a lot of phones! So, let’s look at some things that haven’t improved much. It’s almost like Newton’s Third Law of Motion can be applied to smartphones: while some things improve, other things must take a back seat.

Security. I can say this with certainty – I have yet to see or hear about a smartphone advertisement that says something such as “we’re striving to make this phone the most secure phone yet.” One thing is clear that Apple’s app vetting process helps reduce the level of malware compared to Google Play. Sure I understand that nothing is 100% secure, but the operating system vendors and the handset vendors could at least talk about it.  And, why don’t smartphones come with built-in, optimized versions of virus checkers and anti-malware tools like Windows PCs and laptops?

Most people’s lives could be seriously disrupted by the data stored on your typical smartphone, and we lose these and leave them behind accidentally by the thousands, and we inadvertently install malware.

Case in point – do a search on Google or bing using the term “smartphone security”, and see how many articles are published by the major phone vendors about security and securing your phone. The top result is by the FCC about their Smartphone Security Checker.

Restoring an Android phone. If you reset your droid or buy a new one, restoring everything back to the way it was and in it’s exact place, well…a very manual process. This is not very user friendly. Hey Android vendors, you should take a lesson from Apple on this one.

Display brightness and energy consumption. Phone displays appear to continue to be the “number one” draw on battery life. I’ve started to think most (many?) like their screens really bright. I mean realllly bright. It’s funny, I keep mine pretty dim to squeeze as much life out of the battery as possible, and I’ve lost count of the number of times people have said something like “how can even you see what you are doing??”

GPS energy consumption. My Garmin GPS lasts over 17 hours of continuous usage with two AA batteries. The battery on a typical smartphone has much greater storage capacity, but in actual field tests I’ve killed smartphone batteries in as little as 4 -5 hours of continuous GPS usage. GPS used wrong is a huge draw on the devices battery. Sure, a smartphone is doing a lot more work than a typical, single purpose GPS. But, my point is why hasn’t GPS battery consumption improved over five generations of smartphones? Those of us who build GPS-based native and web apps have to jump through hoops to optimize battery life in applications that do more than take a snapshot of the users current location. Some of the algorithms we write should simply be built-in to the firmware.

Charging times. Now I admit this varies from phone-to-phone but it’s still not very fast in general. I know I have said before that many people are never more than 10 feet from a charger, but for those of us who aren’t that attentive to charging I can say charging times can be an issue. For example, my iPad (okay it’s more of a tablet than a smartphone) is the slowest charging device on the planet compared to my original Google Ion which charged from dead to full in about an hour and a half. Sure, I understand there is a huge difference in battery size, but my point still stands. The cute, itty-bitty charger for iPad is way under-powered for the needs of charging a larger battery.  And, maybe some people are okay with that?

Planned Obsolescence.  This one is totally on Android. I’ve lost track of the number of Android phones that I have sitting around that have been rendered obsolete because the handset manufacturer provided one or maybe even two OS updates to the phone, and then they stopped. They become obsolete in the sense that some apps don’t run on older versions of the operating system. Sure, the upgrades are enticing (better camera, more memory, faster processors, etc. etc.) but what if someone doesn’t want or need to upgrade?

This may become more of an issue for people as some carriers are stopping their subsidies of phones and pushing users to carry the cost of a new phone directly. And new phones can give you sticker shock. If you have to pony up $350 – $600 for that new phone and all it’s advertised features, you might not be inclined to upgrade phones as often as you used to.

Wrap-up. So, I’ve written a mish-mash of different things that should be improved for both Android and iPhone. What I’d really like to see, and it probably won’t happen, is for Android, Apple and Microsoft to take a step back from the feature/functionality marathon and work on some fundamental issues to build an even stronger foundation for the next generation phones.

 

3 Steps for Determining if Your Website is Mobile Ready

Here are three step for helping determine the mobile ready strengths and weaknesses of your existing website. I’ve had a number of conversations from website teams recently asking the question: “Can we reuse our existing site for mobile users?” I was surprised to learn that the individuals asking me the question had, in fact, never visited their own site on a mobile device.

Note, this blog describes steps that need to be address before you decide whether to build for the web or native applications.

Step One – Create a small focus group of company outsiders, friends as well as employees.

  • Gather as many different types of mobile devices as possible including: iPad, iPhone, Android tablet, and several varieties of Android phones. Try to use a combination of older and newer devices. Don’t fool yourself by simply using all of the latest great versions, especially if your web visitors are the general public.
  • Get a mobile projector, such an Elmo or IPEVO.
  • Write down the common use cases, and the workflows associated with them. An example use case might be logging in to your site. And, a workflow would describe the steps a user takes to complete the login process  from beginning to the end.
  • Visit your website and run through the common use cases.
  • Turn off wireless, if possible, and let everyone experience typical internet speeds to simulate, for example, standing in line at the grocery store.
  • Trade off using different devices.
  • Hire a user interface (UX) designer if you don’t already have one. Bring them on board at the beginning, or as early as possible, in this evaluation process.

Step Two – Create a grading system to help assess the experience everyone had with each device.

  • Were you able to accomplish your task as easily and quickly as if you were at your desk with a full-size laptop or computer?
  • Did you have to do a lot of extra panning and zooming in and out to navigate through the use cases and workflows?
  • Was there any functionality that simply didn’t work, didn’t work correctly, or didn’t work as expected on the mobile device?
  • Were there any aspects of the site that looked different or wrong? For example, was all the text the right size? Was everything in the right place?
  • Were you satisfied with the amount of time it took for pages and images to load?
  • Were you able to comfortably use the site when rotating the phone between landscape and portrait views?
  • Were you okay with how quickly you were able to switch between different pages on the website?
  • Were you able to access secure resources without any problems?
  • And, perhaps most importantly, were there any obvious improvements you would like to see made to make mobile surfing experience better?

Step 3. Apply some commonly known mobile-specific conditions to your findings and see if helps to provide context to everyone’s experience.

  • One-handed plus gestures. It’s a fact that navigating a mobile web is significantly different from a desktop browser. There’s no mouse! Mobile browsing is usually done with one hand, while the other hand is used to hold the device. The screen is driven by what are called gestures. Examples of gestures are when you swipe your thumb upward on a page to scroll it downward, or when you use two fingers, usually the index finger and thumb, to pinch zoom the screen in or out.
  • Smaller Screens. And, of course the screens are much smaller than what you would find on a desktop or laptop. Different devices have different resolutions. And, navigating a full website can seem more cumbersome as you use gestures to navigate around, in comparison to the desktop experience of seeing the entire page, and using your a precision mouse to whip through the different links on a page.
  • Download Speeds. Download speeds on mobile devices vary considerably compared to your work machine hooked up to a reliable local area network (LAN). A site that seems zippy on your work machine, may load much differently on a typical smartphone. Also, for some older phones they may have much less processor power and that may lead to the perception of slower download speeds as the CPU chugs through displaying the page.

How do I interpret the results?

When you are done compile, discuss and analyze the findings with your internal teams and stakeholders.

Good. If most testers successfully navigated the majority of use cases and workflows then you are in good shape, and you may simply need to do some additional tweaking to your site.

Not so good. However, if most testers had unsatisfactory experiences then you’ll need to spend more time looking more closely as what worked and what didn’t work. You may find workflows that are great on a desktop machine that are clumsy and awkward on a mobile device.

Don’t be surprised. Portions of your site may have to be redesigned. You may not be able to include everything that’s in your full site into your mobile site. You may have to spend a lot of time optimizing the site to speed up page load times. Pay special attention to functionality that didn’t work on mobile. Mobile web browsers have well known limitations compared to full browsers. Looking at what didn’t work may help you decide if you need access to native device capabilities.

You’ve just taken a huge first step towards helping your team set the stage for stepping into the mobile world.