Productive Organizer

What do you guys think of Roboto, Android 4.0 new font which will overtake Droid Sans’ role?

On first impression I find that it is a very refreshing font compare to Droid. Droid comes across as very edgy, very strong.

Fonts really determine the overall user experience. Steve Jobs told everyone how much his course on Typography helped create this overall successful user experience for the iPhone.

Without Helvetica on Mac and IPhone and Segoe UI for Windows 7 and Vista, users would not like using these electronic devices so much.  For me, Droid always make the original Android Cupcake and Donut look funny.

Where Roboto works best is that it looks much like Helvetica or Gill Sans. These are the set of highly readable font that you cannot go wrong, along with Frutiger and Segoe UI.

Roboto is meant more for 720p screen not on Desktop

One thing I did was to see how well Roboto look on Windows desktop. It turns out that it looks rather bad! There were much mentioned that Roboto released is much optimized for high definition display so that’s why there are glyph that makes it look very bad on desktop. (Top part is Roboto bottom is Helvetica)

Roboto a rip off of iOS’s Helvetica?

There are many that says Roboto is a copy cat of Helvetica, but I think it just prove that the kind of font used in Apple and iPhone is a very readable, presentable and at the same time make a good headline.

Why are we talking about it being a rip-off?

John Gruber have a point:

No one — no one — is criticizing Roboto because it isn’t Helvetica. If anything, the complaint is that it’s too similar to Helvetica. Nor is anyone suggesting that Android should use Helvetica as its system font. In fact, if they did use Helvetica as their system font, the criticism would be louder, insofar as they’d be seen as copying from Apple. (Of course, they couldn’t use Helvetica, because Helvetica can’t be included in an open source OS, but that’s beside the point.)

On Segoe, we agree. But note that everyone agrees. No one from Holwerda’s imaginary Apple-defending Helvetica-loving cabal has anything but praise for Segoe, as Metro’s system font. It’s attractive, readable, friendly, and distinctive.

Honestly, I’m just selfish. I want Android to have an attractive system font, if for no other reason than that the system font is going to be used to render Daring Fireball for anyone reading it on an Android device. This idea that designers who favor iOS criticize Android for being poorly designed just because it’s from an Apple competitor is nonsense — a bogeyman construct dreamed up by open source zealots who refuse to believe over a decade of evidence that open source UIs tend to be ugly, and that ugly UIs tend to be unpopular. We criticize Android for being poorly designed because it’s poorly designed. We favor iOS because it’s better designed. That’s it.

How to change your rooted smartphone

1. Download and install the app Font Changer from the market (requires your device to be rooted)
2. Download the zip file containing the Roboto font and unzip it (XDA Forum link, Mediafire, Or here)
3. Open System > Fonts and copy all the three .ttf files from the unzipped folder and paste them into your phone’s SDcard (inside the folder “.fontchanger“)
4. Open the app in your device and select the font
5. Reboot

Ever get the experience where you get a HTC or Samsung Android phone and absolutely hate that its bloated with a lot of apps you will never use.

Well what grabbed my attention the most was that you can disable them in Ice Cream Sandwich, Android 4.0

Disabling Apps:  ICS adds the ability to disable an app outright. Don’t like an app that came preinstalled? Disable it! Its resources never run and its launcher icon is gone until you re-enable it. (This doesn’t free up any space — it can’t, since pre-installed apps are included in the read-only system storage. But it does put them “out of sight, out of mind.”)

What do you guys think? Am i overrating this feature?

Om Malik mentioned this week how many of us are debating on the wrong area. Instead of thinking who would win out, Google? Amazon? Facebook? or Apple?

What is definite is which old tech industry is going to suffer. As an investor in shares it affects you to know that a company that performs really well with a iron cast business model may be ripped wide open by these new tech companies.

This could be classified as substitutes or blue ocean. Do read this.

Today’s Internet-centric communication device (for the lack of a better word) is in competition with the old way. Thanks to new chip technologies, cheap sensors and fast growing networks, the idea of what is a phone has changed. This is leading to behavior changes and new interactions. They are behaviors of a new connected life. These new behaviors will change many different parts of society and business.

At the launch of the iPhone 4S, Apple chief executive office Tim Cook

[Read full story here >>]

Google and Samsung will be holding an event on 19th October 2011, where they are likely to release the Nexus Prime and Ice Cream Sandwich, the next iteration of Android.

In yesterday’s conference call after announcing their Q3 results, Larry Page said the follow on ICS:

“You won’t believe what we have managed to do in this release. We see Android going gangbusters, and we don’t see anything that will stop that.”

When you promise something like this, you better make sure that you jolly deliver it. Recent iteration of Android have not truly WOW the fans.

And lets face it: Google+ looks to be going downhill. They are not making money off it and probably majority of the people there are just testing it and not truly using Google+

This is bad. This is why I am starting to not believe this open movement and why protectionism may work in some situation.

In recent updates, HTC introduces a suite of logging tools that collected lots of your phone’s information. This on the surface looks good.

But put in the wrong hands, see what happens!

Let me put it another way. By using only the INTERNET permission, any app can also gain at leastthe following:

ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION Allows an application to access coarse (e.g., Cell-ID, WiFi) location
ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION Allows an application to access fine (e.g., GPS) location
ACCESS_LOCATION_EXTRA_COMMANDS Allows an application to access extra location provider commands
ACCESS_WIFI_STATE Allows applications to access information about Wi-Fi networks
BATTERY_STATS Allows an application to collect battery statistics
DUMP Allows an application to retrieve state dump information from system services.
GET_ACCOUNTS Allows access to the list of accounts in the Accounts Service
GET_PACKAGE_SIZE Allows an application to find out the space used by any package.
GET_TASKS Allows an application to get information about the currently or recently running tasks: a thumbnail representation of the tasks, what activities are running in it, etc.
READ_LOGS Allows an application to read the low-level system log files.
READ_SYNC_SETTINGS Allows applications to read the sync settings
READ_SYNC_STATS Allows applications to read the sync stats

Android Police have the full coverage including videos of a proof of concept of a malware key logger that could steal your information.

The best part is for 5 days, HTC HAS NOT RESPONDED!

This need for virus protection, malware protection and overall fragmentation is starting to make Android look like the problems we see on Windows platform and why iOS may be a better platform.

Does this freak you guys out?

We talked about a fair bit at Productive Organizer that this tablet war have actually become an IPad war. Specifically iPad versus the rest. Android tablets, HP Touchpad and Blackberry Playbook all refused to take off.

What took off? Cheap readers or tablets sold by Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Amazon have a really successful business here with the Kindle.

Amazon understands the tablet business model

I am  really impress that Jeff Bezos of Amazon really gets this game

1. Its not about the hardware. It is a services game.
2. Loss Leader: Sell the hardware cheap like the xBox or Printers. That acts as the channel for people to easily buy your products.
3. It is essentially similar to the iTunes. They are a retail operating system.
4. Leverage on the cloud to increase users switching cost and greater tie in to your network.
5. Conversion to Amazon Prime: When they convert consumers to Amazon Prime, consumers get addicted to the ease and way to purchase things off amazon.
6. It gets tablets in the hands of a lot of folks who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford an iPad. It’s an offering for the mainstream – which is a great thing.

Game changer price

You can say all you want about this device not having 3G but at the price of $199 this will really change how the competitors compete.

One of the best device currently is the Galaxy Tab 7 inch at $350. That’s almost 75% more than this Kindle.

This product is in a really sweet spot because

• it is cheap enough that high bracket consumers who have an iPad is able to get one of these.
• people who don’t like Apple can get one of these
• for people who want to try out the Android ecosystem this is a massive undercut to Motorola, Samsung and the others.

Game theory will see that the price of the rest of the tablets will come down.

The importance of hardware and software integration

The hardware is mixed

• TI OMAP4 800 MHZ Dual Core Processor. Not sure how good this is. We will have to do an actual usage review to know. I don’t really trust OMAP processors.
• 7 Inch IPS Screen. With the Kindle Fire we have a 7″ IPS panel with a 1024 x 600 resolution that features great colors and exceptional viewing angles.The IPS display truly has an amazing set of viewing angles thanks to the IPS panel and can be seen at 178° and more.
• Physical dimensions are 7.5 x 4.7 x 0.45 inches (190 x 120 x 11.5mm)
• Gorilla Glass
• Only Registers 2 points on Multi Touch (iPad have 11).
• No 3G, GPS, Microphone
• WIFI 802.11n
• Android Based
• A 3.5mm headphone jack is naturally included as is a pair of top-mounted stereo speakers.
• 8 GB of storage. With only 8GB of solid-state-storage space on the Kindle Fire, there is plenty of room for e-books, and maybe a few other document types, but not much else. Even then, we’d want to know how much of that 8GB is left over after operating system and app overhead. Note that the 64GB 11-inch MacBook Air, for example, leaves you with only 49GB of usable space right out of the box.

Make no mistake, the hardware means jack and only the integration of software, cloud services and hardware matters. The major downside is no camera, microphone and expansion slots for additional storage.

Clearly Amazon wants this to be used as a reader and not anything else.

Waiting for the hackers at XDA Developer to root this and custom rom it.

Another big driver in the overseas market is when XDA Developers have hacked and custom rom this kindle. Just like the Nook, it took off because for a low price you get a reasonable hardware to do many stuff.

So what do you think? Will you get the Kindle fire? The Kindle Touch at $79 dollars look great as well!

So we heard that Samsung is going to unveil their BBM rival data messenger app.

Now before I move on it should be noted that currently the most popular data messenger platform have been Whatsapp which is available on Nokia, Android, iOS and Blackberry. Basically it is everywhere and it is tied to one phone number. Users can single chat, group chat and send multimedia attachments.

Now I do use Whatsapp but I do find that it is a smashing service but the one bad point is that its tied to the phone number and I cannot have Whatsapp on multiple devices as one time and cannot send through a desktop web client.

That is why I like Beluga, which does the same thing as Whatsapp but only available in Android, iOS and does desktop web client as well.

So what Samsung is trying to do here is to have a chat client on as many platforms as possible

1. Samsung’s own BADA
2. Android
3. iOS
4. Blackberry
5. Web
6. Does sharing media, like photos, videos, voice messages, and contacts

Personally I am excited at this prospect. I form a few chat communities using Beluga to discuss investments and development and not all of my friends are on smartphones or on facebook. A ubiquitous chat client that is on ALL platforms could really work.

Do you guys think there is a place for ChatON?

We blogged about the Archos GEN 8 tablets a fair bit due to their low price range versus the iOS devices and other Android Tablets.

Archos recently announced that their GEN9 is coming this year. Here are the likely specs:

The first one is the ARCHOS 80 G9, and it has a 8-inch screen with a 1024 x 768 resolution. The second one, the ARCHOS 101 G9 has a (you guessed it) 10.1-inch screen with a 1280 x 800 resolution. And that’s where the differences between these two tablets stop. Everything else about them is equal, except the price of course. Both of them have:

• Android 3.1 Honeycomb
• 1.5 GHz dual-core CORTEX A9 OMAP4
• 16 GB of internal memory, or a 250 GB Seagate HDD
• 720p front-facing camera
• HDMI output
• Kick-stand

We don’t know how much RAM each tablet has, but we’re guessing it’s somewhere between 512 MB and 1 GB. Also, there’s no mention of a rear-facing camera anywhere, so chances are you won’t be using these tablets as a camera anytime soon.

The thing why Archos still sells tablets or gadgets is that although there are many tablets out there, the big vendors like Acer, Motorola, HTC are not able to reach their pricing point!

Archos is likely to sell the G9 80 at USD 279 and 101 at USD 349. Now that is low consider the Motorola Xoom at USD 599!

My opinion of Archos Tablets is that they always sits between the reliable hardware manufacturers and the China Shanzai ones.

Good Specs, Great Price, but always with some issues. What do you guys think? Will you go for this?

Here is a nice article I found that aggregates great productivity apps specifically targeted at mothers:

1. information on baby development and care
2. healthcare information
3. proper feeding practices
4. track diaper changes, sleep cycles and medications
5. pregnancy tracking
6. sex offenders search
7. kids distraction games

[Read the full article here >>]

Technology have come to a stage where it is able to assist us massively in our goals. Sometimes we use it for the sake of digitizing it to little effect, sometimes it does help massively.

The smartphone with GPS really expanded what we can do with technology to such an extend that you are able to find things and record things on a geographical scale easily.

Here is a good article written on Android and Me detailing how some android apps help the writer lose 100 pounds before his wedding day.