Productive Organizer

I have subscribe to the Google network a fair bit. This means that I use

1. Gmail as my main email client
2. Google Reader as my main RSS feeds reader
3. Google Calendar as my consolidated calendar
4. Google Contacts as my main contact manager

The advantage of subscribing to Google’s cloud services or network, or whatever you want to call it is that

1. It is extensible. You can link data to your data easier than other platform. You can export data away from Google should you feel dis-satisfied with it
2. Because it is extensible and API is open to developers, many desktop,smartphone and other native device developers can build applications to increase productivity and performance
3. Google continues to innovate in their products to accommodate to a large number of users with different ways of calendaring, contacts management, reading and managing email

But the downside for using Google’s product

1. The look is always very ugly compare to Microsoft and Yahoo’s offering
2. Because applications are always in Beta, some people will feel turn off about experimental things and why it doesn’t have certain features

Google have taken a lot of efforts to address the UGLY portion. In the last year, their web applications and Android and iPhone applications have undergone a drastic beautifying.

Now there is a consistent minimalist white theme for almost all their applications. They have cut out a lot of the clutter and have given enough whitespace to enable the user to focus on the right subject.

Good user interface attracts users to come back and want to use it, and the more a person use it, it enhances them better.

The new Gmail resizes better when you change it to a smaller window. The email conversations look better with the picture of the person you are talking to next to it and overall feels more like a chat conversation.

The problem with Google Reader had been that it always look strange and its really not great at focusing on what matters – the content! This redesign removes a lot of the boundaries and ensures the user sees clearly between controls and content.

There is also a tighter integration with Google Plus which is good to grow the Google Plus social network. The more ways you make it easier for info sharing the more it becomes important.

What do you guys think? Do you like the new changes?

If you want a quick and concise guide how to setup iCloud on your iOS devices and how you can access them on your Windows 7 desktop here is a great guide at Inspired Geek that teaches that

[Setup iCloud on iOS, Windows PC >]

One of the great enhancement that Apple brought along for iOS 5 is to sync to iTunes through WIFI.

To me this is long belated, since Android and Google was able to do that a few iterations ago.

Many would assume that you can just go to your iOS device > Settings > General > iTunes Wi-Fi Sync and you will be able to sync.

This is not the case. You would have to set it up the first time.

1. Make sure you are in the same Wi-Fi network as your Mac, Windows Computer. If you are not on the same network you cannot sync!
2. Plug in the iPhone cable to sync.
3. On your device in iTunes you should see Options > Sync with this iPad over Wi-Fi. Check this option.
4. Click Apply.
5. Unplug the cable and go to iOS device > Settings > General > iTunes Wi-Fi Sync to test it.

Wi-Fi improves your efficiency massively.

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!

Toodledo is a web to do list application that enables you to assess to your tasks and sub-tasks wherever you can access the internet.

What is great about it is that it has an API that allows many iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android and WebOS applications from synchronizing their tasks to this platform.

It is free to use although I recommend you give its Pro account a try as it is only USD 12 per year

The one thing that I do not understand is why for such a flexible to do list, it looks so bad. The interface looks cartoonish and the people that use to-do list for management are more professionals who would prefer a more functional interface that is cleaner.

The folks over there finally did a redesign of their web application and suffice to say I like this tone down neutral color theme.

The changes are mostly aesthetic how ever I really appreiciate a lot of re-organization changes

View By List to the Sidebar

This section is more cleaner and well placed. It enables the user to change the view to quickly review by lists,due-date or tags.

Most people will like this sidebar compare to the old one.

Dropdown Sorting Bar

Filter gets separated from other functionalities.

The main user interface is now less cluttered. You can see how you can sort your current view list.

At the next part you can see whether you want to see the details or not.

How has this new Toodledo interface been for you?

I read today that Apple is spending a strategic sum of money typing up with more hardware manufacturers. Competition and Anti trust aside, i think this is reall shrewd of them.

We always complained that Apple’s products are expensive but if you look at it, all the competitive tablets are not cheap.

Today we got news of Motorola’s Xoom Honeycomb likely price without telco subsidy and it comes up to USD 799.

That translates to somewhere close to iPad 1 gen pricing. A 16GB WIFI + 3G cost USD 629!

What it means is that 

1. either they couldn’t bring the cost down
2. they think this hw + os is much better than what Apple provide

I think they are making the same mistake as Samsung. This will not take off

We just got hit with the news of the minimum advertised price for the Motorola Xoom Android tablet and HTC ThunderBolt LTE smartphone on Verizon. Looks like the Xoom will be going for $799 — we have to assume that’s unsubsidized. The HTC Thunderbolt is listed at $249, a more subsidy-friendly number.

That doesn’t mean those are the exact prices we’ll see at launch — and we still don’t know when that is for either device. But it’s a bit of a starting point. One more pic after the break. Thanks to the the tipsters!

[Android Central >>]

As human beings we all have opinions on which device or platform is better than the other and how bad my service provider is.

What I love about twitter is that it is a fun app first and foremost.But, at the same time you can really leverage on crowd sourcing to know what the general trend is for certain things:

1. hot songs
2. hot movies
3. iPad or Galaxy Tab
4. Toyota or Honda cars

Here is a good write-up on the results of a twitter trend study conducted by Crimson Hexagon.

[Twitter Stats Reveal How the iPad, Kindle, and Nook Stack Up >>]

I have in the past stated quite a few times that I don’t read news the normal way. Rather I prefer reading via Google RSS Reader.

The advantages of Google RSS Reader are

1. Aggregates all your favorite news and blogs in a single reader.
2. You only get to read new news that you have not read before. You do not need to turn up at a site, browse for new news, and not knowing whether you have read it before or not.
3. Categorize your reading patterns into labels and folders. You essentially create your own newspaper!
4. Read at different sources but synchronize to a single data source. You can read on your Chrome browser,Firefox, iPAD, Android phone or iPhone yet it will sync to a single data source so you don’t have to see read articles again.

What we all like are free RSS Readers and makeuseof.com brings us 6 of the best:

The Feed

Feeddler RSS Reader

MobileRSS HD

Flipboard

You can read more about the editor’s comments at makeuseof.com

[Full Article here>>]

I tend to agree with Jon Buys view here that when you buy a few Apple products it creates so much synergy that buying a product out of the ecosystem becomes difficult.

It helps that Apple’s product is so simple to understand and do what you tell them to.

Now that cannot be said for Google’s ecosystem. Sure they are ubiquitous and good to use, however they don’t grab you in a way Apple’s products does.

I recently stepped outside the cozy Apple ecosystem and purchased an Android phone, theHTC Desire. It was on sale at a steep discount, and I thought I would be able to integrate itinto my work/life flow. I was wrong, and the phone is being returned.

The phone was powerful, and had some very interesting features, but it was so entirely different from the rest of my Mac setup that nothing felt right. I could go into detail about application crashes, frustrating hardware, the sordid Android Market (I wouldn’t let my kids browse through it), and other annoyances, but suffice to say that it simply didn’t measure up to the expectations I’ve developed from using Apple devices.

Apple is the only computer company that creates all of its own hardware and software; they control the entire package. Personal computers are a mishmash of parts and pieces from different sources. Hardware from one company, software from another. By contrast, many modern smartphone and computer makers get hardware from one place, and an operating system from another. BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion is a notable exception to this rule, but a recent interview with their co-CEO Mike Lazaridis seems to suggest the company’s leadership at least has little sense of what smartphone consumers really want.

[Read the full article here >>]

I think I have commented enough on why I think Android’s model is faulty and that is why its is not a good productive device.

But I never expected that someone could be in such an agreement with my views until I found this post by John Gruber from Daring Fireball.

John, being a first and foremost iPhone and iPad user, takes a stab at why the Android just did not work for him.

It shocks me that many of his points is what I feel hits the nail on the head what is wrong with the platform. He is not an apple fanatic and he draws enough examples from other platforms as well.

Critics of both Apple and Google should take a look at this.

Here is a summary of his argument:

1. The quality of Android apps not the quantity

I’ve complained, numerous times, about the “how many total apps are in your store?” metric — the idea that Apple is “winning” because there are more iOS apps than there are apps for any other mobile platform. If quantity of app titles were all that mattered, we’d all be using Windows, not Mac OS X, right? Having the most apps matters, but having the best apps matters too. The sweet spot for a platform is to do well in both regards.

Quantity of titles is, in some way, a measure of a platform’s strength. But what I care about are the great apps. Where are the great, or even good, exclusive third-party apps for Android?

Popular third-party Android apps clearly tend to be of a decidedly lower design quality than popular iOS apps. (The key word in that sentence is popular — let’s concede that the majority of all apps, at the unpopular end of the long tail both in the iTunes App Store and Android Market, are junk.)

Not all popular third-party Android apps are sub-par, design-wise. But those that are well-designed, in most cases, are the ones which are not exclusive to Android. And the ones that are both exclusive to Android and well-designed, from what I’ve seen, seem to be apps that only make sense on Android, insofar as they wouldn’t be allowed in the App Store.

Compare and contrast with the library of exclusive games for iOS. Just in the past few days alone, I’ve bought three new exclusive iOS games, any one of which would surely beat any of the exclusive Android games on Ahlund’s list of all-time best ones: Astronut from The Iconfactory, Rage HD from Id Software, and Star Wars Arcade: Falcon Gunner from LucasArts. (Total cost for all three games: $9.) That games of this caliber are all exclusive to iOS is, arguably, the biggest hole in the argument that Android is to iOS what Windows was to the Mac. Say what you want about the quality edge that Mac software holds over Windows, but Windows has always had the games.

2. Where are the killer third party apps exclusive to Android?

Let’s sort all Android apps into the following categories:

1. Apps from Google.
2. Third-party apps that also exist on iOS.
3. Third-party apps that are exclusive to Android.

From my time spent with the Nexus One early this year, I know that Google’s Android apps are pretty good. These include both the core system apps, and the closed-source “Google Experience” apps like the dedicated Gmail client and Google Maps.

There are definitely a fair number of apps in the second category — those ported to both iOS and Android. Examples: Amazon’s Kindle client, Pandora, and a few popular games, such as Angry Birds and Doodle Jump.

But what I find striking is that the apps in the third category — those exclusive to Android — are almost entirely unappealing or irrelevant to iOS users.

3. Top Apps on Android are things to manage the phone!

In the free list, the top five apps are all available for iOS,² or, in the case of #5, Barcode Scanner, have equivalent if not superior iOS alternatives. The first app in the list that’s exclusive to Android is #6, Lookout — an anti-virus app.

In the paid list, Android exclusives include Root Explorer (a file system manager), Advanced Task Manager (a process monitor/killer), a collection of home screen widgets, SetCPU for Root Users (a hack for overclocking your device’s CPU), and CacheMate for Root Users (for manually managing system caches). Spot a trend?

In fact, the Android Market, as a whole, bears a lot more resemblance to the Cydia app store than it does to Apple’s official App Store. This is both in terms of content (system hacks, geek utilities, lower-quality UI design) and audience (the sort of users who put “task killers” and home screen replacements at the top of their favorite app lists). Browse the Android Market apps listed at sites like DoubleTwist and AppBrain, particularly the most popular lists. Then browse the listings in the Cydia app store, and tell me there isn’t a strong similarity.

The mere existence of things like task killers and anti-virus apps for Android — let alone that such utilities are popular — erodes consumer trust. Inherent to the console model is that third-party software can’t — not shouldn’t but can’t — damage or gum up the system.

4. Android not meshing the right model compare to iOS

When you think about competition between platforms in other fields, like game consoles — Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo — there’s a strong correlation between device sales, developer support for the platform, and software sales. In mobile computing, it’s not so much that there’s no correlation between hardware sales and the app market, but that there really is only one console-like app market: Apple’s.

1. Apple has carefully constructed iOS and the iTunes App Store to support this “app console” model.

2. Developers, large and small, have swarmed to Apple’s app console model, with consumer-friendly apps, design, presentation, and pricing.

3. iOS users understand the app console model and have embraced it — both in terms of a willingness to look for and install apps, and a willingness to pay for them.

None of those three things are true for Android.

I spoke to a source at a very successful iOS game development shop earlier this week, regarding the company’s plans for Android. According to my source, the company is investigating skipping the Android Market entirely, and working out exclusivity deals with handset makers to bundle games on Android phones.

iOS’s exclusivity for a bunch of big-name mobile games — Need for Speed Undercover, Star Wars: Battle for Hoth, Monopoly, Tetris, The Sims, Assassin’s Creed — has been broken. Not by Android, where none of these games exist, but by Windows Phone 7, a one-month-old platform.

I urge folks interested in such debate to view the original article

[Full Article here >>]