You know what they say: it depends to whom you’re talking to. For them, it’s a fragmentation issue. Since the beginning Google wasn’t able to steer the O.E.M manufacturers into the right direction, a.k.a “release-phones-with-the-latest-OS”. Like this guy said, it’s only business; you want the latest OS, get a new phone!

And then, there’s the rest of us (me included!) looking at this from a positive point of view. Ice Cream Sandwich was launched less than 2 months ago, 3 days before the Galaxy Nexus took off and it’s already close to 1% in “market” share. Well, more like 0,6%, but that was a few days ago!:-) It’s also important to note that there are three versions out there and they are split on only two devices: Samsung Galaxy Nexus and the last year’s hit, Samsung Nexus S, which is not even completely updated yet! Even so, that’s a huge leap in a very short time!

Again, let’s look at the chart above and think positive: Froyo (2.2) and Gingerbread (2.3) make up the most of today’s Android OS phones out there: ~85%.

Fragmentation? Fahgettaboudit!

via Android Central and Android Pit

]]> http://bograma.ro/2012/01/androids-own-ice-cream-sandwich-were-getting-there-fast/feed/ 0 http://bograma.ro/2010/07/switching-is-happening-all-over-again/ http://bograma.ro/2010/07/switching-is-happening-all-over-again/#comments Fri, 09 Jul 2010 16:00:20 +0000 Bograma http://bograma.ro/?p=978278 In February 2009 I left the Symbian UIQ 3.0 O.S for BlackBerry. Of course, some of my friends knowing me and using more or less the same Symbian platform ( UIQ 3.0 and/or S40, S60 Nokia) were skeptical: “BlackBerry is a professional platform, a closed and rigid environment, no way you can thrive under that [...]]]>

In February 2009 I left the Symbian UIQ 3.0 O.S for BlackBerry. Of course, some of my friends knowing me and using more or less the same Symbian platform ( UIQ 3.0 and/or S40, S60 Nokia) were skeptical: “BlackBerry is a professional platform, a closed and rigid environment, no way you can thrive under that rock” they said. What they didn’t know is that at the time R.I.M already decided to go forward with the plan to conquer a new kind of customer with the multimedia phones: the much-debated Storm 1, the Bold 9000, eventualy the Javelin and the Tour later on. Platforms are becoming more and more multimedia and social cause that’s where the money is today.

And that was exactly what made me go first BlackBerry and now,  Android: while the UIQ 3.0 was great and rich in applications (O.K, maybe not so rich by today’ standards or by iPhone/Android markets standards), it lacked the new applications for the social media. The only reason I kept it until February 2009 is the hacking community. They “developed” the O.S much more than Symbian itself did and a lot more than the developers did. While BlackBerry had all these applications, it lacked the diversity one enjoys on Android and iPhone.  In BlackBerry’s case, the developers deserted the booming wonderful community formed around R.I.M’s products. Or maybe I am wrong; I know there aren’t many developers pushing-out BlackBerry applications. The applications themselves are rare and expensive. The price is the main issue: while an average app for Blackberry is 2.99$ (price imposed by BlackBerry App World) , the others go as low as 0.99$. This happens EXACTLY because there aren’t many developers (anymore) and the remaining ones they profit on the fact that the demand surged. But even with this situation, the BlackBerry users aren’t benefiting much. For almost 2 years I look for a working Call Filter aplication. Because I was paying for it, I asked for a few features (existing already on Symbian S40 and UIQ 3.0 for years!) like:

• accept all calls
• reject all calls
• accept phone-book only
• drop unwanted calls and/or mute the ringer
• reject Black List numbers and accept White List numbers
• automatic profile switch based on time schedule

And that was about it. All of the above were supported by other applications, most of them free or charging very little money. And I’ve tried half of those while using the Sony-Ericsson P1i and afterwards, even on BlackBerry. On BlackBerry, I couldn’t find a satisfactory application. Most of them are very basic and extremely expensive – 19,95$ I had to pay for mCall Manager Light (sic!), the only one working as it should but without the scheduling.  After I updated from 4.7 version OS to 5.0 OS, the app stopped working and when they did update it (3 months later) it wasn’t working properly anymore. This experience sums-up all my experiences with BlackBerry applications.

And then there is the support issue: being so fragmentary as it is, the BlackBerry application market is divided between some developers interested in keeping the customer happy and the rest. The rest don’t give a shit about the customer. It’s enough if you buy it once and never comeback ever again, 10$ from each customer is more than enough for a single application. I bet there are a lot of  “developers” hitting the market only once with one single (bad) product and then move on to another platforms; from what I’ve been told developing for BlackBerry is neither cool or money-rewarding.

And now it’s time for a new challenge: the Android O.S. I’ve been playing for a few months with a T-Mobile Pulse but in order to enjoy the full-power of the new O.S, I had to go full way. And I chose the HTC Desire
. While it lacks stamina ( my usage will kill the battery in just a bit over 5 hours!), I have faith in the platform and its ability to deliver a better product later on with rooting, custom ROMs and Froyo later on.

Inspired by a search I did out of nowhere, I decided I wanna try to live without my BlackBerry Bold for a week and…use my T-Mo Pulse Android OS instead! I will continue to use the BlackBerry to receive my work phone calls but that should be it. I’ll also use it to send/reply to some of my work emails but will try to do so as little as possible.

I know there are some disadvantages:

• the lack of physical keyboard will slow me down when writing.
• the lack of work emails will be a definitive minus as I can’t find a good Exchange client; should be free, like the one I use in the BlackBerry.
• the battery life which is horrible in Android devices, on the Pulse included.

There are also advantages:

• the Pulse’ so much better for multimedia.
• the touchscreen is better for “on-the-fly usage” especially on apps not requiring data input.
• a LOT of applications to use and get accustomed with in a short period of time.

I just don’t know if i should update the blog regarding the way the things are going daily, or to write a single post after a week. What do you think?

As I expected, the BlackBerry Twitter application by RIM went officially on Beta! Which means waiting will be over soon. I will continue to use the leaked version (the same built after all) but I will sign-up for the Beta Zone – this is where you can get the Twitter application if you’re not lucky enough to be in a country using the BlackBerry App World.

I’m glad to see they are working actively on this app! In my original review I was expressing my disappointment regarding the fact that RIM announced their Twitter application will be ready by the end of 2010!

Then Crackberry wrote the application will be available on March 31st, as some RIM employees reported at CTIA 2010. It turned out not to be true and RIM has apologized for that blunder but not it seems we’re not going to wait too long; a new version has surfaced just a couple of days ago.

This version 1.0.037 is a lot faster and brings some extra features like the lists. No lag when switching from the messaging section to homescreen or to the Task Manager – this one was really bad; I once clocked a 20 seconds lag…

This is what’s new in this version:

• create, edit and read lists
• edit your profile
• faster operation
• disable tweet and navigation bar

This is still in Beta – not being official and still encountering some lags but it means that the launch date is close!

Update: I wasn’t planning on writing about this but it seems that this is a super-app, like RIM likes to call it, a push application.  I noticed it’s not running in the background (it didn’t on the first version either) but it will send notifications every time it will find tweets or replies/DMs depending on your rules you ticked in Options. If it’s so and it’s a pushed app, it’ll greatly reduce the energy consumption and the strain on your RAM – especially on BlackBerry which always had (and it seems like it will always will or at least as they will keep on running this Java platform/OS) memory issues.

I’ve always been gutted that I can’t see how much voice minutes or data I’ve been consuming every month on my BlackBerry. For the voice part, I’ve been relying on my operator: it offered this service for free from the beginning and while, for a few years, the service wasn’t very exact ( a large number of subscribers used it almost daily in order to verify the authenticity of the initial reading) . But for more than 4-5 years now it’s quite OK and the readings are almost real-time. So it’s a good thing: I don’t have to install an application for that and I don’t have to keep it runnin’ in the background in order to know how much data I “eat”.

I can understand RIM’s reticence when it comes to implement a data counter: it’s not easy to see your customers are cutting-down on surfing the web when they see they consume tens of MBs daily because they stream music & video (an area at which BB sucks anyway). There is always the “unlimited data plan” with an asterisk – they might shut-down your data pipe as soon as you hit 200 MB.

I thought I found a way last year: the perfect data counter! I loved it.  I used it with the Bold 9000 and if you read the review I hope you’ll use it too – it’s a very nice, simple and UI-clean application. I don’t use it anymore and not because it wasn’t good, but because I have a truly unlimited data-plan and because I wanna keep my RAM as free as possible.

Today I was surfing Crackberry as I sometimes do and I read this and thought: this guy has to have an IT policy on his girlfriend’s phone and that’s the reason he can’t run that app. Which was correct. A thing he also found out after countless call on his operator and reading pages throughly over the net. But he also found out that by going to Options/Status and typing ” BUYR ” (except for the “”, of course) you can find out if your smartphone and an IT policy in place or not. Mine doesn’t have one. And what else?

Data and call counters! Yes. Primitive, one-line counters but they’re there. And they’re kinda general. Why? Probably for the reason above: RIM doesn’t care although the feature’s been requested by a lot of people for YEARS! And if you know something about programing, you know that it might take a programmer a few days to come-up with a nifty solution. Or maybe a “dumbphone” solution: in – calls, out – calls, total counter, reset options and maybe, just maybe a date-set automatic reset.

Back to the counters: if you know about this trick and you have a new phone you can always write down the data when your subscription resets in order to find out roughly how much time you spent on the phone talking every month. With the data counter is a bit tricky, as it only tells you exactly how much data you ate until it reaches 1 GB, then good luck and good riddance.You can hit 1 GB in less than 2 weeks if you stream and watch YouTube…which luckily I don’t because Blackberry sucks at compressing videos.

But having those “one-liners” tells us the system needs those internal “applications” in order to function properly and so would we.

PS: Looks like a lot of people knew that particular code above; why wasn’t I aware of that? Well, maybe it’s because they only wrote about in forums and those aren’t claiming too high in ranks on Google.

Most of the BlackBerry users are not your “average Joe” when it comes to using a phone. A smartphone. Thus it’s important to recognize and fulfill the need of these users of backing-up data. I’ve seen many people complaining about loss of data when their phones died or got stolen or fell into the tub (yeah, we take our BlackBerrys with us almost all the time!).

This issue has been addressed by many, including R.I.M. I won’t go into detail too much when it comes to Desktop Manager. Everybody employing a BlackBerry knows it. It can stay like this for a long time when you open it, finally connect, back-up everything by going to Backup and Restore/Backup/Options or by going to Backup and Restore/Advanced for a selective backup.

The disadvantage is that you can’t just put your messages or calendar entries back without overriding all your system (apps, settings), when sometimes you just want to restore some messages. Another issue I ran into was coming from a Bold 9000 (1GB internal memory) to Bold 9700 (256 MB internal memory): I couldn’t restore anything previously backed up because the internal memory was too small.

I backup every couple of months but as a last resort.

Another program good at backing-up is Best Buy’s m:iQ Live. Available for all kinds of smartphones, it will backup most of your usual stuff: images, videos, contacts, calendar entries, messages and call logs. You can share them, access them on the web and restore all when you’re in trouble or you have a new phone. Multi-platform is a great advantage as you’re not tied to a particular OS and you can switch. You install the application especially designed for BlackBerry on the phone and backup in minutes. It doesn’t have to be automatic and it doesn’t have to run constantly in the background. It can be used from time to time when necessary. It also has a neat “status update” feature, so others can see it when visiting your section.

There here comes good – ole Google with Google Sync. It’s a broader solution, as it includes all kinds on syncs including contacts by Gmail, calendar entries by Google Calendar, news by Google Reader, pictures by Picasa, videos by YouTube and tasks by Google Tasks. Of course, not all are available for BlackBerry through a dedicated client but contacts and calendar entries are more than enough for me. Both contacts and calendar entries will be auto synchronized every three hours, unless you chose to do it manually (at least for the contacts). I keep the calendar entries on automatic sync because I use it a lot (and modify data a lot), while the contacts are synced once at the beginning. In time, I could try another sync every few months especially because Gmail has a tool of finding and merging the duplicates, thus allowing me to keep the hundreds of names under control. The application itself is self-explanatory, tiny, can be installed Over The Air (OTA) and works automatically.

Of course there are other backup solutions but these are the ones I use and never had an issue with. This combo-solution is the perfect opportunity to backup and keep it simple. And not pay extra for it, of course.

As of Thursday, I used the new Twitter application by R.I.M. For 2 days I had the occasion of  using every bit of it and make an idea regarding this early version.

Let’s not forget that since being announced by the early adopters lucky enough to be provided with a copy ( by R.I.M, by Crackberry and other sites/developers  hand-picked by R.I.M) lots and lots of tweets and blog articles have popped-up over the Internet driving the people in search of a leak which appeared promptly. Of course, you can never tell if this was done on purpose by R.I.M in order to get as much feedback as possible, or that the BlackBerry community is really, really powerful and we’re benefiting from that.

I downloaded this leak and except for the fact that it will expire on March 31st, it’s THE Beta used by everyone. So, what are the PROs and CONs of THIS build ( it’s important to highlight this as many, many users are disappointed and complaining about quality, U.I, bugs, lags, etc):

PROS:

• its very existence; R.I.M is committed to offer best quality applications to their customers and is not relying solely on its developers.
• the application is built in order to offer as much functionality as possible, that’s why at this moment it does seem a bit overloaded with features
• the notification system is great, allowing one to close the application once it’s done with it. You can launch it, read the tweets by going to your time-line, replies, DMs, profile & search functions and then close it down. It will notify you with a little “t” in the notification bar on the home-screen and integrate the messages in the BlackBerry Messages Application.
• upon opening the DMs, they will be marked with a little check, so you won’t have to comeback to them again.
• the ability to send links from the BlackBerry browser to Twitter in one click AND the fact that this function is integrated with the browser menu options.
• upon choosing automatic refresh, when in foreground the application won’t just unload the new tweets into the time-line causing the fast auto-scrolling of previous tweets, but producing a small notification bar on top of the tweet one’s just reading and announces “new tweets available”.
• after running it for two days I didn’t observe and RAM or battery leaks.
• scrolling 20 tweets is fast and the loading time for the new ones (on WiFi and 3G) is 3 to 4 seconds; it’s OK.
• being a native app, one can change font/size by going to Options/Screen-Keyboard.
• sports  a “conversation” feature allowing you to see your exchange of replies with someone else.
• includes the native shortcuts we’re all used to : “T” for “top”, “B” for “bottom”, “R” for “replies”. There are some more waiting to be discovered.

CONS:

• buggy, no caching so every time you go from one tab to the other it’ll lose time and data reloading everything
• upon exiting the application or even put it in the background, it will slow down the system causing unresponsiveness for more than 15 seconds at times.
• the Retweet function won’t work. There is a workaround by going to “Send To”, choosing “Twitter”, then “Tweet” and then finally editing and sending the tweet. Tiresome.
• OR if it’s true what some users are saying, the RT function does work but you can’t see your own RT (as in the official RT version), while others do. By logging in  your web account, you can find your RTed tweet. So is this a feature?
• no separate notifications for Replies and DMs as we were spoiled by all the others developers of BlackBerry Twitter applications.
• this trial will end March, 31st. I inquired by sending a public reply to @BlackBerry and I got a DM saying they can’t comment on how or why is going to end, but that I should definitely watch them. It’s probably going to be another build and we’ll get to be Beta-testers again? We’ll see.
• lack of push notification. I guess in this kind of application push is not feasible having lots and lots of updates to pull.
• OR when closing the application it will start pushing the new tweets. It might also run in the background and not able to see it – there are some application behaving like this.
• support for tweeting a picture from the Media Gallery would be nice.

Piece of advice: to disable the Twitter application, go to its menu and log off! Yes, a lot of people don’t know how to do it!

Ever since I switched from Symbian to Blackberry, there was one thing I appreciated that RIM does: they work on giving customers the best applications to run. I mean basic applications. They did Yahoo Messenger, AOL, ICQ, the native BBM (BlackBerry Messenger), Windows Live, GTalk, Flickr, My Space and Facebook to name a few. Which means you get push messages and we all know what this means: time and battery saved, low data consumption and no memory leakage.

And know Twitter! We’ve been hoping to get this for quite sometime, but know it’s kinda “official”: the Twitter application done by RIM will be available soon! Of course, the road will be rocky: we’ll have bugs, bugs reports and some updates. But they did it. And that’s my point: here’s a company with millions and millions of customers and these customers get to say their bit. The clients were asking for something and RIM delivers. Unlike so many other giants interested in keeping you at bay and cashing your checks.

I also see Boy Genius Report is writting about it!

PS: More resources are available at BlackBerry Blogs and CrackBerry .

PPS: It’s gonna take some time, the application will be launched towards the end of the year. That’s a long, long time.

Call Logs in Blackberry are primitive. Let’s face it:if you receive lots of calls every day, you have all the chances to find only your last 10-15 calls sent and received.
But why is that? One of the reason was described above. The others are that people don’t care how the Call Logs are set and that they don’t know how to do it in order to benefit 100%.
To check what’s default one should go to Calls (green OK button)/Options/Call Logging and find the default setting which is set to “None” (capture 1_21_49), which means you won’t see your calls in the Messaging area (capture 1_22_10) – it seems that RIM thinks there are people who prefer it that way! All your calls will be displayed in the above mentioned area in a different form depending of your choosing. For that you need to go in another menu (why is RIM putting the options in different sections is beyond me!): Options/Phone Options/General Options and down to Phone List View (capture 1_23_16), where you can choose from the most recent (capture 1_21_10), the mostly used (capture 1_21_26) and listed by names. Set your desired mode and you’re done.
It seems that in the end there is an explanation for the “short” memory the BlackBerry has when it comes to recording call logs: it keeps a copy of your calls (even from a week ago!) in the “View History” section. Go to any call from your Call Logs (preferably to someone you talk to more frequently) and press “View History”. There you can find all the calls you sent/took from that person with date/type of call/duration!
I guess this is called “evolution”! RIM learns model by model influenced by us, the end-customers craving for simplicity, yet complexity. Seems like a contradiction but it ain’t!