Tom Hume

Russ wrote a nice post a month or so back about the splintering of Android.

He's right, I think - we are starting to see fragmentation around Android. When new handsets or versions of the operating system launch, we find ourselves getting occasional small bug reports for our Guardian Anywhere product. Some of these bugs have been down to our not doing things in a standards-based fashion; some are down to differences in handsets (the Tattoo, for instance, has a much smaller screen than most other devices); and some... some we can't quite get to the bottom of.

And of course, it's not just the handset. In an application-rich world, every user has a different combination of apps, and Android's architecture allows them to run many apps at the same time - all of which might interact with one another, leading to difficult-to-reproduce edge cases. I'm also expecting to see issues caused by handset customisation (which operators are doing a great deal of - the T-Mobile Pulse is a nice example of this, and it's still early days)

So there is fragmentation in Android; but I was pleased last year to see Google quietly move from the naive line that "fragmentation won't happen, because it's not in the industry's interest" to "we'll introduce conformance tests for OEMs to avoid fragmentation". This seems to be paying off, so far - in that moving Android applications to new devices, even those with new screen sizes, is orders-of-magnitude less painful than moving between J2ME handsets from different manufacturers. That said, developers still need to do some work to provide graceful degradation.

Apple have done a fantastic job of presenting the iPhone as a single platform. There however, the reality is slightly different: 3 generations of hardware, 26 operating system releases (last time I counted), and a platform which in some incarnations has (or doesn't have) GPS, a loudspeaker, a microphone, or even a SIM card and therefore connectivity. Apple have done a great job of upgrading operating system versions to keep its installed base current, but even there there's some lag. The problem is at least finite, Apple being a closed ecosystem for hardware; and the lack of background apps helps developers avoid issues caused by interactions between applications.

So where does this leave us?

• Fragmentation isn't going away. Not until OEMs stop innovating and differentiating their products;
• Even wunderkinds of the tech industries like Apple and Google can't solve the problem for us. Even their kit - whether it be strictly controlled or lovingly curated - suffers from the issue, whatever you might hear to the contrary;
• As an industry we're getting better at dealing with it: platform vendors are taking more care, developers are evolving techniques and technology to cope;
• For those of us taking mobile products to market, testing across a range of devices is going to be something we continue to do as a matter of course - and we'll still be learning more than we ever wanted to know about weird handset bugs and software versions;

Many thanks to James Hugdroid, who proof-read, sanity-checked, and contributed to this post.

Update: Google have published a really nice analysis of deployed Android versions, implying that developers should be targeting 3 versions of the Android operating system.

MEX: Breakout group on materials

We broke out into groups. Ours was looking at materials: identifying a couple (from a large collection) that could be used to create a future mobile product.

We looked at Bamboo fibres, thermosensitive

Steph's group: lists buttons that couldn't go into touch-screen without impairing UI. Usefulness of volume control as a physical affordance doesn't mean you shouldn't have touchscreen version - combine and have both.

Disadvantages: can be confusing, relying on software can mean you have to use two fingers.

Big advantage of hardware is the reassurance of having done something physical.

Next group, 2dogleg, asked: can you develop a standard palette of haptics for all handsets?

"We skirted the issue a little bit" :) Ended up with use-cases where haptics would feel welcome: silent alerts, tracking location within the keyboard (for sightless text entry), button confirmations, linking to animations (so that you get a feeling from the phone when moving screen-to-screen), showing affordances.

Next group, 2corner, discussed new physical materials to be used in mobile devices: why aren't we using new ones?

Jo Rabin takes the floor. Talking about wand properties - phone responds in colour, shape and texture to altitude, pollen or swine flu. Samsung has antibacterial keyboard coatings. Squidgy phone might be useful as a grip, to fit the exact dimensions of your hand (like buying a ski boot, tennis racket, etc). Phone might act as a stress-ball, with memory to resume its previous shape. Might stretch to show bigger keys.

Dynamic buttons that pop up in response to finger-over, using electro-deformable polymers. Phones should age better - become more comfortable over time, like a nice pair of shoes deforming nicely with age. Durable exterior, replaceable interior.

Ken Blakeslee with the next group, choosing two new materials from a box-ful, "spending a long time squeezing and stroking". Got more down to emotional touchy-feelyness. Left smell and taste out of the 5 senses. Make phones waterproof - immersion is an issue that affects lots of devices. Materials that react or reflect you and your feelings. UI to capture emotions and convey to other remote folks.

Finally, our group - again, choosing two materials. Most of our group were software people, unqualified for hardware. Got very excited playing with the materials. Different contexts of use may benefit from different materials (not sure I agreed with this - IMHO contexts like work/home are collapsing into a consistently maintained identity). Wood is a luxury item; many phones are luxury items. Wood degrades. We also had bamboo fibre (looks like a wig) - it appears questionable but could be weaved or embedded into a matrix, and therefore deployed like carbon fibre.

Marek: renewable materials are a huge issue. User expectations around mobile devices are keyed off the question "is this sustainable"?

Another group looked at another dimension: proximity gestures. What does proximity mean? What is contextual awareness? Gestural input? Haptic feedback? So your device alerts you ambiently to changes in your environment through haptic feedback... but how can you calibrate this without looking at the device directly? How do you know when the device is listening to you? How can you ask it to pay attention - tapping it perhaps?

Back to next group, asked to come up with a user-centred haptic palette. Started thinking about geographic separation and a teenage audience. Wanted to capture 5 emotions and think about how to capture them: love, hug, kiss, affect, "help - existential crisis!", "I'm checking in" (like a Facebook poke).

One teenager is on a backpacking trip, one at home. "Hug" feeling might be a pulsing, or warmth generated from the device (very CuteCircuit). "Help" might be a shocking feel.

Penultimate group, looking at what happens when you focus on touch input. What happens when the touchscreen can sense the amount of pressure being applied? Capacitative touch screens like the iPhone are great for multi-touch, resistive touch (more associated with stylus input) can detect how hard a user is pressing. Hybrids exist too.

More pressure could mean faster, louder, more emotion.

Final group, talking about electro-deforming polymers. Three opportunities: bringing back touchable physical controls, expressing emotion and accessories.

Touchable physical controls: there's an advantage to being able to present specific buttons. Lots of the mechanical control elements like turn knobs afford the same kind of tactile feedback as we apply: it's a simple action/reaction. We lose this with touch devices but can simulate it back in with positional switches, knobs, etc.

We thought about device morphing to change or express emotion - think about how much is in a weak or strong handshake, say? Receiving device can feel the reaction of the action. We use EDP to create a cirtual piano keyboard.

Everyone's been enchanted by the "squishy ball" which was going around...

Marek: tactility is emotionally engaging, and if there's anything people will pay for, it's emotional engagement.

So, this little fellow turned up today, courtesy of one of O2s agencies who are running a scheme for a few bloggers. You might therefore consider that, based as it is on a freebie, this review is liable to bias. I can reassure you in the name of journalistic integrity that after 8 years doing this mobile thang, there is little that excites me less than a new phone turning up. Mind you, even if I hate the thing I'm still giving it exposure - oh I dunno, I'll give up thinking about the moral minefield I'm in and just go for a gander.

So, first impressions: the packaging was nice, and opening the box itself quite enjoyable, in a not-quite-Apple-but-nearly way. The device comes with a reasonable range of cables (headphones - with a double-headphone adapter, quite cute - a dock which O2 have christened the Nest and another which I presume is an FM antenna).

The phone itself is a reasonable piece of industrial design: the styling is reasonably nice actually, in an early Star-Wars aesthetic (cf. rebel alliance cruiser interiors, stormtrooper uniforms), and whilst I'm not a big fan of clamshells as a form factor, it fits neatly into my trouser pocket and I don't have the justified "shit-my-keys-will-scratch-it-to-death" fear I get with most phones. It feels slightly plasticky, though some of the promo material spins this as being "light" - which isn't unreasonable I guess.

The main feature of the phone is its external display, which lights up the casing with a digital readout: cute-ish, even if it gives the whole device the feel of an 80s alarm clock (double the feel of an 80s alarm clock when it's nestled in its erm "Nest"). I think it might be genuinely useful to have the name of callers turn up on this display when the phone rings, let's wait and see.

My big fear about any new phone which is positioned as a slick piece of industrial design is the UI: post-RAZR I actually shiver when I see a handset which looks half-decent, because this tends to imply the interface inside (more important once it's out of the box and you're trying to use the darn thing) has been starved of attention. Initially, I have to say I think my fears are justified: whilst the UI is reasonable attractive (and it's nice to see a handset making good use of all available resolution without cloning Nokia), the menu structures are a little bit iffy, some of the options are downright bizarre ("Enter Object Mode" when browsing a WAP page? What monkey allowed that terminology to be kept in?), and the whole thing is just slow enough to annoy me.

It's a small thing, but if the keypad felt more responsive I think the device would feel way better. Right now it suffers from the same faults as some of Nokias Series 60 devices: press a key, wait half a second, get to the thing you wanted - that's just long enough to be dissonant. A suggestion from Mr Hopper of FP was that perhaps the pretty yet faintly annoying animated wallpaper was slowing the whole thing down, but try as I might I can't work out a way to disable said wallpaper (only replace it).

There are a few nice features lurking in there though, and I was really chuffed to see the National Rail service from Kizoom (easily the most useful WAP service to me) preloaded onto a home-screen menu. This kind of integration of portal content with the on-phone menu structure is really good to see happening out-of-the-box; it's not exactly a leap forwards technically or design-wise, but it's useful nonetheless and ought to happen more often.

The "daily wallpaper" feature, which purports to automatically download new content regularly, also seems cute - presuming it gives me stuff I want, and actually works. I'll keep an eye on this one.

The inbuilt speakers are, I think, the best I've heard on a phone (not that I use mobiles for listening to music much) - they might appeal to a generation that insists on blasting music out of its handset as it lurches around cities. The camera is basic (2 megapixel) but decent, and screen quality is good. Colour use within the UI is a bit inconsistent, but where it's done well it works really nicely, and the whole thing seems coherently O2 somehow (where some operator-branded handsets get a little schizophrenic).

Cocoon claims to sync with macs, but it didn't show up in my Finder when I plugged it in and I got a load of error messages in /var/log/system.log. Not great.

So, so far: I give it 6 out of 10. Not bad for an operator-branded device, and version 2 (or even this one with a firmware upgrade that speeds it up a bit) has potential to be a reasonable device. In its current form I'd see it competing quite effectively with the Motorola RAZR, as a reasonable stylish device that has a UI you can actually use.

I'll write another post once I've had a chance to use it for a few days...

Social mapping: "we are on the verge of enjoying services made possible only when information is matched automatically to location. Maps on our phones will always know where we are. Our children can’t go missing. Movie listings will always be for the closest theaters; restaurant suggestions, organized by proximity. We will even have the option of choosing free cellphone service if we agree to accept ads focused on nearby businesses."

A bit happy clappy, but there's probably something in there...

Ericsson still likes the WAP word: "The system does do exactly what it says on the label. It allows mobile internet sites to bill for content. So if you have a WAP phone – and a GPRS or 3G connexion – it can bill you for services all paid for via your mobile handset.

...

So what's the big difference between WAP Billing and the well-established Bango? Global reach seems to be one advantage. Once you're integrated into the system, you can sell things to 0.5 billion users in 10 countries.
"

Can anyone point me to more information about this? I can't find anything on Ericsson's site. And as far as international reach is concerned, isn't this the big thing that Bango offers? I'm not a huge fan of Bango personally (thanks to the fairly horrible user experience it offers - which admittedly they've recently started to address with better templated pages), but it doesn't seem to be outclassed by Ericsson from what I can see.

Julian and William are discussing J2ME on Ecademy - apparently the games industry have gotten fed up and are going to sort it all out for us. I'd reply there if I could, but haven't been able to post into the forums for a few months now... so here we go:

"My understanding is that this will be a NATIVE game architecture, that is compiled code not a VM. The fragmentation not only increases costs, it reduces innovation. The performance penalities of running game code in a VM is another issue that is being addressed here."

Well, if they fix it tomorrow - which they won't - we'll have 3-5 years before whatever magical pixie dust they eventually release gets out there in large enough numbers to be worth bothering with. If this is a problem for you, either get out of mobile for a few years, or learn to deal with what we've got today (that's rhetorical - I realise that you're doing the latter William ;)).

Julian writes: "Less cynically, a common development platform, and a more open environment would reap huge dividends for everyone."

Actually, I think fragmentation creates opportunities. Look at the number of independent J2ME games developers, and compare to the number of small independent Nintendo DS developers out there. Given the disparity in screen sizes, keypad layouts, and processor performance, "write once run anywhere" was always optimistic. It should be, it was a marketing slogan after all.

Personally - I think it's easy to underrate the position we're in today. It is possible to develop, test, and launch a new game across 80 handsets in about a month. That strikes me as a massive approvement on the situation 5 years ago, when you couldn't even get dev kits or write software for the vast majority of handsets, full stop.

stevenberlinjohnson.com:: "It was simply a sign of something that was probably obvious already: there's nothing cool any more about having an iPod. That's not to say it isn't an incredible product. It's just hard to defend the cool factor when the President apparently has two of them..."

Actually, I'd argue that it's when things stop being cool that they start getting interesting. For me, this was the case with mobile phones: when they were something special that yuppies lugged around with them in the 80s: boring. When everyone you knew had one: interesting.

Ditto microprocessors, puzzles, and the internet.

This one just had me sniggering out loud on the train: augmented animals. I want kittens with lasers, goddammit!

Boz has a photo of monkeys running outside his house in India...

Monkeys will pay for porn.