Author Archive
BlackBerry and a Simpler Mobile Time
Two years ago BlackBerries dominated at Control Group. Back then, if you picked up one of the orange Nerf balls that dotted the CG office landscape and threw it, chances were that you would hit someone who kept a BlackBerry Curve in their pocket. I have fond memories of the original Curve with its beautiful screen and extremely tactile keyboard, as it was the last BlackBerry I ever carried.
As an early adopter, I made the jump from the Curve to the first Android device, the G1. This began a change in the office where everyone was looking for a way to get away from the BlackBerry and get on to something else, be it an Android, iPhone, or Windows Mobile. Within a year, iPhones and Androids were quickly becoming the norm. It got to a point where we had a New Year’s prediction that CG would be a BlackBerry free company by 2012– and it was almost correct. How close did we get?
From a company that was at a time 100% BlackBerry, we now have the following:
So what changed that caused such a radical shift? In short, the mobile landscape did, and what didn’t change was the Blackberry.
With a new emphasis on touchscreen devices that did more than just act as an email life vest, BlackBerry held fast to what made them the king. While they still focused on enterprise level email with Exchange servers, Apple and Google were providing media rich devices with more screen real estate and features than any BlackBerry had ever offered. As its competitors updated and perfected their devices, they took aim at the mighty BB… the iPhone with stronger Exchange functionality, and Android with it’s unique ability to sync seamlessly with Google Apps, as well as increased Exchange functionality.
A series of rushed products like the BB Storm and the BB App World just further showed that RIM didn’t get it. With a new line of hybrid touch devices still featuring the iconic keyboard, they’re still left with an OS that is tricky to code for at best, and has such a small market share that many developers don’t even bother writing apps for it.
RIM’s ace in the hole though, is the wildly successful BB Messenger. While it’s not enough to reel back the customers they have lost, it’s their bargaining chip with other mobile companies. Recent news suggests that RIM is being shopped around to their competitors, more specifically to Samsung. Fearing it is not long for this mobile world, they are trying to keep alive by licensing their software or by being bought out, either completely or by selling divisions.
It feels a bit premature to start writing a eulogy for the BlackBerry but it’s about that time to start notifying the family that this is likely Gramma BB’s last Thanksgiving. Even as a faithful Android user, I still reminisce about the old BlackBerry days when fast email and a good keyboard was all I needed. You could go 3 days without putting your BlackBerry on a charger, you didn’t have to worry about how much built in storage it had, and you didn’t have to worry about apps or games… it was a simpler device for a simpler time.
Another Twist on Interaction Design
I was reading up on the Nokia Twist prototype yesterday. While the technology is certainly interesting, it’s far from unique. LCD and phone manufacturers have been obsessed for the last couple years with the idea of a bendable display and oftentimes it is also a see through (transparent) display. The advances as far as durability go are pretty cool, but they’re working on non practical tech that is a gimmick at best.
For the same reason the world is mostly shunning the idea of a touch screen monitor, they will likely shun this as well. It drags out the motions needed to complete a task, even simple ones. With the Twist, they mention that you bend the phone towards you to zoom in on a pic, or do other twists and contortions to do things like change music tracks, adjust volume etc. The first and most obvious problem with this is that you need two hands to do pretty much any of this. The “old fashioned” way can more easily be done single handed. It’s like the large touch screen monitors. It’s easier to work with a mouse and keyboard where you can drag files and folders around with the flick of a wrist, rather than extending your arm out to touch an icon, then make a streak across your monitor to drag it from one side to the other.
There will certainly be useful applications for this kind of technology, most likely in the medical field (all crazy cool tech seems to end up there.) Phones will benefit most by using the technology that makes the phone more flexible to prevent shattered screens and broken components. In the end, it’s just another attention grab by Nokia, a company that once dominated the mobile market with an iron fist, has over the last half decade slipped into the role of a curmudgeonly old hermit telling those damn Android kids to get off his lawn.
Android gets turbo charged
About a week and a half ago, Myriad Group announced an updated version of the Dalvik VM for Android, appropriately called the Dalvik Turbo VM. Running the Dalvik Turbo VM, Android devices can experience a 2x – 3x performance boost in their applications.
What does this mean for Android users?
With any Android device, it’s pretty apparent that they are performing below what one would expect from their hardware specs. This is because Android was designed to run on a wide range of devices, including devices with limited resources and processing power.
If your phone were to be updated with the new Dalvik Turbo VM, you wouldn’t experience nearly as much lag, applications would open faster and perform better, and you would actually see improved battery life (all things that as an Android user I would LOVE to see.)
How does it work?
The Dalvik VM is a virtual machine that runs in the background on all Android devices. It acts like a middleman between the applications and the OS itself. One of the things that makes Android so attractive to developers is that it’s apps are written in Java, the Dalvik VM then takes the Java code and converts it on the fly into code that Android can use. The Dalvik Turbo VM is an enhanced version of the original VM that makes the conversion process a whole lot speedier. The new Turbo VM is said to be 100% compatible with Google’s stock VM so any existing apps would be able to see the benefits from this as well.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blJpQQZdYPM]
A demo of the Dalvik Turbo VM vs Dalvik VM on a pair of Android Dev Phone 2′s.
How can I get it?!
Sadly that’s not such an easy thing to answer. While Myriad hasn’t given an official answer, it is believed that the devices that would most benefit from the new Dalvik Turbo VM (T-Mobile G1 and MyTouch 3G) won’t be seeing it and it will only be included on new retail devices (which we should see before the end of the year.) That said, many of the Android faithful (myself included) are hoping to see the new VM show up in the popular Cyanogenmod Android ROM amongst others in the near future.
If you’d like to see some more info on the Dalvik Turbo VM, check these links for some impressions and other demo videos:
Dealing with Spoofed Spam Emails
Is your Inbox full of messages from MAILER-DAEMON? We frequently help our clients deal with spam and junk-filled Inboxes — here’s some info about why this can happen, and what can be done to help prevent it.
Inboxes full of messages from MAILER-DAEMON are frequently the result of non-delivery reports (NDRs) from spoofed spam messages. A spoofed spam message is an email from a spam mailer that has been masked with your valid sender email address. When these spam messages are sent to addresses that don’t exist, an NDR is generated and sent back — this is the email equivalent of the post office returning a letter as undeliverable. In theory, one is sent to the invalid sender address, the other is sent to you. Since the invalid one doesn’t actually exist, you are the only one to receive it.
Lots of messages from Mailer Daemon or Mail Delivery Systems can be symptoms of Spoofed Spam
Here are some frequently asked questions about Spoofing:
Has my email been hacked? Probably not — 99% of the time your account has not been compromised.
How did the spammer get my email address? Email addresses can be harvested in a number of ways. The most common are as follows:
- If your email is posted on a website, spammers use “bots” to crawl through websites searching for email addresses.
- When you sign up for access to a web service, some sites will sell your email address and personal information.
- A virus on your machine or on someone’s machine that has your email address on it either as a contact or even just an email to/from you.
What can be done to stop them? Once a spammer has your email address, there’s not too much that can be done to stop them from spoofing their emails with your address. The messages themselves are not being sent by the spammer but by mail servers doing their job and alerting the sender that the recipient doesn’t actually exist.
How long is this going to happen? Generally spammers use a group of email addresses for about a week and then move on to the next batch that they have harvested. You will likely still receive them for a few days up to a couple of weeks.
Can’t you block them at the server or through Postini? Technically it is possible but this can be a double-edged sword. Blocking messages from MAILER-DAEMON will result in actual NDRs being blocked that you may want to receive. If you were to send a message that didn’t reach its intended recipient for any number of reasons, you wouldn’t know about it. Another reason is that not all mail servers will send their NDRs under the name MAILER-DAEMON.
Here are some steps you can take to help prevent this from happening again in the future:
Schedule regular virus and malware scans. By scanning your system regularly, you will help to catch viruses and malware that will harvest email addresses from your computer. This has the added benefit of making sure that your system is virus/malware free to prevent other issues such as system performance issues and identity theft.
Be careful of where you use your email address: If you need to have your email address posted on a website, use a non-standard format such as John.Smith [at] ControlGroup [dot] com. This will help to confuse the “bots” that are used to scour websites for addresses. If you need to register to access a website, it helps to have a separate email account setup for this through a free service such as Gmail.com By keeping this separate email address simply for signing up for websites, any spam you may receive by signing up will be sent to this email address instead.
Even with taking these steps and being diligent with them, there is always the possibility of someone with whom you have emailed with getting a virus that can collect your email address. Unless you are prepared to be tech support for everyone that you email with, your best bet is to help educate them on the issue to help save both you and them the headache of being Spoofed. You can even link them to this blog post to help them learn how they can prevent this from happening to them.