Archive for the ‘Android’ tag
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.
2011 Predictions from Control Group
What will 2011 bring? We obviously won’t know for sure until this time next year, but Control Group’s best and brightest couldn’t wait that long. So…they came together to offer their thoughts on topics ranging from Google, Apple, Amazon, Java and 3D movies in the coming year. Their responses follow.
Happy New Year! We only have 12 months left to see if they’re right…
Craig Hillelson, Field Engineer Manager
- Google Apps will continue to be adopted by lots of small businesses.
- Mistrust of Google will grow proportionally.
- Microsoft will become increasingly irrelevant in terms of the general tech zeitgeist.
- Western governments will attempt to crack down on leaks but without much success.
- Iran will be the victim of a leak of information similar to what the US experienced but on a much smaller scale.
- Every movie will be in 3D and no one will care.
- JJ Abrams will remake “Blade Runner.” Nerds will be delighted or crestfallen.
- Putting microchips in kids will spark a ridiculous parenting debate on every talk show in America.
Charlie Miller, Senior Consultant, Media & Entertainment
- Consumer Tech: The Mac App Store will usher in a tidal wave of new desktop Mac apps and developers, following in the footsteps of the flourishing mobile app marketplace. Developers for Mac software will have a new option rather than “shareware” or “freeware,” and the 99-cent or $4.99 app economy will be unleashed. Bring on the Mac fart apps and Twitter clients!!
- Business Tech: Video reaches a tipping point as a standard content type from non-media companies. Sure, video is seemingly everywhere on the web already, but much of this content is from media companies, networks, and studios. I predict we’ll see huge growth of video delivery from within other verticals, such as financial, healthcare, and maybe even medical. We’re seeing this already, with small media groups being set up inside these types of companies, but as iPads, Galaxy TABs, and Microsoft Slates (maybe…) become ubiquitous, the market and monetization possibilities for delivering video content to these devices will boom.
Deb Au-Yeung, Senior Consultant, Products
- Maintaining Your Image: As more and more publicly available information is being aggregated into profiles on the Internet (Facebook profiles, tweets, URLs, personal websites), there will be a rise of privacy services to help manage your virtual public image and protect your privacy.
- Relying More on Friends: You’ll also see a rise in applications that utilize your personal network to make recommendations and provide support. Whether it’s opinions on a potential purchases, recommendations on restaurants, what doctor to go to, or even micro-decisions like whether you should go to the gym today, we’re going to reach out to our networks to help us make better, more informed decisions both large and small.
- Saving Money on the Spot: With the ubiquity of smart-phones and improvements on pinpointing your exact geographic location, you’ll also see a rise in push notifications in the form of on-the-spot discounts. As you’re passing Starbucks, you might receive an alert that you’re eligible for a free drink or maybe you’ll receive a discount on an item you favorited online, because a large number of users also favorited the same item.
Toby Joe Boudreaux, CTO
- Apple and Google will continue to move UX away from the desktop metaphor.
- Someone will finally nail Android UX with an open, elegant UI toolkit.
- Amazon will begin (re)selling mobile connectivity as a service, a la AWS.
- By EOY, consumer culture will stop thinking in terms of “mobile” and “apps” and stop seeing the huge cracks that currently exist in ubiquitous computing. Maybe just with a couple of brands. Apple will lead the way with the Mac App Store and iOS marketing integration, but because of the same, won’t be seen as totally seamless. It’ll be a small player.
- The hype curve on game mechanics will dip into the “played out” valley until some new player releases something more nuanced than badges and purple cows.
- Javascript will continue to become the most important language in modern application development, and functional programming will continue to catch on. Huge year for Scala (and Lift), Node.js, embedded JS, and stateless multicore/multithread/concurrent programming in general.
- DevOps will continue to be one of the fastest growing job market for product teams and businesses.
- The war over Java will not be settled, and people will start pulling away. The excitement over Scala and JRuby will keep the OSS evangelists raising hell, and eventually Oracle will cave.
Dan Meltz, Consultant
- Cars now have cameras that can recognize parking spots that are big enough. I think they will either add image recognition/OCR capabilities so that cars will be able to tell if a spot is legal. Adding QR codes to the signs is a possibility, but I don’t think that municipalities would be willing to lay out cash for a system that reduces their income.
Colin O’Donnell, Partner
- The world will not come to an end.
- The return of the IPO: Facebook’s IPO will fend off the pop of the latest tech bubble at least for 2011.
- People will realize that tablets are amazing single-purpose devices and not the Swiss Army device many hope them to be — this will usher in more things into the mainstream Internet of things.
- We’ll see the face of tech investment change to match the hyper development lifecycles of products.
- We’ll see the mellowing of gamification and the adoption of more recommendation algorithm services.
- Leaving our awkward digital childhood, we will start to realize deeper uses of social media beyond self promotion and product marketing.
Why All the Fuss Over Angry Birds?
Source: Rovio Mobile.
Angry Birds, the mobile game from Rovio Mobile that allows players to “dish out revenge on the green pigs who stole (their) eggs,” has been making a lot of headlines lately, most recently for racking up 1 million downloads on Android in a single day.
That’s obviously a lot of downloads. But what’s the big deal? What’s so compelling about this game? And what can brands looking to develop a comparable mobile experience learn from its success?
For starters, Angry Birds was a solid success on the iPhone. Once it got publicity, its sales continued to grow and the PR continued.
In my opinion, the initial spark that got it the coverage that started the snowball effect was the choice of gameplay and presentation: The game isn’t complex. And the greatest attraction by far is that it is easy to pick up game play. It also has a simple concept of trajectory-based strategy, puzzle elements in the simplest incarnation, cute characters, fun audio, and an addictive level progression system that has you replaying boards to earn “all 3 stars.”
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: