Monthly Archives: August 2016

mobile, smartphones, smartwatches

Asus ZenWatch 3 prompts the question: is it time yet for smartwatches?

Today Asus launched the ZenWatch 3, an Android Wear smartwatch set for release towards the end of this year. Price was announced as €229.

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Powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 2100, ZenWatch 3 is a chunky affair, 9.95mm thick. “Mainly for the male market?” I enquired of an Asus PR person; “well, yes” was the response. 1.39-inch AMOLED display with 400 by 400 resolution and 287ppi pixel density, three buttons, one programmable for quick app launch, customisable watch face.

Forget all that though; the big issue with these gadgets is the battery life, which is “up to two days”. Whenever I have tried a wearable, the battery life problem is always why I abandon it. I realise you just have to get into the habit of charging it every night, but I am not used to this in a watch. A further problem with the ZenWatch is that you need the special charger with you at all times, since it has an unique charging connector:

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What about smartphones though, these took off despite their short battery life. The reason was that they added a lot of value. Email, maps, then Facebook and Twitter on the go. And if it ran out of power, at least you still had a watch.

The battery life question then is bound up with the question about how much value the smartwatch adds. There is fitness tracking, there is the convenience of glancing at your wrist rather than pulling out a smartphone to check an email or text message, there is turn by turn directions. Enough?

For me, not yet. At the same time, technology always gets smaller and more convenient. No doubt today’s smartphones will look bulky and inconvenient in 10 years time, and it may well be that the future personal communications device looks more like a smartwatch than a smartphone. You can’t beat the convenience of of something on your wrist, rather than something you carry in a bag or pocket.

That presumes, though, that either smartwatches get smart enough to replace rather than complement your phone, or that some other compelling feature turns up that will make them a must-have.

I’m typing this as the Samsung Gear 3 event is about to begin. Vendors are keen to make this work. Come on Samsung, wow me.

The battery life question then is really another question. Are smartwatches sufficiently compelling that

android, mobile, smartphones, software, tablets

Sweetlabs Android App Services: what is it?

Margins on smartphones are thin, which is why we regularly hear commentary about how only Apple and Samsung are making any money from them. Vendors therefore look for other ways to monetize their business, though it is never easy, and there are plenty of examples of failed music stores and other premium services. Google can always make money, through Play Store revenue, ads served via Search, and monetizing the data it collects. But what of the smartphone vendors?

One obvious strategy is to pre-install applications, for which the app developer may pay. I say may because without inside knowledge its impossible to tell whether the Facebook app, for example, is pre-installed as a benefit to customers or because Facebook has paid something. Most users would probably install the Facebook app anyway; but fewer would install the Opera web browser, to take another example, so common sense says that if you find Opera pre-installed, it is more likely than Facebook to have paid for the privilege.

On Windows PCs, which also suffer from low margins, the pressure on manufacturers to make money from pre-installed applications has had a dire affect, significantly reducing the appeal of the product. At worst, you can pay good money for a PC, turn it on for the first time, and be greeted by a flurry of dialogs inviting you to install this or subscribe to that, along with warnings that your new purchase is “not protected”. Apple has never allowed this of course, which is one of the attractions of Macs. Another consequence was that Microsoft introduced its own brand of PC, Surface, and opened stores selling “signature” editions of PCs on which most of the foistware is absent.

The situation on Android should never be as bad. The operating system has a modern design, which means that applications are isolated and cannot cause as much damage as on Windows. If an application that you do not want is installed, it is easy to remove.

Even so, pre-installed apps on Android do introduce clutter and confusion, especially when combined with the constant requests for various types of permission which characterise the initial setup experience. I imagine that many users simply agree to everything, since the consequences of denying permission are rarely clear, and most want their new device to “just work.”

Sweetlabs is a company which specialises in monetizing app installs on Windows as well as Android. On Windows it is best known for the Pokki app store. Sweetlabs does not always present its brand overtly to users. Users are not its customers after all; its customers are app developers and smartphone vendors.

I reviewed a smartphone recently, and soon after switching on for the first time, I saw a notification inviting me to “Complete device setup” and to “Allow App Services to push messages to the n…” (I am still not sure what is the cut-off word):

If you tap this notification an app installer opens, presenting a small selection of apps categorised as either “Essentials” or “Entertainment”. You are meant to select the apps you want and then tap Finish to have those apps install, agreeing the terms and conditions as you do. Once you tap Finish, the notification disappears, though I noticed that the Sweetlabs service continues to run in the background:

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My understanding is that the service continues to run because at some future date more apps may become available. The Sweetlabs site talks about promoting apps through “multiple customer-facing touchpoints, including white-label apps and widgets that integrate into the out-of-box experience and persist through the lifetime of the device.” This can include a Featured Apps widget on the home screen that recommends apps “over the lifetime of the device.”

Is this a good or bad thing? The answer is nuanced. I dislike the way the notification implies that these optional app install are part of device setup; it is not, it is a marketing app. You can get all these apps through the official Play Store and App Services is consuming unnecessary system resources.

On the other hand, if you accept that pre-installing apps is inevitable given the low margins in this business, the Sweetlabs approach has advantages. Instead of simply dumping a bunch of unwanted apps on your device, you can choose which ones you want, if any. Therefore the company promotes itself as a better approach, even presenting itself as a fix for crapware. My review device had pre-installed apps on it as well, though, so it is more a case of putting up with both.

From the perspective of app developers, any service that helps get your app noticed in a beyond-crowded market is a significant benefit. Sweetlabs also offers an app analytics service focused on who is installing your app.

I wrote this post because I did not find much information about App Services when I searched for it after seeing the notification on my review device. If you are wondering whether you need it on your device, the answer is no; it does nothing essential, it is a vehicle for promoting apps, and you can safely disable or remove it. I recommend installing apps from the Play Store instead, where you can see user reviews and other information. It is not really evil though; it may have reduced the price of your smartphone as well as providing app developers another way to get their products noticed.

android, gadgets, mobile, reviews, smartphones

Honor 8 smartphone first look

I’m just back from Paris and the European launch of the Honor 8 smartphone.

Honor is wholly owned by Huawei though the relationship between the two businesses is a tad opaque. I’ve been told that Honor is run as a separate business focusing on a young internet-oriented market, though there is shared technology (it would be crazy not to). The Honor 8 represents a significant strategy shift in that it is a relatively high-end phone, whereas previous devices have been mid-range or lower.

One of the first things you notice about the Honor 8 though is its similarity to the Huawei P9, launched in Europe in April 2016, is obvious. That is no bad thing, since the P9 is excellent and the Honor 8 cheaper,  but the business strategy is a bit of a puzzle. Honor says its phone is targeting a different market, and it is true that the shiny glass body of the Honor 8, in a pleasing blue shade on my review unit, is jauntier than the grey metallic finish of the P9. The P9 is also a fraction slimmer. Yet the devices are far more alike than different, and I would happily pull out the Honor 8 at a business meeting. The Honor 8 also benefits from a few extra features, like the rear smart key.

The P9 has the benefit of Leica branding and shared technology for its camera. An Honor/Huawei PR person told me that this is a software-only distinction and that if you look at the hardware sensors the two phones are very similar. Should photographers therefore get the P9? Possibly, though for a casual snapper like myself I have not noticed a big advantage. See below for some comparative snaps.

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The Honor 8 (left) and the Huawei P9 (right).

To get a bit of context, the Honor 8 is being launched at €399 with 4GB RAM and 32 GB storage, or €449 with 4GB RAM and 64GB storage (inc VAT). That should equate to around £345 and £390 in the UK. The P9 was launched at £449 for 3GB RAM and 32GB storage, substantially more, though as ever real-world prices vary, and in practice a P9 today will likely cost only a little more than an Honor 8 if you shop around. The 8-core Kirin processor is the same, and the screen is the same resolution at 1920 x 1080. Both models also feature a dual-lens 12MP rear camera, 8MP front lens, and a rear fingerprint reader.

Out of the box

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The Honor 8 immediately impressed me as a nicely packaged device. You get headset, charger, USB C cable, SIM removal tool, quick start guide (not much use but does have a diagram showing exactly where to insert dual Nano-SIMs and microSD card) and a couple of stickers for good measure. I am not a fan of the headset which lacks any ear-bud gels so it not secure or comfortable for me, but tastes vary.

The glass body is attractive though shiny and easy to smear. Honor can supply a simple transparent case – more a tray than a case – which will offer a little protection, but most users will want something more.

Switch on and there is the usual Android palaver and confusion over permissions. Here I did notice something I dislike. I got a notification saying I should “complete device setup” and “Allow App Services to push messages”:

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Rather than tapping Allow, I tapped the notification and found an app installer and an invitation to “Choose the apps that come with your phone”. I tapped to see the EULA (End User License Agreement) and found it was a Sweetlabs app that “facilitates the recommendation, download and installation of third party apps.”

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This is horrible; it is deceptive in that it is presented as part of system setup and performs no useful function since you can easily install apps from the Google Play store; at least one of the apps offered by Sweetlabs (Twitter) was actually already installed. My opinion of which apps are “Essential” differs from that of Sweetlabs:

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I did not agree the Terms and Conditions. We have seen this kind of thing before, on Windows, and it is damaging to the user experience. History may repeat with Android.

Other than that, setup was straightforward.

Things to like

Fortunately, there is plenty to like. As on the P9, the fingerprint reader on the back is excellent; in fact, I like this feature so much that I sometimes absent mindedly tap the back of other phones and expect them to unlock for me. On the Honor 8 though, it is even better, since the fingerprint reader is also a “Smart key” which you can configure to open an app or take an action such as starting a voice recording or opening the camera. You can configure up to three shortcuts, for press, double press, press and hold.

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Another neat feature, also not on the P9, is the Smart Controller. This is a universal infra-red controller app and it seems rather good. I pointed it at a Samsung TV and after trying a few functions it declared a “best match” and seems to work fine.

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The camera

The camera is a key selling point for the Honor 8. One lens is RGB, the other monochrome, auto-focus is better with two lenses, and the ISP (Image Signal Processor) takes advantage by recording extra detail. There is also a great feature called Wide Aperture which lets you adjust the focus after the event.

When the camera app is open you can swipe from the left to select a mode. There are 16 modes:

Photo
Pro Photo
Beauty
Video
Pro Video
Beauty Video
Good Food
Panorama
HDR (High Dynamic Range)
Night Shot
Light Painting
Time-lapse
Slow-Mo
Watermark
Audio note
Document Scan

After just one day with the device I have not tried all the modes, but did take a look at Pro Photo which gives you control over the metering mode, ISO sensitivity, shutter speed, exposure compensation, focus mode (automatic or manual), and white balance.

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These same controls are on the P9 though with a slightly different UI and this causes me to wonder exactly what is the Leica contribution that is on the P9 but not the Honor 8. There are a few extra settings on the P9 if you swipe in from the right, including film mode, RAW mode and a Leica watermark option.

How is the camera in use? I took some snaps and was pleased with the results. I also tried taking a similar picture on the Honor 8 and the P9, and comparing the results:

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A Paris landmark (P9 left, Honor 8 right)

You can’t tell much from the full view, especially since I’ve resized the images for this post, so here is a detail from the above:

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Detail view (P9 left, Honor 8 right)

Much difference? Please do not draw conclusions from one snap but these support my impression that the Leica-enhanced P9 takes slightly sharper pictures than the Honor 8, but that a casual user would be happy with either.

Performance

The performance of the Honor 8 seems similar to that of the P9 which I reviewed here. The P9 features a Kirin 955 SoC versus the slightly older Kirin 950 in the Honor 8; the specs are similar. Both have 4 Cortex A72 cores, up to 2.5GHz in the Kirin 255 versus up to 2.3GHz in the Kirin 950. In each case, these are supplemented by 4 Cortex A53 cores at up to 1.8GHz and a quad-core Mali T880 MP4 GPU.

Geekbench 3, for example, reports 1703 single-core score and 6285 multi-core, one figure slightly worse, one slightly better than the P9. A run with PC mark came up with a Work Performance Score of 5799, below the P9 at 6387, with the difference mainly accounted for by a poor “Writing score”; other scores were slightly ahead of the P9, so something may be sub-optimal in the text handling and scrolling.

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Conclusion

I do like this phone; it looks good, feels responsive, and comes with some distinctive features, including the superb fingerprint reader, dual lens rear camera, smart key and smart controller. It does not seem to me to be a young person’s phone particularly, and I can see some people choosing it over a P9 not only for its lower price but also for a couple of extra features. Photographers may slightly prefer the P9, which also has a fractionally slimmer body and a more elegant, understated appearance. In the general phone market, the Honor 8 is competitively priced and well featured; I expect it to do well.

development, microsoft

Time for another look at “pure .NET”

3 Comments

Back in the Nineties there was a lot of fuss about “pure Java”. This meant Java code without any native code invocations that tie the application to a specific operating system.

It is possible to write cross-platform Java code that invokes native code, but it adds to the complexity. If it is an operating system API you need conditional code so that the write API is called on each platform. If it is a custom library it will have to be compiled separately for each platform.

Over on the Microsoft .NET site, developers have tended to have a more casual approach. After all, in the great majority of cases the code would only ever run on Windows. Further, Microsoft tended to steer developers towards Windows-only dependencies like SQL Server. After all, that is the value of owning a developer platform.

Times change. Microsoft has got the cross-platform bug, with its business strategy based on attracting businesses to its cloud properties (Office 365 and Azure) rather than Windows. The .NET Framework has been forked to create .NET Core, which runs on Mac and Linux as well as Windows. SQL Server is coming to Linux.

Another issue is porting applications from 32-bit to 64-bit, as I was reminded recently when migrating some ASP.NET applications to a new site. If your .NET code avoids P/Invoke (Platform Invoke) then you can compile for “Any CPU” and 64-bit will just work. If you used P-invoke and want to support both 32-bit and 64-bit it requires more care. IntPtr, used frequently in P/Invoke calls, is a different size. If you have custom native libraries, you need to compile them separately for each platform. The lazy solution is always to run as 32-bit but that is a shame.

What this means is that P/Invoke should only be used as a last resort. Arguably this has always been true, but the reasons are stronger today.

This is also an issue for libraries and components intended for general use, whether open source or commercial. It is early days for .NET Core support, but any native code dependencies will be a problem.

Breaking the P/Invoke habit will not be easy but “Pure .NET” is the way to go whenever possible.

apple, mobile, smartphones

Wind up your iPhone–this is not a wind up!

I have long thought that the solution to the difficulties we have keeping mobile devices charged is to make more use of the energy created by our bodies as we move around.

Once long ago I had a mechanical watch whose automatic winding worked perfectly; I never had to think about it.

Today I received news of something which is not quite that, but which still sounds useful. An iPhone case equipped with a dynamo so you can turn a handle to recharge it.

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Claiming to be the “World’s first dynamo-powered iPhone case”, the AMPware Power Generating iPhone case offers up to 2 hours phone use from “10 minutes of winding”.

Let’s note that 10 minutes of winding feels like a long time when you are doing it. However, if you are stranded without power it could be most useful.

Currently the case is for iPhone 6 and 6S only. Cost is £69.99 from The Fowndry

cloud computing, microsoft, windows

Notes from the field: Office 365 pain following Windows 10 upgrade

I got involved in looking at a PC where a few Office 365 problems had arisen following an upgrade to Windows 10 (prompted by Microsoft supposedly ending its free upgrade offer).

In particular, SharePoint online was crashing Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer? Don’t Windows 10 users stick to Edge?

Unfortunately Edge is problematic with certain sites. It works OK with Office 365 but there are some issues. For example, open a SharePoint document library in IE and you get the very useful option to “Open with Explorer”, an Explorer UI for your cloud-hosted files.

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Try this in Edge and you get:

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Note how the help information does not tell you how to fix the problem.

For reasons like this, the user still had a shortcut to SharePoint online in IE on the Windows 10 taskbar. Click it though, and IE would crash with its “Internet Explorer has stopped working” dialog.

Probably an add-on, I thought. This was proved right when I opened IE with add-ons disabled – try running:

"%ProgramFiles%\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" –extoff

– and found that SharePoint online worked fine. After some experimentation, I discovered that the SharePoint Export Database Launcher add-on was causing the problem. Disabled it and SharePoint worked fine.

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This add-on is installed by Microsoft Office. It prompts a couple of thoughts.

I do not know if every Windows 10 PC is similarly afflicted, but problems like this do suggest a lack of quality control in some areas. It is also unfortunate that when you install Office 365 Professional Plus you do not get any options; you get everything. Including, in this case, a buggy add-on.

Second, I wish Microsoft would pause from its energetic feature work with Office 365 and sort out the core functionality of working with documents in SharePoint online. As someone pointed out to me on Twitter today, the situation with OneDrive sync clients remains a mess, and when it goes wrong it is not always easy to troubleshoot.

Incidentally, I cannot resist telling you how to fix another OneDrive for Business issue. Here’s the problem: you open a document library in a web browser (even works in Edge), hit Sync, and OneDrive for Business fires up. If this is the first document library to be synced you might be prompted to sign in. So you enter your email address, hit Next, and then enter your password and click Sign in. Sometimes though nothing happens and you can’t sign in. What’s the fix? Don’t click Sign-in, press Enter!

microsoft, windows

The battle to own Windows Explorer shell overlay icons, or why your OneDrive green ticks have stopped working

4 Comments

There are a number of dark areas in Windows that do not work quite right. MAXPATH anyone? But here is another one that I have only recently become aware of.

If you use applications such as Mozy, OneDrive (Business or Personal), Adobe Creative Cloud, Tortoise (a developer utility) or Dropbox, you will be familiar with the idea of files in Explorer showing little icons to indicate their state: synced, not synced, in conflict, excluded and so on.

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A common complaint is that while everything still works, the little green ticks (or whatever) no longer appear.

The reason for this is simple, if depressing. Well, there are two reasons. One is that Windows has a limit of 15 overlay icons. If more than that are specified (by multiple applications) then anything over the limit does not work.

The second is that multiple applications cannot apply overlays to the same file. So if you tried to set up your Tortoise repository in a OneDrive folder (do not do this), one or other would win the overlay battle but not both.

The overlay configuration is stored in the registry, at HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShelliconOverlayIdentifiers\

If you visit this location in RegEdit, you will notice something interesting:

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Some of these entries, including AccExtIco (Adobe Creative Cloud), OneDrive (personal OneDrive) and SkyDrivePro (OneDrive for Business), have a leading space in their name. Why? That is because the authors of these applications want THEIR stuff to work right, so by including the leading space they get to the top of the queue.

(I also have entries for SkyDrive as well as OneDrive, registry bloat caused by the name change no doubt).

Microsoft’s support article on the subject therefore suggests renaming these entries to have TWO leading spaces:

Rename the following registry keys. To do this, right-click the folder, select Rename, and then rename the folder. When you rename the folder, add two spaces at the beginning of the name.

You can see where this is going to end … Adobe will install its entries with three spaces, Microsoft will come back with four, and so on. Possibly.

It is also an imperfect solution. On a machine suffering from this issue I performed an Office repair, which restored the old entries with a single leading space while not removing those with two leading spaces. More bloat.

If you get this problem, the best solution is to remove applications so that there is no conflict. If you want to use Mozy for backup, Dropbox because it works, and two OneDrives because they are nearly free, well, you are not going to have all your icon overlays working and that is that.