Android, iPhone and Windows Phone but why Winpho do not have a chance

Microsoft: One of the wonderful company in terms of business sense. They still generate loads of Cash. They are upbeat about earnings. It's multi legged Gorilla. It has OS which ubiquitous similar to UK in 18th and 19th century until few years. It has web browser and it is inseparable and servered more than 90% of netties until 5 or 6 years back. It has Golden touch interms of enterprise look at MOSS (Sharepoint) and Office products. It enjoyed more than half (50%) smart phone market share until few year back.
 Apple: That guys are pure awesome. If you go back carefully in 2007 and study the market of mobile devices and it's capabilities and experience (including windows mobile) you understand why this guys are standing where it is standing now. They are Game changers. If it is not that disruption happen on mobile, they are still a guy in music.
Google: They know what they do. They have so many failed attempts and they fall quickly and get back quickly. Most of their home grown services except few bruised them time and time again. But they made always beautiful acquisition which includes Ad sense to Android. They know the cloud and they made it so that service need not bother whatever load it brings with them.
Free: Sure. Free is beautiful thing. People like free things. Free thing attracts people. Even if it is not free, considering something sells low cost in the place of market that dominated by premium cost, will be going to supre hit. That's what time and again market proved. HP tocuhpad, Amazon kindle fire etc.
Android: Android started free but it has great team which includes carrier to device manufacturer. Once you get the software and service as half good as something best in the market people will see. Considering the experience of existing one, if you provide better than existing predominant one and half as good as the best in the market, yes you will hit the right place with right time. If it is free, so many jump into, and once you get the momentum, be it bad press or good going to be pushing factor. It develops familiarity and momentum snowballs into formidable force. Unless otherwise some game changing product blocks it, it will continues to roll.
Internet: It is everything. Whatever you buy, it needs to talk some way into internet. And barrier to internet is pretty low, which does't need or force it have windows or macs or linux. Or mobile or what not.
Windows: Apple proved windows can be diluted with product with right value as ecosystem. Mac, iPad, iPhone, iTouch, AppStore and iTuens. Android proved and become juggernaut. And above all it is internet which is going to be universe for anything and everything going to determine or going to dilute the mode by which internet is being accessed, if it is TV, people look for smart TV, if it is phone people look for smart phone. That smart factor's central nervous system is internet. Assume that, if browser is disabled in windows or mac, no body will buy (sorry at least 50% will not not buy) them. So major thing which will be part of buying decision is internet. And past 6 to 8 years, internet started diluting platform dependency in a scale that big vendors like Microsft failed to recognize it.
For Microsoft, it is always 2 to 4 years late in the game: They launched Zune, after seeing iPod peaked out and failed to innovate windows mobile. Later, seeing iPhone, they thought it will not make it, may be purely because, their policy against buying competitor product. Once they saw, iPhone's demand and Android's momentum, it was already too late but they launched windows phone with moden touch. But those vendor moved on to iPad and tablet. Microsoft has just blinked.
So, these are summary of wrongs which Microsoft did,

1. Zune in response to iPod -- probably it should have been windows phone with those things natively integrated 
2. Windows Phone to iPhone -- it should have been tablet, if they succeeded based on step 1, but atleast windows phone with tablet at this time would have stopped some bleeding Other attacks on Office suites, email and search are big topic in itself. 
3. Totally microsoft suffered because of they are not open and not listened to various signals they saw over many years. 
4. Though Steve Ballmer monkey danced and yelled "developer, developer, developer" but it sounds like developer left long past and yelling merely vanished in vacuum --- Apps, Ecosystem with Development, distribution (market) etc and upcoming road-map like connected devices, TV, infotainment etc makes Android strong ahead of windows phone. 
5. Looking at how Device vendor embraced snugly to mine some Gold on the path or tunnel created by Apple, it is going to be long moving target for MS. 
6. Current technology like Touch, Voice and icon based user interfaces advancement made underlying platform branding is less important where in in Desktop or Laptop it always make sense to follow the leader. So brand value of Microsoft as OS leader won't help them seal or make any dent in the mobile area, there is no reuse in terms of existing learning for those system. And again apps which neutralized those leader advantage.  

So for past 10 years MS entered late to Game and exit yearly.  I am seeing how IE lost share and after all bruise started  to overhaul IE. Slightly different story goes to Zune, WinPho, Search etc (these things followed or reaction to their lost focus not entering and innovating early into market).

 If you think of UK to Microsoft, you will be right that it is going to be, within couple of year, they are like nice player and going to be kicked out of everywhere (similar to CES 2012).

iPhone 4 Facetime issue

iPhone 4 Facetime disappears when it is restored from old iPhone using iTunes. I looked at the Google which point me to a blog where it asked me to enable under Settings->Phone. But unfortunately I did not get Facetime under Setting->Phone. So how do I resolve?

I called up 611 and couple of minutes warring with customer care i was able to talk to Apple rep who is not that much useful to resolve, he asked me to call 1-888-Facetime to resolve :) it was totally useless minutes with rep.

So I thought of resetting all the settings under Settings -> General -> Reset -> Reset All Settings.

After that iPhone started rebooting and viola.. Facetime worked.....

Adhoc Browser Performance Testing (IE8, Google Chrome2, Firefox3.5) - Round 2 (with SSD)

This time I tried with IE8 and entirely different system again I used the same link to see the performance http://ideamill.synaptrixgroup.com/jquery/tablefilter/largetabletest.htm

(I also open/close the borwser few times to bring all the moving parts close to the heart of OS -:) )

	Chrome2	IE8	Firefox3.5
Loading the above link button – iteration 1	0.5 sec	1.6 Sec	1.2 Sec
Loading the above link– iteration 2 (Close the browser, reload it again)	0.5 sec	1.7 Sec	1.1 Sec
Clicking GO button – iteration 1	1.9 Sec	Broken and it took 5.5 Sec to hide the table and stopped rendering the table below “Go” button. I tried compatible mode but it also didn't help.	4.3 Sec

For the kick, I checked with iPhone OS3.0 safari, It took 0.5 sec to show few rows and tool almost 3.5 minutes to render the entire page. I also checked it render all the rows. I tried to click the "Go" button, It did not work. Though it is not bad as it is not meant for this kind of load.

System used:

Core2Duo 3 GB DDRII RAM

Gskill Falcon 128GB SSD

All the test ran on the same system.

Disclaimer:

I considered Network latencies, Network congestion etc would be same for all the browser

as it is tested on the same system. You can still use the given Link to try it yourself.

Is Apple reinventing the wheel?

I went through Apple's proposal http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pantos-http-live-streaming-01. It is great to see Apple's push for HTTP Streaming and I appreciate the effort. But devils in details. I have different thoughts here. It looks complex as it needs, server side Segmenter. As per HTTP 1.1, server can handle Chunked transfer encoding (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616 section 3.6.1 Chunked Transfer Coding). When server/client comes to an agreement about size/blocks of chunks, it can stream the video without even the requirement of Playlist (m3p8). It simplifies another call to obtain playlist.

Apple devised this approach for iPhone. And its safari is able to handle video playback natively. When streaming natively handled in HTTP and Html5 video tag and video tag playback execution knows to utilize http transfer encoding, it can do a streaming, we don't even need complex segmenter or intermediary. It is kind of pushing the problem from one place to another.

iPhone HTTP Streaming

I saw an article about how iPhone OS 3.0 Safar handles Video. It is cool, it is now supporting HTML5 video Tag. Safari understands the <video /> or <object /> tag and launches the Quick Time player. I am able to move the scrubber bar. It is kind of cool. The codec supported is not Ogg Theora, it is H.264, please visit Apple site for more.

This will unleash lots of possibilities. Custom streaming or TV Streaming or whatnot - quite possible just with HTML5 and Http Server, may be Erlang will be the language to support needed scalability.

I checked the Video capabilities by converting the video into ".mov" format and created small html page with video tag. Safari understood the video tag and displayed the play button. Once I touch (click) the play button, it launched Quick time iPhone player and it played the Video. I am also able to move scrubber, it felt like a full streaming.

iPhone after 3G

iPhone lived upto its hype even though it lacked lot of features (but OS 3.0 has got missing features). iPhone is a kind of gifted because it is deprived of lots of notable features but people made it great product as if telling a person "you are good" continuously make them good.

Ok, then what should be the hardware upgrade for next release? Probably I would think OLED should be very important to stay par with competition (Nokia, Samsung et al has got OLED display long back). Apple suppose to serve niche market and it should have that. What if it has one more inch big in width - it makes reading web pages very easy and OLED makes thin form form possible and it can still retain its weight and can increase battery size/capacity. Support HD and wirelessly stream video, if not through HDMI etc to other device. It should also allow easy integration with other devices. It should evolve as platform. It should not be an example of child protecting the bird in its hand by squeezing it. The world will turn soft when it is very open, and it turn hard if it is closed - History so far telling this truth.

Software

Voice integration, it would be fine if it understand the voice and textify it on every place (notes, mail, sms, search - spotlight, url typing etc), probably a service running on apple or provider environment take the input and convert it to text somthing sort of google voice search. It helps very much, at least for me.

Anyway Apple will not continue to be lucky as, I feel, Android will one day throw it out of the window as microsoft did for Mac in the last decade.

Browser should support location API by integrating with GPS system and other hardware components like compass etc, this will make rich UI application history.

Broken iPhone

It is Jan 31st, It is kind of bad day - my iPhone display got broken. It was night and I was about to attend the call and found that there was crack running horizontally from home button to top and another one from middle to right side -- kind of forming inverted "Y". I was totally clueless how it broke like that. I started exploring on how to fix it. I called up apple support and scheduled an appointment with "Genius Team" to fix it.

I went there and a "Genius" looked at my iPhone and declared it as accidental damage and looked around the phone - he never able to find any scratch or chip anywhere - it probably scratch free due to the protection of my silicon cover and screen protector. And he is unable to tell me exactly what could have caused the damage. I was trying to tell him that I never dropped and I had another pouch in the belt which i always use for carry the phone. Since it is broken that means it is accident and he gave me print out of apple's terms and conditions and which indicated "accidental" damage will not be covered and warranty. Since he is not able to find visible mark for damage, he offered me $99 replacement. He was telling me that he has 6-7 years of experience in fixing the iPhone (probably other phones as iPhone is not even 2 years old) and he was telling me that glasses never break by its own. But I asked curious question "what if some external forces like defect in assembling or cutting the glass penal or something of that sort" could have caused, for which he said it never happen. I also heard from apple customer care that he(the guy who evaluated) is "Genius" among "Genius guys" so his finds is always correct and told me he did a great favor of offering me replacement for $99. I never mind paying $200, if i damaged it.

hm.. It is waste of time talking to Apple care. So I thought of replacing by paying them.

I did a Google search to find out similar incidents. I got to know Master card has extended purchase warranty for the product purchased from Master card. So I called them and found that something of that sort is available and they asked me bunch off documents amongst repair cost is one. So I planned to schedule another meeting with "Genius" guys to get the estimation.

I went to apple store again and told them my appointment. I was searching for my earlier "Genius" guy so that I can get the estimate from him without explaining more as I had met him earlier. But this time I got allocated to another guy. I showed my iPhone and told the story and asked for estimate. Another guy at apple store who looked at my iPhone just looked at the phone and told that it will be covered under warranty as the crack is originated from "home" button. The same time couple of other Genius come and looked at and agreed that it is covered under warranty. So they replaced me freely. It is kind of surprise to me as I never expect it to be replaced.
So, ultimately,
Apple warranty will cover the cracks in the iPhone display, if it is originated or cracks run through home button.

My Experience with Google/TMobile G1

I bought TMobile G1 a day before thanks giving day. I bought it for couple of reasons mainly Android.
Some of the things I noticed needs more probing
1. From the browser coming back to home by clicking home button - How is the memory and opened process handled for application opened?
2. Omnibar of Chrome while entering url, if .com/org etc missed at the end doing search and listing the results but I expected somthing more like "I'm feeling lucky" in the desktop google search. Probably I could have missed something here (may be setting) but it would have been really good at the out of the box default setting.

Browsing Experience:
It comes close to iPhone but couple of minor issues. Some pages really slowly scrolled while swiping.

I also found that experience or behaviour of the system is not completely uniform across multiple applications. It is really glitch that will, i hope, be ironed out in later releases.

Google Map : I felt tough to follow while driving it is cool with compass mode, I need it give a try some more time.

Keyboard/Virtual keys: It is uneasy to use touch and keyboard as I am forced to use keyboard by thumbing the slide out and it is kind of messy. How can it be used by single hand? It is kind of worst mistake hybridizing touch and keyboard. Though OS and its responsiveness is very impressive but usability it was beaten to death.
So I returned the G1 and bought iPhone. In the end, I realized it is Google's well known secret that -release the thingy in Beta. So, I guess, not too far away, like chrome emerged from Beta - there will be a-phone or multiples but atleast a phone which will strongly carry Google's image and rivals iPhone from left, right, center will emerge. Probably HTC or Samsung will be its surrogate mother.

Harware:

I am not sure why google didn't pickup the right hardware from HTC, it already has Touch HD, it would have been tremendous success if google would have choosen good hardware. Google seems playing second fiddle with Apple iPhone.