Posts from Mobile phone

Long title. Short post.

Daring Fireball says:

The utter simplicity of the iOS home screen is Apple’s innovation. It’s the simplest, most obvious “system” ever designed. It is a false and foolish but widespread misconception that “innovation” goes only in the direction of additional complexity.

"Designed" being the important word in that quote. Because we aren't done designing user interfaces. I think we are just getting started.

This piece in Wired got my head nodding because I am experiencing it every day on my Android phone. I find myself typing less and less on Android because the voice recognition is so damn good. And the type ahead prompts are like reading my mind. Instead of typing, I find myself selecting the next word more often than not.

Machine learning is the key innovation here. And in that area Google is so far ahead of every big company (and most small companies) that it is hard to imagine how they are not going to out innovate on the emerging user interfaces of our mobile future (glasses, watches, etc, etc).

I was at a USV event last week in SF and I bumped into Sung Hu Kim, a product manager at Twitter who handles mobile stuff. We got to talking about things I'd love the Twitter Android product to do. I mentioned that my daugther tweets a fair bit but I often miss them because I follow 735 people, many of them prolific tweeters. I do have a family list but I only get around to checking it every few days and I often miss opportunities to @reply to Emily.

Sung pointed me to the mobile notifications settings and we turned on notifications for Emily on my Android. Game changer! Now I get a notification every time she tweets and I can immediately favorite it, retweet it, or reply to it. I turned on notifications for about ten others including of course my wife.

Here's how to you do it (I assume this works on Twitter for iPhone too but I don't know for sure).

1) Navigate to someone's profile. You can do that by clicking on their avatar in a tweet. Here is my friend Bijan's profile on my phone.

2) Do you see that little image of a head under the block that says "tweets" on the middle left? You click that. And you get this dialog box.

Click on "turn on notifications". That's all you have to do.

3) Then you get notifications at the top of your home screen whenever someone you've added to mobile notifications tweets. Those notifications look like this (look at the very top of the home screen):

For those that are curious, that is Gilligan on my home screen. My friend Josh Harris painted that Gilligan and the original hangs in my office at USV. The Gotham Gal also has a Gilligan in her office. For those that know Josh and his obsessions, it has great meaning. It represents the crazy web 1.0 era in NYC in my mind. It is one of my favorite art pieces we own.

4) When you pull down the notifications tray on Android, you actually can see part of the tweet. And you can click on it to go to the tweet. Here's a notification of a tweet from Bijan (who I've added to my mobile notifications as well).

I have had this feature active on my phone for the past week and it has significantly increased my usage of twitter as I am now seeing in real time the tweets from the folks I care most about. I love it.

We've been talking a lot about mobile here lately and in one of those discussions, someone suggested we share our home screens with each other. I figured that would make for a fun friday.

Here's my home screen:

In case you can't make them out, from top left to bottom right; Kik, Tumblr, SoundCloud, Instagram, Google Maps, Foursquare, Gmail, Twitter, Camera, Google Calendar, Android Browser, Settings, Phone, Google Contacts, SMS, and all my apps.

Oh, and that's the start of The Highline at Gansevoort and Washington in the background.

This is a T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy. I am actually in the process of switching to a Galaxy Nexus running Jelly Bean and will switch to a Chrome Browser and the home screen might move around a bit. But this is what I've got right now.

To play this fun friday game, take a photo of your home screen and attach it to your comment in the thread below. And add any color commentary you'd like to add. This should be fun.

One of the most exciting areas of Internet applications these days are applications that are "mobile native". That doesn't just mean mobile first. It means mobile native – the app could not exist if the mobile smartphone didn't exist.

A great example of this is the "book a cab ride on your phone" category. The leader in this category is Uber which does a great job and really nailed the experience. I've also used SideCar in San Francisco and Hailo in London. All three are great experiences.

These services work so well because the cab driver and the passenger both have mobile phones that are geolocated. The application matches up driver and passenger in real time and handles payment as well. That's a killer experience.

When thinking about new mobile app categories, we like to think about these mobile native services. They are very powerful.

It's Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year. But you don't have to get crushed by the crowds stampeding the doors in order to participate in this shopping crazed day.

You can take out your mobile phone and do your holiday shopping while you are sitting in the park, on the beach, or by the pool.

Consider the new Etsy iPhone app, for example. Download it to your iPhone and shop away.

The treasury lists make a great way to shop on mobile. Here's a treasury called "Merry X-mas for him"

And if you find something you like, you can purchase it right on your phone:

So if you want to participate in Black Friday mania from the comfort of your couch watching football games, try shopping on your mobile phone. It works nicely and you aren't likely to get trampled.

For the past couple years, when I travel in europe I turn mobile data roaming off on my phone and grab wifi when I can. That's the best way to avoid ridiculous data roaming charges.

Last year, on the advice of readers of this blog, I started buying prepaid sim cards in countries where I planned on being for a few days or more. I did that in the UK last summer and it worked out well. I still have my prepaid sim card from that trip. I wonder if it still works.

When my daughter was getting ready to go to Paris for a month in mid June, I got an unlocked iPhone 4 directly from Apple (they had just started to sell it) and sent her to France with it instead of her US iPhone. I figured that our whole family could share that unlocked iPhone and use it whenever one of our iPhone users traveled outside the US.

I also DM'd a friend in Paris and asked him what prepaid plan to get. He suggested Orange's Mobicarte service. So my daughter arrived in Paris, went to an Orange store as I suggested, bought a Mobicarte sim and started using it. Within hours her phone was out of money. She emailed me and asked what was up. I suggested she go back to the Orange store and ask what was happening. Turns out she needed to get something called Internet Max on her Mobilcarte plan. Once she did that, she was in business.

Around the exact same time, my friend Brad Feld was having the exact same problem. He emailed me. I told him what I knew from my daughter's experience. But I didn't have all the details. He banged his head against the wall, broke his glasses, and finally figured it out. Thankfully, he blogged exactly how to do this so the rest of us won't have the same issues.

So I show up in Paris a few days later and confidently walk into an Orange store and buy two Mobicarte sims for the Gotham Gal and me. Armed with my daughter's experience and Brad's blog post, I figure no problem. Well not exactly. I started using mobile data on my Mobicarte sim before the Internet Max kicked in (it takes a while), and ran through all my prepaid money. I had to recharge at the local Tabac this morning and now I am set. Meanwhile the Gotham Gal's HTC G2 is apparently locked (who knew?) and we are waiting for T-Mobile to send an unlock code.

The point of all of this? It is damned hard to beat the man when it comes to mobile data in europe. I'm starting to think that turning it off and grabbing wifi here and there isn't such a bad solution. But if you want to do the local sim card thing, here are my suggestions:

1) Make sure you have a totally unlocked phone. The unlocked iPhone Apple sells online will work. So will the Nexus S. Beyond that, check before you leave home. If you need an unlock code from your carrier, plan ahead.

2) If you are coming to France, read Brad's blog post and print it out for safe measure. I used on O2 sim in the UK and it worked like a charm with no configuration needed.

3) Be prepared for stuff to go wrong. If you don't have the time and patience to deal with snafus while you are traveling, don't go down this path.

I was having lunch with a friend today who lives in Ljubiana Slovenia. We got to talking about mobile data in europe. We both felt that the EU really ought to require all the telcos operating in the region to open up to new providers so we can get a pan-european prepaid sim with a good mobile data plan. Then we'd only need to do this once and it would work everywhere in europe. And on top of that, Google should work to get Google Voice working over here as well. One can dream.

I've long thought that the mobile devices we have in our home (tablets, iTouch, phones) would be our remotes. In fact, we use them everyday for that now. We use the Sonos app on the iPad to control the music in our house. We use the Boxee remote on the iTouch to control our TV. We all have apps on our androids and iPhones that control various devices in our home.

But as we were driving out to our beach house on friday afternoon, I realized that there is an alternative scenario. The mobile devices could be our primary content consumption devices and we will simply connect them to whatever device we want them to "play to."

That's how we and surely many others use the audio in our cars. We connect one of our many mobile devices to our auxiliary input in our car audio system and then play music. We play rdio, rhapsody, mog, fredwilson.fm, hypem, and sometimes local files on our mobile device and use the car audio system for the amplification and speakers throughout the car. We sometimes use the am/fm and siriusxm radio we have in the car. But the vast majority of listening happens on the mobile devices connected via the auxiliary input. We have the various subscription and free internet audio services on our mobile devices, not in our car dashboard.

That's how we use the telephone in our car too. Our mobile phones are connected via bluetooth to the car speakers and microphone. Our address books are on our mobile phones, not in the car dashboard. Our connections to the voice networks are on our mobile devices, not the car dashboard.

And we are quickly seeing video services show up on tablets. My friend Jimmy was at our beach house in long island on friday night. He showed me the Cablevision iPad app. If you can simply "play" the video on the iPad on the TV via a technology like Apple's Airplay, then the iPad becomes more than the remote. It becomes the set top box replacement.

The implications of this alternative scenario are profound. The subscription services might be on the mobile devices, not the displays. If your friend has an MLB.com subscription on his or her tablet and they come over to your house, you could watch the game on your TV via your friend's tablet.

That's how it works with audio today. My kids' friends come over and connect their phones and iTouch devices to our audio system and play their music on it. It seems highly possible that this model will continue to develop and include video as well. And if this becomes the dominant model then the video and audio systems will remain "dumb" and the smarts will be in the mobile devices.

I think its a bit too early to know which way the market will evolve. The auto industry and the consumer electronics industry have been pushing to get smart processers, operating systems, and internet connections into their products. There's a lot of energy going into that approach right now. But consumers are moving even faster than the manufacturers right now and the market may evolve in a different direction before the manufacturers can catch up. It will be interesting to watch how this plays out.

I wrote a post on saturday asking for an android app that would turn my wifi on and off when I was in certain locations. I got a ton of great comments and installed a bunch of apps on my phone as a result, including Locale, JuiceDefender, Y5, and Tasker. I promised that I'd write a blog post telling everyone what was the best solution for me. This is that post.

Locale, JuiceDefender, and Y5 all do the thing I wanted (turning wifi on and off based on location). Y5 is drop dead simple. You don't need to do any configuration. JuiceDefender is very powerful and can do a lot of things.

But I'm really taken with Locale and it is the solution I opted for in the end. It's not a battery saver app, it's a location configuration app. And I think it is a very smart idea. With Locale you can tune your phone to do different things in different places. Here's some copy from the Locale website:

With Locale, you create situations specifying conditions under which your phone's settings should change. For example, your "At School" situation notices when your Location condition is "77 Massachusetts Ave.," and changes your Volume setting to vibrate.

It's been almost 30 years now, but I still remember that 77 Mass Ave means school (MIT). I guess the team behind Locale is out of MIT. If so, I like this app even more.

Here's what I've done with Locale so far. I've set up Home and Office as "situations" and geolocated them on my phone. I've set wifi to turn on whenever I arrive at eiter location. And I've set wifi to turn off whenever I leave either location. I've set volume to vibrate at the Office and to ring loudly at home (I leave my phone by the front door and don't take it around my house).

I'm trying to figure out how to make Locale turn on Bluetooth when I get in my car and turn it off when I get out. I'm going to try to geolocate my garage and see if I can make that work.

The user interface of Locale is simple and yet fairly powerful. I think it can do so much more and I hope they keep adding features to this app. The idea that I have an intelligent phone that configures itself depending on where I am is very powerful and I think there's a lot of potential here.