Simon Dobson (Posts about android)

Dancing with a Lenovo Duet

Simon Dobson — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 08:02:19 GMT

A Chromebook that behaves like a proper tablet.

A convert to tablet computing

Simon Dobson — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 21:27:13 GMT

I'm definitely a convert to tablet computing. Many computer scientists can't see the point of tablet computers, and indeed I was one of them. They're too large to be truly personal devices (like smartphones); too small to be usable as "real" computers (like laptops); and don't really support many of the functions and activities people like me spend a lot of their time doing (like coding and writing). Given all that, what's the point? Having taken the plunge with a Samsung Galaxy 10.1, I can safely say that all the above are true -- and that that's not the point at all. What tablets are great for is consuming, be that papers, photos, videos, news, web pages, and any and all other information. In fact they're so good for it that I can't see me using a laptop for these sorts of activities again.

It's hard to explain why tablets seem so much better: it's probably the naturalness of the interface. That may not sound too surprising, but for a computer scientist a keyboard is basically as natural as breathing, and I've never felt that a keyboard is a barrier -- indeed, I often find keyboards more natural and powerful than GUIs. So I'm surprised that I find a touch screen so much better than a mouse. It's interesting to compare the Galaxy with the Kindle (the ordinary one, not the new tablet). Kindles are fantastic for reading books, especially outdoors, and have the other great feature that they isolate you from the internet and other distractions while you're reading. The e-ink display is very restful, too. What they're not as good for is reading PDF files (and annotating them), as the screen resolution and size are both "off" for most paper formats: if the document you're reading doesn't re-flow, forget it. That makes Kindles less useful for academics than they could be, given we spend so much time consuming papers. I have to say that I also like the ability to jump out of a book and onto the web, or into linked content. Despite the arguments over the impact of linking, it's hard to argue that restricting access to information improves understanding. I always made do with reading off my MacBook Air, but for some reason that's never been very effective. So I was surprised to discover that reading PDFs on a tablet is actually extremely easy and restful: more so than the laptop, even though the screen resolutions and pixel densities are comparable. My only suggestion for why this is so is that a tablet can be moved more easily, like a book: you constantly change the angle at which you view it, to conform to your reading position, how alert you feel, and so on, in a way that you can't with a laptop. (If this hypothesis is correct, it's a really good example of the subtleties involved in designing mobile and pervasive and their interfaces.) Given that I've had the tablet for less than a week I certainly haven't found all the apps I want to, but here are my favourite so far:

News: Taptu. The tablet comes with Pulse, but I think Taptu is better: it seems to be more aggressive about downloading the articles it lists, which means it's more effective to read on the train.
PDF: Adobe PDF Reader. Good display capabilities but no annotation: apparently ezPDF allows annotation, so might be worth buying.
Books: Kindle Reader. The only choice, really.
Magazines: Zinio. Subscribe to or buy single issues of a wide range of glossy magazines covering virtually all topics (from Maxim to National Geographic to Shutterbug).
Game: Air Attack HD Part 1. Basically a clone of the old console/arcade game "1942" -- blow up everything in sight with no sign of strategy. Way better graphics, of course, and I don't think the Nazis actually used airships or had big electric-spark-generating towers for destroying marauding aircraft, but great fun!!! (Fruit Ninja comes a close second.)

What the tablet doesn't do well is anything to do with typing. Soft keyboards have no "give" and no tactile feedback, so typing on one is a lot like drumming your fingers on the table. This isn't something I could do for any length of time, so writing anything longer than a quick email is going to be problematic. (Before you ask, I'm writing this on the Air.) But this limitation is massively outweighed by the advantages. Even the little things are challenging to the status quo. A tablet is pretty much always-on (since it sleeps by default rather than shutting down), and instant boot. Why can't "real" computers do that? Of course, they can -- and indeed did, 30 years ago -- but we've accepted a different approach as normal. There are reasons for this -- it maximises flexibility to load everything off disc through a flexible boot process -- but once you see an instant boot it's hard to make the argument that it shouldn't be replicated on all devices. I feel about tablets the same way I feel about the first laptop I encountered: it's game-changing. But in fact they're more game-changing than laptops ever were, because they open information up to an enormous new user population who'd never use a traditional computer effectively. Using one for even a few days sparks off all sorts of ideas about what should be the future of books, the future of programming languages, rich information linkage, the ways we educate and the ways we make information available. Tablets are easily the most exciting new piece of kit I've seen in the past decade, and I can't wait to see where we can take them.

Some data is just too valuable

Simon Dobson — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 08:02:33 GMT

The recent furore over tracking mobile phones is a warning of what happens when sensor data goes too public. Over the past week first Apple and then Google have been caught capturing location traces from users' phones without their knowledge or consent. The exposure has been replete with denials and nuanced responses -- and indeed a not-so-nuanced response purportedly from Steve Jobs. This is almost certain to end up in court, especially in Europe. The details, both technical and managerial who-knew-what, are still unclear. It's just about possible that one or both cases were caused by over-enthusiastic engineers without management approval, and we should of course suspend judgment until more details emerge. We can, however, explore possible motives. The Apple case involves tracking a phone over a protracted period of time and storing the resulting trace as GPS co-ordinates in an unencrypted file. This is invisible to "normal" users, but is visible when a phone has been "jailbroken," and is sync'ed with the user's desktop. As soon as the story broke there was an application available for Macs to overlay the trace onto a map. We did this with a colleague's phone, and the trace goes back around a year. In places it's surprisingly accurate; in others is shows clear signs of distortion and location artifacts. Apparently Google Android performs similar tracking, but over shorter periods and with the results stored less openly. It's not quite clear whether the tracks recorded in either handset are forwarded back to their respective mother-ships, but that's certainly a risk. In the Apple case, traces are collected even if location-based services have been switched off at the application level. It has to be said that this whole affair is something of a disaster, both for the companies concerned and for location-based and pervasive services in general. What the fall-out will be is unclear: will people move back to "dumb" phones to protect their privacy? Experience suggests not: the convenience is too great, and many people will conclude that the loss of privacy they've experienced, though unacceptable per se, is insignificant compared to the overall benefits of smartphones. Indeed, if one were being particularly conspiracy-minded one might suspect that that the whole affair is a set-up. Management (one might argue) must have known that they'd be found out, and so made sure that the tracking they were performing was benign (no transmission back to base) so that, when the story broke, people would be momentarily offended but afterwards would be inured to the idea of their phones tracking their locations (it happened before and had no bad consequences, so why worry about it?) even if those traces were later pooled centrally. To a company, some personal data is so valuable that it's worth risking everything to collect it. The reason location traces are important has nothing to do with the exposure of the occasional adulterer or criminal, and everything to do with profiling and advertising. Big data isn't just lots of small data collected together: it's qualitatively different and allows very different operations to be performed. A smartphone is a perfect personal-data-collection platform, being ubiquitous, always-on and increasingly used to integrate its owner's everyday life. The Holy Grail of mobile e-commerce is to be able to offer advertisements to people just at the moment when the products being advertised are at their most valuable. Doing this requires advertisers to profile people's activities and interests and respond to subtle cues in real time. Imagine what a trace of my every movement does. It can show, to first order, how often I travel (and therefore my annual travel spend), what I see, and how I see it. Combined with other information like my travel history, booking references and internet search history, it can show what I'm interested in and when I'm likely to be doing it to a surprisingly high accuracy. It can identify that I commute, my home and work locations, my commute times and other routines. If I travel with other smartphone users it can identify my friends and colleagues simply from proximity -- and that's before someone mines my social network explicitly using Facebook or LinkedIn. Now consider what this profile is worth to an advertiser. Someone with access to it, and with access to the platform on which I browse the web, can inject advertisements tailored specifically to what I'm doing at any particular moment, and to what I may be doing in the future. It can offer distractions when I'm commuting, or offers for my next holiday before I leave, and group discounts if I persuade my friends to join in with some offer. Basically a location trace is almost incalculably valuable: certainly worth an initial bout of injurious comment and lawsuits if it leads to getting hands legitimately on that kind of data. With spam email one needs response rates in the fractions of percent to make a profit: with access to a detailed user profile one could get massively better responses and make a quite astonishing amount of money. Location tracing, like loyalty cards, gains most of its value from information asymmetry: the data provider thinks that a few vouchers is good value for the data being given away, even though the actual value is enormously more than that. If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product. It's not necessarily dystopian, may lead to better services, and may in fact be the price we pay for keeping basic services free on the web given the unexpected lack of many other business models. But it's not something to be given away for free or without consideration of where and to whom the benefits accrue, and what a properly constituted fair trade-off would be.

Getting rid of the laptop

Simon Dobson — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 05:00:02 GMT

I've been ~~playing with~~ evaluating two ~~new toys~~ important new pieces of technology: an iPad and a Pulse SmartPen. The combination almost makes we ready to ditch my netbook -- or at least got me thinking carefully about why I still have one. The iPad is well-known; the SmartPen perhaps not so. It's made by a company called LiveScribe, and works with special notebook paper. A camera in the nib watches what's been written and tracks the pen by looking at a background of dots arranged to provide location information about the pen on the page. The pen can also record what's being said, and cleverly links the two data streams together: later you can tap a word and hear what was being said at the time. I've been using one for a fortnight. I used to keep written notebooks, but moved to taking notes purely on my netbook when I realised I was forgetting what I'd written where: a notebook is just a dead tree with dead information on it, and I've become used to everything being searchable. However, getting searchability meant converting my note-taking style to linear text rather than mindmaps or sketches, since that's what the tools typically support. (There are mindmap tools, of course, but they're completely separate from other note-taking tools and so get in the way somewhat.) There's also a barrier to note-taking in having to get the netbook out, rather than just picking up a (special) pen and (special) paper. The resulting data is searchable, since the desktop tool does fairly decent) handwriting recognition: I can "tag" pages in the margins, writing slightly more carefully than usual, and search for the tags even if full content searching is a bit aspirational. For what I do this is a lot, but not quite enough, as I spend a lot of time reading, looking up information and writing emails, papers and the like. A Kindle or other e-reader would be great for the reading, but not for the net access. That's where the iPad comes in: can it replace the need for a more traditional web-access and writing device? It's certainly a lovely piece of kit, fast and stable, and allows easy browsing. The keyboard is pretty good for a "soft" device, and one could easily see writing email and editing small amounts of text using it. I can also see that it'd be an awesome platform for interactive content and mixed media books/films, assuming the editing tools are available elsewhere. Of course neither netbooks nor iPads are really optimised for the creation of content: they're very much consumer devices intended for the consumption of content written on other, bigger machines. I don't think that's a criticism -- no-one does smartphone software development on a smartphone, after all -- but it does mean that neither is optimal as a device for someone who creates a lot. But the combination of a digitised paper notebook with an internet-access device is extremely attractive. Both devices are extremely portable and friendly, and link well to the larger "back office" machines I use for "serious" work. I have two worries, one about both devices and one about the iPad alone. The first worry is the almost completely closed nature of the software. The Pulse loads its recorded sound and images into its own desktop tool, which are than only available through that tool despite (I imagine) using standard data formats internally with some clever hyperlinking. The tool does provide important value-add, of course, specifically the links from written text to recorded audio. But that should be separate from the actual content, and it isn't. One can "archive" a notebook, or turn individual pages into PDF, but not (as far as I can tell) get access to the content programmatically as it stands. That's simply obstructive on the part of Livescribe -- and also a little shortsighted, I think, since their linking technology could clearly be applied to any print-linked-to-sound data if their tool was open and able to access arbitrary content. I think this is a great example of where openness is both friendly to the community and potentially a commercial virtue. (Oh, and the Livescribe desktop only works on Intel Macs: who exactly writes non-universal binaries these days? and why?) The iPad has a similar ecosystem, of course, which is "open" in the sense that anyone can write programs for it but "closed" in the sense that (firstly) access to the App Store is carefully constrained and (secondly) there are features of the platform and operating system that aren't freely available to everyone. I can understand Apple's contention that -- for phones especially -- it's important to only download apps that won't brick the device. This doesn't of course imply that there should be a single gatekeeper as has happened with the App Store: one could provide a default store but allow external ones, as happens with Android Market. A single gatekeeper is basically just a way to extract rents from the software ecosystem. This can stifle both innovation and price, to Apple's advantage. What worries me more, though, is the extra, non-commercial dimension in terms of content control, which I think is more broadly damaging than just software. I was looking at an app for cocktail recipes (Linda's a big fan). There are several available, of course, but all come with a rating of 17+ because of their mention of frequent drinking or drug use. There's a suggestion of the illicit becoming the illegal there. It's also well-known that Apple enforces a "no porn" rule on the App Store. Whatever one's attitude to pornography, much of it isn't illegal and it's not clear that a software company should restrict the uses of a device above and beyond the law. The whole experience reminds me very strongly of Disneyland: safe, beautiful, welcoming, friendly -- and utterly fake, and utterly anodyne. One can choose not to go to Disneyland, of course -- and certainly not to live there -- but it's another thing to hand control of access to information and information technology off to a commercial third party. Anything can be disallowed on a whim, or for the greater commercial good -- and can of course be disallowed or edited retrospectively. Whether we like it or not, human culture includes material, that is distasteful for many people. That's why we have critical faculties, and diversity, and laws on free speech. Commercial device providers and operators are not constrained by requirements to fairness in the way that newspapers and public broadcasters are, and could easily be persuaded to silence some forms of speech on the basis of commercial interest regardless of their wider legality. For the present I'll be keeping the netbook for internet access, but using the SmartPen for note-taking, and thinking a bit more about a dedicated ebook reader. It's a compromise between openness and convenience that I'm conscious of making, and not without some hesitation. Time will tell how the choices play out and evolve, and maybe I'll buy an Android tablet when they mature a little :-)