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Posts tagged Google
The Nexus One and Android
Mar 31st
I seem to be blogging quite a bit this month and I appear to have a lot to say!
Anyway, I took the plunge and forked out for a shiny new Nexus One from Google and bought the desktop dock so I could show off to my boss. After using it for two weeks I can only say that my experience so far has been blissful. However I will state that it has not been entirely perfect, with a few quirks along the way.
The phone feels well built with a very responsive AMOLED touch screen, which is also very nice to look at and it leaves my old Nokia E71 eating it’s dust when it comes to performance. The 1GHz Snapdragon Processor might have something to do with that.
The Android Operating system is very swish and fluid, using it is very simple however sometimes drilling down to the settings is a little tedious. When I set-up the phone, I entered my Google Account details and before I could finish a cigarette all my contacts, e-mail and calendar were synced with the phone and any updates on the handset would propagate back to Google. Awesome. Next I set-up Facebook which also synced with my contacts adding addresses, e-mail addresses and profile pictures. At this point I was having to calm myself down with the sheer amount of awesomeness that this phone was delivering.
I have yet to get the phone to crash, freeze or slow down even slightly and I sync my Google, Facebook, Twitter and my work information along with running games, weather and news widgets, there seems to be no end to what this phone can do. I have apps for going walking in the country, to augmented reality browsers to find things that I need and even an app to scan bar codes and purchase the item on ebay.
I did run in to a problem when I switched networks from three to O2. The short story for this was because three was:
- expensive
- provided terrible customer/technical support
- refused to allow me to send e-mail over their network without a ‘three’ proxy application. (They don’t have an android application, so no e-mail)
Anyway when my O2 SIM arrived, I popped it in the phone and found that the cell reception was utterly rubbish and the 3G connectivity non existant. I had activated the SIM and spoke to technical support several times. However I could not seem to register on the cell network for more than five minutes before being disconnected. It seems that the Nexus One stores the network that you are registered to and doesn’t offer a clear option to change the default network. I ended up doing a factory reset and seeing as all my settings and data were backed up to Google’s servers, I was up and running again within five minutes with an awesome cell reception and stable 3G connection. Goodbye three! Despite being a loyal customer, you took advantage and insulted me, so I wont be missing you.
Another minor annoyance is answering calls. Sometimes when the phone rings the screen does not wake up, which means I have to press the top button and then swipe to answer, which sometimes does not register for what ever reason. I would like to make answering calls less fiddly. Obviously the main complaint is the battery life. If you run everything and play about a lot, which is natural when you get a new toy, the battery will last around a day, which when compared with the Nokia E71 is just appalling. My solution was to have the auto brightness adjustment on, I turned off my 3G APNs with APN Droid and can manually enable them when I want mobile internet and I usually turn off GPS and Bluetooth until they are needed. So far, Including taking/making calls, reading e-mails, checking Facebook sending and receiving SMS and listening to music to and from work the battery will go down to around 74% after a day which is far, far better. I decided to give the music player a test run and went into Birmingham on the bus which is 45 minutes each way. I spent around 3.5 hours listening to music and by the time I got home the battery was at critical ( < 15% ) which disappointed me slightly as it rules out the phone for use on long distance journeys as a music player.
After a week or so, I got curious about the Android SDK, so I decided to take some time out and have a quick peek at what was going on. Turns out that Android applications run on the Dalvic virtual machine and the code is all Java. So a quick install of the ADT plugin for my device emulators, a quick install of Eclipse and Subclipse (for Subversion) and a download of the Android SDK and I was nose deep in documentation.
It turns out that Developing Android Applications is very easy and uses a similar paradigm as MVC for web applications. So I spend last Sunday tinkering around and wrote my first proper application after Hello World! which was Droid Partridge. It is a very simple application which plays Alan Partridge’s classic moments and has a dialog box. I eventually released this on to the world via the Android Marketplace, so others can download and install and enjoy the pocket comedy for those socially appropriate moments where “Jurassic Park!” is needed to be said out loud. Over the next few weeks I will be updating this application to include more sounds with better compression and iron out any bugs.
Developing on Android was fun and quick, however the tool kit does have some drawbacks. The interface designer which creates the view layouts in XML is rather lacking and is not quite up to the standard that VE (Visual Editor) was for Eclipse all those years ago, nor is it up to scratch with the WPF / Silverlight visual designer. (which also defines it’s interfaces in XML) It is a shame really as that part makes the whole process much more difficult for newcomers who just want to define a very basic UI to play around with.
Another drawback is the mobile device emulator itself, on a Quad core machine with 4GB of ram (My development machine at work) it is still as painful as trying to run through a swimming pool of treacle, it is so terribly slow! Also if the program does throw an exception during runtime, I often get the ‘Source Not Found’ window open up in the debugging perspective and I can only hazard guesses where it has gone wrong from the not too helpful stack traces that seem to have no mention of any calls to my code.
Despite this, I am quite committed to keep on tinkering with Android. True, I did pay $25 USD for the Android Marketplace account, but it is also a very nice development experience, very much unlike Windows Mobile development. I have a few nifty ideas that I want to try, for which I have yet to see a solution for and also a couple of colleagues have thrown suggestions at me so at least I have something to keep me out of trouble and off the streets of Meriden!
A while back I did mention that I was developing a Windows Mobile Twitter application, that has been abandoned completely as I’ve jumped on to the Google bandwagon and riding off in to the sunset to get as far from Microsoft and it’s stagnation as possible. I just hope that for all our sakes, that Google stick to their “Don’t be evil” ideals.
P.S.
Just in-case you didn’t notice, like the new theme ?
The problem with Google
May 3rd
Posted by Will in General Comments
No comments
Google as a company pledge to not be evil and are the largest and most popular search engine, encompassing the globe for search, e-mail and other cloud based applications. I’ve watched this company start from a relatively obscure search engine evolve into a giant in providing services for consumers. I myself am very much in bed with Google. They manage my mail, my calendar, I have their phone with their operating system that syncs my contacts and settings to them. I also subscribe to Latitude and Buzz, use their Google Docs, their website analytic services and their Checkout for both buying and selling. (I even use their web browser!)
So yes, for me, Google has become ubiquitous. They know where I am, who I talk to, what I say, where I live and my bank details. It’s a tremendous wealth of information and a tremendous amount of faith that I put in to this company as I allow them to encroach more and more into my life, attempting to make it better.
The problem with all this power (excuse the cliché) is that it also means they have a large amount of responsibility. Google has to assure it’s users that it can address any issue that it’s users experience in a timely manner and that it wont provide cookie cutter answers via e-mail and hope the user goes away and figures out the problem themselves. Which may I add is probably just as likely as the user tripping over the meaning of this universe whilst out for a brisk stroll in the countryside with their dog.
The point is, over the last month, I became an Android developer and paid for that privilege. I also set-up a Google Checkout Merchant account so that if I did produce revenue from the applications that I built in my own time, I could eventually access it and put it towards server costs. However, when setting up the account the Google Checkout site completely broke down and I sent numerous e-mails to their support team via their help pages. There is no phone support and no direct e-mail, just a generic inbox. I got a response 24 hours later stating that the problem was fixed. It was not. So more e-mails were sent.
I had a look at the Google Groups and found a couple of threads and commented and added the cookie cutter e-mails that I had received so far. Quite a substantial number of users complained of the same problem and the lack of decent Google technical support. Close to two days after the incident and after many more cookie cutter responses with no time-scale on a fix or even a hint at what the problem was, The Register picked up on people getting more than just annoyed in this article. A few hours after this appeared on the internet, the problem was fixed.
Now I provide customer support at work all the time ranging from application failure and bug reports to supporting end users on varying mobile handsets and handling digital pens. The thing that stinks with Google’s so called support is that it is so impersonal and as generic as possible.
What would had been better is firstly not to send templated e-mails to users. The information is rarely relevant and shows no context of the problem that the user was having. This also infuriates users and highlights that the customer support team are either ill equipped or just don’t want to know.
Second would be to publish a public announcement to let users know that there is a problem, they know about it and any information on cause and resolution time scale. Google did none of this until The Register took notice of the users, which in my mind is shameful customer support. Considering Google make money from Google Checkout transactions, they should be hang their heads in shame at this massive failure, that is the perfect example of how not to support customers and loose business.
Now, that happened well close to 2 months ago, however the reason for this post is because yet again I am stumped by Google’s not-so-fantastic support for the same product. In my case, I’ve been trying to verify my bank details and was sent a generic e-mail with a couple of links which looked like it was copied directly from their help site. I followed one set of instructions, this did not change the situation and I spend a good half an hour running round the not-so-helpful documentation running round in circles. The Google Groups has unanswered threads on this and were informed that only direct e-mails will enable Google to sort this problem out.
So I am awaiting another cookie cutter response back from Google. Sadly I am now left with the sinking feeling that now that I have become one with the hive mind that is Google, is this the shape of things to come when I encounter a problem ? For theirs and my own sake, I really hope not.