You could say I’ve been sold on the concept of wearable tech, but that wouldn’t necessarily be true. I’ve been ready for this technology for decades now, patiently awaiting its release. When Google announced Glass back in 2012 I got so excited I could barely contain myself. I signed up for the explorer program as soon as I was able to (read as soon as I got around to it, after procrastinating for about a year, as you do). Recently, I finally got Google’s blessing to buy one of these devices, which promptly resulted in me doing this for about 6 hours:

Yeah, that’s me repeatedly adding and removing Glass from the shopping cart only to close the tab, and immediately reopen it 15 minutes later. Pebble was not cheep, but perfectly affordable, and definitely worth the money. Glass, is exuberantly expensive and I’m not sure if it actually delivers $1,500 worth of functionality at the moment.

Don’t get me wrong, having a real life HUD has been my dream ever since I have seen the original Terminator movie in the 80’s. There is nothing I want more than to have the internet beamed directly into my eyeballs. But… I don’t think I can justify paying so much money for what appears to be a glorified prototype built from off-the-shelf hardware components that cost no more than $150 to manufacture. Not only that, but with such a daunting price tag, Glass is neither a status symbol, nor a fashion statement. In fact it is directly the opposite.

Glasshole

Glass isn’t even out of the open beta phase, and is still not publicly available for purchase without a signup and an invite. And yet, we already have an insulting slur that has been coined to describe some of the early adopters. Sure, in the past we have given the enthusiasts of large, blinking Bluetooth headsets a hard time for wearing them all day, but there is no special name for them in the common parlance. But if you wear Glass, you’re a Glasshole. You have to admit, this is pretty bad PR.

The reason why Glasshole is a thing that caught on doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the technology itself. You could argue that it is actually has more to do with the American economy, fading of the middle class and the growing wealth inequality in our society. The term has been said to originate in the San Fran area where the “new technology elite” are rubbing elbows with lower middle class urban residents. The close proximity makes wealth disparity between the two groups really evident. Lower income residents residents of the area feel getting pushed out and priced out of their own neighborhoods by the affluent newcomers. The smug, young and rich tech-yuppies who have enough disposable income to pay $20 for a latte and $1500 for a pair of gaudy, ostentatious camera goggles don’t always have enough empathy or social awareness not to be absolute jerks about their privileged status.

It is interesting how Google’s decision to beta test the devices with “developers” and marketing them as high-end, luxury accessories it might have contributed to their quickly declining reputation. As a member of this community, I can attest to the fact that we do have a very high concentration of massive douchebags in our industry. What’s worse, our douchebags tend to be at least superficially smart, which makes them all the more insufferable. In fact, I’m pretty sure I have definitely acted like a smug, privileged asshole at many occasions, so it’s not like I’m the shining beacon of virtue here.

You could argue that expensive smart-phones are just as much of status and privilege symbols, but you don’t wear those on your face. They are easy to put away, and that’s exactly what people are expected to do with them when they are not in use. Over the years we have developed a camera-phone and smart-phone etiquette and people know what is and is not acceptable to do with their phone in public. Glass has a front-facing camera that could be used to covertly record live-stream over the internet which does make people uncomfortable. We do need to develop Glass based etiquette like we did for phones if we want them to become more acceptable and less threatening.

Also, high-end phones are actually much more accessible than Glass, even at low income levels due to the fact that phone carriers are willing to swallow 80-90% of their price just to lock you into a multi-year contract. It’s hard to hold owning an iPhone against someone if you can get your own for free or almost free (by merely signing away your first born to the phone company). It stands to reason that Google could potentially mitigate the bad reputation Glass has been gaining by drastically reducing the price and making it available to general public. Which is what I hope happens soon. Because I really want a pair.

But what else is there in terms of wearable technology? At the moment, not all that much. One area I’ve been interested in is biometric tracking. When I embarked on my body hacking project one of my biggest challenges was figuring out what was my optimal calorie input/output ratio. It infuriated me to no end that I had to make wild guestimations about how much energy I was burning every day. If I was doing it today, I would have simply got a FlitBit wristband and have actual concrete data to work with.

I have managed to improve my lifestyle and change my habits to the point I no longer need to spreadsheet my calorie intake, so I don’t really have a need for such a device now. In fact, I think owning a glorified pedometer like FlitBit Flex, Jawbone Up or Nike Fuel would probably just make me feel guilty about all the exercising I’m not doing.

Cardio is very important.

I kinda wish these biometric tracking devices did more. A wristband should in theory be able to measure not only the number of steps you take every day, but also things like your body temperature, heart rate (by measuring pulse, even if inaccurately), galvanic skin response, and more… While devices that do measure your vital signs do exist, most of them are marketed as medical devices. There aren’t many affordable, and hassle-free options for people who just want to monitor their body for the sake of monitoring. If I go to a doctor, and he asks me if I was running a fever I could pull up my phone and look at my body temperature variance over the last month or so. Granted, this might just be a problem that’s unique to me because the only thermometer I own shows temperature in Celsius and is technically supposed to be used in a lab, and not on your body.

I wish there was a FlitBit that would measure both activity and vital signs, but there isn’t any. The closest you could get is probably the Angel Sensor which is still in development, and looks really bulky and expensive. It’s probably an overkill for something I don’t need, but would be nice to have because it would be exactly like that one augment from Cyberpunk 2020.

Do you own any wearable tech? What is good out there? What are you excited for? What is your opinion on Glass? Will you be getting if if the price drops?

My Chromebook

Granted, before plonking down the very modest amount of money (compared to other tablets and laptops, you financial situation notwithstanding) you should understand that this is not a general purpose computing device. It is a web browser with a keyboard. While you can use it for “work” via all manner of cloud services (Google Docs, Microsoft Live, Share LaTex, etc..) it is not what it was designed for. It was built for browsing the web and comfortably typing in your Facebook updates, or making notes in Markdown Journal. It is a device that offers a hybrid experience that lies somewhere between a tablet an an actual laptop but it is not a replacement for either.

I do own an iPad and it is a perfect device to use if you like to read or watch videos in your bed, on the toilet (though I have a policy of never taking electronics into the poop palace) or on the couch. If I’m going on a trip, or staying somewhere overnight I typically load it up with consumable media and take it with me. I usually shunt downloaded PDF’s into the iBooks, use Kindle for purchased content, Comic Zeal for reading comics in CBR format and Comixology / Marvel apps for downloadable content. It works marvelously as long as I don’t have to type a lot on it.

Hell, even if you hook up a Bluetooth keyboard to it, copying and pasting and switching between different pages and apps tends to be a pain in the ass. Whenever I type on the touch screen I yearn for a real keyboard. Once I hook up a real keyboard I start yearning for a real mouse or a touch pad because fingering the screen to switch tabs or apps completely breaks my flow. Mouse and keyboard go are a great combo for a reason. It will become abundantly clear as soon as you sit down to do any serious typing and/or editing on a touch screen device.

Light Strip on the Back

This is where a Chromebook comes in: it lets me maintain my flow. It lets me compose a blog post complete with links, quotations and even code snippets without driving me absolutely insane with awkward mouse-less multitasking scheme. Not only that: as soon as you sign into Chrome it syncs up all your extensions, bookmarks and bookmarklets. This means I get the full benefit of indispensable little user experience improvement tools such as Adblock and Last Pass which don’t really work on my iPad due to extensive app sandboxing.

I keep comparing the Chromebook to an iPad because I think this is the most constructive way of thinking about it. I have seen countless reviews of these devices, all of which concentrate on comparing it to regular, fully functional, multipurpose computers. I think that’s a little silly, because in such a comparison the Chromebook will always come up short. The best way to think about it is as a low end tablet that swaps the touch-screen with a keyboard and a touch pad, and replaces the sandboxed app ecosystem with Chrome Extensions. This means that while you may not get the latest version of a flappy/angry bird themed game on it, you will have access to tools that can actively modify your browsing experience. Browsing the web on a Chromebook is no different than browsing on a Mac or Windows PC.

Size Comparison with the iPad

The Chromebook 11 is tiny, and weighs almost nothing. I actually believe that it is a bit lighter than my last gen iPad and has similar battery life. The other day I used it for roughly five consecutive hours of browsing (including some light editing in OneDrive version of Powerpoint) and I still had roughly 80% of charge remaining which is quite impressive. My MacBook’s battery would be more or less dry at that point. I don’t really think this is sheer battery efficiency, but rather the amount of processing being done.

Chromebook uses an Exynos 5 dual core 1.7GHz CPU which doesn’t actually seem to get very hot at all. I had the device on my lap and the underside was barely lukewarm even during heavy load which is probably contributing to the battery life. At a glance the slow CPU combined with mere 2GB of RAM don’t really inspire much confidence in this things ability to perform under stress. Indeed, if you open several tabs and load computation intensive pages the performance does suffer. Probably the most annoying side effect is laggy scrolling of “heavy” website. The Chrome OS itself however performs very well. It boots in seconds and it wakes up from standby instantly. You can literally take it out of your bag, open the lid and start typing.

I have used netbooks that were similar size, weight and price range before, but not of them even comes close to Chromebook with respect of performance and responsiveness. Those devices were severely bogged down by their heavy-duty operating systems. Chrome OS makes this form factor work.

In my initial post, I expressed a concern that Chomium OS seemed to be missing a lot of libraries which crippled the web experience. So far the Chromebook had none of these shortcomings. I used Dropbox, Microsoft Office cloud tools, Share LatTex service, Youtube and even Netflicks. All of which worked rather well. Netflicks was a little bit sluggish to load and buffer videos but playback was actually acceptable. It’s probably also worth mentioning that the invisible speaker built into the rim around the keyboard is surprisingly loud.

If you ever wanted a cheep, disposable, super-tiny, super-light laptop like device for web browsing, then Chromebook 11 is perfect for you. You can just throw it into a bag and not worry about scratching, damaging or breaking it. It will definitely not replace a regular laptop, nor can it compete with a tablet with respect to portability. To use it you still need a table, or at the very least a lap to prop it on. But I think it offers unbeatable experience for typing up emails, note-taking or doing some light web based work that does not require firing up native tools. It’s a great value for very little money and I highly recommend it.

Magic Mouse is none of that. It is a rather flimsy and decorative. It really looks nice next to my laptop, but it is in no way as sturdy and dependable as my trusty Sidewinder.

The Magic Mouse really looks nice next to a MBP

So why did I want one? Because it really does fit with my laptop. You see, my MBP is my untethered mobile workstation. When I’m at home and at my desk I usually work on my desktop because nothing beats the comfort of a 24″ monitor, a sidewinder mouse and the Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. But when I want to work or browse the web while on the road, I want to travel light. I don’t want to be burdened by too many cords, USB dongles and other optional plug-in devices. Magic Mouse works on Bluetooth which makes it perfect fit.

Not only that, it is also a multi-touch device. One of the things I really enjoy while working under OSX are the built in touch-pad gestures. I love the two finger sideways swap that gets me to a clean workspace for example. These sort of things became part of my workflow on a Mac, but the touchpad only gets you so far. If you are working on a flat surface like a desk, it really helps to have a mouse handy – and I wanted a mouse that would let me preserve at least some of the gestures I have learned to love.

Hence, Magic Mouse – not something that I would normally buy, but something that did fit a specific set of mobility related needs. How do I like it so far? It’s not bad actually.

One thing that does bother me a bit is the lack of haptic feedback. The mouse does “click” as a mouse should – that’s not the problem. If you wanted to use it as a standard “Apple Mouse” that sports a single button, it would be perfect. But I’m a power user, and a single button is not enough for me. Fortunately, Apple knows that you can’t force people to work with single button devices – they will find ways around it. So in modern versions of OSX you can actually turn the second button click straight from System Preferences:

Apple knows that most people want two button mice these days.

This works very well. I’ve been using the mouse for several days now, and I have never had a mistaken click situation – left always registers as left, and right always registers as right. It just work. But, alas – I am lost without a middle button. Sadly, Apple has not acknowledged the existence or need for such an input methodology yet. Perhaps that feature will ship with Snow Lion, or whatever the next release of OSX will be called.

Sometimes I wonder how other mac users browse the web without a ubiquitous middle click? On the touch-pad I ended up installing a nifty app called Magic Prefs which allowed me to configure a three-finger-click as middle mouse. Since that app was already running on my machine, I used it to add a similar feature to my Magic Mouse:

How I add middle click to my Magic Mouse

I found that three-finger-click is not comfortable on the small frame of a Magic Mouse, so instead I opted for a gesture that can only be called a “long-finger-click”. I think the picture above explains it quite well – it involves laying down your finger along the vertical axis of the mouse – which I find is exactly what my hand wants to do when I decide to middle-click.

Unfortunately, the detection of this gesture is a bit iffy. Part of it might be the software implementation – if Apple acknowledged middle-click as a valid user need they could probably devise a very tight detection with wide margin of error for this gesture. Built in OS features tend to be much more streamlined and tested than third party apps. Still, the other part of the equation is the lack of aforementioned haptic feedback. On my Sidewinder the middle click is effortless because the mouse wheel is big, metallic and textured (for better grip). Magic mouse has a glassy surface, and you have to more or less guess where to place your finger. It is not a hardware problem – it is a design paradigm issue that he are yet to solve.

Would I recommend this mouse to someone else? It depends. If you have a MacBook, and you want a portable, wire/dongle free device that will just work and let you combine the touch gestures with a flexibility of a mouse then yeah – it is a good pick. If you are running Windows I’d probably stay clear. Multi-touch under Windows tends to be as wonky as Bluetooth mouse support.

Here is a short list of non-intuitive iPhone tricks:

Show Battery Percentage

This one is actually right there in the menus, but I think it should be mentioned, considering how many people do not have it on. In fact, I have no clue why this feature is not on by default. If you want your phone to display the percentage of battery juice left instead of the difficult to read battery picture simply go to:

Settings –> General –> Usage –> Turn on Battery Percentage

Take a Screenshot

This is possibly the most commonly asked question I get. Most iPhone users learn this in the first few days of messing around with their device, but it is not obvious since there is no button or UI cues that would show you how to do it. So in case you don’t know it yet, here is how to take a screenshot:

Hold the Home Button and then click the On/Off switch on the top of your phone. This works in every app, as well as on the lock screen. The screenshot goes directly to your Camera Roll.

Take Pictures in Locked Mode

This is a new feature in iOS 5, and a very nifty one at that. You can now quickly access your camera from the lock screen without unlocking your phone by double clicking on the Home Button. It will bring up the alternate lock screen menu, with a little camera button in the corner. Tap that, and you can snap a picture. You can also use Volume Up as a shutter release button which is also nice.

The best thing about this trick is that it locks your Camera Roll. You can only access the pictures you took in this session. This is great when you want to give your phone to someone to take a picture of you, but you don’t want them to “accidentally” look through your entire picture collection.

Select Entire Paragraph

This is a trick known only by small percentage of iOS power users. When editing text in any application (email, text message box, Safari text box, etc..) two finger swipe to the left will select the entire current paragraph. This will prevent you from messing around with the selection handles and let you quickly copy and paste big chunks of text.

Keyboard Shortcuts

One of the rarely used features of iOS are the “keyboard shortcuts” – probably because of the confusing name. I call them text filters, or text expander because that’s what they really are. By default, iOS comes with a single “shortcut”. When you type the string omw and press space, it will auto expand to “On my way!”

You can add more shortcuts like these by going to:

Settings –> General –> Keyboard

The shortcut section is near the bottom. So far I have added only one replacement code – but a very, very useful one. On my phone, typing “lod” will expand into ಠ_ಠ. I find myself using the look of disapproval emoticon at least once a week, and before I discovered this feature I used to copy and paste it from the web.

Scroll to Top

To quickly scroll all the way to the top of the web page in Safari or to the top of the list in most apps simply tap the status bar (you know, where your clock is). In the Twitter app for example, this lets you skip to the top of your feed without automatically updating it.

Quick Period at the end of the Sentence

This is a quick tip that will save you a lot of finger pecking. To quickly add a period at the end of the sentence you just typed, simply double tap the space bar. It will convert the first space into a period automatically and let you continue typing.

Quick Caps

To quickly capitalize characters, press and hold on the shift key, and then swipe to the chosen letter.

Alternatively, you can enable the “CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL” feature by double tapping shift. To disable the caps lock mode, just tap shift one more time.

Extra Characters

To see extra accented characters and non-standard punctuation marks you can tap and hold any of the keys. It will unroll extra options and you can swipe to choose the one you like.

If you are like me, and you sometimes need to type in a foreign language that has non-standard accented letters not included in the default English keyboard layout, you can add another layout by going to:

Settings –> General –> Keyboard –> International Keyboards –> Add New Keyboard

This will add a tiny globe key next to the space bar. You can tap on it to quickly cycle between your layouts.

Swipe-less Page Switching

Normally when you are on your home screen, you swipe left or right to move between the pages. On the bottom, just above the dock there is a row of dots that marks your position. If you tap to the left or to the right of the dots you will skip to the previous/next page on the list.

Additionally, clicking the Home Button will automatically take you to the first page, regardless of where you are.

Force Quit, Reboot and Shutdown

When an app freezes on you you can hold the Home Button for 5 seconds or longer to force quit the current app.

If that does not work, you can hold the Home Button an the On/Off button together for 10 seconds or more to force your phone to reboot.

To shut down your phone completely, hold the On/Off button by itself for 10 seconds.

Recently Used Apps

When you are on the home screen, you can double click the Home Button to see a list of recently used apps. You can move through the list by swiping left and right.

Lock/Unlock Orientation

When you are in the recently used app mode, you can swipe to the left to access iPod controls. The leftmost button on that screen however does not have anything to do with music playback. It locks/unlocks the
phone orientation. When it is toggled, your phone will use the current orientation in most of it’s native apps.

A buddy from work accidentally locked his phone in portrait mode this way, and turning the phone in the Test/iMessage screen would not change to the landscape orientation. Amusingly enough, not all apps respect this setting, so landscape mode would work in some, while not in others causing all kinds of frustration and bewilderment.

Send to Voicemail

Most people know that clicking any of the volume buttons will silence the phone when there is an incoming call. If you want to send the caller directly to your voicemail right away, you can double click the On/Off button instead.

Swipe to Delete

Quite a few apps support this feature, but new users rarely realize it is there. In most built in iOS apps and many 3rd party ones that show you a list of things (for example a list of emails in the mail app) you can quickly delete an item by swiping it. This usually results in the red “delete” button showing up allowing you to delete it.

Clear the Text Box and Start Over
via Gui13 in the comments

Let’s say you typed up a long tweet or a message, and suddenly decided you don’t like the phrasing and would like to start over. You could backspace all your text, or select and cut it but there is an easier way.

To completely clear out all the text from a box simply shake your phone. A little popup will ask you if you want to undo your typing, and let you either clear the box or cancel.

Do you have any tips you would like to add to this? Let me know in the comments.

I loaded it up with bunch of books I thought he would like, and then I found out he was up till like 3am that night, finished a book and started another one. I believe that this present was a success. But we did hit a little snag at the beginning. When my dad unpacked it he thought that the font was a little bit to small for his liking, and asked me if it is possible to increase it. I said sure, took the device and spent like 15 minutes trying to make that happen.

I checked every single menu and settings page at least 5 times, and then I decided I am at a complete loss. Would Amazon leave out such an important usability feature? Would this device get such good reviews, and such a huge user base if it did not have such a fundamental function as changing the default font? It had to be there, but I just could not find it. So we passed the damn thing around the table and everyone took a crack at finding the elusive feature. We have failed to locate it.

So I turned to the internet for help. It turns out that we were not the only confused users out there. Google gave me dozens of results for phrases like “how to change font size in Kindle” or “Kindle default font size”. It wasn’t that difficult to locate the answer. It was this:

Kindle font option button

There is a tiny little button to the right of space, which looks exactly like a second Alt button. But it is not. It opens a little menu that lets you change the font size, default line spacing, screen orientation and etc. It is actually very customizable device, and I was able to tweak it to my dad’s liking in just a matter of seconds. The problem was finding the button. Let me try to enumerate the ways in which this is bad interface design:

1. The font key does not look like a function key

   If you look at Kindle’s keyboard, all regular keys are small and round. This includes characters, numbers and common modifier keys such as shift, alt and etc. All the keys that are not actually used in active typing, but have some other function (like calling up menus or navigation) have distinct elongated shape. They also all spell out their function (home, back, menu, etc..) The tiny Aa key is not used for typing – it calls up a menu, but it looks just like a modifier key which is why I never actually looked at it when searching for the feature.

2. The font changing key can be easily mistaken for another key

   The key looks like the right Alt. on most keyboards Alt keys are mirrored on both sides of the space bar. So the placement, and the label (which starts with capital A) were very unfortunate.

3. The font menu is not in the intuitive location

   I was actually watching other people try to search for this function, and everyone did the same thing. They went to the menu first. I seemed logical, no? Where do you change configuration settings for this device? Probably in the main menu somewhere. It never actually occurred to me that there could be a dedicated button for this particular set of features.

   Not that such a button is a bad idea. You probably will be changing the font size and screen orientation more often than any other feature of your device, so reserving an easy to access button for it is definitely a good idea. It is just that the button was very well hidden.

I’m not sure how people haven’t noticed it in testing. Granted, I probably would not notice this flaw at all if my dad did not bring the issue up. For me the font was just the right size. So I guess I can kinda see it slipping through the cracks.

Other than this little quirk (which is not an impediment at all once you know about it) the device is very cool. It is tiny, light, comfortable to hold and the distinctive display is really easy on the eyes. It does look like paper, and it has none of the glare of an LCD screen so you can comfortably read it outside on a sunny day for example.

If you think you could use an ebook reader, I highly recommend it – especially since the Wifi-only version is dirt cheap nowadays. And trust me, you don’t really need 3G for this device. The built in web browser is actually pretty cool, but these days you can probably get same (or better) results on your smart phone.

I will leave you with an interesting observation: every single person who was checking out my dad’s Kindle for the first time did the same thing. They all started to swipe their fingers across the screen in an attempt to scroll around or advance a page. Then they looked confused when it did not work. I can’t believe how quickly have we gotten used to the ubiquitous touch screen. We truly are living in the future. It is like that common movie trope where a time traveler from the future can’t figure out how to use a 20th century computer because it does not have a touch screen and it does not react to voice commands.

Look at the streaks on the screen...

I’ve been using it for over a week, and I can tell you this: I don’t hate it. In fact, I quite like it. It really doesn’t suck the way die hard blackberry users and iPhone enthusiasts would want you to believe. I never really owned a smart phone before – especially not a RIM one. My exposure to blackberries was limited at best – I helped several people set them up for email at work. The closest I got to a real mobile computing was my Dell Axim pocket PC which was not a phone and did not have internet. I mostly used it for playing NetHack and Go in boring classes before I got myself a laptop.

So I approached the Storm with a clean slate. I had no habits of a long time Blackberry user, and my minimal exposure to Apple’s phone left my brain capable accepting different UI paradigms. At the same time I was cautious and kept my expectations low, keeping in mind all the negative criticism the Storm has been getting. And you know what? It’s not actually a bad phone.

Let me talk about the clicky screen – cause that was supposed to be the major selling point of this device, and it is also pointed out to be it’s major flaw. For me it works. When I was messing around with it in the store it was a little bit weird, but on my way home I decided to text couple of people and compose and email. And it just “clicked” (put sort of intended) – I got it. I can now type on it reasonably fast. Much faster than on my old non-qwerty phone. It was a bit like learning to use a split (ergonomic) keyboard for the first time. For the first couple of minutes it is a bit disorienting, but then everything falls into place and it just works. I believe that the secret here is that you don’t actually have to lift your fingers from the screen to type. You can just slide them around or lift them slightly, reposition and then slide over the key.

If you made a typo somewhere in your text, you can just lay your finger on the screen above the keyboard and it will go into cursor mode. Swipe it left and right and it will move in the desired direction one letter at a time allowing you to put your input where it needs to be. Once your done tap the screen to go to the end of the line.

Your main navigational motions in the Storm are taps, finger swipes, screen clicks and… The Blackberry button. I think this goes for all Blackberries – when in doubt, hit the BB button twice. It will run the default action from the menu which is probably what you were looking for. Arguably this makes for a much less intuitive UI than the multi-touch, screen driven iPhone but it is not a deal breaker. At least not for me. Remember – I’m a long time WinCE user so I’m no stranger to nested on-screen menus. You usually swipe to scroll, you tap to select and you click to activate. This allows you to “hover” over items and read the “tool tip” to figure out what they are and what they do before you actually launch them.

The performance of this hand held is decent if you don’t forget to close the unnecessary applications. One caveat you need to remember is that the big red “hang up/exit” button that most people use to quit applications, doesn’t actually close them. It keeps them running in the background. To actually quit you should either use the BB Escape key (the one with the arrow) or the close dialog option from the application menu. A lot of people who complain about the devices sluggishness are simply running 5-6 background apps they don’t even know about.

This happened to me too – the other day I noticed that the phone is dead sluggish and it pretty much ignores me when I flip it horizontally to go into the landscape mode. I held the BB key down to pull up the app switcher and noticed that I was running the Brick Breaker game, portable Word, the media player and the map navigation software. You see, my cousin was playing with the phone the day before and she “closed” all these apps using the wrong button. I closed all of them properly and the phone returned to it’s normal performance.

The software running on the device is decent. I love the Facebook app which was featured prominently in the application center. It dings me whenever someone posts on my wall, comments on my status or pokes me. It’s a small thing but it makes me happy. I wish I could find a similar app for Twitter. Right now I’m using UberTwitter which is pretty good but you have to leave it running in the background and it doesn’t produce the little chime or put an icon in the status bar when it detects an @ reply or a direct message.

The email works well. The device is pre-set to work with popular services such as Gmail, Yahoo and etc. By default they seem to be using POP rather than IMAP for gmail which means that reading messages on my BB will mark them as read in Gmail but not the other way around. Which is OK by me. I could try to set it up for IMAP but I’ve been to lazy.

So far I haven’t had any problems with the device. My only concern is how will the click-screen fare under daily usage. I’m sure RIM did some stress testing on this thing, but still – I’m clicking it like a million times a day. Also, I wince whenever someone is playing with my phone because they tend to push the screen with full force so I can almost hear it buckling. Not to mention the smears they live on the screen with their greasy fingers. Ugh…

This actually puts me in a weird situation when I actually want to show my new acquisition to people, but I don’t because I know they will want to play with it and will leave smears all over my screen in the process. And they will also read my emails.

Battery life varies depending on what you do. It seems that some applications eat battery juice like there is no tomorrow. If you are not running to many apps, and simply check your emails and make a short phone call or two the charge seems to last for a while. I’d charge the phone before going to sleep, then wake up in the morning, use the phone all day, and it still had a few bars left. If you pushed it I think you could get two days out of it, but not much more than that. On the other hand when I was messing around with the maps application, installing and uninstalling things all day, the battery lasted much shorter. It is a far cry from my old LG phone which usually needed to be charged twice a week at most. But then again, blackberry is not just a phone.

Here is the bottom line – if you are looking for a smart phone with a large screen and decent amount of applications and large community behind it the storm is not a bad device to get. If you are a long time blackberry user, you will likely hate the on-screen keyboard. The multi-touch screen in iPhone is definitely much better than the click feedback in storm which is more of a gimmick. Once you get used to it though, it just works.

Storm gets my seal of approval. It does everything I really need it to do and it doesn’t get in my way. It is a Blackberry for people who never used a Blackberry (ie. not the high powered CEO’s or corporate users). As such, it works fairly well. It is not devoid of flaws but it is not a complete piece of crap like some reviews would make you believe.

Storm - the poor mans iPhone knock off

I’ve been eying Blackberry Storm which has been hailed as low quality, poor man’s iPhone ripoff. But the damn thing has been attracting negative reviews the way a turd attracts flies. I watched some video reviews and saw it was incredibly sluggish – the reviewer actually had to cut away because the device simply wouldn’t flip back to the vertical mode which sort of made me reconsider buying it. Then again, supposedly a lot of these early bugs were fixed by the recent firmware upgrade.

I had a chance to play with it the other day and I actually didn’t find it so bad. Changing the orientation worked fine (not like in the video), and the typing was ok. Granted, the click screen is a little wonky but it didn’t seem like a deal breaker. I think I could live with it – it actually felt like a step up from trying to type on my non-qwerty LG phone. It seems that Storms touch screen gets slammed the most by people who switched over from other Blackberry models and felt that it was throttling their typing speed by not allowing to press 2 or more buttons at once. I’d have to agree that a physical keyboard and iPhones multi-touch interface are probably superior. But I didn’t hate it.

The browser was fine too. I went to my company website and it looked great. I didn’t try Terminally Incoherent cause I was at work, and… It would take a lot of typing. Yes, I am aware my url is pretty difficult to type and remember. I just can’t figure out how to shorten it and I’m pretty sure that Texas Instruments won’t let me have ti.com domain.

The Storm user who allowed me to play with her phone confirmed that the device sometimes does lock up. She said it happened to her only twice since she purchased it. She didn’t have any other complaints – and said she was pleased with the purchase. Unfortunately she couldn’t really tell me how is it on the application side. How much software and support is there for the Storm. I mean, I know I’m not going to get iPhone like variety of apps but I’d like to know that I’m not investing in a prematurely dead platform that no one is developing for anymore due to the bad press.

Any Storm users around here? How is that phone treating you? Is it worth investing into? And if not, what else is out there. Should I look at Blackberries at all? Curve maybe?

I looked through the reviews of Verizon smart phones on CNET and it seems that not a single one of them was really rated positively. The reviewers could not say enough good things about AT&T’s Blackberry Bold and of course the iPhone (apparently both can cure cancer, and iPhone even has a free app for ending the world hunger but no one has ever bothered to download it) but they pretty much trashed every single Verizon device.

Basically I just need a phone that would let me get email, browse the web and have some applications for stuff like Twitter, Facebook and maybe let me upload pictures to Flickr. I was looking at storm because I do have an iPhone envy – so I naturally went for the cheep knock-off. But I’m willing to consider alternatives. What should I get?

Would you switch providers in my situation to get the iPhone?

All in all, it served me well for over a year. Lately though I started having problems with it. It would just stop working for me in the middle of the class forcing me to use the keyboard to advance slides. Students were slowly getting accustomed to the 5 minutes of extra time at the start of the lecture as I tinkered with the damn contraption. Sometimes I was able to coerce it to work. Other times, I had to stop messing with it and start the class.

Eventually I figured out what was wrong with it. The spring that holds the single AAA battery in place lost some of it’s “springiness”. It became less “springy”. It “de-springified” itself, so to say. As a result and the battery gained unexpected freedom of choice. It could choose to stay in place or slide slightly out of position. The battery cover was not designed support it, and it did not hold it in place. Instead it gave it just enough space to slip off the connector, but not enough space to rattle around. So you wouldn’t know the battery was lose, until you popped the cover up, and pushed it back in.

Any sudden movement had the potential of shaking the battery out of alignment again, forcing you to pop the cover again to restore power to the device. It’s actually very distracting when you are trying to teach something.

So I decided it is time for a new “clicker”. I also decided I’m not going to go for the cheapest thing available this time around. I believe that the Targus was pretty much the crappiest model available, and I’m actually amazed it lasted that long. It was sort of an experiment – I actually didn’t know I would use it so much. I ended up liking it, and now I consider the clicker/laser pointer combo to be an indispensable tool.

I believe that if you are going to be using something a lot, then it’s probably a good idea to invest a little bit of money into it. For example, I spend most of the hours in my day typing on a keyboard and using a mouse. I go to work, and I type and mouse around for about 8 hours. Then I go back home only to type and mouse around some more.

It is in my best interest to ensure that the keyboard and the mouse I use so much are of decent quality. That’s why I’m using the Sidewinder mouse and the Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. Both are high end items that I paid premium for, but hey – it was worth it. You can save on other things, but these two items are essential tools that I use both for work an for play.

Same goes for the “clicker”. I teach once or twice a week, and I sometimes do get to present in front of people for other purposes. It is not an essential tool for my job, but it helps. So I picked the Logitech Cordless 2.4 GHz Presenter which was one of the higher end toys. I don’t think it’s top of the line, but it seemed like a good investment. Besides, I never really had a bad experience with Logitech products – their mice and keyboards are usually very dependable. So I was hoping they use the same quality control for their “clicker” things. Here is a picture for you:

Yes, it does look a little bit like an electric shaver/hair trimmer from afar. It’s smaller than that though. It is much smaller than that. Something that big would be impractical. Here is another picture, this time with someones hand so that you can see the scale of this thing:

As you can see, it’s quite handy. It fits well in your hand, and is larger than the Targus model, which is actually a good thing. You can get a better grip on it, and the sleek elongated shape makes it easier to hold while you are pointing at things. The USB connector slides right into the unit which means I won’t loose it or forget it as easily. It always annoyed me that the Targus model did not provide this feature.

One of the very crucial things with these presentation tools is that they absolutely need to work out of the box. I need to be able to walk into a classroom, plug it in and go. Installing drivers is out of the question since the school machines are pretty tightly locked down. I’m happy to report that this model worked flawlessly under Windows XP. I haven’t tested it under Vista yet, but I assume it won’t be much different.

And yes, it has an LCD screen. Why would it have and LCD screen? Well, it’s a timer which is what really sold me on this model. You see, keeping track of time has always been an issue for me. When I do presentations, I’m in full screen mode which means I don’t see the clock on the screen. So if I need to check the time, I have to look at my watch… Which is my cellphone. Yeah, I actually don’t own any wrist mounted watches that work – the batteries run out in all of them, and I have been to lazy to go see a clock-master-repairman-guy to perform the sacred ritual of battery replacement.

Yeah, I did replace my watch batteries once or twice but half of the time the operation involved me putting dents and scratches into the back panel, loosing the rubber insulation parts and not sealing the thing properly. So I’d rather give the nicer, more expensive watches to a professional. But I’m kindoff scared – there is an off-chance that I do in fact have latent superpowers (something that I have always suspected) and the watch-guy may turn out to by Sylar and he will remove my brain or something.

Ok, that was a Heroes Season 1 reference if you haven’t caught it. I haven’t really watched the show since then – I will need to catch up one day. The first few episodes of season 2 failed to capture my attention. But I digress..

Back to presentations, and checking time. Looking at my cell phone is probably not the best time keeping solution. It’s hard to do it discretely. I would sometimes take it out, and put it on the desk for easy access, but most of the time I forget and leave it on my belt clip. So if I need to check the time, I have to reach for my belt, un-clip the phone and push a button so that the front LCD display lights up. The Logitech Presenter tool has a built in timer that you can set yourself. It’s actually very easy one-button set up. Each time you press the “timer” button you add 5 minutes to the counter and it starts counting down back to zero. At any time you can glance at the display to see how much time you have left. When the countdown reaches 5 minutes it will alert you with a slight vibration. It will do it again at the 2 minute mark to let you know it’s time to wrap up. The signal is inaudible when you hold it in your hand. It can also be a bit startling at first. I knew it was coming, but it sort of surprised me during my first lecture. You get used to it though, and it is a very helpful.

This particular “clicker” comes with a nice little protective case you can slide it into so that it doesn’t get too bumped up in your backpack. The button locations are pretty good, and the laser pointer is bright and… Pointy?

I only used it couple of times, but so far it has been performing flawlessly. I must say I’m happy with the purchase, and I recommend it to anyone searching for a good presentation tool. The timer is a life saver, and it is worth getting it fro that feature alone.

This year my cousin got a Wii for Christmas and so I was able to play around with the thing. I’m not going to comment on the social aspect of the console because it is a closed topic. Needless to say, the nature of the controller makes it immediately accessible and attractive to people who usually have little interest in console gaming. It provides a more natural and intuitive interface that people have no problem learning.

But as with many innovative interfaces, it does not work well for traditional software. For example, while playing Smash Bros I was longing for the traditional controller Playing a game that required traditional input, and did not rely on the Wii’s motion control using the Wiimote and a Nunchuk was awkward to say the least. Aiming with the Wiimote is also quite difficult making it useless for FPS games. I’m not sure how much does the Wii Zapper extension change this but in my experience even something as simple as hitting a button on the screen requires a quite bit of waving, and aiming and is far from effortless or intuitive. Or rather, it is intuitive because everyone immediately knows how to use the controller, but actually putting the pointer on a button and clicking it requires some effort.

To fully exploit the device you must write software that is designed for it from the ground up, and keep in mind it’s various quirks. For example I noticed that the Wii Sports that ships with the console has a very fuzzy motion detection system. Or rather, the emphasis of the system is to create fun and engaging game play mechanic rather than forcing the user to learn complex Wiimote motions. Thus:

1. The golf game does not really care which way you swing. I would actually always swing away from the TV for better control.
2. The baseball game does not really seem to be able to tell the difference between an underhand an overhand swing when pitching. Also, both pitching and batting could be accomplished with just a quick wrist snap.
3. The tennis game did not appear to care which way you swing when you try to hit the ball. I successfully struck the ball by swinging in the opposite direction without any negative effects
4. The boxing game seemed especially fuzzy, ignoring roughly half of the frantic Wiimote wailing

All of this made me wonder how exactly does the Wiimote works. How does it report the motion back to the console, and how hard it is to detect and interpret these signals. I’m wondering if the fuzzy controls of Wii Sports are actually conscious design choices, or are they dictated by the shortcomings of the technology itself.

It might be a little bit of both. It turns out that the Wii devices use 3-axis accelerometers (probably these) which report back the acceleration imparted on the controller via Bluetooth. When you are holding the controller perfectly horizontally with the A button facing up, you will likely get a reading of 0 on the X and Y axis and a negative reading on the Z axis due to gravity). If you stand it up on the table with the IR sensor facing down, and the expansion port facing up, you will get a read on the Y axis, and zero everywhere else. Finally, if you lay it flat on the side you will get a reading on the X axis.

Based on these 3 numbers and compensating for gravity you can extrapolate how and when the Wiimote is moved, and approximately in which direction it is pitched or rolled. However, you can’t exactly pinpoint the position of the Wiimote with respect to the screen – that’s what the infrared sensors are for. You probably can’t also detect the yaw of the controller because rotating it on the spot will not exert any acceleration on the X axis.

So while Wii sports could probably detect which way I’m swinging it is likely that the actual Wiimote API actually abstracts basic motions. And if it doesn’t, I believe that the first thing that any Wii development team writes are motion libraries. Let’s face it – it is much easier to create a basic listener that tracks the Wiimote and fires of an uniquely named event when it detects a predefined motion than to re-invent the wheel every time you want to detect whether or not the user is swinging the controller or holding it still. On the other hand, detecting complex motions with high degree of accuracy might actually not be all that easy considering your only inputs are acceleration readings. It is probably trivial to detect a swing as a noticable acceleration spike on one or more axis. It is probably more difficult to differentiate between an underhand, overhand or a backhand swing. If you throw in more complex motions into the mix, it quickly becomes a mess. Which I believe is what I experienced in the Boxing mini game. Wii was dropping half of my rapid motions because it was detecting them as continuations of previous ones. When I started throwing punches one at a time, the detection rate seemed to improve.

Keeping the motions simple, guarantees good detection and responsiveness. Thus, not caring about the direction of the swing makes for a better game play.

Detecting complex Wiimote motions is actually an interesting research area. I’ll refer you to the Wiigee project which is a Java framework which uses Hidden Markov Models for training and analysis of the controller motions. They are able to recognize complex movements such as drawing a circle, square or a Z shape in the air solely based on the accelerometer input.

But you can do much more. If you combine the accelerometer readings with the IR sensor readings you can fully track the remote in 3D space allowing you to do some pretty amazing stuff. Check out Oliver Kreylo’s Wiimote Hacking page (especially this video) or the infamous head tracking project by Johny Lee.

I also bought the Microsoft Natural Keyboard Elite which I use at the office. At home I was still using an old Dell keyboard that originally came with my computer. I didn’t mind it, because it was simple and functional. I was considering buying a split keyboard for myself, but since Christmas was coming I simply put that on my gift list. :)

My cousin was nice enough to get me the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 this year. It is actually the high end cousin of the Elite keyboard with the standard inverted T and normal Home/End/Insert key block.

It has all the features I look for in a keyboard these days, namely:

1. Pronounced and raised wrist rest
2. Keyboard split in two blocks
3. Standard inverted T block for arrow keys
4. Insert, Delete, Home, End keys being in predictable places

I especially like the wrist support section. It is nice and wide allowing you to rest your wrists as you type but unlike Elite it is actually soft to touch. I think it has some sort of jelly inside, but unlike many of the wrist support thingymabobs you can buy it has a slick leather like finish to it which it will be easy to keep clean and should be less prone to wear and tear. I found that the cloth finishes on things like that tend to thin out, lose color and start to look filthy after a while.

The keyboard itself seems a bit bigger than the elite. It is actually wider, and the keys seem to be more spaced out. The numeric pad is like 5 miles away from the home row for example. But it also might be an illusion caused by the curvature of this keyboard. All ergonomic keyboards tend to have this hump toward the middle (which culminates where the keys are being split) and the sides taper of at an angle. This is actually by design, and it helps you to keep your hands at a more natural position. As you can see on the image above the 4000 has a very pronounced hump where the designers placed the fairly useless zoom bar. At least useless to me, because I hardly ever use any zoom features for anything, and I have yet to figure out how to re-bind that thing. Needless to say, by being there it actually forces the split key blocks to be farther apart than in the elite. Which is probably why the whole thing seems so wide.

The keyboard has few dozen additional keys all over the place. There are actually 14 special buttons above the function key row, and additional parentheses , equals and backspace above the numpad. Fortunately you can re-bind nearly all of them using the InteliType software that shifts with the keyboard. Yeah, I really hate the fact that I must install a driver to actually use the full functionality of my keyboard but eh… You either do that, or you are left with bunch of dead keys.

5 out of the 13 special keys are so called “Favorites Buttons” which have no built in function. You are actually supposed to bind them yourself to commonly used programs:

This is neat, until you realize that there is actually no way of reaching these keys from above the home row, without lifting your hand. This severely limits their usefulness, and relegates them to the realm of novelty feature. Next to these you have your volume control, calculator button (which I immediately rebound to use the XP Power Toy calc), and the Web, Search and Mail buttons which I will probably use for something else.

Strangely enough, the keyboard only has one Windows key (on the left) and one Menu Key (on the right). Most keyboards have them mirrored on both sides just like Alt keys. Then again, Elite also had one of each so I guess this is a design choice MS made for all of their ergonomic keyboards.

I have only one gripe with this keyboard. It is a minor annoyance, which I wouldn’t even mention if this was not a $60 keyboard. When I pay that much for a keyboard, I expect quality. Sadly, there seems to be a little play in the space bar. It seems to be a little loose on the left side. As if there was a few millimeter gap somewhere allowing the key to move up and down slightly without being depressed. It feels perfectly fine on the right, but when you hit it with your left thumb (as I commonly do) it makes an unusual “clunk” sound as it drops down a millimeter or two and the right side rises slightly in a sea-saw effect of sorts. At first I thought that this was simply a flawed keyboard, but I noticed that I was not the only person with this issues. Quite a few people are complaining of the same exact problem in Amazon comments and product forums and elsewhere online.

I believe that this is an inherent design flaw caused by the sheer size and curvature of the key. The space bar is actually bent and extends the whole length of the hump. This curvature combined with it’s length and would require some stabilization and support, which is likely missing here. Thus, it introduces the slight play which is detectable and a bit annoying. It is not a deal breaker though – I think I can live with it. I also heard you can correct this by taking off the key, and slightly bending the support bar inside of it. I might try that at some point if it keeps annoying me.

Here is a tip for Microsoft design team – in the next model, just split the damn space bar in two. Most ergonomic keyboard manufacturers do that these days, probably to avoid precisely this sort of issue from surfacing. Either that, or put the Windows key on both sides of the split, making the space bar smaller. A $60 keyboard should not have a clunky space bar!

Other than that, it is a fine piece of hardware. I’ve been using it for 3 days now and I think it is very comfortable. I’d recommend it whole heatedly if it wasn’t for the space bar issue. For some people it might be a deal breaker. If you are easily annoyed with that stuff you’d probably be better off with the Elite. But then you’d have to deal with the non-standard arrow key block, which may be even more annoying. :P

I have not tested this keyboard under Linux, and probably won’t for some time because the box I hooked it up to is currently running single boot WinXP. At some point I’ll try to hook it up to my Ubuntu box and see how it works, but I don’t feel like crawling underneath my desk and untangling cables again. Considering this is a Microsoft product, I’d expect half-assed Linux support. But, we shall see…