Polite new icon

I was calling someone recently and I watched the screen while waiting to see if they would pick up.  After a few seconds passed I noticed this nice icon appearing on the screen asking for understanding if the person didn't pick up.

I thought it was very cute and encouraged a polite response to someone not answering my call. Maybe it is not new, but it was my first time to notice it.

Bluetooth devices don't always admit all of their capabilities

The Bluetooth protocol is used to communicate between all manner of diverse types of device. In order to ensure that you don't try to do something silly like play music on your heart rate monitor, devices must declare which of the various profiles it supports. Of course it is becoming increasingly common for devices to be capable of multiple different functions and so the standard allows them to declare support for more than one profile.

The most common type of Bluetooth device, is a hands-free unit which allows you to make phone calls while driving your car without taking your hands off the wheel. These devices implement the Hands-Free Profile. These devices must be capable of outputting sound, so it should in theory be possible to use this device for listening to the music stored on your phone.

Unfortunately, many of these devices don't declare that they implement the A2DP profile. Perhaps this is  because the A2DP standard states that devices implementing this profile should be capable of outputting high quality audio and many hands free units have poor quality - but high quality is a subjective judgement which should be left to the user to decide.

If you have such a device, don't panic because  there is an android application called BT Mono which can solve the problem for you. It works by fooling your hands free unit into thinking there is a call in progress and then whatever sound you play on your phone will be directed to the hands-free unit.

Do modern smartphones support magic?

Arthur C Clarke famously declared "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Modern SmartPhones are certainly close to passing this test.

I recently upgraded my phone from a Samsung S2 to a Samsung S3. I didn't upgrade for the new features (it should suffice to know that I also invested in a screen protector at the same time), but I am still excited to learn how far technology has advanced in the year or so since I bought my last phone.

The one feature which really amazed me is that if I open a contact record in my address book, I can call it without even pressing the "dial" button. All I need do is simply hold the phone up to my ear and it assumes that I want to call the contact on the screen. To be honest I don't know how it works, but I was just prompted to enable this feature when I first opened the address book. I assume the phone's accelerometer can detect the fact that I raised it up quickly before holding it still - but as Arthur said all those years ago, it is hard to be certain that magic is not involved.

Antennas Application for Android Phones

One of my favorite applications is the Antennas application, which is a simple but ingenious application that shows you the location of the mobile phone masts nearest you. It knows your location from the GPS sensor in your phone and it also has access to a database of where mobile phone masts are located.

Sample Screen from the Antennas Application

Despite the growth of mobile phone networks, I am sure that you often encounter the situations where you have poor signal. When this happens you know that you probably need to move to get a clearer signal. The trouble is that often you have no idea what direction you should move in order to improve reception. The antennas application can solve that problem by showing you a simple Google map showing your location and where there are mobile phone base stations near you. It also accesses information from your phone about which particular base station you are connected to at the moment (which might not necessarily be the one closest to you).

I find this application very useful. It has helped me get to know all of the mobile phone towers near my home and work. They are easy to spot when you know they are there, but the phone companies often try to hide or disguise them because many people object to unsightly masts.  My favorite type of phone mast is disguised as a tree.

Reading books on my phone

I used to think that Kindle was just an expensive device for reading e-Books, but then a colleague told me about the Kindle Application for the Android platform so I decided to try it out. I did not want to waste money on something I would not like so I first tried it out with a few classic books which are out of copyright.

I was pleasantly surprised by how enjoyable I found the  experience of reading on my phone. The small screen was not really an issue, since I only needed to see the part of the page that I was reading at the time. Unlike the real Kindle device, the Kindle reader on the phone actually lights up the screen which means that books can be read in pretty much any light.  By default the book is rendered as black text on a white background, but I found that this caused the battery on my phone. However, when I switched my preference to white text on a black background I found that the books were just as readable and it had a dramatic effect upon the battery life.

After reading a few literary classics, I decided to try out the experience of  purchasing a book through the associated store. I decided that "30 Arduino Projects for the Evil Genius" would be an appropriate first purchase. The buying experience was very smooth and within a few seconds I had the new book on my device with no shipping charge added to the bill. However, I don't think it was a good choice of book to read on my phone because unlike the literary classics I would like to be able to view both the text of the book and the wiring diagrams at the same time. Nevertheless I think that the next time I go on holidays I will be stocking up my phone with reading material and saving myself on some luggage charges for a suitcase full of heavy books.

Here are my most recent acquisitions on Amazon:

What will be the most important mobile platform

One of the most interesting talks at Blogtalk 2010 conference a few weeks ago was the presentation "Apps are bad" by Ronan Skehill. The basic point that the speaker was making was that the best choice of target platform for the developers of mobile applications was the web rather than developing a "native application" for any particular mobile device platform. His reasons for saying this were the fact that there are too many different mobile platforms to keep up with andf in any case it is now possible to develop very high quality web apps that give just as good a user experience as any native application.

As part of the discussion thast followed the presentation some people raised the fact that you would categorise platforms differently depending upon whether you are a developer or a user.

From the developers point of view of developers they might categorise platforms based upon one of these:

• Operating system: Windows, Linux, Mac OS ..
• Browser: IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera ....
• Device Form Factor: Desktop, Laptop, netbook, tablet, smartphone ....

However, comsumers might be more likely to categorise using one of these critereon:

• Price
• Size/Weight
• Colour
• Brand

People used to speak of Linux as a potential target platform, but this is not really a single operating system. For example, if you read the list of Linux distributions on wikipedia it is several pages long. To make thinks even more complex, there is a complex set of ways to view the dependencies between these distributions as you can see from the page which compares the various Linux distributions which typically gets several edits per day.

Ronan's advice is to develop as much as possible of your application using web programming methods and only use native interfaces when absolutely necessary. There exist a number of application development environments such as Appcelerator Titanium which allow developers to develop applications for mobile platforms that combine the portability and ease of development of web applications with the power of a native application.

Blog Talk 2010 | Apps are Bad

View more presentations from Cauwill.

By co-incidence I also heard a talk recently from the Velocity conference (via IT conversations) which was talking about the MITE platform which seems like a very impressive system that allows people to monitor how the performance of their mobile applications are performing as seen by a number of different device types on a number of networks. I have not personally used this tool, but I have experienced applications which theoretically work on a particular device but in practice they don't actually work for users on 3G networks because the network is so slow that the application keeps timing out.

Which mobile phone provider is nicest to the Apple fanboys

I think that the iPhone looks like a nice phone, but I am not personally tempted to shell out serious money for a phone which is entirely locked down (and I am very happy with my current Android phone). However, many of my friends are serious apple fanboys and since today is the first day that the new iPhone 4 is being officially sold in Ireland, many have been twittering all day about the relative length of the queues in different shops.

In the USA, many iPhone fans are less than thrilled with the fact that they can only be bought with an expensive AT&T service contract (apparently the service is also not very reliable). In Ireland it is possible to buy iPhones either free of contract or with a contract from any of the service providers. According to Electric News, the different mobile phone service providers had a radically different attitude towards facilitating the Apple fanboys who can't wait to get their hands on the new device:

• Three Ireland opened its stores in Dublin, Waterford, Limerick, Cork, Galway and Killarney from a minute past midnight.
• Rival network O2 opened the doors of some stores in Dublin, Drogheda, Tralee, Galway, Cork andLimerick at 8am. However, the mobile operator said it was restricting iPhone 4 sales to existing customers for the initial launch period.
• Vodafone stores opened at the normal time, but the online store began selling the handset at 7.30am.

There seems to be a serious shortage of stock with all of the outlets reporting that they were sold out by the evening time when I got a chance to check. This is probably a reflection of the huge rise in popularity in all smartphone types. All of the outlets were also reporting that the Android based HTC Desire is also sold out eventhough that has been on the market for a while.