Tag: mobile

You are your phone

Fig 1
Barcode of smartphone use over two weeks.Black areas indicate times where the phone was in use and Saturdays are indicated with a red dashed line. Weekday alarm clock times (and snoozing) are clearly evident.

Here are a couple of quotes from the “You are your phone” article:

Even obscure variables such as how frequently a user recharges the phone’s battery, how many incoming text messages they receive, how many miles they travel in a given day or how they enter contacts into their phone — the decision to add last name correlates with creditworthiness — can bear on a decision to extend credit.

and

The test subjects used their phones more than five hours a day, on average. Much of that usage went on unconsciously, the researchers found. When the subjects were asked to estimate how often they checked their phone during a day, the average answer was 37 times. The tracking data revealed, however, that the subjects actually used their phones 85 times a day on average, more than twice as often as they thought.

It’s an interesting read, though not too surprising.

SwiftKey goodness

For a few years now I’ve been a happy user of the SwiftKey app.  SwiftKey is a predictive keyboard for Android and iOS.  I was very skeptical when I tried it the first time, but my mind was blown almost instantly.  The app does not just make generic predictions T9 style, but learns from your SMS history, emails, social network posts, and even your blog’s RSS (obviously, only those channels that you allow it access to).  With that, the predictions are so accurate that you rarely have to type more than a couple of characters for it to guess.  In fact, sometimes it guesses the next word without you even typing anything.

Well, OK, so I wrote this all before.  Why am I suddenly retyping this?  Because I got an email from SwiftKey with some updates as to what’s happening there.  And I think that it’s pretty cool how they’ve taken something so seemingly simple as a keyboard and turned into a … well, not industry yet, but something more and something exciting.

ninja themes

For all those touch-typing fans, they’ve released two keyboard themes Ninja Pro and Ninja Trainer.  If you mastered your laptop’s keyboard, enhance and extend your skill to the mobile and tablet now.

swiftkey 6

SwiftKey 6 beta version is out with some cool features.  Most notably  – Double-Word Prediction, which should save you even more typing.  SwiftKey has also reached 100 supported languages, so you can recommend it to your foreign friends much easier.

neural

And if SwiftKey wasn’t awesome already, they are pushing the boundaries with some real high end computing – neural networks and machine learning.  The blog post goes into detail of how this whole approach works and how it makes predictions better.

Wow!  Talk about a simple keyboard app for the mobile now … The sky is truly the limit.

Android 6.0 Marshmallow, thoroughly reviewed

Marshmallow Nexus

Ars Technica has thoroughly reviewed Android 6.0 Marshmallow.  Read the whole 10+ page review, or satisfy yourself with this very short summary:

The Good

  • The new home screen adds tons of genuinely useful features. App Search, predictive apps, vertical scrolling, and the uninstall shortcut are all great time savers.
  • The new permissions system lets users give informed consent to access their data while keeping them in the loop about breaking things from permission denial. Developers get to have a dialog with the user about why they need a permission, and old apps are fed fake data so they can be denied access without crashing.
  • “Adoptable Storage” finally makes SD cards as good as internal storage. Now if only there were Marshmallow devices with SD cards.
  • The fingerprint API isn’t groundbreaking even among the Android devices, but it’s the kind of ecosystem building that only Google can do.

The Bad

  • There still isn’t auto rotate support for the home screen. Google teased us in the developer preview but the feature was cut.
  • The new permissions page is a great first step, but it doesn’t list all of the access to the system an app actually has. Special settings like “Notification Access,” access to the accessibilities framework, and more are scattered all over the settings.
  • Apps can opt out of power saving features like Doze and App Standby just by changing their priority settings. We don’t trust developers to play by the rules.

The Ugly

  • There is still no solution for getting Marshmallow out to the billion+ devices out there.