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iPad

Google’s Rejoinder to Microsoft and Apple – The Tablet and BookWars are Here!

The three musketeers go head-on

Microsoft makes its tablet debut by announcing pre-orders of Surface a few days back. Surface runs on Windows RT, a special OS designed for tablets. This was all set to crush iPad’s building momentum, until Apple sent out invitations for a special event – “we’ve got a little more to show you”. And that’s for their smaller iPad model. And now, hot off the press, Google announces an Android event on October 29th and 1 minute ago TechCrunch tells me that they are launching ‘a tablet for everyone’ campaign with their $249 Chromebook from Samsung. A Chromebook for all – their newly sought mission. It’s war time and an interesting time to see how these wars will play out.

Who’s got the best hand?

Well, undoubtedly, Apple and Google are ahead in the game with popular OS’s ubiquitously used and Windows clearly has a lot of work to do to disrupt the market with its newbies. Read my earlier post on what they can do to yank the tablet market share. Hands down Android leads the apps market followed by Apple – universal truth, everyone knows.  And of course, the third musketeer is making best efforts- holding global hackathon for developers in over 60 cities starting November 9th to kick-start the nouveau Windows 8 development community. However the bigger problem still exists – Windows cannot create the grand slew of apps which the other guys have anytime soon.

Now, who’s acing the marketing strategy?

That’s a million dollar question. We all know that Apple has to do little on this front as it has cast a brand impression far and wide and lured people consistently to buy experience, design and style with the 1s, 2s, 3s and now Minis. All of they have to say is “we’ve got a little more to show you” and get ready for the long lines in front of their stores and make Foxconn in China work harder.

Google’s strategy is interesting and it almost seems reactive. However, a strategy exists. They’re using product, price, promotion and place tactics to takeover with their $249 Chromebooks. Yes, a first big marketing push for Chromebook with TV spots for the non-techie audience and expansion of its brick-and-mortar efforts by collaborating with almost 500 stores with special Chromebook kiosks.

But Microsoft by far is still the largest spender with the $1.8 billion number. And seems like being a new entrant, it’s almost inevitable if it needs to make a dent. What we have to remember though is it is competing with folks who already been there and done that pretty well and with folks who have cast a wide net with their marketplace and open source OS’s.

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Watch Out SmartPhone Users…Olympics is Here!

I am sure all you guys have already downloaded that Olympics 2012 app on your mobile devices to watch the grandeur, follow the medal winners, buy your tickets, and place your bets. I downloaded one this morning too. And then, I read this report from ThreatMatirx on 5 major threats that will be encountered on smartphones during the Olympics this year.  I thought of sharing the findings with you guys as well, just in case you’re an Olympic freak like meJ.

Mobile devices have reached their ‘wild west’ stage according to PC world.  A state with no rules, and lots of lawlessness.  Smartphones are now ubiquitous, one in every hand, and an indispensable commodity, perhaps. But along with the many favorable possibilities, there is an emerging ecosystem of hackers and malicious developers exposing smartphone users to a lot of risk.  70 new malware threats were discovered on mobile devices in 2011, and 2012 is about to beat that number. Why are smartphones vulnerable? Because, people don’t see and understand the level of risk they’re exposed to. And so, they don’t care to take the precautions.

This might be a beginning, so if you want to enjoy your Olympics, watch out for these threats:

Dubious Apps – Yes, there will be many, who would try to access information from your device surreptitiously.  They would access your contact database and ask them to download the app on their devices as well. So you got to pay attention to the permissions when you download an app.

Drive by Downloads – You Google Olympics 2012, and click on a link to see the action. Guess what, that’s not a legit site or they have a malicious plot on a legit site and now your device is infected.

Hidden links – Be very careful of those shortened URLs, yes those Bit.Lys. There are tools which can help you figure if those are legit URLs or not. If you click on them blindly, you are likely to get to a malicious site.

Search Engine Poisoning – Hackers are gaming the search engines. They have ways to show up on the top pages and lure you into clicking on their links. So dive deeper, don’t just blindly click on the first few links.

Phising attacks – Cyber-crime is not new, but it takes a different dimension on mobile devices. If you’re in London and are looking for tickets, make sure you don’t buy them just because they’re cheap, they might be fake for all you know. Do your due diligence.

Not saying that your Olympic experience on mobile is trouble ridden, but it is always good to understand the risks. All you have to do is take a minute to think before you click on anything. How did you get to that link, did a friend send it to you or a stranger?  You read a post about Olympics and clicked on that link, who wrote that post? Your close Facebook friend, or someone you randomly follow on Twitter.  And post Olympics, keep the lessons from this article to have a mal-free experience on your phones.

Enjoy a great Olympics season!

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BlackBerry10 – Would this be a Game Changer for BlackBerry?

Blackberry Smartphone maker RIM has been behind iPhone and Android to provide ‘A’ class user experience. RIM’s market share has dropped down drastically from 41% in 2007 to 4% in 2012. Although it has been able to improve shares in India and China with mid-range smartphones, the future still looks bleak.

Playbook: Not so good user review

RIM which was pitching QNX based playbook device but did not get a good market response mainly because of the lack of essential features when the device was launched. Another setback relates to emails, Blackberry device need to be connected as a bridge for sending and receiving emails. It’s also the lack of good quality apps that are pushing end users to Android and iPad devices.

Fate of BlackBerry  Java based Phones:

RIM has lately realized that improving its java based blackberry OS would not provide the end user experience that is present in Android and iPhone devices. As RIM’s legacy OS was built with key based user interface in mind, it is not scalable enough to handle touch based user interfaces smoothly. With people preferences switching from a keyboard based device to a touch based device, it becomes hard for RIM to sell their legacy OS device.

BlackBerry 10 in News:

With the vision all set to work on developing a fast and smooth touch based device, Blackberry announced BlackBerry 10 in late 2011 to play in the smartphone market. RIM however has been delaying the launch of the device, now scheduled for Feb 2013. Hopefully, there would be no key features missing in their new device as was the case with Playbook.

Overview of BlackBerry 10:

Let me give an overview of the BlackBerry 10. It has QNX as the operating system which is time tested and extensively used in modern car systems, rocket launches and Nuclear power plants.  Mobile application development in QNX can be done using either native C/C++, Web Works, Adobe Air . BlackBerry 10 can also run android applications using android runtime player.

BlackBerry 10 native development

The native development is done using QNX Momentics IDE which provides drag and drop features for faster UI creation. It also has a very good UI previewer which can greatly reduce developer effort as it directly updates the UI in the previewer when you do changes in the QML document.

BlackBerry 10 uses cascades UI framework for developing rich and intuitive UI with 2D and 3D effects. The developers have two options for developing UI , writing code in C++ or using the markup (QML) . QML provides a more easier and flexible way for making UI. Various fine grained UI behaviors can be provided by using QML. Many of the cool UI components have been

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Part 2 – iOS6, Jelly Bean, Windows8 – Who is the Prettiest of Them All

Going Social

Integration with Facebook, much as they did with Twitter in iOS 5. , Its now easier to share photos, update statuses or other postings on Facebook. You will now be able to share photos and safari links on Facebook within the respective apps using the share button. The friends profile information has been integrated directly into the contact list and calendar, and also updated automatically.

Photo Streams allows you to create groups that are automatically notified when pictures are added, and these photos are automatically delivered to their iOS Devices. If you have an AppleTV, your pictures can even be transmitted to one that has access to your Photo Stream, so your Apple TV screen saver will always display the latest pictures, automatically.

For Developers:

The Social. Framework provides a simple interface for accessing the user’s social media accounts, This framework supplements the twitter framework that was introduced in iOS5 and adds support for Facebook and Sina’s Weibo service.

App can use this framework to post status updates and images to user’s account. .It works with account framework to provide single sign on functionality. UIKit framework also provides a new UIActivityViewController class for displaying the action that user performed like post content to social sites like Facebook or Twitter.

 

What are Jelly Bean and Windows8 doing?

 Windows 8 doesn’t just feature Facebook and LinkedIn contacts in its People contact book, it lets you anchor people on your Start screen, see status updates and share across multiple social networks from all over the OS. When it comes to photos, Microsoft has integrated Facebook and Flickr at the core, letting you see images stored on your accounts, other peoples’ accounts, and up on your own SkyDrive cloud storage account.

 Android always had a great Facebook sharing feature. Users can share and upload from pretty much anywhere in OS, or from most Android apps. Users can pull Facebook data for their contacts already stored on the devices or pull all Facebook friend into contacts. With Jelly Bean OS, Android beam apps now supports NFC-based picture and video sharing with other NFC-enabled devices as well as NFC-based connectivity with Bluetooth devices.

Guided Access – A kiosk mode

Guided Access is a new feature found in iOS 6, which allows you to enable a “kiosk mode” on your iOS devices. This can be handy for users who use the iPad or iPhones as retail assistance in stores, in restaurants, as menus, as examination paper in schools, or in an entrance exam.

You also have the ability to restrict access to certain portion of the screen, the whole screen, and/or disable the motion control with application

Passbook – a New eWallet

Passbook feature is an eCommerce solution, Its nothing but the barcode collection for boarding passes, store cards, coupon, movie tickets etc. The user just needs to scan the smart devices to check in for a flight or can have alert when coupons or vouchers are about to expire. Passbooks also sync to iCloud.

For Developers:

PassKit.framework is new framework that uses web services and a new file format to implement   downloadable passes. Passes are created by company’s web service and delivered to the user’s devices via email or custom app .The file format identifies relevant information about the services being offered so that the user knows what it is for.

 

 

A better Phone app, FaceTime Safari browser, Mailand Game Center.

 

In iOS 6, users can reply to incoming calls with messages (present or custom) or save reminder – timed or geo fenced. It also provides “Do Not Disturb” messages which toggles with fine -grain phone call exceptions, schedules or repeat calls.

FaceTime is now available over cellular network, Apple ID unified with phone number, enabling FaceTime or iMessage answering on iPad or Mac. Safari will now provide an offline reading list, photo uploads, full screen Video in landscape mode. iCloud tabs for safari on other iOS devices and macs which sync the browser data and make it up to date.

Mail application is now available with Flagged mailbox, VIPs- designated contacts cause notification, email flagged with stars in separate inbox. User can attach photos in-line, open password-protected office docs, per account signatures. Game center allows cross-platform turn-based and realtime gaming between iOS and Mac, also provides features to find friends from Facebook. It also syncs with OS X.

For Developers: 

Other Framework enhancement by Apple in iOS 6.

The EventKit framework now includes interfaces for creating and accessing reminders on the user’s device. The reminders you create show up in the reminders app along with ones created by the user. Reminders can include proximity or time-based alarms.

The StoreKit framework now support the purchasing of iTunes content inside your app and provides support for having downloadable content hosted on Apple servers.

State preservation makes it easier for apps to restore their user interface to the state it was in when the user last used it. Prior to iOS 6, apps were encouraged to write out information about their current interface state in the event that the app was terminated. Implementing state preservation still requires effort on your part to identify what parts of your interface you need to save

You use the Cocoa Auto Layout system to define layout constraints for user interface elements.Constraints represent relationships between user interface elements such as “these views line up head to tail,” or “this button should move with this split view subview.” When laying out the user interface, a constraint satisfaction system arranges the elements in a way that most closely meets the constraints.

In Addition to location data, the system now ask the user’s permission before allowing third-party apps to access certain user data which includes Contacts, Calendar,Reminders and Photo Library.

The iAd framework supports a new medium rectangle banner size for ads on iPad devices.

The ExternalAccessory.framework includes new interfaces for managing connections to Bluetooth devices. Apps can now post an alert panel that lists the Bluetooth devices available for pairing.

What are Jelly Bean and Windows8 Doing:

Microsoft’s goal is quite clear: instead of having a list of individual apps for payments, everything should be integrated into a single place that replaces your wallet and also offers live updates on your accounts and access to nearby deals. Just as the name suggests: your credit cards, loyalty cards, and others. Specific companies and programs that showed up in the demo were PayPal, Chase, Fandango, and Delta, but you could also save your library card and more to the hub. The hub also integrates with the new Nokia Maps.

With similar functionality, Google wallet is a huge question mark for Google, Sprint is the only official Google mobile wallet partner. Google announced new NFC-based features unrelated to payments, but the challenges in-front of them is number of android devices available with NFC.

iOS adds more features, but keeps the same screen size and user interface that has not been changed since iOS launched .Android’s Jelly Bean improves performance and adds Google Now, connecting different services into persistent available location assistant. Windows Phone 8 now runs on the Windows NT kernel, the same kernel Windows 8 runs on. This means that user gets support for multi-core chips and also gets faster porting of apps and easier overall development across platforms. This will strengthen Microsoft’s ecosystem. Windows phone 8 upgraded to entirely new hardware, but the usability of OS is very tightly bound to the availability of the hardware and upcoming support with Windows 8.

The big challenge in front of Google is only 7% of Android customers who are up to date and running Android 4.0 as compare to 80% of iOS user running latest iOS 5 on their smart phones and tablet. This also tells us something about how the OS’s are being marketed.

 

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2011:The Year of Tablets

While the recent arrival of the Chinese New year christens the year as the year of Rabbit,for tech geeks and industry this year is going to be a big transformative year and will potentially drive the tools and technologies across different technology spectrums in next 5-10 years.It has got everyone from the chip manufacturer’s to mobile service provider’s to have a go at a bigger piece of pie.

2011 would be as I like to call it the year of the Tablets.Last month’s CES there were as many as 80 different tablets demo’ed.No doubt some of those will never see a shelf in your nearest electronic store(recently Nokia’s MeeGo was dubbed a No-Go) and some of them will be just crushed by the competition and never see the dawn of 2012.While this is good for consumers to have so many choices as well as a competitive market from price perspective,technologically specially for testing this is going to be a nightmare scenario until we have a settled  market place with one or two dominant players (iPad anyone??) and couple other trying to get the remaining market share.Here are some thoughts on what might be dominant players in this space.

Apple iPad:Nuff’ said.The tablet that started it all.However it would be interesting to see what the rumored iPad 2 brings out this year and how testers deal with the closed ecosystem of iOS to get more testing and more importantly automated testing figured out in iOS.One advantage compared to other tablets is that Applet products clearly have a nice ramp-up and ramp-down release giving testers time to figure out where to put their more testing effort on.But there is still no clear winner with automation testing on iOS applications.Till then Happy manual testing….

Samsung Galaxy Tab:Based on Android,so far has received favorable reviews and will be a good competitior to iPad especially from price perspective and in lot of developing countries where for some reason Apple has not succcessfully developed a crazy fan following like North America but Samsung has a good standing and brand recognition from other consumer devices.The automation tool and testing approaches people develop for Android smartphones will be really useful for Android based tablets as well.Android SDK has a really nicely documented testing framework and we will have to see how automation testers will leverage it to provide a robust and effective solution.

Motorola Xoom :D ebuted at CES and has got a lot of industry folks excited.Again being based on Android it will have the advantage of collective work being done on different Android devices but ultimately contributing to Android ecosystem with new and hopefully innovative ways of testing.

Apart from this major players,it can be rest assured that RIM (The Blackberry company) will come out with at least one tablet based on Playbook and try to lure in the Blackberry faithful and you can always trust the old man Microsoft trying to get out at least one tablet based on Windows 7,surely with different partnerships in the mobile ecosystem(Nokia) or also joining hands with Dell who want to stay relevant in the diminishing notebook sales environment that are being replaced by tablet sales.

On the software side specifically from testing perspective,different test tool companies including test management,defect tracking,task management,automation tools will have to adapt to the wider landscape of devices that the tablet industry is going to bring.In a way the field is very similar to what the desktop environment must have looked in the mid 90′s when the browser war was on.

Another way of looking at it would also be emergence of better browser standards which will adapt to tablets/mobiles and eliminate the need for native apps but they are very slow compared to the fast emergence of the tablets.However the battle has just begun so it should be an interesting time for next couple of years for testers and services companies alike…

Drop us an email if you want to see how Infostretch can help you with your mobile device(including tablets :) ) testing or check out more information here

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iPad + iBookStore = Full time book reader

As Apple have created a blue ocean of Smartphone/tablet and still including feathers in crown, one of it is iBookStore for iPad.

This is revolutionary step indeed. Prior to iBookStore, there was only one serious attempt to provide digitize book reading using gadget and that is Kindle from Amazon. iBookStore has strong capabilities of changing reading habits of users  and stands good chance to override the era of printed books.

Over & above the normal experience provided by printed books, below are a few features that stand out.

  1. Over the internet it is possible to download any book available on iBookStore.
  2. iPad size is fitting with size of most of books.
  3. Various brightness levels and changing in font size give better user experience.
  4. Larger storage can store as many book as user wants.

Besides that there are few more improvements I would like to see in iBookStore mentioned below,

  1. User needs all books; probably this is one of the reasons behind success of Amazon Kindle. Amazon has almost all books which user may need to read.
  2. It needs to consider the approach of http://books.google.com, which is considered as largest online book collection. Major reason behind its success is, it provide partial book reading.  If iBookStore provides it as one of its feature then that would be boost its usability.
  3. As iPad is hand held device and it is completely feasible to have better (repeating again better) text to speech converter. One of the major success factors behind success of Android is its investment for text to speech and vice versa investment.
  4. Improvement in battery life, as we visualize iPad a hand held book reader. It is good chance that user may carry it in outdoor travelling for few days. That would be awesome if iPad have battery life to use it for long item.
  5. Language Translator: – I do understand complexity and technical feasibility to implement cross language conversation, I would love to see user friendly language translator.
  6. Allow to read books from different sources, at this stage user can read books only form iBookStore, it is not possible that iBookStore have all books which user may need to read. That would be good if user can read ePub books under DRM license from third party provider.

Well, digitizing print book media have few more benefits like minimizing use of paper (will keep our planet greener), removal of piracy, cost cutting in printing, improved distribution process etc…

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Apple iPad Review

Apple iPad is here! Is it between iPhone and MacBook Air? Is it worth it? Do I need it? Read it all here – I am tempted to write about it, but we let the experts speak about it.

Read Stephen Fry’s Review

Read David Pogue’s Review

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