Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

The blog about mobile tech

Tag Archives: Smartphone

Customers prefer thin over working mobile phones WTF!

I am shocked appalled at this report…

At an event today, HTCs vice president of product strategy Bjorn Kilburn noted that the company had conducted research last year to find out whether customers preferred thin smartphones to those which compromised thickness for better battery life. The answer, interestingly, was that they generally preferred thinness, at which point its plans for 3,000mAh-plus devices were removed from the roadmap.

via HTC: customers prefer thin phones to better battery life | The Verge.

What the hell was the question they asked? Do you want a brick with excellent battery life? or a wafer thin mint that will run for 8 hours? I can only guess two things here, that Steve Jobs was right and you shouldn’t ask customers what they want or that they did ask the most stupidly and self serving research questions in the world!

I don’t think we need a phone that lasts a couple of days, but I truly believe the middle ground is that the phone MUST last under normal to heavy voice, video and data usage for 12 to 14 hours but it must be less than2 to 3 cms thick (which frankly is thin in my book). This is achievable today with good design. Right now phone manufacturers are making the equivalent of cars with 1 gallon fuel tanks… great around town near a petrol station, but useful for doing anything for longer. A car such as that would be seen as being fundamentally flawed and would sell like a plague carrier, so should a mobile phone that lasts 8 hours or less.

Samsung S2 Battery extender

Battery life is the bane of the Smartphone user and for most getting 10 hours use out of their mobile phone is an achievement. There are a great deal of workarounds for this problem, most involving carrying a large external USB charger device as I have talked about before on this blog or a battery jacket of some sort. The big issue with those are that you have to attach them to your phone for some time during the day which makes it all a little unwieldy at times. During last summer I upgraded to a Samsung S2 mobile phone and for a great deal of last year, this phone had excellent battery life, getting 10 to 15 hours of usage each day. Then I returned to work in the UK for an extended period and I quickly noticed my battery life was significantly down, getting between 6 and 10 hours depending upon my usage. The penny dropped – my data usage was now going over 3G and not WiFi. My phone battery life was suffering from the vagaries of the signal reception causing additional battery drain and the fact that 3G is a higher drain anyway.

Samsung S2 Extended Life BatteryI started the search for an extended life battery and stopped first with Samsung themselves. What they had was a 1950mAh extended life battery which I could not describe as extended life as the standard battery is 1650mAh and this was for a MRP of £19.99! What a waste. I kept looking and found a 3rd party extended battery which provides 3500mAh on Amazon.com from Accessories Online. Now 3rd party batteries are a little troublesome due to a past record of safety and quality issues, but I crossed my fingers and ordered one for the grand price of £7.90 (price seems to vary a little) thinking if it did not work I only lose the money and possibly my fingers in the resulting fire :-)

However that is not how it has turned out, the battery has turned out to be a fantastic addition to the phone and certainly pushes the Samsung S2′s real world usage up beyond 20 hours of normal everyday use away from WiFi networks. In fact some days I find that I am putting it on charge with 50% still on the phone as I go to bed. I can really recommend it with two provisos. The first one is a stupid one, it does take twice as long to charge it obviously. The second is that this battery is double the thickness and you can thus see the problem – how the hell does it fit in the phone. The simple answer is that it doesn’t, it fits into the phone space and you have to have a new back plate that doubles the maximum thickness of the phone. You also have to realise that it also adds a bit of weight to the phone.

However I am fine with the extra thickness as it only makes it as thick as an older style phone or an iPhone 3GS in a case. It fits very comfortably in the hand and I have never really had thin as a required feature for my phone. The problem is that no cases will now fit and if you use a desktop cradle that is also not usage (unless you can modify the fitting as I have done to make it work). The additional weight is also not something I care too much about but it does make the phone seem a lot more solid rather than heavy.

I have been using this now for four weeks and I have not suffered a problem with it, and it has really liberated me for my phone usage on an every day basis. In fact during the time I have been using this battery, Motorola US has released the Razer Maxx which does something very similar but with a more svelte fitting than this bolt on is. This is as a smartphone is supposed to be.

Powered Flight…

… or in other words, having a good charging solution for your charge hungry smartphone, MiFi and tablet. This is where the A-solar Power Bank Pro comes in.a-solar-power-bank-pro

I have always prided myself on always having the best tech, particularly when it comes to smartphones, Wi-Fi gadgets and tablets. However one of the banes of my life is the poor battery life that much of this kit comes with, particularly with the smartphones. One solution I have had is to always make use of the latent charging capabilities of my netbook/notebook, by ensuring that I can charge everything over standard USB leads. This has worked well but it has not been always the most ergonomic solution, with cables appearing out of bags and always having to ensure that I am charging on shutdown to ensure that the port power is not shutdown when I go into suspend mode (I know some laptops do have an always on port).

So I cast around and found the A-solar Power Bank Pro, which gives me 5000mAh of charging goodness. This can be fed to your USB based devices either via a standard USB output with 500mA capability, or via the very iPad and MiFi friendly 1000mA USB output. The key and very important feature here is that they can be both used at the same time to charge two devices, even a combination of iPhone and iPad. I have now been using this for a good three months during which I have kept myself running during long travel days into and out of London, as well as the much more demanding weekend in Amsterdam, whilst I was running around Koninginnedag. The London travel days stressed my Smartphone battery through running it fully active (browsing and tweeting) for the full 4 hours of travel time each day, plus all the normal usage going from meeting to meeting, including heavy GPS usage from the Walking Directions features of Google Navigation. A much more demanding test of its capability was the Koninginnedag weekend, during which I double handed an iPhone and an Android phone, taking video and photographs and posting to Facebook and Twitter throughout the day via an unlocked MiFi. It kept me going so I never lost connectivity and never lost a photo opportunity. It even charges overnight from a standard USB port, so it really cuts out the need to have an additional power block, and it fits well within an inside or outside suit pocket, or cargo trousers/shorts.

This is an excellent device to extend your smartphone, iPad, iPhone or MiFi life on even the heaviest data usage days, and can really recommend you get one, and at between €39 and €49 it is a snip. I got mine whilst passing through Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, for the lower price Smile

Everyone Mobile

An interesting statistic crossed my path the other day, and that was the fact that 2 million iPhones had been sold in the UK. Now I have not fact checked this little nugget, but it is impressive even if it is half true. That is 1 iPhone for every 30 people in the UK. The iPhone is not all the smartphones that are out there, so combining with the numbers of Blackberrys, Nokia and Windows Mobile devices, you can say that the UK has taken a major shift towards mobile computing in the palm of their hand. The rest of the world is also going this way, and this accounts for why I feel so ‘me too’ when I see so many iPhone devices out there. I might even have to change my message tones as I hear other peoples’ around me.

Makes you wonder why SMS is even used any more considering how many people have mobile email!

Hopefully the number of people out there using these devices whilst travelling may actually encourage the mobile operators to reduce data roaming costs… maybe.

Netbooks and the Long Distance Worker

Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal has taken a look at several Netbooks and has posted a summary video as follows:

Walt pushes his review from the perspective that Netbooks are some sort of halfway house between Smartphones and standard Laptops. This may have once been the case when dealing with the little 7” EeePC 701 and it seems that much of his perspective comes from the review of that little device back in January 2008. I purchased the EeePC 701 and used it as a web/email device and did find the small screen, lack of storage and slightly limited performance a problem but the 2nd generation EeePC 90x, Acer and MSI Wind products have resolved those issues.

Earlier in the year, I moved over my primary laptop to being the Advent 4211, an OEM branded MSI Wind U100. This has sufficient performance (Intel Atom 1.6GHz), storage (80GB HD) and screen size (10” 1024×600) for my needs, which are largely email (Outlook), Office applications, Project planning, Blogging, IPTV Video playback and messaging – all in fact except playing games. The only issue that arose was one of battery life where for cost and supply reasons, the battery was limited to being a 2200mAh one which provided a little over 2 hours of use. This however was solved by adding the 4400mAh 6 cell battery which cost less than £50, although I would have much preferred it to have been included from the start. This provides over 4 hours of use and is certainly the most long running laptop that I have ever owned.

This is all in addition to having a Windows Mobile 6.0 Smartphone which allows on the go email (I use the HTC S710 Vox) but in no way replaces having a full PC. Even if I had the famed Apple iPhone, I would not see that replacing the Netbook as my workhorse device as it simply does not have the power, keyboard, and application capability of a full OS based device. All the same, interesting view and I look forward to the 3rd Generation Netbooks that are now becoming available that make use of onboard 3/3.5G communication devices.

Laptop or Smartphone

This one is the biggie – as a mobile worker, a long distance remote worker, what is the main technology you need to do your job? Do you believe you need your hulking 15″ or 17″ Laptop that weighs 3kgs (6.5lbs)? Is that really a portable solution? Or are you the newly born iPhone convert who only needs that few small inches of screen and 6 hours of battery life? Which is it? Nick Wingfield at the Wall Street Journal has just written an interesting set of thoughts that at the headline level, imply that we all should be the iPhone convert by now.

However I believe that the choices as to which technology is best, is down to exactly what you have to do and where you have to do it. In fact for the generalist like myself, I see a continuum of devices as being needed for the mobile worker with a very important cornerstone at the centre – decent and effective data synchronisation. This is not fully the cloud world view – oh no, I see the need for the cloud to be part of a complete solution that ends up with data spread from device to device, over the cloud and in the cloud – pretty much of a whole atmosphere approach.

Right now I have been experimenting with Microsoft Live Mesh as that cornerstone, combined with hosted Microsoft Exchange, Activesync, Evernote, Box.net, Logmein and JungleDisk. Some of these are more mature than others (Exchange and Activesync – although I have to be very Microsoft based from a device perspective), some are more small business than enterprise (Logmein/JungleDisk), and some are really flaky – Live Mesh. Right now (let us leave Mesh out of it for now), I have a very effective ecosystem for tech use combining two Netbooks, four other laptops, two mobile smartphones and three separate working locations – to the extent that I can (and have) suffer individual device failures and gone straight back to work – an important characteristic for an independent consultant like myself.

Now back to Live Mesh, this has showed promise and sort of does work but suffers from a failure to sync certain folders for no apparent reason, something I have shared with Paul Thurrott of winsupersite.com. I have stuck with it though, and not returned to Microsoft’s Foldershare or gone to competitors as yet although that is getting close.

So what sort of user do you believe you are? Smartphone or Laptop or somewhere in between, or somewhere else?