Month: January 2014

Wireless Chargers are the Truth

image

I bought this Qi Charger for my Nexus 5 to sit next to my dresser, and I must say for $35 it does everything it needs to do.

For anyone who has a Nexus 5 or any Qi compatible phone like a Note or other Galaxy phone I suggest you invest in this thing.

RAVPower Wireless Charger Charging Pad Qi-Enabled USB Charger Phone… http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00H9B7ALK/ref=cm_sw_r_udp_awd_xRzYsb0VMRMY1

Advertisement

Mobile Messaging is Broken

We hear see it in the communities all the time. People in every single camp arguing over how great their respective platforms messaging app is or isn’t. However I feel what people fail to see is that messaging as a whole is simply broken and I do not see it getting any better. Instant messaging is like email and if it is not cross platform it kind of just sucks.The Messaging Closed Garden

iMessage is great for iPhone users and their iPhone using friends. However the minute 1 of your friends jumps ship, they are at risk of losing a message or never receiving one because either…they have an iPad which got the message and it never got delivered to their Android or Windows phone as a SMS…or an array of other weird delivery problems. The issue here is that iMessage is not cross platform, which in the end makes it only as good as what device the person your sending it to has. It is a seamless and elegant application but it doesn’t solve the mobile messaging problem.

The Messaging Cross-Platform Jungle

Now on the other side you have multiple cross platform apps for messaging. You have Hangouts, which will has SMS integration. This great because you can send and view SMS messages and Hangouts all in one app, and it is cross platform. Problem solved…right? Not really. Hangouts problem is actually the complete opposite of iMessage. Hangouts requires everyone to be using Hangouts, which for the most part probably is not going to happen that much with iOS. In addition Google decided to inelegantly separate SMS and IM messages in different threads which makes absolutely no sense. Even with Android…users are dispersed between FB Messenger, WhatsApp, ChatOn and others so the problem is even worse. Plus to add a little more, even if a user used Hangouts or another app on iOS…it cannot act as its default SMS provider, so it brings us back to the initial problem of juggling multiple messaging apps.

Which brings us back to the original claim, that mobile messaging is broken. Yes it works well for the pocket of users each messaging platform supports but in the end for many people messaging will continue to stay an array of 2 – 3 Apps users use to communicate. For me who carry’s a iPhone for work and Nexus 5 for personal…

– WhatsApp on my Nexus 5 to party chat with my sisters
– Hangouts on my iPhone and Nexus 5 to chat with my wife through IM and SMS for everyone else.
– iMessage on my iPhone for SMS and sometimes IM’s from my baby sister and my dad

Yep for me that is 3 apps. This is the new normal for mobile messaging, and I don’t see it going away

Nobody Wants Stock Android

Another discussion on Google+ got me thinking about the whole discussion about stock Android. And the one thing I realized is that nobody wants stock Android.

Stock Android is AOSP, and for the most part nobody wants AOSP in its pure form. They want AOSP+.

For example, with the Nexus 5 what you are seeing is Google’s skin on top of AOSP. Google replaced the browser, messaging, camera, dialer, and search apps specifically to meet Google’s needs. For the most part Google did to AOSP what every other OEM did to AOSP, but less intrusive and arguably more elegant and useful.

Call it what you like but the Nexus does not run stock Android it runs Google Android, and it will only get more googlier in the future.