alleshannes.

Exciting, exciting: the box half open

A couple of days ago I touched (ha!) my first Android phone. It’s more than just a test drive this time, I dropped my S60 Nokia for it. I “am” on a HTC Hero now. HTC is stepping out of its “just a OEM manufacturer” shadow once more with this phone (they was already building T-Mobile’s MDA and the O2 XDA).

Old and new, side by side

How does it feel?

The unboxing gave me a solid first impression, from the packaging to the metal and rubber device casing. Also turning it on was of course a carefully designed pleasure but I also admit that I had all the information ready that you are asked for during your first steps (such as all your user accounts from social networks, Google login, etc.). For complete newbies that might be a bit overwhelming but I guess that this isn’t the target group anyway. Although it’s pretty large (esp. compared to my Nokia candybar) it’s also rather thin and therefore fits into pockets easily (the rubber makes it a little difficult to get it out of there again, however).

First doubts about everyday compatibility...

All you get in a box!

Two really good things

… in comparison to usual phones:

The Mail Widget (part of HTC’s own “Sense” UI) on one of the home screens provides you with your mail just a litteral fingerstroke away and even notifies you via the mailbox icon on the main screen. I had email on the Nokia, too, and it was really helpful to check for important messages in some difficult situations. But it was built like an annex to the regular SMS interface, took a long time to load and was just not so easy to use. Now, it is really an option e.g. to tidy up my inbox on a train ride home, including some smaller replies right away.

The second great thing, to little surprise, is the Android Market. The (Nokia) Symbian community is an active one, too, but you can’t access its fruits as easily (at the momet they are restarting anyways, with Symbian turned open source). And there are really surprising and playful apps, like the Metal Detector (by Kurt Radwanski) that makes unintended use of the built-in compass.

There are also a couple of nice aspects that are less impressive on their own but contributing to the overall experience, such as all the widgets that you can fill your many screens with, the Blackberry-like trackball, or a standardized mini USB connector for the power supply (still worth mentioning, unfortunately). A third point would be rooting the phone and discovering its Linux guts, but that’s more a fun “because you can” — oh wait. You also need it for tethering (i.e. phone as internet uplink for the laptop)!

There are downsides, too

(this section is relatively long because I was so surprised and disapointed that a phone of this class fails on what I would consider basic tasks):

Androids love to talk via wifi but they are almost silent on Bluetooth (you can attach Bluetooth headsets! wow!). Bluetooth, however, is an established method for exchanging data between small devices, like phone to PC and even more so phone to phone. In a recent study on young people and their phones done I did for my work, Bluetooth turned out to be the second important function of the phone (right after texting) because it is so easy to swap ringtones, pictures from the last party, vcards or anything. Any device has Bluetooth, anyone can use it. I had to install swiFTP (a plus for the Market but not for Android) to make my computer talk to my phone. I always made fun of the oh-so-avantgarde iPhone users who were still passing phone numbers via pen & paper. I would have never believed that a phone of today could make this misstake a second time.

The more I traveled for business reasons, the more I’ve learnt to appreciate my phone as a moving hotspot. 3G and Bluetooth drain down my battery like mad but my computer is online whereever I want (almost). The Android phone puts and end to this. No Bluetooth, no tethering. Now, most of the internet is on the Android phone already — true. But there are a couple of applications and stuff that I want to start from my computer (and note that you can’t attach files from your computer to emails on your phone without swiFTP or a cable). I read about Wireless Tether for Root that would still make it possible if I used some minor force to get root access. Which I did right away despite a couple of warnings that it also might brick the phone (thanks Jesterz and Dayzee). Having to digg so radically means that tethering wasn’t kind of forgotten but really made unavailable deep inside. WHY on Earth?

Then I have this nice Address Book on my Mac. Several hundered entries with birthdays and tags in the notes and so on. Android does everything for you as soon as you go to Google. But I don’t want to put all my addresses on Google (and I guess a couple of people in my Adress Book don’t want to be listed there, either). Google Contacts has no field for birthdays, too. So, how to sync? Android and iSync? No way (remember: Bluetooth doesn’t work). Android does sync via USB cable and HTC’s HTC Sync with Outlook (only), they say. I can barely remember such efforts and restrictions from my first Siemens phone 10 years ago. Can this be taken serious, additionally on the Mac and on-the-go?

• Android and ActiveSync/Exchange? Granted, that’s built-in. But where would I find a trustworthy Exchange server (and for free because I think syncing my data with my devices should be nothing I pay for regularly).
• I also tried vcardIO and Andook Lite (by Fezza) which would at least import address books from the SD card (i.e. no sync) but the applications failed before they completed their job (they are pretty beta and maybe my address book is too large). [update 2009-10-22] vcardIO had problems with the images included. Without it works very nice, except that birthday are stored as notes]
• Android and SyncML? There is a Funambol client but it doesn’t seem to work with my o2 account. I never had to think about syncML with my Nokia, it just worked (everything was set up simply via configuration SMS!)

Overall

It’s still a great phone, the HTC Sense is a very welcome improvement over the regular Android interface and it’s all worth fighting with the downside issues. It’s completely inadequate for a phone built more or less with an open source attitude, however, to constrain the user so heavily in basic connectivity.

If there is someone out there with a non-paid, no cable, no Google solution for me, please let me know!

Imagine, you’re back from a trip abroad and want to tell your friends about all the fascinating experiences that you have made (And you either don’t have a blog for that purpose or don’t want to publish it publicly). Usually, that means you have to go through your entire address book and select the appropriate persons. However, if your computer knew about your relationships it could help you a lot with this task.

How could an interface for this case look like? Here are some propositions (and some problems to discuss!). …

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The mobile phone as a truely social device makes an ideal plattform for social network visualisations. This gets demonstrated in a very inspiring way by Steven Blyth in his master thesis project at the now discontinued IVREA. As I found out he researched a question in the immediate neighbourhood of mine:

How can the softness and ambiguity of our social worlds be visualized within the computational and binary context of a mobile device?

The Social Fabric is a representation of your social world, displayed as a single visual array [of avatars] on your mobile phone. It does not replace your address book or calendar but keeps you subtly informed [via the body posture or the avatars!] about which relationships are prospering, which you have neglected, and the overall state of your social fabric.

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In lots of his ideas and writings I found good arguments for what I want to further investigate. A very good point is that ambiguous metaphors can avoid the impression that a computer system could be truely accurate about something that is vague by its nature: social networks. As I am following a rather number based approach at the moment, this is something I will consider (with this Paper by Thomas Erickson from IBM).

He also revived another fascination (deep inside of me and, actually, my thesis proposal) for agents and avatars. In his opinion they are not discarded by history, as one can hear often, but depend on the proper design and sometimes sophisticated technology. The more the latter flourish the more the first can emerge as useful companions.

In contrast to his work, visualisation is supposed to be only one facett of my thesis with further applications building on insights gained by them.
Something left unclear to a certain extent in his text is his profiling method, what I used to call the “long term relation records”. Especially when considering “old friends” and “family members” a good balancing between current communication behaviour and long time habbits can offer new possibilities to deal with the less active parts of our “circles of friends”.

Thanks to one of his co-students at IVREA, Myriel, for poking my nose into this work! It found some good resonance over different media: WMMNA (relates it to GORI), Wired, LIFT 07

Usually, your phone bill is a vast amount of numbers that nobody ever reads actually (secret services left aside). It gives you some interesting details if you search for something particular but it’s hard to get an easy overview over what was happening the last month. Now, this has changed! After some weeks of tinkering with code (mySQL, PHP, HTML and some JavaScript) some visual tools have rolled out of my workshop.

The first simple step sums up all of your time spent calling someone on the phone. Different colours for working hours and leisure time (and for the month under focus) are added for further pattern recognition like collegue/friend identification. First evaluations revealed already that some patterns are really characteristic for particular events in the past. That way, the visual attractiveness of certain patterns leads us to remembering interesting stories attached to these dates (that sometimes have been forgotten already). As a nice Extra the whole plot seems to be somehow related to a powerlaw.

A second graph is more oriented towards science and theory. One of the background-chapters in my Master-Thesis focuses on the (mathematical) structure underlying our social networks. Some (Barabási) say all networks of free choice are governed by powerlaws, others (Watts) think that our network of friends is described better by a bell-curve. Maybe I can deduce in reverse from the pictures I get what type of network is contained in a phone bill. It looks as if we talk a lot to non-friends, so far.

A third (not yet fully matured) version will focus on temporal patterns and therefore plots the month of the year against the hour of the day to locate each call. With this method I want to look for “hot” times with a lot of traffic, usually calm zones and possible dissenters.

The work on this graphic as well as the others shows that rather simple data from a phone bill can generate some complexity when it comes to meaningful visualisation. In order to manage this abundance of information I want to add more options to select and filter the dataset. I also need some means to enlarge the “resolution” (i.e. less information per area) for those points in the graphic that are currently examined by the user.

… we all could sell it and become rich fast. Really? If everyone has a lot of the same, we won’t make much money. In fact, we will have to look out for the real rare and precious gems. A newly founded company, Com+Art Galleries, started idealistic expeditions into this unknown territory.

This presentation (pdf: 1 mb, German only but a lot of pictures) offers some insights into art and into its surrounding businesses.

Drop by often because Com+Art Galleries will go public soon, offering the possiblity to participate in this exciting project to you.

When we want to get to know another person, we have to share some of our personal or private opinions and feelings. Some people are more afraid of doing so — they are afraid of being vulnerable — and that’s what we refer to as shy, more or less. In a recent discussion about Experience Design, we came across the Social Button again: Primarily it is intended to facilitate exactly these initial steps towards an interpersonal relation. The button reveals matching personal criteria (common friends, e.g.) by displaying some meaningful graphics on the Social Button of the corresponding person. It is not only exposing private data (to certain extent) but uses another person as “billboard” — two factors that might make us feel uneasy in a similiar way than the usual face-to-face situation but initiated by technology.

It seems as we have to trade in control for getting to know others more easily. It was one of our goals to reduce the reasons for these privacy concerns as far as possible by implementing a symbol decoding on a subjective basis.

Preparing an interview with Nathan Shedroff (which will be conducted by Jane Pitrowsky) I focused on an emotional aspect of my master project, the creation of feeling at home. According to Shedroff we cannot avoid evoking experiences for the user (as experience is closly linked to perception, e.g.) but it becomes a designer’s responsiblity to take care of the emotional and sensual implications of his creations (Some of his perspectives are difficult to apply to my project because I develop a service rather than a single product). …

Why use mobile phones as technology platform?

Smartphones are the first real pervasive platform. They are always with you and have the processing power and network connectivity of a 1995 PC. A service or application that works on a Smartphone has the unique capability of being available throughout your everyday life.

This is the statement that can be found on the homepage of the Context Project, the documentation of a large research done on the communicative (and consequentially social) behaviour of people by the
Department of Computer Science,
Helsinki Institute for Information Technology Basic, and
Advanced Research Unit

They developed a very sophisticated software application to keep track of all the people you meet and conversate with during the day, called the ContextPhone. Unfortunately it is designed for SymbianOS and therefore restricted to Series60 Nokia mobile phones.

Moreover, they mention the potential of the communication logs as private diary, several privacy issues and the possible influence on our behaviour (rituals), because we could start manipulating our context in order to make use of the collected/transmitted information as a message on its own (ideas which came to my mind as well).

I found another reason via Wade Roush on Technology Review

The smart phone is “an ideal system for pervasive, supportive social computing,” writes Russell Beale, director of the Advanced Interaction Group in the computer science department at the University of Birmingham, England. It’s “a two-way device, creating and consuming information, is highly personal, and is almost always available… .”

For the further development of our Social Display prototype we were in need for a transceiver, a display and some computing power. All of this can be found nicly bundled into a state-of-the-art mobile phone. I had heard of a mobile version of processing and after a quick view (when I found a cool example-code for some bluetooth-tricks by Francis Li), we decided to give it a try.
…