Talking about voice control

I’ve spent the last week talking to my phone. Not that revolutionary you might think; it is after all a phone, and voice has been part of the feature set right from the get-go. But in this case I’ve been testing out Siri, one of Apple’s key selling points for the iPhone 4S. Siri allows you to ‘talk’ to the phone in order to make calls, appointments, send messages and search for information.

In one sense this is nothing new; older smartphones, including those from other platforms have had voice control features for many years now. Where Siri makes it interesting is in its ability to handle natural language. Where most of the other systems rely on very simple phrases, Siri can handle longer contextual strings and a variety of voice inputs. So you could say, for example, “What’s the weather like in Melbourne”, and it’ll find a five day forecast; ask it then “what’s the time there?” and it’ll remember the context and give you AEDST time for Melbourne. It’s all rather reminiscent of Star Trek, frankly, speaking to a small computer in your pocket, although it does rely on having a net connection of some sort as some of the voice processing is done at Apple’s servers rather than in the device itself. It learns as it goes, according to Apple, so rather like products such as Nuance’s Dragon Naturally Speaking, the more you use it the better it’ll get. It’s also got a specific setting for English (Australian), and it’s highly advised that you use it; the difference in its understanding of a strine accent and a yankee one is remarkable. There’s obvious scope here for use by those with physical ability limitations where typing is difficult or impossible, but even just as a cool gimmick.

Siri does have its limitations, especially locally. Ask it for any kind of directions, and it’ll sadly inform you it can only give directions when it’s in the US. That’s not reticence on its part; the directions part of Siri’s logic relies on a couple of US-specific services that Apple’s signed up to. There are words and phrases it’ll stumble on repeatedly, and because it learns its owner’s voice, it’s markedly less effective for other users if they borrow your phone. To be fair to Apple, it does mark Siri as a “beta” (that is, still in development) product, so there’s plenty of room for improvement.

There’s arguably a bigger strike against Siri to consider, however, and it’s true for any voice controlled product. Within the context of your own home or office, talking to a computer may feel a little odd at first, but generally you’ll have access to a keyboard anyway, which adds a layer of instant precision. Out and about, and you’re going to have to talk over the general chatter and noise of the world, which means relatively loud. All of a sudden, you’re getting Siri to calculate the interest on your home loan, or noting the times of your medical appointments in public. Most of us would rather keep that stuff private. There’s no easy way around that — it’s decidedly a public perception problem rather than a technology one.

Can Amazon’s Tablet Fire Up Apple?

To date, nobody’s been able to make a real dent in Apple’s near dominance of the tablet market, although plenty have tried. Apple and Samsung are, at the time of writing, locked in a fairly brutal court battle regarding Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1, but it’s a unit that’s most likely going to be priced near identically to the iPad 2. At that price point, it’s a tough sell to the average consumer.

Amazon’s recently announced Kindle Fire, however, takes things in an interesting new direction. It’s a 7” Android Tablet with much the same hardware as Blackberry’s Playbook, which means that while it’s not absolutely cutting edge in terms of specifications, it’s still pretty handy in terms of basic processing. Amazon’s made two key decisions with the Fire that make it stand out from the somewhat bland Android pack.

For a start, you won’t automatically realise that it’s running Android, because unlike every other Android 3 (“Honeycomb”) tablet, the Fire isn’t running Honeycomb at all. Instead, it’s based off the older smartphone 2.1 version of Android, but completely reskinned such that it doesn’t look like anybody else’s Android at all. Amazon’s including tight integration with its online ventures including books, video and app stores, which sadly means that when the Fire launches in mid-November, it’ll be US-only for now. Having said that, Amazon’s only just launched the Kindle into the local Australian market at a retail level; the model that’s now known as the “Kindle Keyboard” is being sold on store shelves in Woolworths, Dick Smith and Big W, so there’s hope that we’ll see the Fire locally sooner rather than later.

The real hook with the Fire isn’t the specifications or the integration with Amazon’s web services, although they’re a great point of differentiation in their own right. Instead, it’s the asking price, which is $US199. The Australian dollar has only just slipped under parity with the US dollar, and there’s always GST to tack on to any purchase, so that could well become, say, $250 by the time it does hit our stores. Still, $250 for a tablet with these specifications is an absolute steal. The closest we’ve come to that kind of pricing on a brand-name tablet to date has been HP’s TouchPad, but that was a case of the company selling off the remaining stock in a (pun not intended) fire sale. The Fire’s low entry price makes it a compelling option for content consumption, which is still the single best reason to buy a tablet of any stripe, and if Amazon can get it to Aussie consumers sooner rather than later it could well have a real iPad competitor on its hands.

The future of flight looks noisy

One of the standards of modern air travel is that you’ll be asked — sometimes in multiple languages, depending on your choice of airline — to switch off all your electronic devices when taking off and landing as an added safety precaution. It’s OK to use electronics while in flight on most larger aircraft, but nothing with a radio, on the grounds that they may interfere with the in-flight electronics. There’s plenty of debate about how true that actually is, but for my money, I’m willing to forego a little inconvenience of switching to airplane mode in return for the plane not heading straight into a mountain. Call me fussy, if you must, but I think that’s a decent deal, even if the odds are slim that my device will interfere anyway.

Switching things off has only been a problem for me recently when it came time to switch off my (or any) e-Ink reader, as you’ll in fact use more power and signal fully switching the screen off rather than just leaving it on the standard screen image. Air travel has never been the most comfortable of pursuits — even if you’re wealthy enough to afford business class or better seating — but what it has typically involved has been cutting yourself off from the outside world for as long as your flight took place. Sure, in-flight telephones have been a stock standard on most planes for some time, but at the kinds of rates that more or less ensure that nobody uses them — or at least nobody I’ve ever noticed, and I’ve done more than my fair share of plane travel.

That’s something that’s changing very rapidly; many overseas flights are utilising in-flight Internet, and it’s something that’s being actively tested by the major carriers locally; both Qantas and Virgin are trialing in-flight Wi-Fi access. It’s initially only touted as a way to deliver entertainment from an on-board server, but both airlines appear to be investigating the possibilities for onboard net access as well. Qantas is also trialing iPads as delivery devices for entertainment services, although those will be rather heavily locked down units for entertainment only.

In-flight Internet’s a tricky thing to manage; not only do you have the grim spectre of folks accessing content of a dubious nature, but opening up the wider Internet also means potentially opening up conversation channels via applications such as Skype or Facetime. Suddenly, the normally relatively quiet plane interior could become a maelstrom of chatter. Given that longer haul flights often cross several time zones and Internet access means you’d be able to speak to anyone in any time zone, it even means that the airline-imposed ‘sleep times’ — typically when the lights are dimmed in order to encourage folks to sleep — might become interrupted on a rather regular basis.

I’m a little torn as to the utility in this case. I’ve no doubt that on longer flights — essentially anything longer than standard Australian domestic flights, so above five hours or so — I’d welcome Internet access as a basic way to divert myself by idly browsing the Web, keeping up with email and maybe doing a little light work. At the same time, I don’t welcome the idea of a plane that I’m stuck in for the next nine to nineteen hours being full of folks talking extra loud because they’ve already got headphones on and can’t hear themselves properly in the first place. What do you think?

The Future Of Printing

The concept of the paperless office has been with us for a very long time indeed. While it’d be tempting to think that the concept coincided with the growth of personal computing in the 1980s, it dates back even further than that, being used in the mid-70s to describe a vision of the offices of the future in Business Week.

Given that was the mid-1970s, this is pretty much the future, and yet paper and printing are still with us to a very large extent. It seems we still adore having printed sheets of paper, even as the growth of smartphones and tablets would seem to make them largely redundant.

I recently travelled to Shanghai to view a number of new printing innovations from HP (disclaimer: HP paid for my airfare and accommodation to attend the event). There were some products, such as the white and attractive Envy 110 that are aimed squarely at the home office market; there’s not a great deal of actual physical innovation there, although it is an attractive unit. Moving slightly up the scale were models such as the HP LaserJet Pro M275, AKA the HP “TopShot”. In most respects it’s a standard laser colour multifunction device, but with an additional quirk. The top of the unit houses an arm that hangs over the scanner plate, giving the TopShot the capability to capture three dimensional looking images. HP was a little coy when it came to answering specific technical questions about the Topshot, which won’t be available until sometime next year, but it’s an interesting glimpse into printing’s future.

While you can shift somewhat paperless with a Tablet or Smartphone, HP’s got that angle covered. It announced tweaks to its existing ePrint system, which lets you print to any printer from any device capable of sending files via email, adding a social element to it by allowing you to name your printer. Not a great innovation you might think, but it’s got to be easier to remember “myprinter@hpeprint.com” (or whatever you choose; it’ll be first come first served for all names) than it would be, say “hpe101010101015732~4@hpeprint.com”.

The other area HP was at pains to demonstrate fits more neatly into slightly larger offices, and that’s document security. If you’ve worked in any office at all, you’ve probably noticed plenty of times where an office printer sits with a stack of printed documents on it. Not only can it be a waste of paper, but there’s the risk of folks seeing documents that they shouldn’t be privy to. HP demonstrated systems that send documents fully encrypted, whether via a cabled or wireless network, and that then can only be printed via a passcode punched into the printer itself; the idea is that you’ll send a print job, but not forget it as you’ve got to approach the printer and enter the passphrase to print it, at which time you’ll walk away with it rather than remotely printing and then forgetting it.

The Perils Of Being An Early Adopter

HP recently managed a couple of firsts in the Australian marketplace. It launched the TouchPad, a tablet competitor to the many Android tablets and Apple’s overachieving iPad 2, and in doing so launched the first device running WebOS onto the Australian marketplace. WebOS was an operating system originally developed by Palm — you may recall the PalmPilot, precursor to today’s wave of smartphones — and snapped up by HP last year for what was going to be a variety of phones and tablet devices. The phones never officially made it to Australian shores, but the $499/$599 (16/32GB) TouchPad would have been the first taste of WebOS for many consumers. It was officially launched through Harvey Norman with a blitz of advertising, and apparently within four days around 1200 TouchPads were sold; not a bad result for a new entrant in the competitive tablet space.

Then on the fourth day after its Australian launch, HP — a US based firm — announced it was ceasing all development in WebOS hardware worldwide, effectively killing off the Touchpad line. In the US this led to the remaining stock, which hadn’t been selling, shifting out of stores at US$99/$149 respectively, which was something of a bargain. Locally, Harvey Norman announced it’d offer refunds to any TouchPad customer who wanted one.

I’ve seen products fail to succeed locally, but never one die quite that fast. While there’s a happy enough ending for those purchasers in that they were offered refunds if they wanted one, it it does point to one of the perils of early adoption of technology. There’s a certain cool factor in having new technology first, especially if you can take advantage of its features first. I attended the launch of the Apple iPhone 4 where hundreds and hundreds of customers lined up outside Telstra, Optus and Vodafone/Three stores for the privilege of being early adopters. That’s as much a fashion statement as a desire to have new features first, but it’s still true that there can be benefits — as long as you avoid the pitfalls.

Early adopters have to deal with all the things that go wrong first, whether that’s a software error that makes things work unpredictably, or a stray or poorly built bit of hardware that overheats, undercharges or just outright explodes — although thankfully that latter case is remarkably rare.

You’re also stung with the financial cost of being an early adopter; in the case of the TouchPad in Australia that led to refunds, but while at $499/$599 HP was having trouble selling the TouchPad in the US, at $99/$149 they sold out almost immediately. Prices on technology drops in a relatively regular pattern, and often the best value you can get from technology is simply to have a little patience.

Understanding SSDs

The chances are high that the next time you go to buy a laptop, you’ll have the option of either a standard mechanical hard drive or an SSD. On the surface, the numbers would appear to favour mechanical drives; even the cheapest notebooks tend to pack in at least 320GB into a drive, whereas the SSD option is typically under 256GB, and often very small. That’s what you’ll see on the in-store sticker, but understanding what an SSD is, and why they’re becoming more prevalent in the consumer notebook market can help you make an informed buying decision, rather than just looking at the straight storage numbers.

SSD stands for Solid State Drive, and unlike traditional mechanical hard disk drives, they’re not a bunch of spinning platters and an LP-style read head, instead reducing all that moving clutter into a what is essentially a bunch of microchips. Why would that be a good thing? Well, for a start, because that makes them substantially more resistant to shock and bumps. Drop or bump a working laptop while the read head is spinning and you may lose data or crash the machine; with no moving parts this is no real issue for an SSD. The lack of moving parts also makes most modern SSD drives notably fast, leading to quicker startup times in particular, but also improved application performance in cases where the application can benefit from the SSDs write structure; not every application can.

No moving parts also means no whirring noises and a reduced heat footprint, which leads to fewer spinning fans and even less working noise in operation. An SSD-based notebook at the time of writing still won’t be silent, but it’ll often be a lot quieter than a mechanical hard drive based notebook. All that can also make SSDs more energy efficient, which for a notebook should equate to longer battery life. Finally, the lack of moving parts and reliance on chips rather than platters makes it possible to design SSDs that are smaller than traditional hard drives, although to date most manufacturers of installable SSDs have opted for traditional hard drive sizes in order to make them easier to fit. So what’s the downside? As mentioned, the price per gigabyte for an SSD is still a lot higher than for mechanical drives, which is why SSD options usually either invite a price bump or storage drop, and typically both. There’s some concern about the life cycles of SSD drives compared to their mechanical counterparts, although you’d be wise to be backing up all of your data in any case; any drive can fail, and it’s really just a matter of when.

There’s been a huge drop in the prices of SSDs in the past couple of years, just as the storage capacities of those same drives has gone up, and that’s pretty much exactly why they’re becoming a more commonplace option within notebooks. It’s worth considering the SSD option if the notebook you’re after needs to be thin, light and quick, but for the moment those who need large media libraries or primarily use a notebook as a desktop replacement are probably still a little better served with the traditional mechanical type.

Femtocell To The Rescue?

Optus recently launched a new product offering called the “3G Home Zone” to the market. It’s a small, router-like device that acts as a base station for your mobile phone signal within your home, tethered to an existing broadband service. So if you’re in an area with poor Optus reception, or the physical characteristics of your home make mobile reception a problem, the 3G Home Zone product will boost that by using your existing broadband service to bridge the gap.

The 3G Home Zone contains what’s known as a femtocell; a device designed to bridge the gap between fixed line (ADSL or Cable broadband, in other words) and mobile services. Optus isn’t the only femtocell carrier on the market; Vodafone have a similar offering, but at this stage it’s only open to business customers rather than consumers.

The prospect of improving your home mobile (both 3G broadband and call) quality is an appealing one, but there are some catches. The 3G Home Zone is offered on a 24 month contract term, which is a very long time in the life of mobile devices. There’s an associated cost as well; if you’re on a $59 or better tariff with Optus the 3G Home Zone costs $5 per month, while those on lower tariffs will pay $15 per month. That extra payment isn’t without some additional compensation, as it also comes with unlimited national calls bundled in with the 3G Home Zone femtocell, but only for a single Optus mobile handset; you can nominate up to 12 connected Optus phones, but only one of them will get free calls. Given the number of plans that come with either stupendously large caps or unlimited calls anyway, that’s not much of a deal.

The other trap is the data one. A femtocell works by leveraging an additional data connection; in this case it’s your home broadband. You’ll need a minimum speed of around 1Mbps for it to work at all, and all the time it is working, it’s also chewing through your data allocation from your ISP. Surprisingly, even if you’re with Optus for home broadband, they’ll still count the 3G Home Zone’s data usage against your data cap. In other words, you’re using your money and your broadband to supplement Optus’ network coverage. Optus has stated that they’ll continue to work to improve the network overall, and that femtocells are a solution in small locations and where home construction impedes any mobile signal. There’s perhaps a market there, but I can’t help but think that the carriers offering femtocells need to make them more appealing to end customers, either by lowering pricing — as you’ll still be using their services and generating revenue anyway — or offering better bundled terms.

Windows 8 Might Just Dull Computing’s “Cutting Edge”

It’s been something of a maxim in computing circles that processing power (however you choose to measure it) increases over time. This is a good thing, given that it enables faster performance and the development of new applications that would simply be impossible under older hardware. There’s Moore’s famous Law (really more of an observation, but I’m nitpicking) that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years. More transistors equals greater performance, in other words.

That pace of progress is a good thing in certain ways, but it does mean that systems can become obsolete from a technical standpoint long before they actually stop working as functional machines. The salespeople of the world would be delighted for us all to update our desktops and laptops every one to the three years, but there are plenty of PCs that manage service lives of a decade or more, even though what’s under the hood is well behind the cutting edge. They certainly won’t run the latest games, many of the latest applications or operating systems.

Except, that is, when they do.

Speaking recently at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in California, Tami Reller, corporate vice-president of the Windows division announced that the next version of Windows, currently known only as Windows 8, should have the same minimum system requirements as Windows 7 currently does. It won’t be quite the same experience across systems, as Windows 8 will dynamically adapt performance based on the system it’s running on.

Without a doubt, Windows 7 currently runs better on a high end system than a low end one, but the important detail is that Microsoft’s planning to keep the minimum supported specification effectively frozen for quite some time, especially when you consider that the system requirements for Windows 7 are essentially the same as they were for Windows Vista. A 1GHz processor is hardly cutting edge, but if Microsoft can keep to Reller’s claimed (and widely reported online aim) of “keeping system requirements either flat or reducing them over time” then Windows 8 might just run on some very old hardware indeed.

It’s early days yet — we won’t even see Windows 8 on store shelves this year, and there’s speculation but no strict timeline for when Windows 8 will launch.

It’s a fascinating move from Microsoft, especially in contrast to the software offering that (at the time of writing) Apple’s just about to launch, OS X 10.7, AKA “Lion”. Like its predecessor, “Snow Leopard”, Lion won’t run on older PowerPC based Macs, but it also drops the software that allowed older PowerPC applications to run from the operating system entirely, as well as not supporting some of the very first Intel-based Macs either.

There are catches here; obviously some systems do die a death faster than others whether due to wear and tear, design or even just old-fashioned bad luck. New hardware isn’t just about processing power; you can also add other new and interesting features to a system by updating it regularly, and depending on your use of a computer, that may make sense to you. If you’re on the other end of the spectrum and need every last watt of power you can wring out of your hardware, Microsoft’s plans are certainly more appealing than Apple’s.

Google’s Chromebooks: Shiny, Or About As Useful As Tailfins?

Is there space for yet another operating system in the marketplace besides Windows, Mac OS X and the many flavours of Linux? Google certainly thinks so, and over the next six months we’ll see a number of laptops launch running Google’s own “Chrome OS”. This shouldn’t be confused with Google’s cross-platform browser, also called Chrome. Chrome OS is actually an offshoot of Linux, so much so that there’s an open source derivative version, Chromium that can be downloaded and run on pretty much any hardware you throw at it. Google’s own officially-branded notebooks running the Chrome operating system will have specific hardware requirements and be known as Chromebooks.

Chromebooks will differ from the regular laptop in a way that’s not all that surprising given Google’s focus on online applications. They’re primarily cloud-based, which means the majority of data a Chromebook will access will be stored online, with minimum quantities of onboard storage. As shouldn’t be a shock, Google’s own applications are front and centre, with the key experience intended to be similar to that of running everything in a browser, all of the time. Online access also means that onboard processing power will be kept low, although this cutting down of storage and processors hasn’t led to price drops for the first run of Chromebooks, expected to launch overseas mid-June. They’re priced at the same kinds of prices you’d pay for a netbook running Windows right now. To remain competitive, they’re probably going to have to drop prices a touch, especially in Australia where online data costs could quickly make a Chromebook a rather costly option.

While the big name vendors such as Samsung and Acer will start selling Chromebooks overseas very soon now, there’s actually a locally produced laptop available right now running Chrome… of a sort. Local online retailer Kogan announced the “world’s first” laptop powered by Google’s “Chromium” operating system back on the 3rd of June. The choice of words in describing it is undeniably rather deliberate; Kogan’s effort isn’t a Google-stamped Chromebook, but running on the open source Chromium variant instead. That could have implications down the track for updates and security, as part of Google’s pitch for Chromebooks is that they’ll update automatically (based on a common hardware profile) while the open source Chromium variant is dependant on open source developers continuing to improve the code, which they may or may not do. I’ve not yet had a chance to slap one of Kogan’s Chromium-based laptops onto my test bench to assess if it’s any good or not, however.

This still leaves the question quite open as to whether ChromeOS will actually capture the attention of consumer buyers. There’s been a definite shift in recent years towards cloud-based applications. Google’s the obvious poster child, but even Apple’s getting into the game with the launch of its iCloud service. Lightweight inexpensive netbooks have enjoyed reasonable sales, but they’re also being pinched by easy to use Tablets, including those running Google’s own Android operating system. Despite appearances, not everything Google releases automatically turns to gold. Its Wave online real-time collaboration product was launched with considerable hype, but failed to gain the attention of the broader market; Google’s essentially ditched Wave, as it has other products that haven’t taken the way the company intended to.

Is the mobile office a reality right now?

Recently a journalist I know (full disclosure; he’s my brother) spent an entire week working purely from his smartphone — you can read the whole tale here: http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2011/05/no-luggage-the-complete-series/. There was a little more to his plan; he also abandoned luggage in the interests of utility, and, I suspect, seeing how far he could push an idea, good or otherwise. But for the purposes of his week, his smartphone was his working computer.

Smartphones are getting smarter, and they’re also becoming quite ubiquitous. There are many models that start under $200 (some even cheaper, although at the sub-$100 price point you quickly outstrip the phone cost with the cost of your ongoing bills, making their limited utility a not-entirely-smart choice.). If you’re carrying one around with you, the temptation to check email or get other work (or personal) chores done is quite high. I know I’ve been guilty of that on more than one occasion. As they’re ramping up in power, with new models sporting dual core processors, dedicated graphics chips and expandable memory, the concept of carrying a single, small device to do all your on-the-go work is becoming more and more realistic.

I’ve also been testing out an interesting concept from Motorola that plays with this concept of the smartphone as the centre of your working world. The company’s new Atrix mobile looks very much like a plain smartphone. It’s an Android smartphone with a specific trick up its sleeve. Dock it into the $449 lapdock (an optional extra) and it’ll power up the lapdock to act as a regular notebook style computer.

It’s not a full Windows PC or anything like that; you’re still running the Android applications on the phone plus a small selection of applications that run on the desktop itself; most notably the Firefox browser. Within that combination, however, it’s entirely possible to get a lot of work done via online services such as Google docs, as long as the data quota on your phone is robust enough, or you’ve got access to a WiFi network to sidestep that issue. As an example — and for something of a test run — this entire article’s been typed out on the lapdock using the online Evernote service to synchronise it automatically back to my main work PC. Writing this way is certainly a lot faster than trying to type the same amount of content on a small smartphone touchscreen.

So does it work? Sort of. There’s a point where spending $449 on what is basically a headless notebook (on top of the phone’s asking price) starts to strain anybody’s budget; at sales you could score a full notebook (or pretty easily a netbook) for the same kind of money. The lapdock charges the phone when docked, which is very nice indeed, and there is utility in being able to switch from very small screen phone apps to their full-screen equivalent for some work types. But still, if you’re carrying the lapdock around, you may as well carry an actual notebook. It would make a great desk-based dock for your phone, but again, you could have a desktop or notebook in the same location. Given it’s not bundled with the phone I suspect Motorola won’t sell too many lapdocks, but it does point to where computing is heading in the not too distant future.

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