Samsung

New Mobile Phone or Tablet? Do this now:

ianwaring Android, Apple, Google, Mobiles, Samsung

Find My iPhone - Real MapIf you have an iPhone or iPad, install “Find My iPhone”. If you have an Android phone or tablet, install “Android Device Manager”. Both free of charge, and will prevent you looking like a dunce on social media if your device gets lost or stolen. Instead, you can get your phone (or tablets) current location like that above – from any Internet connection.

If you do, just login to iCloud or Android Device Manager on the web, and voila – it will draw its location on a map – and allow various options (like putting a message on the screen, or turn it into a remote speaker that the volume control can’t mute, or to wipe the device).

Phone lost in undergrowth and the battery about to die? Android phones will routinely bleat their location to the cloud before all power is lost, so ADM can still remember where you should look.

So, how does a modern smartphone know work out where you are? For the engineering marvel that is the Apple iPhone, it sort of works like this:

  1. If you’re in the middle of an open field with the horizon visible in all directions, your handset will be able to pick up signals from up to 14 Global Positioning System (GPS) Satellites. If it sees only 2 of them (with the remainder obscured by buildings, structures or your car roof, etc), it can work out your x and y co-ordinates to within 3 meters – worldwide. If it can see at least 3 of the 14 satellites, then it can work out your elevation above sea level too.
  2. Your phone will typically be communicating its presence to a local cell tower. Your handset knows the approximate location of these, albeit in distances measured in kilometers or miles. It’s primary use is to suss which worldwide time zone you are in; that’s why your iPhone sets itself to the correct local time when you switch on your handset at an airport after your flight lands.
  3. Your phone will sense the presence of WiFi routers and reference a database that associates the routers unique Ethernet address with the location where it is consistently found (by other handsets, or by previous data collection when building online street view maps). Such signals are normally within a 100-200 meters range. This range is constrained because WiFi usually uses the 2.4GHz band, which is the frequency at which a microwave oven agitates and heats water; the fact the signal suffers badly in rain is why it was primarily intended for internal use inside buildings.

A combination of the above are sensed and combined to drill down to your phones timezone, it’s location as being in a mobile phone cell area (can be a few hundred yards in dense populated areas, or miles in large rural areas or open countryside); to being close to a specific wifi router, or (all else being well, your exact GPS location to within 10 feet or so.

A couple of extra capabilities feature on latest iPhone and Android handsets to extend location coverage to areas in large internal buildings and shopping centres, where the ability for a handset to see any GPS satellites are severely constrained or absent altogether.

  • One is Low Energy Bluetooth Beacons. Your phone can sense the presence of nearby beacons (or, at your option, be one itself); these are normally associated with a particular retail organisation (one half of a numeric identifier) and another unique to each beacon unit (it is up to the organisation to map the location and associated attributes – like “this is the Perfume Department Retail Sale Counter on Floor 2 of the Reading Department Store”. An application can tell whether it can sense the signal at all, if you’re within 10′ of the beacon, or if the handset is immediately adjacent to the beacon (eg: handset being held against a till).

You’ll notice that there is no central database of bluetooth beacon locations and associated positions and attributes. The handset manufacturers are relatively paranoid that they don’t want a handset user being spammed incessantly as they walk past a street of retail outlets; hence, you must typically opt into the app of specific retailers to get notifications at all, and to be able to switch them off if they abuse your trust.

  • Another feature of most modern smartphone handsets is the presence of miniature gyroscopes, accelerometers and magnetic sensors in every device. Hence the ability to know how the phone is positioned in both magnetic compass direction and its orientation in 3D space at all times. It can also sense your speed by force and direction of your movements. Hence even if in an area or building with no GPS signal, your handset can fairly accurately suss your position from the last moment it had a quality location fix on you, augmented by the directions and speeds you’ve followed since. An example of history recorded around a typical shopping centre can look like this:

Typically, apps don’t lock onto your positioning full time; users will know how their phone batteries tend to drain much faster when their handsets are used with all sensors running full time in a typical app like Google Maps (in Navigation mode) or Waze. Instead, they tend to fill a location history, so a user can retrieve their own historical movement history or places they’ve recently visited. I don’t know of any app that uses this data, but know in Apples case, you’d have to give specific permission to an app to use such data with your blessing (or it would get no access to it at all). So, mainly for future potential use.

As for other location apps – Apple Passbook is already throwing my Starbucks card onto my iPhone’s lock screen when I’m close to a Starbucks location, and likewise my boarding card at a Virgin Atlantic Check-in Desk. I also have another app (Glympse) that messages my current map location, speed and eta (continuously updated) to any person I choose to share that journey with – normally my wife when on the train home, or my boss of affected by travel delays. But am sure there is more to come.

In the meantime, I hope people just install “Find my iPhone” or “Android Device Manager” on any phone handset you buy or use. They both make life less complicated if your phone or tablet ever goes missing. And you don’t get to look like a dunce for not taking the precautions up front that any rational thinking person should do.

Another lucid flurry of Apple thinking it through – unlike everyone else

ianwaring Apple, Cloud, Facebook, Fitness, Future Trends, Google, Internet, Low Energy Bluetooth, Medical, Money, Samsung, Twitter, Watches Leave a comment

Apple Watch Home Screen

This happens every time Apple announce a new product category. Audience reaction, and the press, rush off to praise or condemn the new product without standing back and joining the dots. The Kevin Lynch presentation at the Keynote also didn’t have a precursor of a short video on-ramp to help people understand the full impact of what they were being told. With that, the full impact is a little hidden. It’s a lot more than having Facebook, Twitter, Email and notifications on your wrist when you have your phone handset in your pocket.

There were a lot of folks focussing on it’s looks and comparisons to the likely future of the Swiss watch industry. For me, the most balanced summary of the luxury esthetics from someone who’s immersed in that industry can be found at:  http://www.hodinkee.com/blog/hodinkee-apple-watch-review

Having re-watched the keynote, and seen all the lame Androidware, Samsung, LG and Moto 360 comparisons, there are three examples that explode almost all of the “meh” reactions in my view. The story is hidden my what’s on that S1 circuit board inside the watch, and the limited number of admissions of what it can already do. Three scenarios:

1. Returning home at the end of a working day (a lot of people do this).

First thing I do after I come indoors is to place my mobile phone on top of the cookery books in our kitchen. Then for the next few hours i’m usually elsewhere in the house or in the garden. Talking around, that behaviour is typical. Not least as it happens in the office too, where if i’m in a meeting, i’d normally leave my handset on silent on my desk.

With every Android or Tizen Smart Watch I know, the watch loses the connection as soon as I go out of Bluetooth range – around 6-10 meters away from the handset. That smart watch is a timepiece from that point on.

Now, who forgot to notice that the Apple Watch has got b/g WiFi integrated on their S1 module? Or that it it can not only tell me of an incoming call, but allow me to answer it, listen and talk – and indeed to hand control back to my phone handset when I return to it’s current proximity?

2. Sensors

There are a plethora of Low Energy Bluetooth sensors around – and being introduced with great regularity – for virtually every bodily function you can think of. Besides putting your own fitness tracking sensors on at home, there are probably many more that can be used in a hospital setting. With that, a person could be quite a walking network of sensors and wander to different wards or labs during their day, or indeed even be released to recuperate at home.

Apple already has some sensors (heart rate, and probably some more capabilities to be announced in time, using the infrared related ones on the skin side of the Apple watch), but can act as a hub to any collection of external bluetooth sensors at the same time. Or in smart pills you can swallow. Low Energy Bluetooth is already there on the Apple Watch. That, in combination with the processing power, storage and b/g WiFi makes the watch a complete devices hub, virtually out of the box.

If your iPhone is on the same WiFi, everything syncs up with the Health app there and the iCloud based database already – which you can (at your option) permit an external third party to have access to. Now, tell me about the equivalent on any other device or service you can think of.

3. Paying for things.

The iPhone 5S, 6 and 6 Plus all have integrated finger print scanners. Apple have put some functionality into iOS 8 where, if you’re within Bluetooth range (6-10 meters of your handset), you can authenticate (with your fingerprint) the fact your watch is already on your wrist. If the sensors on the back have any suspicion that the watch leaves your wrist, it immediately invalidates the authentication.

So, walk up to a contactless till, see the payment amount appear on the watch display, one press of the watch pays the bill. Done. Now try to do that with any other device you know.

Developers, developers, developers.

There are probably a million other applications that developers will think of, once folks realise there is a full UNIX computer on that SoC (System on a Chip). With WiFi. With Bluetooth. With a Taptic feedback mechanism that feels like someone is tapping your wrist (not loudly vibrating across the table, or flashing LED lights at you). With a GPU driving a high quality, touch sensitive display. Able to not only act as a remote control for your iTunes music collection on another device, but to play it locally when untethered too (you can always add bluetooth earbuds to keep your listening private). I suspect some of the capabilities Apple have shown (like the ability to stream your heartbeat to another Apple Watch user) will evolve into potential remote health visit applications that can work Internet wide.

Meanwhile, the tech press and the discussion boards are full of people lamenting the fact that there is no GPS sensor in the watch itself (like every other Smart Watch I should add – GPS location sensing is something that eats battery power for breakfast; better to rely on what’s in the phone handset, or to wear a dedicated bluetooth GPS band on the other wrist if you really need it).

Don’t be distracted; with the electronics already in the device, the Apple Watch is truly only the beginning. We’re now waiting for the full details of the WatchKit APIs to unleash that ecosystem with full force.

How that iPhone handset knows where I am

ianwaring Android, Apple, Future Trends, iBeacon, Low Energy Bluetooth, Mobiles, Samsung, Watches Leave a comment

Treasure Island MapI’ve done a little bit of research to see how an Apple iPhone tracks my location – at least when i’ll be running iOS 8 later this autumn. It looks like it picks clues up from lots of places as you go:

  1. The signal from your local cell tower. If you switch your iPhone on after a flight, that’s probably the first thing it sees. This is what the handset uses to set your timezone and adjust your clock immediately.
  2. WiFi signals. As with Google, there is a location database accessed that translates WiFi router Mac addresses into an approximate geographic location where they’ve been sensed before. At least for the static ones.
  3. The Global Positioning System sensors, that work with both the US and Russian GPS satellite networks.  If you can stand in a field and see the horizon all around you, then your phone should have up to 14 satellites visible. Operationally, if it can see 2, you can get your x and y co-ordinates to within a meter or two. If it can see 3, then you get x, y and z co-ordinates – enough to give your elevation above sea level as well.
  4. Magnetometer and Gyroscope. The iPhone has an electronic compass and some form of gyroscope inside, so the system software can sense the direction, orientation (in 3D space) and movement. So, when you move from outdoors to an indoor location (like a shopping centre or building), the iPhone can remember the last known accurate GPS fix, and deduce (based on direction and speed as you move since that last sampling) your current position.

The system software on iOS 8 just returns your location and an indication of error scale based on all of the above. For some reason, the indoor positioning with the gyroscope is of high resolution for your x and y position, but returns the z position as a floor number only (0 being the ground floor, -1 one down from there, 1..top level above).

In doing all the above, if it senses you’ve moved indoors, then it shuts down the GPS sensor – as it is relatively power hungry and saves the battery at a time when the sensor would be unusable anyway.

Beacons

There are a number of applications where it would be nice to sense your proximity to a specific location indoors, and to do something clever in an application. For example, when you turn up in front of a Starbucks outlet, for Apple Passport to put your loyalty/payment card onto the lock screen for immediate access; same with a Virgin Atlantic check-in desk, where Passport could bring up your Boarding Pass in the same way.

One of the ways of doing this is to deploy low energy bluetooth beacons. These normally have two numbers associated with them; the first 64-bits is a licensee specific number (such as “Starbucks”), the second 64-bit number a specific identifier for that licensee only. This may be a specific outlet on their own applications database, or an indicator of a department location in a department store. It is up to the company deploying the Low Energy Bluetooth Beacons to encode this for their own iPhone applications (and to reflect the positions of the beacons in their app if they redesign their store or location layouts).

Your iPhone can sense beacons around it to four levels:

  1. I can’t hear a beacon
  2. I can sense one, but i’m not close to it yet
  3. I can sense one, and i’m within 3 meters (10 feet) of it right now
  4. I can sense one, and my iPhone is immediately adjacent to the beacon

Case (4) being for things like cash register applications. (2) and (3) are probably good enough for your store specific application to get fired up when you’re approaching.

There are some practical limitations, as low energy bluetooth uses the same 2.4Ghz spectrum that WiFi does, and hence suffers the same restrictions. That frequency agitates water (like a Microwave), hence the reason it was picked for inside applications; things like rain, moisture in walls and indeed human beings standing in the signal path tend to arrest the signal strength quite dramatically.

The iPhone 5S itself has an inbuilt Low Energy Bluetooth Beacon, but in line with the way Apple protect your privacy, it is not enabled by default. Until it is explicitly switched on by the user (who is always given an ability to decline the location sharing when any app requests this), hardware in store cannot track you personally.

Apple appear to have restricted licensees to using iBeacons for their own applications only, so only users of Apple iOS devices can benefit. There is an alternative “Open Beacon” effort in place, designed to enable applications that run across multiple vendor devices (see here for further details).

The Smart Watch Future

With the recent announcement and availability of various Android watches from Samsung, LG and Motorola, it’s notable that they all appear to have the compass, gyroscope but no current implementation of a GPS (i’ve got to guess for reasons of limited battery power and the sensors power appetite). Hence I expect that any direction sensing Smartwatch applications will need to talk to an application talking to the mobile phone handset in the users pocket – over low energy bluetooth. Once established, the app on the watch will know the devices orientation in 3D space and the direction it is headed; probably enough to keep pointing you towards a destination correctly as you walk along.

The only thing we don’t yet know is whether Apple’s own rumoured iWatch will break the mould, or like it’s Android equivalents, act as a peripheral to the network hub that is the users phone handset. We should know that later on this year.

In the meantime, it’s good to see that Apple’s model is to protect the users privacy unless they explicitly allow a vendor app to track their location, which they can agree to or decline at any time. I suspect a lot of vendors would like to track you, but Apple have picked a very “its up to the iPhone user and no-one else” approach – for each and every application, one by one.

Footnote: Having thought about it, I think I missed two things.

One is that I recall reading somewhere that if the handset battery is running low, the handset will bleat it’s current location to the cloud. Hence if you dropped your handset and it was lost in vegetation somewhere, it would at least log it’s last known geographic location for the “Find my iPhone” service to be able to pinpoint it as best it could.

Two is that there is a visit history stored in the phone, so your iPhones travels (locations, timestamps, length of time stationary) are logged as a series of move vectors between stops. These are GPS type locations, and not mapped to any physical location name or store identifier (or even position in stores!). The user has got to give specific permission for this data to be exposed to a requesting app. Besides use for remembering distances for expenses, I can think of few user-centric applications where you would want to know precisely where you’ve travelled in the last few days. Maybe a bit better as a version of the “secret” app available for MacBooks, where if you mark your device on a cloud service as having been stolen, you can get specific feedback on its movements since.

The one thing that often bugs me is people putting out calls on Facebook to help find their stolen or mislaid phones. Every iPhone should have “Find my iPhone” enabled (which is offered at iOS install customisation time) or the equivalent for Android (Android Device Manager) activated likewise. These devices should be difficult to steal.

Start with the needs of the end user, and work back from there…

ianwaring Amazon, Future Trends, Internet, Management, Mobiles, Politicians, Samsung, Software, Xioami Leave a comment

Great Customer Service

A bit of a random day. I learnt something about the scale of construction taking place in China; not just the factoid that they’re building 70 airports at the moment, but a much more stunning one. That, in the last 3 years, the Chinese have used more cement than the USA did in the 100 years between 1900 and 2000. The very time when all the Interstate and Road networks were built, in addition to construction in virtually every major city.

5 of the top 10 mobile phone vendors are Chinese (it’s not just an Apple vs Samsung battle now), and one appears to be breaking from the pack in emerging markets – Xiaomi (pronounced show – as in shower – and me). Their business model is to offer Apple-class high end phones at around cost, target them at 18-30 year “fans” in direct sales (normally flash sales after a several 100,000 unit production run), and to make money from ROM customisations and add-on cloud services. I’ve started hearing discussions with Silicon Valley based market watchers who are starting to cite Xiaomi’s presence in their analyses, not least as in China, they are taking market share from Samsung – the first alternative Android vendor to consistently do so. I know their handsets, and their new tablet, do look very nice and very cost effective.

That apart, I have tonight read a fantastic blog post from Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission and responsible for the Digital Agenda for Europe – talking specifically about Uber and this weeks strikes by Taxi drivers in major cities across Europe. Well worth a read in full here.

Summarised:

  • Let me respond to the news of widespread strikes and numerous attempts to limit or ban taxi app services across Europe. The debate about taxi apps is really a debate about the wider sharing economy.
  • It is right that we feel sympathy for people who face big changes in their lives.
  • Whether it is about cabs, accommodation, music, flights, the news or whatever.  The fact is that digital technology is changing many aspects of our lives. We cannot address these challenges by ignoring them, by going on strike, or by trying to ban these innovations out of existence
  • a strike won’t work: rather than “downing tools” what we need is a real dialogue
  • We also need services that are designed around consumers.
  • People in the sharing economy like drivers, accommodation hosts, equipment owners and artisans – these people all need to pay their taxes and play by the rules.  And it’s the job of national and local authorities to make sure that happens.
  • But the rest of us cannot hide in a cave. 
  • Taxis can take advantage of these new innovations in ways consumers like – they can arrive more quickly, they could serve big events better, there could be more of them, their working hours could be more flexible and suited to driver needs – and apps can help achieve that.
  • More generally, the job of the law is not to lie to you and tell you that everything will always be comfortable or that tomorrow will be the same as today.  It won’t. Not only that, it will be worse for you and your children if we pretend we don’t have to change. If we don’t think together about how to benefit from these changes and these new technologies, we will all suffer.
  • If I have learnt anything from the recent European elections it is that we get nowhere in Europe by running away from hard truths. It’s time to face facts:  digital innovations like taxi apps are here to stay. We need to work with them not against them.

It is absolutely refreshing to have elected representatives working for us all and who “get it”. Focus on consumers, being respectful of those afflicted by changes, but driving for the collective common good that Digital innovations provide to society. Kudos to Neelie Kroes; a focus on users, not entrenched producers – a stance i’ve only really heard with absolute clarity before from Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. It does really work.

 

Watches? Give me a Hearing Aid that knows when to psst… in my ear

ianwaring Apple, Google, Pebble, Samsung, Watches Leave a comment

iWatch Concept Devices

Speculation is still rife on the nature of Apple’s upcoming iWatch device, the latest of which was speculation of a $1000 price tag or a positioning against Rolex. If it is, I may need quite a bit of advance warning before Jane sends me to collect hers (if indeed Apple release such a device).

Probably the best overview of the watch industry i’ve heard was a Cubed Podcast featuring Bill Geiser, the CEO of MetaWatch, but who previously did work for Fossil and before that for Sony on their email capable watch ranges. If you have a spare hour in a car or train journey, it’s well worth the listen; it’s Episode 11 of the Cubed Podcast, downloadable from iTunes or listen here.

One of the statistics Bill cites is that the watch market is worth circa $1.2Billion per annum, with 85% of this revenue attributable to watches costing more than $500. He is also at pains to point out that they are a very visible fashion accessory, have many variations and focus on doing just one thing well – which is telling the time. A lot of forays into putting more intelligence into them in the past have failed to make a large impact.

Since the time of that Podcast, Pebble have come out with the second iteration of their popular watch (known as the “Pebble Steel“, Samsung have sprung out two attempts at their Samsung Gear, and Motorola (who are in the middle of transitioning ownership from Google to Lenovo) have “pre-announced” their Moto-360 concept device.

The Motorola concept looks impressive (the core competence of high technology companies is normally far removed from consumer-attractive fashionable design). A few samples are as follows (you’ll need to click on these images to blow them up to full size in order to see them animate properly – or alternatively, see all the related demos at https://moto360.motorola.com/):

Moto 360 Speed Reading

 

Moto 360 Set Alarm

The only gotcha is that space constraints usually kill the size of battery you can install in these devices, and the power required to drive the display and supporting electronics – while doing any of these applications – will empty their capacity in minutes. The acceptable norm would be at least a working day. As someone whos found their phone running out of power while trying to navigate myself around unfamiliar streets in Central and West London, this is something of a show stopper. And these Moto 360 concepts appear to be destined for science fiction only, as modern day physics will stop these becoming a reality – yet.

So, at face value, we may need new display technologies, and/or new batteries, and/or moving as much as possible away from the wrist and into powered packaging elsewhere on a person. I’m not sure if you can cast the display (like a TV using Google Chromecast, or using Apple Airplay) over low power Bluetooth, or if there are other charging mechanisms that could feed a decent display using the movement of the user, or daylight.

It’ll be interesting to see what Apple come to market with, but we may all have it wrong and find their device is a set of health sensors coupled with a simple notifications system.

While technologists may think a watch spewing the already compelling “Google Now” type notifications would be impressive, many should be reminded that looking at your watch in a meeting is often a social no-no. It’s a sign that the person doing so is disinterested in the subject of conversation and is keen to move on.

Likewise for the current generation of Google Glass, the devices look dorky and social norms around the presence of sound/picture/video recording have yet to be widely established. Sticking the glasses on top of your head is the one norm if you’re using public conveniences, but usage isn’t wide enough outside San Francisco and various tech conferences yet. And the screen real estate still too small to carry much data.

My Nexus 5 handset has one colour LED on the front that blinks White if i’ve received an email, Blue for a Facebook update, Yellow for a Snapchat and Green for an SMS. Even a service like IFTTT (“If this then that”) sitting in front of a notifications system could give a richer experience to help prioritise what is allowed to interrupt me, or what notifications get stored for review later.

Personally, i’d prefer an intelligent hearing aid type device that could slip the “psst…” into my ear at appropriate times. That would me much more useful to me in meetings and while on the move.

In the interim, the coming wave of intelligent, mobile connected electronics have yet to get evenly distributed across a very, very wide range of fashion accessories of all kinds. From the sound of Google’s work, it sounds like they are aiming at a large number of fashion OEMs – folks primarily fashion providers but who can embed licensed electronics that talk to the hub that is an Internet connected smartphone. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple’s approach will be similar, but allowing such devices to hook into Apple provided app platforms than sit on an iPhone (such as the widely expected HealthBook).

We’ll hopefully have all the answers – and the emergent ecosystems running at full clip – this side of Christmas 2014. Or at last have a good steer following Apple’s WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) and Google I/O (the Google equivalent) before mid-year, when developers should be let loose getting their software ready for these new (or at least, class of these new) devices.