RHFtech™ Write on Tech » Android

Don’t throw out your computer yet

Richard Frisch — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:36:40 +0000

I do quite a bit of video production. So, I am always on the lookout for tools to make the post-production effort easier. My main tools for post-production are a beefy Windows 7 rig, running Adobe Premiere Pro CS5. I have tried many other programs. That list includes, but is not limited to: Final Cut Pro 7, Final Cut Pro X, iMovie, Windows Live Movie Maker, and Avid Media Composer. Avid Technology, Inc. recently released Avid Studio for the iPad, a video editing app, similar to Apple’s iPad iMovie, but with a simpler user interface (UI). As it only cost $4.99, I was game to play with Avid Studio on my iPad 2.

After buying and installing the app, I threw together different assets to test what the app can do. I used titles, video, photos, transitions and audio. My experiment yielded two short videos, Avid iPad test 01 and Avid iPad test 02, which I uploaded to YouTube directly from the app.

Avid Studio for the iPad is pretty good for a first version, just not good enough for two reasons. Unsurprisingly, the first reason is the app has a limited feature set. As an example, although you can add titles, you can’t change the black backgrounds to another color or use an image instead. You can’t even add a second text box to the title.

The second reason was more troublesome. The iPad’s hardware is unsatisfactory for post-production transcoding, even with short videos. Video rendering and transcoding taxes all computer hardware. The video chip and CPU in the iPad are built for low power consumption not high speed video production. It took a long time to work with the two videos I produced, even though each was only about one minute long.

I look forward to Avid Studio version 2 running on the as yet unannounced iPad 3. That should be a better experience. I don’t expect to give up my Windows 7/Premiere Pro setup anytime soon.

This got me thinking whether someone with more limited computer requirements might forgo their personal computer all together. Is it possible to discard our personal computers (PCs) and replace them with tablets?

Most everything we do with our PCs, both Windows and Macs, has an analogous app, feature or function on today’s tablets, even hardware intensive video production. Yet, after due consideration, I conclude the answer is no. We will be using PCs for a long time.

Everyone uses their computers to read/write email, to surf the web, and to compose or edit documents, spreadsheets or presentations. Tablets can do that. A lot of us use our computers to view and edit photographs. Tablets and smartphones can do that too. In fact, many of the iPad photo editing apps are superior to Windows and Mac applications in both easy-to-use functionality and cost. Tablets are great gaming machines, as are computers. Additionally, some of us consume media—video, music, and books—through our computers. Tablets can do that too.

Typing on a touch screen device is an inferior experience to using a real keyboard. Most tablets allow us to connect keyboards to them via a Bluetooth radio connection. I successfully did this using an Apple wireless keyboard and an iPad. It works fine. The biggest complaint I have about this setup is the lack of a pointing device, other than my finger. I find mice far more exact and easier to manipulate when I am using a keyboard. But I suppose we could adapt to a setup of touch screen and keyboard, sans mouse.

Storage is the single issue that will keep tablets as adjuncts to computing, rather than becoming our computer mainstay. Computers have large hard drives. We can add more storage to most computers, even notebooks. Tablets come with limited, usually fixed, storage. Most large form factor Android tablets and iPads come with 16GB to 64GB of storage. 64GB or less is insufficient for many of us to store all our photos, videos, music, documents and apps. We depend upon our computers to store the preponderance of these files. There are great utilities and services (think Dropbox) that let us sync or move these files from our computers to our tablets and back. Without these we would quickly find tablets limited and their luster would fade.

So until we have 500GB to 1TB tablets, something we are likely to see in Windows 8, due out later this year, I suggest you hold on to your computer.

Kindle Fire – eBook reader or iPad competitor

Richard Frisch — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 02:32:28 +0000

The Kindle Fire is a nice combination touch-screen tablet, video and audio player, and eBook reader. At $199, it is a good value.

If you attended my presentation of Apple’s Post PC Era: Explained, you would have heard me refer to Amazon’s developing strategy to exploit the post PC era. 2011 is the crossover year in the first world. More smartphones and tablets will be sold worldwide than desktop and laptop computers. We are living in a post PC world. The future is mobile devices, like the Amazon Kindle Fire.

Today, the iPad owns most of the market for tablet computers. It has been available for about 20 months, first as the original iPad and then as the iPad 2. There are several Google Android-based tablets that compete with the iPad. None have gained traction in the marketplace.

eBook readers, Kindles, Barnes & Noble Nooks, Sony eBook readers, Kobo and others have sold well over the past few years. They are inexpensive and convenient. They mostly use e-ink, monochrome screens designed for good text display and long battery life. Some let you access the web via a built-in browser. No one would use an eBook reader instead of a computer or a tablet to browse the Internet if they have a choice.

This post is about Amazon’s new Kindle Fire device, a small form-factor tablet PC. It weighs about 0.9 lbs. The color touch screen is 7” diagonal, similar in size to most of the other Kindle models. Unlike other Kindles, which have cellular radios, the Fire is WiFi only.

Amazon delivered my Kindle Fire Tuesday, November 15. I am one of the first five million people to get one. It is quite similar to the Barnes & Nobel Nook Color and the newer Nook Tablet.

It is a fantastic value at $199 or 40% the price of the least expensive iPad. It is not equal to an iPad.

The Kindle is not perfect. The Android OS is not as polished as the iPad iOS. Storage on the Fire is limited to 6.54GB, a small amount in today’s world. However, all your Amazon-purchased digital content—music, video, eBooks, and apps —is available to download, re-download, or stream as long as you are connected to WiFi.

It is a good eBook reader. It is an okay Internet browsing device. It is a wonderful video player, especially if you are an Amazon Prime member. Prime members can stream thousands of free movies and TV shows. The Fire comes with an email app. I am not a fan of the app.

It comes pre-loaded with several other apps: Audible (an Amazon property), Contacts, Email, Facebook, Gallery (photos), IMDb (another Amazon property), Pulse (a news reader), and Amazon Shop.

Battery life is okay, not great. Charging time is slower than I would like.

Amazon offers a premium app from the Amazon app store each day. For example, today’s free app was the Documents to Go full version app, normally $14.99.

The user interface (UI) is sparse compared to Google’s standard Android UI or the iPad’s. But the UI is easy to navigate and most people will quickly grasp it.

Accessories are sparse and expensive. For example, an additional USB A/C charger is $25.

I tricked mine out by installing the Dropbox app, which took some doing. This app lets me easily transfer files to and from my Kindle Fire. I added a couple of file manager apps also. Netflix and Pandora apps are available for free in the Amazon App Store.

The touch screen is not as responsive as my iOS devices: iPad, iPhone, iPod touch. Sometimes screen taps seem to be unrecognized because there is no visual feed back that the OS is acting upon the tap. Other times they really are unrecognized.

The device’s weight is good but the undifferentiated form factor is a bit disturbing. It is impossible to quickly tell which end has the power button. The power button is poorly placed as it is easy to inadvertently hit it with a finder if you have that side down. I solved this form-over-function design issue by placing a small piece of clear tape on the bezel near the power button, so that I can easily tell one side from the other.

I am hopeful that the software will improve over time, but even if it doesn’t the device is quite useable.

The Amazon Kindle Fire is both an eBook reader and an inexpensive, small form-factor tablet PC. Will it cause people at Apple to lose sleep? I doubt it. Is the device perfect? No. Is the new Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet better or worse than the Fire? I don’t know. Would I recommend buying an Amazon Kindle Fire? Yes.

Kindle Fire – Secure or security nightmare?

Richard Frisch — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 18:40:05 +0000

[Updated: 2011-10-22]

Amazon announced the Kindle Fire touch screen tablet last week at a NYC press event.

My immediate reaction was I want one. Many people will have that reaction.

The $199, 7-inch (diagonal) color touchscreen device has built-in WiFi, weighs only 14.6 ozs, and has a reported battery life of 8 hours of use. It is a tablet computer, ebook reader, media consumption, and gaming device. It is available for pre-order now but won’t ship until November 15 for the earliest customers who pre-ordered. The device has a sexy appearance and a low price, compared to comparable and not-so comparable touchscreen, tablet computers.

Before you commit to buying one you should be aware of the fantastic cloud resources and technology Amazon is bringing to the Fire. The two most prominent are:

Unlimited cloud storage for all your Amazon digital content: books, magazines, movies/TV shows, apps, games, and music.
Silk – Amazon’s “cloud-accelerated” web browser.

The device has only 8GB of storage. The least expensive iPad has twice that. Rather than adding more space and increasing the price, Amazon has “solved” the storage issue by keeping your data on their servers in the clouds and downloading it when you want or need it, if is not already on your Kindle Fire. If you are not connected by WiFi, the only radio inside the Kindle Fire, you are out of luck. There is no cellular model.

This means that Amazon will know a lot about you, even more than they currently do if you shop there. Perhaps even more than Apple knows about its iPhone and iPad customers, since they can add content from non-Apple sources. Consequently, if you value your privacy the Kindle Fire is not for you.

The Silk browser is both exciting in how it improves on the Kindle Fire user’s web experience and disquieting because it is what in security circles is known as a “man-in-the-middle attack” or MITM. Amazon is using its huge server business to accelerate web-browsing on the Kindle Fire. Unlike traditional web browsers like Firefox or Internet Explorer that directly download a website’s content, Silk will intervene on all websites and “optimize” their content to increase the speed with which pages are rendered. Amazon will shrink image sizes and attempt to predict your likely next webpage call and send that to your Kindle Fire in the background. The information is sketchy but it appears they will even do this with secure websites, like your bank or email. [Turns out my fears were unfounded. The Electronic Freedom Foundation announced that after discussions with Amazon's Silk developers, they are satisfied that Silk will not be a man-in-the-middle for secure (SSL/https) websites. https://www.eff.org/2011/october/amazon-fire%E2%80%99s-new-browser-puts-spotlight-privacy-trade-offs]

The upside to this technology is that web surfing on the Kindle Fire should be as fast as possible. Pages should render faster than they would otherwise. Furthermore, Amazon will be in a position to stop malware from hijacking our private information. The downside to this is that we are being asked by Amazon to trust them in a way that not even Google expects today.

Good Internet security follows a Trust No One (TNO) model, which includes Amazon. Fortunately, Amazon says that we will be able to opt out of this feature from the Silk browser’s setting panel.

Whither the Personal Computer?

Richard Frisch — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 15:36:16 +0000

August 2011 has been a big news month in the tech world. First Google announces it is acquiring Motorola and now Hewlett Packard (HP) announces it is disposing of its PC business and shutting down its TouchPad tablet business, too. These two corporate moves have significant implications for large technology companies like Microsoft, Dell, Lenovo, HTC, Samsung, Apple and many others. It also has significance for consumers like us.

Would you buy an HP PC after their announcement? I wouldn’t. And this bad publicity spills over to the printer business, which is not on the chopping block right now. I was already turned off to the cheap, poor build quality and the high price of supplies for HP printers. I am unlikely to recommend or buy a printer from HP again.

Personal computing is in flux. According to Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, we are at the beginning of the post PC era. Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President, Corporate Communications, says we are in the PC plus era. Jobs referred to PCs, Macs and Windows, as “trucks” in a 2010 interview with Walt Mossberg, a Wall Street Journal reporter, and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO.

Regardless of what you label this era, the PC is now competing with smartphones and tablets for our dollars and attention.

Each of these devices has an operating system (OS). The main PC OSes are Microsoft Windows and the Max OS X. There are many smartphone OSes but the two dominant ones are iPhone’s iOS and Google’s Android. iOS powers the iPad and Android powers most of the iPad’s competitors’ tablets.

Applications, apps, programs (call executable code whatever you want) are generally specific to one operating system or a family of OSes. A program may run under Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7, but not on Mac OS X or Android.

Each operating system has its own user interface (UIs) and ways of manipulating that UI. Many features, such as left and right mouse clicks are used similarly, but not always identically on multiple OSes. An example is that “Ctrl+C” copies whatever is selected in Windows, while “command+C” is the Mac OS X keyboard equivalent.

Having a common operating system that works across multiple devices makes it easier for us since we don’t have to know the nuances of using multiple OSes and a plethora of similar apps built for each OS. I suffer a form of tech-induced dyslexia because I may be working on Windows XP, 7, and Vista, Windows Servers, Mac OS X—Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion—iOS devices like iPads and iPhones and Android phones, all in the same day!

Unfortunately, if we want to have both personal computers (Windows, Macs or Linux) and mobile devices like a smartphone or a tablet we can’t have that single operating system. Apple uses the Mac OS X for its PCs and iOS for its mobile devices, like the iPhone or iPad. Google provides the Android OS for mobile device manufactures to install on their smartphones and tablets, and also makes Chrome OS for inexpensive, cloud-oriented PCs. Microsoft sells Windows for PCs and Windows Phone 7 (WP7) for smartphones. Currently, Microsoft has no true tablet operating system. WP7 will not run on tablets and Windows 7, which has some built-in touch features is only found a few special purpose tablets.

Windows 8, due out sometime in 2012, will run on both personal computers and tablets, but not smartphones.

Apple added UI enhancements and multi-touch gestures to Lion, the newest version of Mac OS X, in an attempt to unify the OS X and iOS experience, as much as possible. Some of the changes like Launchpad are resounding failures, while some of the multi-touch gestures, and full-screen mode are nice UI tweaks.

The PC is not going away. We will still be buying Windows PCs and Macs for years. But its heyday is over. Most of the innovation in computing technology is in the mobile and social space today. And so is much of the fun stuff.

Android phone sales triple this year

Richard Frisch — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 00:14:37 +0000

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