Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Category: Technology

  • Swype

    Well, I did a post using voice to text, so let’s try one with Swype. Swype is a keyboard replacement app that has you type by touching the first letter in the word and then dragging your fingers across all the other letters in the word without lifting your fingers. You swype, you don’t type.

    So presumably the app takes the first and last letters and computes what words are possible given all the letters you touched. Sometimes it offers you choices when there are multiple possibilities.

    It works amazingly well. And it’s kind of fun, especially on longer words.

    Homepage

  • voice to text

    i find myself taking advantage of the voice to text features of my phone quite frequently these days.

    it works really well.

    for a quick google search it’s ideal

    as a test this entire post was dictated via my new phone.

    no capitalization or punctuation but otherwise perfect.

  • Couldn’t put it any better

    Credit to Hugh MacLeod.

  • That was fast

    I assumed with all the different Android devices this would happen eventually. But not this fast…

    Google IO TV Screenshot 2

  • Still in love

    For the record, I love my replacement Incredible just as much. With the recent great weather I’ve especially enjoyed tendering with PdaNet. Now I don’t even need WiFi.

    I have yet to pay for an app…

  • Phone bites the dust

    It was a gorgeous spring weekend in Brooklyn and my wife was up at SUNY Binghamton for her nephew’s graduation, so I had the girls to myself. So that meant plenty of park time.

    We were at our favorite park and Danielle was doing the monkey bars. They aren’t really monkey bars, more like gymnastics type rings spaced apart so you swing from one to the next. Danielle is pretty good at them and loves doing it.

    So of course, I try to take a picture of her doing the rings. When I take pictures with my Incredible, I tend to hold the phone lightly from the bottom (since the lens and flash are on the top). Danielle is doing her thing and I try to time the shot so I can actually see her face while swinging.

    I haven’t used the phone enough to have a good feel for the exact time lag between pressing the button and the picture being taken, so this type of action shot is a bit of a crap shoot. So after taking the picture, I’m looking at the phone to see how it turned out. Danielle is, of course, finishing up the rings. I’m not watching her closely.

    On the last ring, one of her hands almost slips. She loses balance a bit and her legs go flying to get it back. Her foot executes a perfect punt of the phone right out of my hand. The phone goes flying 20 feet in the air. This part felt like slow motion. I try to catch it. But it’s just out of reach.

    Danielle feels terrible, like it’s her fault. Of course it isn’t. I, of course, am upset. But my daughter is more important than my phone (saying a lot about my daughter, because I love the phone) so I lie to her, tell her it’s fine and we go back to playing.

    But I could see the hairline cracks in the screen. And the very top part of the screen (the notifications panel) wasn’t working right. I knew it was toast, but at least it looked serviceable until I could get a replacement. I do have insurance on it, so it’s not the end of the world.

    Though as the day progressed the screen slowly died. It’s now to the point where you really can’t see anything. I can receive calls, mainly because I know where to press to accept a call. But that’s it.

    The replacement arrives Tuesday. Monday will be no fun…

  • Foursquare for Old Farts

    Foursquare has been very popular in New York since it first came out. I recall thinking it was an interesting concept, but with my old crappy phone (with no GPS) it didn’t really work. So while I signed up for Foursquare, I never used it.

    Hey, now I have a cool phone with GPS. Using Foursquare is a snap. It automatically detects where I am and shows me all the places nearby I could be checking in. And since it’s been around for a while now, there are a gazillion places in my neighborhood to check in. I can actually check in to my apartment building.

    But, um, why? I mean, I get it if you are single and out on the town all the time. But for an old fart with kids, what exactly is the point? Become the mayor of Walgreens?

    Sigh, clearly I’m too old to be hip…

  • More Incredible

    OK, I’ve had the HTC Incredible for over a week now, so I can talk about it a bit more.

    Camera: I hadn’t really used it after two days. Now I’ve used it a bit more, though still not a lot. Overall, at 8 megapixels I’d say that this phone can easily be your general day to day camera. I’ve never considered a camera a big part of the phone, but perhaps that’s because I’ve never had a good camera in my phone. Some shots of the girls on a chilly Mother’s Day:

    IMAG0013

    IMAG0017 IMAG0018 IMAG0020

    Video: Quite good, though you need the proper lighting. The interesting thing about trying video on your phone is that you naturally just pivot the phone landscape or portrait depending on what looks better. But it’s not as easy to rotate a video.

    Here are two videos taken from my phone. The one of Tori dancing to The Wiggles in her PJs was taken portrait, downloaded to my PC and rotated via some freeware. The one of Danielle flipping was uploaded directly to YouTube from my phone, and is thus sideways. But the light was better.

    Google Map Navigation: This was called the "killer app" of the Nexus One when it first came out. It may kill Garmin. Especially for someone like me who uses ZipCar  and therefore doesn’t want to install a real GPS system, this is ideal. The turn by turn directions were as good as the GPS on my old Acura. It’s a battery killer, so you definitely need a car charger, but this app is truly great.

    Games: Still way too early to tell, but my phone can keep either daughter entertained and I have yet to pay for a game. That was my basic success criteria, so all good there.

    Battery Life: If I really use this phone a lot, I can blow through the battery in less than a day. On a regular day’s usage the battery seems to last fine. They are already selling more powerful replacement batteries for the Incredible. I’ll wait on that. I do make sure to turn WiFi and GPS off when I’m not using them. But I’m still leaving the Live Wallpaper on. Silly as it is, I like getting a sunset every day on my phone. If it’s raining, when I turn on my phone a windshield wiper pops up and "clears" the rain off my screen. Yes, I know, totally silly.

    Apps: Right now there isn’t anything I can think of  that I need. Yes, I’d like ZipCar to release an Android app. FreshDirect has an iPhone app though I always order food from my laptop so I’m not sure I’d use a phone app. But I’m seeing a rapid move towards Android development (Twitter released their Android app before an iPhone app). So I’m not worried that I won’t have apps that I need.

    There are some usability things that I would quibble with. I’m using a different SMS client which I like, but now I’m getting notifications from both the new client and the default SMS client when I get a new text. Haven’t figured out how to turn that off. The behavior when I connect to my computer seems inconsistent. Sometimes I just get my SD card as a hard drive, sometimes I get the phone memory as one drive and the SD card as another.

    The biggest negative I have found is that it’s pretty much impossible to download any paid video to this phone. If I buy video on iTunes it is copyright protected and I can’t watch it on my phone. If I use Amazon I get a Windows Media Player file, which my phone doesn’t play (need to look for an app for that, I guess). That’s not something I care a lot about, but if you did care about that, an iPhone is clearly your best bet.

    My overall impression remains the same. This is a tremendous phone.

  • First picture

    image

    The first picture taken with my Incredible.

  • An Incredible Review

    It’s only day 2, so I’m clearly in the honeymoon period with my new phone. And for all the iPhone users out there you have to remember that I am moving from a dying Blackberry Pearl, so I had nowhere to go but up. So here are my early thoughts.

    Phone Size: Very sleek. The one thing I liked about the Pearl was how tiny it is. The Incredible is actually thinner and only a tiny bit bigger. Very happy with the size. It seems thinner than my wife’s iPhone, but I think that’s just because I haven’t bought a case yet.

    Screen: Fantastic. The clarity is stunning. I was happy reading eBooks on my Pearl, you can imagine how ecstatic I am now. No Kindle for me, thank you.

    EMail: This, of course, is where Blackberry shines, so I wasn’t expecting an upgrade here. But most of my email is GMail based, so some parts of the experience are better. The best thing that my Blackberry did was have a single inbox that consolidated both Gmail accounts and Hotmail. But there was some weirdness. For my Hotmail account, reading an email on my Blackberry marked it as read on Hotmail. But with Gmail (via IMAP) the read/unread marks did not sync up. That was annoying.

    On the Incredible, the annoyances have flipped. GMail is totally in sync and totally the way GMail should be (with conversations). Everything syncs perfectly. My only gripe is that my work and personal accounts are in separate inboxes (same app, different lists). But the seamless way that notifications work on the phone make that a fairly minor issue. My Hotmail account has to be in a separate app entirely. That’s annoying. And since it is POP3, it does not update the read/unread marks.

    So this is probably a wash.

    Camera: I haven’t used it enough yet. Seems good.

    Video: Haven’t tried it yet.

    Browser: Very nice. I’ve tried a couple of the other browsers, but the default one works very well. All the pinch and zoom stuff works very nicely. I also like the cut and paste implementation. Very effective when dealing with small print.

    HTC Sense UI: Here I can’t really compare it to the regular Android home page since I’ve never used it. I’m comparing more to the look of an iPhone. I like this a lot. HTC created some nice widgets to give the phone a cool look. If you’ve seen pictures of the Incredible you’ve seen the big old school clock at the top with local weather integrated. Very nice. And the customizable pages are very iPhone like.

    And, though totally pointless, I’m a fan of the Live Wallpaper. When your screen is largely covered with apps, the wallpaper isn’t that important. But I like the "Grass" Live Wallpaper. Your background is basically the blue sky with a few blades of grass at the bottom. Nothing fancy. But the sky changes color with the time of day (you get tiny stars at night) and if you look carefully you notice that the blades of grass are swaying slightly in the breeze. Again, totally pointless, but I like it. I still need to see what affect it has on the battery.

    Sense UI comes with FriendFeed, which consolidates Twitter and Facebook. This I don’t like, because it automatically posts updates to both. I really use them differently so I wouldn’t want to post the same thing in both places. Though it does consolidate them nicely, I’ll be using the separate apps.

    Battery: This is still the big unknown. Today is the first day starting with a full charge and I’m still not using it normally. I’m playing constantly. I’m also always around WiFi so it is constantly using WiFi (better performance, more battery drain). I’m downloading apps right and left and I’m constantly tinkering. So I doubt the charge will last the day. HTC has a nice WiFi on/off widget, so if battery life seems to be an issue, I won’t leave WiFi on all the time.

    Ah, I just found a place where the phone will tell you what apps are using how much battery. Nice. I had one rogue app eating battery so that one is out of here.

    Phone quality: Well, I’m still on Verizon so it’s excellent. I’ve done multiple work conference calls with no issues.

    Music: I’ve always used my iPod for music, so having it on my phone isn’t a big deal to me. But it is nice to have. Clearly if you buy a lot of music from iTunes and you want that music on your phone, an iPhone is the best option. But since iTunes has started using iTunes Plus as their standard, all of those songs will copy over fine. I tried out doubleTwist, which functions like iTunes for Andriod. It worked great, synced my iTunes playlists onto my phone.

    Apps: This is the big deal, of course. I’m sure the iPhone has more and better apps. But the things I really care about I have:

    • eReader – for eBooks. Links with Barnes and Noble
    • AIM (there are IM aggregators, but everyone I chat with is on AIM)
    • SportsTap – very nice app with all sports scores.
    • Seesmic – Twitter client
    • Facebook
    • Google Sky Map – Can’t wait to use this in Cape Cod.
    • Shazam
    • WordPress – can update this blog
    • Yelp
    • Documents to Go
    • NewsRob – RSS feed that links to your Google Reader settings
    • Pandora
    • PdaNet – Phone can act as modem for my PC
    • and a bunch of games

    I haven’t paid for any apps yet. ZipCar has an iPhone app that would be nice to have, but it isn’t available for Android yet. There’s a cool iPhone NYC subway app and I think it’s available for Android but not free. I’m sure there are others, but right now I’m good.

    So far it’s a great phone. Now, if the iPhone was available on Verizon, would I get the Incredible? Excellent question. The Incredible is probably second best, but I’m pretty disappointed in Apple’s closed approach. So I’d be pretty conflicted…