Nuclear Bits

After learning about Tim Cook’s recent letter about the iOS 6 Maps app, I’ve seen a few tweets on my timeline asking/wondering if Steve Jobs would’ve publicly apologized in the same way. Let me take you through a few of examples.

Exhibit A, from 2007, just after the launch of the first-gen iPhone. Steve wrote a similar letter and published it on Apple.com after the price of the 8GB model was dropped from $599 to $399 just two months after it went on sale.

We want to do the right thing for our valued iPhone customers. We apologize for disappointing some of you, and we are doing our best to live up to your high expectations of Apple.

Then we have Exhibit B, from 2010, when the iPhone 4 went on sale. Apple released a statement after the initial pre-order rush caused a lot of customers to miss out due to system malfunctions.

Many customers were turned away or abandoned the process in frustration. We apologize to everyone who encountered difficulties, and hope that they will try again or visit an Apple or carrier store once the iPhone 4 is in stock.

And then there’s Exhibit C (Via @annkur), from WWDC 2011, where he introduced iCloud.

It just works…. Now, you might ask, why should I believe them, they’re the ones who brought me MobileMe. It wasn’t our finest hour, let me just say that. But we learnt a lot…

Still wondering?

The folks at Cleartip have published some stats by looking at the traffic to their mobile site. Let’s ignore the sensationalist headline — ‘iOS Adoption Rate in India‘ (Stats only show users accessing their mobile site) for a while and look at the numbers.

Prior to its September 19th launch, iOS 6 constituted a negligible 0.2% of the iOS traffic share to our mobile site. On the first day of its release, iOS 6′s share clocked in at 6%. Another four days later, iOS 6 surged to almost a 25% share.

That’s pretty impressive, considering that all 25% of these users had to manually update to iOS 6. I’m guessing the numbers would’ve been pretty low going from iOS 4 to iOS 5 since OTA updates were not possible back then. In a “broadband” deprived country like India, I’m sure OTA updates played a huge role in this case.

At the time of going to press, the two most recent versions of iOS (iOS 5.1.x & iOS 6) have a combined contribution of 75% of iOS traffic to our mobile site.

I checked my analytics data and interestingly, iOS 5.1.x & 6.0 users already contribute over 95% of the total iOS traffic to Beautiful Pixels. This site has them at a little over 70%.

Cleartrip also decided to look at the Android users to their mobile site:

Android’s latest OS Jelly Bean 4.1.x released over two months ago; has a measly 1.8% share of the Android market so far. Over a year has passed since the launch of Ice Cream Sandwich, but its share still hovers at just 28% — a milestone that iOS6 will surpass in just another couple of days.

No surprises here, barely any Android phones that are sold in India have received the ICS update, let alone Jelly Bean.

I wonder what the stats are like for their native iOS app, which is pretty good too.

About two months ago, I got myself a Galaxy Nexus. I’ve been an iOS user since early 2008 when I bought the first-generation iPhone from the grey-market in Mumbai for 22k. That was the most I had spent on a mobile phone, and it instantly went on to prove itself as a worthy purchase and the smartest decision I had taken in a while. The iOS ecosystem (known as iPhone OS back then) grew like crazy after the introduction of iPhone OS 2.0 and we all know where it stands today. Since then, I’ve moved from the first-gen iPhone to the iPhone 3GS and then from the iPhone 3GS to the iPhone 4 (and hopefully from the iPhone 4 to iPhone 5 very soon). You could say that I’m well settled into iOS by now and have gotten used to the freedom and limits it has to offer.

Yet, in working with apps for Beautiful Pixels over the last couple of years, I’ve grown more and more curious about the Android ecosystem. We get a lot of email asking us why we don’t review Android apps or just from an Android developer asking us to take a look at his app. So I decided to jump onboard the Android wagon and got myself a Galaxy Nexus and was using it as my primary phone for the last two months, up until last week when I moved back to my iPhone 4.

While the Android keyboard has seen a terrific improvement from what it was back in Android 2.2, it still falls short of the experience the iOS keyboard offers. My experience using the keyboard on the Galaxy Nexus was the biggest annoyance during the time it was my primary phone. For starters, it just doesn’t have the same touch feeling as on the iPhone. The latter feels much swift and responsive than the former, which required a slightly harder push on the touch. Now, I’m told this may be because the screen of the GNex isn’t as good as the one on the Samsung S3 or the HTC One X, but the Nexus is still the best phone out there that offers a stock Android experience.

Moreover, the actual typing experience on the Android keyboard is terrible. Suggestions are just not there yet. Take a look at the following example. I wanted to type ‘answered‘, but missed out on the character ‘s‘. The iOS keyboard correctly suggests if I’d like to change it to ‘answered’. The Android one, on the other hand, suggests ‘answer’ and ‘sneered’ — none of which are close to what I’ve typed.

Spelling suggestion on iOS and Android Keyboards

So I try to check what other options are available for suggestion and tap the word and am shown the following list. 10 cookie points to anyone who can point out the suggestion I’m looking for in this list.

Android Keyboard Suggestion

So what’s the next logical step? You try to manually move the cursor to the spot and add the missing characters. Unfortunately again, moving the cursor on Android isn’t as easy as it is on iOS. You can’t tap and drag to move the cursor, you either have to tap exactly where you want the cursor to be or tap once so a little blue handle appears and then drag & move the handle. So this takes 2-3 extra taps to get it right every time in my case.

I also particularly dislike the way the Android Keyboard requires 3 taps to add a word to the dictionary. When you tap once, it shows you an arrow with the option to “Tap again to add to dictionary”. Now ideally, this should be enough. But this then leads to a popup with the word you’re trying to add to the dictionary filled in, with the option to Save or Cancel. A totally unnecessary 3rd step in my opinion. There are other minor annoyances with the keyboard, but these are by far the worst of the lot. The suggestions are helpful very few times. Now, many have suggested that I should be using the SwiftKey 3 keyboard, and that I have. It just didn’t suit my style of typing and often tried to be a step or two ahead of what I was trying to do, resulting in unnecessary deletion and redoing what I had typed. I gave up after 3 days. It felt like I was trying to get used to SwiftKey 3 instead of getting it to adapt to my style of typing.

I recently signed up for this service called Branch, which is very clever idea that lets you have insightful conversations about interesting topics with like-minded people. You can either join an existing topic or create a new one if you want. I’ve been using the service for about 3 days now and I really like what I see. It has a very clean and subtly beautiful design and good aesthetics. There are some great conversations that you can read through and some very nice advice and thoughts from people I look up to.

I figured it’d be a good start to hear about the backup strategies my peers employ to backup their personal data — what apps or services they use and if there were any that I wasn’t already aware of. I’ve embedded the thread below:

Amazon has just launched the India Kindle Store that offers over a million books to customers from India at prices in Indian Rupees. The books include both international and local titles and Amazon promises it is the largest selection with the lower prices of any e-bookstore in India.

The books available on the India Kindle Store are just the usual kindle versions that have a separate price listed in INR. A couple of days ago before the launch of this store, I purchased this ‘A Game of Thrones‘ book via the regular US pricing of $4.11 and was charged Rs. 238.22 to my Credit Card. The same book, now that the Indian pricing is live, is available at Rs. 241.52. I’m guessing the pricing will fluctuate based on the dollar value.

You can read these books on any iPad, iPhone, Mac, PC or any Android-device by using the official Kindle app. Once you purchase a book, it is wireless delivered to the device of your choice and you can sync your read position across all your devices using their Whispersync technology. Amazon also lets you download samples of the books so you can “try before you buy”.

Along with the Kindle Store, the company has also made the Kindle devices available locally via Croma’s retail outlets. Customers can purchase the Kindle from any Croma outlet or via their Online Store at Rs. 6999. Moreover, Amazon is also selling the Kindle, Kindle Touch and Kindle Touch 3G and Kindle DX via their website with an option to ship to India, but that will incur additional customs and shipping costs.

When I wrote about my Nexus 7 a few days ago, I mentioned that I’d be trying the Kindle app on it. I installed the app and purchased the first book from A Song of Ice and Fire a couple of days ago and have found myself immersed in reading. Sure, a major reason for that is the book itself, but reading on the Nexus 7 is a pleasure in itself and I’m definitely seeing myself purchase a lot more books now.

A couple of days ago, Pod2g — prominent hacker in the jailbreak scene — discovered a flaw in the way iOS handles its text messaging. In a nutshell, what it means is that anyone with proper knowledge of SMS technologies can spoof the header of a text message in such a way that the iPhone displays the the “reply to” number as the sender, instead of the number that’s actually sending the message. While this is a serious issue, it’s not something that’s suddenly affecting millions of users.

IANS wrote about this story, with the headline “Hacker claims security flaw with Apple’s iPhone“, which is fair enough. India’s leading daily, The Times of India, republished syndicated the same IANS article, but changed the headline to “Apple iPhone security flaw revealed by hacker“, which again is a fair headline.

Here’s what Firstpost decided was a good headline to go with, syndicating the exact same story sourced from IANS.
“Not so secure: Text messaging on iPhone can be hacked“.

I like how Firstpost’s team throws the term ‘hacking’ around so freely.

A week ago, I went ahead and bought myself a Nexus 7. I hadn’t planned on buying the device, nor was I actively trying to get my hands on one. I had read its reviews of the major technology sites after it was launched, but it remained on my “It’d be cool if I had it” list. The only attractive thing about it for me was its form factor. But when I received an IM from Mikhail saying that he knew someone who was getting a couple of devices to India, I figured I’d give it a try.

When the rumors about the “iPad mini” picked up steam recently, I wrote that it would only appeal to me if Apple made it handy & light enough that I can easily hold it in one hand. I already have an iPhone 4 and the new iPad. So the only reason why I’d want to own a device that sits between these two screen sizes is reading — a device with a screen big enough to comfortably read and a form factor small enough that it’s light and easy to hold. The Nexus 7 appeared to fit this criteria perfectly, so I went ahead with the purchase. The device isn’t officially sold in India yet, so this was a grey-market purchase at Rs. 14,999.

The Nexus 7 measures 198.5mm x 120mm x 10.45mm. It’s just 12cm wide, and hence is very easy to comfortably hold between your fingers and thumbs. It weighs just 340 grams, so it’s also light enough that you can hold at the sides, gripping by your palm and resting your thumb on the bezel on the side. This makes the Nexus 7 the perfect little reading device for me in terms of form factor. However, that means nothing if the screen isn’t good enough for reading text. Thankfully, the Nexus 7 has a 7″ screen with a 1280×800 back-lit IPS display. That’s a pixel density of 216ppi, almost as good as 264ppi on the Retina Display of the new iPad. This way, the Nexus 7 has a great screen for displaying both text and image/video content in a small package and makes for the perfect reading device for me.

The very first app I installed on the device was Pocket and then, Google Reader. Pocket looks incredibly great on here and every night, just before I sleep, I spend a good 30 minutes lying down & reading through the articles I have added to Pocket. I have found myself reading a lot more on this device than on my iPhone or iPad, in spite of them having better reading apps. Moreover, my reading consumption has vastly increased in the last 7 days. I am going to install Amazon’s Kindle app and see if I can complete reading a book entirely on this device, considering I’m someone who generally hates reading books. In my 26 years of existence, I have read a total of 5 books only.

Rumors and reports that Apple’s readying a smaller iPad have gained momentum in recent weeks, with a possible introduction as early as an event on September 12th. However, a lot of these reports claim that this smaller iPad will continue to have a 4:3 screen ratio with a resolution of 1024×768. I don’t know what this means for the device measurements, but if it’s wide enough that I have trouble holding it on one hand, I see no reason why I’d want to buy it.

I know I spent 15k on this Nexus 7, but it was all well worth it.