This is going to be a long, hard war and there will be no clear winner. Let me start by saying that both phones are exceptional devices, and even as I’ve made my transition to Nexus One, there are days when I lust after the 3GS for seemly no reasons reason other than its sheer sexiness.

So, why did I switch to Nexus One? A combination of geekiness and practicality:

Openness: Let’s start with the geekiness. I like the fact that Android is open, and that developers have more freedom to develop great apps.  I like the fact that Steve Jobs doesn’t obsessively reign over the inventiveness of the entire mobile computing world, blocking competition and innovation in entire categories that potentially compete with Apple’s revenue streams. Browsers, podcasters, Turn-by-turn directions – Apple has selectively blocked anything potentially competitive. Mac freaks are prone to throwing hissy fits about the big bad PC, have they looked at the developer terms for the iPhone?

Multi-threading: Multitreading may seem like an obscure requirement, but its actually quite mainstream. Why should you get kicked out of chat everything you recieve a call? Why should your online radio station stop playing if you want to browse through your notes? Basically, why can’t applications run in the background? Android does multitasking beautifully. Notifications are subtle and effective, and running multiple apps has apparently little or no impact on battery life.

Tweak-ability: There are a myriad setting you can play around with until the feel is just right for you. iPhone has made improvements over time in its configurability, but its still not quite there. For example, I can specifically position icons on an empty screen in Android. May not seem like a big deal, it isn’t, but its a tweak that improve usability for me. Can’t do it on the iPhone.

Navigation: While I enjoy the minimalism of the iPhone, a single home button is too constrained. I like the navigation buttons on the Nexus One (and other Android sets). When I press Search, it brings up a context sensitive search bar. When I press Menu, it shows the settings and options available. The presence of context sensitive buttons makes the user experience more consistent, and the navigation better anchored.

Widgets: Widgets are little apps running on your home screens, making information and functionality available right up front. You can have todos and upcoming appointment showing on the home screen, or a stream of facebook status updates, or weather and news…basically anything you want, accessible right from the home screens. Android, especially the HTC variety, come with great widgets out of the box, and of course developers can build any widget they fancy. iPhone, so far, is “widgetless”.

The Devil’s Advocate

That, in not quite a nutshell, is why I went the way of the Android, but there’s a little more to be said. While the applications in the Android store are steadily growing (20,000 the last I checked), that’s only about a fifth of what it is on the iTunes. I don’t think this a particularly useful measure, since the number of apps is immaterial, 95% of  users need 50 great apps. These apps exist on both platforms. There are some things that Androis, and Nexus One in particular needs to improve upon:

A desktop app: I get the whole cloud thing, but contrary to what most engineers in Google may believe, people on earth still use desktops. Google needs to make it easy for people to  browse and install apps, sync music, download podcasts and sync Outlook/Lotus Notes from their desktops. In terms of managing podcasts and music, iPhone/iTunes is light-years ahead of Android.

Hard buttons: The navigation buttons on Nexus One are soft, which basically means they’re part of the screen and operate on touch. Having hard buttons (like HTC Desire) would be much much better, as sometimes you have to press multiple times for the soft buttons to ‘click’.

Oleophobic Coating: In plain language, Nexus One needs an oil repellent coating (which the iPhone 3GS features). N1 is a smudge magnet and the sensitively of the touch screen seems to go down as the smudges get thicker.

There you have it, a run-down of the iPhone vs Android war. To summarize, iPhone and N1 are both exceptional devices, but to put it in the words of Gina Trapani “iPhone’s for sheep, Android’s for geeks”. And I’m no sheep.

-Adnan

Ten years back Blackberry was revolutionary. There were several features in the Blackberry that made it unique, for instance…

It was an early entrant into the PDA phones category.

Before that, you had cell phones (e.g. Motorola) and then you had PDAs (Palm). The space in between was ripe for conquering – and conquer Blackberry did.

It made mobile computing easy.

The ecosystem around Blackberry is closed and propriety  and as evil as that sounds, it’s actually a blessing for a vast majority of the users. The two greatest mobile makers in the world (RIM and Apple) have a stranglehold over their platforms, and they still continue to outsell everyone else. Blackberry obvious discovered very early on in the game that it had to make the use experience easy – no funky widgets, no unstable apps, no bells and whistles. And to do this it had to obsessive control the platform.

It made mobile data secure.

Its probably the only device that the president of the US would be allowed to use. RIM has always had a razor focus on the people they want to target: business users who travel and need to keep on top of their use email. BB is designed from the ground up to be secure – hence the close control over every aspect of the platform, including the telco part.

It pushed email

You have to understand that back in the day this was revolutionary. The fact that you could get emails as soon as someone on the other end pressed Send just played into the growing hyper-connectivity addiction. You might argue that you can do the same on your Windows Mobile by setting the mail client to check for email every 2 minutes. Yes, but it would require tweaking and cost data every time it connected. Blackberry was an elegant solution that just worked.

So there you have it, a brief run-down of what made Blackberry great. So basically, if you’re coming from mid 90s to early 2000s, and you discover the Blackberry, you will be dazzled, the clouds will part, the mountains will sing, and in divine unison everyone would seem to say…”BLACKBERRY”….but that was 10 years back.

If you go to the Blackberry after 2 years of living, loving and hating the iPhone, then at the best of time your reaction will be “Meh”. And the fact that Blackberry is increasingly trying to position itself as a consumer device is ironically making matters worse. But all is not lost, after using a flashy platform like iPhone, there are certain some aspects of BB that appealed to me:

• It’s Snappy: That’s the first thing you notice when you start playing with it. Try opening a calendar or contacts or another app on iPhone and then compare the loading time with Blackberry. BB gives instant a whole new meaning.
• Keyboard: I loved the keyboard on my BB. After 2 years of a soft iPhone keyboard, actually feeling the click of a button gave me this deep happy feeling that I only otherwise get when I eat organic cereal. There’s something real, healthy and satisfying about it. More practically though, while my typing speed is still probably quicker on a soft keyboard, what I still about physical buttons is that its easy to dial numbers and look for contacts…just start typing and viola.
• ….struggling to think of another bullet.

But the real reason people continue to use BB is non of the above; its legacy. In most cases it works with corporate email systems, and is unanimously approved by all major corporate and government CIOs. That’s a difficult feat to match for touchy, feely mobile media devices like iPhone and N1, at least for the time being. So essentially vast swathes of the user base is essentially blackmailed into using BB.

In almost every aspect of usability, Blackberry lags behind iPhone and Android. The trackball or the optical track-pad is just no match for capacitive touch, or pinch-and-zoom. Internet browsing is generally a pain on BB; you can’t double tap to the section you want to read. Adding a number to an existing contact requires like 4 deliberate steps, not 2 simple taps. BB doesn’t maintain SMS conversations in one place, as each message you receive and send shows separately. You have to scroll down to the received message, click R for reply and only then can you SMS back.

I could go on and on and on with usability pains on the Blackberry, but it has been written before. To put it in the words of Infoworld “the BlackBerry has become the Lotus Notes of the mobile world: It’s way past its prime.”

The past six months have been a slog. First I lost my beloved iPhone in a taxi in Bulgaria, then to compound the matter I got talked into getting a Blackberry, sold by the constant evangelical preaching of my colleagues. For the first 4 weeks I tried to convince myself that once I get past the learning curve, life will improve immeasurably. It never did. So I plotted on getting the smacking new 3GS. When the elaborate plot to impact a a set from Italy failed, I turned to coercing my friends in Hong Kong to ship me one. I need to work on my persuasion skills.

Many, many times I almost caved into the temptation of the slick new iPhone, but persevering in the tradition of monks, I held out, and then one day, like a revelation, I saw a gleaming rendition of the Google Phone and I decided I had to have one. In two weeks, serendipity played its part, and I had a little Android playing in my hands.

So, after using the three titan of the smart phone world, I understandably have strong opinions on the subject…

Part II: The Blackberry Mistake

CUPERTINO, CA—Claiming that he completely forgot about the much-hyped electronic device until the last minute, a frantic Steve Jobs reportedly stayed up all night Tuesday in a desperate effort to design Apple's new tablet computer. “Come on, Steve, just think—think, dammit—you're running out of time,” the exhausted CEO said as he glued nine separate iPhones to the back of a plastic cafeteria tray. “Okay, yeah, this will work. This will definitely work. Just need to write 'tablet' on this little strip of masking tape here and I'm golden. Oh, come on, you piece of shit! Just stick already!” Middle-of-the-night sources reported that Jobs then began work on double-spacing his Keynote presentation and increasing the font size to make it appear longer.

via Frantic Steve Jobs Stays Up All Night Designing Apple Tablet | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source.

Here’s the quick and clear guide to clarity in writing:

Short: Short words are the rule that makes your exceptional words sing. Short sentences make powerful points faster.

Talk: Write like you talk, except better. Better words, better arrangement, better flow. Know the rules of grammar, then break them like you do. But better.

Care: Clarity comes from deeply caring if people truly understand.

Do you?

via Three Quick Steps to Clear Writing | Copyblogger.

A Pakistani startup Help Me, an off-shoot of NextGen Innovations, was featured in VentureBeat last week. VB is a major Silicon Valley based tech blog, and its quite notable for a Pakistani startup to have caught their attention.

Farzal, the founder of Help Me, identified the  unmet requirement of mobile apps to offer support for to their user base. Currently the customer support for mobile apps is atrocious at the best of times. Even for apps that take significant development effort, after sales service is limited to angry App Store ratings, and customer complaints sent on untracked email addresses. App developers, often lone geeks, don’t have the infrastructure or experience to manage customer service when their apps hit prime time. That’s where Help Me comes in.

They bring technical expertise, customer service experience,  multiple delivery channels and flexible pricing (e.g. pricing on per ticket basis) to startups that don’t want to abandon their customers to obscure FAQs. Awesome idea, well executed!

Great work guys!!

-Adnan

Many people, myself included, remain suspended in the search for the earth shattering idea that will change everything; the idea that meets at the very least the following criteria:

1) It’s solves a real problem
2) People will pay real money for it
3) Competitors can’t replicate it
4) Market is large and growing
5) Differentiation is substantial and sustainable

Now, nobody said running a business, or starting one was easy, but aren’t these standards too high. How many successful businesses do we know of that met these requirements when they were founded? With the exception of a few, highly specialized businesses, backed by a portfolio of patents and years of PhD research (e.g. Nanoink), I can’t think of anything that is not imitable.

If you build a widget (especially the web 2.0 category), by the time of your second sale you’ll have a competitor. Building software has just become too easy. If you think you can differentiate based on technology alone, then I think you’re deluding yourself. So the questions is: Are these tech entrepreneurs, and the investors who fund them infected by some denial-of-reality bug?

What was novel about Facebook, or inimitable about StumbleUpon, Delicious, Upcoming. What was so earth-shattering about Yelp? Each of these solved a real problem, BUT:

• People weren’t willing to pay any money for them
• There were incumbent competitors operating successfully
• There was no question of sustainable differentiation

The last I checked these businesses, and many others like them, are the poster kids of what it  means to be a tech startup and an entrepreneur. We aspire to build companies that don’t meet the text book criteria of a sustainable business. Somethings gotta give.

This movie should be a must watch for all educationists. Education is not about sticking your degree on the wall, its not even about having a degree at all-its about learning. Thats the part that we so often miss. In my academic life, I met hundreds of students, and so few of them enjoyed their curricula that its disconcerting. “IT mein bahot scope hai” was the general wisdom, as people were lining up for H1Bs-the gateway to a good life. And it was all for naught.

Busts and booms come and go. There will be a new “in” thing, the mouse-trap of the future. Screw all that. If you want to be an artist, a historian, a writer or an imperial entomologist-why the hell not?

I absolutely loved the movie, and highly recommend it.

I just came across one of the most impressive promotional  ideas I’ve seen recently, and it just costs a couple of hours of effort and heap-loads of talent. While googling for a review of Smashing Magazine, I came across a critique of the website. Now this critique wasn’t the usual flat, ugly blog post, but a beautiful, individually styled analysis, employing and referencing best practices from usability and typography. It striking enough to receive over 70 comments, including one from the editor-in-cheif of Smashing Magazine.

Out of curiosity, I clicked on About to see who the designer was. I was expecting a formally trainer graphic designer out of California. Surprise!! It was Amrinder Singh from Mishriwala, a tiny village in Punjab, India. He really stands out from the clutter of web designers and design shops…and he just graduated two years back. Very impressive.

For those running outsourcing web design shops or design studios, there is a lesson to be learnt here.

-Adnan

Finding like-minded geeks in Dubai has been really tough. When I first came here, the only “entrepreneurship” that people were willing to talk about was flipping property. In a city plauged by superlatives, there wasn’t much place for modest, introspective, “thinking” geeks. Well, hopefully, there is now.

Some guys in RIT (Dubai) and DSO finally decided to get together and talk tech. A fresh change from the networking events littered by suited marketing “executives”, selling crappy products that they don’t understand.

I’m excited; the first meet up is on Feb 9th. Sign up here.

-Adnan