First of all, Google has been updating their default Android English/European keyboard and the Chinese pinyin keyboard. Google pinyin has a button to fast switch to English but there’s no way of getting back. Fortunately Smart Keyboard Pro added Chinese recently. This has a simple iPhone-like button to switch between any languages you have enabled. Finally we have a one-button switch between English and Chinese.

The English keyboard is very good, at least as good as Android’s default keyboard although you may need to get in and change some settings like getting auto capitalisation and training full stops/spaces to work etc. The Chinese keyboard seemed as competent as Google pinyin although of course it doesn’t have the sync to cloud stuff.

Mark Carter, the guy behind the Hanping dictionary on Android, prompted me to take a fresh look at the handwriting IMEs. Now I don’t think these sorts of IMEs are useful for non-native speakers, as a rule, because we tend not to be super fast at sketching hanzi and quite experienced with pinyin.

However one app really surprised me, gPen. It’s available in traditional and simplified variants. When you run it you get a large qwerty keyboard with an animated advert on the top. Oh oh! And it makes horrific tones out of the box, so you hit the settings and they’re all in Chinese which is going to prove problematic for some.

However… once I turned the tones off and dialled up the time I had to write a character (increased the delay allowable before the IME goes with what I’ve written), I found it very good! What you do is sketch on top of the qwerty keyboard, it’s genius really. So you can tap out stuff in English if you want, or sketch out characters.

At first I was painstakingly drawing characters with limited success but later on I just scribbled them and it seemed to work better somehow, not sure why that is. It looks like it’s stroke order sensitive, which is fine if you’ve been religious about stroke order when you learned characters like I have been. Maybe that’s the extra information it needs to work so well even on messy scribbles?

Now I’m not sure I’d actually use gPen much because I find the Smart Keyboard Pro option much more useful for me. However the IME is so good that it’s absolutely useful in terms of sketching a character you don’t know into a dictionary.

It may also be worth mentioning an app called Hanzi Recognizer. This is a standalone full screen app which allows you to sketch out a character and get a list of candidates and CE-DICT entries for them. It’s free so I suppose I should try be nice, but it’s hard having been spoiled by Pleco’s recognizer. You need to finish writing something and then hit recognize. It also seems to put odd stroke labels on what you’re sketching, as if you’re certain about those on a character you don’t know… still anyway, it seems useful in light of no other Android apps like this.

Firstly, these guys love themselves. Rather than just put the damn thing in the market, for the last year we’ve had to mess around with a craptastic seperate installer app, frequently dig out old usernames and passwords for a beta to get reinvited to download the thing again. On top of that at one point the craptastic installer wouldn’t register the keyboard so it unhelpfully just whinged about not being the right device because it thought you had stolen it. Turns out the solution was a weird hack of pressing back, right at the end, rather than OK. Nice…

Then there’s that fucking pop-up. This is what makes me think they’re not even using their own keyboard. If you select a word that’s down the list of choices, because of a custom word you entered, Swype helpfully pops up this message to tell you what’s happened and tell you that you can delete the word if you like. That’s great, but it pops up every fucking time this happens. There’s no control to disable it. What’s more, it’s persisted through at least one update. This is just plain baffling.

Worse of all, however, is the fact that whatever was good about Swype they’ve just gotten rid of. Where once I used to be able to sketch out words and write away with minimal corrections, now every second bloody word needs to be corrected. Sometimes I’m just tapping the keys because I’m in a bloody hurry and can’t be arsed taking my chances on whether Swype will get it right again. I thought this was maybe me, but today I spoke to someone else who had exactly the same experience. Swype has basically gone shit.

All this time, you can’t buy it, the endless beta bullshit, the lame show stopping obvious bugs, and the virtually broken actual swyping, and we’re ready to call it a day. It’s frustrating because they recently added an actual swypable Chinese keyboard. It’s kind of nifty although they’ve not really thought through about how much of a time waster it is to disambiguate two things in a row for single characters. There’s also a handy way to flick to English, but the long press scroll through entire list of languages to get back to Chinese.

It’s actually easier to use the Google pinyin keyboard and switch to English, even without text prediction, than it is to have to switch entire languages. I switched to the standard Android keyboard earlier this morning and already I’m not going “oh for fuck sake!” at my phone at yet another Swypo. Thanks Swype, you were good when you were young but now you’ve let yourself go and you’ve become far too much hard work, I’m ready for the next big thing.

I’ve tried out all the ones that are available: Swype, Shape Writer and SlideIT. The latter two can be simply downloaded from the Android Marketplace right now for free. Swype needs you to head to their site and sign up to the beta, at which point you can download an app which itself requires you to log in to your beta account on your phone, download the Swype keyboard and installs it. They had a bit of trouble with the various ROM cookers slapping Swype in their ROMs so they seem to have gone all medieval on their ass which is kind of understandable.

I think I can say with a fair degree of certainty that Swype is the best of the bunch. That’s not to say Shape Writer and SlideIT are bad, they’re both way better than using a tappity-tap qwerty keyboard but they are certainly less polished. The keyboard graphics are a bit on the naff side, or even weirdly blurrily resized, and ultimately they’re let down a little by deficiencies in being able to accurately and quickly deal with punctuation and capitalisation – as well as generally being more temperamental in getting the right word.  Ordinarily I’d say go download one of those since it’s just a tap in the marketplace, but I’m confident enough that anyone will love the input system enough – you may as well go and sign up for Swype and get a copy of that.

Eventually they’re going to charge, one presumes, and I really have no problem with that idea at all. I’ve paid for things which have given me a lot less utility than Swype has. I mean… I actually reply to fairly complicated emails in a reasonable length, with one hand while walking back to Melbourne Central from UniMelb… which is quite a way removed from what was possible with the old tappity-tap keyboards.

In other pretty exciting news, a chap I know on Google Buzz has just today kicked out a beta of his Han Writing app, a Chinese/Japanese/Korean/English handwriting IME. It’s kind of bewildering, very advanced stuff. Essentially you can draw squigs that look a bit like cursive Asian script and it will pick them up. Obviously this is most of use to people who are more at home squigging Asian characters than they are using a qwerty keyboard. This, sadly, is not me by any stretch. However if you’ve any interest in this sort of stuff you should definately search for Han Writing on the Marketplace and give it a spin. It’s impressive work.

Which brings me full circle to the area that most affects me with keyboards on Android and that is how to efficiently handle multi-lingual input. I type a lot more English than Chinese, but I type enough Chinese, and typically embedded within English, that it’s actually quite irritating the process of switching keyboards with the long-press system. Han Writing is quite interesting in this regard because it offers a qwerty tappity-tap keyboard mode where you can type pinyin and Chinese characters will appear for you to tap. Unfortunately at present the qwerty mode is really pretty basic for English, so it’s not really a solution, but it highlights this niche.

What I want is this: I want Swype to be able to process pinyin. I’ve thought about this a bit and I think it’s probably unreasonable to have Swype just operate in a mixed mode Chinese/English because lots of the pinyin is going to look like some sort of English. It would be better to have a simple mode button you press to switch. At which point the keyboard only looks at the very limited set of pinyin phonetics. Obviously the way prediction works with pinyin keyboards is slightly different, we break things down into words rather than individual characters. Since there’s like a bazillion different “shi” individual characters but not that many “shishi” ones.

If one restricts to writing actual words, the point you lift off sends a confirmation just like English. So when you squig out jingchang and lift off, pretty much it’s clear you mean 经常 and that should appear. I was also wondering about a further idea, taken from the way that Swype handles capitalisation. You can perform an additional gesture by scramming a finger to the top of the screen to indicate a capital. I wonder if you couldn’t add four gestures, maybe even the corners of the keyboard, to indicate a tone.

I have the sense that this wouldn’t be necessary a lot of the time, but sometimes it would make the difference between needing to select a character from a pop up list or inserting the correct one right off the bat. Particularly for, say, single character verbs and the like. Of course this is pipe dream stuff, it seems the IME guys working on English and the IME guys working on Asian languages are very distinctly different people. The only mixed-mode keyboards I’ve seen so far are the Chinese guys who often put in a sort of barely functional English keyboard. Interestingly the developers of the Android Sogou replied to me a couple of days ago about a list of suggestions to fix their English keyboard. Some four months after I sent them the email. I think that sort of thing summarises the priority this area is getting from people in either camp.

Unfortunately you can’t actually use it… That’s because if you try and draw it will just scroll the browser window around. Which is something so obvious you would have thought they’d have inserted some sort of UI control to stop this from happening. If they have, I haven’t found it.  Presumably this is an easy fix though. The only thing that’s now required is for the Skritter guys to craft a mobile web page with an appropriate sized flash app, probably the text will need to go on the top or the bottom rather than on the side like the current desktop version.

Still, the holy grail of mobile hanzi cramming might just be upon us. Sometimes I don’t even care if I’m getting old.

However my usage statistics showed something else, the device was using a LOT more power when I was out and about on campus. This ended up being a stronger correlation than the usage of Google Maps, although it was easy to blame Google Maps because it tended to be used during these points. What I ended up discovering was that it’s the AMOLED display on the Nexus One that is the power demo. The CPU too, if you can find ways to get it to do a lot of work, is a serious drainer. I think that CPU is better clocked at 850Mhz but the press/public latched onto Snapdragon being 1GHz so it became a marketing arms race.

The reason for the huge change in power drain was because of changing the screen brightness up to the highest level to read the screen in the bright Australian sun. I also want to make some comments on quality of display of LCD vs OLED.

Without making writing a lengthy and technical post about how the technologies work precisely, the difference between LCD and OLED is quite profound. With LCD you have a single backlight source, either fluorescent or white LEDs, and the LCD display itself cuts light making it out of the device. As opposed to OLED which has individual light sources for each pixel. Therefore it comes as no surprise to learn that LCDs use about the same power despite the display content, the only thing that changes power is the brightness of the backlight. There’s also an effect whereby LCDs can still be visable in bright light without needing to ramp up the backlight to such a level to provide a strong enough source of light to overcome the ambient light. Effectively light can bounce off the back drop that enters from outside, and not the backlight.

So what does this mean? Well, an OLED display with a largely black background uses less power because it’s not really doing too much. It’s not zero power for various reasons, but around the 30-40% mark of an LCD. It’s typically trotted out that an OLED display showing off typical program material will use less power than an LCD display. This is where things get complex and where basically the various marketing capacities of technology companies and mobile phones have chosen to measure and therefore state things in such a way that position OLED as being the all-conquering hero. It is not.

The problem for a device like a mobile phone is that you frequently will need to view something on a white background (a web site or a UI) in full daylight. Even the best OLED display is not as good as LCD as this and in order to be in the running we’re talking about 100% brightness. Under these conditions it can use 3-4 times, or more, power than an LCD. If this were rare you wouldn’t have a problem. However it’s not rare. A mobile phone goes outside and the program material often is of a bright nature. Some might be puzzled by Apple not choosing OLED on the iPad. Take a look at Apple’s UI. It’s white. An OLED display on an iPad could be catestrophically power hungry and a panel of that size would also be extrodinarily expensive.

LCD is a highly understood technology with a whole bunch of different implementations of various costs and trade-offs, of which it generally can be easier to find one which works best for a mobile device.  Apple went with an LED backlight IPS panel which is a pretty expensive choice but a very good one for image quality, brightness and wide viewing angle. There is a sub argument here on the readability of LCD versus so-called e-Ink, in general light-source displays are really bad for long viewing in low light. I wouldn’t want to read books on any LCD display.

Lastly another thing about quality of display. Anyone who has seen the display on an iPhone and a Nexus One will be left in no doubt the Nexus One has the better display. I find that the iPhone’s display in particular seems to suffer a major loss of contrast as the backlight is dropped, this is a fairly common issue with LCD and it’s also a symptom of older, cheaper, LCD technology. OLED is not immune from a reduction of image quality at lower brightnesses, in particular it has a fairly poor colour fidelity at lower brightnesses and overall like most organic LED materials, degradation is a lot more rapid than one would like.

To counteract that OLED panels are biased blue from the outset, so the faster drop-off of blue will be less noticable. That would be okay but the vendors then often bias the panel back to linear colour response, which effectively nullifies that approach. It’s possible, although I have no knowledge of this existing, that the driver circuitry could simply know hours of life and alter the colour balance to try attain a linear colour response over a greater proportion of screen life.

AMOLED displays, like the Nexus One, are certainly a bazillion times better than the previous high-res LCD displays. I’m talking as opposed to the more common QVGA like displays. I still have a HTC Touch HD which has the same resolution and size screen, more or less, and it’s not even in the same league. It is not clear to me what the ramifications are for LCD for such high resolutions. It may be that this is the reason that AMOLED is particularly suitable here, but I find it more likely that the relative rarity of displays in that resolution and size and desires to cost-cut weren’t giving LCD the run it could have.

The practical advice here for N1 owners is clear. Get a dark background on your N1 and try to avoid high brightness settings as much as you can. Conscious of the competition from high-spec Android phones it will be very interesting to see what approach Apple will take with the new iPhone. I feel certain it wont be OLED but they surely must be feeling some pressure to increase the resolution and display quality over the 3GS.

The question is whether the public love affair with OLED will vanish before OLED manages to tackle these shortcomings, or will it serve as a reminder that the old faithful LCD with some more recent innovations actually has the solution we’ve been looking for.

Then when we moved to leafy Belgrave,  40-odd  kilometers from Melbourne CBD, and got no Optus signal at all – I think it began to dawn on me that we had signed up to a third rate operator. Happily they charged me an absolute fortune to get out of my massive two year contract even after a year. Not a great experience so far and naturally sufficient that I shant be engaging their services again any time in, oh, my lifetime – and made pretty sure everyone else knew what a farce these guys were also.

So tail between legs we ran off to Telstra. No contracts, never again. Handsets owned outright, post-paid low-end plans. I also got one of Telstra’s fancy pants Next-G 3G dongles. The service overall has been excellent. The charges for data are absolutely astronomical, however, but hey I’ll take high charges for actual service than low charges for no service at all.

Circumstances changed when I started using a spangly new Nexus One. I was using the netbook and 3G dongle a whole lot less but a whole lot of data was appearing on my ‘browser pack’ on my phone. Today I called Telstra and disconnected the 3G dongle account and upgraded my browser pack to something they call “phone as a mobile”. Since I hacked the Nexus One to give me tethering I can either use the device itself or plug into my netbook (where it gets powered/charges) and sponge off the Net on that as required. I’m paying $59 for a 1GB allowance, which is probably, hopefully, more than I need and definitely more than I’d like to pay. However since if you go over they charge you 25c per megabyte, your break-even point is the 300MB pack with an additional 120MB downloaded pay-as-you-go which is 420MB. Nice.

Phoning Telstra up to get a service disconnected (when you have no contract) and upgrading the datapack on an existing phone was painless. What puzzles me though is why their website is just so diabolical. Once logged in half the functionality teleports you to disconnected websites. You have to piss about to sign up to monitor data usage, or to get online billing, all separate. You can’t upgrade your own plans, you can’t even buy a new plan although you can sort of upgrade phone and plan via their shop. It’s a terrible web site, reminiscent of also-ran operation in the UK rather than the incumbent in Australia.

What really pisses me off is that to get a 1GB data plan on a 3G dongle would cost me $39.95 a month and they’d ‘slow’ access after that – which is great. However 1GB on my phone, same network, is $59 and if I go over they’ll rape me sideways. There’s a very clear bias in charges where “phone as a modem” is loads more expensive. I think this is because they treat 3G dongles as being incremental business so they’re competing on price. I find it frustrating and disrespectful that I already give them a standing charge in addition to this higher charge data pack, just to have a mobile phone account for telephone calls – of which I make maybe 5 a month. I still need to do it this way because it’s simply more economical to have the large pool of quota (and the more sane 6c a megabyte) in one place available for my phone and my netbook.

I’m weary of the terrible telecoms situation in Australia. Weary of Telstra being the only one to offer a service that works properly but using this as a license to rip you off completely while cowboy operators that can’t run their web sites or customer service numbers, let alone a functional telephone network – lie, cheat and steal by falsely selling capacity they don’t have. Why can’t we have some actual respect?

Telstra need to bring their services up to date, fix your goddamn web site. Lower your prices not hugely but just so you’re not being absolutely ridiculous. Third party operators need to stop offering bargain basement services which they fail to deliver. More than anything else there needs to be a goddamn regulator with teeth to get stuck into this situation.

First thing is first though. Telstra need to charge me $39.99 for that 1GB plan on my mobile instead of $59 just like if I had the plan on a USB dongle. On what basis should it be otherwise?

Much of this has changed with the introduction of Google’s own handset, the Nexus One. First off it’s got a display that leaves the Touch HD in the dirt. The same 800 x 480 resolution but a magnificently sharp OLED display which is simply a joy to behold. Secondly the rest of the specs are pretty knock out including the 1GHz snapdragon chipset. Software wise the fact it’s a Google phone also solved another emerging issue I was tracking with Android handsets, that of old revisions of the OS due to OEMs being quite slow to update their legacy handsets. Clearly that’s not a problem with the Nexus One, it ships with the latest Android 2.1 and you can be damn sure it will be on the vanguard of Android releases.

So what is the Nexus One like if you’re interested in Chinese?

There’s really several ways you’d look at a Nexus One depending on what you’re familiar with. I think this is important enough that I’ll make a list:

1. Previous Windows Mobile handset owner: You will be blown away. The speed, functionality and of course having a simple fast and well-stocked market place will be a revelation. If you’re a Google services aficionado then you will find the Nexus One is a borderline religious experience.
2. iPhone owner: Having a nicely polished decently performing handset isn’t new to you. You’d notice the incredible screen on the Android and probably how customizable the nuts and bolts of the software is, such as how your home pages look with the addition of live backgrounds, custom ‘gadgets’ and so on. You’d also notice multi-tasking depending on what sort of person you are. If you’re someone who likes to run background clients doing things like IRC chat for example, you’ll find this a huge improvement. Many/most iPhone users would probably lament the relative lack of games on the Android platform however.
3. Previous Android handset owner: You’d be familiar with Android and so that really only leaves the speed and the screen resolution to impress you. The additions to recent Android OS revisions might not be a revelation, but if you’re stuck on a much older revision you might get jealous of Google’s latest fancy apps like ‘Googles’ and so on.

For me the Google services (and Facebook) integration is absolutely awesome. I found it easy enough to consolidate my Google contacts with my Facebook ones, fully populating my contacts list without referring to my old phone. Each contact has a Facebook profile piccy on it too, which is fantastic. Everything seems to connect well, Calendar, synced contacts with email and so on. The push email seems to be instant and I really enjoy the Android gmail client in exactly the way I didn’t enjoy having to use a web interface on WinMo.

Obviously the phone is a fully finger-powered unit unlike WinMo, that too is seriously magnificent for me. I was ecstatic to be able to simply download the Google pinyin IME off the market place and be greeted with a very high quality very easy to read Chinese IME system. The little track ball makes it fantastic just to scoot back and forth editing sentences too, which is something that’s a pain in inaccurate touch-screen devices normally, requiring you to often use touch cursors. Chinese apps on the Android Marketplace aren’t anywhere near as prevalent as the iPhone. So I would say that really the Nexus One is a great phone to use if you want to use it as a communication device that can do Chinese, but really if you want high quality Chinese apps you want an iPhone or an iPod.

That might deserve some clarification since the situation is quickly changing. The Apple App Store has a truly vast number of Chinese language reference/education applications. It is, however, hampered by diabolical search and much of them are pay-jobs and if you buy, that’s it. The Android Marketplace by contrast has less applications at present by some margin, however they are easier to find, ratings are more prevalent and even if it’s a paid app you can download and install and simply uninstall it if you don’t like it and get a refund. That’s really important. I spent a lot of money on a whole load of absolutely terrible iPhone apps. No more!

That includes the more expensive apps like the Chinese Collins Dictionary. Download it, try it and if you uninstall within a day you aren’t charged for it. Overall though there’s definately more and better dictionaries, flash card apps and character drawing/learning applications on the App Store than Android Marketplace and that’s before you consider the alpha and the omega of Chinese apps, Pleco. Pleco wont be Android because the author Mike Love is wedded to C and Android is Java. I can understand his point alright but still take the opportunity to give him a hard time on the Pleco forums

The Android is getting better as the marketplace is really picking up developers quickly particularly since you don’t need a Mac to make an app, and is is already easier to find good Chinese applications, but until Pleco arrives on Android all Chinese students pretty much require an iPod at the very least. At least in my view. On the other hand a fully loaded Pleco with dictionaries etc is kind of expensive and add an iPod as well… if you want to do stuff on the cheap… there might be an argument for Nexus One only. I’d have said iPhone but I think you’ll end up spending more money on bad apps before you find the good ones…

I can, I think, officially cross WinMo off any list of desirability because Pleco is now on iPhone/iPod and will shortly gain flashcard support making it functionally equivalent of the WinMo version. At present I’m carrying around a HTC Touch HD as an expensive PDA (radios turned off), just to run Pleco. I plan to migrate my use to the iPhone/iPod version when that’s up to speed. I don’t think it is by any means a showstopper to have a separate device to run something like Pleco if you’re learning Chinese. On the contrary I find it quite useful to be writing, for example, an email in Chinese and have Pleco open so I can check dictionary results etc.

Curiously one great app on WinMo, CooTek’s TouchPal the seriously awesome software keyboard with Chinese support, has been a non-starter on Android despite a lot of noise promising an Android version. The app appeared on the store for awhile, now it’s gone and CooTek’s uncommunicative support made noises about needing to wait until some OEM version appears (a handset operator presumably licensed it off them). That’s a bit of a shame but the Google Pinyin IME is excellent and Sogou (another huge IME on desktop PC in China) is also available and seemingly more appearing by the day. That’s pretty awesome given how easy it is to one-click install, try and uninstall if they’re crap. In fact… I think I need to install all of the Android Chinese IMEs and do a mini round up!

Any things I didn’t like about the Nexus One? A few small niggles. The buttons under the screen seem a bit hard to push, particularly noticeable with the menu/properties button. I’ve also experienced some battery draining events due to apps running in the background. Android doesn’t habitually let you actually close apps, you just switch between them. So there’s a market in apps which do actually close applications so you can free memory and CPU. Theoretically this shouldn’t be necessary but evidently it sometimes is as my battery draining event proves. I think this ought to be addressed at the OS level. If Google were smart they’d collect CPU cycle statistics anonymously somehow and feed those back to the market place and display a figure for each app so you can judge what a hog it is. This is important these days because the Nexus One has a huge amount of CPU grunt. This is handy (fastest phone I have ever used by some margin!) but it means that a bad app can quickly consume a lot of battery also.

Finally, Google being somewhat less evil than most, the boot loader can be simply unlocked to enable loading your own stuff. They give you a warning about warranty but there’s no exploits necessary. I performed this task very easily and then applied a simple patch to give me root access and to enable tethering support (something my WinMo phone did out of the box to be fair). I’m not anticipating needing to hack the bejesus out of my phone like I did on WinMo just to obtain a satisfactory appearance, but so long as there are advantages to being able to patch the OS (apps that need root, tethering etc) then it’s great that this isn’t difficult to do. I would say in general there’s less need to hack the Nexus One than this is either an iPhone or a WinMo – because generally Android is more open is isn’t about stopping you from wanting to do what you want to do because you just arbitrarily decided people should do those things (Apple) or you’re fundamentally an incompetent mobile OS provider (Microsoft). Android is absolutely awesome in almost every way right out of the box.

Overall for me, the Nexus One is the pick of the bunch as far as smart phones go. It’s been awhile since I had a phone that I actually enjoyed using. However that should be tempered with the knowledge that I walk around with a WinMo and an iPod as well, I like to own the best tool for everything rather than the best tool which is a compromise of being able to do everything in one unit.

If you’re a student of Chinese I think a Nexus One and an iPod is the best combination in 2010.

The biggest problem is there’s just bazillions of exactly the same thing. Dead simple stuff, often straight shovelware front ends for existing free content. There are some good efforts regarding flash cards and writing practice but for everyone that’s good, there’s literally a hundred that are not. Because, quite honestly, anyone making an application can count on getting maybe 5 downloads due to this insanity, it obviously doesn’t bode well for quality software development.

On the other hand I’m currently beta testing Pleco for the iPhone. This being a new version of what is hands down the most ambitious, feature-laden high quality mobile Chinese language reference tool in the world – previously only being available on Windows Mobile and Palm. It’s got a bunch of bugs right now but it’s so far removed from the barrels of shovelware garbage on iTunes it’s impossible to communicate it. When it is released it’s likely to get absolutely buried in the garbage, and it’ll be priced at a level which will quite obviously make it the most expensive application on the store… that’s terrible really.

That said, I think word-of-mouth in the Chinese student community is enough, people will go looking for it and searching for ‘pleco’ should pretty much work in the utterly broken iTunes search scheme. What about all the other apps though? Why can’t Apple properly sort their shit out. Expose the App Store database properly on the web so we can use our actual web browsers instead of the iTunes Safari-powered abortion… that would be a good start!

Maybe if the market wasn’t so broken it would be worth the effort for these developers to spend a little more time and effort in making genuinely useful and original applications. As it stands I’m left feeling that maybe someone has but quite honestly I cannot see how on earth you’d find them.

So an upgrade to an android handset is a foregone conclusion to me, hopefully shifting Pleco to running on my iPod when they release that later this year. With that sort of upgrade looming I felt I didn’t have anything to lose. So I upgraded my previously hacked HTC Touch HD rom to a few different cooked varieties including WM 6.5. Well 6.5 was a farce, it has a sort of finger-friendly front menu thing but it’s entirely based around Microsoft’s shit software (browser etc) and there’s no easy way to edit it yourself. It’s basically lightyears behind HTC’s TouchFlo 3D… and as for making it all more finger friendly, MS basically hacked some UI elements to be larger so now you’ve got frankenstein offspring of a 90s UI and some sort of weird special-needs ‘accessibility’ graft-on. It was deeply horrible.

Then I tried the latest and greatest 6.1 cooked ROM from a guy called Dutty who has been doing this stuff for quite some time. It’s got all the updated HTC stuff (amazing how much there is just to make WM usable) from unreleased HTC handset models, third party apps and lots of graphics, performance and other changes. Holy cow batman it’s really goddamn good. I mean it’s still WM so it still needs a fucking stylus just to view an SMS, but combined with the 4.0 release of TouchPal soft keyboard (coming to Android incidentally) and the latest version fo Pleco – it’s actually pretty damn cool.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still pissing off to Android as soon as a decent handset appears (with better than 320×480 resolution), but it’s amazing what can be done when you can bust your phone wide open and enthusiasts cook up their entire OS installations.

The iPhone’s really only has three big ideas:

1. Touch-screen UI based on a finger and not a stylus
2. Capacitive touch-screen instead of resistive, which allows the first point.
3. One-click installs with a fully integrated ‘App Store’

To be fair there’s also a fair amount of incremental improvements such as Safari being a really quite good web browser, bundling decent qualitify inclusive applications like the mail client and incorporating a better quality operating system which has things like proper International language and input system support as standard.

The confusion arises, I think, when people look at this nice stuff and say hey I could really use that and it’s true, we can all use that including people who want a proper hand held computer. The iPhone isn’t that though, it’s an Apple appliance. The fact it can only run one app at one time is a cataclysmic deal breaker, likewise the complete lack of a clipboard. Just as much the absolute humongous pain in the arse it is to get stuff onto your device due to everything being locked down.

So then, let’s look at the HTC Touch HD’s main selling points over the iPhone:

1. Spectacularly better screen – 480 x 800 is absolutely Godly
2. Proper multitasking hand-held computer with wide open access
3. Ease of getting files and goodies onto the device  – no Apple lockdown

Clearly only some people actually care about this points. Unfortunately I fall into that camp. It might be better illustrated through examples. I like to run Google maps with GPS all the time, so I can flick to it and see where I am. I also like to have a language application open to a particular feature/word etc, communication applications like Windows Live Messenger, IRC, and I like to read proper documents and even comics on the phone.

If I was to try this on the iPhone I’d be shutting down applications every time I switch, they’d have to try remember their settings/place, so when I switch back they come back. Often they don’t. You can’t run background applications doing communications at all on the iPhone, switch away from your instant messenger client and you’re logged off. Also the screen is too low resolution for documents, particularly comics, and getting documents and comics onto the phone is an utter pain in the arse – often you use a sort of web browser hack to download the stuff you want which your apps can then access.

A couple of days ago on the train I was reading an academic essay, the original PDF, full screen horizonal so I only needed to scroll down the page to read it. The resolution of the HD Touch is Godly and allows this. Also if, as you’ll see from my other blogs, you’re doing any asian language character work – the HD Touch’s resolution is once again Godly. Now to be fair I’m using simplified Chinese which just about works on the iPhone and the input system is great, but if you were using traditional Chinese (like Taiwan, Hong Kong and others), they’ll just be a mess.

Getting the document onto the phone was as simple as plugging it in to USB. A standard USB port, I plug it in to any computer anywhere and it charges and I can either use the proper sync application or just mount it as a drive to copy stuff onto it. I can’t even copy a little video onto the iPhone through iTunes unless it’s on the ONE computer allowed to sync to it. That’s so needlessly irritating it’s ridiculous.

So is life with the HD a nerd’s dream? Partially. I’ve really enjoyed getting apps on there, messing about getting my favorite asian true-type font on there and so on. However life has also been full of a vast amount of pain and limitations which really need to be solved for Windows Mobile to survive in the face of the iPhone and Google Android. Here’s a list:

1. The interface isn’t touch-screen – sure there’s slapped-on front ends like HD Touch 3D but even that is an utter ballache and doesn’t scroll properly with finger strokes as an iPhone does. For most stuff you’re forced to get a stylus out and this completely destroys using the phone when you’re walking, for example. I can’t even do an SMS when walking, I could do that on my goddamn N95 for Christ’s sake.
2. Resistive screen. Look, it sucks. I hate the way that the stylus actually feels soft on the screen. I hate how hard you have to press. I understand the arguments about accuracy but I think that’s a software issue that’s been nailed. The resistive screen has to go.
3. The OS is flakey: Applications break the OS. You get locked files, mysteriously gobbled resources. All the sorts of things you get on a desktop computer which really have no place on a mobile device. If an app misbehaves, it should be utterly killed off and have no repercussions for the rest of the apps running and the OS. This is not the case with Windows Mobile 6.1 – I’ve had to reboot my phone a lot.
4. Quality of internal applications: There’s no other way of putting it, Pocket IE and Pocket Outlook are utterly, totally, comprehensively gash. I don’t understand this, Microsoft is a software company – this is the stuff they should have nailed. Opera is barely decent browser which ships with most of these devices because Pocket IE is so shit. Enjoy Opera’s hilarious retiscence over where you actually meant to click a link or zoom in or something, and then there’s the retarded zoom SLIDER. Then there’s Outlook, it’s fucked. There’s no native Gmail application. Even third-party commercial applications like Flexmail are riddled with issues and once again are completely oblivious to the idea of a finger-usable UI. Even contacts and the act of picking up the phone etc is horrendous. Windows Mobile devices are abominable as communication devices.
5. An application store. Once is announced, why has such an obvious idea taken so long when MS have vast experience of this kind of thing with the Xbox? An easy commercial marketplace makes everything better. Better for the user, which creates demand, which creates a market, which means developers come BACK to the WM platform from the iPhone. It’s just vital.

So the next question must be, is there any realistic chance that MS will address this and turn around the Windows Mobile platform? I don’t think so.

Why? Well, it’s a long laundry list and Microsoft is not a nimble company. They have been responding to the iPhone at a glacial pace, announcing an application store for the new ‘Windows’ platform (Windows Mobile 6.5) and a front-end which is finger friendly. That application store is very late now, and since it isn’t actually on the millions of WM phones out there… it requires people to download it. The finger UI is top level cosmetic which is exactly what the manufacturer’s have been doing anyway with stuff like HTC Touch Flow. This is a retarded decision, MS should not reinvent what everyone else had to do because of their incompetance, they should fix up the critical stuff that deeply sucks about the platform which people are not fixing adequately, like the browser, the mail client, and the general quality of the OS.

It would be churlish to suggest they’re not doing some of that as well, but they’re not actively talking about it (except for a new Pocket IE version… which I’m sure will all of a sudden be fantastic) which is telling enough.

The bottom line is that the list of things for Apple to fix is much shorter although at least half of this stuff is philosophical decision choices which we’ll have to agree-to-disagree on, which means it wont get fixed because Apple folks aren’t regular human beings like us, and I’m sure there’s a really compelling business argument for utterly fucking you around when it comes to just getting a goddamn file on your phone.

The cat amongst the pigeons is Google Android. They has all the good stuff from Apple while actually being a proper computer that you can enhance and extend, coupled with the power of the best web services company in the world ensuring that all their honest-to-god killer applications are delivered with the absolute best, most integrated, solution. In other words, we have the ideal mobile platform with all the correct decisions being developed right now, it’s launched and all the hardware manufacturer’s are working on Android devices.

What we have is a three-horse race. The tortoise, Microsoft, is out front but isn’t even going slow, it’s only just realised there’s a race on and has stopped to (slowly) put on it’s trainers. The hare, Apple, started life as a mean lean racing machine, everyone in the stadium is chearing it on as it whizzes around, lapping up the attention. The hare doesn’t intend to run the full race, it’s got the adulation it desires. Meanwhile the ostrich, Google, knows exactly what needs to be done. It might look a little goofy but it’s out the gate and intends to actually finish the race.

Fortunately the HTC Touch HD is quite a desirable device right now and should still be at the end of the year when I dump it and pick up an Android phone and most likely that’ll be HTC too, so they’re not losing out. Apple isn’t necessarily the loser here too, because there’s an iPod Touch in my bag too. Anything that appears on it which is genuinely cool, and doesn’t require Internet connectivity, I’ve no qualms with buying it on that platform. Microsoft though, what will I choose to use of theirs? I can’t think of a single thing if given the chance.

Microsoft’s old mentality of making something crap, then improving it gradually until it’s pretty good, only works if you’re the only guy who’s making the thing. If you aren’t the only guy, and if the other guys have more ideas, faster development and some genuine USPs of theirown… well then. The real question on my mind is… in ten years time maybe Google will be scratching their head about the possibility of an Android successor to the desktop. I think you’d have to be an idiot to believe that this wasn’t Google’s long-term play all along.

Maybe Microsoft isn’t that dumb after all. When I look at the Windows 7 tortoise, it looks to me like it’s down the gym and is on a diet. Maybe the next race will be closer?