2010 August | The Silicon Valley Geek

Archive for: August, 2010

Dude, where’s my stuff?!

Aug 23 2010 Published by Ben Chong under Business, Marketing, Product

If you haven’t yet heard of Dropbox, the video below is a very good introduction to the problem it is trying to solve:

Another product, ZumoDrive, which I use on a daily basis, offers very similar features to solve the same problem.

Fifteen years ago, your cell phone was a cell phone: you used it to make phone calls. If you had a computer, it was mostly likely a desktop. If you had a computer at home, it was probably the only one, shared between family members. If you were lucky, you had a PDA and its most important contents were a contact list and calendar that you synched with your computer through the serial port.

Today, the cell phone, PDA and MP3 player have combined to become your smartphone. You probably use a computer at work and whether you want to admit it to your boss or not, you probably use it for personal web surfing and email. You probably have a notebook computer at home. If you are lucky, you may even have a companion device, like a netbook or iPad which you use on the couch, in the kitchen or coffeeshop.

The kind of content that you consume has also increased. Fifteen years ago, Winamp, the first MP3 player, was not yet developed. Consumer digital cameras were just coming into the market. Netscape had barely started.

Today, you can purchase or download digital music from a variety of sources and you probably have several gigabytes of that. Digital cameras can take high resolution pictures and videos and you probably have more pictures than you can keep track of. You spend more on the Internet than doing anything else and you probably have more bookmarks that you can manage.

When you combine the number of devices that you use today, with the types and amount of content you consume and manage on a daily basis, you realize that Dropbox and Zumodrive have correctly identified a need.

My next article will go into more detail on how Dropbox and Zumodrive go about solving this problem.

Disclaimer: I do not work for either Dropbox or Zumodrive

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Dell Streak size comparison

Aug 19 2010 Published by Ben Chong under Business, Marketing, Product, Gadgets

One of the phenomena I’ve observed in the Android world is that manufacturers are using size and hardware technologies as differentiators . Observe for example, the evolution of the device size (from 3.2″ to 4″ then 5″ screen sizes), CPU speeds or the use of better and more sophisticated display technologies (AMOLED, SuperAMOLED etc).

So obviously I had to do a size comparison of my Dell Streak with the other devices in the stable.

Round One – iPhone 4G, Sprint EVO 4G and the Streak:

Here, I reversed the order and the size difference is more apparent:

If thickness is your measure of superiority, then you will be disappointed with the Streak. It’s the thinnest device here:

Side note: New notification implementation

On the few Android phones I’ve used, you would drag down the menu/notifications bar to reveal more details about the notifications. Here, with the Dell Streak, you tap on the notification bar and a menu drops down to show you the details.

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Much ado about Chrome OS

Aug 18 2010 Published by Ben Chong under Business, Marketing, Product, The Daily Geek

The blogo-/twitter-sphere was briefly alit last week when this article came out on TechCrunch.

I think the simplest explanation is probably the correct one in this case: Google is working on a 3G/Broadband connection manager for Chrome OS and they working with Verizon to validate it on the Verizon network.

The bigger question though, in my mind, is what kind of device will Chrome OS appear on?

Android, Google’s “other” OS, is coming along strong and is poised to overtake Apple’s iOS in terms of shipment volume. Android is no longer limited to smartphones. It will be shipping on everything from music/media players to tablets from Samsung and Motorola.

How will Chrome OS fit in this picture?

One possibility is that Chrome OS will ship on regular PCs as a companion OS to Windows. A well known example of such an approach (and I would say the “pioneer” in this space) is DeviceVM’s Splashtop. This alternate OS environment ships on notebooks from HP, Lenovo, Dell etc and allows the user to get onto the Internet within seconds of powering up his PC, without having to boot up Windows.

However, this approach is not game changing. DeviceVM is already shipping such a solution.

What is will be game changing however, is to leverage the lightweight nature of Chrome OS and ship it on inexpensive hardware. Conceivably, we would be talking about sub-$200 netbooks/tablets with Chrome OS as the sole operating system. An old blog article from ARM.com alludes to this approach.

In other words, Chrome OS will not be Android’s “big brother”, but it will be the lightweight, single-purpose younger brother. If you want an all-in-one multi-purpose mobile device, get one with Android. If you want an inexpensive bring-you-to-the Internet device with a great web browsing experience, get one with Chrome OS.

This makes sense in a way. The Android web browser today, for example, is really quite limited. Firstly, by the small screen size and low screen resolution of the devices it appears on. Secondly, popular Chrome browser features like bookmarks sync, extensions are not (yet) available for it.

A somewhat single-purpose device still makes sense if they are low-cost enough. We have seen that Amazon’s Kindle continues to sell strongly in spite of the iPad.

What is Verizon’s role in this scenario?

Verizon has been selling 3G/broadband-capable notebooks and netbooks. A natural extension to this product portfolio will be an Internet tablet.

The business model can also get interesting here. For example, the consumer gets a Chrome OS tablet for free when she signs up for a 2-year data plan. Google and Verizon monetize from both the subscription and ad revenue that result from the use of Google services and web properties.

Update (11am PDT): Just saw this on Engadget: Chrome OS tablet coming from Google and Verizon on Black Friday?

Update (5pm PDT): Looks like the Engadget article is all speculation. The link above has been updated. The source of this speculation, Lee Matthews, probably read someone’s blog about Chrome OS (ahem…cough) and added more sauce to the mix…

Disclaimer: I am a Senior Director, Program Management at DevicevM. I wrote this article to express my personal views.

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Dell Streak Out-of-Box Experience and UI

Aug 17 2010 Published by Ben Chong under Business, Marketing, Product, The Daily Geek

I finally found time to power on the Streak to run it through the initial user set up.

This out-of-box experience (OOBE) is what distinguishes the Dell Streak from the other Android devices I’ve seen so far. As you will see below, a simple OOBE application runs the first-time user through the different components of the user interface.

This is the boot up screen:

The boot time is a little long and disconcerting because other than an initial sound effect, nothing really happens at this stage. Is the system dead?

When the system finally comes up, you get to select your language:

Then you have a quick introduction to the various buttons etc:

You also get an introduction the menu bar, which is the bar at the top of the screen. The icon here drops down a panel to access all the applications:

“Additional views” here actually refer to additional desktops that you can create, above and beyond the 4 that are already created for you:

The notification area is a section of the menu bar:

Explanation of what information status area contains:

The ubiquitous Android “back” button. You can see that it is designed in such a way that the orientation of the device during normal use is expected to be horizontal (landscape mode).

What the “menu” button is about:

What the “home” button is about:

The last screen of the OOBE contains more tips:

This is the home screen:

This is screen #3. The theme of this screen is communications (contacts, messaging and Gmail):

Screen 4 is the social, media, entertainment center:

Tapping on the arrow will drop down an abbreviated menu with a set of commonly used applications. This fixes one of the usability problems of the Android application list: that there are too many icons to scroll through if you need to look for a particular application.

Clicking on “more” will get you the full list of applications:

View of the web browser with the keyboard:

So how does the physically large screen help the web browser experience? The resolution here is 800×480. Unfortunately, most modern websites are designed with a screen width of 1024 in mind. Here is an example of this blog on the Streak. Notice that the right column is cut off.