Apps lurking on a phone

I noticed that my Nexus 6P had Project Fi app was installed on my phone by default. It was disabled, but it was there. Once I put the Fi SIM card in, it automatically activated itself and prepared my phone to register with Fi’s network.

It’s sure better than asking users to install the app separately. But I am not sure how I feel about random apps lurking in the phone and auto-activating without my knowledge.

A few months ago, I dropped my 2014 Moto X and ended up with a shattered screen. While the phone was out for repair, I used a Galaxy Nexus for a few days. Typing on the smaller screen was so painful I realised I couldn’t go back to a smaller phone.

When I was in India a couple months ago, my brother bought a Moto X Play. The Play has a 5.5-inch screen. When I was in India, I used that phone once in a while, and the size didn’t seem all that unmanageable. Actually, it didn’t feel much larger than the 5.2-inch Moto X I was using.

In the context of both of these experiences, I decided getting a Nexus 6P will not be such a bad idea. And I received my 6P today.

Nexus 6P in box

My initial impressions after having the phone for about 5 hours:

• I’m already missing Moto X’s Active Display feature. (It’s a shame new Moto X uses an LCD display. Active Display with the whole screen lighting up is much less nifty.)
• I was thinking that the official case sold by Google would inhibit the use of NFC. But it looks like it really may not. I only wish they offered the case in more colours. Both the black and grey are boring colours.
• As expected, the phone doesn’t feel too big on the hand. But the real test is when I put it in my pant pocket and ride a bicycle. I’ll know it in a few days. Good so far, though.
• Setting up the phone was super-easy with the new ‘Set up nearby device’ option. It copied over all my apps and almost all settings. Installing all the apps took about an hour or so, but I didn’t have to hunt for apps, so it’s a win.
• Moving WhatsApp messages to the new phone was a pain. I copied over WhatsApp’s entire folder and still WhatsApp only restored messages till last week. Messages from the past few days are just gone.
• Fingerprint reader is nice, but I do find the placement a bit hard to use. Hopefully I’ll get used to it in a few days.

In short, nothing spectacular, and also nothing terrible. Let’s see how this goes!

Poor battery life after Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) update?

If your Android phone was recently updated to Android 4.1 (aka Jelly Bean) and you have been seeing really bad battery life ever since, read on.  It could be that Google+ sync has been enabled by the update and that’s using up a lot of power.  Go to your phone’s Settings > Accounts > Google settings screen.  For every Google account listed, deselect the Google+ option.  This should bring back sane battery life to your phone.

See Demystifying Android power usage for more generic tips on saving battery life on Android devices.

Why I think new Android menus are broken

Up until Android 2.3, Android devices required a hardware “menu button”.  Pressing the menu button was the standard way of accessing the functions provided by apps.  Quite a few people  complained that this model is broken because sometimes users wouldn’t think that they can press the menu button to find actions they can perform.  Google “fixed” this problem in Android 3.0.

In Android 3.0, menu button became obsolete, and Google asked developers to use other on-screen UI elements to provide access to app features.  But the issue now is that actions are in two different menus.  Take Google Maps, for instance. If you want to check into a place, that option is available from the drop-down on the top-left:

But let’s say you want to change the Google account used for Latitude.  For that, you’d need to choose Settings from the bottom-right menu:

Similarly, Google+ app has its options split across two different menus.  Some options on the left:

And some on the right:

I know this is not plain madness, and there are reasons behind this UI change.  There are recommendations in Android Developer (or Design) Guide to help developers decide which options belong in the top-left menu and which options on the other one (called Action Bar).  But the issue is, any large app like Google Maps or Gmail or Google+ is going to have a large number of possible operations, and only when you know a good amount of it you can correctly guess which menu has the option you are looking for.  Expecting a common user to guess that correctly is unfair.

After having used my Android 4.0 phone for about 6 months, I’m giving a Thumbs Down to the new menus.

Disable automatic updates for your crucial Android apps

Android Market has a per-app preference for automatically updating the app when a newer version is available.  It’s convenient, and is usually a good security measure to keep this option enabled for all your apps.  However, if there’s an app that’s “crucial” — i.e., if you cannot afford to have this app not running, you may want to disable automatic updates for that app.

I use Sleep as Android to track my sleep.  I turned on sleep tracking last night and went to sleep.  Woke up this morning and saw that the Sleep app wasn’t running.  Instead there was a notification from Android Market that it had updated the Sleep app overnight.  The app got killed when it was updated and was never started again.  Had it been a weekday, I would have missed my wake up alarm and could have slept longer than usual.

I have now disabled automatic updates for this app.  Disabling automatic update for this app would require that I manually update it every time there’s a new version.  It’s a pain, but it’s much better than oversleeping and being late to work.

Setting alarms on Android using Google Voice Actions

Do you hate this UI of Android’s alarm clock app?  I hate it too; fiddling with the dial to set the time correctly, and to get the am/pm correctly can be annoyingly hard.

There’s an easier way: Google Voice Actions.

Tap on the microphone icon of Google search widget and say something like “set an alarm at six thirty am tomorrow” and you’re done!  (Or just say “alarm six thirty am”... after all that’s all a computer needs to hear :-)

Samsung Galaxy Nexus: first impressions

I have been using a Samsung Galaxy Nexus for a few days now.  I have been an Android user since the G1 days; there isn’t much I have to say about the software in this post.  I like Android and I don’t think any other phone software is a good choice for my usage.

Talking about the Galaxy Nexus’s hardware, it’s an enormous phone.  Very wide, but it manages to fit in my hand by being very thin.  I like the feel of holding the phone in my hand (disclaimer: I have never held an iPhone for more than a few minutes).  Battery life is good; super fast camera doesn’t look like a big improvement, but I’ll know the difference only when I have to use a slower camera.  The phone is crazy fast in pretty much everything it does, and fast is almost always good.

One of the things I was excited about was the phone’s higher (than my previous phone, Nexus S) display resolution.  Text on the Galaxy Nexus is clearly crisper, and gives a better reading experience.  But I can still see “pixels” on the screen... more specifically tiny “holes” on white surfaces.  Apart from that I don’t really have any concern.

Android’s “sticky row” of icons

Have you seen Android home screen?  Android’s home screen has a number of “pages”, usually 5 or 7.  You can keep different icons and widgets on each page.  There’s also a “sticky row” at the bottom; icons in that row are present in all pages of the home screen.  In this screenshot, Phone, People, Messaging, and Browser are all sticky, so they are present on all pages of the home screen.

Sticky row sure sounds useful in theory—because “important” apps can be accessed from all pages of the home screen, but I have never found it useful myself.  Once I am familiar with the icon layout, I hardly ever look for an icon in the home screen—I simply navigate to it instead.

Let’s say I am on 2nd page of the home screen of my phone and I want to open the browser.  Although the browser icon is present on the second page as well, I’d swipe over to the center page (which is the “main” page where I am mostly on) and then launch the browser from there¹.  My brain has associated the main page with browser so it’s faster to launch it from there vs. looking for it on the 2nd page.

I believe this how it is for many people: this is why programs in Start menu are easier to find when they are in alphabetic order, but the icons on the desktop when in a familiar order.  Only this spatial familiarity makes us walk towards the kitchen without thinking when we are thirsty.  Walking to the kitchen first and then figuring out what we want from there is more efficient than doing it the other way around.

Most people won’t look so deep into this, and they don’t have to; it’s the job of UX/interaction designers to evaluate these ideas.  Which means, even if the Android team knows by now that the sticky row is useless, they cannot take it away lest upsetting users who think it’s a useful feature.  If I were to control whether the bottom row of my Android is sticky or not, I’d make it non-sticky².

Notes:
1. If memory serves right, Android 2.0 (Eclair) was the first version of Android to have a sticky row.  I have been using Android from version 1.5 (Cupcake).  I got the sticky row feature when I upgraded to a Nexus One a year later.  I don’t know how much of an influence this has over my usage patterns.  Also, I am still using Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), so I cannot customise the icons in the sticky row.  My usage pattern may change when I upgrade to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich).

2. I know Android is open source, so I can control if the bottom row on my phone is sticky or not.  But this annoyance is not reason enough for me to hack the home screen app.  Not yet.

Honeycomb: first impressions

Have you used the G1?  That was the first ever phone to run Android.  No one liked it.  It sure did a number of things well, but it didn't quite meet the needs of most people.  A year later there was Nexus One, with Eclair on it.  That's when many people had a real choice: they could choose between an iPhone or an Android phone running Eclair.

Honeycomb is a version of Android that's designed specifically for running on tablets.  Though the name of the OS is the same and it can run all pre-Honeycomb apps, it's a very different beast.  It's so different that it frustrates people that expect the UI to resemble what they're used to.  So what if it's different?  It means most of the stuff is newly built.  Expect the quality of G1 from current Honeycomb tablets.  They are unfinished, and the Tab I am using now crashes every day.  Every single day.

I liked the G1.  It was much better than the phones I had before.  It was better than the iPhone for my use because I don't live in Apple's walled gardens.  I have been wanting a tablet since the day I saw Steve Jobs announcing the I pad in January 2010.  Now I am happy with my Tab.  If you are not the kind that can forgive buggy software, or if you are not dying to get your hands on an Android tablet, I'd advise that you wait until tablet versions of Android stabilises.  Won't be very long.

Demystifying Android power usage

I have been using Android phones for more than 2 years now.  One of the biggest issue some people have with Android is battery life.  Today I did some mini troubleshooting of battery usage on my phone, and thought I'd write about it.

I woke up in the middle of my sleep early this morning and I disconnected the phone from its charger because it had already charged to 100%.  Went back to sleep and woke up after an hour or so.  Guess what, the battery was at 92%!  While the phone wasn't doing anything at all, it had lost 8% battery.  That definitely doesn't sound good so I opened the battery usage monitor (Settings > About phone > Battery use) and found that "Android System" was the component that had been using most of the battery.

Android System is the component responsible for syncing email, calendar, photos, etc.  I work at a company where I get 200+ emails a day on a normal day.  I had enabled syncing of my work email two days back, and it looks like that's consuming a lot of power.  Apparently my phone had been kept awake by Android System for 12 minutes and 38 seconds in the 1 hour period it had been on battery power (see screenshot).  That's actually a lot.  If I stop syncing my work email, my battery life would improve considerably.

Not all components we see in the Battery Use screen may be obvious, so let me try to explain some of them.

Display is obvious: power spent to keep the screen on.  Android System does things like data syncing and VPN connectivity.  Wi-Fi is the power used to be on wi-fi networks, including the energy spent to search for wi-fi network availability.  If I know I am going to be in a place with no wi-fi networks around for an extended period of time, I turn off wi-fi on the phone.

Android OS is the energy taken by Android OS itself for its housekeeping.  Phone idle is the power used by the phone to keep it running while it's sleeping.  Usually Android OS and Phone idle are at the bottom of the list, i.e. they use very less power.  If they show up in the top (and you have been using the phone for some time), something is probably wrong.  On the other hand, if your phone has been sleeping most of the time, these components would be in the top because there wasn't anything else happening.  When that happens you would have a lot of juice left in the battery too.

Cell standby is the time taken to keep your cellphone connectivity on.  (This does not include the energy spent on voice calls because voice calls are tracked separately.)  If I am traveling by road I'd be often going through places where there is no cellphone network.  My phone would keep searching for network and connect to any available network only to get disconnected a few minutes later.  When that happens, I have seen a good amount of energy being spent on Cell standby.  In those cases I turn off data connectivity (Settings > Wireless & networks > Mobile networks > Data enabled), and that really helps.

Swyping: first impressions

I tried Swype some time back.  After using it for a very short time, I gave up and went back to standard Android keyboard.  I have been trying Swype again for a few days now.  I can't say I'm happy with it although I haven't fully given up on it yet.

The biggest challenge for me in adapting to swyping (vs. typing) is the shift in the mental model of text input.  Instead of making letter mistakes I make word mistakes now, and that's not really a pleasant thing.  Has my text input accuracy improved?  Maybe, but I can't say I'm happy with it.  I have a feeling that I would be a lot happier with a physical  keyboard than this swyping business.  (Just now I had to make three attempts before I can get the word "keyboard" right.)

The built-in keyboard in Gingerbread is pretty good, when combined with autocomplete.  I think I will probably stick to the standard keyboard for long text inputs, and use Swype when I don't feel like expending the energy required for typing correctly on the soft keyboard.

Text input through soft keyboards is indeed a problem, but Swype doesn't provide a solution to it; instead, it introduces a new problem.  In my current view both problems are pretty much of the same magnitude.  Most likely, Swype will soon become irrelevant because Google is serious about improving their keyboard.

Google search widget and its awesomeness

Android tips #2

Some more Android features you might not be aware of.  My Nexus One has been updated to Android 2.2/Froyo, and I discovered a few of these features recently. So these features might be 2.2-specific.

• You probably know that the Google Search widget on the home screen can search the contents of your phone too, from Android 2.2 onwards.  But did you know that you don't really need the Search widget to be on your home screen to use search?  You can simply press your phone's Search soft key when you are on the home screen, and that would bring the search UI of the widget (even if the widget is not present anywhere in any of your home screens).
• You can type a phone number and dial it directly from your phone's search interface (either from Google Search widget or by pressing Search soft key when in home screen).  You can also type a phone number and create a new contact with that phone number from the search UI itself.
• This is a feature I know I will be using very often, but I know it's not for everyone.  You can press and drag upwards on the soft keyboard to reveal two rows at the top that have numbers and few special characters.  Will be handy when having to type one symbol or a digit in the middle of a phrase.

See also: Android tips.

Android tips

I see that many Android users have difficulty in discovering features that are available in their devices.  In this post I am going to share some commonly unknown features/functionality of Android software.

1. This is a question I have been asked several times by my friends who use Android.  How would you delete or forward a single message in an SMS conversation?  Long press is the answer.  Long press the message you want to delete or forward and you will get a menu that will let you do it.
2. Android's built-in SMS app will not autocomplete phone numbers of your contacts that are not marked as "mobile".  Not everyone has correctly categorized phone numbers in their contact list, and it could be a pain.  There are two ways to solve it: 1. correctly classify mobile phone numbers as mobile numbers in your contact list; this can be hard to do.  2. Use a third-party app like Handcent SMS for messaging.  Handcent SMS lets you configure if you want to see non-mobile numbers while composing SMS.
3. Let's say you have a phone without a physical keyboard.  You are in some UI where there is no text entry field, but you want to type something.  For example, imagine you are seeing your contacts list, and you want to find a contact by typing the contact's name.  (It's faster than scrolling and finding it.)  What you can do is long press Menu button, and that will bring the soft keyboard.  Now type the first few letters of the contact to filter the contact list.
4. You know that all your Google Talk chat history is available in Gmail.  But did you know that you can search your chat log from within Android's Google Talk app itself?  When you are in Google Talk app, press the Search button and enter your search query.  This will show all chats that match your search query.  Opening a result would show you the chat log in the same way Gmail does.  You can even reply to that chat by email or chat from there itself.  This can be extended to other apps too.  Any app's search functionality can be activated by pressing Search key when you are in that app.  You press Search button when in home screen, it brings the regular Google search (or phone search in 2.2/Froyo and above).  You press Search button when in Gmail app, it brings the Gmail search box.

See also: Android tips #2.

Android task killers

I think, if Android Market was like iPhone App Store, none of the task killer apps would have been allowed in Market.  Here's why.

As I am writing this, a search for [task killer] in Android Market finds 88 apps.  All these task killers come in different sizes and colours and varieties; yet their primary function is one thing: kill the apps that are running in the background.  One of the first documents one would read when they learn Android development is Application Fundamentals page of Android Developer Guide.  It says:

[An activity] is stopped if it is completely obscured by another activity. It still retains all state and member information. However, it is no longer visible to the user so its window is hidden and it will often be killed by the system when memory is needed elsewhere.

This means that Android keeps an app in background because the user might switch back to that app in some time.  This work flow would be familiar to you.  You are reading an email in the Gmail app and you receive an SMS.  You open the SMS from the notification bar and reply to it.  When you are done with the SMS you press Back key of your phone and you are back in Gmail, in exactly the place where you left.  You can continue to do what you were doing in Gmail.  To make this possible, Android keeps Gmail app's state in memory.

Let's say you don't come back to Gmail, but you open a game and start playing.  And let's assume this game needs a lot of memory.  Now Android would kill the Gmail app automatically and reclaim the memory used by Gmail.  It's given to the game you just started.

Android keeps recent apps in memory that would otherwise be left empty and kills apps and reclaims memory exactly when it is required.  This lets you get back to the state in which you left an app so you can continue whatever you were doing.

All these task killers do is kill the background apps immediately discounting the possibility that you might want to go back to the same app.  If you are thinking task killers make your phone faster, think again.  They are actually making you slow.

Android apps I use

I have been using an Android Dev Phone 1 for about a year now, and I should say I am very happy with it.  Phones are not phones anymore, and the ability to run third party apps is quite crucial.  Here in this post, I am going to list some apps that I have on my phone.

CallTrack.  This app logs all the phone calls in a Google calendar of your choice.  Why would I need my call log in a calendar?  Well, I don't know yet; but I don't want to throw away my call log every time something happens to my phone (e.g. wipe user data, change the physical device, etc).

SMS Backup.  This one copies to Gmail all the SMS messages you send and receive.  It has proved quite useful to me.  For example, you can do a Gmail search for a friend's name or email address and you will see the SMSes you sent to them or received from them, along with other emails and chats you had with them.

Notepad with Sync.  I was using AK Notepad for quite some time.  But I prefer Notepad with Sync for one reason: it syncs to the cloud.  You need to sign up for a Helipad account.  One more user name and password to remember, but at least my notes would be much safer on their servers than on my own SD card. Also, I can edit my notes on the phone as well from a computer, without having to copy files around.

Handcent SMS.  Shows SMS messages in a popup and let me reply to or delete messages then and there, without having to switch to a different app.  Quite useful to me, as I read and immediately delete about 80% of the SMSes I receive.

Twidroid.  A full-featured Twitter client for Android.  (Update: I am now using the Official Twitter app for Android.)

OI File Manager.  Not something I use every day.  But it's good to have a file browser installed, so you can, for example, install some app that you get from some source other than Android Market.

My experience with T-Mobile Android G1

How long have I been using it?

For about 3 months now.

Do I like it?

Yes

Will I swap it for an iPhone?

No

Will I swap it for the cool new iPhone 3GS?

Nope

Why not?

I need a physical keyboard. Plus, I am not a fan of Apple's products

Will I swap it for a Palm Pre (when there is a GSM version of the phone, of course)?

I will, most likely

What do I like in the G1 phone?

• Touchscreen -- I have always liked touchscreens (but not as the ONLY means to control the device)
• Android OS -- one of the best phone operating systems I have used
• Has a decent number of apps available in the market and I can write my own if I want, with free tools
• Seamless integration with my Google Account and syncing of my contacts with Gmail

What do I not like much?

• Battery life -- I don't want to remember to charge my phone every night
• Not so easy to use physical keyboard
• And a few minor annoyances (but minor annoyances are with every device!)

Will I recommend it to my friend?

Depends on what my friend needs

What will I tell the people who say their G1 phone is slow?

• Don't run too many apps in the background. I used to run both Google Talk and Meebo running in the background and it made the phone considerably slow. Now I don't do that anymore.
• Do not enable SSL (or encrypted connections) if you don't really need it. Twidroid especially was apparently sluggish with SSL enabled.
• Try to use as few widgets on the home screen as possible. Widgets are more or less like background applications. My phone got intolerably slow when I had about 4 widgets on the home screen. (Now I have only one.)

What I wish Android OS had?

Ability to write apps in Python or other some higher level language than Java

Overall, what would I rate my phone, on a scale of 1 to 5?

4. I am very happy with it.

GPRS/EDGE configuration for Android G1

I just figured out today how to configure Android G1 (aka HTC Dream) phone for using Vodafone India's (formerly Hutch) Mobile Connect GPRS service.  All we need to do is to create an APN with APN set to "www".  For Idea phones the APN is "internet".

Detailed steps for configuration:

1. From home screen select Menu > Settings
2. Select Wireless controls > Mobile networks > Access Point Names
3. Select Menu > New APN
4. Type any name you like for "Name" field.  I typed Vodafone Mobile Connect.
5. Enter www for "APN" field.  (You will enter internet if you have an Idea connection.)
6. Leave everything else to default values.
7. Select Menu > Save
8. Select this APN as the default one by touching the red green circle next to its name.  If there is only one APN, that would be selected by default.

Two mobile phone tips

Note Taking
Mobile phones are handy for scribbling down notes on the go.  But the trouble is when you want those notes on your computer so that you can merge the notes to an existing document or continue editing the notes with a bigger screen and keyboard.

I use AK Notepad on my Android G1 phone for taking notes.  Whenever I need a note from my phone on my computer, I choose the option to send the note by email.  That opens Gmail's mail compose interface with the note's contents.  I save it as a draft and force an email sync (by choosing Menu > Refresh).  Now, Gmail in my computer browser has the note as a draft.  I can now copy the note text and discard the draft.

Opening Long URLs

Let's say you are viewing a web page that has a long URL on Firefox on your computer, and you want to open the same page on your mobile phone.  Mobile Barcoder Firefox extension creates a 2D barcode (known as QR code) for the current URL.  You can use an application like Google's ZXing to scan the barcode from the computer screen and open the URL on your phone's browser.