Background
In light of rapidly eroding marketshare to Samsung and Apple, HTC revamped and simplified its product line in 2012 to create the One X. The One X was a fantastic device that sold much less than it deserved to. It had a great camera, an awesome display that beat the crap out of all competition in 2012 and a handsome design. Yet, it got rolled over by the behemoth that was Samsung Galaxy S3.

Fast forward to 2013 and HTC has its last real shot and competing in a business that is increasingly becoming a two horse race between Apple and Samsung. The HTC One is the Taiwanese handset maker’s Hail Mary!. The billion dollar question is, will it make it to the receiver’s hands for a touchdown?.

Hardware

Look and Feel- Let me get it out of the way first. The HTC is the most beautiful Android phone I have ever had my hands one. I could make an argument that it is as good as the iPhone 5 in hardware design which is saying a lot. In many ways, bests the iPhone 5. Until the One arrived, the iPhone 5 was the standard to which every smartphone ever made would be measured. It represents a level of hardware design that everyone aspires to. The One equals that and bests it with an even better display, larger screen, front facing stereo speakers and a gorgeous unibody design. If hardware design is why you stayed with Apple, this should be the one that makes you switch. It is that good.

I borrowed an iPhone 5- the benchmark for smartphone hardware design and placed the One next to it. With the curved back design, the One looks thinner than the iPhone 5 when placed on top of each other while in reality it is a tad thicker. The smart bezel design gives the feeling of an edge to edge display. See below for comparison shots with the iPhone 5.

UltraPixels- Much has been made about the unique and very risky UltraPixel camera that HTC has shipped with the one. It is a 4 megapixel camera (paltry by today’s standards if you look at it from a pure megapixel standpoint) but one that packs a much larger and better sensor. In practice, this should allow for much better pictures. See the gallery below for some sample pictures.

In my tests, I found the claim to be very valid for low light pictures and not much of a handicap for outdoor pictures in good light conditions. See the gallery below for a low light comparison shot between the iPhone 4S, Samsung Galaxy S3 and HTC One.

BoomSound- With the One, HTC has introduced the best smartphone speakers in the industry. They call it BoomSound. What it means is that the phone has two front facing speakers- above and below the display to give a stereo effect. And it excels. When placed next to an iPhone5 and Samsung Galaxy S3, the sound emanating from the One’s twin speakers were far better. Coupled with the fantastic display, it made for immersive video viewing.

Software

HTC One ships with Android Jelly Bean 4.1.2. This is a reasonably new version of Android and has the fantastic Google Now. It also includes some of HTC’s innovations. HTC’s Sense gets a major refresh with One and is called Sense 5.0. Outside of the Android improvements, Sense 5.0 boasts some new features – BlinkFeed, Zoe and better pictures with the unique and risky UltraPixel camera.

BlinkFeed- HTC created BlinkFeed, a news and social network aggregator that sits front and center on the home screen of Sense 5.0. It is not unlike Pulse or Flipboard and in looks, very much like Windows Metro UI. That said, it is harmless and partially functional. The good news is that it can be relegated to a non-home screen. The bad news is that unlike widgets, it cant really be removed completely.

Zoe- Zoe is an interesting take on pictures and video. I would go to the extent of calling it a stepchild of the two. In the camera mode, HTC allows for the Zoe feature to be activated which takes a second of video before the picture is shot and about 3 seconds after the still picture is done. The picture and the videos are available but in addition, this combo of the two is also created and HTC calls it a Zoe. In practice, it is pretty neat and occasionally but not always handy to have.

TV Tuner- The HTC One packs an IR blaster (which is conveniently co-located with the power on/off switch on top of the device). To support the IR blaster, there is an app from HTC built into the phone simply called “Remote”. I put the feature to task on my 7 year old LG Plasma TV and my Comcast cable box. It took me all of 5 minutes to have both my TV and Comcast box completely controlled from the remote app. The process was simple and all I had to do was switch the two boxes on/off a couple of times as part of the setup and also plug in my zip code to go with the Comcast channel guide. Once done, it was so easy to control everything from the phone that I found myself grinning. It is the simplest and handiest universal remote I have used and it worked just out of the box.

I didn’t get a chance to try this on newer TVs with built in apps. The remote works with Hulu boxes also. Not sure if it would work with PS3′s and Xboxes. I know the PS3 uses Bluetooth for remote control. So I may need a different piece of software to control the PS3 in that case.

Experience

Which brings me to the most important part of this review- the overall experience. Often times, phones are good in parts but not as great when things are put together. The HTC One X was a great phone that had issues once I plugged in Jelly Bean. The Samsung Galaxy S3 is a completely functional and good device that falls short in one quality- what you feel when you hold it in your hand. I am happy to announce that the One passes all those tests very well.

The HTC One is a fantastic device built with attention to detail. From the aluminium unibody design which turns heads everywhere (yep, it does) to the gorgeous 1080p 469ppi display which is stunning to say the least, the device makes for a great first impression. But it doesnt stop there. Sense 5.0 (barring BlinkFeed) is a much more subtler skin of Android 4.1 and there is more Android and less HTC here. And thats a very good thing. When HTC started skinning Android, Google’s UX was a work in progress and thats putting it mildly. After Ice Cream Sandwich, Google has been on a tear. Android 4.0 onwards is feature on top of feature that truly differentiates Android from iOS and Windows Phone x. Android is now by far the smartest OS and is  well integrated with Google properties that is so widely used.

There was a time when Android was an open place where all junk went in, including Google’s own. Today, it is a sophisticated and polished OS that has a clean UX while still allowing for all the user customizations one wants in android. Google Now is the biggest single leap in mobile OS feature set in the last year or so and Google is only getting started. As they add more cards to Google Now, it should be the definitive element of the Android experience in the coming years. Google Now is the “smart” in the smartphone.

The UltraPixels camera definitely shows promise. Videos came nice and rich. Color reproduction was very good. The stereo speakers made for great listening. The almost edge to edge display is a thing to behold especially when viewing HD videos.

Battery Life was good in the limited testing I performed on the device. It lasted a full day and was on its last legs around 9 pm. While it is a tad less than the iPhone 5, it is still more than decent for a 4.7 inch 1080p display device.

htc one-battery usage

Cellular connectivity was on par with my Samsung Galaxy S3 and voices sounded clean and clear. I was unable to see anything special with the Sense Voice that HTC is advertising but it was as good an experience as any other high end smartphone.

WiFi performance was good. I did not do throughput measurements since it would be an exercise in measuring my Comcast experience more than anything else. The One supports 802.11ac. I am expecting to get an 802.11ac router in a few months and will put the feature to test then. NFC worked when I used the Samsung TecTiles with the HTC One.

Overall device performance was excellent. The device was very snappy and responsive. Touch response was great. There are only two buttons with the One X instead of the usual 3 that Android phones have. It took me a few hours to adjust but once the adjustment phase is over, it feels very normal and natural. The basic model ships with 32GB which is more than sufficient for me given how much of my content I access directly from the cloud. The 2GB RAM definitely helps in speeding things up.

Bottom Line

For a Hail Mary, HTC One is as good a throw as it gets. With its stylish good looks, innovative design, premium materials and finish, top of the line hardware specs and an excellent version of Android OS, it is made to appeal to everyone. It is a compelling product in the space and most certainly the best Android phone ever made. If you are in the market for a smartphone, you should give the One very serious consideration. You will not regret it.

What is Facebook Home?
Facebook Home is an Android launcher which replaced the traditional Android home screen with a Facebook view of things- full screen images from feeds, instant ability to like and comment on posts, faster and simpler ways to use Facebook Messenger and so on. Facebook Home is a launcher app that can be downloaded for free on the Google Play store.

Facebook Home is available only on certain Android devices – HTC One X, HTC One X+, HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S3, Samsung Galaxy Note 2 and HTC First. Of these devices, HTC First is a launch device for the service and it comes customized with the best Facebook Home experience. Interestingly, Facebook Home is currently not available for Google Nexus 4. Facebook Home is not available on iOS and it is unlikely that it will ever be given how tightly Apple controls its user experience.

Getting Started
Getting Facebook Home is pretty simple. The app is available on the Google Play store[download link]. You download it and install it on your Android phone. If you are not familiar with Android launchers, they are basically tricked out/customized Android user experiences. Facebook Home is Facebook’s launcher on Android- tricked out with all Facebook services. Once installed, the app will give you a brief overview of the key gestures for interacting with it. The only other prerequisite beyond having one of the said Android devices is that the Facebook app be installed on the phone.

The Upside

Unlike many other Android launchers which are either packed or have too many customization options, the Facebook Home launcher is incredibly simple to setup and I was up and running in a matter of minutes. The interface is pretty clean and utilitarian.

When good quality images are being shared in your feed, the screen is an engaging and pretty experience. Wonderful personal images flash by with a simple gesture of double tap to Like these images. A single tap brings up the circular profile image of you. Click on this circle brings up three options – Facebook Messenger, Facebook App and other applications.

When the Facebook app is selected, you are taken to the full form Facebook Android app. This is no different than selecting the Facebook app on your Android device today.

When the Applications icon is selected, the traditional Android Applications view is not what you see. Instead you see a set of app screens that can be swiped from left to right. The first screen shows basic apps like Phone, Internet, Play Store and such. The left most screen shows all the Android apps installed on the device. Folders cannot be created in this app view. You can load up on as many screens as you want (atleast I could add 4-5 additional screens worth of apps) but I had no option to create folders.

The Facebook Messenger has been thought out much more differently with the concept of Chatheads. Chatheads is a cool new way of interacting with Facebook friends in real time. Even when out of the Home interface, Chatheads of folks you are currently engaged via Messenger is hovering around.

The Downside

Here is why I have no plans of having Facebook Home on my Android phone.

1. It takes over my phone experience and I have no easy access to my usual apps. Everything is a minimum of an additional click.

2. Access to my Notifications drop down is no longer a simple swipe down. This is by far the biggest drawback. It is as if Facebook wanted to purge away all the basic Android experience in favor of its view of the phone experience.

3. Lousy photographs appear stretched and well, lousy on a full screen. Not everyone I know or every person I follow takes good pictures. And this shows as stretched full screen renditions on my device. Thanks, but no thanks.

4. If you don’t have a cluttered feed, very old posts show up eventually.

5. Hyperlinks to YouTube and other websites show up awkwardly. Having gotten used to the preview box for YouTube videos and thumbnails for articles, it feels weird seeing bit.ly links as is on a large 4.8 inch screen.

6. No widgets. If you are an Android widget lover with widgets for anything from weather to Evernote to Spotify to what not, you lose all of it with the Facebook Home launcher enabled. This is a big loss. I use widgets extensively and without them, every action with the phone takes that much longer.

7. Very Facebook centric. I list this as an issue because its my phone and there are a lot of things I do with it beyond looking at pictures of friends and liking pictures or exchanging messages. The Home interface makes it harder to do the simplest things one uses their phone for.

8. Ads are coming. In Zuckerberg’s own words, ads are coming at some point to Facebook Home. If I have paid $199 for my device on contract and pay another $1700 over a period of two years for voice and data service, the last thing I want to be doing is look at ads on my home screen. And voluntarily so.

Facebook Home on iOS

Facebook announced a new version of its app for iOS. This app brings the Chatheads feature and stickers to iOS6. It also has minor design changes within the Facebook app. More details on this update can be found here. There are rumors that Facebook is talking to Apple on bringing Facebook Home to iOS. I consider this a highly unlikely event. Apple is doing well with its minimalist aesthetic and clutter free design. With Jony Ive driving things now, it will only get cleaner. Adding an extra layer on top not to mention opening up the APIs for such a feature would not be like Apple to do. I have been surprised before but I still think this is unlikely. I do expect the smart engineers to bring much of the Facebook Home functionality in some form or other to the iOS Facebook app over time.

In Conclusion

Unless your life revolves around Facebook, I do not see why you should install Facebook Home. It makes doing everything with your phone, just a wee bit harder. It potentially makes your device screen awkward to be seen in public. And for no good reason. I am a big user of Facebook and love the social networking features it offers. But I’d like to use it on my PC and as an app on my mobile devices. Not as something that takes over the home screen on my handset. Its just not worth it at this point.

I do expect Facebook Home to get more functionality as time progresses. Facebook has promised monthly updates. So it is possible that some of the downsides I mentioned before are addressed soon. Until then, I will stick to my widget customized Android screen for daily use and an ever improving Facebook Android app for my Facebook fix.

It has gotten to the point where we cant imagine a life without apps, much as we hate to admit it. To capture this sense of addiction, I have taken the liberty of creatively adapting the Alcoholics Anonymous twelve step program for apps. So without further ado, here it goes.

The Appaholics Anonymous Twelve Step Program

1. We admitted we were powerless over those apps- yes, indeed there is an app for everything. Including one to read this- whenever, wherever and however. OK, I am already drifting. Our lives have become unmanageable without these apps.

2. Came to believe that only a feature phone could restore us to sanity- but good luck finding one.

3. Made a decision to uninstall all those apps right away- oops, I need that one and this and this one. Nevermind.

4. Made a searching and moral inventory of all my apps. 118 in total. And thats just the ones on my phone. And another 123 on my tablet. And then there is the other tablet. And the other one.

5. Admitted to self and self only that I just need that one last app and I am done. Unless they release a 2.0. I mean, there are bugs in 1.0 after all. And the in-app purchases. C’mon, I cant use the gimped version. What do you think- is this the Lite or the Premium Pro version?

6. Were entirely ready for the spouse to remove all these apps on my phone- until she found out that I have that new game that she doesnt. Now she is not giving me my phone back.

7. Humbly asked her to remove all my shortcomings- the credit cards on file, the password to the app store, everything. But then realized, I need them for my two-step verification after all.

8. Made a list of all the people I totally ignored in the corridor, in the cafeteria and the restroom (yep!) that I was too busy to acknowledge as I was buried in my phone screen busy with my apps. Became willing to look up and  acknowledge the next time.

9. Made eye-contact the next time I met them. Smiled. And went back to my screen. Hey, I did what I promised.

10. Continued to take personal inventory, 121 phone apps at this time and 141 tablet apps. When added new apps, promptly made note to delete them. Lets cross the bridge when we get there. What’s the real hurry here?

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to constantly improve our interaction with the app. Hands free gestures, eye tracking, voice- I’ll take them all.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening thinking about removing all these apps, just realized why am I trying to delete them again?. I love them unconditionally. They are my handpicked selection, downloaded, sorted into the right folder in the right page, not the home (too valuable real estate), not the 6th screen (too many swipes), just right on the 4th alongside the related social folder (logical choice). 

While you read this, I will have added a couple of new apps to try out. And plan on committing myself yet again to the program.

Disclaimer: This is in no form or manner meant to offend anyone in a real AA program. App addiction is not in any form or manner as life changing and life threatening as alcohol addiction. AA is doing a great job in helping people with a real problem. This post is just in good humor.

Everything must be free.

From the day of the browser, we are used to free things on the Internet. Unlike the real world where everything has a cost, we are accustomed to getting everything for free on the Internet. We want free email but scream when Google uses our email to target small obscure text ads in the Gmail UI. We share away everything and more on Facebook but are indignant every time they update their privacy policy to make every user count towards their bottom-line via third-party ads. We love the Spotify library but hate that they actually charge to stream to your mobile device. How dare they?.

Behind every product and every service on the Internet, there are a bunch of engineers and  not to mention infrastructure that includes servers, data centers, and what not.  And if they were to offer everything for free, who is to pay for all of that?

The Ad driven services model

Google was the first to really pioneer the ad-driven services model. They pretty much gave everything for free bar the occasional premium version of some software with additional storage (Picasa, Google Music) or enhanced business driven features (Google Apps). In return the user agreed to let their content and browsing habits be mined for targeted ads from Google. It was always uncomfortable knowing how much Google knew about you but in return you got everything for free. This has worked for the most part.

The Paid services model

The other end of the spectrum are the paid services typically driven off a “freemium” model. Evernote, Spotify, Dropbox and many others work this way. You get a basic service for free but it has its limitations. For a fee, all those restrictions get lifted and a premium product is offered to the customer.  This works too. It has a smaller audience for the paid services but it is not as reliant on ads and there are effectively two streams of income.

And for everything else…

A few months ago, I wrote about my utopian dream of a paid, ad-free Gmail service. Since then, I have been surprised by the number of hits for that post and the number of people who search for it (thanks Google Analytics). I would pay for one such service as I would for an ad-free Facebook.

I pay $9.99 for my Spotify premium service as I do for my XM Satellite Radio on my car. I pay because they offer a value addition over free services. And I wish many free services on the Internet came with a paid option. Like my dear Google Reader. Google has been slowly but steadily shutting down a bunch of its lesser used services and focusing on a few key pieces. I admire that strategy and see it as the right move for Google. But at the same time, it has a cult following that is taking to Twitter and to all of the Internet and complaining about it. I will miss it badly and really wish Google offered a paid option at at $2.99 a month for those who want to keep the service. That would pay for the developers who maintain it and readers like me, happy.

 Finding the sweet spot

It all comes down to finding the sweet spot between managing development effort and monetizing the product. If the product is worth something to customer, they will pay for it. And a one size fits all solution may not work for everything. I see Evernote, Spotify and Dropbox as good examples of offering a compelling free product and a paid model that is actually worth upgrading to.

Google knows much better than I do at why they shut down Reader. And I can see their strategy as being sound. Just that the dedicated users of a good product lose out on something very integral to their daily life. With no compelling products to replace it, this loss will be felt.

I picked up a Surface today at my local Microsoft store along with a Type keyboard. My job requires me to benchmark the performance of the best in class devices in the business and I wanted to add a Surface to our library. I have categorized my experience into two categories- the good and the not so  good.

The Good

Hardware is great.

The best part about the Surface is the look and feel of the actual hardware. It seems extremely well build. It looks great and feels solid. Front and back, it looks and feels great. The kickstand is as advertised. Feels really well made.

Display feels rich

The display is rich. The Surface is a 1366 x 768 tablet in a sea of much higher resolution screens. But from a color depth and clarity of display standpoint, it feels rich. Apps tell a different story but that is for later.

Windows 8 is innovative

I have written about my experiences with Windows 8 on a non-touch PC. On the Surface, some aspects of the OS shine. It is generally responsive and native apps like IE, Bing Maps, Bing Finance and others are designed for the OS. While I have quibbles about the apps themselves, they seem well suited in general for the touch experience.

Good Battery Life

In the limited hours time I have spent with the device, battery life has been good. I havent let it drain fully yet but it is holding up very well.

Multitasking and User Profiles

Multitasking is easier on Windows 8 than iOS and Android. It is simple and easy to switch between apps. It is also great that the OS offers the ability to create multiple user profiles. Something Android didn’t add until recently and iOS still doesnt offer.

Touch Experience is good

I didn’t feel very many hiccups with the touch experience and response. Apps responded to touch very quickly and the drawing apps showed that the device was tracking the fingers pretty nicely.

The Not So Good

And now for the not so good parts. Unfortunately, there is more of this than the good and much of it has to do with the software. The software doesnt seem ready yet for primetime competition with the likes of iPad. And there are quite a few reasons why.

Out of the Box experience left a lot to be desired

One of the biggest reasons for the tremendous success of the iPad is its out of the box experience. While Microsoft has done a good job with packaging the product, the out of the box experience is pretty lacking. Here is my laundry list – the device takes forever to setup, it feels like a Windows PC and not a tablet and in my case, the wifi just didn’t work. In true Windows style, I had to disable the adapter multiple times before the Surface was able to do a Wifi scan. Disappointing.

The hardware is not perfect

While the overall hardware feels good, there are some misses. The kickstand, robust as it is cannot be adjusted. It is open or close. Nothing in between. This leads to a weird situation when the device is used anywhere outside of a table.

The device is heavy and long. The Surface cant be held in one hand for more than 10-15 minutes and it feels heavy. It is also too big to be used in hand for prolonged periods of time.

An OS of many weird choices

On one hand, the tile based system is the right way to go for touch devices. But Microsoft hasn’t made the jump cleanly. There is so much of the PC based interactions that it makes for an awkward experience. Saving a document takes you to the PC non-touch experience that is difficult especially without a keyboard.

The desktop mode is an afterthought for reasons that are not very obvious. Across the board, as I spend more time with it, the dichotomy between the Windows 8 of the old and the new touch experience is very evident.

Updates and other PC quirks

I was told that there were multiple Windows Updates that needed to be applied, much like a PC. I thought tablet OS didn’t need to be updated like PCs but I was wrong. iOS and Android core OS updates are very much in the background or rare. My Windows Update took a good 40 minutes. And I wasn’t sure if it had frozen or was just taking time. I hope this does not happen often.

Simple tablet specific tasks like increasing the font size of a page were not  intuitive enough to do. I was reading a page on Bing finance and felt the need for a bigger font size. After 5 minutes of trying, I gave up. Could not get it done. It is entirely possible, I missed it. But hey, it wasnt obvious at all.

Apps are lacking

Apps are lacking. And whatever apps are available look like they were afterthoughts by the designers who reserved their best effort for iOS and and/or Android. Free apps are missing a lot of good ones and the paid apps are inconsistent. Take this example. In the top paid apps, there is a version of Facebook called (Facebook Mobile) developed by AnKo Software for $2.99. It has 4 stars. In the Top Free apps category, there is an app called Facebook Touch developed by FBTouch and carries 3 stars. Here is the kicker. I still have not found the official Facebook app for Surface. And no Twitter either.

Microsoft Office is not ready for touch

I havent used Office on the new Surface Pro tablets or any of the touch ultrabooks but on the Surface, Office is not well flushed out. There are tasks that show a traditional Windows interface not suited for touch amidst those written specifically with touch in mind. Long form typing was hard with or without the keyboard as is the case with many tablets. Overall, the experience was not anywhere close to that on a laptop or PC.

The Touch and Type Covers are not there yet

I had to choose between the Touch and the Type cover in the Microsoft store. The Touch cover felt very weird and the Type cover seemed better of the two and so I went with it. When I got back and tried the Type cover on, it didn’t feel that great either. While the Type cover is a step in the right direction, it is not anywhere close to a real keyboard typing experience on a PC or a laptop. It is hard to explain but it just doesnt feel right.

The Type cover is also bulky. When it is open, its great but when the cover is folded back, holding the device feels awkward with the fingers resting on inactive yet physical keys on a keyboard. The Type cover needs to be removed when not in use but the tablet is in use. It makes it cumbersome but thats the only way.

Conclusion

So what does it all translate to?. The Surface has a lot of good first steps for Microsoft and there is a lot of potential to improve with future iterations of the hardware and software. The base from which MS can take the leap is all there and in place. But Surface is not a tablet I would recommend for $499. It has a lot of raw edges both in hardware and more so in software that need to be ironed out before it can compete with the rest of the industry. It needs work. The DNA is there. The motivation is there. Soon the product will get there. It is not there, just yet.

WFH: Life happens

Over the years working from companies in the East and West Coast, my wife and I have had to work from home occasionally. Most of these occasions were driven by the usual reasons- cable installation, furniture arriving, plumber coming in, feeling sick, kid is sick and cant go to school, etc. And every one of these occasions were not conjured up out of thin air. It was specifically to address a problem. And unless you have someone at home all the time, it is a recurrent event in every employee’s life.

WFH: More work hours.

Consider a typical workday for most of us. We head out before 9. Drop the kid. Head to work. Leave before 6. Pick up the kid. Come back home. If any work is pending, catch up after the kid has gone to bed. Now if it was possible to start working at 9 and work all the way until 6.15 when the kid comes back, you get the full day without the commute, the time to settle at work, the time to wrap things up, the lunch hour and what not. It is a definite hour or two of extra work just within the work day.

WFH: When used wisely, it is less distraction.

One of the key reasons why we have a workplace is to collaborate. This is true and valid for 90% of the time in a year. But for about 10% of the time (maybe more for some others), it may help to block out the collaboration and focus just by oneself on one or more problems that need individual attention. The workplace may not be amenable to such a requirement due to all the work related and unrelated distractions. On such days, working from home could be a huge difference maker. I have in the past done the occasional day from home only to catch up on emails and small work tasks that I otherwise never seem to get to.

The Downside

Yes, working from home can be and is probably misused by a small portion of people. This is applicable everywhere. But if that is the reason to worry, those folks are probably slacking in the office anyway and will find a way to slack anywhere. They are less productive wherever they are. And no amount of rules and restrictions will change that.

Yahoo!

I am a big fan of Marissa Mayer and do think that she is an extremely capable CEO who is well aware of the backlash such a move would generate. If she chose to take the decision nevertheless, it speaks of dysfunction that could otherwise not be cured as this article speculates. That said, it will not sit well if Yahoo! is trying to entice the best of the best in the Valley to come work for it. Already, popular web companies are starting to appeal to Yahoo! engineers to make a switch. Smart engineers are extremely protective of their independence and a company banning telecommuting will be viewed as infringing that freedom.

I work in a lab and most of my time has to be spent at the office anyway. But Yahoo engineers are web developers who could function just fine from wherever they choose to work. Collaboration is critical- yes, but it will happen if there is vision. If engineers believe in an organizational vision, they will work together to make it happen. If there is lack of vision, even the best will have no incentive to collaborate and make a difference.

The motives are genuine from Yahoo! management. Unfortunately the execution  may leave a sore taste in the mouth not just for current employees but potential new hires which are hard to entice in the current technology boom. It will also be viewed as a not so friendly move by employees who place a significant amount of focus on their family lives as many do. Hopefully all this furor will give Yahoo! a moment to think before the move reportedly goes into effect in June.

Wearable Computing- the next big thing

For the last few years, smartphones and tablets have been the areas where much of the gadget wars have been fought. As the post-PC era dawns on us, we have shifted all attention to innovation in smartphone and tablet technology.

Wireless technologies, display technologies, device miniaturization, voice control, location based technologies and others have been at the forefront of this tablet and smartphone era. Core innovations are continuing to happen like bendable displays and advanced LTE systems but the devices themselves are close to being in their ideal form factor. This means that a next dimension in the gadget wars will be opened and the bet seems to be on wearable computing.

Google while already working on Google Glasses as its first foray into wearable computing is also reportedly working on smart watches. Personal fitness trackers are all the rage these days and they come in multiple form factors from pendants to bracelets to portable dongles.

What started it all

Dick Tracy’s two way radio

You could argue that Dick Tracy’s watch was the original inspiration for every smart watch that is out there and it would be a fair assessment. For the last two decades, technology companies have been trying to crack this gadget and have repeatedly failed. This was for a multitude of reasons- lousy internet connectivity, stone age display and technologies not to mention manufacturing that was not yet ready for such a level of miniaturization. Over the last few years, all of this has changed. And we are now ready to make the dream smart watch.

Apple serendipitously kicked off this recent interest in smart watches when it made its last generation iPod Nano small enough to be plugged into a watch strap and used as one. The Lunatik TikTok was a cult hit that spawned a cottage industry of iPod Nano watch bands. But in a seemingly odd move, Apple increased the size of the latest Nano, killing the budding market, or so it felt at that time.

Enter the iWatch

There was a lot of speculation when Apple increased the size of the 7th generation Nano that it was building its own iWatch. And it makes sense. The time is finally right for the iWatch. There are over 500 million iOS devices out in the wild.

Imagine a watch that can sync with those devices and deliver iMessages, provide email notifications, show social network updates, updates with latest tweets, stream songs (both via Airplay and from the Cloud directly via Wifi) and *possibly* support Siri wouldnt that be a game changer?. Now if it can also support Facetime, how about that for a killer gadget. Other than supporting Siri which is processor intensive and challenging and also Facetime, everything else can be done. And Apple will wrap it up in a package designed to appeal to its hundreds of millions of iFans. At $199, that would instantly be the device to buy this year.

There are question marks on Apple’s continued domination of the gadget industry. Much of it is overblown but it is a fact that Android has caught up both in the wow factor of hardware and fantastic software. I would argue that the current Jelly Bean Android OS on Nexus 4 is more innovative than iOS 6. It helps Apple then to introduce a new segment to foster its next few years of bottom line growth.

Competition

Smart watches are hitting big time now with the huge Kickstarter success story, Pebble and Sony’s very own Smart Watch. Other innovative startup players are also starting to enter the space like Metawatch (another Kickstarter success story) and CST01 (Kickstarter too). But the big guns will come swinging soon. Casio is selling a G-Shock that syncs with iOS via bluetooth. Google is probably building its smart watch as we speak. Samsung and LG wont be far behind. But Apple will have a head start if it does launch its device this year. And given their design chops, they will come in with something that has looks to kill.

I believe there is a big potential market for an Apple wearable device like an iWatch. Apple has probably seen the marketplace opportunity and will likely offer one such device before the end of the year. And it will sell. Until then, I will go back to waiting for a shipment update on my Kickstarter backed Pebble.

The first post in the PTWY series as it shall henceforth be referred to, is personal fitness trackers. This post was originally titled “Following my footsteps with the FitBit One” and you’ll soon realize why. About a year ago, I came across a product called the FitBit Ultra. It was being pitched as a personal tracker and as a tool for your Quantified Self. One that would tell you how much you exercised in the course of a normal day and how well you slept at night. I was intrigued. For less than $100, here was a wearable gadget that could help you understand some of your key daily body patterns. And it would potentially help kick start a fitness routine that would at once be tracked with the same gadget.

I started writing this post about 3 weeks ago and thanks to the explosion of personal fitness trackers spotted at CES, every major publication has written an article about it. You are welcome to check them out here – Wired, The Verge, Forbes. And before you jump on me saying this is nothing but pedometers- yes, they are that but a lot more. Imagine them as Pedometers 2.0.

Why do I need a fitness tracker?

The first question that I get from people when they see my FitBit One is why?. Why do I need a fitness tracker?. Here is my reason. I’d love to stay fit by going to the gym. I’d love to be running half marathons. I’d love to go hiking every weekend. The reality is, I cant. Between work and home schedules and demands, I don’t get to do some of the things that would take to keep me fit as a fiddle. I need something that works within my lifestyle. And to determine that, I need to know where I stand. That is what a fitness tracker comes in. A tracker doesn’t make me fit. It tells me when I need to get moving and when I deserve to take a break. It tells me when I need to be climbing stairs and when I need to be sleeping better. And thats a good place to start.

How do I use my fitness tracker?

I use a Fitbit Oneas my personal fitness tracker. It was launched in Fall 2012. It is the second generation fitness tracker from FitBit. It is not waterproof. It supports Bluetooth 4.0 to sync with iOS devices and my laptop with the provided RF USB receiver dongle. The One comes with a small case with a holster like setup and also a night strap. When you register your device at fitbit.com, it sets up a starter goal at 10,000 steps  (approx 4.7 miles) and 10 stairs a day. Its a reasonable place to start in my opinion.

I put the One in my pocket first thing in the morning. I then forget about it until about lunch time when I take a look at my step count. After 2.5 months of use, I know approximately how many steps I should have done to get to 10,000 by the end of the day. If I am not trending to pattern, I force myself to start walking more – maybe a post-lunch stroll or extra walks within the office. I recheck in the evening. If I am not getting the desired step count, I force myself to walks within the house. Now this might all sound weird, but I tell you it works. I have now developed the habit of forcing myself to walk more based on the FitBit One.

On days when I end up tracking ahead of my usual step count, I aspire for greater numbers than before. In that vein, I hit a personal goal of 20,000 steps last weekend. It is a great motivator tool, in my opinion. And it also serves as a signpost during the day.

The sleep tracker feature is pretty neat. It tracks your sleep patterns and gives you a fancy chart of when you actually went to sleep, how long you slept, and how often you woke up at night. I have found this to be pretty accurate.

FitBit One

Product Space

FitBit is not the only product in this space. They are one of the most popular alongside the Nike FlexFuel band and the Jawbone Up. This section describes in brief, some of the fitness trackers in the market.

FitBit One / FitBit Flex/ FitBit Zip/ FitBit Ultra:

I use a FitBit One and recommend it. It is a good buy at $99. If you plan on buying one, I would recommend that you preorder and get the Flex. It costs $99 and is expected to ship in March. It is a band that is also waterproof- the one missing feature on the One. FitBit also offers the Zip which is everything that the One is without Bluetooth sync.

One other cool feature of the FitBit family is that the company offers open API’s for its products which has allowed for a good app ecosystem to sync and upload your FitBit data to.

Nike FuelBand:

The Nike+ FuelBandwas the premium product to the FitBit when it launched. It continues to be in short supply, for reasons unbeknownst to me. It has a band form factor and does much of the same that the FitBit does with one major exception- it does not track your sleep.

Jawbone Up (redux):

Jawbone is the most interesting player outside of FitBit. They were the first to launch a major wearable computing product with the original Up. But just as soon as it launched, it will pulled off the shelves due to quality issues. The rebuilt Jawbone UPwas launched last Fall and is a very good product from the specs and reviews of it.

MyBasis:

MyBasis offers its fitness tracker in the form of a watch. It is also the most expensive product of the lot at $199. They claim that they have approached the problem from a health and fitness background and offer additional software tools to manage and utilize the fitness data for a better lifestyle.

Misfit Shine:

The Shine is a wildcard here. It is backed by ex-Pepsi and ex-Apple CEO John Sculley. It was crowdfunded via IndieGoGo and has a product with an entirely unique and small footprint. It is about the size of a quarter and twice the weight of one. The company claims it can track your swimming, cycling and similar fitness activities outside of the basic run and walk metrics. It is expected to ship in the next few months and I will review it when I get my backer unit.

Moves iOS app:

And in a sea of $79 and above trackers, here is a free iPhone app launched last week that claims to do much of what the other fitness trackers do. It utilizes the plethora of sensors on the iPhone to get its data. The impact of having many sensors up and running for a while on the battery life of your iOS device could make this a deal breaker. But if you want to get started on the road to fitness tracking, Moves app is a cheap (free) place to start. Android and WP8 versions are supposedly on their way.

Bottom Line – Should you buy one?

I hope I gave you just enough to get interested in the world of fitness trackers. I think they could be really useful in helping you identify the good and bad in your lifestyle from a fitness standpoint. It is insanely simple to use and pretty easy to get addicted to. Before long, you will be making small but important adjustments to your lifestyle. To me, that alone is worth the price of admission.

Google Search Plus your World

A few months ago, Google created a furore when it announced its integration of Google+ with Google Search. What this meant was that your searches would include parts of items shared on your Google+ feed wherever applicable. There were questions raised on everything from forced G+ integration to search being corrupted by not necessarily pertinent and high quality results. But folks in technology knew that this was a long time coming.

Social search has been the holy grail of search for a long time and Google had just taken its first steps towards integrating it closely with its traditional web search. It was always a matter of when not why personalized search was going to include our  social networks.

Google also knew that Facebook was working on it. It was after all a logical progression of their vast troves of semantic data driven by our social connections and activities through their Open Graph system.

Facebook’s Graph Search

With all this happening, Facebook formally took off the wraps from its Graph Search feature. It is a significant step forward for Facebook as it tries to reposition itself not just as a social network but a social network that provides useful services. In one fell swoop, it entered the territory of Google Local, Google Search, and to a lesser degree Yelp!, Foursquare, LinkedIn and Angie’s List. It is definitely an ambitious step forward for the Menlo Park giant.

How will it work for me?

So what is Graph Search?. In layman’s terms, it allows you the Facebook user to search for things within the network. This could be for a good pizza place in Cupertino or previews of the latest Corvette StingRay. Results will be driven not by traditional web search crawls but by semantic searches within your friends and their actions on the network. So if your friend likes Amici’s in Cupertino and expressed it by liking the Amici’s Facebook page, that would show up in your results. You could then further refine your results to asking for pizza places in Cupertino that your friends living in Cupertino prefer and so on. You get the idea.

Challenges

Ignoring the massive indexing and data mining challenge this means for Facebook (and hence the slow rollout and Beta moniker), the feature also requires certain things to happen for it to work meaningfully.

1. Your friend circle has to do meaningful actions to help in your search results. Going with the earlier example, if you have no friends who like pizza or specifically any pizza place in Cupertino, your search is pretty useless. Google Search or Yelp! can do wonders there.

2. You need a reasonably large friends circle. A small friend circle means a smaller trove of available public data to mine from and thus, not so effective results for your search.

3. People have to Like pages or leave indexable comments or Checkin at public places so that there is data that can be mined for recommendations. I could have 500 friends but if they don’t perform actions within the context of Facebook, it means nothing.

4. Businesses need to establish a Facebook presence and integrate with Open Graph system. This works very much in Facebook’s favor as it would drive more businesses to their services. If there are a 100 pizza places in Cupertino and only 10 of them have Facebook pages, the search is severely limited.

5. Facebook will have to go out of the way to convince people that they are not breaching their privacy. This is a huge issue. Facebook has not really been a beacon for privacy and the Graph Search is already making people leery. Google knows how bad it can get as they experienced during the launch of the Search plus your world service.

Potential of Graph Search

There is tremendous potential for Graph Search if Facebook can overcome the challenges mentioned above is a way that doesn’t cause a privacy firestorm. Semantic Search is the future of Search. People will increasingly lean towards search results biased by their social networks. The singular reason for the existence of Google+ is to gather data that is relevant to you- the videos you like in Youtube, the apps you have on your Android device, the songs you listen to, the places you go to searching via Google Maps and so on.

Facebook with a much larger user base to mine is taking what is really the next logical evolutionary step for the social network. Whether it is effective or not is dependent on the users and the small businesses that make the core of the network.

I will post my hands-on impressions of Facebook Graph Search when I get the feature enabled. Until then, here is a good walkthrough of the service. If you want to go behind the scenes on how Facebook built Graph Search with two ex-Googlers, read Steven Levy’s piece in Wired.

It is good to be writing again. I took a wonderful break for the Holidays and am excited for 2013, as most of you are. Interesting things are cooking up at work and at home. There are new areas I am hoping to explore through out this year professionally and personally. So lots of promise and thrill of new and unknown challenges.

And then there is my writing. I am definitely looking to up the ante further in the kind of content I would like to deliver on this portal (as I see it) and make it worth your while reading it. My blog sites generated over 23000 unique views in 2012. I would like to modestly beat it and get 30000 unique views in 2013 which would in itself be a personal achievement. To do this, there will have to be newer articles and posts to excite you, the reader and give you value for your time.

I was tempted to do a review of 2012 but what is the point to it, now that 2013 is here. Instead, I plan on doing a series of posts on what to look forward to in 2013. I would like to add more long form articles which take time and effort to put together. The website itself was updated in December and I hope to do more there.

The hope is to offer compelling content that makes it worthwhile to keep you coming here. Thanks for your continued patronage to my website. I hope to keep it worth your while.