Five months have elapsed since that first week-end when my encounter with Android was a severe case of culture shock. With significant daily experience of the device, I can now form a more mature judgement of its capabilities and its potential – of course from my own highly subjective point of view.

I still hate having to use Google Calendar and Google Contacts for synchronization.  I hope that SyncML synchronization will appear in the future, make Android a better desktop citizen and provide more choice of end points. Meanwhile I use Google. With that out of the way, let’s move on to my impressions of Android itself.

I am grateful for features such as a decent web browser on a mobile device, for a working albeit half baked packaging and distribution system, and for Google Maps which I consider both a superlative application in its own right and the current killer albeit proprietary infrastructure for location enabled applications. But the rigidly simple interface that forces behaviours upon its user feels like a straitjacket : the overbearing feeling when using Android is that its designers have decided that simplicity is to be preserved at all costs regardless of what the user prefers.

Why can’t I select a smaller font for my list items ? Would a parameter somewhere in a customization menu add too much complication ? Why won’t you show me the raw configuration data ? Is it absolutely necessary to arbitrarily limit the number of virtual desktops to three ? From the point of a user who is just getting acquainted with such a powerful platform, those are puzzling questions.

I still don’t like the Android ‘s logic, and moreover I still don’t quite understand it. Of course I manage to use that system, but after five month of daily use it still does not feel natural. Maybe it is just a skin-deep issue or maybe I am just not the target audience – but some features are definitely backwards – package management for example. For starters, the “My Downloads” list is not ordered alphabetically nor in any apparently meaningful order. Then for each upgradeable package, one must first browse to the package, then manually trigger the upgrade package, then acknowledge system privileges the upgraded package and finally clear the download notification and the update notification. Is this a joke ? This almost matches the tediousness of upgrading Windows software – an impressive feat considering that the foundations of Android package management seem serious enough. Where is my APT ?

Like any new user on a prosperous enough system, I am lost in choices – but that is an embarrassment of riches. Nevertheless, I wonder why basics such as a task manager are not installed by default. In classic Unix spirit, even the most basic system utilities are independent applications. But what is bearable and even satisfying on a system with a decent shell and package management with dependencies becomes torture when installing a package is so clumsy and upgrading it so tedious.

Tediousness in package management in particular and user interaction in general makes taming the beast an experience in frustration. When installing a bunch of competing applications and testing them takes time and effort. Experimenting is not the pleasure it normally is on a Linux system. The lack of decent text entry compounds the feeling. Clumsy text selection makes cut and paste a significant effort – something Palm did make quick, easy and painless more than ten years ago. Not implementing pointer-driven selection – what were the developers thinking ?

PIM integration has not progressed much. For a given contact, there is no way to look at a communications log that spans mail, SMS and telephony: each of them is its own separate universe. There is no way to have a list of meetings with a given contact or at given location.

But there basic functionality has been omitted too. For example when adding a phone number to an existing contact, search is disabled – you have to scroll all the way to the contact. There is no way to search the SMS archive and SMS to multiple recipients is an exercise left to applications.

Palm OS may have been unstable, incapable of contemporary operating system features, offering only basic functionality and generally way past its shelf date. But in the mind of users, it remains the benchmark against which all PIM systems are judged. And to this day I still don’t see anything beating Palm OS on its home turf of  PIM core features and basic usability.

Palm OS was a poster child for responsiveness, but on the Android everything takes time – even after I have identified and killed the various errant applications that make it even slower. Actually, the system is very fast and capable of feats such as full-motion video that were far beyond the reach of the Palm OS. But the interaction is spoilt by gratuitous use of animations for everything. Animations are useful for graphically hinting the novice user about what is going on – but then hey are only a drag. But please let me disable animations as I do on every desktop I use !

The choice of a virtual keyboard is my own mistake and I am now aware that I need a physical keyboard. After five months, I can now use the virtual keyboard with enough speed and precision for comfortable entry of a couple of sentences. But beyond that it is tiring and feels too clumsy for any meaningful work. This is a major problem for me – text entry is my daily bread and butter. I long for the Treo‘s keyboard or even the one on the Nokia E71 – they offered a great compromise of typing speed and compacity. And no multitouch on the soft keyboard means no keyboard shortcuts which renders many console applications unusable – sorry Emacs users.

The applications offering is still young and I cannot blame it for needing time to expand and mature. I also still need to familiarize myself with Android culture an develop the right habits to find my way instinctively and be more productive. After five months, we are getting there – one handed navigation has been done right. But I still believe that a large part of the user interface conventions used on the Android does not match the expectations for general computing.

It seems like everything has been meticulously designed to bury under a thick layer of Dalvik and Google plaster anything that could remind anyone of Unix. It is very frustrating to know that there is a Linux kernel under all that, and yet to suffer wading knee-deep in the marshes of toyland. The more I use Android an study it, the more I feel that Linux is a mere hardware abstraction layer and the POSIX world a distant memory. This is not the droid I’m looking for.

The French satirical investigative journalism weekly “Le Canard Enchaîné“  reveals that our holier-than-thou presidency is in fact a pirate’s lair. In a stunning display of hypocrisy, the presidential audiovisual services produced 400 unauthorized copies of the 52 minutes documentary “A visage découvert : Nicolas Sarkozy“.

The editor, Galaxie Press had only shipped 50 copies, but the propaganda plan required more so the Elysee went to work, going as far as modifying the cover and replacing the Galaxie Presse name and logos with “Service audiovisuel de la présidence de la République”.

Isn’t is deliciously ironic that the same executive power is the main force behind the latest disgusting bungled piece of French legislation regulating and controlling the usage of the Internet in order to enforce the compliance to the copyright law ?

It is even more appalling that we are dealing with repeat offenders : last spring, while the Hadopi law was discussed, U.S. music duo MGMT received €30,000 as a settlement for a copyright infringement by French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party who used one of its songs at a political rally without permission. Those who led the charge against Internet users are not the most respectful of copyright.

Hadopi is also known as the “three strikes” law because it after a certain number of warnings a copyright infringer’s Internet access would be cut off. Hadopi has just been adopted. Nicolas – one more of those antics and your Internet access is toast !

Accra, 23 February 2009.

Mobile telephony prices varying with network load – yield management made transparent

The mobile telephony marketing idea of the day is the MTN price zoning concept I witnessed in Ghana. According to which cell you are attached to, a message on the handset displays a discount rate. On lightly loaded cells the discount can go up to 100% (although I never saw it at more than 50%) and on the heavily loaded ones there is none. Making network loads transparent to the users through a price signal a great way to both shape traffic, take advantage of available infrastructure to provide cheap traffic and charge premium prices to the most demanding users. I have never before seen yield management made so transparent – so refreshing compared to the elaborate pricing schemes designed to play that role in more subtle and more annoying ways.

Here is an extract of the press release from MTN Ghana on MTN Zone service launch in June 2008 :

MTN Ghana has announced the launch of a new Innovative service named MTN Zone. The service gives its Pay As You Go subscribers the opportunity to enjoy up to 100% discount day and night on calls they make to other MTN Ghana subscribers and runs on the per second billing plan. MTN Zone subscribers have a flat tariff on all MTN to MTN calls when they register and subsequently receive messages that display dynamic discounts they will enjoy at any point in time.

In order to enjoy the benefits of MTN Zone, existing and new MTN prepaid customers simply need to register for the service by entering *135*1# and pressing the send or ok button on their handset. Alternatively, they could send 1 to SMS short code 135. Registration onto MTN Zone service is currently free of charge. To activate the cell broadcast functionality on their handsets, customers must enter enter * 135*4# and follow the instructions, this process is unique for each handset module. The cell broadcast feature when enabled, gives MTN customers the opportunity to see the dynamic percentage discount they will enjoy when they initiate a call at that time and the discount will be applicable throughout the duration of the call.

“We are excited at what the team here at MTN Ghana has been able to provide after thorough research and development. Discerning Ghanaians want the most cost effective and exciting means of communicating with their family and friends and we are proud that as a team we have been able to crack this motivation and demonstrate our leadership in innovation and superior customer understanding. This new service empowers our customers with more, choice and control over their cost of making calls. The excitement this service has generated within one week is unparalleled in the industry in Ghana. As usual we will lead the market in innovation and others can follow”, says George Kojo Andah, Chief Marketing Officer.

I believe that they have good reason to be proud of this innovative service. It probably requires some custom billing system but I believe it is a great idea – maybe I should write a proposal for our marketing department. The billing people might be horrified though…

It is coming – but very slowly of course, thanks to the oligopolistic structure of most mobile telecommunications markets. Bombastic new entrants such as Proxad in France may pretend that their vision of future low cost flat fee mobile data offerings will be the second coming, cutting the household bill by half in three years, but once they’ll have joined the spectrum license holder’s club there will be no incentive for them to be more aggressive than what is necessary for them to grab their share of the market. They pretend that their new hotness is a technological advantage that will be the support for their claim of costs reduction, but they forget to mention that the only reason why the old and busted competition has not pushed that technology forward is that they control the market with no need for such bother. The large incumbents have immense resources – financial, technical, human and organizational. They can be terribly powerful when they realize that they are under threat : the steamroller may take a good while to get started but you don’t want to get in the way when it begins to roll at his stately speed.

So is the new entrant the trigger ? Actually, not : the new entrant’s marketing department has just done his homework and read the signs correctly. Early adopters have from the dawn of times been clamoring for simple low cost and preferably flat fee mobile data offerings, but as usual the visionaries don’t hold much weight on a mass market – changing the game takes a large mainstream actor with his own agenda. And as surprising as it may be, that interloper is Apple. As users we may spurn Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field and the technically banal Disneyland world of Apple, but the marketing magic is awe inspiring to say the least. On the basis of it, Apple managed to get the mobile operators to produce deals that were completely unheard of on that market, including the revenue sharing arrangements that lasted until last year and the still strong absolute control of the platform by Apple. As a result of all that hype, the Iphone led the charge in mass usage of mobile data access.

Of course, mobile data access had already been possible for ages and the competitors are catching up fast on Apple’s lead in mobile user experience. But credit goes to Apple for giving the masses the taste for mobile data. Last September, “the Australian Mobile Internet Insight found that during the average iPhone browsing session, users consumed 2.07 MB compared to 0.30 MB for other mobile users“ – that is six times more ! “The report also found that the average page size for iPhone browsing is more than double the mobile average, which the report attributes to iPhone users browsing desktop versions of websites“.Last month, AT&T announced that its expectation of a tenfold usage in data traffic is driven by the Iphone. Net Applications’ February results show the iPhone generating two third of mobile web accesses. Meanwhile, AdMob Mobile Metrics report credits the Iphone with a 52% share of the traffic. Google claims that it had seen 50 times more searches on Apple’s Iphone than on any other system on the market. I have heard a European mobile operator’s executive mention Japanese studies reporting that Iphone users generate ten time the data traffic of other users. Apple’s share of the handset market will certainly remain minor, but as with any catalyzer, a small quantity changes everything.

So we have a mass market hungry for cheap data and new entrants hoping to build their market share on that. They may eventually disrupt the market somewhat, but the incumbents won’t be caught napping : IP RAN, Ethernet backhaul, IP core networks and the IMS architecture are all in the pipeline. The incumbents fully expect the new market pressure on price, and they expect to be ready to take it on. Cost of the megabit transfered can currently comfortably be counted in cents with just the fingers on your two hands, and the operator’s ambition is to cut that at least in three over the course of three years. Can you believe that mobile operators are actually shaping up to be able to compete on the price of bulk data ? You better do, but don’t hold your breath and expect mobile network operators going at each other’s throat with with generous offerings of abundant data transfer capacity while your bill plummets – the price war will play in slow motion if the history of the mobile telecommunications market is anything to learn from.

Meanwhile, SMS still costs from four to 42 times more than fetching data from Hubble space telescope…

I have become a user of Brightkite, a service that provides situational awareness in the geographical context. Once its relationship to user location information sources such as Fire Eagle improve, it may become a very nice tool, especially in mobile use cases where location reporting may be partly automated.

But even if they add technical value in the growing world of geographically aware applications, theses services are actually not innovative at the functional level. For example, in the ham radio universe, APRS is already a great system for real time tactical digital communications of information of immediate value in the local area – which includes among other things the position of the participating stations. And there is also TCAS, which interrogates surrounding aircrafts about their positions, and AIS which broadcasts ship positions and enables the entertaining Vessel Traffic Services such as the one provided by MarineTraffic. All these radio based systems broadcast in the clear and are not satisfying the privacy requirements of a personal eventing service. But that problem has also been solved by the Blue Force Tracker which even though it is still a work in progress has already changed how a chaotic battlefield is perceived by its participants.

“Where am I, and where are my friends ?” is not only the soldier’s critical information – it is also an important component of our social lives, witness the thriving landscape of geosocial networking. Geographic location is a fundamental enabler : we are physically embodied and the perimeter of location based services actually encompasses anything concerning our physical presence. So we can’t let physical location services escape our control. Fire Eagle may be practical for now, but we need to make geographical information part of the basic infrastructure under our control and available on a standardized, open and decentralized basis. The good news is that much thoughts have already been invested into that problem.

Physical location is part of our presence, and as you may have guessed by now, this means XMPP comes to the rescue ! We have XEP-0080 – User Location, an XMPP extension which is currently a XMPP Foundation Draft Standard (implementations are encouraged and the protocol is appropriate for deployment in production systems, but some changes to the protocol are possible before it becomes a Final Standard – as good as a draft standard RFC and therefore good enough for early adopter use). It is meant to be communicated and transported by means of Publish-Subscribe or the subset thereof specified in Personal Eventing via Pubsub. It may also be provided as an extension of plain vanilla <presence/> but that is quite a crude way to do it compared to the Publish-Subscribe goodness.

The rest of the work is left to the XMPP client. Of course, the client can show them on a map, just as Brightkite currently does. But I can also easily imagine an instant messaging contact list on my PDA where one of the contact groups is “contacts near me”. I would love to have Psi do that…

Bruce Schneier brought to our attention the performance and ease of use of off-the-shelf data-mining tools for social networking analysis. With a few million CDR that sort of tool can identify user communities in the physical, temporal and social dimensions. ThorpeGlen’s graphical user interface screenshots are particularly impressive.

Needless to say that SIM swapping does not work as the IMEI is still available – that is old news. But swapping both SIM and teminal is not the solution either anymore as behavorial analysis can nowadays still yield a match. This may be the end of  the road for communications security in durable networks by pure compartimentalization. Instead of acquiring random prepaid accounts, clandestine operators should now focus on creating sufficient decoy activity so that the social signal is drowned in enough misleading connexions – and maybe only stolen accounts provide enough credible noise to evade profiling. Doing that without a single mistep is going to be difficult, especially under the sort of pressure that justify such precautions.

But whatever the performance of  the analysis system, casual mobile phone use in a clandestine context is getting more risky – if  this is an off-the-shelf system, just imagine what custom systems can do for the most advanced nations.