Thank you…

This is a post to someone who doesn’t want any birthday wishes on her birthday today.  She has forbidden Facebook posts, birthday messages and any form of celebration.  Therefore I won’t mention her name, just that she’s related to me.

She can be a right royal pain in the arse, but she’s also proven to be an ally to me in battles I wouldn’t have been able to fight alone and a great help to my parents and her friends.  As stubborn as we both are, we have our share of fights and as much love as there is between us we get over them to focus on more important things.

She has been welcoming to my fiancé who appreciates her greatly for that, and I’m over the moon that they get on so well.  She has been and continues to be a rock in the planning of my impending marriage and anyone who has let her out of their lives has sincerely, without reservation, been at a great loss.  Never ever underestimate this one people.  Here is someone who is loyal, caring and trustworthy and will go to the ends of the Earth for those she deems deserving of her time.

Her talent has shone in her endeavours, and I’m dying to see her get the biggest break of her life so she can reap her rewards.  Our family home is a showcase for the talent, as is her implementation of the vision of other individuals in their own businesses.  Big things are coming for her, if she stays motivated and keeps her spirits positive.

So, no message saying happy birthday, but instead a thank you to her and her continued, welcomed presence in my life and the lives of all we know.

Oh, and a few pictures to make her smile 🙂

Okay, fine, one Happy Birthday message :p

Nexus 4 and Android 4.2 – the Usability Perspective

Well well people, after a splendid introduction to Android for the past 18 months from my trusty, and bruised, beaten and bewildered Samsung Galaxy SII, here I am with my second Android phone – the LG Nexus 4.

I wrote about my transition from BlackBerry to Android previously, and some things this phone brings makes life with Android even easier, and some things a little harder.

Everywhere you go you see a review from a technical point of view, but often they omit some key things about other user experiences with Sense and TouchWiz and, sometimes more importantly, third party launchers such as Nova Launcher Prime and GO Launcher EX.  This is where I’m going to add a little, including, inevitably, the issues I have with the phone.

Firstly, I will start off with the same thing that all of them start off with.  This is a gorgeous piece of hardware that feels solid and looks beautiful.  There’s been a lot of press about how the glass back looks and it’s lived up to it.  Understated compared to the pictures but nonetheless, it adds something unique to the phone:

Nexus Back and Camera

Whilst we’re on the subject of the back of the phone it’s nice to have the camera flush in the back after the raised affair of the Galaxy SII.  The small ring around the flash doesn’t make any difference and the phone sits nice and flat on a normal surface.  Smooooth!

The Nexus logo makes a great change from the Google logo on previous Nexus phones and adds to the Nexus branding being pushed here.

Along the edges is a rubberised edge.  This has been hailed by some reviewers as cheap.  I hail it as “stopping the ownership of this phone being expensive” – it’s needed.  Without it the slick surfaces would result in many more falls.  It’s tactile, it keeps the phone in your hands nicely and makes it infinitely more usable.  Even the visible screws along the bottom have been criticised.  Not only did I fail to notice them at first, when I do look at them, they speak out to the inner geek.  They say “shh, you can open me if you really want to”.

Grip is important

The muted chrome bezel and curved edges of the glass set it off nicely.  It really looks far more impressive than the Galaxy SII ever did, even though I loved the look of the Samsung when I first got it.  The design itself has inspiration from the Galaxy Nexus, which my father has and I still love.  It works, and it doesn’t make a song and dance about it.

So, holding it is great right? Well, 90% of the time.  There are times when the slightly smaller form factor of the 4.2″ Galaxy SII are missed.  It fit in my hands a little better, but those with bigger hands will have no problems.  Those with smaller hands may find two handed operation easier in more cases.  It’s a small gripe I have which is mainly done away with when typing with the new Android 4.2 Keyboard which has Swype-esque gesture typing, but with SwiftKey-esque predictions.  I will go on to why I am sticking with SwifKey over the stock keyboard a little later.

On to the guts and glory and the key difference between how this phone manages storage from a practicality point of view, compared to the SII: It’s better.
No SD card to worry about, no external storage.  All “App Storage” is part of the main 16GB you get.  Whilst that limits the phone somewhat, it’s already proving to be more useful than the SII was in real-world usage.  How? Well observe the following on a 16GB SII:

• 1.97GB Internal Storage
• 11.5GB USB Storage
• XXGB SD card (I used a 32GB card and it does not alleviate the pains of storing a multitude of apps by a long shot)

Loads of storage right? Well, no.  The 1.97GB Internal Storage is what is reserved for installing Apps.  App Data can exist in the USB Storage or SD card portion, and apps themselves can be installed on the SD card (unless they contain widgets, in which case they have to be installed in the Internal Storage portion.  It all sounds so confusing and probably is to the average user.  It’s a complicated balance and you’ll find the phones often crashing and overheating and you’ll notice that you’ve used up all your space with camera images, WhatsApp images, videos, podcasts etc. It’s a nightmare.  You can’t be a heavy user in this style of phone storage management for a very long time.

What really works for me is the Pure Google Android experience.  Quicker than anything else I have ever used, slick and to the point.  Simple and powerful, usable and intuitive.  You’ve read many reviews on this elsewhere and I agree: Jelly Bean 4.2 is sublime.

There are things I miss about the SII’s own notifications drawer (screen rotation toggle missing is frustrating for example) and some intricacies of the contacts management/usage (swipe the name right to call left to text message was always nice), plus for toggling Wi-Fi, GPS etc it is a few more clicks than the simple “On/Off” always available from Samsung.  Other than that, it works.  Brilliantly.

The camera is also a bit weak compared to the Samsung offerings out now (sister’s SIII smashes the Nexus 4) but the features are good (Photosphere is brilliant) and implemented with some thoughts to usability.

HALT:  Two weeks into using this phone on the Three network I cancelled my contract and sent back my beloved Nexus 4.  This blog post took a back seat, and I could no longer make too fair a judgement on the long term usability.

Battery life was so-so, still requiring a mid-day charge to see it through to bedtime, but would make it home in the evening most days with moderate usage.  Aside from that and the limited storage, the Nexus 4 was the best phone I have ever owned and indeed used.

So why the change? Well, upon deciding to leave EE, I was offered a too-good-to-refuse deal for their 4G service (and getting 31Mbps download and 23Mbps upload on 4G made it worth it).  I wouldn’t pay the full £56 a month, but the amount I am paying is worth it for the 8GB cap limit I get.

As a bonus, the worry I had about Three is in our flat, was that the signal was poor (ground floor) but with EE this isn’t a problem.  Same with my parents’ house.  My dad suffers from Three’s poor signal in-house, but when he gets signal it’s great (mainly outdoors).

With EE I obtained the Samsung Galaxy Note II, which is the phone my next post will be about.  The original plan was to keep the Note II until the Nexus 4 became available again from Google for £279.  Selling the Note II for upwards of £350 would have been the icing on the cake.  However, I couldn’t do it.  The Nexus 4 was, and is, still the best phone I have ever used from a software point of view, with build quality to boot.  There are reasons I stuck with the Note II though, which I will go into more detail next time.  These are those which addressed the few concerns I had with the Nexus 4 and then some.  Briefly:

• Note II’s removable battery is a bonus but the true battery bonus here is the sheer life of the battery.  3,100mAh will see me through 17 hours leaving me with anything from 10 to 20-odd percent with moderate-to-heavy usage.  Never could I do that on the Nexus 4 or SII.
• The screen real estate of the Note II is mind-boggling.  And amazing how easily you get used to the 5.5″ AMOLED with it’s vibrant colours.  It’s the best display I’ve seen so far but not as good in terms of feel as the Nexus 4 (more fingerprints and not as slick to run a finger over).  Scratches easier too I’ve found!
• Storage.  16GB App and generic storage + I have a 32GB SD Card for it. Sold.
• 4G LTE – didn’t think it would be a big deal and make much difference, but it really really is and does.
• The camera is leagues ahead in terms of quality.  Sorry Nexus 4.
• I have the notifications style I like back with some massive improvements over the ICS on my SII (namely direct access to Settings, Jelly Bean enhanced notifications, more toggles and a brightness toggle built in – SII had this before ICS)

So, watch this space for my perspective on the Note II – the second best phone I have ever used or owned, yet, still somehow the one I find easier to live with than the marginally more impressive Nexus 4.

Mo Bros!

Hello all!  In my absence from the world of Movember this year, I’d like to share here some links to friends of mine participating in this fantastic cause… Get them some donations, share, re-tweet, whatever, just plain check out their efforts!

Firstly, Luay Charmokly: http://uk.movember.com/mospace/4634161

Luay Luay… Ohhh Noo… Me Gotta Go! Aye-yi-yi-yi!

Next up is the wonderful Monty Pannu’s beastly Tash: http://uk.movember.com/mospace/1369352

Monty’s hairy python!

Support these Mo Bros! DO IT!

Something I’ve been doing for a while… Movember and more!

So, I’d like to firstly say well done to all the Mo Bros and Mo Sistas on this year’s Movember campaign!  I have done this for the past three years and you can catch some highlights here. Below are some of my efforts:

The first year, 2009, with Dave Ananas, our trusty pineapple!

Needed some professional help with this one!

This year, I have been doing something totally different.  This year I had my stag, a little early as I’m not tying the knot until next year July, but Oktoberfest only happens once a year!

I was participating in the Ramshackle Rally to Munich this year, raising money for St. Luke’s Hospice.  The story behind what I’ve done is here on my JustGiving page.

It’s been a great time with a lot of fun and hard work along the way.  The rally itself was fantastic and an experience to remember.

The premise is simple: Buy a £200 or less car, modify it to make it cool or fit a theme and then drive for 1,500 miles (though ours ended up being 1,800 partly due to an accidental detour through Switzerland).

The route was just incredible.  Dover to Calais for the first night.
Kick off 08:00 from Calais for a long stint to the stunning, romantic Annecy (take your other half there people!).

Where can you go from Annecy?  Do what we did – go straight through Mont Blanc into Italy.  After an overnight stay in the gorgeous town of Bormio, we headed through the Stelvio Pass for some planking, exceptional driving and the ability to say “I did that road Top Gear talked about!”
This took us into Innsbruck where we were met with an old town with immense charm.

The next day we stayed in Austria to tackle it’s fantastic Großglockner mountain, again with a fantastic pass, and a view to outshine what we saw from Stelvio.  This led us into a stretch to Slovenia where we had a particularly fun night and heavy party in Ljubljana with the epic organisers of the Ramshackle Rally.  It was a night of heavy rain but you could still tell this was an impressive city with a lot lot offer.

Finally the next day we drove on to Lake Bled to take in what is a spectacular view and finally up to Munich, via Austria again, to meet for a few days at Oktoberfest.  Some stopped in Salzburg, but by the end of it Team Get Duffed didn’t have the energy.

Munich resulted in a massive party, all dressed in costume, drinking, eating brilliant food and challenges such as mass planking and the Cinnamon Challenge.  There was also an element of streaking which took a lot of the lads by surprise (and a couple of the lady-folk).

The header image of this blog is a picture I took along my travels and you can see more of those here at my Picasaweb.

I strongly suggest doing something like Ramshackle Rally once in your lifetime.
Other things I have been tempted by include The Rickshaw Run and all of these present great fund-raising opportunities for good causes.

In the coming years I wish to do some work for The Stroke Association and Alzheimer’s Society, so all fund-raising ideas are welcome!

In the meantime, here are a couple of shots from my travels through Europe:

The beauty of Annecy at night

The Duffmobile in the clouds atop the Stelvio Pass

King of the World – from the top of the Großglockner Mountain

Lake Bled – The beauty of Slovenia

The most innovative tech company? Hint: Begins with “A”

I’m gobsmacked.  Over time we have seen some great innovations and just when you think we’ve exhausted all options, someone comes along and offers something fresh.

We’ve seen the iPod come about and put portable music players on the map.  Sure, Diamond had the Rio PMP300 (which the first iPod looks like a streamlined, sexier version of) and Cowon had it’s early offerings as well as Archos with their Jukebox 6000 but Apple really got the market heated up.

We’ve also seen iPhones shake things up over the years – nothing was this slick with touchscreen before.  Yes, there were other touchscreen phones, but this had an ecosystem to go with it, it had the magic that only Apple could bring.

Since then, Android took a massive jump into the scene and has taken cues from iOS and in turn iOS has taken cues from Android.  All the developments have led to larger form factors in both phones and the form of tablets.

In the meantime, Notebooks were shrinking.  Firstly into Netbooks which, for all intents and purposes, are a dying breed.  Then screen size was becoming important again, so ultrabooks made more sense.  Slim it down, keep a lot of screen real-estate.  MacBook Air again was a pioneer in this space.  There was, what many believe, no stopping the Cupertino giant.

But this is not the company I’m talking about.

There are fantastic innovations from companies like Samsung who took the first brave step into Phablet territory.  They are among the main big guys like HTC who have pressured Apple into releasing a 4″ iPhone.  Then they venture into true multitasking.  Windowed apps which allow browsing in two windows, note-taking etc.

Sure, innovations are rife from big boys like Samsung.  But their tablets are tablets, their phones are phones, and, outside of phablet category, that’s about it (even with the S-Pen making sense as it does).

Roll on Windows 8 and ideas aplenty.  Surface RT, groovy, Sony’s efforts, everyone’s efforts, great.  But, oh, look at this… It’s Asus.  Just look at the video below – 8 minutes of your time well-spent:

Yes, the Transformer was genius, the Padfone not so much, but hey, Pad Infinity came out and it rocks, Padfone 2 looks much better and now this?!

The VivoTab is a massive, albeit subtle improvement on the current hybrid form factor.  Easier to detach than the current Android tabs, slicker connection point for the dock, plus it will have MS Office.  That blows Android’s Polaris offering out of the water.

However, the true gem I find is this bit of courageous ingenuity:

The TAICHI is an example of the creativity required to be called innovative.  Simple idea, just implemented so well, with purpose to boot.  The mirror and dual screen modes are a fantastic idea and possibilities have increased exponentially.  More importantly – CONNECT FOUR!

In any case, Asus were doing magical things before their Windows 8 offerings, but they’ve just trumped themselves again.  Being Asus there is every chance that the TAICHI will be a bit “meh” the first time around, but being that it’s not just another slide, swivel or dock, it’s a totally new idea they’re willing to try.  That is innovative, that takes balls and that’s what’s driving the industry.  Good work Asus.

(Engadget covers specs here for those that want to know, and they originally had a look at this back in June – the link to that is within theri article also – I’ve borrowed the image from their site, which I imagine is a press release image from Asus)

First thoughts on Alto from AOL

Alto has accepted invites for testing and, of course, I had to sign up.  I am glad to see they didn’t go the initial route they had planned for Alto, which was a full overhaul of AOL Mail.  It’s going to be hard to do something magical in that space which will usurp Gmail from it’s throne.  They decided, wisely, to give it the function of making email accounts you already have a pain in the arse keeping tabs on just a little bit easier to sift through.  As a disclaimer, I already have Gmail set up to move Living Social and Groupon deals straight to their own labels and bypass the Inbox, but Stacks is an interesting way to give it seperation in a more visual way.  This is their system where it can keep daily deals in one place, attachments in another etc.

Oh, and they have a pretty logo:

So, I tried Alto out after reading about it last week and it’s pretty slick so far.  Having given only 5 minutes of my time to it, I haven’t really got to grips with the Stacks system yet, but a few things I can note I am pretty pleased about:

• Multiple accounts in one place is the genius behind it
• Linking to Google Drive if you have a Gmail account – makes sense because it’s such a popular and useful service!
• Press ‘E’ to Archive.  Yes, they’ve done it there too.  Makes life easier for those who live by Gmail, and updates on your Gmail account so no stress for those who wish to archive from Alto and move swiftly on
• My contacts are there, this is good.  It also imports folders/labels from email accounts which helps organise very well
• They also link to Google Calendar, with a note that their own calendar system is coming.  If this integrates with my Google Calendar then that will be brilliant
• Stacks seems to do what it says on the tin, but I have yet to explore this more

Things to note which I didn’t like or are symptomatic of it being a beta:

• Search didn’t work (Beta issue probably)
• Automatically opens the clean, but rather simplistic, pop up compose function. Would rather an option to choose if you want to automatically go into full compose mode every time (unless I missed this option somewhere)
• Gmail itself may be messier, but altogether more versatile
• Pressing ‘C’ does not compose a new message, nor does the ‘Ctrl+W’ in normal AOL mail.

Altogether Alto was an interesting look at my mail and I may use it from time to time, I can’t see it being a replacement (at least not yet) for Gmail’s regular web interface.

As I side note, I used AOL mail for the first time since the 90s with my @about.me account and it’s really changed!  A friend of mine had AOL a few years ago and it still looked like the 90s; for shame… Now it’s similar to Yahoo! Mail, but still much cleaner and nicer.  Good work AOL, but it’s still no GMail in functionality.

Back to Alto though, it’s just the beginning and whilst not revolutionary, it certainly could be useful.  I’d keep an eye on the progress of this one.  There have been other inbox aggregators, but not many have been so well thought out.  Will Stacks be the differentiator? With a little work it could be useful, but not sure how much that means at this point.

Digital Trends has a more in-depth look here: Hands on with AOL’s Alto: A webmail client that’s big on beauty, and has decent brains to boot

Let Chiggles World commence…!

It’s been a long time coming. I’ve needed a fresh outlet and a start to doing what I’ve wanted to do. Let’s crack on shall we.
Couldn’t think of a better name but this is essentially about my world. What I have seen, eaten, used and enjoyed. What has made my world a better place. Everything from the little things in life to the gadgets I use, how I make them work for me, holidays I go on, the gems I find and more.

Hope you enjoy!