Mobility Digest » Polls

Revisited: Do You Love Your Windows Phone? (Poll)

David K — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 19:55:27 +0000

About 7 months ago we ran a poll asking Windows Phone users what their thoughts were of the platform. At the time 89% of you gave a 4 or 5 star response. So the honeymoon is well over at this point. Let’s put all the talk about how sales are doing, etc behind us and revisit the simple question: How much do you love your Windows Phone? Feel free to use the comments section to explain your answer. Oh and if you’re not using a Windows Phone use the comments section but stay out of the polls please.

[poll id="107"]

Do You Love Your Windows Phone? (Poll)

David K — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 05:39:42 +0000

There seems to be a theme I’m hearing – Windows Phone users love their phones. I mean they love them to the extent that they are talking advertisements for Microsoft. I have a few friends who own them (mostly non-techies) and they all keep telling me that they can’t put them down and love to show it off. But let’s put this to a simple poll but please, only answer if you own a Windows Phone. And feel free to justify your answer in the comments.

Word of mouth may just be the thing that starts the snow ball rolling down the hill…

[poll id="56"]

Samsung Denies Nexus Two Rumors, Bloggers Rejoice

Doug Simmons — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 16:51:27 +0000

A handful of blogs insisted they had inside sources who knew for a fact that Samsung will be unveiling the Nexus Two next Monday. Gizmodo really fanned the flames reporting that a friend of theirs got to play with it and took a picture. Allegedly leaked specs included, essentially, a Galaxy S with a better processor running Gingerbread without any Samsung interference on software.

Today Korean publication Danawa reports that Samsung told them that all this Nexus business was “simply untrue.” Danawa did not name this person nor can I find any mention of it on Samsung’s site, but given that they’re both Korean I suppose I can trust Danawa not to make such a thing up more than I’d trust Gizmodo on anything. But that doesn’t necessarily mean this spokesman’s claim matches the truth and it wouldn’t be the first time a company denied doing something and summarily reveal it.

What’s more interesting to me is this: The denial has been met with relief on various Android blogs I’ve checked, like Phandroid, among the writers and the readers, some thanking God about the revelation. They note that Samsung’s Galaxy S phone line which includes the AT&T Captivate, while high-end, is buggy, dinky, cheap and plasticky in feeling it compared to HTC, which would be sad to abandon, and the only noteworthy improvements over the Nexus One was the alleged Hummingbird processor and Super AMOLED screen. Definitely nice to have those two but maybe not at the expense of money and a sturdiness.

Playing with the Captivate I’d have to agree with that, and I realize that at the moment there’s really no one you can trust on Nexus Two successor news, but I’m curious where you all stand on HTC versus Samsung phones, hardware-wise, in general, regardless of the platform. Thoughts?

Doug Simmons

[poll id="43"]

FTC Clears Google. Won’t You?

Doug Simmons — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 15:00:20 +0000

Ahh Street Viewgate, the scandal that never ends. Well actually yesterday a step was made in that direction with the US Federal Trade Commission, initially prompted by politicians of most states to break Google’s balls in pursuit of political claptraps much to the chagrin of Consumer Watchdog (who by the way still uses Google Analytics on their website), wrapping up its probe while securing another pledge from Google to make a better effort in the future with regards to privacy.

But, sadly, that doesn’t mean the rest of the world has left them off the hook. Google’s goal is to roll Street View out throughout the entire world, perhaps magically inside of buildings too. They’ve covered a lot of turf, but have a long way to drive to realize that dream and the terrain ahead is rough with potholes of angry people, Europeans mostly, Italy, the UK and Germany in particular, still all fired up about it and that terrain is not within the FTC’s jurisdiction.

Check out this fun live interactive map of Google Street View’s political and legal woes across the globe (in addition to a coverage map that link also lets you pull up where Google is currently driving around in case you live in that area and want to make some stupid signs and buy a megaphone. It’s crazy, all those blue things you can click on for more information:

Shifting from the backstory to my rant, these are some facts (or my contentions at least) worth considering in my latest request for you to give Google a pass on this mess: Google discovered the data themselves and promptly disclosed it to the world and the proper channels of the involved countries, IE not the CIA, Facebook and dataminers, immediately. No whistles were blown, no investigations or probes were probing. They had an opportunity to quietly put all those hard drives in a really big hard drive which they didn’t take.

What, Google couldn’t keep a secret like this? Remember the robot cars? That was a pretty big deal with a lot of people involved, an awe-inspiring operation, and they kept it under wraps until they surfaced on their own schedule with a blog post heard ‘round the world. This was an option to them with Street Viewgate, but, a few incidents notwithstanding, Google does try to do good – but by definition Google’s human (corpus, Latin for body of people). Religious leaders preach that all men sin, including themselves, but we should still strive to make a reasonable effort to avoid doing bad and in the event of failure to atone for it somehow. So maybe you should aim that finger 180 degrees away from Google, buddy.

The data in question, had they opted to let themselves get away of it, would be of absolutely no use to Google – it was a giant digital hot accidental potato to be blamed on incompetence, oversight, bad luck, miscommunication or disorganization but not anything blatantly illegal or flagrantly unethical. This was an accident, an accident without the stupid quotation marks everyone’s using. I say accident, the Australian communications minister says “the largest privacy breach in the history across western democracies.” Tomato tomato.

Google has been contrite, cooperative and transparent throughout all of this with everyone, authorities and civilians alike. Google fesses up upon discovery, certainly no financial gain, no criminal intent that anyone can convincingly try to articulate. They just wanted to take some pictures and map SSIDs. When you do that on such a tremendous scale, a little screw-up or two happens but for the greater good as Google Maps and wifi location improvements are wonderful things. Google has apologized its ass off, showing even the Toyota CEO how it’s done. If you’ve got a good understanding of what mapping SSIDs entails, existing software like libpcap, Wireshark, Kismet and the like, maybe you can see how easy it might have been with their developers racing to cook up a variant to forget the over-preservation of certain inflammatory data. Just drive through, put up with the Brits throwing stuff at you, snap pictures, geocache SSIDs and upload.

Google well before this happened has bent over backwards to accommodate everyone’s delicate sensibilities with, for example, removing entire cities upon request, blurring faces and license plates, heading requests from the military, removing or otherwise obfuscating abortion clinics and domestic violence shelters, giving all users the ability to flag anything for fairly prompt examination and possible removal, give governments a heads’ up, lower the cameras a meter – you name it, they’ve done it, and typically upon request or common sense, not because they googled and found laws against the practice in other countries and foreign cities – though they surely did that too.

Recorded data exclusively included unencrypted data. Were this intentional, Google could have easily cracked WEP encryption on the fly to get a lot more juicy data for their sinister plan; they didn’t. You’ve heard the legal arguments, trespassing comparisons and other poetry, about whether or not it’s legal to listen in, inadvertently or otherwise, on unencrypted wifi data in public places but here’s one from a slashdot reader for you web developers who likens people being vocally upset about being victimized by Google’s wifi receivers to “bitching that Google indexes your site because you didn’t setup a robot.txt file.”

Google has been dying to destroy, to really expunge, all of this data but they can’t, and this must drive them nuts, because they could be accused of destroying evidence. It could be argued – no, I’ll use the active voice here – I’m arguing that it is the loudmouth politicians and protesters perpetuating the threat of this data leaking.

I know I’m going out on a limb with this paragraph, but if anything, the net result of this fiasco is that the public, the public of countries with newspapers and / or Internet access and maybe some roads, has been educated a bit on the importance of securing their home networks. If you’ve ever gone wardriving yourself you’d see just how many people don’t encrypt and as a result expose themselves to sniffing but from the bad guys, not just Google. It’s even prompting countries like Germany, I believe, to make laws mandating that people encrypt their network. If you can slip into an ends justifying the means mindset, then you know that this is a good thing.

Google has been punished and dragged through more than enough mud. If you are levelheaded enough to acknowledge this as a relatively harmless innocent mistake but say they should get spanked harder to set an example, well, to you I say c’mon, no one would want to go through what they’ve gone through, and surely in addition to Google others have learned a lesson here (Skyhook, Microsoft). No need to get litigious and cash hungry or deny your less crazy citizen counterparts the ability to use this wonderful service that looks really cool on a phone with a compass and other sensors.

People, please just drop it and, if you must, instead just keep breaking their balls (and maybe Facebook’s) for privacy invasion they commit intentionally and out in the open with fine print spelled out clearly and in a normal-sized font. On that link they also offer all their older versions of the privacy policies, one example of transparency. Here’s Google outlining their improved Street View driving policies nice and succinctly. What the hell more do you want from them? Punitive damages? Cessation of Street View driving operations? Shutdown of the service itself? Further humiliation or burning of senior executives at the stake? More self-deprecation?

Can’t you just settle for an elected, not a leveraged, disclosure, emotionally moving and clearly sincere apologies, crystal clear transparency and ramping up of privacy policies? The fifteen minutes of fame rule, from what I’ve seen, often applies to business matters. Anyone remember the Oracle vs Google Java battle? I sure don’t and that was pretty serious, threatened Android entirely as well as the open source community, issues of impact on the line, not imaginary ones or something like that.

Damnit, let it go already, and while you’re your computer or phone check out Google Maps because they actually expanded it to Antarctica where they’ve got cute penguins whose panties don’t bunch up as easily as yours.

Doug Simmons

[poll id="42"]

The WSJ Poll War Continues

Doug Simmons — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 17:40:19 +0000

Remember that WSJ mobile OS poll brawl which began with Google killing until MS-sympathizing sites like this one rallied their troops to distort the results? Refresh that poll page which as of my writing this has Google in the lead with almost half a million votes or so trailed by Microsoft at 14K, 96% vs 2.6%, Microsoft’s original percentage share before this went crazy.

I suppose those powerful Windows Mobile sites had better fire up some new battle cry articles to get back in the ring — or maybe find something better to do.

Woah I just shot and pasted that in and while I tracked down that facepalming gorilla Google jumped up another 50K votes, Microsoft gaining nine. Via Phandroid.

Doug Simmons

Google Kills on WSJ Poll

Doug Simmons — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 19:14:26 +0000

The Wall Street Journal is running a poll asking readers, “Who makes the best mobile operating system?”

You can take the poll yourself and find out the results and let the suspense build up in order to find out the results, or if you’d prefer I’ll just go ahead and spoil it for you, dumping their poll results as of the time of my posting this:

Well how about that. I’m well aware that Google makes the best mobile OS but still, you think it would be Apple dominating this, right? At least with their audience? Or RIM maybe for the Wall Street crowd? Nope, single digits for RIM, Apple getting a little over a third of Google’s vote share. How about that.

Oh wait look, there’s Microsoft, a solid half a percent above Other.

Doug Simmons

Hey I got an idea. Let’s compare audiences with the Journal and see what you guys think of the same question in this here poll.

[poll id="40"]

So, You Going Windows Phone 7?

David K — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 02:03:07 +0000

We try to cover all platforms here but obviously WP7 has taken center stage in the last few days because of the launch and the strong advertising push. So we’ve all learned a lot lately about the operating system as a whole and the actual devices that are coming out. We’ve said a lot about Windows Phone 7 so now it’s your turn.

Let’s do some polls and also, please, use the comments to explain your answers. The first question is simple enough: are you going to get Windows Phone 7? The second question, if so, which device? And remember, like class, the rationale counts so share with the group in the comments:

[poll id="38"]

[poll id="39"]

Poll: How Important Is Flash?

Gil Bouhnick — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 22:37:37 +0000

There is an ongoing debate between the iOS people and the Android/Windows Mobile people regarding the importance of Flash.

No doubt, Flash is a very popular web technology used by many sites, but recently a question popped up about the importance of Flash in those sites, especially when accessed from a mobile device. Some believe that Flash is valuable and must be supported by today’s powerful smartphones while others believe it is a source of many problems like stability, performance and battery life.

MobilityDigest and The Mobile Spoon would like to know your opinion.
Do you think Flash must be supported by your smartphone?
Are you suffering from the fact your current phone doesn’t support it?

Tell us what you think:

Technorati Tags: Flash,Adobe,Smartphone,Android,iPhone,iPad,Browsers,Internet,Poll

What Device Do You Not Want In Your Pocket?

David K — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 03:33:58 +0000

We waste spend a lot of time talking about how great our devices are around here. We tend to not focus as much on which is the worst. Let’s do a simple and unscientific poll here. Your next phone will be either Android, iPhone 4 or Windows Phone 7. Most of you tend to be in the Android or WP7 camp but what camp are you definitely not in? In other words, someone hands you a fancy new iPhone – do you dare touch the forbidden fruit?

Why is this relevant? For all the shit I give to the iPhone, I’d take it over Android. It’s a much better marketplace with a lot more quality apps, great specs on the phone and you get a good out of the box experience and I think in the end Android reminds me too much of Windows Mobile 6.5 with it’s lack of a UI, apps that aren’t top notch and too much mandatory tweaking (I know it’s fun but it gets old).

Anyway, let’s take a poll to get a sense as to what you don’t like. And feel free to shout out as to why. Maybe you distrust the manufacturer, think the OS is half baked…shout it out

[poll id="21"]

Oh and assume the hardware is similar across the board and yes, I left Blackberry out cause no one wants that;)

Android App Inventor – Greatest Thing Ever or Beginning Of The End? [Poll]

David K — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 02:28:36 +0000

By now you probably saw the release from Google talking about Android App Inventor. If you don’t know, this lets anyone write an ‘app’ for Android. Essentially you have a simple program that you can use to drop in text boxes, sound clips and even gain access to the GPS and accelerometer. There’s no programming at all and it’s all visualized. Want to see Google show off how powerful it is? Here it is making an ‘app’ that’s a picture of a cat and when you press it, it meows. Holy shit I’ve been waiting my whole life for this app!

There’s two ways to look at this. Google wants you to think that this is sliced bread (well Android sliced bread since other OSes have the same thing). But generally, this lets anyone create an app so you can create apps that suite your needs and now everyone is a developer without knowing code. Pretty hard to imagine that’s a bad thing. But a cynic (uhm me) would say that they just opened the marketplace to 100 ‘press here to hear the cat meow’ apps and if you thought that they had a marketplace filled with fecal matter you ain’t seen nothing yet. But it doesn’t matter what I think. What do you think? Sound off and poll off. And just to see if there’s an exact correlation, state your OS as well:

[poll id="16"]

[poll id="15"]