mobile things
opinion and news on mobile gadgets and development
Oct
3
Why mobile phone revision can be more effective than alternatives
Posted by grouchal in mobile software, research, review
Originally published at :
uhavepassed.com » Why mobile phone practice is more effective than alternatives
Mobile phones are a new media for educational resources, and one that is proving to be very effective for particular content and revision activities. The content must be suitable to mobile phone revision, but then mobile phones are more effective for a number of reasons:
* Easy access
* Private revision in public places
* Less distractions
* Alternative Media
* Micro revision sessions
1. Easy access
To start revising on a computer or other resource generally involves moving to where the computer is located, once moved to the correct location it takes time to start up and begin revision. This change of location creates a barrier that stops students from revising.
A mobile phone is never far, so starting revision is a couple of key presses to resume the software just where you left it.
This ease of access encourages students to revise multiple times a day, because they can revise in alternate locations, on the sofa, on the bus, in bed to name a few of the most popular!
2. Private revision in public places
Revising or studying in public is not something most students generally undertake - on a bus, whilst waiting for friends, etc. A major reason for this is that revision resources generally make it obvious what they are doing.
Tapping keys on mobile phone however in public is not unusual, and the privacy of the mobile phone means that you can send an SMS, play a game or be otherwise engaged without making it at all obvious.
3. Less distractions
Computers now provide many alternatives to doing revision, chatting on instant messenger, reading websites or interacting on the favourite social website.
Phones also have distractions (SMS messages and phone calls) but students tend to multi task these activities better when they are able to do mini revision sessions instead of interrupting large revision sessions.
4. Alternative medium
Revising on a mobile phone is not common and this novelty makes the task revision more appealing than sitting in front of a computer or reading a book etc.
The inclusion of games that re-enforce the concepts behind the driving theory test also helps students to engage in the content by providing alternate ways to revise the key concepts.
5. Micro revision sessions
The most prevalent method offered to prepare for the driving theory test involves sitting in-front of a computer and completing mock test after mock test. This approach is continued until they have answered all the questions and think they know all of the answers.
Doing these tests takes a lot of time and it can become an unappealing to sit in front of a computer and click through multiple choice tests. Once it becomes an unappealing task this often means students start “cramming” their revision into large sessions. During these large session students stop thinking about the concepts behind the questions and the process becomes one of matching questions to answers, not understanding the underlying concepts.
On the mobile phone the ease of access means it is easy to do mini sessions of revision - 2,5 or 10 questions in a spare minute or 5 minutes - which can result in much better analysis of the concepts behind the question.
Note: In order to make sure students are adequately prepared for the real test, uHavePassed provides computer based access to realistic timed mock tests as part of a normal subscription.
Find out more about using uHavePassed to practice for the driving theory test, or buy a subscription.
Popularity: 71% [?]
Sep
19
future of mobile SDKs
Posted by grouchal in Business, Development, google, mobile software, review
Joel writes a really interesting essay which is part history lesson and part predictor of the future of AJAX and SDKS.
I’d like to quickly explain my conclusions from the article and then discuss what this might mean for mobile phones.
Starting with the mistakes when Lotus Symphony was being built, removing all the innovation to fit the constraints of the most accessible computing platform of the time. The Lotus approach was compared with the Microsoft approach that meant the software was bloated but innovative. The argument is that the smart guys learnt you either spend 6 months trimming your software to give it better performance or you just waited six months and found out that Moore’s law helped you get better performance.
History lesson over he then looks at the state of AJAX technology and web apps - and compares Google’s fast and lightweight approach with gmail, docs and spreadsheet etc with other new technologies. The vision he creates is that someone will come up with a newSDK which solves not only cross browser compatibility problem, but starts on the real holy grail of web apps and starts to make web apps inter-operable in the same way cut and paste did for the desktop. I like the vision and see how it could work, but I am not sure that perhaps this idea of inter-op may not just be more a technical dream than a consumer ideal - especially with the security concerns etc.
The lessons to be learned and the conclusions he comes to make a lot of sense, I wish he had spent more time analysing the candidates for the NewSDK though.
I guess Joel is talking about two types of competitors for Google - those that are creating platforms (Microsoft, Adobe) and those that are competing on applications (Zoho, Salesforce, Microsoft). Google I think has a good chance of making their work become de facto standards as they tend to embrace open source but also open up their own ideas. I think that Google Gears is a great example of this - and Zoho are now working with them on the project and using the technology in their software.
I understand the compromises between efficient feature low and bloated feature rich applications - and I think that Googe have got gMail spot on I have no idea what I needed Outlook for all those years. The docs package is different though - I have tried both Google Docs and Zoho and I think that the simple interface for Google means that I miss a lot of things from word - however I love Google’s simple approach to collaboration. Zoho is feature rich but is also harder to use as it is harder to work out where the limits are - but if my key need is to quickly put together a nice looking document - I use Word, if my need is to collaborate on a doc then I use Google Docs as it doesn’t confuse other users so much.
So if we say that Google have usability worked out and their approach is working well and keeping users (the Spreadsheet I think is fantastic) I guess we are left with inter-operability. Is inter-operability important to users? and how can security issues be handled?
The platform at the moment is Facebook for interop - you can access a lot of applications and share data using their API and this is clearly going to advance - but the goal that Joel mentions of being able to cut a picture from flickr into gmail is not going to be enable by facebook. This sort of goal is going to need a change is the browsers and who is looking at making platforms and the browser work differently - Micrtosoft, Adobe and Google Gears. Which of these approaches is Open, lightweight and not bloated? Google Gears.
So to learn the lessons that Joel has pointed out and use them in making my prediction for the future of Web apps the newSDK he talks about to me won’t be a single javascript library. I think Prototype and jQuery and Scriptalicious will all continue to develop in the ways and compliment each other. I think that Microsoft will have a big problem using previous techniques to bundle Silverlight into the OS which will take away their normal tactical advantage. Abode will need to make sure that AIR has lightweight access in addition to using full flash functionality and gets installed as part of Flash installs. Google gears will need to have proper infrastructure set-up perhaps even a more open name and path forward “Web Gears”?. One of these three will be the choice of developers and with a complimentary back end Facebook, OpenId or some other system will allow the Web 3.0 apps to be about collaboration and interoperability.
So what does this mean for mobile?
Well lessons learnt from Joel’s history lesson and lessons to be learnt from future predictions mean that I think that Apple’s approach to phone apps is going to become predominant. The browser will be king - but browser choice will have to come into play if innovation is going to move us forward. Mobile has to have off-line more than desktop, mobile apps must have access to device capabilities to truly create innovative apps. I think that the rumoured gPhone will contain something similar to Google Gears and will allow developers to use the back-end infrastructure of Google to enable their apps to interoperate - I hope this can all be made much more open though. I think Apple with adopt Google Gears into Safari and other manufacturers will be able to use it too. As the number of iPhone and facebook applications rise - so too will compatible browsers on other phones - either Opera or manufacturer ones. So the iPhone API will become quite a standard - and if it is widely enough used and complimentary enough the Google Gears one - I hope both of them are already looking for W3C approval.
So my predictions for Web 3.0 and Mobile 3.0 see them converging - Google Gears (or some other candidate) along with facebook (or next years equivalent or openId) will be key to both platforms and the iPhone API (or a cross platform javascript library) will be key to mobile interactions and Prototype (or another dominant javascript library) will become a key API for the Desktop.
Popularity: 100% [?]
Jul
2
Balanced iPhone review
Posted by grouchal in iPhone, review
The BBC have given what I think is the most balanced review of the iPhone I have found - they do not seem to suffer from the fan-boy or apple-critic syndrome of some other reviewers:
BBC NEWS | Technology | Hands on with the Apple iPhone
Through all the reviews I’ve read the keyboard comes up - which is not surprising - but hardly any criticism of the greasy screen - it normally gets mentioned, but then doesn’t appear on the cons list - which is interesting.
Of all the main criticisms the keyboard looks to be the one that will give them teh biggest problem - and I think they will be unwise to take too long to allow either an external add on or a new model with built in keyboard. The network speed and other things will be solved with new networks etc.
I am just praying that they will allow 3rd party apps soon - there are so many areas where this device could be moved much quicker forwrad by allowing the masses of geeks that no own one to put their own ideas on there.
Popularity: 52% [?]
Jun
28
Find the nearest loo - from your phone
Posted by grouchal in mobile software, review
I think this is a great idea - just aslong as you know about it - when I have been travelling this would be a great tool to have on my phone - questions is would I remember it at the time? Or just ask someone?
There is a quick review on TechCrunch: When You’ve Got To Go, Go To Mizpee.com
I am not sure about the comments that say the Web 2.0 “has just jumped the shark” - it is neat ideas like these that allow the innovation to happen - it may be this that inspires it’s creators or someone else to come up with a better service - so don’t dismiss it immediately as useless.
Popularity: 65% [?]
Jun
26
Haptic Clock?
Posted by grouchal in Gadgets, mobile software, review
Nice idea at cwwang.com for an application that is a “Haptic Clock“.
The plan is I guess that when you are stood talking to someone and you want to glance the time, but not upset them you reach into your pocket and press a key and then feel the time. I like it - also for meetings without clocks in the room.
The porlbem as I see it is that it won’t work in my pockets, I can’t leave it running as it will get stopped by random key presses - and if I lock the phone (my N70) the application won’t be in the foreground.
If there was someway to make it into a screen saver - this is a great idea otherwise I think it is just an idea.
Popularity: 80% [?]
Jun
22
PlanHQ - business planning online - a review
Posted by grouchal in off-topic, review
I have tried out a service on the web called PlanHQ a couple of times and from my first visit I thought that they had a very good potential. This visit had been about 4 months ago and I set-up a business plan using the software and it helped me pull my ideas together. I understood the product was still in beta at that point so was quite forgiving of the odd button not working and things like this.
I liked that the application had a button within it to allow people to give immediate feedback on the page that they were in to the developers - this seemed very logical to me and a great communication tool (I have since noticed it on other sites). Each time I came across a problem I noted it and then carried on with what I was doing - finding a workaround at most times.
What I like most about the service is the core idea - a business plan should not be a document but a living set of data that charts the plan for your company and allows you to look at it from lots of different perspectives. The document has now been reduced to an output from all this data to communicate your plan to other people - brilliant.
The service is there to help you plan in the first place - but also to get you to keep the document alive as you grow your business, and easily compare progress against the plan.
They finished their beta a while back and I knew that I would have to pay for the service - but decided that it didn’t give me enough value to be worth the 30 day trial.
I chose to revisit the site last week as I am in a phase of planning again and I got it working quite easily. I was disappointed with what I found though. The design has changed and I think as a result of this - there were lots of bugs again - buttons didn’t work, error pages appeared. I was so disappointed as I believe in these guys vision but they seem to be going backwards not forwards. What I had found previously as a great beta application that I thought had potential and was recommending to people had become a much less usable application, which I found frustrating to use myself let alone recommend.
I had made a couple of recommendations about the site after the beta - the first was to make it multi-currency which they have done - but this still has bugs - graphs and charts show dollar signs still. The second was to look at the financial planning and allow sales forecasts to have a combination of product, price and volume to allow easier planning.
I found myself now using a combination of google docs and spreadsheets to allow collaborative reviews of the text and figures and I am using Zoho Project to manage the goals tasks.
If the financial element within planHQ was better I think I would pay for it for sure (once usability was fixed).
Truely Unique - part of their service which shines out as an example of what they are trying to do is the analysis tool for comparing markets, requirements and competition. I can honestly say that this took is fantastic at helping you see the woods for the trees, understand what it is your markets want and compare this with what is being delivered. I have gained insight in to my market place with this tool and it has been instrumental in changing my strategy, and the great thing is you can use this tool for free in the first 30 days - then move to easier to use tools for the rest of the cycle with your business plan.
Here is my suggestion to the planHQ guys:
Your belief in an idea is great - you are at the beginning of setting a benchmark in on-line business tools, but you are only just beginning. Look to the Markets section of the product and continue to innovate along these lines in other areas - remember you are not creating a new way to output a business plan document, but a new way of building & maintaining a business plan that allows you to review data in many ways.Your QA processes need to improve greatly - there is nothing worse than pressing UPDATE and nothing happens after you have just spent time typing something in, and there are many bugs like these. Your designers and technical guys need to sit with some users and use this software, at the moment the reasons not to use it out weight the reasons to use it.
I cannot say enough how much I think these guys have the right idea, but the execution is really letting them down at the moment.
Popularity: 65% [?]
Jun
13
Squace beta - my thoughts
Posted by grouchal in Technology, review
I was lucky enough to get an invite to beta test Squace today and thought I would share my thoughts on it so far.
First up if you’ve not heard of them - have a quick look at the website and see if you can work out what it is they do. The website states “With Squace mobile surfing becomes just as fun, interesting, quick, and useful as it should be! - For free”. I thought the idea sounded fun and the picture of the grid looked innovative and interesting - but how will the web become fun interesting, quick and useful?
The beta registration seemed a bit rushed - rather than individual emails - the beta testers were sent an email as a BCC and this contained instructions saying that to login you just needed to use your email address and the we all have the same password. This didn’t seem like a great idea to me - as everyone will know each others password - I assumed that they had decided to save costs on emailing here, and thought that the first thing on login I would get was a prompt to change the password - but this did not appear and it took me a while to find the settings page to change it manually. Not a great first impression - makes me think that if they view security like this, they will certainly not get any trusted information from me.
Installation went well - they only seem to offer the client for a small number of Nokia phones, but I think I had to tell them my phone when I registered for beta access so mine was on the list. An sms later and installation took place on the phone.
Within the web part of the application I could view a list of bookmarks which had usefully already been populated for the average person who is interested in the America’s cup, World Health, Science, International Football and Dilbert - not really me - so I had to first clean this list out - leaving 15 or so for me to see what the software would do. There is also an applet on the page that emulates the phone interface - this should be an optional addition as it slows down the page and I don’t know why I would use it.
On the phone I was looking forward to seeing the fun, interesting and quick internet. I loaded the application and signed in (it is not Java certified so I have to go through connection prompts each time) what did I find? Well little of surprise as I had already seem the screen within the web application.
There is a grid and your bookmarks are organised alphabetically from A in the top left corner you can navigate around the grid and then get options for each “pixel” in the grid - there is also a letter to mark the change when bookmarks starting with one letter become bookmarks with another letter B and C etc.
From the menu for a pixel I could choose to load the data - for the RSS feeds this would bring up another grid with the items of the rss feed in each pixel, to which I could then navigate to see the details. Are you following? if not have a look at the demo on the site.
From these pixels I could then get to see the items - thorough the browser implementation that they have created.
So what do I think? well I think the interface has the beginnings of a really great idea - it could provide a whole new paradigm for navigating data on a small screen. Unfortunately it is not there yet, and I think it needs a lot more work.
I think that I should be able to tell more about the information in the grid by looking at it - which RSS feeds are new since I last looked at them - how many items etc. In the rss detail screen I should be able to do similar things. This kind of thing could al be done with colour. Ordering of the grids should also be possible, but colour could be used for tags and other data. I’d love to have time to write down all of the things it could do and how I think it could be better, but I should really do some work today.
As an RSS reader this needs a lot of work - next item etc is not possible - as a bookmark tool it could be interesting - but I think it would need to have a better web based version and it seems crazy to implement another browser where you will compete with Opera and others.
When all is said and done this is a beta, but I think it is going to need a lot of work doing to it before they can hope for widespread adoption.
I really like the basic idea and think this could be the start of a new wave of interaction for non-iPhone users - so best of luck to them - but at the moment it is not ringing any bells for me. I’m not sure how they will make money out of it - so I hope that they can get the patent that is mentioned on the website - a clear way forward would be to work out the issues with this and then licence it to Nokia, Opera or Apple.
I hope they will include me in the next beta though!
Popularity: 26% [?]