Author Archive
Last week’s post outlined the business case for transparent battery life figures. So the argument ran, manufacturer’s spec sheets are a major disappointment for customers and when the time comes, they are more likely to switch brands at upgrade time.
I couldn’t make up my mind about which image to add here… should Jerry be shouting “show me the battery life” or should I have mashed Renee Zellweger’s line from the same film… “they ‘had-me’ at the retail outlet”?
Sounds like recent(ish) Xerox acquisition WDS is campaigning for greater transparency – honesty? – from the mobile industry with its published battery life times. Their recent study saw that “Only two of the 50 devices tested offered consumers an expected battery life for web browsing – the Apple iPhone 4S and the Nokia N9.”
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TM Forum’s chairman Keith Willetts recently wrote about the ‘critical importance of delivering a great customer experience‘. Keith makes a bunch of points about why customer experience management is important and how companies like Apple manage to charge higher prices and maintain higher profit margins because they constantly create better customer experiences… nothing new here, you’re thinking? But where Keith appears to diverge from that well trod path, is that he starts to offer practical advice about ‘how’ companies can deliver experiences (Great Customer Experience Don’t Happen by Accident).
Read More Post a comment (0)Holidays allow me to get through my reading list. Except, I’m increasingly finding that my ‘reading list’ has more videos that need watching than books. A sign of the times? Rachel Hinman thinks so. It’s what she would call ‘comfortable computing’. The changing nature of what people are doing with their mobile computing devices and therefore, how UI designers need to consider how Mobile HCI (Human Computer Interaction) is different.
Many years ago we used to think of this as lean forward and lean backward, but Rachel has moved my thinking on hugely in this 35 minute short through vimeo.
I particularly liked the idea that we need to ‘go to the gemba’ (where the truth is). Which meant that looking for answers in the lab can’t take you far in the mobile domain… we need to visit people in their natural habitat. Sounds like what is working for mobile HCI should resonate with test & measurement too. Although she also mentions why changing perspective is so damn difficult in practice, quoting Marshall McLuhan’s ‘rearview mirror effect’ as a difficult habit to jettison.
Well worth adding to your ‘reading list’ and thanks Rachel… I see there’s an old fashioned print version too.
Rachel Hinman: The Mobile Frontier from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.
You hear that Mr. Anderson?… That is the sound of inevitability…
Rubin recently claimed that the latest version of Android (Ice cream sandwich) shipped as “over a million lines of code”. Although he’s also suggested (in the past) that Android had over 11 million lines of code – even if 80% is probably the Linux kernel itself.
Which got me thinking about code sizes, the scale of the testing programmes and what a 1 million lines of code looks like… So here’s an edited reblog (RB?) of Jack Ganssle’s excellent 2008 embedded systems article, to help frame the problem into byte-size chunks.
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Over the past week or so, I’ve been trying to establish how much money it costs Operators to test an Android smartphone and how much Operators spend on testing smartphones and Android in particular.
I have some interesting data points:
What does an average smartphone user do? Here’s an infographic from techcrunch that answers the question from an iPhone perspective: albeit from the tail end of 2010.
Three things stand out for me:
It would be interesting to see the Android view, so if anyone has seen the data, let me know.
I find myself in the middle of a ‘device testing’ debate. Around one fifth of the Mobile Operator community have historically committed to large test teams, test centres and test budgets. Over the years these budgets, teams and centres have diminished – whilst the pressure on the teams has increased. Now, smartphone complexity (and the step change increase in test cases) is forcing Mobile Operators to think carefully about their diminishing and traditional commitment to testing and there are three clear options.
Business as usual.
Firstly, continue with the current paradigm – but test more efficiently. Proponents suggest that automated device testing can relieve the test team burden – but sceptics suggest smartphones have made this approach unscalable. OS & application complexity and update cycle speed mean that Test teams can’t write (and manage) the test cases fast enough – even if they co-opt the support of the friendly engineering resources at Anite, Rhode & Schwarz and Anritsu.
Latest results on smartphone market share: Android now upto 52.5% market share of the quarters smartphone shipments which is just over 60 million units... and 13.5% of all mobile device shipments for the quarter.
Read More Post a comment (0)Android's progress; table, bar & line chart shows shipments and share from Q4 - 2008 to Q2 - 2011. Latest quarter uses Gartner update.
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