Android and external keyboards - No luck if you are not from the US

Google added the ability to connect a USB or Bluetooth keyboard to an Android device some versions back. They decided to include one and only one keyboard layout, the US QWERTY layout. It was up to the OEM’s to add more if they found it necessary. Not many did. This means that if you live outside the US and maybe Great Brittan, you are out of luck if you want to connect a local keyboard to your Android phone or tablet. Sure it will work, but none of the local characters will be there.

Asus did a lot of work to correct this on their Transformer and Transformer Prime. Samsung have local keyboard docks for their latest Galaxy Tab range, so they must have done some of the same work. Samsung did not decide to include that work on any of their phones, so if you own one of them, you again are out of luck. HTC have not included any local keyboard layouts in either their phones or the Flyer.

I do see, to some extent, the logic in leaving it to the OEM’s to include different keyboard layouts, that way they can make them fit only their own accessories and make more money. That does not explain why Google did not include sort of standard layout for the country's that's already supported by the standard touch keyboard. I’m not knowledgeable enough to know if this is hard to do, but I don’t see why it should be. This way Google would make sure that everybody that wanted an external keyboard would get at least a decent experience.

Android devices are very versatile devices, and can be put to use in a lot of different scenarios. This is what Android is all about. Leaving out the productivity scenario by not giving everybody who buys an Android device the possibility to connect their local keyboard seem just plain dumb. As the phone screen grows bigger and tablets finally get some traction, the need for an external keyboard will grow. Today if you want to use your latest Android Smartphone as your primary computing unit, and live outside the US, there is no option that I know of. There are some apps in the Market that does some of the work, and there is descriptions online on how to make your own keyboard map on a rooted phone or tablet, but it’s all way to much work for anybody normal. I just want to get myself a nice compact Bluetooth keyboard with my local characters, connect it and get to work.

I might be overlooking something and if anybody out there knows a solution to this problem, please do not hesitate to leave info in the comments. I’m interested in both free and commercial solutions.

The battle of the eco-system - The death of Android

Google’s Android seems unstoppable right now. It’s the biggest mobile OS in the US and it just surpassed Symbian in India, a country where Nokia have reigned supreme for many years. It’s hard to imagine that this flight toward total market domination could crash and burn any time soon, but there are indications that Google could lose momentum in its fight to stay on top.

The first indication is the obvious one. Where Apple is keeping its, rather large, share of the mobile market with only three phones, Google has Android on hundreds of phone. So even if Android is the most used mobile OS in the world, it’s only due to the very large support from mobile phone manufacturers right now. Google will have to make sure that they stay happy with their choice of Android, and many of them do manufactur phones with others mobile OS’s.

The next two indications both come from what we have seen and heard about Andorid 4 (ICS). First installment is Android 4 as a mobile OS. Despite the fact that everybody that have tested it says it’s the best version of Android by far, they also state that it’s still not at easy to use as iOS. The learning curve is a lot steeper on Android and will discouraged a lot of users from picking Android as their next Smartphone OS. The other learned fact is that Google with Android 4 decided to focus on the mobile experience and leave the tablet part of the OS mostly like it was on Android 3.2 (Honeycomb). The reason this is bad for Google is because Android 3.2 never gained traction against the iPad, mainly because it’s maybe even harder to learn then Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), and that is not a good place to be. So where Apple is adding important new features in their latest release iOS 5.0. Google is still trying to fix the user experience with their release, Android 4.

Next up is the eco-system Google has to offer. Google has a mobile OS, a tablet OS and a desktop OS, just like Apple and Microsoft has. On top of the important three OS’s Google has an impressive amount of services. So what is wrong?

The OS’s
Microsoft has the biggest desktop OS, Apple has the biggest tablet OS, and Google has the biggest mobile OS. The problem is that Apple’s desktop OS is doing quite well, Microsoft is building its tablet OS on Windows, and nether of Google’s other OS’s is doing any business.

The services
Google has the biggest search engine, Apple has the biggest music and app store and Microsoft has the biggest gaming platform. The problem is that Apple either has, as good a service or hooks into Google’s service better than Google does and Microsoft owns the platform for cooperate use.

The future in the mobile space is going to be all about the eco-system. Not just in app, music, movie and book purchase, but also access to the content you created or bought. Here Google only have Android as a mobile OS to deliver this experience to the costumer. Apple has iOS that are a success on both the mobile and tablet platform, and they have MacOS the desktop OS of the second largest manufacturer of Personal Computers. Microsoft owns the desktop both for the consumer and the business user. They are soon launching Windows 8 that manage to tie together Windows, Xbox Live, Windows Phone and the Windows server platform.

If the future is all about the eco-system, Google is going to have a hard time explaining to their OEM’s why they should stay with Android. Logically none of them can get into the Apple eco-system, but most of them knows the Microsoft eco-system and could easily change. Some of them might even think that it’s better to try something new, and go with WebOS or something else.

The bottom line here is that Google, if they want to stay on top of the mobile OS game, also have to focus on the tablet and desktop experience. They need to get developers to make great apps for tablet Android, kind of like that Google is doing on ChromeOS. I know ChromeOS is dead in the water, but that might just be because it’s a little ahead of its time. They need to make sure that they deliver top-of-class integration into their own services, way better than Apple and Microsoft, and they have to make sure that they or third party developers deliver near perfect integration into the Microsoft server platform. They have to fix the first time user experience and update the UI to better guide the user, and they need to make sure that an Android user can easily get to music, movies and books without having to turn to Amazon and the Kindle Fire. Then Google will be able to stay on as the biggest in the mobile OS arena.

The Cloud vs. Mobile OS - App or HTML5

HTML5 vs. local app

The future is in the Cloud. That’s what everybody has been saying for a long time. Some of this is here already. Google Apps and Microsoft Live are two of the biggest cloud based services and the ones closed tied to a mobile OS. The reason I focus in on the mobile OS is that this just might be where we will see most interesting collaboration between the client and the Cloud.

It was my belief that we would see a fairly quick move from the standard app and program to a HTML5 based app type. They would be easy to keep updated, customers would not have to update all the time, and the pricing model could be anything from full payment upfront to a pay per minute. There are services that are based in the Cloud, but on phones all of them seems to have versions running as an app. This is mainly due to two things, small screens and lack of full HTML5 support by the mobile browser. So they build a mini client for the Cloud based service. Most often you’ll find that the app will have only a small portion of the functions the browser based version have. This again is also primarily due to two things, screen resolution and processing power.

Faster processors and large screens with desktop like screen resolution is finding its way into our future Smartphones. The questions is will this new found power and space be used to bring better browsers with HTML5 support or to build better apps that will deliver full functionality of the Cloud service on to the phone? There is no doubt that both will happen, but will the new and better browsers on the coming Smartphones be used to run the cloud based HTML5 apps or will the native app grow and slowly turn into, not just a dumb client for the service, but a full featured version of the Cloud service?

I believe in the latter, and the reason for this is that a native app far better can harness the power and screen size of the target device. The native app will be able to check screen size, processing power, screen resolution and if any external devices are connected, and adapt to use all this. This something a HTML5 app do not have access to, it depends on the browser to present the user interface right. The native app can change depending on if the phone is used in landscape or portrait. It can detect if an external monitor is connected and again change the UI to fit the bigger screen. Apps like this will make the future Smartphones come alive as a productivity device in ways we have not seen yet and therefor set new standards for the way we work and play on Smartphones.

I’m certainly not declaring the Cloud dead for mobile users, but for the mobile user the Cloud in large parts will be used as a storage and sync place, and the creating and presentation of the information will happen in a intelligent app running locally on the smartphone.

Asus PadFone - Take two

Asus PadFone

Since Asus went public with their lasted tablet concept, the PadFone, I have been thinking a lot about it. It was very hard to figure out that Asus wanted it to be, a phone or a tablet, since it had to run either Android 2.x or 3.x. The launch of Android 4 gives new life to the idea, since it is supposed to build the bridge between phone and tablet. We had a chance to get a good look at the mobile part of Android 4 when Samsung and Google launched the Galaxy Nexus, a little under a month ago. It will still be some weeks before we get the chance to see Android 4 running on a tablet, but I believe that it is possible to make a fairly good guess at how it will look.

What has been shown of the hardware so far, tells us that the design and weight of the PadFone is a good deal off the current standard. The iPad 2, Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and even Asus own Transformer Prime is sleeker and a lot more exciting to look at. This is something Asus has to be aware of and need to change before the launch sometime next year. The PadFone concept is even more apropirate today, than it was back when it was launched. Smartphones have evolved into super Smartphones with screen sizes that just get bigger. This is mostly for the better, but it does make is harder and harder to make simple phone calls.  You could use a headset, but it is impractical and most people don’t want to. This is where the modular design of the PadFone fits perfectly.

I would suggest that Asus took the PadFone even further. Asus has to make sure that the PadFone docks in the Transformer Prime keyboard dock. This way The PadFone is not just at phone and a tablet, it would be a phone, tablet and a notebook. Android 4 makes this transformation possible. I expect that a device running Android 4 will be able to detect if an external screen is connected, no matter if it is a dock or through a cable. This detect will make it possible to change font size and icons to fit the screen being used. All newer super Smartphones will at a minimum have a HD displays, and all these pixels have to be used differently on a 5”, 10” or a 22” screen.

If this scaling of the user interface becomes possible with Android 4 I’m sure that new and exciting apps that take advantage of this will emerge. They will be able to transform them self’s from mobile apps, to tablet apps, to full blown programs that utilize connected keyboard and mouse. If Android 4 makes this possible and the Asus PadFone gets access to the Transformer Prime dock, then Asus will have the first device, In a, what I would expect to be, long row of devices, to offer this unique modular platform. This could be a 3 in one device that would offer the full benefit of all 3 product types without any compromise.

Goodbye Desire Z - And the death of the QWERTY Smartphone

Lenovo LePhone was one example, we will see more of this in the future

I have finally put my trusted HTC Desire Z back in its box for good. It’s been there before, while I was testing other phones, but it always came back out when I was done. I've had the Desire Z for almost a year now, that is a long time for me, and I have loved using it. Typing on a touch screen have never been for me, I got more words wrong than right. The spell checker on most phones are good, but even that would not put my typing on the right track. Because of that I have always been drawn to QWERTY phones, and the HTC Desire Z has been my favorite of them all. So why am I retiring it now?

Over the last couple of moths I have been testing phones with 4” screen and above. That has changed my view on touch typing and not least the weight of a phone. I have never minded carrying a heavy phone before. The Desire Z checks in at 180g, but I knew that it was the priced you paid for the QWERTY keyboard. It was a productivity choice and I fairly quickly got used to the weight of it. The first 4” phone I tested was the LG Optimus 2X, and even if I never came to enjoy using the LG user interface, it was the turning point for me. The extra 0.3” made all the difference. It sounds strange that, this small amount of extra space can change the experience that much, but trust me it does. The size of the touch keys get just big enough that I actually god most words right. Now the spell checker more and more turned in to a problem for me, but that is whole other store. The Optimus 2X weighs 139g and is still a fairly heavy phone, but it’s a lot better and a lot thinner than the Desire Z. After the Optimus 2X, I tested the Motorola Atrix, and just recently the Samsung Galaxy Note. The Galaxy Note weights 168g so it’s still a heavy phone but with a screen at 5.3" it’s well worth it.

The QWERTY Smartphone has always been a niche product. Not many made it; HTC, Samsung and Motorola all have one or two models. Nokia had more, but focused on the same form factor as RIM (Blackberry). Both Nokia and RIM have lost a lot of ground the last year and HTC have no replacement for the Desire Z planed. Motorola still have QWERTY Smartphones, both in the Blackberry form factor and the slide out versions. Samsung also have some left in their lineup, but the numbers of models are fading. Everybody is focusing on touch screen Smartphones, and the size of those screens seems to grow every year. Google and Samsung just lunched the Google Nexus Prime, a 4.6” Android phone. HTC has the Sensation XL at 4.3” and the Titan at 4.6”. Samsung have them all beat with the Galaxy Note at 5.3”. So with the size of the touch screen growing and more and more consumers getting used to typing on the screen instead of on a hardware keyboard, the QWERTY Smartphone is dying.

At the same time, on the tablet market, we are seeing a movement in the opposite direction. One of the more prominent Android tablets the Transformer is build to dock with a keyboard. The next Android tablet from Asus the Transformer Prime, have the same dock. Even the iPad seems to be getting a hardware keyboard now. I’m not talking about the iPad 3, but about all the wireless keyboard docks being offered and sold for the iPad. The tablet offers ease of use and transportability, but at the price of no keyboard. To be productive on a tablet you need a keyboard. The iPad have been around for more than 2 years, but it’s only in the last 6 - 8 months the keyboard dock sales really have gone up. The honeymoon period of the tablet is over and now they have to prove them self's as real business tools. I predict the same thing is going to happend with large screen Smartphones.

The 4” Smartphones have been around for less than 12 months and the larger ones are just coming out now. As Smartphones with screens at and above 4.6” starts to enter the business arena, they will slowly move in on the tablet domain, since most people do not want to carry around 3 devices (phone, tablet, notebook) all the time. Large screen Smartphones can replace tablets for most tasks. They offer the same screen resolution, and with Android 4, will be running the same OS. At the same time the tablet with its keyboard dock will move in on the notebook domain. They will be running iOS, Android or most likely Windows 8. This move up the hierarchy will create a need for keyboard docks for the large screen Smartphone. Wireless keyboard for Smartphones is no news. They have been around for some time, but have spent 2 - 3 years in hibernation with the rise of the QWERTY Smartphones. Now the QWERTY Smartphone is fading away and I foresee a bright future for the foldable wireless keyboard. Add a MHL to HDMI link cable (or netbook dock) to the mix and the large screen Smartphone suddenly can morph from a phone, to a tablet, to a netbook type device for use on travel and vacation.

The QWERTY Smartphone might be dying, but I believe we have not seen the last of the hardware keyboard for Smartphones yet.

Android 4 - And the end of the tablet app

Andy Rubin at AsiaD

When Andy Rubin at the Asian All Things D conference told Walt Mossberg that “I don’t think that there should be apps specifically for tablets”, I seriously wondered if he really had a grip on the tablet business. It started looking strange already earlier that day, when Google and Samsung showed of the Nexus Prime Galaxy Nexus and Android 4. I know that the presentation was planned together with Samsung and what they were showing was a phone, but at the same time Google was showing off Android 4, the Android version that was to pull Gingerbread and Honeycomb together, and there was no mention of any tablet functions or apps. I wonder about this a little more in my post, Google Android 4 - A bit of a cold shower.


Thinking a bit more about it over the weekend I started to think that Andy maybe did get it after all, and that his vision of how a mobile OS should be, could be the very right thing. If I’m right about where Google is taking Android, it will also explain why they seemed to avoid answering questions about tablets. Here is how I see it.


The OS has to make sure that it will run one any type of device, it being a phone with a QVGA screen or a tablet with full HD resolution. It has to make sure that the UI works on every screen size from 2.5” all the way up to 10.1” or more. The OS has to be written in a way so the developer can just build an app and it will run on all the above mentioned platforms. In other words, Android makes sure that all apps work on both phones and tablets, and that freedom is not found on any other platform out there.


So does that mean that we will never see a tablet app ever again on Android? Nope, but you will not find the app under the HD section in Android Market. There is only one version of any app, but the app can choose to work differently depending on screen size and resolution. I’m not a developer, so I cannot be sure, but I’ll bet that there in the Android 4 SDK is a way to find out the resolution and screen size of the unit running you app. That way Google puts the design choice in the hands of the developer and do not try to force any hands. This also makes sure that hardware designs can be very flexible, and the company building a device can be free to setup screen size and resolution any way they want it. All this freedom will seem a little daunting to start with, but when developers find out that they need only manage one source code for all Android devices I’m sure that we will start to see apps that work very differently on phones and tablets.


If I’m right you will never have to worry about an app being tablet compatible, or if you will have to buy your favorite app again in a tablet version if you buy yourself an Android tablet. I hope I’m right and I hope that we will see Google show the way for other developers by updating all there apps so they react according to screen size and resolution. Andy you said it you self, there is no need for tablet specific apps, and I agree, but there is a need for apps to change depending on screen size and screen resolution. Google please start updating.


Back in June I looked at Android as a tablet OS and concluded that it was not ready. The post is in Danish, but here is a Google Translation, Status on Android as a Tablet OS.

Google Android 4 - A bit of a cold shower

Expectations were high when I sat down to watch Google’s presentation of Android 4, Ice Cream Sandwich. The rumor mill has been going wild with thoughts on what Google had decided to include in this latest update. I for one was hoping for most of the ideas to come true. And it was a very impressing presentation Google did, with Samsung and the Samsung build Nexus Prime Galaxy Nexus. There has obviously been put a big effort in to enhancing the overall usability of Android, for the mobile user. All of the new features made perfect sense when one thinks about it. None the less I felt more than a little cheated. Google had used all it effort to build the perfect Smartphone OS, but left tablet users out to dry. I will agree that Honeycomb (Android 3.x) is an okay platform for a tablet OS, and with the added features and the streamlining of the UI in Android 4, Google has a pretty decent tablet OS. I just expected so much more, both on the phone and for the tablet.


Nexus Prime Galaxy Nexus will set the standard for all coming Smartphones, with its 4.6" screen and 1280x720 resolution. On top of that it packs a dual-core 1.5 GHz CPU. The screen resolution is on par with an average 15" notebook and even if the ARM processor is not as powerful as your average netbook, it's damn close. Asus just pulled the covers of its successor to the EeePad Transformer, the Transformer Prime. It's build on the Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core chipset. It’s a chipset with processing power equal to Intel's Atom series. The Transformer Prime is going to be thinner than the iPad 2 and come with a keyboard docking option like the original Transformer. I think that clearly shows where the tables are going and type of scenarios they will be used in. It's my believe that the mobile phone is slowly working its way into the tablet space and that tablets will turn into ultra-flexible notebooks. I had expected Google to be more aware of this and to support this, a lot more in Android 4.


Android as we know it today, Gingerbread (2.x) for mobile and Honeycomb (3.x) for tablets, is primary a consuming OS. With that I mean that it does best is to show you something. Show you movies, pictures, websites, social networks, news, book and play some music. If you want to create anything, that being anything from small tasks like writing an email or bigger things like editing a movie, Android often falls short. There are simple apps that help you do something’s, but the limitations in the touch interface, and the lack of professional apps, does make it real hard to be creative on Android.


So what is it I’m looking for? Google seems to think that there is no need for tablet centric apps for their own services, and they keep putting out HTML5 frontends for us to use. With that in mind the least Google could have done was to give the user access to a full browser. When future Smartphones will have screen resolutions like a notebook and tablets more and more will be used docked to some kind of keyboard and have the processing power of a notebook, including a full Internet browser based on Chrome, in Android 4, seems like an obvious choice. Secondly I had expected that a phone running Android 4, would have behaved a lot more like Honeycomb when used in landscape mode. I had hoped for a more tablet centric versions of Gmail, Calendar and Contacts, on phones used in landscape. The resolution is there for it. Lastly I was waiting for a way better use of the MHL port, and an adjustable UI based the use of that port. I’m sure we do not have to wait long before we see the first phone based on a quad-core CPU, and with that we will be carrying around PC processing power in our pockets. Connect a phone like that to an external monitor and a wireless keyboard, and you have a full blown notebook. Android should be able to support this scenario. The need to make the UI bigger as the screen resolution goes up is obvious, but it’s just too bad that this nice high resolution cannot be utilized when connected to a bigger screen.


So does that mean that Android 4 is a total disappointment? No that not the way I see it, but I could be afraid of that Google, with their focus on the mobile part of the market, will end up cutting them self out of from the very lucrative business market, and there by leaving the door wide open for Microsoft and Windows 8. It would be too bad, since Google fairly easy could set Android up as real opponent to Windows 8 on the coming business minded tablets, and a little competition is never a bad thing. Windows 8 is not due until sometime next year, and Google, of course have time to release a new version of Android to address all this.


For the time being we can look forward to our new Android Smartphone being even smarter, and hope that Google sees the opportunity of growing far beyond the mobile market, by merging Android a lot more with ChromeOS.