Tag Archives: htc

Facebook Home was a Huge Threat to Apple, Apparently

By Alex on

File under: predictions that looked remarkably stupid after a remarkably short period of time.

Farhad Manjoo on Facebook Home on April 4 (emphasis added):

“Apple, on the other hand, can’t be happy about this news. Now its three biggest rivals—Google, Facebook, and Amazon—are all spending the bulk of their mobile development effort on Android, not iOS. If I were Tim Cook, I’d be especially worried that Facebook might solve one of Android’s biggest problems—its “fragmented” ecosystem, in which every Android phone looks and works a little differently (and usually, not very well). This has long been a chief selling point for Apple: If you learn to use an iPhone once, you’ve learned to use it forever—all other models will always work more or less the same way. Now Facebook could ruin that advantage. By investing a lot of resources to create an inviting, well-designed UI that works the same across all Android devices, Facebook could turn Android into a system that’s as easy to use as the iPhone. So, sure, Google can’t be happy about Facebook stealing its phone’s front screen, but Apple is today’s biggest loser.“

BGR’s news about AT&T’s apparently impending cancellation of the HTC First:

“Our source at AT&T has confirmed that the HTC First, which is the first smartphone to ship with Facebook Home pre-installed, will soon be discontinued and unsold inventory will be returned to HTC. How much unsold inventory is there? We don’t have an exact figure, but things aren’t looking good. According to our source, AT&T sold fewer than 15,000 units nationwide through last week when the phone’s price was slashed to $0.99.”

Sure, sure, Facebook will tweak it, but we have here the clearest possible evidence that Facebook isn’t among the tech elites, and that one should have been skeptical of Home all along.

-The ScreenGrab Team 

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5 Reasons to Be Skeptical of Facebook Home

By Alex on
FB Android

Facebook Home (for Android)

Facebook has its own phone now. It’s a midrange HTC phone called the HTC First, which can be bought for $99 on a 2-year AT&T contract in the U.S. (EE and Orange are supported in Europe). It runs a lightly customized version of Android (not even a fork) called Facebook Home. For a few other compatible non-First phones, Facebook Home can be downloaded as an app from the Google Play Store. Facebook Home provides deeper social notifications, such as full-screen (ad-choked) notifications on your lock screen and home screen, and these notifications come from people rather than from apps, apparently.

As with most things Facebook-related, I regard this as a ton of hype from a company that is essentially a one hit wonder. Here’s why I remain skeptical of Facebook Home.

1. “People First” is a Losing Strategy

Facebook Home is, to use the company’s own language, all about people and not apps. If that sounds familiar, it should. Microsoft has been using the same language to talk about WIndows Phone for some time now. What’s worse, this tagline doesn’t even make sense: are the apps you use on Android or iOS somehow not about “people”? The portrait of the stock iOS/Android user that one gets from FB and MS is of someone who indulges lots of discrete, antisocial apps like PDF readers, music players, podcasting clients, and note-takers, and that somehow this must be stopped by putting “people” back at the forefront.

But this portrait is bullshit. It ignores every trend that’s happened on iOS and Android over the past five years. Just look at iOS alone. For an OS that’s not about “people,” it was the perfect proving ground for Instagram (an app so popular that FB had to desperately buy it for ~$1B), Flipboard, Albumatic, and Vine. Cross-platform (read: iOS + Android above others) apps like Snapchat, WhatsApp, and other SMS-replacements have also sprung up without any need to embrace the FB/MS “people first” ethos. As Michael Gartenberg has noted, resorting to this type of language indicates that one is actually very much involved in a heated battle over apps. It’s always about apps, in other words, and the only people who talk about “people” instead are the ones who are losing the app race. If people were all that mattered, a simple dumbphone with a contacts list would be enough.

2. Facebook Still Doesn’t Get Mobile

FB has the same problem as MS, namely that it wasn’t born mobile (to use Qualcomm’s icky catchphrase) and is having to adjust accordingly. The “app” concept – that high-quality, mostly self-contained programs that do a narrow range of things well – was so revolutionary because it finally addressed the silent majority of users who never multitask and just want their software to do well-defined tasks in relative isolation from each other, while preserving OS stability and device battery life. This is why iOS is so successful and appealing to multiple demographics. From the demos at today’s presentation, Facebook Home has all of the charm of a PC-era trojan that hijacks your device. Facebook is already a huge battery drainer on Android, and now that it has deeper access to your device, as well as the ability to run ads in your cover feed, it’s going to do everything it can to erase the optimized experience that iOS and top-tier Android have been working toward for years. Of course, many people won’t care.

3. It’s Confusing

Most people don’t know what a launcher is. This won’t be a problem for users who buy the HTC First, but for people who download the Home app (odd how a service “not about apps” is itself an app only salable via Google’s Play Store), it’ll be interesting to see how well an app that takes over your entire Android experience fares. Custom launchers (Nova, Apex, Go) are usually the province of power users who know Android in and out, but for the casual FB user, it’ll likely be hard to get back to the stock Android launcher once they go through with the Home setup. This specter of a potentially broken, overly complicated software experience relates back to point #2.

4. Who Will Buy The Hardware?

The HTC First is $99 with a 2-year contract with AT&T. For the same price, you could get a Galaxy S3 on any of the four major American carriers, or an iPhone 4S with Facebook integration into iOS, ad-free. Which would you choose? Granted, I have a low opinion of the savvy of many Facebook users and as such may underestimate how many of them may want to walk into AT&T and buy “the Facebook phone.”

5. Facebook is an iPhone-centric Company

Zuckerberg himself uses an iPhone, and the rest of the company seems to have given much more mindshare to the simple iOS experience, without going out its way to exploit the peculiarities of Android (widgets, larger screen sizes, etc.)

-The ScreenGrab Team

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HTC One: The Software/Hardware Divide, and the Birth of the Non-Android Android Flagship

By Alex on

HTC unveiled their new flagship smartphone today. The HTC One (not to be confused with the One X, One V, or One VX – good luck on that) appears to raise the bar yet again for Android phones. With a 1080p display, all-metal encasing, and an entirely re-skinned HTC Sense on top of Android Jelly Bean, the One looks set to battle with Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S4 for dominance of the non-Nexus, highly commoditized Android market.

The One’s industrial design is sleek if uninspired, if such a thing is even possible. With chamfered edges and a preference for metal over glass and/or plastic, the One draws more than a few lessons from the iPhone 5. The Beats Audio branding and new speaker setup give it some cool hardware flair.

But I’m more concerned about how HTC has approached software with the One, more specifically how it has integrated Jelly Bean with its new hardware. If the iPhonesque body weren’t enough of a hint, then the software experience evines that HTC is really trying to create a non-Android Android flagship device. The word “Android” itself wasn’t mentioned, and instead HTC trumpeted the “New Sense,” the fifth version of its Android skin. Particular attention was given to New Sense features like a new hub/live feed called BlinkFeed and a default dock of Gingerbread-esque icons backed up by two capacitive buttons: home and back, with the multitasking key strangely axed.

The tiles in BlinkFeed may recall Windows 8 or Flipboard, but they’re really closest in spirit to the Android 4.2x Google Currents Daydream – a “Daydream” is the screensaver-like feature that is by default activated when you charge your Nexus device without firsts hitting the power button. The Currents Daydream creates a beautiful cascade of stories from your Currents subscriptions, and lets you tap stories as they go by to open them individually in the Currents app. My take is that this feature is cool, but not the type of huge “wow” innovation that market stragglers really need in order to overtake their betters. 

But let’s get back to that business about capacitive buttons in particular. The lack of a multitasking key is baffling – if there’s one thing that Android unequivocally does better than iOS or Windows Phone, it’s multitasking. HTC has opted to hide multitasking behind a double-tap of the home button. Meanwhile, Google Now, one of the hallmark features of Jelly Bean, is buried beneath a long-tap of the home button. John Gruber astutely notes that both long-tap-for-voice and double-tap-to-multitask are iPhone hallmarks, and I think that they feed the narrative of HTC trying to make a non-Android Android blockbuster. But I think that they are depriving users of some of the best features of Jelly Bean.

During a Twitter exchange with The Verge’s Chris Ziegler, another person and I agreed that we basically had forsworn most non-Nexus Android devices. But I think it’s not just because we want timely updates (something that HTC has struggled with, as evinced by the HTC Thunderbolt only now getting ICS); it’s because Google has gotten astonishingly good at design, such that the stock Android experience has far outstripped what any OEM can do with their custom skins.

HTC thrived back when Sense filled in the gaping holes in Android 1.x and even 2.x, when it was barely a proper OS and need real character. We may be getting to the point at which Google is so confident in its design chops, and so intent on selling things directly to customers via a long-touch retail experience, that its stock Holo vision of Android becomes more and more distanced from whatever the likes of HTC and Samsung want to do with their flagships. They’ll either have to diverge from Google’s brand to keep their own brands alive, or adopt Google’s Nexus-like take on Android for the sake of unity (the latter doesn’t seem commercially viable at this point, however).

-The ScreenGrab Team

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Windows Phone and “Communication”

By Alex on

I went to an AT&T store today to get my Nexus 4 fully activated. The experience ended up being much more positive than my admittedly low expectations had prepped me for. Along the way, the tech savvy clerk and I discussed his experiences with some of the devices in the store, specifically the HTC One X and the Nokia Lumia 920.

I won’t bore you with reviews of these phones, both of which are fantastic pieces of hardware that are flagship devices for their respective platforms. But in justifying his abandonment of the 920 in favor of the One X, he said that Windows Phone was good for “communicating” but not “much else,” with much of said “much else” being apps.

It reminded me of a recent TechCrunch piece about Nokia’s decline, in which the author argued that the Finnish giant lost its way when it became obsessed with improving the phone functionality of its services and not foreseeing that data would become more important than voice. Ironic then, that is partnership with Microsoft would end up bringing it back to the same behavior that necessitated such a partnership in the first place.

Microsoft and Nokia either fail to see that there is more value in data than voice/traditional comms or they simply can’t compete when it comes to data. I expect that the latter is true, primarily due to their tardiness in entering mobile with Windows Phone 7/8 (three years after the first iPhone, two years after the Android G1), but at the same time I think that they’ve failed to compete in part because they failed to see the value of data.

Windows Phone is in a way the software equivalent of Nokia’s current hardware: beautiful, totally different from anything in the mainstream, and barely used. As a “phone” – something that can make high-quality calls, sort thru contacts, and perform basic tasks, it’s fine, but when you try to do something as simple as peruse Twitter, it stumbles early and often.

If it’s not enough to simply “communicate” anymore, however, then the carriers themselves ought to be just a bit wary of the smartphone market’s vitality. While hoary institutions like SMS and cellular data are not shuffling of this mortal coil any time soon, the notion that the “phone” is the default communication device could be in trouble.

iMessage and Snapchat, whose combined scale is still small, are nevertheless two excellent examples of lightweight apps that would be right at home on a wearable device like Google Glass or the increasingly mythical iWatch “smartwatch.” And while such services would allow for “communication,” they would be data hogs first and foremost, with features like cellular calls and SMS likely taking a back seat to the various in-app walled gardens, or to some aggregation service like Google Now.

One could argue that we are already there with smartphones. I know people who have moved the iPhone Phone app to the dreaded junk folder along with defaults like Videos and Reminders. But the elite status of the iPhone is still seen in the huge prestige gap between it and the iPod, the latter of which has no competitors and is more about fun than a full mobile experience.

Oddly, the lackluster status of Windows Phone as a glorified feature phone could open the doors for Microsoft and Nokia to simply leapfrog the smartphone paradigm and release a must have wearable computer. This is what Apple did with the iPod: lagging badly in the CD burning race (the first iMacs shipped without one), it decided to just change the game rather than play catchup. The same can be said of what it did to netbooks with the iPad.

In any case this seems to confirm my ongoing pessimism about Windows Phone, its opportunities in China notwithstanding. “Communicating” isn’t enough, which of course is obvious in the smartphone era – but though the phone is still king for now, this decline in the value of traditional “communication” means that it is already losing ground to the very things (data, apps, services) that is so perfectly enables (via cellular networks).

Paradoxically, by not seeing that, Microsoft et all may be best positioned to exploit the shift – they could just throw in the towel when it comes to smartphones, and try their luck at something else. But I expect at some level that they do not so much “not see” that a smartphone’s value has more to do with data than call quality and specs, but that they instead have just not competed, in large part because they just don’t get what users want.

– The ScreenGrabTeam

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