Tesco Finder gets barcode scanner / remote support from remote countryside

I'm just back from one of my splendid 'cycling and cider' holidays in Cornwall - mountain biking through the fantastic trails set up around Calstock and Gunnislake in the day, delicious local cider procured from any one of a number of local cider farms in the evening (and it's important to get it that way round).

While I was away, Apple finished quality-assuring the latest version of Tesco Finder, which now supports barcode scanning through the iPhone's camera. Management and editing of product lists has been improved, too, such as being able to delete a shopping list even if there are still products in it.

It just so happened that the day following the launch of the update, our R&D server (that supports requests from Tesco Finder applications) rebooted inconsistently from a Windows Update event. At the time the hubby and I were out biking in the middle of a trail through the woodland across the Tamar river from Gunnislake where mobile signals don't go. It was only when we climbed up next to the ruined chimney of an abandoned tin mine above the forest that my phone started alerting me that something was wrong.

Fortunately on that day the phone I had taken was my Google Nexus One which I have grown to love over the last few weeks despite its occasional glitchiness. It just so happens that some time ago I had downloaded a free app called "Remote RDP Lite" which acts as a simple Windows remote desktop client. Despite the GPRS-only data signal, I was able to reach the server / login / check a couple of logs / reboot it whilst I sat on the hillside. After 5 minutes I used the Nexus One's web browser to check the admin web page for Tesco Finder and discovered that once again requests were coming in thick and fast - and being processed successfully.

You might wonder why it was that a colleague didn't reboot the server? Yes I have wondered that too since an important group of them know where all the account and server login information is kept. It's in a safe to which they have the combination, and inside is an envelope containing login information, on which I have written "Everything that has a Beginning... has an End". This dark motto reminds me to ensure that we always have the ability to access the knowledge of any R&D project, in case one of us should be accidently terminated (for example, a losing a dimension having been hit by London bus, or mountain biking unexpectedly over a cliff).

Apologies to customers whose sparkling new Tesco Finder didn't work for a few hours, and also to developers trying in vain to get the API to respond. I've stopped the server from automatically installing Windows updates and immediately rebooting - we'll be doing that manually for a while.

On the other hand I have to admit to feeling a sense of immense satisfaction that technology has enabled me to support a leading application for customers whilst located in the technology-free remoteness of an abandoned Cornish tin mine overlooking pure countryside. If you want to see where I was located, click here

To celebrate, I felt a sip of local cider was in order....

Google Nexus One - an R&Dist's delight (Exciting but Buggy)

I’m just back from my visit to the USA and, as promised, I used the Google Nexus One as my main mobile phone for most of the visit. This post reveals my experience (in comparison to my iPhone 3GS), and it is one of mixed news I can tell you!

In summary, the Nexus One is very much a geek’s phone, full of exciting features - but does not have the polish of an iPhone experience. It is also buggy - to the point where I had to restart it once a day unless I used it just for voice calls and text messaging - hardly the point of a smart phone.

In order to fully immerse myself in the experience, I pre-ordered a USA Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) SIM card l so that I could play without incurring any nightmarish roaming charges. Such SIM cards are freely available on eBay and I arranged with the seller for it to be delivered to my first hotel, which happened without any incident. The seller even activated the card for me so I could discover my USA mobile number and send it to those who needed to keep in touch before I arrived.

The Nexus One quickly connected to the network and my voice calls and texts behaved as normal. Email and browsing worked fine too, and the phone locked into the hotel’s wifi network easily - informing me that I had a ‘login’ page to go to before it could continue and starting the browser to help me.

The phone’s News and Weather app (which consists of a widget on the phone’s home screen with the weather symbol, temperature, and a randomly selected news story, plus a full app with all news stories) quickly realised that I had left London and switched to the local weather in Bellevue, WA. It also adjusted its “UK” news menu to “US” to give me local stories.

The Google Map was also surprisingly accurate, even if I was deeply inside a building. There would be no hope of GPS there so the phone must have triangulated its position based on the various AT&T cellular towers as well as remembering its last GPS fix (perhaps assuming I could not have strayed far) because often the central arrow on the map was exactly right even if the phone was showing a large “margin of error” circle.

I was able to receive emails and send them out easily enough, but the more I used the phone the more I noticed that the ability to work out where my fingers were on the screen became inaccurate. Over a period of a couple of hours of continuous use the degree of error became worse until completely different parts of the screen were responding to my touch, and the keyboard became impossible to use as the error was at least two keys “above” the ones I wanted using the on-screen keyboard. The only way to resolve this was to turn the phone off and on again. I found this happening frequently throughout my trip: the more I touched the screen, the more the calibration went “out”. Has anyone else found this?

The Nexus One’s apps, as found in the Market app, are a geek’s joy - and I think this is where the iPhone and Android audiences diverge. I downloaded the following apps - all free:

• Barcode Scanner - useful for, well, scanning barcodes using the phone’s camera - quick and accurate.
• ConnectBot - great for Telnet connections using a command prompt.
• Facebook - great app for keeping up to date on Facebook BUT when sending images they end up a lot smaller resolution on Facebook than the iPhone equivalent.
• Flip’n’Shake Lite - an app that uses the orientation of the phone to perform various tasks. For example, if I’m on a call and wish to switch to speaker, I simply move the phone from my ear and place it upside down on a table (so the speaker is facing up).
• Fring - a way of using Skype albeit with lower voice quality. There is a Skype app but it doesn't work at all well on Android (come on Skype!).
• Google Goggles - scan anything and it works out what to search for - hugely impressive and a pointer for my desire to “scan the product and understand it, not its barcode”.
• Google Sky Map - superb app for identifying stars and planets in the night sky where you are - a total joy to use and really inspiring when presented with the clear Nevada night sky during my trip.
• Google Translate - say a few words and Google Translate converts them to a different language and says those words in that language - closest yet to Douglas Adam’s “Babel Fish”.
• Layar - great augmented reality app - I have on my list the task to create a Layar data-set with all the world’s Tesco stores and their locations on it!
• Listen - a podcast app, excellent for picking up my favourite BBC podcasts such as “Friday Night Comedy”.
• Network Discovery - find out more about the other hosts and devices on your connected network - a geek’s joy.
• Newsrob - a Blog reading app designed to work with Google Reader (my preferred blog access site) by downloading articles for offline reading.
• Remote RDP - Windows Remote Desktop - works very well despite the small screen!
• TasKiller - an app that kills other tasks - VITAL! (more on this shortly).
• Twidroid - a simple Twitter client.
• Wifi Analyzer - analyses Wifi signals in order to lock onto a desired signal, and for suggesting the ideal channel for a home Wifi access point by seeing what other signals are on the various channels available.

My PAYG SIM card offered me 100MB of data for the week, which I thought was more than enough given that I would be within wifi range for much of the time. Wrong! The reason:

Background tasks! Whenever I ran Facebook, Twidroid and other apps and then exited them… I hadn’t exited them! They became background tasks (in default settings) so they could keep my incoming tweets and friends’ Facebook updates up-to-date. The apps didn’t care whether I was on wifi or cellular - as long as they could see their respective servers across the Internet they went about their business silently - eating into my cellular allowance in the process.

This is the downside of apps as background tasks - on the iPhone no 3rd-party apps are allowed to remain in the background - to kill the Facebook app is to truly end it. Moving from my iPhone mindset to the Nexus One cost me in terms of the amount of cellular bandwidth. Once I used up my 100MB allowance, the background apps crashed through the rest of the money I had put on the SIM card account at the rate of $1/MB and soon I was incommunicado!

Overcoming my $10 dollar loss, I researched the problem and installed TasKiller which reveals all the background apps, and I killed the ones I didn’t wish to keep running. Indeed there’s a satisfactory “kill all” action which ends all but the most vital phone background tasks (such as monitoring for incoming calls). It even wipes out the animated background screen. My second week in the USA was cellularly inexpensive as a result.

Finally, the Nexus One lacks the finesse of the Apple phone. It works well but I need the geek in me to help understand what's going on. Just my opinion but it’s little things such as the icons not as “polished”, through to there being less inherent sense of reliability. This phone is an R&D’ists phone compared to the iPhone’s production quality. I’m in R&D and instantly forgive its quirks. Others will not be so patient.

Some of you may say that it was unfair to go from iPhone to Nexus One - it’s bound to compare unfavourably because it is so much more advanced. Maybe, but you have to be able to pick up a phone and use it - not fiddle about with it or restart it every couple of days. I’m sure that some bug-fix / feature-enhancing updates are on the way (after all, that has happened with iPhone several times) and I look forward to it.

Having said that, the Nexus One has a great character and form, and will be a significant platform for smartphone technology both now and in the future.

I’m glad I own one to see what happens.

Living with Google Nexus One / Going to Microsoft MIX?

I'm taking a long weekend out to visit Dublin (it's my (Irish-born) hubby's 50th birthday, bless him!) and, as I already have an O2-Ireland SIM card, I'm going to 'live' my communications using the Google Nexus One, and I'll see how I get on with it being my only internet connection whilst I'm away, just as I did with the iPhone when in Berlin a few weeks ago. I'll let you know how I get on next week.

Are you going to Microsoft MIX conference in Las Vegas next month? I'm looking forward to getting stuck into the impressive (on paper anyway) Windows Mobile 7 platform with a view to including it in our list of supported mobile operating systems (alongside 6.x) in our mobile strategy by learning about it there. I'm hoping to 'live' my communications using a Windows Mobile phone when in the USA in March so it will be interesting to compare my enforced comms experiences with iPhone / Nexus One (Android) / Windows Mobile if this works out (I'll buy a local USA SIM card with lots of data to make the compasrison fair).

Nexus One arrives...

I just wanted to give you proof that we're not just doing iPhone mobile stuff.

The Google Nexus One has arrived on my desk and it is about to get a programming it'll never forget! SDK being downloaded right now: Tesco Finder for Android, here we come...