Blackberry Native App Coding

The latest free Blackberry Playbook offer has hit the developer's plate, and brings with it a 32gb version shipped to your door along with a whole lot of learning fun! The only catch - you have to submit an app written with the Marmalade SDK, a native C++ library designed to make it easy not only to port your app to Blackberry, but also to iOS and Android with relative ease.

At first, writing code using the Marmalade SDK (or any native SDK for that matter) seems over-whelming. A good grasp of C++ won't save you completely, as there are thousands of function names, classes and other structures that are unique to the SDK. Fortunately, there are plenty of "Hello World" type examples and some amazing tutorials by DrMop (www.drmop.com) that help you learn and provide code snippets to grab for your app. Marmalade itself offers a huge library of tutorials and has online forums where developers can share their coding conundrums!

So why go through the bother, just to get a $149 Playbook 32gb? It is about the challenge! It is also about learning to develop in native (versus HTML webkit only) and having an app that can be ported to all major platforms. It is about the potential to make money with the app, especially if a pay version is released. And all you need to get started is the willingness to put in some time and effort.

Microsoft Visual C++ Express 2010 is available as a free download, and forms the development environment to work in. The Marmalade SDK installs and works seemlessly together with it, even providing a simulator to test your app and emulate different devices. Everything required to get coding, including Blackberry signing keys, is free along with a Playbook. Anyone with the drive to work hard and learn has the potential to make the next "Blockbuster App", an Angry Birds of their own!

iPhone 5: Hit or Miss?

With the arrival of the new iPhone (arguably the fastest phone in the world), and the tremendous market response it has achieved, can there be any doubt that Apple has out-done itself yet again and driven another nail in the coffin of all other smartphone makers?

While the iPhone 5 is definitely a force to be reckoned with, not all is as pretty as it may seem. It may have the fastest processor, great for playing 3D games and crunching through videos and photos, but for most of us the extra speed will do little to improve most of the features we use. Reviews have already pointed out iPhone's biggest weakness, iOS 6, which has both added features in this latest version (integrated Facebook) and taken them away (Google Maps).

Fortunately, the OS can be improved. Unfortunately, with all that power under the hood, basic email-attachment access via direct file system browsing is left to be desired. Apple still doesn't want you to access your phone's files except for photos, and through 3rd party apps or iCloud. And you still can't download an MP3 file directly off the web using your phone and set it up as a ringtone.

Physically, the new iPhone is a beauty. Light, thin, but definitely not the thinnest phone ever (as Apple would lead you to believe). iFixit's teardown shows a suprisingly easy disassembly, if you care to open up your phone. The one-piece aluminum chassis is light and dissipates heat well. However, the black version is going to need a case (which most people use anyways) because apparently it scratches extremely easily. The white version doesn't show scratches as easily since the aluminum is also light in color.

So is the iPhone 5 a hit or miss? The market has answered and the masses are eating up iPhones like never before. Despite some criticisms, Apple has their fan-base in the palm of their hand, and the fan-base is growing. However, there is nothing revolutionary about it. The iPhone is just a little bit more refined, using the fastest available chips, thinner but still with a long-life battery, and slightly larger screen.

With all the media attention Apple has gained with the hype around the new iPhone, one would think it was miles ahead of the competition... But there are plenty of other options in the smartphone market that can compete well on that level. Depending on useability requirements, there are many other phones that may be a better fit to someone versus the iPhone.

Now that Apple has set the bar higher, be ready for a slew of new devices that emulate the design esthetics, speed and battery life of the iPhone 5. If you are willing to wait, I see some amazing smartphones coming in the next few quarters!

Heating Up The Battle of the Tablets

This fall we are going to see the next wave of strikes in what has been coined "The Tablet Wars". As the battles rage on, competition will only be good for consumers as we see prices drop and tablet options increase during the fall holiday season and into the new year. Anyone who is looking to add a tablet to their shopping list would be wise to wait and see where things go over the next few months.

Looking at the current landscape, we have no less than 5 major players all fighting to take a bite out of Apple's too-long-dominated market. There is Google's Nexus 7 which is a powerful $199 Android tablet. Anyone using Google's services for their main daily activities would do well with this choice as it provides excellent integration with Google's online ecosystem (Gmail, Google Docs, Blogging, Youtube, Google Maps, and others). It also gives unrestricted access to the full range of Android marketplace (now called Google Play).

Another great choice (which will likely out-sell Google) is Amazon's Kindle Fire HD, which is now being released in 2 size versions. The biggest advantage of the Kindle Fire seems to be the more controlled environment, easier interface, and stream-lining of the experience for users who consume Amazon content such as ebooks and videos. There are many Android apps and ways to get even non-Amazon-market apps through work-arounds, but for the average non-technical user the tablet is a great choice for entertainment. Versions come in at $199 for the smaller model and $299 for the larger one (putting the iPad at a huge price disadvantage).

The Surface is Microsoft's first entry into the tablet market. It appears to be a very sleek looking tablet poised to give the iPad a serious kick in the marketplace, especially when it comes to enterprise use. Not only an iPad competitor, but also an ultra-book competitor with the Surface Pro. It will come in 2 flavours... The RT edition running on an ARM processor and running mobile Windows 8 apps, and the Surface Pro which is based on Intel and runs a full Windows 8 that will be able to function and run the same apps as your laptop. Windows has a huge application history and there are more PC's running Windows than any other operating system. Depending on the pricing, Microsoft may gain considerable market share.

The Blackberry Playbook, now more than 1.5 years old, still is excellent value for the money. Recent sale of the device in the $150 range make it an obvious choice for a cheap well-built device that speeds through websites, has some nice 3D games and lots of apps coming. Although it lags behind iOS and Android in terms of apps, all the main bases are covered and a well-stocked variety of applications exists. Playbook buyers will get an added bonus in early 2013 when RIM releases the first Blackberry 10 platform phones, and soon after the Playbook will receive a BB10 software update! For these prices it is a really good purchase, especially when you have seen the impressive BB10 interface.

Other major hardware manufacturers are releasing cheap tablets, mostly in the Android space. Samsung already has its Galaxy series and ASUS is pushing the Transformer series of tablets. There are countless others, but it will be important to see which ones are able to deliver a quality Android 4.0+ device. Many cheap tablets have poor quality construction, low resolution screens and still run on Android 2.3 (Gingerbread).

Finally, Apple is releasing the iPad Mini in order to try and get a bite of the smaller-format tablet space. While this may make many other tablet-makers fearful, Apple will also need to watch its back as the Microsoft Surface, Kindle Fire HD 8.9 and larger Samsung and ASUS tablets (and a rumoured larger Blackberry Playbook) nip at its heals in the larger format iPad space.

Facebook Social Media Dangers

The trend today is for everyone to set up a social-media presence with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, MySpace, Google+ and others. Unknowingly, people are uploading way too much information about their private lives. Compounding the problem, often many of the sites have poor security settings by default or revert to poor security settings at each "upgrade" of the service. As more of these sites become "monetized" in order to become profitable, your information is being shared with 3rd parties. It is important to realize how to protect yourself and ensure that your "social media" presence does not become a liability that you may regret for years to come.

Facebook Privacy and Security Issues

Many people have a Facebook presence. Unfortunately, it becomes a place where they share everything about their status, location, family photos and so on. There are privacy settings to ensure you do not announce your birthday and location, and share photos to the entire Facebook community, such as friends-of-friends or the public. That means that a friend of a friend can access your information. All you need is one "friend" of yours who is overly "promiscuous" in accepting Facebook friend requests (which may be from fake or scam accounts) and they now have a way of looking into the photos you intended for your immediate friends and family.

Do you really want pictures of your children on the internet, available for anyone to see? Or your trip to the Caribbean dressed in your bikini, or sipping an alcoholic beverage on a cruise looking a bit wasted? You have to ask yourself whether that is an image you want there forever. Facebook has not been transparent when it comes to photo-management after deletion. Only recently we found out they have kept your photos for years after you "deleted" them, so that anyone who had the original URL to the photo could still view it, even though it wasn't on your page anymore.

Facebook liability also relies on your "friends" privacy. If they are not careful they can share with you Facebook apps (some of which invade your privacy even more), or they may tag you in photos that they take (which you do not approve of them uploading), or they may wish you Happy Birthday by posting a big fat message to your Wall, after you tried so hard to not publicize it. Therefore, your entire privacy on Facebook is really only as good as it's weakest link which happens to be your other Facebook friends.

Security Breaches

Security leaks have occurred on all of the popular social-media websites. LinkedIn had a hacker that was able to steal millions of usernames and passwords recently. Facebook apps are common that try to convince you to share access to all of your private information. Even "phishing" attacks try to convince you to sign in to Facebook or Twitter because somebody posted something "that you have to see if negative about you", in order to entice you to disclose your login/password information to a fake site. It all seems innocent at first. Why would anyone want access to your Facebook or Twitter account? However, often these are used to penetrate further into your online identify and breach more and more vital accounts, including email and banking. It can also be used to socially-engineer attacks on your friends... like "help please sent me money, I am stuck in the airport and lost my wallet".

Monetization and Increasing Privacy Invasion

As most of these start-ups become public for-profit companies, there is increasing pressure by shareholders to "monetize" or build a profitable business from the social-media content. Facebook, Twitter and others are using your information (which is the only asset they "own" and can generate revenue from) to share with 3rd parties in order to direct advertisements or other information to specific users, hoping they will see it and purchase their products. Industries are notorious for invading your privacy first, asking questions later. It often takes lobby groups and lawsuits to instigate "Codes of Conduct" to force ethical changes on Wall Street. When there are billions to be made from your information, there is no rule that won't be broken and then covered up.

Twitter and Photo Location

Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are some of the most popular smartphone apps available. Because smartphones contain GPS, many of these apps now allow you to "tag" an image with your GPS coordinate (geotagging). This is a useful feature in some cases, however it can be a disaster when using it for social media sites. Wikitude is a geolocation-centric "augmented reality" browser, displaying information based on it's proximity to your location, including Instagram and Twitter postings. With a simple browse in Wikitude, you can find all the Twitter users and Instagram users in your vicinity. Run into any residential neighbourhood and you will find countless teenagers using their smartphone to tweet profanities, messages to boyfriends, relationship issues, pictures of themselves "hanging out" or in the bathroom showing off a new outfit, and so on. This is all because they have location-settings of their smartphone apps set to ON, which embeds their location within their social information. 

Recently, awareness of  this feature became popularized by a website which scanned Twitter for messages with the word "home" and location data, to bring attention to the fact that people are unknowingly telling the entire world where they live. Many Instagram photos share their location and you can use services to display all photos within your neighbourhood. This is a major concern especially due to possible sexual predators, stalkers and other criminals who can use this type of social media to their advantage. An answer to this could come from a form of GPS "blurring" which would randomize or add a "fudge-factor" to all GPS coordinates from social-media sites. That way, if you are in a residential neighbourhood, your location cannot be pinpointed down to the nearest meter but instead within 100 meters which could overlap a dozen or more houses.

Tools for Thieves

Some people post Facebook updates when they are on vacation. They will even post photos. If they have location GPS set to on, their photos will be tagged and you will see they are presently in another part of the world enjoying their vacation. However, their older photos (which are also easily viewed within their account) may also have location data mapping to their home. Thieves could then see that a person is away on vacation and using this information, track back to their home and go on a rampage. Online phonebooks can be used to do searches for persons and return a specific address, so if the Facebook user is using their real name as a username (which is often the case) it becomes relatively easy to track them down, stake out their house for a few days while viewing their status online, and find the opportune moment to break in.

How to Protect Yourself

1. Turn location information OFF for all apps on your smartphone

2. Do not post photos of yourself, your children or friends

    - Do post photos of inanimate objects, scenery, gardens, animals

    - Do post links to things that may be interesting to you

3. Do not update your status to indicate you are away or on vacation

    - If you do share this, share it after you get home

    - Share photos of scenery and where you've been, but not with you in it

    - If you share photos of you, make sure you are fully clothed

4. Do not tweet anything you wouldn't want your grandmother to hear

    - Avoid profanities

    - Avoid anything controversial

5. Keep it professional

    - If you have hobbies or interests, post information on that

    - Be sure it is nothing you could be embarrassed about

For example, my blog contains mostly high-tech related news. I am a hobbyist Blackberry developer and tech-tinkerer. I do garden a bit for fun as well, and have composed music. My entire social-media presence is geared towards:

1. Sharing my music

2. Technical/electronics hobbyist news

3.  Gardening photos

I avoid as much as possible sharing photos that have identifiable faces or people. I have set my Facebook privacy settings to be as restrictive as possible. I have all of my location settings OFF. All of these hobbies are something I would gladly talk about to children or grandmothers. None are an embarrassment. In fact, I am proud of my hobbies. My professional life is distinctly separate but I have no problems if my clients and people I work for see my Facebook, Twitter postings, Youtube videos and listen to my music. If this information was printed in tomorrows newspaper, I wouldn't care and probably nobody else would either.

Rules to live by: Make sure your online presence can stand up to scrutiny if you decide to run for an election, and wouldn't mind sharing with people of all ages, races and political persuasions. If at all in doubt, don't even bother with social-media. It is a mine-field both personally and for business use which has to be carefully navigated.

Apple vs Samsung vs RIM

The jury has made a verdict. Samsung was found guilty and faces paying $1 billion to Apple. This is the cost of doing business. While the two companies share many more billions in a supplier relationship, this is merely a small price to pay for Samsung having made an enormous fortune otherwise on their phones in the past few years. If they had paid licensing fees that Apple demanded originally, it would have cost them billions as well. So Samsung took a bet, profited well and now Apple's lawyers have caught up with them. Still not a bad business decision, as Samsung likely saved this way rather than paying licensing fees to Apple over the years.

Now, many had called the entire patent system regarding technology and user interfaces a joke. The patent system is broken, and in the USA they are granting patents with broad interpretations. Keep in mind Apple won on it's own turf, but around the world they have not had as great a success against Samsung and other rivals.

So what does that have to do with RIM? Well we are nearing the release of BB10 and Blackberry is bringing a fresh new look to the mobile computing device. I am happy that RIM has differentiated itself and hope it remains that way. The alpha device does unfortunately look a bit too much like an iPhone, so I hope they bring something new like they did with the Playbook and the active bezel which allows various gestures. Phones have all started to turn into iPhone clones anyways. Then again, how many shapes of phone can you produce with existing non-bendable technology based on square/rectangular pixels?

I look forward to innovative fresh new designs and user interfaces over the next few years. Blackberry is in a position to redefine itself and with QNX-powered phones and TAT-inspired interfaces, we can begin to see some new ideas. Windows 8 also gives us a fresh look over the multitude of Android interfaces with numerous dessert-named versions (confusing to many), and the iPhone's overly-simple and rather bland interface (it is getting a bit stale now and needs a good shake-up as well).

The new BB10 alpha looks a bit like all the other full-screen all-touch phones. In my opinion, a bit too much like iPhone and numerous Android phones out there. I hope they bring the Torch design as it has a unique look and feel and gives us a nice keyboard to interact with. The all-touch Blackberry Storm was a complete bomb, but likely due to the clickable-screen. However, the Playbook brings us a very functional touch-enabled bezel which let's you swipe in menus, keyboard, close folders, and so on.

What I would like to see is a BB10 all-touch similar to the Playbook with some kind of bezel, perhaps with back-illuminated buttons if needed in the traditional bottom-row found under most Blackberry screens that would only light up upon touch. Obviously the bezel would take away from the screen size but can be made small enough to still look good (and different from other phones).

For the physical keyboard BB10 device, a Torch-like device would be ideal. As much as I like the current line of Bold and Curve phones with their always-visible keyboards, they take away from the size of the screen. A slider seems to be the best of both worlds and provides us with that much-loved large screen format that is dominating the market and made Apple's iPhone so successful.

We live in exciting times for mobile technology and I look forward to seeing what is coming up! I am hoping that RIM uses this opportunity to stand out from the crowd and impress!

(Send from my Blackberry Torch 9810)

Playbook vs. iPad Mini

Ok, so by now we've all seen the iPad mini rumours. The question is, does this new iPad pose as huge a threat to the 7" tablet space as everyone believes? Is Apple going to change face and dump the iPad onto the market with their untold billions and not make a profit, in order to make money later with their content revenue stream (iTunes?).

We know that Google and Amazon are following that model and some other vendors also are dumping their tablets simply to lock users into a particular ecosystem. Will the iPad mini kill all other tablets? Apple could price it so aggressively to do that. However, we assume that people will rush to buy one that perhaps wanted an iPad but couldn't previously afford it.

The cost of a regular iPad has been in the $499 range for a while. The old one, which eventually will be discontinued, is currently at $399. The iPad mini will likely come in at $299 at the very least, if not the mid-$300's. I doubt there will be a 3G/4G version. It will likely be only Wifi but who knows.

This makes the iPad more than all the other mainstream 7" tablets, which for now are at the $200 entry-point. For that money, though, you are biting into a piece of Apple's ecosystem and that has been the main selling-point. Just how important is it to have access to iTunes vs. Android vs. Amazon vs. Blackberry App World? The market has already shown it's preference.

It will all boil down to the costs and numbers of people out there still looking for a tablet but did not feel the need to pay $400-500 for one. The lower end of the market, already populated with tons of cheap Android tablets, has been available for some time. Is there an unmet need for an iOS tablet to live in this space?

Most people who already have tablets would not be running out to buy another tablet, even if it was an iPad mini. People who do not have a tablet may feel the urge to hop into the Apple ecosystem at a lower price-point. This is not necessarily cannibalizing their iPad 10" sales, or is it? Perhaps parents with a regular iPad want to buy their children something smaller and cheaper so they leave their larger tablet alone!

One thing is for sure. With iPad mini coming, if rumours are to be believed, the 7" tablet space is about to get more interesting and competitive, which is good for consumers. I for one will not be rushing out to buy another tablet any time soon. I have my Blackberry Playbook which serves my needs well.

However, we have seen iPad dominate when faced against similar priced tablets in the $500 range. So if the iPad mini comes in at $299, it may create some pressure on Google Nexus, Samsung Galaxy 7 and Amazon Fire. I do not even mention the Blackberry Playbook because we are seeing it on sale now for $150 at some places. It appears to be getting "dumped" already just to clear shelves, and at that price some people are getting it... But even at $150 there is no mad rush.

Apple will use their big marketing dollars to make iPad mini a must-have item. I hope there is room left, beyond all the marketing-hype, for the other tablet-makers to thrive. There are plenty of great apps and tablets besides iPad, despite the number of sales and profit Apple has made.

Blackberry Torch 9810 (White Edition) Tear-Down

My friend's white Blackberry Torch 9810 fell in the pool and after she tried unsuccessfully to fix it (with rice) and also bringing it to a cell-phone repair store, it was deemed dead-on-arrival. With no hope in sight, I decided to give it a go. Since we had nothing else to lose, I decided to crack open the phone and visually inspect it. However, I found nothing obviously wrong. While I was at it, I took the opportunity to make a video showing how to open the phone here:

Blackberry Torch 9810 Teardown

After a bit more research, I heard about a technique to use distilled water and then 99% isopropyl alcohol to wash the phone and remove impurities that had dried on from the contaminated water which often short out contacts on the circuit. I will try this technique and report back on whether it succeeds or not. Meanwhile, enjoy these photos showing the parts of the phone in detail.