…stories of a Mobile Computing enthusiast.
Posts tagged google
iPhone vs. Android (Searchdown)
0Today for the first time I tried out the Google Trends Webpage for myself. First confrontation that came to mind was as obvious as it was surprising.
It somehow makes sense when actually it doesn’t. Searches for “iPhone” since even before its release have never once been surpassed by those for “Android”. Another fun-fact is that it seems like the lower blue Graph has some direct connections to the upper one. Whenever the News Reference Volume for “iPhone” increased heavily the Search Volume Index did the same with a certain delay. The significant timestamps marked in the upper Graph are the following.
As we know the original iPhone has been presented in early 2007, has been released in mid 2007 (huge upward burst in searches) and “A”marks the release of its successor, the iPhone 3G. Android on the other hand has been bought by Google in 2005 and had its initial release in late 2008. This definitely hasn’t been as much of a hit on Google Search.
Of course I’m not implying anything about the capabilities or limitations of those Subjects. I just wanted to share this because the Trends didn’t even remotely compare the way i expected them to.
WordPress at last.
0As readers of my (outdated) Google Blog have already noticed I have recently changed my Blogging-Engine to WordPress. I am still fairly new to this platform but since this is a self-hosted WordPress.org Blog I have all the functionality of WordPress at my fingertips.
One major change I have introduced most recently is that I want to make this Blog a bit more vivid by not only posting original Content to it but also fun bits I find on other Websites. These will fortunately not show up on the front-page of this Blog, however they will show up in the main RSS Feed and of course on their own separate Page. If you don’t want those things to show up in your RSS Reader I suggest you subscribe to one or both of the English and German Feeds because that’s where all my other Posts end up based on their language.
I hope this change injects some much-needed life into this blog and I look forward to sharing my sense of humour with you.
Sick and twisted fruit
18 years ago
To scratch the topic of Mobile Computing once again I want to take you through the processes of setting up an iPhone and a Nokia N97 Mini with a Bluetooth driven wireless Keyboard. The reason I’m doing this is of course due to recent events I experienced and – SPOILER ALERT – the iPhone fails miserably under almost all circumstances. Successful ones could unfortunately not be tested.
The Keyboard used can be seen on the following picture, accompanied by the successfully paired N97 Mini:
Why it’s a Bluetooth Keyboard designed by Apple themselves, just to make it a little less tough for the iPhone one might think. But I digress.
The step-by-step Instructions for the N97 Mini (or basically any Symbian S60 device) go as follows:
- Download the free Bluetooth Keyboard Application from Nokia.com. Choosing the right one shouldn’t be too hard, I didn’t find one for Symbian S60 5th Edition so i just took the first one which popped up an incompatibility alert but still installed and worked fine.
- After opening said Application, turn on your Keyboard and pair it with the Phone. In my case this included defining a Passkey like “123456” and then entering exactly that Passkey on the Keyboard. Pressing Return should finish the pairing process. I assume this works the same on all Bluetooth enabled Keyboards.
- That’s it. You’re set to write some text messages or even emails with your Bluetooth Keyboard.
On the iPhone on the other hand, the situation looks as follows. (At least that’s all I found out on a jailbroken iPhone 3G with the latest jailbreakable iPhone OS 3 on it).
When you turn on Bluetooth and search for devices, the (Apple !!) Keyboard does not show up. So if I’m not wrong that takes care of our first approach. The second approach then would be taking advantage of the freedom of a jailbroken iPhone. Do some searching on Google/Youtube and what I found was a Video explaining how to use an App (namely BTStack Keyboard) from the Cydia Store (which of course comes with jailbreaking the device) to use Bluetooth Keyboards with your iPhone. The only catch you ask? It costs 5 Dollars and since I neither own an iPhone, nor a Cydia Store Account (or whatever is needed to buy their Apps) my trail to success stopped there.
If there is another approach, be it for jailbroken or non-jailbroken iPhones please let me know. Nothing would please me more than knowing that Apple isn’t having such a tight stranglehold on its customers after all. Smartphones set aside, I’m one of them as you can see from the picture.
Of course it’s not surprising that the Nokia Device works with an Apple Keyboard. The Bluetooth Standard is the same for everybody, also for Apple luckily. And of course it might not make perfect sense to everybody that I’m connecting a Keyboard to a Mobile Phone that has a QWERTZ Keyboard built-in. To be honest I’d know a lot more to do with such a keyboard on an iPhone than on this N97 Mini. Seems like it’s not supposed to happen.
Chrome OS
08 years ago
I’ve been one of those who were eagerly awaiting the first impressions of Google’s Chrome OS since it was announced some time earlier this year. One positive remark right there can be made because they seem to have been quite eager to get it out there as well. Open Source, so much the better.
I knew that it was going to be a Browser-based OS like none has ever been before but judging by this first release I’m still a bit disappointed.
Chrome OS:
So to the right you see what the login-screen looks like. And “woohoo” you have to log in with your own Google Account. Internet Connection required of course. Pretty nice idea. But while that is handy because it enables you to log in to the same account on different computers you will see later why I dont think it’s necessary for now.
Next up we have the Chrome Browser which shows up full-screen as soon as you’ve successfully logged in. The tabs I opened in the second screenshot aren’t open at first Login. There’s just the Google Calendar and an empty tab as far as I recall. Of course with every Google Service you use the Login-Information needed doesn’t have to be entered separately every time. You can for example use Google Reader for RSS Reading, Google Mail for writing Emails and so on. So a colleague of mine dared me to write a Document on this thing and email it to her. Seems quite impossible on a Browser-Based OS with no desktop or additional applications. But in fact it’s not that hard. Everybody who used Google Documents before should know that.
You just go to http://docs.google.com and have some basic possibilities of creating and editing Text Documents, Spreadsheets and so on. And as you can see you can then Email it as an attachment in a wide variety of file-formats. Since Chrome OS is only targeted towards Netbooks and those don’t feature high resolution screens or highly capable hardware one can argue that this is already more than enough for the average netbook-user.
With the help of another colleague and trying out random combinations on the keyboard (banging my head against it for example) I found out how to get to the terminal. You just have to press Ctrl+Alt+T. The Concept of multiple Sessions like normal Linux Distributions have has been dropped. The Terminal goes full-screen and as you can see the “uname” command tells you absolutely nothing about this OS that you shouldn’t already know as soon as you’re enough of a freak to even bother searching for the Terminal. Other than that it’s interesting that the “man” command suggested at the top isn’t even available. And I was kind enough to give you a directory listing of the root directory just so this screenshot wouldn’t use too little space.
Conclusion:
So while this is a nice Gadget to have it provides the user with absolutely no capabilities beyond what Web 2.0 (as we call it) has to offer. Some might say this is sufficient. I say it’s not. Right now it isn’t possible to change the Screen Resolution of Chrome OS over the menu and I didn’t find any config-files i could edit to change it manually. Now that I “know” that Chrome OS is based on Ubuntu using Gnome (at least that’s what I hear) I could try to find the config-file once more. But I’m just not that much of a geek. I feel I have enough of an idea right now of what Chrome OS is going to be as soon as it’s finished. In the end it’s just another tool for Google to grab its users by the chest and make them be part of their huge scheme of collecting information no matter if it’s useful or not. So I think it would be cool to log into the OS without a Google Account. Other than that I have no requests towards the final product, probably because I won’t be using it natively anyways.
Thoughts on Facebook and more…
0So I’ve been thinking about possible contents for another Blog Entry all day without getting any good ideas. Still I went home from school having achieved something I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time. I rearranged the folder structure of my Homepage so I could give it a sort-of Splash Screen Startpage, giving the user the choice to either continue to my Homepage, or hop over to my Blog.
The Result can be seen here: http://desentizised.gotdns.com/
So coming home I didn’t have any specific idea for a blog entry yet but after some surfing around it got to me. Considering how many people I know are on Facebook, plus all their Facebook-Friends and the Facebook-friends of those, you come to ask yourself: How many Users are there on Facebook? I knew this wouldn’t be something to ask Google but rather Ask.com. Didn’t get me the answer immediately, but still I found what I wanted. Which was the Press Release Section on Facebook and before linking the interested ones to it I’d like to give you a brief overview of the Facebook Community:
- Facebook has more than 175 million active users. OK, so that’s a very high number but I thought that has to be taken into perspective by learning a little more about those 175 million.
- More than 3 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide). Still not the kind of perspective I wanted since it would take a lot of calculating to get to the amount of minutes an average user spends on Facebook, which would still not tell us anything about the number of users Facebook sees each day.
- More than 18 million users update their statuses at least once each day. Alright, so that’s the kind of information we need. When I think in millions I always think of population. Austria and New York City for example both have about 8 Million. (strange comparison I know) So roughly NYC and Austria combined update their Facebook Status every single day. Which tells me that 175 million might be a bit generous but on the other hand, who would you expect to write a script that gave you an accurate number over a certain amount of time?
- More than 850 million photos uploaded to the site each month. So this was when I asked myself where they store all the data which is submitted to them each day. Let’s say an average picture on Facebook is 50KB in size, not much right? 850 million a month makes roughly 28 million photos a day. Therefore, 50KB times 28 million makes 1,400,000,000 KB which would be way more than one Terabyte a day. A DAY. I know Google among others must be way more space-consuming but when you see the actual numbers it just blows you away.
(Any errors among my calculations can of course be critizised in the comment-section below)
I’m sure I could come up with more to talk about but I think this is enough for now.
Here’s the Link to the Press Release Infos of Facebook by the way.
yours truly
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