Posts Tagged ‘iPhone’
So I decided to make the switch to Android from my iPhone, and started the process of switching carriers and trying to actually start using it. The most surprising part of the journey involved the reactions of those around me. Several friends or co-workers were literally shocked that I would give up my iPhone. Has Steve Jobs done such a good job of convincing us the iPhone can do anything short of solving world peace? I think he has based on the shocked looks of those around me.
Once I jumped through the carrier switching hoops and activated my phone at a nearby Verizon store I received my first call, it was my wife. I told her it was my first call on the new phone and her reaction? “Wow, I can actually hear you!” She didn’t realize how bad the voice quality was on the iPhone until she talked to me on the Droid 2. I can’t say how much of the credit goes to the Droid 2 and how much goes to Verizon, but it was a step in the right direction and helped reassure me that my switch was going to work out. So how about everything else? Here is a breakdown:
Positive Changes
Call Quality
Verizon is one of the main reasons you would even consider a switch right? Believe me, it is worth it. Call quality is much better than the iPhone. Of course with Verizon the network is much better as well, so that’s almost a reason to switch right there. Time will tell if rumors are true of the iPhone going to Verizon in 2011
Paradigm Shift
The biggest change to the migration is the paradigm shift away from iTunes. Everything is synchronized over the air. Contacts, software updates, even music can be synchronized wirelessly. Even as a software developer I was surprised (for some reason) that I could actually install other music players (such as WinAmp). It is a big world outside of the Apple walled garden.
Email
Our company uses corporate Gmail, so the Google integration was a prime draw for me. I like how easily it fit in to my email routine, has threaded messages, and understands labels and other Google paradigms. The physical keyboard on the Droid2 helps as well, but I’m still using the onscreen one about 50% of the time (probably because of my 2+ years with the iPhone)
Calendar
The calendar is great on the Droid2 and is again tightly integrated with our corporate Google Calendar. It is much easier to create an event and invite people to it than on the iPhone.
Free Turn-by-Turn Nav!
I along with millions of others relied on Google Maps on my iPhone as a navigation aid when I was travelling and didn’t bring my Garmin. But the Droid2 has a great turn-by-turn Nav and seems to work really well. The best feature is that it is free and has no monthly charges. The phone also came with a Verizon branded version that has a monthly fee, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to pay for that when the base version seems great.
Voice Control/Speech to Text
The Droid2 (and Android 2.2 “Froyo”) has a great speech-to-text feature that actually works. I love being able to send a text by speech (and it is usually fairly accurate), or do a search by voice. I’m not sure if this will stop people from texting and driving, but it should make it much safer if you chose to ignore Oprah’s advice and do so.
Apps
Literally every one of the iPhone applications I actually use was available on the Android Market. Pandora, Shazam, Evernote, Facebook, Weather Channel and yes even a free full version of Angry Birds.
Adobe Friendly
Now I can actually see a menu at those restaurants that have Flash only sites. Even better I can easily run a mobile version of the same AIR code base that runs on a laptop or a desktop. To install a development version of an application I just need to install a file from an email. I don’t have to worry about my iPhone UDID (Unique Device Identifier), Ad Hoc Builds, Provisioning Profiles, etc…
Neutral Changes
Learning Curve
It does take a little while to get used to the idea of using the hardware buttons. There is a “back” button, a “menu” button, a “home” button and a “search” button. Once you get used to the idea it is great, but it takes a bit of getting used to. I’ve really learned to appreciate the back button and really noticed it when playing around with my old iPhone 3GS (which is basically now an iPod touch) when I kept trying to use it. The Settings menu isn’t quite as intuitive as the iOS design.
Contacts
I had a tough time figuring out how to just get the contacts I cared about to my Droid2. Since everything, and I mean everything comes over to the phone I paid for Gmail’s tendency to create a contact for everyone I ever emailed. I had hundreds of contacts I didn’t care about and others that I did were just listed as the phone number and all the details (name, email, company) were just listed out as text in the Notes field. After some Google searching I found a way to export my iPhone contacts as Address Book vcards (I use a Mac) and import them into Google as a new Contact Group. Then I could weed out the old junk Contacts and just use those I cared about.
Drawbacks
Fit and Finish
The fit and polish of the OS and the hardware isn’t quite up to Apple standards. It is very usable but doesn’t have the same “wow” factor as an iPhone. I think with the widgets and other features it is getting closer, but it isn’t as intuitive and has taken me awhile to figure out which apps to move to the home screen, how to have multiple home screens, etc… I think it will get there, but still lags behind Apple a little in this category.
Music and Video
The iPhone has its heritage from an iPod, and the Android phone is definitely weaker in this area. It ships with the Amazon MP3 store installed, which is good, but there is not a straightforward way to get your music library on it from iTunes, and then even if you do the music player isn’t the greatest. The same can be said for Video/Movies. There are some good 3rd party players out there to consider which can definitely help. I’m in the process of setting up some Open Source application (iTuneMyWalkman) on my Mac in an attempt to make the iTunes connection tighter.
Notifications
This might seem small, but is my biggest pet peeve about Android at this point. With an iPhone you get a pop-up type window front and center even if your phone is locked when a text message comes in, or an appointment reminder goes off. With Android everything is housed within the Notifications bar that you pull down from the top of the screen. It does place a little icon up there if you get a new text or have a calendar reminder, but it is very easy to miss the fact that you have a new message or are about to miss an important call. I haven’t been able to find a way to turn off email notifications (which I don’t care about) so something is always in my notification bar.
There may be some 3rd party applications out there that help mitigate this issue but I haven’t taken the time to look too closely to find out. Hopefully this gets more robust with future Android releases.
Summary
All in all I made the transition fairly unscathed. I’m loving the Verizon network and call quality. I’m able to send email, update twitter and facebook and do everything I need to on my phone with ease. I’m still enjoying the turn-by-turn Nav and getting to know the voice commands, but I love sending texts by voice. The minimal nature of the notifications leaves a lot to be desired and I often miss text messages and I need to pay closer attention to my calendar to make sure I don’t miss a meeting. I don’t regret the switch and it has been fun to get to know a new platform more closely. I still have a few barriers to conquer and smooth out (such as iTunes sync), but overall I’m a happy camper.
I’ve had an iPhone for quite awhile. Not from the very beginning. I wasn’t in line they day they first went on sale to pay what was it? Something like $600 for it? No, but I had one fairly early on was excited to get early access to the developer program. It was exciting to create one of the first business applications for the AppStore and to be on it the day it launched. The first generation iPhone was a huge step forward from my current Smartphone at the time, an HTC something or other from T-mobile that ran Windows Mobile 5.
Looking back I’ve always been an early Smartphone fan. I had my first one, a Palm Treo 180 almost 10 years ago. It was basically a monochrome Palm Pilot with a phone app on it and a very delicate hinged earpiece that did eventually die. I upgraded to the newer Treo, this one was in COLOR! But it had the same hinge issue and despite my best efforts, it eventually quit working too. I think I then tried an early version of the Sidekick. I liked that it was unique, but didn’t appreciate how closed the platform was. I couldn’t just install other Palm apps like I could on my Treo’s. I got a Sidekick 2 and liked the new features, but it still fell short and at some point I moved over to Windows Mobile. With Windows Mobile I liked the openness, but the interface was terrible, going into the Task Manager to kill runaway processes, etc… So I was excited when Model Metrics got into the iPhone fray early on and I was able to expense an iPhone.
Looking back it was the first time I had a Smartphone without a physical keyboard. I think in my mind that is why I gravitated towards the Smartphone was because I wanted to use them for email and liked the idea of a full keyboard. I grumbled along with everyone else saying, “It’s not as fast for email as a Blackberry, but you get used to it”. I didn’t upgrade to the 3G model when it later launched, but did get a 3GS when they hit the street as my first gen was getting long in the tooth and I liked the idea of a faster processor.
Now we are doing development of mobile applications across several platforms and one of those is Android. We have some test Nexus 1 phones in the office that are used for development and testing. I liked a few things about them, but found the trackball and general approach fairly primitive when compared to the iPhone I was used to. I appreciated the idea of Android (open source, multiple manufacturers, runs Flash, supports Adobe AIR), but I kept wondering in the back of my mind how it would really feel to try using it as a primary phone?
Gradually other phones have made their way into our company. Some had the first generation Droid, others some of the newer Android models from HTC or Samsung. It wasn’t until I was at the Adobe MAX conference in October and was given a Droid2 along with thousands of other developers that I truly thought about leaving the iPhone fold. I played with the Droid, connected my Google account and tried downloading a few applications. Everyone asked what I thought about it and I realized I couldn’t really say unless I tried it as my primary phone. So I just made the switch (which was surprisingly painful), not because of Android, but involved the procedures of moving off the company AT&T plan, to a personal plan, to a personal Verizon plan and then back to the company Verizon plan just to keep my number. Tune in for my next blog where I’ll break out my thoughts after going Android and how it compared to my iPhone.
Everything seems to be going mobile, and IT is scrambling. Yesterday’s policies aren’t cutting it when company executives buy the latest-whiz-bang-mobile-gadget-bling and then want to read their company email on it, and other employees soon follow.
Traditionally companies had one supported device, the RIM Blackberry. We all know it still has the dominant business market share, but Apple has made huge gains over the last couple of years and now Android devices are coming on strong and overtaking Apple. The waters are further muddied by tablets (iPad today, Android tablets tomorrow) and how IT will support, condone and manage them.
Some companies have moved towards a “employee liable” approach allowing individuals to bring their own device in an attempt to save $300-$400 a device. However this can become a support nightmare and most companies find it cheaper in the long run to provide a few devices that they can more easily manage and support. Saving a few hundred bucks can cause more support headaches than it’s worth.
So where do we go from here? Several companies are emerging to provide device management support. But what is the inflection point to move towards a solution like this?
- Security – For regulated industries such as Life Sciences, Pharma and Financial Services security is a must
- Pain – Once you move above 200 devices the support pain can get too much
- Cost Management – To contain roaming charges and data overages
- Application Management – Apps are proliferating and need management
There are options from vendors such as Zenprise, AirWatch, Mobile Iron and iPass to help with some or many of these needs.
At a recent conference I heard stories of people seeing a $1,500 iPad bill for data overages (most likely due to Netflix), or surprised by roaming charges when travelling.
I’d recommend that IT departments get in front of this quickly and create and update their device policies and management systems to get ready for the continued tsunami of mobile devices and tablets headed their way.
You may recall back in March we wrote a post on the rapidly dwindling need for desktop machines. That trend has continued, except now it's changing directions yet again. Not only are laptops and netbooks increasing sales, but now tablets are all the rage just 6 months later.
Apple has once again defined a new segment with their iPad, in an arena where tablet PC's had historically failed miserably. With a large, beautiful touch screen, fast processor, and light weight, it was a huge home run.
Recognizing a big market opportunity, competitors are lining up and salivating over what could be huge sales. A quick search on Engadget's website shows a fairly large list of upcoming tablet devices. Companies like Samsung, Toshiba, Archos, Texas Instruments, Dell, Acer and HP are building their own tablets to compete and hopefully take some market share from Apple.
Will they succeed? Tough question – but given the publics' acceptance of Android based devices I suspect we will see several tablets from Apple competitors doing well.
So why do we care about this at Model Metrics? Because we develop applications that grant mobile access to cloud-based data. And our 2GO platform runs on all of these devices whether they're IOS-based or Android. Stay tuned, this is an exciting place to be.
Got an interest in cloud computing? Wondering what all the hype is about? Listen in to CloudCast, a weekly podcast running anywhere from a half hour to 45 minutes. We meander a bit from enterprise applications to consumer applications, but if you’ve ever wanted to get the inside story on what’s hot, find it here in iTunes.
EDIT: The standard RSS link is here – http://www.modelmetrics.com/cloudcast.xml
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I recently had a conversation with the VP of Sales at a large manufacturing company. For the purposes of this discussion, I will call him John. John and his sales organization have never had a centralized, collaborative CRM system before and they are about to begin a salesforce.com implementation. Among the goals of the project is the need to consolidate the many point solutions they have used for managing their customers over the company’s 40-year history. They recognize the need to establish consistent processes for the sales team and want to leverage workflow capabilities to improve communication. After a series of fruitful meetings, John mentioned that he is working with IT to purchase mobile devices for the sales team because he has received a lot of demand from the team, and wants them to be as productive as possible with the new CRM tool.
The scenario described above is very common. The benefits of leveraging mobile technology for a sales rep include increased productivity, more timely information, access to real-time data at the point of contact, and access to information without the overhead of lugging a clunky laptop. All of this is theoretically sound, but don’t let your mobile strategy define itself without thoughtful consideration of questions that are sure to be raised as part of your implementation. Addressing these issues proactively will allow you to separate fact from fiction and apply a mobile strategy that fits your organization and your users so that you can realize success.
Who are your users?
The diversity of the user base is a great place to start in defining a strategy. It is common to have a mix of technologist and technophobes within the same sales team. The technologists tend to demand all of the latest and greatest tools and technology as a means of making themselves more productive. Without it, they claim that their efforts are diluted and they are bogged down with administrative overhead required to access information or log calls. On the other hand, the technophobes will resist any sort of change, especially when it comes to technology, by claiming that the time spent to manage all of these new tools and gadgets will negatively impact the time they spend in front of the customer.
When it comes to mobile, you are wise to know your audience. If your team is not accustom to using mobile technology for email and basic calendar management, you may want to take steps to introduce the device before you make it a critical component of your CRM strategy. Users who have leveraged these tools in their personal lives or at a past job will be much more comfortable in adopting this technology as part of their work.
When it comes to people, it is also important to note that strong demand for a Blackberry, iPhone or other device from users who do not currently have these products, may be a red flag. The grass may seem greener on the other side of the fence for those who have bought into the idea that these tools will make them more effective. I recently worked with a sales group that insisted that they needed offline capabilities because they weren’t always “connected.” Once we provided the offline functionality, they demanded mobile devices because they found it cumbersome to “lug around heavy laptops.” Once they received the mobile device, they complained about the small screen and the difficulty of entering data with a small keyboard. This is exactly the type of situation we want to control by proactively managing a mobile strategy.
How mature are your processes?
As the saying goes “Process before technology.” Change management is a key component to any CRM implementation. The introduction to new systems represents a disruption, and optimizing or changing processes will require that users have a clear understanding of their role and expectations. The process of change must be managed deliberately to ensure that users are not left behind as they adjust to their new way of working.
If process change is part of your implementation, it is common (and a good idea) for the mobile implementation is postponed to a second phase. It is important that users are familiar with the goals they are trying to achieve before they take on learning how to manage multiple entry points.
What do users need to do to get their job done?
It may seem obvious, but it is critical to give objective consideration to what your users need to accomplish using their mobile device. A clear definition of use cases serves as the basis for streamlining key processes and maximizing efficiency for end users. When defining mobile needs, many companies make the mistake of setting an expectation that anything that can be done with a laptop should be possible with a handheld, and this is simply not realistic. Use case definition should help to separate fact from fiction when it comes to defining what functionality needs to be available.
The reality of a handheld is that the physical size, speed and ergonomics are significant challenges for some users. These factors make processes that require consuming or reading data better candidates than those that require entering data. This is especially true of complex data entry processes where there are many fields or pages to navigate. This is not to say that call logging or data entry are not candidates, but scrutiny should be applied to processes that required extensive typing or scrolling as users will become easily frustrated.
A failure to keep it simple when it comes to mobile will also likely equate to poor or incomplete data. Typing on a small keyboard can be time consuming. Moreover, navigating multiple screens can make a simple task daunting. The resulting behavior for end-users is to cut corners, enter the minimum amount of data required, or neglect to enter anything at all.
What device suits your needs?
Mobile devices are not all created equal and there is no one answer to which is the best. The strategy established must be consistent with the goals of the organization and the tools must be right for the job. A thorough analysis of the right device should include alignment with the mobile use cases, feature functionality of the device, device-specific feature support offered by your CRM software, customization capabilities, and the service network.
How will security be maintained?
Finally, the need to secure your data and protect the intellectual property of the organization must be considered. Users may demand access to ALL data through their mobile device, but the strategy must consider the risk of a lost or stolen device. For ease of use, most systems do not require that users enter a password each time they are accessing their CRM application on the mobile device. For this reason, it is important that data is evaluated by sensitivity so judgments can be made about what will and what will not be accessible. Furthermore, a password policy on the device itself should be mandatory if there is risk of a breach.
This is not an exhaustive list of mobile strategy components, but does represent some key points of consideration. The cost of implementing a mobile solution is not insignificant, so these basic questions will help to proactively plan rather than having to backtrack and repeat.
I have an iPhone and for the most part I love it. I like the interface, the seamless access to music and all the apps on the AppStore. I don’t like the shortcomings, such as the lack of cut and paste, no video capture, lack of landscape keyboard, etc… Many of these will be addressed soon with the 3.0 OS, which is already in public beta. We have created six apps for the AppStore ourselves and we know and love Objective C. But what about Android? I’ve heard a lot about it, especially when the G1 launched, but I’ve never personally used it or seen it in action beyond some POC work by some of the developers on my team.
That is about to change. Google did a very smart thing, which at first I thought was very generous, then I realized was a brilliant move to buy mindshare. They gave all 4,000 of us a free Android phone just for coming to their conference. But we weren’t 4,000 random people. We are thought leaders and developers from all walks of life that know enough or care enough about Google to spend a couple of days learning more about it. Even with this “Google Centric” crowd I saw a lot of iPhones and Blackberries and very few G1’s. But now all of us have a free Android phone, and not only that but it is unlocked and we have a SIM card for 30 days of voice and data access.
I’d say the odds of all of us trying out some development on this platform just increased dramatically. I’m curious to see what comes out of this or what types of skunkwork apps my team can put together now that we have a spare phone we can actually try things out on.
Calendar2GO Lite for Salesforce CRM on the iPhone
We just found out Calendar2GO Lite was approved by Apple. This is a free little application that allows you to easily see your Salesforce calendar on your iPhone and shows all the events for the current week, broken out into days and is very similar to the home screen in Salesforce. You can drill into an event to see the detail, whether it is recurring, it’s description, etc…
There is a full version that should be approved soon that adds several nice features such as a daily view, weekly view, linkable phone numbers, email addresses.
Check it out and let us know what you think. I’m curious how many other organizations use Salesforce as their company calendar. Also, any interest in seeing this on a Blackberry?
In case you haven’t heard we announced CardLasso back in November of last year. We have had a lot of interest and received some great feedback since it was shown in the Dreamforce keynote by Adam Gross, namely:
- This is great, but I don’t have an iPhone
- Could I use this for Tradeshows?
- Do you have any Corporate plan options
I’m glad to say that we have now implemented each of the above suggestions and they are either live in Lasso, or are currently in beta.
Card Entry via Web Cam
If you don’t have an iPhone you can enter cards directly from your laptop or PC with an attached USB Web Cam. This option allows for high-volume card entry and doesn’t require a proprietary scanner (such as CardScan).
Other Mobile Phones
We also have a new mobile offering that will allow you to enter cards from ANY mobile phone (including Blackberries which you have all asked about). This approach will work with any phone that allows you to take a picture and send an email.
Native Blackberry Client
We are also developing a native Blackberry client to have even tighter integration with this platform, so if you are excited about the new Blackberry Storm you got for Christmas, stay tuned.
Lasso Offline for Tradeshows
If you are in marketing and go to tradeshows, you know the pain of entering hundreds or thousands of business cards. We utilized our 2Go mobile platform and built a special offline version of Lasso that allows you to rapidly capture pictures of cards using a web cam in an offline mode and then they can be uploaded for transcription once you have Internet connectivity.
We are very excited about Lasso and it is a great showcase of what can be done with force.com Sites.
If you are interested head over to http://www.lasso2go.com to sign up for a $1.99 trial to give this a spin.
Note – Screen shots for Blackberry and iPhone below.
Dreamforce ’08 has come and gone. We had a couple of nice mentions — Lasso2Go of course but we also had the DFMobile application. Hit http://dfmobile.force.com from your mobile device if you’d like to see it. It works on a Blackberry, a WAP/ simple XHTML compatible device or an iPhone.
The use case: you’re a Dreamforce 08 attendee and you want to find out about the event from your phone. And if you’ve already registered on the Dreamforce portal, you can access the schedule you built there on your mobile device. You can search partners and sessions, find out more information about the Foo Fighters and local watering holes, and a whole lot more.*
The basic system is pretty straightforward. Some details:
- The back end is the existing SFDC event registration system based on customer portal.
- The DFMobile piece starts at a page that inspects the client and redirects to either the WAP / simple XHTML page or to the iPhone page based on the HTTP_ACCEPT environmental variable.
- Both resulting pages use the same Apex controller and are based on Force.com Sites. Sites lets users see public information — partners, sessions, local info — without authenticating.
- Users have the ability to search partners and sessions based on some simple criterial.
- Users also have the ability to login. Once logged in, the user can see the schedule they originally created on the full web client.
There were a few other features that didn’t quite make it to production. For example, we created a way to highlight the particular room a session was in on the iPhone client. And to be clear, this is used a single image that the iPhone highlighted based on coordinates in the object. The only reason it didn’t make it to production was the timing of go-live.
For the iPhone developers out there, this is using the CiUI library from CNET. Over all, CiUI was pretty serviceable. The only thing that came up occassionally was an odd timing issue related to how fast CiUI could respond to user input. Sometimes, during testing, the javascript that replaces the body of a page would get out of synch with the results coming back from SFDC. The page would then display without the decorative wrapper containing the header, footer and CSS. Note: this apears to have only been an issue in artificial rapid fite tesing, not in production, and wasn’t an issue related to Force.com response times.
The biggest lesson learned? Getting the permissions aligned between the custom object, customer portal and Force.com sites takes a minute to get used to. If something isn’t checked, your application will appear unresponsive. If your app appears unresponsive, chances are good that it’s related to permissions.
A pretty exciting project all in all.
Blackberry Screenshots
Blackberry Main Screen (WAP/Simple XHTML)
Blackberry Session Search Form
Blackberry Session Search Results
iPhone Splash Screen
iPhone Main Menu
iPhone, post login, My Sessions > Tuesday view
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* OK, well, not a whole lot more, but some more. Check it out on the
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