Choosing between Android, iPhone, Windows Phone and Blackberry

One of the things that I tend to use most everyday is my smartphone. I almost always carry it with me everywhere I go, and also have it close by when I'm at home. Needless to say, if there was one piece of technology I wouldn't give up it would probably be my smartphone. However, with so many different types of phones and smartphone operating systems out there, it can be somewhat of a hassle to determine the right type of smartphone for your needs. As such, I have put together here a little guide that may help you select the right type of phone. Most of what I have mentioned here comes from my own personal experience, with all these operating systems.


Top 3 reasons for choosing an Android Phone:

1. Price: A quick comparison between android phones and other smartphones will quickly reveal that android phones are in general a little less expensive than other varieties. This may be either due to lower specs, lower build quality or less features so always be sure to check some reviews online before going for an android phone that looks too good to be true. The top tier android phones, however, may be just as pricey as other competitors though, depending on how the smartphone market is when the phones are launched.
2. Freedom: One good thing about the android OS is that most manufacturers give you the option of installing any application that you want on your phone. It doesn't necessarily have to be downloaded from Google play (Android's app store). Often times, you can download it from the creators website (or forums such as XDA developers) and install it directly. Also, if you're even just a bit tech savvy, you can download custom roms and with technical some know-how "flash" it to your phones. Also, did I mention that you can play flash videos/games on android (you'll have to download a custom APK, but it's possible)?
3. Features: Big screen, small screen, high res, loud speakers, keyboards... there are all sorts of hardware features that you can find in android phones. If you're looking for an AWS spectrum phone (some providers like Wind/Mobility in Canada, and T-mobile in the US us the AWS spectrum for their services) then you can find plenty of android phones that may meet your needs

Top 3 reasons for choosing iPhone
1. Top of the line hardware: Apart from minor antenna problems with the iPhone 4, the latest lines of iPhones  have every piece of great hardware you'd want in a phone: 8MP camera, thin and light, high res display, adequate hardware noise cancelling and most of all a hardware silent/vibrate button (which is indispensable if you go to a lot of meetings and only realize that you forgot to turn off your phone after someone else's phone rings, and you don't really want to remove your phone out of your pocket)! One thing that I would have liked to see was some kind of a notification light, so I don't have to repeatedly turn the phone on to see if I have a message or email.
2. A wide selection of apps: iPhone still has more apps by number. Also, since Apple has been around the smartphone market for a while and the App store gets higher revenue than Android/Windows Phone/Blackberry stores many developers usually chose to release their apps for the iPhone first.
3. Reliability: iPhones on average have less software/hardware problems than Android phones. I've usually never had my iPhone never refuse to connect to the network after coming out of the subway for example, where as other platforms have sometimes given me some trouble.

Top 3 reasons for choosing Windows Phone
1. Fresh: Windows phones arguably have one of the funkiest looking hardware around. This is pretty cool when you want to differentiate yourself from the other iPhone users out there. Also, the Windows phone UI is pretty fun to use  and Microsoft has done a good job of showing the most critical information to the user upfront without having them jump to apps and screens.
2. Nice hardware: Many windows phone hardware partners (Nokia, HTC in particular) are putting out some of the best camera phones and high res displays out there.
3. Sufficient apps: While the Windows phone app store may not be as big as iPhone or Android, it does have a large variety of apps (especially those built using the "Metro" design platform) that will most likely take care of most things you would want to do with your phone.

Top 3 reasons for choosing Blackberry
1. Reliability: Blackberries have some of the best reception and voice quality (along with a few Nokias and Motorolas) that you can possibly find in a smart phone.
2. Keyboard: The Bold 9000/Bold 9900 probably has the best keyboard my thumbs have ever typed on. However, unlike touch screen based phones, there's no way to switch to a "number only" key pad when you want to make calls for example. Other Blackberries also have formidable keyboards that make it easier to type out those quick emails and texts.
3. Business features/BBM: Blackberry Enterprise Services/Blackberry Internet Service ensure that you get your emails in a secure and timely manner. Also, I've found BBM to be more reliable and faster than Apple's iMessage and even text messaging at times. It is also more secure.

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Top 6 Gmail Tips

Gmail is probably one of the best free webmail services out there given the enormous number of features it has. Plus, chances are good that if you're reading this blog, you're a gmail user! As such, I've put together a short list of my top 6 tips that I use all the time on Gmail's web interface. Although I do use Apple Mail quite a bit, I've been drawn to the web interface more so than a desktop email reader because it's easier to use from any computer, and works great without any setting up or delays thanks to Gmail's speedy interface.

My Top 6 Tips for Gmail:

1. Use keyboard shortcuts to quickly process your emails. This is especially handy when you have a lot of mail to process. Simply hit:
• N to move to newer conversation
• P to more to previous conversation
• C to compose
• ! to report spam
• F to move forward
• R to reply
• And there's more.. you can find the whole list of shortcuts here
• To enable this feature head over to the settings page by clicking the "Gear" button on the top right hand side of your gmail window, and pick "Settings" from the menu. The keyboard shortcuts option should be under the General tab.
2. Undo send - Have you ever been in the situation where you clicked send and only after you clicked it did you realize that you had made a mistake. Well worry no more, because Gmail's undo send feature "fakes" the process of sending out emails by giving you a 5 seconds to cancel sending your email once you click send. You can turn this feature on from the settings page under the general tab.
3. Automatically process your emails by using filters (on top of Priority Inbox): With the filters feature you can set rules for incoming mail such as newsletters or notifications and sort them, mark them as read, delete them and so on. The easiest way to set this up is to click on the "More" button at the top of an email when you are viewing an email and click "Filter messages like this". Gmail will then ask you a bunch of questions and you can have your filter set up in no time.
4. Read email from other email accounts through your Gmail Account. If you have multiple email accounts like I do, then it may be best to use the multiple sign on feature that google has started offering recently. If you click on your username on the top right hand side of the page, you can click the "Add account" button to link to or more accounts to one account so that you can easily switch back and forth between these accounts. Just one thing you may want to remembers is being in the correct email account before sending out emails.
5. Allow others to send email from your account: A recently added feature in Gmail is the ability to grant access to others so that they can send emails on your behalf! You can find this option in the "Accounts and Import" field on the Gmail settings page.
6. Multiple Inboxes: A great labs feature that I like is to have folders or labels displayed on the main page so that you can quickly see what's up. This is great if you set up Gmail to fetch email from several accounts, as you can have several different inboxes on the main page to browse through. You can find the multiple inboxes lab in "Settings", under the "Labs" tab (just search for multiple inboxes). Once you enable this lab, you'll have a multiple inboxes tab where you can configure additional options.

Bonus: Get yourself a Gmail pet hamster!

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The best ways to increase iPhone Battery Life

One thing that Apple has always paid attention to is the battery life in their devices. Most of them, particularly their laptops, far surpass the industry average when it comes to giving you lots of juice. In this post, I will mention some of the ways I, and many others, have managed to get more life out of their iPhones devices.

If you've used your iPhone for a few days, you may have noticed that the battery life is not as good as it was when you first got it. There are many reasons for this and the main culprits include:

1. Misbehaving apps that keep turning location services on or waking up your phone, trying to tell you something
2. Changed screen brightness and email sync settings - a brighter screen and syncing more often
3. Your phone trying Low reception areas
4. Syncing of large files (pictures, books, data etc.) from your phone to the "cloud"

All of these things use battery life. All of these things are also what makes your smartphone "smart". 

If you feel that your battery life is more important to you, then the best way you can get it back is by effectively disabling all the syncing, brightnesses changes and bad settings that have been pushed onto your phone by rogue apps.

Doing so is simple (although perhaps tedious):

1. Uninstall any apps you may have recently installed. In particular you can save a lot of juice by uninstalling data hungry apps that you don't really need/use such as:
1. VOIP Apps (Viber, Dell Voice etc.)
2. Apps that upload your pics to the internet (this include iCloud syncing, calendar syncing etc.)
2. Disable "notification" settings for apps that you don't really need notifications from using: SETTINGS > NOTIFICATIONS
3. Make your phone dumber: Turn off services that you don't need. Things that you can turn off from SETTINGS include: Location services (no GPS if you do this!), Siri (if you happen to have it, I don't use this much anyway)
4. Prevent uploading of "Documents and Data" to iCloud when you're using cellular data: Do so from SETTINGS > ICLOUD > DOCUMENTS & DATA > turn off USE CELLULAR
5. Prevent applications like Skype from signing you automatically from SETTINGS > SKYPE > SIGN IN AUTOMATICALLY

If you want to do all of the above, then you can try resetting all your settings from: SETTINGS > GENERAL > RESET ALL SETTINGS and this will maintain all you apps, but delete all the settings for the apps (this includes Mail, Google Calendar/Contact Syncing etc.). So next time you open an app it'll ask you if you wan't to use location services, notifications etc., and you can only allow a select few to access things like location services.

As far as I know, disabling things and resetting are the only ways of improving battery life on the iPhones (apart from draining the battery fully and recharging it again). Let me know of any other methods you come up with.

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Choosing a good pair of headphones/in-ear headphones

So, you want to buy headphones huh?

I think headphones these days are actually becoming more of a fashion statement than a device that helps you listen to audio. Being a commuter on the TTC (also known as "The Rocket") for the past 7 years, I have observed a marked increase in the use of headphones, ear phones and a bunch of other things. One thing that strikes me though is the large amount of people wearing those "beats" by (dr.) Dre headphones. Those may be great for the bass, but for people who wish to buy some "quality" headphones, here are some of my thoughts regarding a few technical aspects you can look at before purchasing a pair of headphones. While nothing beats trying out the headphones, this guide may be of help for people who wish to buy things online.

You can generally find the specs I've described below on the manufacturer's website or by simply by doing a quick search for it on google. Headphones.com is also a great resource for looking up some specs.

Headphone Impedance

One of the things you have to keep in mind about a headphone is that, effectively, it's just like a resistor (something that burns up energy). It takes the energy from the device that powers it and causes some membrane to vibrate in order to produce sound. The lower the resistance, the louder the sound produced by the headphones for the same amount of power. This is a key factor that you have to consider when buying headphones because if you plan to use a handheld device like an iPhone or a mp3 player to listen to music, you're generally going to want a lower resistance, somewhere between 8Ω - 16Ω (Ω = Ohms, a theoretical measure of the resistance). If the resistance is any higher, you'll likely have to resort to using a headphone amplifier that use batteries to get higher noise levels from your headphones. Not that there's anything wrong with using an amplifier, but it's just an extra inconvenience you may have to deal with in order to listen to some music.

Frequency Response

Here's were things start to get a little subjective, but I'm only going to mention the tech details.

So you probably know that headphones work by vibrating a little membrane like thing (called the "driver"), back and forth. However, the ability of that membrane to vibrate really fast or slow depends on what kind. A whistle sound for example, has a high frequency. A drum beat, however, has a low frequency. While listening to music though you want your headphones to produce both sounds equally well. However, that is not always possible to do. Some headphones can produce lower frequency sounds better, while others can produce higher frequency sounds better. The best types are good at both. As such, each headphone type has it's own "frequency response curve". The "flatter" the curve is, generally means that the headphone can produce more frequencies at the same sound level, and therefore produce more sounds.

X-axis is frequency (how fast the speaker is vibrating), Y-axis is gain (how much potential sound the speaker can produce at that frequency)

In the pictures above, the graph at the top is of a headphone that costs $19.99. To the bottom is a headphone that costs $1,945! (yeah, two thousand bucks!). The main difference is that the cheaper headphones can't produce the lower frequencies as well (like drum beats and such), hence the dip in the curve on the left hand side (which means you can barely hear those sounds). The really expensive ones can handle the bass very easily so it's like a "flat line", hence the price!

This spec of the headphone is what allows the headphone to handle the "lows", "mids" and "highs" that audiophiles often talk about. If you're into base, you want the left hand side of the frequency graph to be flat, and above 0 for the y-axis.

Active Noise Cancelling Headphones

Another type of headphones that are catching on these days are ones that work by playing "antisound" (1/2 wavelength out of phase sound waves, if that means anything to you...) so that it cancels out sound from the outside. These are especially handy if you plan to travel on planes or trains, since it's really easy to generate antisound for the low hum of airplane or subway engines. However a couple of caveats you'll need to keep in mind:

• Not all sounds are actually cancelled. It won't cancel out the sound of babies crying beside you, or people talking loudly, since it's very difficult to generate antisound for these sounds
• They'll often require batteries, and some may not even work without batteries. Buying new batteries every week/recharging them may become a hassle really fast
• These headphones are usually very expensive!

Some things you can check for such headphones are their "noise isolation"/elimination curves.

For example, if you are considering the Bose QC15 headphones, you can google for the noise isolation graph for the headphones, and it'll show something like this:

In this case, you want the frequency curve to be as low as possible for all frequencies, as opposed to the frequency response graphs in the previous two pictures above because want to cancel out/block the noise. Noise from airplane engines are somewhere around 70-100 Hz frequency, and the Bose QC15 do a nice job of cancelling it out by dropping the sound level of the engine noise by ~20dB. That's about the same reduction as reducing the sound of car traffic to the level of sound of an average conversation with a friend (yeah, it's hard to picture sound...).

So with noise cancelling/isolating (noise isolating headphones just block out the noise by covering your ears...) headphones, you'll want to check out these curves and try to find the ones that block out the most noise.

One thing you have to remember is that a side effect of this antisound business is that the actual sound that you want to hear will get a little distorted, changing the frequency response curve of the headphones. As such, it's always a trade off, and it's up to you to decide if noise cancellation is more important than you being able to hear a particular part of a song.

Fit and Finish

One final thing that's pretty obvious is how the headphones fit on you. This is something that you'll likely just have to experience on your own by visiting a store or something, and is highly subjective. As well, you probably want it to look cool.

I, however, don't really mind how it looks as long as it sounds good!

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5 Internet Radio services outside the US

To be honest I'm not much of a music junkie. If I feel like listening to something, well, I don't really have a collection of 50,000 songs that can just "turn on". Instead, I depend on online radio stations to feed me with the latest music there is. Of course, it's even better when I can choose the type of music that I want to listen to, instead of just listening to whatever my local radio station is playing.

So, without further ado, here's a list of radio websites that I've started liking. Please feel free to share you own. Also, you may probably notice that there's no mention of Pandora here, because Pandora (and Spotify for that matter) doesn't quite work outside the US yet.

Jango

A cool radio station that allows you to choose the artist that you'd like to listen to, and suggests similar songs from quite a large list of popular songs. What I also like about Jango is their app for Android (and iPhone, Blackberry as well) because, unlike the next service I've mentioned (Grooveshark), they seem to be giving it away for free. And, you don't even nee to sign up! What puzzles me is that these people don't even have ads on their radio station (yet, but seems like they're working on it, judging by their advertising page). One thing that does bug me though is that the website will constantly nag you if you don't sign up for a Jango account if you're listening to music online. This sort of makes skipping a song a bit harder. But I suppose it does make sense to sign up though, because that's how the service keeps track of what songs you like and what songs you don't. Another great thing about Jango is it's ability to choose between a wide variety of songs, vs sticking to one artist only - which is a nice touch, although I really don't mind either setting.

Grooveshark

I must admit that Grooveshark does look quite a bit fancier than Jango (and doesn't nag you to sign up as much), and it great if you're only listening to stuff on your computer. It has the features that are similar to Jango, but it doesn't really allow you to chose your "variety" settings. Nevertheless, it also seems to have a huge repertoire of songs that you can listen to. One thing about Grooveshark is that their smartphone service is not free, so if you plan to create your play lists on Grooveshark, you will have to pay a small fee to listen to it on your phone.

Live365
Feels like the usual internet radio station where you choose a Genre to listen to, and tune into a channel. It does have quite a few ads here and there though. Also seems like they make you sign up for an account...

Shoutcast
Comes with WinAmp too, so if you happen to have it on your computer then simply open it up and browse to your desired radio channel.

iTunes
Simply switch to the Radio tab on the left hand sidebar to check out a wide selection of radio channels. This is great if you don't want to open a bunch of websites and just need to listen to some music. I usually don't like installing iTunes on Windows computers due to its tardiness, however, it is definitely my choice of music player on OS X.

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A Brief Review of Windows Phone 7

Windows Phone 7 is probably one of the coolest smartphone OS's you've never used. It's nothing like Windows, and very different from iOS as well as Android. I really like the smooth transition effects, and the general snappyness of the phone.

Some reasons why you'll actually like a Windows Phone:

1. Simple and easy to use (for the most part). Don't quite agree with this commercial though, some things are a little more difficult actually (see my WP7 wishlist below!)
2. Excellent Facebook, Linked in and Twitter Integration. In particular I like the integration of Facebook and Windows Live chat with text messaging so you can quickly switch back and forth
3. Fancy transition effects. 
4. You can edit Microsoft Office documents!
5. In built music recognition feature (like Shazam) that works quite well

One bad thing about Windows Phone, however, is that the hardware is not standardized. This means that using one phone may not give you the same experiences as using another, since one design may be more prone to accidental clicks than another. Or, one design may have a larger screen resulting in lower battery life but better ability to type. Not being able to really try out the phone at a store and it's cool transition effects is also a downside.

Some things in WP7 I'd like to see worked out in future versions (dear Microsoft, I hope you are reading this wishlist) that you may not like about WP as well:
1. They actually made some things a little more difficult while trying to make things easier. A good example of this is making and receiving calls. In order to make a call, you click on the "Phone" live-tile on the live tiles screen. This actually takes you to a list that shows the history of calls... instead of taking you to the dial pad. Unless may be you just had a missed call, in which case going to the missed calls list directly would be more convenient, there's no reason to tuck away the dialpad under some menu. Another problem is answering calls. To answer calls you actually need to perform two steps! First you need to "Swipe Down", and then click the "answer" button again to take the call! I personally think that this is just silly. Swiping down should automatically trigger the answer call response. I've missed a few calls thinking that swiping down would answer the call. Also, I think that Microsoft should do something to allow people to access their messages and emails right from the lockscreen.

2.5 Basic apps: While the lack of apps for the platform is no big surprise since most developers seem to be developing for other more prominent and potentially lucrative platforms, Microsoft really needs to do some thinking about default apps. A fresh windows phone ships actually without a stopwatch and timer app (it does have Microsoft Office though...). Even my 8 year old flip phone has that (and a flashlight app)! Sure, you can download a few apps, most of which don't work all too well, but this is something that any new phone should come with. In-built music recognition and QR code readers are great, but please stick to providing some basic apps that every other platform out there has.

2. Internet Explorer: Any smartphone in today's market needs to have great web browsing capabilities. IE, for some reason, has a lot of difficulty handling large divs, and handling iframes properly. A good example is visiting xda-developers.com. If you scroll left or right, the text in the div gets cut off! Apart from the browser's incapability to support web-kit like styling elements and divs it also has very poor "tabbing" capabilities. If you need to switch to a tab, you need to drag out the menu from the bottom, tap tabs, and then tap the tab of interest.

4. Adding contacts/searching: Too much jumping around to do. To add someone to my contacts list, I first need to click name, add their name, click save, then click phone, add their phone and click back. Why not put all of these fields on one page like every other mobile OS out there? Also, searching for contacts is kinda  tough even though you can click on a letter and it shows you contacts with a particular letter, you can't go one level further and sort by Letter-Vowel combinations like iPhone and Android (just a thought).

5. Live-tile and app screen: While having live-tiles is great, having only 6 of them visible in one viewing is not all that great. I really wish there was some way to make some tiles 1/4th the size of the current ones, so 4 tiles could be squeezed in the same place to avoid scrolling. Also, scrolling up and down the app screen is somewhat of a pain if you happen to have a lot of apps.

6. Scrolling: The only way to get to the bottom of a very long page is to keep scrolling for a day and a half! May be they could allow people to move the scroll bar?

7. No tethering! Yes, my carrier actually allows me to tether, and I've done so successfully (and rather easily) on my android. Not sure why Microsoft doesn't want to bother adding this.

While Windows Phone 7 may not be as fully featured as other systems, I'd say that it's definitely getting there.

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