What is Innovation?

With the advent of mass consumer smartphone technology, phone manufacturers compete aggressively in becoming a more, if not most "innovative" company.

Apple, being the company that brought to the world a game-changing, life-changing revolutionary smartphone, is being challenged aggressively in this area.

How do I define innovation?

In my view, innovation involves having a new concept.  It can be evolved from old ideas.

The most important factor for it to be claimed as real innovative is that competitors try to follow suit and start copying.

Here's one that I consider an innovation.  Back in the days of resistive touch screen smartphones and PDAs, PalmOne was the leader.  However, there was a major issue in all those devices.  When they went out of battery juice, the data will be gone. A restart of the device by recharging will not bring back the data. You can only restore from the desktop.

Figure: The Palm Tunsten T2 with Resistive Screen

To resolve such shortcoming, PalmOne introduced a new way of making the data persistent even when the battery is flat.  They introduced NVFS, "Non Volatile File System" and implemented in their then flagship Palm Tunsten T5 PDA in 2005.

All was good. And competitors saw it succeed and copying began.

And sure enough, Microsoft followed not long later and came out the "Persistent Storage" in their Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system.

And all devices following that have persistent storage that stay beyond battery flat.

This is innovation.

And then in 2007.  Apple introduced a new way of interacting with the phone and the copying begins.

This is innovation.

Now, most recently, a certain smartphone company came out with many new features.

One of them allows you to pause your video by looking away from the screen.  Another one allows you to scroll your screen without touching the screen.  And then they tried to bring back the "stylus" from the dead.

What seem to others as innovation for the above three features do not fall under my definition of innovation.  They obviously did not arouse enough interest or mass market appeal for their competitors to copy these features.

2014 is a year which I really think new innovations are imminent.

Macro Lens Photography

I came across this "Macro + Wide Angle" lens for mobile phones few weeks ago and bought it to have some fun with macro photography.

The one I bought is this "clip-on" type that can be used by simply clipping it over the edge of the phone with the lens aligned to the phone's lens.

Today I've taken some close-up pictures with the macro lens and I will show them beside their respective original photo taken without the lens.

There's also the Wide-Angle lens that comes with the package and I touch on that at a later time.

These pictures were taken indoor at night under florescent lighting, which explains the poor photo quality.
But still, the macro effect is apparent.

Strange Phenomenon of the Gadget World

Not many years back, companies like Nikon, Pentax, Casio were trying to make their cameras as small and compact as possible and charge a higher price.
Today, we see people shooting away with a 9.7" squarish and flat device.

A biggest-sized camera of all time. (2013)

Again not many years back, companies like Ericsson, Sony, Nokia were trying to make their mobile phones as small and compact as possible.
Today, we see people putting a 5.6" flat slab to their face. One can even see people holding a bigger 7" one with a brand starting with "S".

Are we "going backwards"?!
Strange phenomenon.

iRevolution

Think about this...

2007 - The smartphone world was revolutionised.

+3 years,
2010 - The tablet world was revolutionised.













+3 years,
2013 - Something is gonna got revolutionised. Right?

With vast cash to burn on its side, I very much doubt the "i" smartphone is going to die, to the utter disappointment of the "dessert" community, I guess.

I'm not a fan of the fruit company, but I'm a lover of their product, particularly the "i" smartphone.

My iPhone 5 Daily Usage

I've the iPhone 5 for roughly 3 weeks now.
Here's a breakdown of the things I do on it... Graphically.

As can be seen from the chart, I use the iPhone a lot for Music, Gaming and Apps.
- Music: because of iPhone's great sound quality. (with a music app that provides customised graphic equalizer)
- Gaming: because the graphic chip in iPhone 5 has significantly improved over its predecessor, iPhone 4's (which itself is already awesome)
- Apps: because I still prefer iOS's intuitive touches(pun not intended) to apps functionalities such as "Badge Notification", "Swipe to Delete", "Status Bar Tap to Top of Page", etc.

One thing to note is the low percentage for net browsing.
I generally don't use the iPhone much for surfing net. One of the reasons why a bigger size screen is not necessary for me.

Next, here's the breakdown for the Social Networking app usage for me.

Google+ is slowly taking over my social networking life because of the great community there and the quality of the mobile and PC app for Google+.

And yes, the iPhone 5 is taking over my life ... slowly but surely ...

My iPhone 5 Review (Part 1)

The Wait Ends

After months of waiting, I've finally got the iPhone when it launched in Singapore on 21st September 2012.

Took me near 2 hours from queueing to getting the phone itself. Not really a long time.

Size and Weight

The first impression that I had when I first held the phone is my hand is that it's so light and slim it seems "hollow". One can even mistake it for one of those dummy prototypes showed handphone shops.

There are other light smartphones around such as the Galaxy S2 and S3. Both of these are light but because of the wider width, they don't give the same overall-lightness feeling that the iPhone 5 gives.

Maps

There are reports of several glitches in the new Apple Maps.

I tried the Fly-Over for New York. Some buildings and roads are so distorted that they look like they are in middle of a war zone.

Turn by Turn

I read some reports that the Turn by Turn was showing wrong routes and info.

I tried once yesterday over a short distance on Singapore street.
It finished with accuracy. No errors then.
I'll have to try more over a longer distance to conclude its accuracy.

User Interface

One of the main differences, which is a big improvement in this case, over the iPhone 4S is the bigger 4" screen.

It is taller, while maintaining the width. I really welcome that size proportion. I generally have a small palm and anytime wider than the width of iPhone 4S or Galaxy S2, I will find it hard to operate the phone with one hand.

With this difference in screen size, there's an impact to the app design. For those older apps that aren't designed to take the full advantage of the taller display, there will be 2 black rectangular boxes each at the top and bottom of the main app display.

But for those apps that have updated to take up the full screen estate, they just look gorgeous.

See next: My iPhone 5 Review (Part 2)

A Technology Irony

It's amazing how technology is going forward. Well, unless you're talking about the Galaxy Note.

Some years back, every vendor was trying reduce the size of phone such that the smaller it is, the more expensive it will be.
And a few years back, we were so glad we were able to get rid of the infamous stylus as an input device to a mobile device.

Now the reverse is seen in Galaxy Note.
What irony!