I was a bit disappointed with the iPad 2. Yes, it was a little bit faster, a little bit lighter and it finally had the cameras that it should have had in the first place if Apple had not been such an unpleasant company and deliberately avoided reducing their profits by a dollar or two per device so they could squeeze a few more sales this time around. However, it’s an unequivocally worse design. The curved corners make it harder to hold but, more importanty, mean that whenever you rest it on something you invariably wind up pressing a button you dont want to press (often the volume key, which can be disconcerting) and, to fit it into a marginally smaller space, the quality of the speakers is noticeably lower. And, while the magnetic ‘case’ is innovative, it’s virtually useless under almost all normal use cases, offering minimal protection, falling off with even a light shake and being notably awkward to balance when used as a stand. So, when the first Android came out that really looked like a competitor, I thought I’d give it a try. So here I am now, $500 the worse for wear, typing this on a 16GB Asus eee-Pad Transformer. The combination of price, performance and features makes this the first tablet of any kind that I have come across that potentially offers better value than an iPad – others can do better prices and some have marginally better features, but this is the only one I know of that does both, decisively.

The hardware is great

First impressons are mixed. The aesthetic is a cross between steam punk and 50s kitsch and I’m not sure I love it. It’s certainly not as adorable as the iPad though it is definitely quirkier. With its keyboard detached it feels a little lighter than the iPad 2 and it’s much easier and more comfortable to hold for long periods. With the keyboard attached it is much heavier, but it works and feels like a very good netbook with all the nice benefits of a multi-touch screen and multi-touch mouse. The keyboard is easy to type on and feels like a higher quality mechanism than even the Macbook Air, though it is rather small overall and the space bar and return keys in particular are much too tiny. The main thing the keyboard gives, however, apart from two full-size USB ports and a fullsize SD card slot, is a stonking 16 hours of battery life. I really love that. I like that you get a second micro-sd slot in the tablet part of the machine, I like the two perfectly usable cameras, sensibly centre mounted, and and HDMI output that works at full resolution. I don’t like the proprietary USB connector, but I understand the need for it, given the smart docking needed. I prefer the Apple power supply but the Asus equivalent is not too bad.

Android has some good points

The machine comes with a straightforward and pretty plain Android 3.1 installation, with a few useful apps such as a workable office suite ( Polaris – not at all bad) and a universal book reader that pulls in books from other readers like Kindle and so on – and they supply Angry Birds (ahem). I’ve spent a fair bit of time on the Android Marketplace and have replaced most, though not all of the apps I love most on the iPad. Of those I really miss, I don’t think anyone is likely to improve on Garageband for the foreseeable future and Netflix, though available for some Android devices, is not yet available for this machine, at least not in Canada. There are other quirky apps that use the various Apple goodies to do nice things that are not there yet (the compelling iDough, for instance, or the truly magic MagicPlan, or the brilliant PhotoPuppet), and Apple’s own office apps are very hard to beat but, in general, there are good alternatives and the Google integration (much better docs, maps, Goggles, search and G+) is great. I’m sad to say that Skype’s alleged support for video in Android 2.2 and greater does not extend to 3.x – obviously, now they are being purchased by Microsoft, they have adopted a similarly creative approach to arithmetic.

I really like being able to really choose a web browser (Chrome, Firefox, many others) rather than being stuck with the awful limitations of Safari’s mobile webkit which sits under every browser in iOS. At last I can use a proper rich text editor on the web, and upload files easily and without intermediate steps. Even though the rich-text editing is not quite perfect (very hard indeed to position a cursor on the form, only really works with the detachable keyboard) this alone makes it a viable notebook replacement for travelling. Little touches like a virtual keyboard that doesn’t require three keystrokes just to open an HTML tag mean that I can use plain HTML almost as easily as on a desktop machine so, even when the WYSIWYG editor is not usable, I can still write in web forms. This means I can now do virtually all my routine work on a tablet computer, not just most of it. There are even plausible bibliography managers which I can hook into desktop tools like Mendeley.  I like being able to choose email clients too: currently I’m leaning towards K-9, which is a good open-source toolset, but the built-in Android mail client is OK and it would be better than the Apple Mail client were it not for the inability to search IMAP server messages. The widgets that let me show stuff that interests me most are really cool and I like the great control over general look and feel for most aspects of the machine. I like that I can install apps from anywhere I wish but that the Android Marketplace is sufficient for most needs (though I wish it would make it clearer whether an app is only for phones). There is a noticeably much smaller range of apps available and the quality of apps is, on average, much lower than those written for iOS. However, though there are some surprising gaps in the range here and there, there are plenty from which to choose. Some of the interface choices are good, once you are used to them – I slightly miss the single button control of the iPad but the Android navigation buttons are mostly pretty sensible and generally fairly consistent.

but…

I deeply dislike the corollary of the flexibility and choice of the Android approach. Compared with iOS, it feels clunky, awkward, ugly and unreliable. It is a long time since I felt the need for anti-malware tools. On my desktop Macs and Linux machines I do use such things but they are very light weight compared with those I use for Windows. Android makes me nervous again and I’ve installed some malware defences. That’s a small issue compared with the big one: the vast majority of Android apps are inconsistent, poorly integrated, fail to adjust to hardware properly and often fail. They frequently provide options for things that the device cannot provide (for the Transformer, this includes options for buzzer settings and things relating to phones and GPS). I’d judge stability to be around half that of iPad apps, on average. This is certainly true of tools that are duplicated on both platforms such as Pulse, Skype, Zinio and YouTube, and I am fed up with having to respond to unnecessary alerts: it feels a bit like Windoze again. The much vaunted Flash support is a *really* bad idea and is a great advertisment for Apple’s stance that it should be wiped from the face of the Earth. On the rare occasions it actually works for a moment roughly as you might expect it to work, it is slow, unstable, with features that occasionally succeed and often fail. Worse, it doesn’t quite know what to do about multitasking so you can wind up with a Flash movie not-quite playing in the background with no obvious way back to stop it. It is painfully inconsistent, even compared with early iPad apps. A particularly irritating lack of consistency is that some apps understand what it means to rotate the machine, others do not. Some behave differently with a keyboard attached, some do not. This is made all the more unfortunate because the eee-pad uses soft keys for the Android navigation that move (or sometimes do not move) with the screen orientation. Some apps like to provide a settings menu in the right place, others like to move it around. Some allow other buttons to be used when dealing with settings, others do not. There are few parts of the screen on which I have not found the settings menu. At least almost (but not quite) all leave the home and back buttons untouched.

I like the configurability of the machine for most things but sometimes it is tedious (K-9 mail is very flexible and configurable if you have an hour or so to spare in order to make it behave the way you wish) and some are extremely irritatingly unconfigurable: right now I can’t make the VPN work at all with AU’s PPTP servers and there is really nothing to set that would fix the problem: and yes, I have already tried a vast range of tools and utilities that claim to help. It *is* (of course) possible to root the device and thus add pretty much anything to it, including OpenVPN, but I think I’d generally prefer a Linux machine if I were intending to go to that much trouble.

Conclusions

My expectation of an Android tablet, admittedly based on my experience with iOS devices, is that it should be an appliance, not a full-blown computer. And that’s the problem: unlike Apple, Google find it very hard to let go of the computer underneath: they make it part of the way but don’t follow the path to its logical conclusion. I’m an unreconstructed geek and I’m used to file systems and like being able to browse the SD card and see the system logs, but even for me this kind of stuff is a throwback to a less enlightened age and it greatly reduces the usability of the machine. Likewise the ‘friendly’ pop-up messages that tell you what the system is doing, what kind of errors it is experiencing and so on.  It takes away from the experience because it emphasises the workings of the underlying machine, not the technologies that it is enabling which are what we really want and need. Why should I have to care about which bit of hardware my file is saved on or how the system has decided to record it? Why should I have to find a peculiarly placed ‘save’ button when I have just done something that clearly was meant to be recorded? Why do I need to know that a device has been added or removed? Just show me the thing, don’t tell me what I know I have just done! The computer is here to help me, I am not here to help the computer.

I’ve really really tried to love this device. I hate Apple as a company and I feel fairly positive towards Google and towards Asus, who have produced every one of my favourite non-Apple machines over the years. I much prefer the relatively open and evolutionary approach to the tightly controlled and design-led approach. I believe in freedom and diversity as essential elements of creative and positive growth. The eee-Pad Transformer is a very well designed and keenly priced bit of hardware that oozes quality and sturdiness even if it does look a bit like one of those stunningly ugly brown plastic Dolce and Gabbana bags beloved by bag counterfeiters. It has all the good things of an iPad, plus wonderful battery life, wonderful flexibility, better sound, better input and better output options. When the next version comes out in a couple of months with 3G and improved hardware, it will be hard to beat as a bit of hardware.

However, I am sad to say that Android is not ready and I fear it never will be as long as it tries to compete head-on with iOS while still trying to battle the likes of RIM and Nokia on home ground. It’s not just a question of evolution and refinement, though it is getting a little better and a little more slick with every point release. No, the problem is at the most fundamental design pattern level. The philosophy behind Android is too heavily oriented to the machine, not the human being. With some effort I could probably make the Android do pretty much anything the iPad can do, but why should I have to struggle when the iPad does it painlessly already? There are probably many really great apps that just work perfectly with the machine but why do I have to struggle to find them when every app, no matter how awful in concept and execution, just works on an iOS machine? And, if I really want some serious flexibility, it makes more sense to use a real operating system like Ubuntu, with a friendly interface on top of it. Android is fairly successfully trying to please everyone by being as many things as it can be, but there’s not much in it to delight anyone. It is much like Windows of yesteryear: it’s the next best thing, an adequate, cheap and flexible alternative to what we really want.  It could be more than just the Windows of mobile devices, the cheap family car version of the real thing, the system you use if you have a really good reason not to use an iPhone or iPad. However, it needs a clearer vision and a braver attitude to become something better: the true genius of iOS lies in what Apple were unafraid to take away, not in the features that they provided. Android has dipped a toe in the water but won’t leave the beach behind.

Call for papers:
SCA2011 - International Conference on Social Computing and its Applications,
Dec.12-14, 2011, Sydney, Australia. Website:
http://www.swinflow.org/confs/sca2011/ Key dates:
Submission Deadline: extended to August 15, 2011.
Submission site: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sca2011 Publication:
Proceedings will be published by IEEE CS Press. Special issues:
Distinguised papers will be selected for special issues in Journal of
Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce; Social Science Computer
Review; or Computers in Human Behavior. ===========
Introduction Social computing is concerned with the intersection of social behaviour and
computing systems, creating or recreating social conventions and social
contexts through the use of software and technology. Various social
computing applications such as blogs, email, instant messaging, social
networking (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), wikis, and social
bookmarking have been widely popularised where people interact socially via
computing space. Such applications have been profoundly impacting social
behaviour and life style of human beings while pushing the boundary of
computing technology simultaneously. While people can enjoy or even indulge
in the benefits such as freedom and convenience brought about by social
computing, various critical issues such as privacy protection, touch-screen
based HCI design, and modelling of social behaviour in computing space still
remain challenging. SCA (Social Computing and its Applications) is created to provide a prime
international forum for both researchers, industry practitioners and
environment experts to exchange the latest fundamental advances in the state
of the art and practice of Social Computing and broadly related areas. Scope and Topics Topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to: · Fundamentals of social computing
· Modelling of social behaviour
· Social network analysis and mining
· Computational models of social simulation
· Web 2.0 and semantic web
· Innovative HCI and touch-screen models
· Modelling of social conventions and social contexts
· Social cognition and social intelligence
· Social media analytics and intelligence
· Group formation and evolution
· Security, privacy, trust, risk in social contexts
· Social system design and architectures
· Information retrieval, data mining, artificial intelligence and
agent-based technology
· Group interaction, collaboration, representation and profiling
· Handheld/mobile social computing
· Service science and service oriented interaction design
· Cultural patterns and representation
· Emotional intelligence, opinion representation, influence process
· Mobile commerce, handheld commerce and e-markets
· Connected e-health in social networks
· Social policy and government management
· Social blog, micro-blog, public blog, internet forum
· Business social software systems
· Impact on peoples activities in complex and dynamic environments
· Collaborative filtering, mining and prediction
· Social computing applications and case studies Submission Guidelines Submissions must include an abstract, keywords, the e-mail address of the
corresponding author and should not exceed 8 pages for main conference,
including tables and figures in IEEE CS format. The template files for LATEX
or WORD can be downloaded here. All paper submissions must represent
original and unpublished work. Each submission will be peer reviewed by at
least three program committee members. Submission of a paper should be
regarded as an undertaking that, should the paper be accepted, at least one
of the authors will register for the conference and present the work. Submit
your paper(s) in PDF file at the SCA2011 submission site:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sca2011. Authors of accepted
papers, or at least one of them, are requested to register and present their
work at the conference, otherwise their papers may be removed from the
digital libraries of IEEE CS and EI after the conference. Publications Accepted and presented papers will be included into the IEEE Conference
Proceedings published by IEEE CS Press. Authors of accepted papers, or at
least one of them, are requested to register and present their work at the
conference, otherwise their papers may be removed from the digital libraries
of IEEE CS and EI after the conference. Distinguished papers presented at the conference, after further revision,
will be published in special issues of Journal of Organizational Computing
and Electronic Commerce, Social Science Computer Review, and Computers in
Human Behavior. General Chairs
Irwin King, The Chinese University of Hongkong, China
Igor Hawryszkiewycz, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia Program Chairs
Jinjun Chen, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
Shaun Lawson, University of Lincoln, UK
Nitin Agarwal, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, USA Program Vice-Chairs
Rajiv Khosla, Latrobe University, Australia
Tim Butcher, RMIT, Australia
Man-Kwan Shan, National Chengchi University, Taiwan Workshop Chairs
Nathalie Colineau, CSIRO-ICT Centre, Australia
Xiangfeng Luo, Shanghai University, China Steering Committee
V.S. Subrahmanian, University of Maryland, USA
Irwin King, The Chinese University of Hongkong, China
Igor Hawryszkiewycz, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
Jinjun Chen, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia (Chair)
Feiyue Wang, Chinese Academia of Science, China
Wesley Chu, University of California, USA
Shaun Lawson, University of Lincoln, UK
Jianhua Ma, Hosei University, Japan
John Yen, Pennsylvania State University, USA
Jiming Liu, Hong Kong Baptist University, China
Adrian David Cheok, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Craig Standing, Edith Cowan University, Australia
Laurence T. Yang, St Francis Xavier University, Canada (Chair) Local and Finance Chairs
Chang Liu, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia Conference Secretary and Web Chair
Xuyun Zhang, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia 

Depending on your point of view, the results of the research reported on here may be a cause for great concern or for celebration. Most notable among the findings is that, in the Internet age, we tend to remember how to find facts that may be useful rather than the facts themselves.  I suspect that some might see this as an issue negatively affecting our intellects, precisely as Socrates bemoaned the effects of writing on our ability to think. They would be right, to a point. Personally, however, I think this is a good thing, because it lets us better concentrate on how to use and link those facts.  It is a continuation of a process that began with the invention of signs, language, painting and (especially) writing, and that has given us the ability to gain a far richer and more useful view of the world, offloading and distributing our cognitive processes to create scaffolding for ever more powerful and complex ways of understanding. This research does not suggest a great difference in kind. However, it does starkly show that we shape our tools and that our tools shape us, deeply and significantly. 

It notably affirms George Siemens’s theory of Connectivism. This is good supporting evidence, if more were needed, that we are offloading our cognition into non-human entities, in a way that is significantly different from simple transactive memory. Whether or not it is a good thing, it suggests that the skills that we are developing relate to our ability to traverse human and non-human networks, so any theory of learning should consider us as being part of a broader web of knowledge.

Address of the bookmark: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/07/study-why-bother-to-remember-when-you-can-just-use-google.ars

Steve Wheeler on good form discussing whether there are (or should be) a different term for adult learning than for child learning. He thinks not and I agree with him up to a point. Many differences between adult and child learning relate to an increase in context (greater focus) and connection (greater ability to synthesise other knowledge) combined with greater power to control one’s own destiny. Adults tend towards greater self-direction, greater motivation leading from choosing their own directions, and can deal with more complex and connected knowledge. It’s not a difference in kind, but in proportion. But more is different in a complex system and different is different in any system. The stuff and process that goes into chocolate brownies is not so very different from the stuff and process that goes into rock buns, but it’s helpful to have different words to describe them when you are in the bakery. Yes, it’s all cake, but it’s not all the same cake.

Address of the bookmark: http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2011/07/learning-is-learning.html

Social Times reports a fairly remarkable set of figures, given the range of phones and tablets that are available. The iPad alone accounts for 1% of global Web traffic. That’s a hell of a lot of traffic for one line of computers in a market where there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of lines of computers (including desktops, notebooks, netbooks, tablets, smartphones, slightly-dumb phones, web-enabled clocks, refrigerators, cars, picture frames and chopping boards).

This is not great. I am currently a user of a great many Apple products because they make excellent machines at very good prices, but it should never be forgotten that Apple is a company that makes other former dominant computer companies like Microsoft and IBM seem, by comparison, like well-meaning bumbling saints. Apple are and have always been dedicated to capturing and locking in their users in every way they could think of. My stock response to complaints about Microsoft’s abuse of its dominance on personal computers through the 90s and early 2000s was ‘at least it’s not Apple’. But, increasingly, it looks like now it is. Ah well. At least it’s not Facebook…

Address of the bookmark: http://socialtimes.com/ios-iphoneipad-u-s-mobile-browsing-marketshare-60-7_b69156

An elderly but still relevant and very perceptive short piece, pre the rise of Facebook, on why social networks don’t always succeed. The reasons the article gives are:

1. privacy – or the lack of it
2. no real reward or penalty system – what’s the point of sharing, where’s the value?
3. not granular enough – we don’t have binary relationships – they have a context and vary according to what our current context might be (e.g. a workmate who is also a friend)
4. not integrated with other apps – predates Chris Anderson’s distinction of social networks as destination or feature and speaks to the importance of mashability
5. walled gardens – not connected, isolated pools

I like these a lot, and they reflect a number of the issues I and many others have been writing about since and that strongly underpin Athabasca Landing, this site – not bad for 2006. But the interesting thing here is that Facebook then happened, largely by concentrating on the single second aspect of value and not just ignoring the other four issues but actually riding rough-shod over them and squashing them into the ground. Which is of course why I hate Facebook, because these principles are sound, usable and relate to human, not multi-billion-dollar company needs and interests. However, it shows that you can probably do away with a lot of ‘necessary’ things if you do one thing very well and, equally, that there are quite a few necessary things that are not mentioned here.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.tnl.net/blog/2006/06/15/5-reasons-why-social-networks-fail/

An article in the Guardian from Cory Doctorow, pointing out the (possibly) obvious fact that networks are a necessary but far from sufficient cause of social change. Facebook, Twitter, et al do not cause revolutions like those seen recently in the middle east, but they certainly help to spread the word around.

A good antidote to over-enthusiastic posts that suggest social networks will change the world – e.g. this or this. People change the world, not social networks. Social networks make it easier for more people to connect, communicate and share in a more egalitarian way than ever before, but other forces and other (hierarchical and centralised) media still matter.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/16/networks-fame-revolutions?INTCMP=SRCH

Thanks Gregg for pointing me back at this one – a great paper on the importance of structural holes in networks. This is a formal representation of principles I and others have explored relating to parcellation in social spaces, and the need for (small) bridges and isthmuses to connect those parcellated spaces. Further proof and rationale from a different angle that (as is often so) Darwin was right about this.

It makes me wonder whether the principles the authors look at might be extended somewhat to consider temporal flux in more detail: the reason Darwin found this kind of hole-filled network interesting was that evolution happens more rapidly and branches sooner in small, parcellated spaces (like, famously, the Galapagos Islands). However, he noted that, very rarely and occasionally, these spaces need to connect with others in order for adaptations to flow into the broader ecology or, more often than not, be swamped by them. But maybe not entirely swamped: an interesting article in New Scientist recently suggests that early homo-sapiens coming out of Africa bred occasionally with existing hominids in Europe and Asia and, though only a small percentage of Neanderthal and Denisovan genes persist in modern populations, they definitely had an important impact, especially on immunity to disease. Lots of good lessons on social environment design from this.

Address of the bookmark: http://onemvweb.com/sources/sources/ties_bind_socialnetwork_principles.pdf

This is fascinating, not only in providing a bit of information about the resilience of Wikipedia pages to vandalism but also in graphically illustrating the flow to the adjacent possible, ever-growing and branching, that makes the system not just a repository of knowledge but a means through which it grows.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/projects/history_flow/results.htm

Interesting report on an article suggesting that the tragedy of the commons may be avoidable more easily at smaller scales. Obvious but interesting, this suggests to me that the principle of parcellation that helps drive differentiation in evolution has some ubiquitous underpinnings – it works in much the same way whether you consider competition or cooperation.

Address of the bookmark: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/06/group-dynamics-key-to-avoiding-tragedy-of-the-commons.ars?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+%28Ars+Technica+-+Featured+Content%29