PC World put out an article talking about the new Motorola Android phone touting a 2.4 GHZ processor. That is more than double the speed of any smart phone on the market to date. This opens the door for many possibilities of creating programs that were impossible to build up to the standard of a regular PC. Take for instance Microsoft Office. Sure there are office programs on iPhone and Android but really none of them even remotely compare to the capabilities of the full fledged Microsoft Office suite. Current smart phones just don’t have the multithreading capabilities or the speed needed to really accomplish this and still have a good user experience. Most of these applications have to be ‘dumbed down’ for it to be able to run on a smart phone. With these new found power there are many more possibilities for creating more powerful rich applications

Yay, Utopia is here!

Well, not really. One of the things that is still in its infancy is human interaction. Sure we’ve come a very long way with our touch capabilities and how we interact with interfaces, but there are a couple limitations. Number one is size. If you want a small pocket size device, as of right now you get a small pocket size screen. We don’t have the futuristic holographic imaging bursting forth from the tiny little device yet. Right now, if the device is small, the screen is small. There’s a lot that can be viewed small and a lot that may not be as desirable to be viewed as small. Number two would be that human interaction isn’t always the same with touch screens. I have friends who have smart devices and they have ‘mastered’ the touch screen and type very fluently, however, not as fast as on a regular old keyboard. It amazes me that after decades of computer evolution the one thing that hasn’t changed is the basic qwerty keyboard. It’s been around since before electric typewriters. Sure you may make them more ergonomic etc, but the foundation of the basic qwerty keyboard remains the same to this day as it always has and it doesn’t look like it’s going to go away anytime soon. So to be productive on these devices as we’ve been on desktops or laptops we will need to continue to innovate on the human interaction aspect.

I’ve recently worked on an application that required a mobile (iphone/Android) to quickly search through data and do it in such a way that it fits the dimensions of the iPhone/Android Phone. One of the great things about Android and iPhone is the fact that both operating systems use safari webkit as their web browser. It is a slimmed down version however it has a lot of the same features as the full blown safari web browser. That being the case, building a web application for the iPhone is also building a web app for the Android phone too. iPhone and Android, however, suffer from the same ailment… Dimensions. Yes it’s true you can browse the web and see websites and it looks almost exactly the same as it does on your desktop PC (minus things like flash), but the problem you run into is that to see the entire website, the browser must shrink the webpage to the point at which you can no longer read the text until you zoom in. Then the content goes off in all directions off the viewable area of the screen and you must drag your screen in each direction to view the content. Fine for a regular website. Not so fine for an application in which you must interact with the content. Most native applications for the iPhone have a prescribed look and feel about them that does a great job making it easy to interact with the area of the screen that you have to work with on the iPhone. A great way of making an iPhone web app is to mimic that same look and feel in a web browser. So how do we do this?

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Phone companies have been kicking around wireless handsets for years. Everyone claiming that the future was wireless handset devices. Soon we won’t need our laptops anymore. We’ll have all the computing power, media and communication we need all in the palm of our hands. There are alot of technical challenges though that havn’t been overcome quite yet. Thus, no large group has bought into one particular mobile device. Not however, until the iPhone.

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This is a video demonstration of how static photographs can enhance lower quality video to enhance lighting, resolution, camera shake and much more. It’s an amazing example of where video technology is headed. You can find out more about the technology and even download the source code here.

As exciting as this technology is, I think it does bring a few things to mind. For one, YouTube in the future will not be dependable. The cameras can and will ‘lie’. The line between the real and the fake is being increasingly blurred. Using video surveillance will require knowing the source of the video and ensuring that the video hasn’t been tampered with. We are living in a media driven world; a world in which it is increasingly easy to manipulate media. ‘Seeing is believing’ is becoming less and less prudent. There are alot of pros and cons from any new technology and the greatest defense against the ‘cons’ is understanding the technology and what it is capable of.