06 10th, 2010
Product Reviewed: Tawkon (www.tawkon.com) version 1.0.1 tested on a BlackBerry 9700 (Onyx).
The upshot: While documentation and online help for purchasing and troubleshooting are still sketchy, Tawkon is a remarkable application, and comes as close as I’ve ever seen to achieving the Holy Grail of “Set It and Forget It” as any application out there. Tawkon should be considered a vital utility for every mobile phone.
Tawkon describes itself as “a mobile phone application that gives users information and tools to avoid mobile phone radiation as much as possible, with minimal disruption to normal phone usage.”
Go back and read that sentence again. There are an awful lot of promises packed into that claim:
[1] a software application for your mobile phone (not a hardware measuring gadget); [2] delivery of information about your phone’s radiation emissions from its various radios; [3] tools to help you minimize exposure to cell radiation; and [4] a usable interface that lets you get on with your calls.
Does Tawkon deliver?
[Disclaimer: After some initial difficulties purchasing and activating the application, Tawkon provided me with the application and asked me to test and review it.]
I’ve been using Tawkon for a week on a BlackBerry 9700 (Onyx). Navigating to the Tawkon website [http://www.tawkon.com/m] on my phone’s web browser, I clicked the big green PayPal button. This took a leap of faith, actually, since no price was noted (Tawkon costs $9.99) and I associate big buttons like that with “one-click” purchases. I clicked anyway. Much to my surprise, I was taken to BlackBerry’s AppWorld and the message “This application is not available on your device or for your carrier.” Hm.
I wasn’t sure what to do, so I just closed the browser and gave up.
Within hours, and much to my surprise, I received a classy email from Tawkon, thanking me for my interest and asking about my experience downloading and using the application. This was a first for me, and tipped me off to the fact that the Tawkon team is serious — really serious — about getting the user experience absolutely right, every step of the way.
Who could resist a letter starting, “As a young start up, we’re eager for constructive feedback…”? I wrote back: “Today I finally got my AT&T Blackberry 9700 working with my Orange (Israel) SIM. Tried to download Tawkon, and got a message that it’s not compatible with my phone or my operator. Don’t know which. So, I’m disappointed.”
Four hours later, I got a personal email reply from a real person — one of the company’s founders. After some troubleshooting, he explained that the problem was that I had chosen to purchase via PayPal, which meant purchasing through BlackBerry’s App World store, which is not supported in Israel (who knew?). Instead, I needed to click the other green button, and opt to pay using my credit card via the Mobihand store. Purchasing via Mobihand was indeed quick and easy.
Obviously, this gateway to purchase is confusing and difficult to use, and Tawkon will have to make sure that customers see only relevant buying options, or they will lose many bewildered customers along the way…
…which would be a pity. Because once the aches and pains of getting to the right web page to purchase Tawkon were over, and once the application was installed (important — and undocumented — note: you need to restart your BlackBerry after installation in order for Tawkon to launch properly! You can tell if it’s working by checking for the Tawkon mini-icon in the top margin of the BlackBerry home screen), everything went as smooth as silk.Tawkon has done this application right. They have obviously put a lot of thought into making the application function seamlessly, so much so that it’s hard to believe this is just a first release. Once they cross a few T’s and dot a few I’s, you’ll never guess this is a start-up. Tawkon feels like a mature mobile app from an experienced first-tier company.
I launched Tawkon from the Downloads folder on my BlackBerry, and was taken directly to a Tawkon Prediction screen that scanned my system and reassured me that my phone’s radiation levels were low. The Real-Time Radiation Indication Bar is liquid mercury; it’s so sensuous and fluid you’ll want to walk around mapping your radiation environment just for the pleasure of making the colors flow.
Keeping that screen open, I placed a call from my cell phone to my landline and took a tour of my home. (When you’re not on a call, Tawkon scans using a “Prediction Mode”. When you’re on a call, Tawkon goes into “Call Monitoring Mode”.) The results? My home and office are in good shape, although I won’t be making any calls from the bathroom. It’s just as well.
In fact, you don’t even have to open the Tawkon application to see your phone’s emission status. That little mini-icon on the home screen changes color from green to yellow to red to cue you in, say, before you even make a phone call.
Where Tawkon really shines is when you’re on the move. Most of the time, I never even noticed that Tawkon was there, running automatically in the background. But when I answered a call sitting in a mall café — bzzz. I walked into an elevator while deep in discussion — bzzz. My phone vibrated and a message appeared on the screen, an alert from Tawkon that my phone was emitting high levels of radiation. I switched to a bluetooth headset or the built-in speakerphone and was pleased to see that Tawkon registered the change and let me know that it was helping. Tawkon also records the emission patterns during calls, letting you go back to review your call history to see how much you were exposed to — or avoided exposure to.
How the heck does Tawkon work? Tawkon says it monitors and analyzes your mobile phone radiation as a function of three key parameters: your phone’s specific absorption rate (SAR) – different for each phone model; environmental conditions – rural versus urban area, mobility, and distance from a cellular base station, terrain, etc.; and personal phone usage – the way the user holds the phone, distance from the user’s head or body, etc.
How reliable is Tawkon’s feedback? I’ll have to leave it to someone with a lab equipped to independently check Tawkon’s results against their own measurements. (Tawkon claims to have tested its results in collaboration with In4Tel, a strategic partner.) What I can say is that the feedback makes sense. Tawkon buzzed me in places where my phone would be expected to boost its power to get a signal — in elevators, enclosed stairwells and basements.
What is the impact on battery life? I don’t know how to gauge that, but I would expect it to be minimal, since Tawkon is a software solution. I spent a day at a convention and used my BlackBerry heavily all day for email, some long calls, Bluetooth radio on (WiFi was off), taking pictures of slides and constant Twittering during panels and sessions, and still had plenty of battery life left at the end of the day even though Tawkon was running in the background.
How does Tawkon know what it knows? Beats me, but I feel a lot better with Tawkon installed. You can read up on WHO’s most recent findings regarding cell phone emission risks here. I set out to purchase Tawkon because I wanted to feel some sense of control over my mobile risk:reward ratio.
The upshot: While documentation and online help for purchasing and troubleshooting are still sketchy, Tawkon is a remarkable application, and comes as close as I’ve ever seen to achieving the Holy Grail of “Set It and Forget It” as any application out there. With the risks of cell phone emissions still unclear, Tawkon should be considered a vital utility for every mobile phone.
Tawkon is a keeper. It’s earned a home on my phone.
PROS:
- “Set it and forget it” convenience
- Gorgeous interface
- Responsive, helpful customer service straight from the development team.
- Provides valuable information about what’s going on in your hand and near your head.
CONS:
- Instructions are not part of the application (you can find information in videos posted at Tawkon.com and on YouTube here and here, but it’s up to you to find them).
- Purchasing process become confusing if you’re outside the BlackBerry App World zone. (I guess it’s an “App Region”, not an “App World”, yet.)
I was using Wite-Out® today for the first time in years. As I painted out type, I thought for a moment what it might have been like to be a Wite-Out product manager 10 years ago. Imagine asking the user experience question: What bothers Wite-Out users about Wite-Out? What can we improve? The immediate replies that came to mind:
- Waiting for the Wite-Out to dry
- Clumpy application of the correction fluid after the first use; the fluid dries and sticks to the brush and the neck of the bottle
- Having to paint over the same words two or three times because they show through even after the first application
- The smell (some people like it, some hate it)
What jumps out here is that improvement in any one of the first three areas will have a negative impact on one or two of the others. If Wite-Out dried faster, it would dry (and clump up) on the bottle and brush applicator faster. If it clumped less, it would take more time to dry; it would also be a thinner fluid that would be less opaque once the liquid evaporated.It’s a no-win scenario, which is probably why there were no major changes in Wite-Out technology over the first 20 years of my life: the product designers had found the best balance — or perhaps the least-bad compromise — between drying quickly and maintaining wetness (smoothness), and were sticking to it. But it must have been frustrating if you were trying to make a better product and increase market share.I popped over to Bic’s Wite-Out site to have a look. Guess what? As of 1994, there are four different formulations of fluid Wite-Out: Quick Dry, Super Smooth, Extra Coverage and Water Base (low odor). Hm.I suppose a cynic might say that there are four different packages for the same product, and the formulation label just panders to the public’s varying degrees of Wite-Out insecurity. In fact, the proliferation of Wite-Out recipes reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell’s classic statement from Howard Moskowitz that “There is no perfect spaghetti sauce. There are only perfect spaghetti sauces.” In The Ketchup Conundrum, Gladwell expresses it thus:
The answer appeared almost immediately: a specific recipe that, according to Moskowitz’s data, produced a score of 78 from the people in Segment 1. But that same formulation didn’t do nearly as well with those in Segment 2 and Segment 3. They scored it 67 and 57, respectively. Moskowitz started again, this time asking the computer to optimize for Segment 2. This time the ratings came in at 82, but now Segment 1 had fallen ten points, to 68. “See what happens?” he said. ”If I make one group happier, I piss off another group. We did this for coffee with General Foods, and we found that if you create only one product the best you can get across all the segments is a 60—if you’re lucky. That’s if you were to treat everybody as one big happy family. But if I do the sensory segmentation, I can get 70, 71, 72. Is that big? Ahhh. It’s a very big difference. In coffee, a 71 is something you’ll die for.”
I’m guessing that a similar process went on at Bic: if you can’t actually improve a product’s features without making some other problem even more annoying, then instead of finding a compromise balance (as was done historically), optimize for each problem separately. Voila! Four kinds of Wite-Out.Of course, you can then go ask Barry Schwartz
It’s worth watching this 1984 presentation by Steve Jobs. Aside from the enjoyment of seeing anyone that deeply proud of his work and excited to watch the audience’s reaction to it, there is the real drama there.
Everything that makes Steve’s keynotes so incredibly good today was already in place 25 years ago: the stunning moves into far-advanced technological territory; the purity and simplicity of the product design; the passion for powerful application controls, direct object manipulation and delightful user experience… even today, this video is exciting and awe-inspiring. Not to mention historic.
Steve Jobs Demos Apple Macintosh, 1984
[Thanks to @CharlieKalech for the tip.]
Here’s something really interesting: Mike Volpe’s word clouds allow you to get a visual sense of the content of President Bush and President Obama’s inaugural speeches. Seen side-by-side, you get a feel for how they are similar — and different. (The size of the words is determined by the number of times it was used; larger words were used more frequently.)
I’m not going to share my personal interpretations, or my reactions to the most recent inaugural address. But I confess to being fascinated by the ideas it triggered, and these clouds add another thoughtful aspect to that contemplation.
The other day, I posted this tweet to Twitter:
“Harry Potter’s magic wand: the ultimate converged mobile device.”
Within five minutes, I was being followed by “Ron Weasley”. Somehow, I think he’s going to be disappointed…
[You can follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/power2b]
My computer is nearing the end of it’s professional career (it’s almost four years old), and about ready to head into its golden years of volunteer service to advantaged children.
It has given me a good opportunity to think about applications, functionality, and priority: Which applications do I use/need every hour? Which every week? Which every month? Which less often?
The Big Four
The every-hour ones come to mind quickly: Email (Mail), Contacts (Address Book), Web browser (Firefox), and Calendar (iCal). Rarely does a quarter of an hour go by without my using all of those applications. My “Big Four”.
Every day? PDF viewer (Preview), iTunes, To-Do list tracker (Things), Basic word processor (TextEdit), iSync. Most of these I use several times a day, but they’re not in constant use in the way that the Big Four are.
Every week? Page layout (Pages), PDF distiller/editor (Acrobat), Photo managment (iPhoto), Presentation application (Keynote), Photo manipulation (Photoshop), RSS reader (NetNewsWire), OmniOutliner (simpler for tracking many data sets than Numbers or Excel), MicroSoft Office suite: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, for reading files created by other people.
Monthly or less: iMovie and iDVD, QuarkXPress (down in the ranking since its heyday as my every-minute-core-of-the-workday application), Illustrator, Numbers / Excel, Skype.
There are “luxury” applications, of course, that I use frequently, but can get along without, like Twitterific and Calculator.
But with my computer having difficulty coping with the activities of daily life (and thus qualifying to collect on its Long Term Care Insurance), I’m reminded that the most critical functions aren’t even used hourly: they’re used every minute, or even every second.
Functions like the keyboard (working, and working as expected), mouse, real-time operating functions that let applications use resources in the most efficient priority order, display activity (including the ability to show presentations on a second screen), on/off, power management (and battery charge), trackpad and trackpad button reliability (the latter not an issue for new MacBook users — whether you like it or not), internal clock accuracy, a functioning internet connection (OK, that’s not necessarily part of the computer).
If any of these aren’t working, go see how impossible it is to manage for an hour, let alone a week.
But this isn’t a gripe post. I want to dig a little deeper; I want to look and see why the above is actually a product trend driver.
Several years ago, a team at Nokia started studying “mobility” in general, and “what people take with them when they leave the house” in particular. What they found? Three things that people don’t leave the house without: keys, money, cell phone. There’s a lot to learn from this about human needs, but for now, I’d just note that there’s been some nice progress in incorporating the money (and less so, the keys) right into the mobile phone. That’s a nice trend, but at it’s core “unnecessary”, because people will carry those three items even if they represent three discrete packing hassles.
It gets more interesting when you start looking at “luxury” mobile technologies. If you manufacture a mobile product (eg., camera), you’d darn well better make it integrate-able with a cell phone, or it will be(come) a niche product.
If You’re In, You’re In. If You’re Out, You’re Out.
You have only to look at the camera industry to prove the point: from film to digital to camera phone, just think of how our expectations about picture taking have changed in the last decade: we accept lower quality photos in exchange for the potential to snap a memory at any moment. “The best camera is the one you have with you” — that means the camera in your cell phone. The same goes for video recorders; the same goes for watches; the same goes for GPS devices, PDAs, handheld gaming computers, portable DVD players, even iPods sorry, personal music players.
Today, the Blackberry isn’t just the hallmark of high-flying businessmen (well, in countries like Israel, where BB is still only available under corporate contract). Blackberry Pearl, Palm Centro, Apple iPhone, Nokia E62, T-Mobile Sidekick… these have brought smartphones to the masses, and the masses want them badly.
Why? Look back at my Big Four applications: Email, Web browsing, Contacts, Calendars… those are served adequately by a good smartphone, such as Nokia E71, Blackberry series, Palm or iPhone, although each of these has strengths and weaknesses in these applications. Voila! I don’t need to carry a laptop if I leave the office for a couple of hours.
The smartphone represents the integration of the Big Four application needs right into your mobile phone, alongside your camera, your wallet, and your watch. You’re going to take that phone along with you in any case, right? Getting those applications integrated into the mobile phone makes them necessities — everything else is just a niche product.
Which brings us to…
* * *
The Birth-Pangs of the Netbook Computer
What about the applications that I can’t get through the day without? PDF reader, iTunes, To-Do list tracker, word processor, iSync. PDF reader? Lousy for mobile. iTunes? Good if you’ve got an iPhone; not worth mentioning otherwise. To-Do lists? Depends on the phone you have, and the tracking software you choose. Word processor? Nada nada nada. iSync, OK.
Which means that if I go out for the day, I do need to take my computer, otherwise I’ll need to defer a lot of activity until I get back (blog posting, reading attachments, significant letter writing, major document creation, etc). Laptop computers are mobile. They’re also heavy. Either I’m shlepping a heavy laptop (after an hour’s hike through Frankfurt airport, or six hours walking a convention floor, you’ll see what I mean), or accumulating a backlog of tasks. Ouch.
Ouch!
This “Ouch” is what drives the growth of the new UMPC (ultra-mobile personal computer, or “netbook”) computer market. It’s a market category that seems obvious: make a laptop that’s light enough to really carry around, and that can get you through all your normal daily application needs, and most of your weekly application requirements. It meets a true need, so long as the real fundamentals (reliability, trackpad, etc.) are well-met.
Why did the netbook market take so long to gain traction, and why is it finally moving now?
Netbooks aren’t in the top-three items people won’t leave their homes without. So while they do meet a need, they don’t meet a Need, if you catch my drift.
For a netbook computer to make sense to me as a consumer, it needs to fulfill more needs than my smartphone, and offer some kind of major advantage over a laptop. Why? Because I’ve already got a phone of some sort (and won’t give that up), and I’ve already got a computer of some sort (which may as well be a laptop).
The netbook can’t replace my cell phone in any case; the best it can hope to do is replace my laptop (unlikely, unless I prefer a desktop computer as my main computer) in situations where I simply cannot manage on a smartphone alone. In other words, a netbook is a luxury.
So, what has changed, then? Why has this market now gained traction? How has the netbook moved itself from luxury to necessity?
Their Heads in the Clouds
Essentially, it boils down to the critical “back-office” functions: hardware, software, OS, broadband mobile data connections, and cloud-computing competence (to keep the applications and data available, usable, secure and in sync). Of those functions, the latter two are not under the control of the computer manufacturers, who have had to wait for them to catch up.
That “wait for them to catch up” vulnerability has, to some extent, been responsible for the move of mobile phone manufacturers into the internet content space (Nokia with Ovi, Apple with MobileMe, RIM with Blackberry Internet Service for individuals). You can focus on their sales of content, but that represents the raindrops — the real focus should be on their ownership of the Cloud. When you own the Cloud, you don’t have to wait for someone else to build it in order to provide the service.
The mobile phone manufacturers “got it” — the computer manufacturers didn’t (well, with the exception of Apple, which is probably why they became mobile phone manufacturers in addition to creating a cloud). So the netbook manufacturers sat and languished for years, trying (mostly futilely) to bundle cellular broadband cards into their machines, which just didn’t go far enough.
Today, though, the Cloud has grown. It has developed so drastically as to be competent to take over synchronization of personal computing functions that represent daily, weekly and monthly needs (email, documents, calendars, photos on Picassa and Flickr, etc.). While it’s still true that “cloud computing” exacts a toll in lag time while data is accessed, that inconvenience is bearable for applications that aren’t accessed on a constant basis. Google in particular is building the back-end infrastructure that allows the netbooks to succeed on a functional level.
With the support of the Cloud, a netbook can handle almost every personal computing need — at half the price of a laptop computer. It is the that Cloud takes the computing and storage burden off the mobile devices, allowing them to provide the necessary applications without actually providing them.
The ultimate set-up, of course, is a transparent set of perfectly synced devices: phone, ultra-mobile, and desktop sizes, from which any documents and data sets can be retrieved. Whether those devices are actually one core device with a number of corporeal states (a la Modu), or cloud-computing-served units (iMac + MacBook Air + iPhone) is a question of technology and security.
(Technology = Can the synchronization be maintained for discrete devices? vs. Can the cloud have little enough downtime and great enough bandwidth to be able to serve up the data on demand? Security = Distribution of multiple hardware units containing sensitive data? — think of UK government security issues, with computers and data files left on public transport — vs. Can the cloud be secure enough to entrust with all sensitive data?).
We anxiously await mobile utopia.
Simply pop in the battery, push the lever on the side and well, that’s the beauty of it… you already know how to use this little guy. There’s also a helpful LED on the front to indicate the progress of the charge for the hopelessly impatient. “Toasting” your lithium-ion batteries is, at first glance, a little weird, right?
[via Engadget]
Yeah, designing a charger to look like a toaster is pretty kitschy. But it sure got me thinking… having a clear, visual and visible indicator of battery charge would be a huge improvement over my current (sorry) situation.
On the one hand, I keep reading urgent articles claiming that 30% of cell phone energy use is actually wasted electricity spent on chargers left in the sockets (or plugged in to already-charged phones). On the other hand, of my many phones, only one keeps a message on the display to tell me “Battery full: please remove charger” (another one keeps a single chirp as the “battery full” alert). Not that it helps a lot when the phone has been left to charge overnight, but still.
I wouldn’t want to remove the battery from my phone every day or two for charging (especially since that would turn the phone off — I don’t keep spare batteries much). But I would love to have a smart charger that turns itself off once the device battery is full. (If it would turn itself back on when the device got back down to, say, 50%, all the better.)
How about it? Anyone want to have a stab at making/marketing it?
A funny translation problem in the Hebrew localized OS [of the Nokia E71] showed up before I switched the phone over to English, which translates as:
“Keypad is locked. Press Unlock and then the function key to unlock.”
Of course, the softkey for “Unlock” wasn’t labeled “Unlock”, it was labeled “Open”. Hm.
Yeas:
- Keyboard better than expected
- Thin
- Has a hole for wrist strap (finally!)
- E-mail setup was fairly easy
- WiFi
- GPS (yay!)
- Great default settings for profiles, home screen application shortcuts
- Overall excellent use of the home screen (idle)
- Very nice mechanism for releasing the back battery cover (squeeze and lift)
- 3.2 MP camera
- Pre-loaded bar-code reader, which looks cool, but I can’t figure out how it works.
Nays:
- Keyboard arrangement a bit odd
- I know it’s really small for a QWERTY keyboard (that’s why I got it), but the E65 was a more comfortable size
- Slow, slow download of e-mail (even just the headers)
- Not yet synced with my Mac PowerBook G4 (which might be a problem with my iSync)
- GPS use costs extra monthly to activate (oh, well…)
- A bit slippery, despite the dot design on the back
- My outgoing test e-mail hasn’t gone out, even though mail is getting in
- The system doesn’t remember the WAP access key for my home wireless network (as was true with my E65), which means I have to manually enter it every time I take the phone online. This is a royal pain in the neck.
- Shiny metal back is not lovely, and attracts fingerprints
- S60 not always behaving as expected, including some quirky softkey labels in the web browser (Messaging?!)
- I haven’t found out how to turn off the feature that automatically locks the keypad after a few minutes of non-use. It’s OK, but I’d like to have control over that.
