Now when I say “best phone” I am actually talking about one of two types of phones – either an iPhone or an android phone. Dumb phones are for high school kids, and no one actually buys a blackberry( their company gives them one),  Whatever phone runs windows is going to suck, and you probably don’t know what Symbian is . If you are on a network that has the iPhone, then get the iPhone. It’s not going to be exclusive to AT&T forever and you can bet you’ll see me standing in line for one when it comes out on Verizon. On the other networks there is probably at least good android phone. Currently on Sprint it’s the EVO 4G, on T-Mobile it’s the Samsung Galaxy S, and on Verizon you have the Droid X and Incredible. Also don’t worry about the actual price of the phone when comparing them. The price of the contract, with data plan, is way more than a hundred dollar difference- get the better one.

Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” was just released and this marks the one and a half year anniversary of my mom running Ubuntu on her home computer. I know what you are thinking, wow, she must be very tech savvy. Actually it’s the exact opposite. My mom doesn’t know the difference between Microsoft Word and Microsoft Windows, and believe it or not that’s why Ubuntu is such a great OS for her.

Ubuntu and the iPad share some common ideas. They are simple, they come with the essential programs to get stuff done right out of the box, and you don’t have to worry about viruses or extra junk that slow things down. What’s great about Ubuntu is that it’s free, you don’t need to buy new hardware for it, and it has some neat things that OS X and Windows don’t have. For example, there is an option for any window to always float on top, so that it can’t be covered by another window. This means a video, or chat window will always be seen and you can “work” on something else at the same time.

There are some caveats to using Linux though. Not everything works perfectly on it. Flash sucks on Linux. You know how bad flash sucks on OS X? well it’s much worse on Linux. Hulu works, but any embedded video will just freeze the browser. Want to use tweetdeck, which is built on adobe air, well that is going to be very slow as well. Want to watch Netflix instant streaming? it’s not supported, and there is no work around that I have found.

Lucid Lynx solves one of the problems I mentioned before. Ubuntu is building into the OS everything you need to be up and running from the install. In this version Twitter and Facebook is built right into the OS with a program called Gwibber-

The panel that shows chat and broadcast accounts. Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr are integrated.

With every release Ubuntu is becoming more usable without having to go into another operating system for home use. For Mother’s Day instead of just taking her out to dinner and buying her flowers, give her another gift and install Lucid Lynx on her computer. She’ll love it.

Wednesday I see this tweet from Ramit Sethi, who runs one of my favorite blogs http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/ and I absolutely had to see if I could meet up with him. Know Ramit from his blog I sent him the following email-

Subject line: Like free food? Let me take you out to lunch!

Hi Ramit,

I read your book, volunteered to be a beta tester for your iPhone app, and tell my friends about your blog all the time. I saw on your twitter that you are in NYC, and I am a big fan of yours, so I want to take you out to lunch. What’s the catch? Well you wrote this post- http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2008/10/12/the-best-20-youll-ever-spend/ So of course I am going to pick your brain.

Pick a time and a place and lunch is on me. Even dinner, brunch, or a late night snack at 2:30 in the morning!

Thanks in advance,

Ilya Rivkin

He actually responded to me the next day saying –

Can you meet today at 12pm in union sq? In 30 min? Sorry for late notice but it’s only time I have

Sent from my iPhone

Luckily for me, I work within walking distance from Union Square. We already have two lessons learned even before I got to talk to him. First, you can reach out to someone and get a response. And second, someone in his position is just like a VC. Be ready to meet up within a half hour of an email or phone call. I walked over to union square and had some extra time so I bought his book at the Barnes and Nobles which was right there. It was the last one and the front cover had some minor defects. So I asked the cashier if I could get a discount and he gave me 20 percent off. Now Ramit loved that I did that. That’s what his site is all about.

Here is a breakdown of some of the advice that he gave me. He said that if I look at people that I admire,which happen to be him and Tim Ferris for example, I’ll see that they have a focus. Ramit focuses on personal finance, and Tim focuses on lifestyle design. He said I can’t be known for ten different things, I have to be either the iPhone guy, or the cycling guy. I can’t be the guy that does hardware engineering, and iPhone and business, and cycling and chess and etc.

So how do I get really good at something? He said to just start making things, offer my services to someone trusted(key word) for a discount or free. And to make something useful, not just cool and shiny because cool and shiny doesn’t mean anything in five years. Reading blogs is nice and all, but at the end of the day things have to get done! Stop thinking and start doing. Set goals. For example I’m going to reach out to 10 people each week and get one contract by the end of the month. Once you get really good at something you don’t have to worry about a job ever again.

The last topic we talked about was more controversial. I’m a fan of finding out cognitive biases and finding out how to tweak them, but it turns out I have one I might not have realized. My worry is that being an engineer, it is possible to turn into a commodity. Which would be very bad. I also told Ramit that the start-up scene in NYC is getting big. His response was that if I want to be in a start-up then I should move [back] to Silicon Valley because they have much more VCs and start-ups and that the mindset over there is completely different, where the engineer is elevated to a much higher social position( there it is cool to be an engineer). I’m not sure If I completely agree with that last part. I still think that NYC is going to be the place to be in a couple of years, but what he said definitely got me thinking.

Overall I thought having lunch with Ramit was awesome, and I plan to take what I learned from him and apply it to make awesomeness.

OK, the app store has over 130,000 apps and the retention rate of users is pretty bad. So what kind of app should go on the iPhone? I am going to separate apps into three categories – games, useful apps, and novelty.  There was a time when you could make a novelty app like iFart and hope to make some money.  Now the chances for that are very low. It is possible to have a successful game on the iPhone though. Games on the iPhone are different than on most platforms. They are made to be very simple and so that you can pick them up play for a few minutes and then the bus finally arrives. Games are fun, but I’m going to focus on useful apps this post.

To make a useful app, the app has to solve some sort of problem. Getting people to take money out of their pocket and into your bank account is not a problem! Some people think that once someone pays 99 cents for their app it doesn’t matter how many times the person uses it. I think that is wrong for many reasons and in the end you up making more money in the long term if people like and use your app. Also as an engineer you have an obligation to help people. Check out the talk from Mike lee for more about that.

If you want to make a useful app, you have to think of when someone is going to use it. People use their iPhones when they are not at home and either want to find out some information very quickly such as to find a restaurant near where they are, or to check the latest score in the baseball game since the restaurant they found doesn’t have a TV. Or they want to upload some information for people to see, such as tweeting to their friends- wow this baseball game is in the 19th inning. Basically most apps that are used have an existing web service that they connect to. The iPhone is a software platform and it is possible to have things specifically for the iPhone and nothing else, such as games, but when it comes things people use all the time, the iPhone becomes an extension of the internet. The apps that are used time and time again are ones that connect to your bank, the Weather Channel,  Facebook,  or the New York Times. The iPhone also has some cool hardware features that are useful for an app- specifically the GPS and the Camera. Twitter, Foursquare and Ustream take advantage of those things.

So if you want to make an iPhone app, and it’s not going to be a game or some novelty, think about why someone would open the app more than once, and make sure it has a web service that the iPhone can connect to. Oh, same thing applies for the android or any other would be smart phone.

That’s a comparison of touchscreens of various smart phones. It’s pretty obvious that the iPhone has the best touchscreen. The full results are at http://labs.moto.com/ and they say that

to get it right, gadget-makers have to assemble a variety of critical elements — screen hardware, software algorithms, sensor tuning, and user-interface design, to name but a few — and then refine each component of the stack to deliver the best touchscreen experience possible. It’s a complex and laborious process that requires extremely close collaboration between multidisciplinary teams, as well as a high-level vision for a quality end-user experience.

Here is an example of some specs that you would find on a website. This one is taken from engadget. The chart includes the Droid and the Nexus One. Both phones were in the touchscreen test above. According the to the chart, which one has the best screen?

Tech specs don’t say anything about quality. Look past amount of RAM when buying a computer, and horsepower when getting a car. The things that make something really good or awful are in the details, and that’s never found in the specs.

“Common Sense is the enemy of Sticky messages. When messages sound like common sense, they float gently in one ear and out the other. And why shouldn’t they? If I already intuitively “get” what you’re trying to tell me, why should I obsess about remembering it? The danger, of course, is that what SOUNDS like common sense often ISN’T…” Heath, Chip, and Dan Heath. Made to Stick. New York,NY: Random House, 2008. Print.

I could elaborate on this, but I think the quote speaks for itself. It’s from a great book by the way, Highly Recommended.

I check my emails in the morning on my Droid before I go to work. I got a DM from a friend of mine( who also should not have been caught with something like this) and there was a less conspicuous message- haha. This you???? and a shortened link. I clicked on the link and it sent me to twitter to login. Seeing how I hadn’t fully woken up yet, I “logged in” to the site. Mistake.

So how do you avoid this? well I say the only way to get a virus is to click on a link and download something, and then run it. If a message looks suspicious at all, don’t click on the link! That’s all it takes. Now,  there was almost no way that I was going to get a virus on my Droid so I said, why not?, and clicked the freaking link. Here is the most import line in my post-

THE DROID BROWSER DID NOT RECOGNIZE IT WAS A PHISHING SITE!!

Any desktop browser would not let you on the site and tell you it was a phishing site( well I dunno about IE6). In any case, the site has to be reported first. To find out if a site is for phishing look at the URL. On this one it was obvious that it wasn’t twitter, it was actually along the lines of login.twitter.kevanshome.com/login/?8erNv. Obvious. However the navigation bar on the mobile browser only showed the login.twitter part because the screen is smaller. Turns out your smartphone isn’t as safe as you thought.

So you gave your username and password to someone, what do you do now? Try to log in to the site. If you can, change the password immediately  and check the email address that the recovery password gets sent to.  If you can’t log in, that means the person changed the password. Call customer support.

Luckily in my case I was able to access my account and change the password. Even more lucky was that the message I was sending out was so blatantly from a hacked account it couldn’t have done any damage. Also Kudos to twitter, they have a great help page for this situation http://help.twitter.com/forums/10713/entries/31796-my-account-is-compromised-hacked and they also noticed my account was compromised and they reset my password automatically.

iPhone OS right now boasts over 140,000 apps in the store, and the strict review process makes Apple the gate keeper that only lets good quality apps get in. Android doesn’t come close to that number having about 1/10th of that number of apps. But it’s taking a different approach.

Check out the App store on the iPhone and search for “Google” you’ll find Google Earth and Google Mobile app. Now do the same in the Android Market. You’ll find, Google Goggles, Skymap, Voice, Translate, Gmail, Finance, Talk, Shopper, Earth, etc..

Google does not have a strict review process, so they are making sure there are going to be high quality apps in the market by writing their own.  Aside from games, most useful apps are tied into a back-end service- think Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, Weather, Mail, NYtimes, etc.. Google is making apps that tie into one of the best back-ends out there. Their own! So even though Android does not have the number of apps as the iPhone, they have some that pack quite a punch. As more of the big development companies start porting apps to the android, Google’s apps might differentiate the two platforms considerably.

I gave my Droid to a couple of people and they have not been able to figure out how to unlock it. Turns out Google can make bad UI designs like the rest of us. Now, I’m no expert on user interfaces, but I did just finish reading “The Design of Everyday Things” by Donald Norman, and there is a guy at work who is a designer and both agree that the unlock screen on the Android is bad.

Old Droid Unlock Screen. How do you unlock this?

The mark of a good design is that someone unfamiliar with an object should be able to pick it up and use it without having to consult an instruction manual. How would you unlock the screen below? Norman talks about putting constraints in the design- Logical constraints use reasoning to determine the alternatives. … Cultural constraints are conventions shared by a cultural group.

New Droid Unlock Screen.  Is the sound on or off?

The unlock icon on the left looks like a button and that it should be pressed. Culturally however the symbol makes users think that the device is already unlocked. What I noticed was that people would repeatedly press the green icon over and over, expecting something to happen.  By the way, in which screen is the sound on the device off? Unlike the unlock button, this actually follows cultural constraints, and the new Droid Unlock Screen picture has the sound off.

iPhone unlock screen. Slide to unlock of course!

The iPhone unlock shows good design, using what Norman calls knowledge in the world. It clearly says “slide to unlock” and there is an arrow pointing to which way you should slide- Simple. The crazy thing is that the Droid unlock screen unlocks in exactly the same way!  The problem is that people don’t think of the icon as something that slides. There is a little triangle that serves as an arrow, but it obviously does not do it’s job.

The Droid has an added challenge that, unlike the iPhone there is no hardware sound off button. This means they need to fit both the unlock and sound off functions in the same screen. Does anyone have any suggestions or alternate home screens to fix this?

Yesterday I was at Borders. For some reason that’s my proffered retailer for buying books, opposed to Amazon or Barnes and Nobles. I regularly get emails from them about promotions they have, and as a side note you should never buy a book from Borders for full price because there is ALWAYS a promotion(this one was for 30% off an item). So I go to pay for the book( Art of the Start, Guy Kawasaki) and I don’t have my Borders card but I tell them my email address, and the guy punches that into the system. I also tell the Cashier guy that I know that there is that 30% off coupon going on now and I would like to use it. Now for some reason the guy  says that I actually have to print it out and bring it in, OR I can show it on my smart phone if I have one. That’s kinda strange because it’s not the first time I have bought a book at Borders and usually when I give them my email address they automatically apply the coupon.

Luckily, I have my Droid with me of course. So I go to yahoo mail to log in( I use my yahoo account for junk mail like coupons and such) and I can’t access the account through the Droid browser. Bummer. So I step off the line and see if I can’t set up the yahoo account in the mail app. Yahoo doesn’t allow free POP forwarding so I knew it might be tricky and I might walk out of the store without the book. I google “Droid yahoo mail”click on the first link, which is yahoo answers, follow the instructions and Lo and Behold- It worked!

What really Impressed me was how fast it was to switch between the mail app and browser. The instructions were long so I had to go back and forth a bunch of times. When I would go back into mail it didn’t need to load anything, and I was right were I left off. That’s called multitasking.

So I set up two email accounts in two days, the exchange email works but has it’s kinks, and the yahoo one worked out great. And I set both of them up without using a computer.