Sony SmartWatch: View in Phone is nice, but what I really want is Send to Pocket

One of the cool things the Sony SmartWatch can do is open up a Twitter or Facebook page on your phone. For example when viewing a Twitter notification on the SmartWatch you can scroll down and click the arrow button, which gives you the option to View in Phone, Reply with a pre-determined message you’ve setup on the phone, or Retweet the message. 

If you click View in Phone (shouldn’t that be View on Phone, btw?), it almost instantly pops up the tweet in the application you’ve defaulted for the action (in my case, the official Twitter app for Android). Its one of the things that is very impressive when I demo the SmartWatch to people.

Plume is actually the main Twitter app I use on a daily basis on my Galaxy Nexus, but I selected the official Twitter app for View in Phone because when the tweet is displayed its a single press to get to the Android “Share” menu. Why do I care about that? Because 99% of the time the reason I’m viewing the notification on my phone is so I can add whatever it is to Pocket so I can “read it later”.

Pocket or any other read it later service is exactly what the SmartWatch was made for. In a perfect world, I would scroll through my Twitter notifications on my watch and the ones that were interesting I’d just “Send to Pocket”, without any need to actually do anything on my phone. As it is now, I first have to open the tweet on my phone, then pull up the Share menu, then select Pocket. 

What I’d like to see the Sony Smart Extras team do is update the SmartWatch Twitter app to have a “Share” button. On the phone you’d go in the app and select Share To and then using the standard Android Share menu select the service you want the Share function to default to (in my case I’d pick Pocket). Then when I see an interesting tweet I want to follow up on later, I’d click the arrow button, press the Share button, and then know when I pull up Pocket later on my phone, tablet or computer that article or post will be there waiting for me.

I like using Pocket because it doesn’t just put the tweet in my list, it actually grabs whatever is linked in the tweet as well (I usually only send tweets that are linking to articles, i.e. tweets from AndroidCentral, Daring Fireball, Engadget, etc.). 

Seems like the perfect marriage of technology, I hope someone makes it happen.

Topolsky says the Transformer Prime is “bad” and “not a contender” - I beg to differ.

So in the Vergecast number 19 from February 24th, 2012 I heard Josh Topolsky make the following comments about the ASUS Transformer Prime:

“I used the Prime for a week - it’s terrible. I don’t care what anybody says. It is bad. Browsing is bad, email is bad, app selection is terrible, could not find one single twitter app that didn’t suck. It’s like not a contender. The Touchpad is a better device.”

Later Josh said he doesn’t use his tablets for “productivity”. He also says the Playbook UI “beats the pants off ICS”. 

Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, so I’m going to give mine in rebuttal. I bought an iPad on launch day and upgraded to an iPad 2 on its launch day. It’s the only Apple product I own and use; my phones are Android-based although my wife uses an iPhone (currently a 4S). 

For the last two years I’ve been using my iPad every day at work, its completely replaced my spiral notebooks and dragging a laptop into meetings. I’ve had my Transformer Prime for about a month; two weeks ago I cut over to it as my every day tablet and haven’t looked back.

There is no doubt that the apps on the iPad are the flashiest around, with polished interfaces designed specifically for the large-screen format. I think this is what Josh was referring with his comment about app selection (since functionally you can find anything you have on an iPad in the Android Market, and then some). Many Android applications are “cheating” since the platform works more like a PC computer when it comes to resolution - anything designed for an Android phone works perfectly on an Android tablet, but they look ugly with tons of whitespace because the developers don’t re-design for the larger resolution of the tablet.

The solution is to search around and look for developers who are making an effort. In regards to the Twitter comment, its deplorable how Twitter has done nothing to enhance their application for Android tablets. What looks good on my Galaxy Nexus is horrible on my Transformer Prime. However Tweetcaster Pro has a great Android tablet interface that includes slick enhancements like a quick way to see just photo, video or link tweets, and the option to post both to Twitter and Facebook at the same time.
The UI comment is really interesting, since the iPad UI basically does nothing at the home screens other than list app icons and folders. There’s no concept of widgets or live wallpapers. My main home screen on my Prime shows my current calendar agenda, today’s weather (34 degrees in Chicago, not 73) plus a three day forecast, a combined timeline of current Twitter and Facebook updates, and an email icon showing that I have 44 unread Exchange emails. To get any of that information (other than the unread email) I’d have to open up three different applications on my iPad.

My next home screen has my news and entertainment applications along with the USA Today widget that gives me the latest headlines at a glance without opening an application. Oh and I can search for anything by just clicking the search icon at the top left corner of the screen.

A single touch of the Recent Apps button gives me a scrollable list of my open applications (with a screen capture) that I can jump between or swipe away to close, far more elegant that double-clicking the home button.

I’m really curious about the “email is bad” comment. I use Exchange, Yahoo mail and gmail and find the email experience on the Prime on par with the iPad experience. They have similar inbox motifs, you can easily switch between accounts, and you have all the functions you expect like forwarding, reply all, mass selection for deletes and moves, etc. I’m at a loss as to what magical thing the iPad does with email.

Similarly on browsing, the stock Android Browser app on the Prime works very well and natively supports Flash, so every site I pull up works as it should (try loading many hotel or restaurant sites on an iPad and you’ll know what I mean). And now there’s the Chrome beta which, other than not supporting Flash (which seems ludicrous to me), is a great browsing experience especially if your desktop browser is Chrome as well (which it is for me). Yes its missing a few things like being able to change the user agent on the fly but its still an early beta and if there’s anything we’ve learned from Desktop Chrome is that the updates come quickly.

Because the browsers on the Prime work so well and because of its 16x9 aspect ratio, for those apps which developers haven’t bother to optimize for Android tablets there’s often a simple solution: just use the website like you would on your computer. Once you select “desktop” you’ll get the exact experience you have on your computer.

One of my key applications is Evernote. I take all my meeting notes in it and prepare my agenda’s with it, that way I always have access to them via my phone, PC or tablet. One of the areas the Prime kills the iPad is spell checking - in Android it works like we’ve been trained in Office for the last 15 years - a red line under anything spell check doesn’t think is right, and you tap it to get a list of suggestions or to add it to the dictionary. Completely intuitive, compared to the ass-backward method Apple uses. But better still is the auto correction that for me works far better than Apple’s on the iPad (which I found so erroneous I had to turn it completely off).

Oh, and if you don’t like the ASUS keyboard, you can switch to the default Android keyboard (which works the best for me), or pick from several in the market like Swiftkey X. Good luck using anything but Apple’s on the iPad without jailbreaking.

And then there’s the Prime’s keyboard dock. Beautifully designed, its the first thing people ask me about when I bring the docked Prime into a meeting I know I’ll be taking a lot of notes in. Apple of course sells their wireless keyboard that can be used with the iPad and I have one which I take on trips, and while its a nice piece of hardware it doesn’t compare to the functionality of the Prime’s keyboard dock with its specialized Android function keys for back, home, adjusting the screen brightness, launching the browser, etc. All you can use on the Apple keyboard are the multimedia controls, and there’s no track pad option which can be a lot easier to use when positioning the cursor than poking at the screen with your finger.

Throw in the fact the Prime keyboard dock has a USB port for external data devices or a mouse, and provides an additional 6 hours of battery life, and its a match made in heaven for IT road warriors who don’t want to drag around a laptop but need the functionality of a keyboard and mouse when using applications like Remote Desktop.

And lets not forget the microSD slot. I’m a PC user and I truly hate iTunes; the only reason its even loaded on my PC is because that’s how you’re forced in the Apple ecosystem to get music and movies onto your iPad. Removable media eliminates the need for iTunes; now I just simply drag the media files I want onto my microSD card and I’m good to go. 

The iPad 2 has some undeniable style points. The Smart Covers are slickly designed and the use of the magnets to detect if the cover is closed to turn off the display is wonderfully implemented. ASUS uses the hinge slots for the keyboard dock to connect their “origami” covers which work well but aren’t nearly as “magical”. On the plus side, a black ASUS Prime cover costs about half that of a black leather Smart Cover and the Prime cover won’t come off unless you really want it to. 

There are lots of other little things that I prefer in ICS on my Prime over the iPad, like notifications (which Josh also acknowledged). So the only conclusion I can come to here is that Josh primarily uses his iPad as a gaming device (mainly to play Dead Space, which currently isn’t available on Android in the U.S.). Since he says he doesn’t use it for “productivity”, I guess my use cases for the tablet just don’t apply to him. I have a few games for my iPad but frankly rarely have played them more than once (I usually buy them during those great 99 cent sales, they’re hard to resist). I don’t play the few Android tablet games I have very often either. The tablet isn’t my gaming platform; when I play its on my Xbox 360, or my PC, or for mobile gaming on my 3DS. I do enjoy watching movies on my tablets when I travel, and my Blu-ray rips look fantastic on the Prime’s higher resolution widescreen display. And there’s that nice micro-HDMI port on the Prime that lets you output to an HDMI TV with a $7 cable instead of a $30 adapter.

So for me the ASUS Transformer Prime is a fantastic device with excellent performance and some features not available on the iPad that make it an ideal choice for how I work and want to get things done. The iPad is great too, but iOS is stale and I’m tired of being locked into Apple’s meager connectivity options. 

Oh, and the “Touchpad is a better device” comment? That was just the vodka talking, right?

Source: theverge.com