I had an interesting search experience today. I typically rely on a browser’s dedicated search box instead of actually navigating to a search engine’s homepage. Today, I went to google.com and started searching for chrome extensions. I was surprised when the top result in the auto-suggest popped up with the usual blue text and URL you see in an AdWords ad. It’s hard to tell if that’s really an ad, since that link is to a legit Google site focused on exploiting Chrome’s V8 Javascript VM for some interesting use cases.

Is this the direction Google is taking, mixing ads and search results where users have experienced strictly search results? It’s certainly one way to drive up CTR, but at what expense to the user experience? I’m curious to see if this is a widely deployed “feature” or something that is being tested across a limited number of searched. It was definitely a turn off for me.  Some experimenting shows me that it’s kind of like a “I’m feeling lucky” hit for a specific URL that matches the search query. If so, their choice of presentation is unfortunate.

There were some known NVIDIA GPU issues with my model and they finally struck about a month ago. The display stopped working and I could not output to an external display but I was able to still boot the machine in target mode. I promptly made a backup and dropped off my Mac at the Apple Store in Bellevue to get fixed. Their diagnosis matched the known GPU issue and a new “logic board” was required. Within 3 days, my Mac was ready to be picked up, and the repairs would have run ~$1200 out of pocket if not for Applecare (and in this case, a known issue that extended warranty coverage beyond the first year).

Fast forward 3 weeks and I’m flying to Milwaukee and get a Service Battery error in my Power Manager panel. I stop by the Bayshore Apple Store and am greeted by an extremely helpful floor rep who delved into a good bit of detail around my issue. He set up an appointment for me since the Genius Bar was booked and when I went in the next time I didn’t have to retell the details of my issue. A quick diagnostic test and I got a new battery.

I have to say, Apple’s desire to take care of their customers and their products stands out from the crowd. IBM was the same way with Thinkpads when I was using them. It’s a big deal to me and helps balance out some of the other issues I hear, like the Time Capsules that are dying just after their one year anniversary of use.

I wish more companies were like this, I remember the hurdles I had to clear to get D-Link to replace my parents’ router after it crapped out. Kudos to Apple, this experience helps justify some of the cost premium for their products.

Posted via email from G’s posterous

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

Posted via email from G’s posterous

Wonder where he works lol
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

Posted via email from G’s posterous

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

Posted via email from G’s posterous

My life, since being back, has been dominated by work. I haven’t worked this hard ever in any professional capacity. I told this to a friend lately, and he said that I say that about every job. That made me wonder if it always just feels busy while I’m in the middle of it, or if I’m taking on increasingly challenging roles and responsibilities. I tend to think it’s the latter.

Moving from my last job to my current job has been quite a transition. The company cultures are nearly polar opposites and I feel like this has been a change for the positive given my personality and preferences for a work environment. I find my current company to be very open, energetic and full of driven people. People take on cross-functional roles too, which I really enjoy because of the exposure to different aspects of the business. I’ve been involved in design, product development, procurement, architecture and development discussions. I love it.

The flipside to being happy with the work is the amount of it. I’m regularly working 60-70 hours a week, easy. While it’s true that it doesn’t feel like work most of the time while I’m in the middle of things, I do find it is compromising my life outside of work. I get in early, leave late, check and respond to e-mail even later and lose some if not all of my weekends on a semi-regular basis. I’m not getting to the gym as much as I want to, I haven’t taken care of some life basics – WA driver’s license, WA auto insurance, dentist and eye appointments, etc.

Why continue this lifestyle? Well it’s the vicious circle of enjoying my job and then taking on more than I probably should. My plan is to get some work/life balance in place once my wife moves up here. Hopefully I can get it all together by then!

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Moving Home

For some time now, Katie and I have been planning to move to the Seattle area. It’s why we spent the past two summers apart with Katie interning up in Seattle to get a feel for the city and gain some contacts in the legal market here. We talked at length about where we had strong preferences to be and Seattle rose to the top of the list. I will miss the Bay Area and the friends I had from school and work a lot, but it came time to move on to something new. I know we will all keep in touch and I will make it a point to visit with them whenever I go down to the Bay Area.

I’m currently crashing with my parents, which has taken some adjustment. I had to throw out a bunch of old stuff accumulated from living in this house for 13 years to make space for the new stuff I moved up (mostly just clothes). Katie’s finishing up school in May next year and sometime between now and then we plan to buy a house, move everything from Oakland up to Seattle and have her commute down to finish up the last few weeks/months before she graduates. I try not to dwell on it, but being long distance again is going to be tough. Thankfully, we have our honeymoon coming up in a week and a half and Katie’s on winter break until mid-January, so we’ll get to spend a lot of time together over the next two months.

Staying in Mobile

When the economy started to tank back in September, I started to get a little nervous about my prospects for finding a job. I thought I would casually feel out the market and see what was interesting that was going on up in Seattle. I had some interesting discussions with a handful of the big companies and some startups up here and then I found something from T-Mobile out of the blue. The discussions progressed quickly and I broke my rule for scheduling on-site interviews on Fridays/Mondays to give myself extended weekends in Seattle and flew up mid-week to meet with T-Mobile. The interview went well and I was informed before I left that an offer would be coming. This was great news for me and put me at ease moving forward. Once the details were agreed upon, I ended up canceling my remaining interviews after doing some long thinking about what it was I wanted to do next.

Did I want another job? Or did I want a career? Lockheed could have been a career but I didn’t find myself enjoying the corporate culture there. Aplix was a job, not a career, from day one and I knew that. Combining that experience with what I did at 4thpass, I came to realize that I had some pretty unique experience in mobile that I could leverage into a career, the only remaining question was how passionate I still was about the mobile industry.

I had believed for a while that mobile was stagnating a bit. Yes, there was the iPhone, new Nokia phones, even the G1, but I felt like everything was moving toward some convergence of hardware features and there wasn’t a whole lot of innovation left once this convergence was achieved. Recently, I attended a Stanford/MIT VLAB talk addressing the future of mobile and was reminded of the impact of mobile on the emerging world. There was a presentation from an EIR at Kleiner Perkins where he detailed his experience tracking the use of mobile technology all over the world, particularly focused on second and third world countries. This really interested and excited me at the prospects of the leading markets (Japan, Europe, US) learning from the creativity of emerging markets in uses for mobile technology. It also reminded me that there is a lot yet to come in mobile and we’re really opening up a lot of possibilities and the hardware capabilities have matured to match what desktop computers were doing just a few years ago.

The open sourcing of a relevant, usable mobile software stack has changed the game I believe. While I’m not a huge fan of Google, or perhaps a fan at all, I do believe that their effort to move Android along and finally release Android as a platform for development signifies a tremendous shift in the mobile industry. We will see the long term effects of this and look back at the Open Handset Alliance and this effort as a watershed project for the industry. It is after arriving at this conclusion for myself that I felt like staying in mobile and, in particular, pursuing this T-Mobile opportunity made the most sense for me.

Some of you may know that I spent the better part of this past year pursuing an entrepreneurial venture. While that has been sidelined for now, I believe sometime down the road I will revisit trying to start my own thing. I learned more than I believe an MBA could ever teach me and I know at some point this will be a path for me to take but I have accepted that now is not the time. I plan to do as much as I can with my current opportunity and really see where it takes me. My friends here in Seattle know how seriously I’m taking this when they see me actually dressed to the nines for my job =)

What’s Next

So I joined T-Mobile USA as a Principal Architect working on next generation mobile platforms. I can’t really get into any more details than that, between the confidentiality agreement I signed with T-Mobile as a whole and the NDA specific to my project. I can say that I’m extremely excited about its prospects, what I will learn along the way and what influence I will be able to exercise over the direction of the project. The confluence of these pieces made the T-Mobile offer one I simply could not refuse. I’m also really happy to be putting my Master’s degree to full use now, as I’m heavily focused on all aspects of Software Engineering.

If anyone reading this is interested in working on Android for T-Mobile, please let me know. We are looking to build our team up and there are opportunities in Bellevue, WA, San Jose, CA and Richmond, VA.

As someone who works in the mobile industry, I had been tracking the release of the original iPhone, along with a variety of other developments like Android, RIM’s new technologies, Symbian S60 devices and even Palm’s attempts to keep up. Apple was winning the press game and got a lot of attention for their device, and I can say after considerable usage, rightfully so. In terms of a combined personal and professional mobile device, it is clear to me that the iPhone is the most enjoyable device to use out there. Certainly, there are problems and it is by no means a perfect device, but Apple seems to have struck a good balance between control for good user experience for mainstream users and openness for 3rd party programs. (By openness, I’m just referring to the availability of an SDK, and a decent one at that. All the legalese surrounding it and the treatment of 3rd party apps as second class citizens on the device are up for debate.)

Pros

Outstanding battery life on EDGE

iTunes <-> iPhone end to end ecosystem for music management is great. No need for an iTouch or any separate music device.

Top notch 3rd party apps really have a good degree of polish and are very usable. I still haven’t paid for a single iPhone app but have found plenty of useful applications.

PIM (contacts/calendar) sync is very easy to do with iTunes (though it still doesn’t really make sense that you go through music software to do this…)

Call quality is superb. No dropped calls, very clear voice quality.

The form factor is great, I really appreciate the rounded edges when this phone is in my pocket. The HTC phone was a brick that constantly bulged from my pants pocket and not in a good way.

The glass screen has kept me from installing the protective plastic skin I bought for the phone since glass is so scratch resistant as compared to most plastic screens.

Cons

Special cable for charging the phone. I really liked being able to use any mini-USB cable to charge my old HTC phone, which were just laying around at work or at home. Firewire charging also isn’t compatible with the new iPhone, which means I need to modify my car stereo setup to bring that capability back.

Cut and Paste would be more handy than I had anticipated when I read gripes about this being missing.

No background processing and no push updates for 3rd party apps (yet) really limits what the iPhone can do when you’re not actively using it. Mobile devices should be constantly working for you, not just when it has your attention.

Battery life on 3G isn’t as bad as I expected based on what I had read, but it can be an issue. I’m probably exclusively on 3G once or twice a week when I have high data usage needs and waiting for that to come down over EDGE isn’t a judicious use of battery.

Speakerphone really isn’t loud enough as compared to other devices.

Since the iPhone treats phone capabilities as an “application” on the device, there are too many button pushes/screens to get through to place a call. Double clicking the home button to get to your Favorites is a nice touch though.

The cost of the data plan + 200 text messages is a bit outrageous. They know they can get away with it so they do. The rumored tethering plan at an additional $30/month is just insane.

I wonder how much of the transition eye candy really inhibits the performance of the phone. It’s nice, don’t get me wrong, but I frequently see very stuttered animation for the transitions. If this can be cleared up with future updates, then it’s just an optimization problem. If not, it’s clear that there is overburdening of the hardware platform and they should have scaled the transitions back accordingly.

Inability to treat the iPhone as a USB hard drive/memory stick out of the box. I know there are a variety of paid iPhone apps that help with this, but it should work like this out of the box. Apple should have implemented an appropriate file system separation to facilitate this given how much storage these devices ship with.

AT&T does little to make using this phone on their network special. I think this is a key shortcoming that caused them to take the bad tasting medicine of a very expensive exclusivity agreement. Just take a look at how much AT&T paid Apple last quarter.

SmartTags exists in Mail.app in Leopard, but not on the iPhone mail client. This would save me some hassle in saving people’s email addresses, phone numbers and physical addresses that I get in email or text. How many times have you received a txt/email saying “meet me at X address” and you just want to click on that address, load up Maps and calculate directions from your current location?

Final Thoughts

Clearly, there are many things to improve and fix on the iPhone. That said, I’m happy with my purchase, can swallow the extra expense for data over my previous $15/month all you can eat + 200 text messages package and look forward to what’s coming next for this device.