Today Microsoft revealed the Xbox One. One of the “features” is the fact that it is always listening. You can walk into the room where your Xbox One is and say “Xbox on” and it will wake up. I am beginning to believe that most engineers that work for these large companies do not have families. We have been on this trend of “Natural User Interface”. Which has been a combination of touch and speech. I can totally agree with touch but speech brings some major complications when you have four kids. As my kids get older they catch on more and more. Since we have not went down the path of having the speech component actually recognize specific voices yet this causes a problem.

Let me give you a scenario. I voice activate one of my dozen technology devices and a kid screams in the background “delete delete delete yes yes yes”. Well there went that family album we had. Voice only works if you are in very quiet locations. Apparently no one has been at my house for a while.

I think we need to think of what natural really is. Natural to me is not speaking to my computer. Sure it looks awesome in Star Trek but in real life we all look like we have some mental disorder. “Hello Siri how you been?”.

Now on the other hand speech is very important to my wife who does not like to type. She uses it on her Android phone all the time. Last week her phone got in a state where she couldn’t talk to it anymore nor talk on the phone. It became useless not because of making phone calls but because it is the primary way she interacts with her device.

Speech has it’s place we just have to think about those times and places where it doesn’t work so well, at least in its current state.

I’ve made my way back to Android. I’ve been back and forth a few times. My first android phone was the Motorola Droid. I’ve owned ever version of iPhone as well. In between iPhones I tend to get some new version of an Android phone. My latest is the Samsung Galaxy Note 2. This is the perfect blend of Android as what I call a Phablet (Phone + Tablet).

A Stylus?

I’ve been using tablet computing even as far back as Windows XP. I also formally carried a Palm Treo. There is something to be said for having a stylus. I like to take hand written notes occassionally. There is something I still like about drawing. Some of my thoughts just don’t fit into words. There is something to be said about being able to draw something on a screen. I do end up exporting my S Notes to Evernote still. Since Evernote does OCR on the handwritten text I can search my hand drawn notes still even. It gives me the best of both worlds like paper but yet digital.

Battery

The battery on this guy is amazing. I have yet to be able to run the sucker dead in a day. I spent an entire day taking notes from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and only got down to 65%. I even was on 4G all day.

Size

Yes this phone is huge. It is a 5.5 inch screen. I don’t find it to big. Samsung has done some nice things to make it easy to type on it one handed still by allowing you to put it in one handed mode and the keyboard will shift from one side to the other. Some things are still a reach occassionally but I don’t mind.

Tablet Time.

I think I’ve made up my mind. I want to get the Galaxy Note 8.0. It also comes with the stylus which personally I love. I like the smaller form factor tablets personally as since I got my Nexus 7 I never actually pull out my iPad anymore. I may even spend some time and work on more Android apps again.

Well I’ve decided to start over. New blog engine new content. I’ve been back and forth on whether I need to move my content. Normally I would say yes. Why not then. Well I want a clean fresh start. I have not done a good job of blogging or getting content up. I’m now going to try to do a better job. We shall see though. I’m stripping it all down this time and keeping it simple.