steve kwan user experience designer

Vitrium in The Province!

(August 25th, 2008 - 3:53PM)

We made it into this Sunday's Province (one of Vancouver's premiere newspapers). See the article here:

Company on the trail of PDFs

Vitrium on Breakfast Television

(August 25th, 2008 - 1:20AM)

We've received a lot of press lately, but I specifically decided to post this video here because Peter Nieforth (our CEO) does an excellent job of explaining docmetrics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Im_XfuXn6M

Campbell River sunrise

(August 21st, 2008 - 12:12PM)

22lbs

(August 19th, 2008 - 2:51PM)

Review: HTC 6800 (Bell)

(August 18th, 2008 - 6:11PM

(3.5 / 5 stars)

Summary:

I recently replaced my Motorola Q (which I hated) with Bell's HTC 6800. This phone, also known as the Mogul in the US, has been on my belt for a few weeks now and I've used it enough to write a detailed review.

The HTC 6800 is easily the best phone I've ever owned. With the exception of a few major shortcomings, I highly recommend this phone to anyone looking for a more functional Pocket PC.

Things I like about Bell's HTC 6800:

• The touchscreen / keyboard combo.

  The HTC 6800 features a combination touchscreen / keyboard input. Pull out the stylus and you can use the 6800 as a traditional PDA. However, slide out the keyboard and the display rotates into landscape mode, giving you access to a full QWERTY keyboard. The combination input works brilliantly.

• The large, clear screen.

  The 6800 features a large, clear QVGA screen that's excellent for Web browsing, document creation, or games.

• The large keyboard.

  By using a slide-out keyboard, the 6800 is able to provide a much larger keyboard than I'm used to on mobile devices. With only a few weeks of practice, I can key almost 20WPM on it.

• The all-encompassing feature set.

  With the exception of a few shortcomings mentioned later, the HTC 6800 has almost all the features I could want in a mobile phone. It's almost like a laptop in your pocket.

• The excellent built-in camera.

  The HTC 6800's camera snaps 2MP photos with excellent quality, even in the dark. It also records videos with sound. With the 6800, I no longer feel like I have to carry around a separate digital camera.

• Windows Mobile 6.

  Windows Mobile 6 isn't perfect, but it's getting there. Having used Windows Mobile 5 on my previous phone, I can see dramatic improvements in the features and usability of 6. There are still annoying bugs, but they're bearable and can be fixed by the odd reboot. Pocket Internet Explorer still sucks, but Opera Mini is a great replacement, and it's free.

• The excellent battery life.

  I'm sitting on the ferry using the 6800 to write this post, and previously I was playing NES and Lucasarts games on the device for a few hours. Despite the heavy work, the phone still has half its battery life left.

• The phone dimensions.

  It's a bit thicker than a Blackberry or iPhone (0.7 inches thick), but it's not as wide and it clips nicely onto the belt.

• The reception.

  I was fishing out on the ocean by Campbell River and was still able to get reception for text messages.

• The excellent price.

  With my Bell loyalty discount and an HTC 6800 price cut, I was able to get the phone for $200.

• The reasonable phone and data plan.

  Bell gave me unlimited data and mobile email for $30 a month.

• The built-in wireless.

  The 802.11 is a nice addition, although I find the cellular data is good enough that I don't need to use it.

• Bell's excellent email sync software.

  Bell's mobile email service seamlessly syncs with your existing mail accounts and pushes to your device. It can operate with almost any network configuration. You don't need to configure your mail server to push to the HTC 6800; rather, you just install a service on your PC that pulls email out of Outlook and pushes it to your phone. Brilliant.

• It brings mobile computing to life.

  I've aways dreamed of having a mobile device so capable that it would almost be like an extension of myself - a portable connection to the world. The HTC 6800 is the first device I've used that made me feel this way.

Things I dislike about Bell's HTC 6800:

• The low RAM.

  For me, the HTC 6800's one unforgiveable flaw is that it only has 64MB RAM. Windows Mobile consumes about 40MB of that, leaving you with only 20MB of RAM for your on purposes. This is a huge drawback. If you only want your phone for calls, email and document processing, 64MB is fine. However, you start to feel the pain when you attempt to run more intensive applications.

  Opera Mobile 9.5 beta, a great portable Web browser, barely runs on the HTC 6800. In fact, it frequently gives me low memory errors. It's a beta version, so perhaps the release version will work better. And failing that, the phone still runs the lower-end Opera Mini just fine. But this sort of low-memory problem is always a factor if you plan to install third-party applications on your phone.

• No GPS.

  Although the hardware can technically support GPS, the HTC 6800 does not have this feature. With a lot of hacking you can enable GPS on this phone, but this is for advanced users only.

• The weight.

  The HTC 6800 is much heavier than most phones, probably because of the sliding keyboard. But it still feels good in your hand and isn't noticeable when hanging on your belt.

• The fact that it's already superceded.

  HTC has aleady released a superior version of this phone called the HTC Tilt. It's unfortunate that Bell doesn't (yet) carry this model, as it has more RAM and has GPS enabled.

• The low storage memory.

  In addition to having low RAM, the 6800 also has a storage problem. It only comes with 150MB of available space, which renders it almost useless as a portable media player. It has an expandable microSD slot, but that will only allot you a few extra gigabytes of storage.

• The non-standard headphone jack.

  The 6800 has no headphone jack. If you want to plug in a pair of headphones, you need to plug a converter into the USB slot. On top of this, the 6800 doesn't come with a converter for standard headphones - only for the micro ones that cellular headsets use. Again, it seems like the device was not intended to be used as a portable media player. If this feature is important to you, stick with the iPhone.

Conclusion:

I'm extremely happy with the HTC 6800, but it lacks some important features. Luckily, those features aren't important to me.

The HTC is a great phone if:

1. You want a touchscreen phone, but need a QWERTY keyboard
2. You want a Windows Mobile phone (in other words, you don't want a Blackberry or iPhone)
3. You don't need to run high-memory apps
4. You don't need GPS
5. You don't need your phone to act as a portable media player.

The joy of SCUMM

(August 11st, 2008 - 4:31PM)

I'd been looking for new games to play on my phone (review of said device forthcoming), and I discovered ScummVM.

I won't go into the details of what ScummVM is or how it works (all that info is available on their website), but it basically lets you play old-school point-and-click adventure games. In particular, with ScummVM you can play LucasArts' old school games like Full Throttle.

What's great about ScummVM is that it's available on a lot of platforms, including Windows Mobile and the iPhone. This is great because touchscreen devices, especially those with styluses, are ideal for point-and-click games.

I've been playing Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle on my new phone, and I'm absolutely loving it.

I highly recommend downloading ScummVM, especially if you're interested in portable gaming.

Worst support person ever

(August 5th, 2008 - 11:55AM)

Not too long ago I had a Motorola Q with Windows Mobile 5. It's supposed to have MSN Messenger on it, but one day it mysteriously stopped working. I put up with this for a while, but eventually I called Bell technical support. The conversation went something like this.

Support guy:
"Thank you for calling Bell technical support. How can I help you?"

Me:
"Hi, I've got a Motorola Q and MSN has stopped working on it. I keep getting a message saying that the service is not responding. This has been going on for a few months now."

Support guy:
"I see. We don't have a solution for this problem, so we'll need to do a bit of investigation. Can you please give me your MSN username and password so we can diagnose the problem?"

Steve:
"Uhh.....no."

Support guy:
"But we need that information so our support team can verify if the problem is with your MSN account."

Steve:
"I understand why you want the information, but it's my MSN username and password."

Support guy:
"Sir, your information is safe with us. We have a very explicit privacy policy that prevents us from disclosing your information to anyone outside of the company."

Steve:
"I understand that, but bear in mind that I too am subject to several NDAs and privacy policies. Even if I wanted to give you my MSN username and password, which I don't, I still couldn't do it because that would give you access to my contact list, which includes many business contacts. With my MSN username and password it would be possible for someone to masquerade as me and acquire confidential information."

Support guy:
"Well, I'm not sure how to proceed then. If you don't give us that information, we can't test to see if there's a problem with your MSN account."

Steve:
"Well, if you're just trying to find out if my MSN account is the problem, why don't I just create a new MSN account, attempt to login from my phone, and see if the new account works? If it does, we know the problem is with my old MSN account."

Support guy:
"Umm...I guess that would work."

Tech support taken to school once again.

I guess the whole "we will never ask for your username and password" line that most companies feed you only applies to their own software, and not software from third parties such as Messenger accounts. :)