Stuart Eichert’s Blog

Below are five quick things you should not assume as a mobile developer.

• Don’t assume you have network connectivity – What would happen if I launched your app and the device was not connected to the network? Will you show the user a white screen? black screen? something else that makes it look like the app crashed? Could you have stored some data locally to show the user? Network connectivity is a gift. It should not be expected. If you can’t do anything useful without the network, at least tell the user to try your app again when they have network connectivity.
• Don’t assume you have GPS – Today it may seem like every mobile device has a GPS receiver, but you really cannot assume that you do. As a corollary you shouldn’t assume that you can quickly get a GPS fix for your cool location based service application. Again, try to find a way to provide value to the user in the absence of GPS. If you really do need to get a GPS fix, make sure your UI informs the user that you are waiting and give them a way to cancel.
• Don’t assume the device can make voice calls – Not every smart mobile device is a phone. Think iPod Touch.
• Don’t assume the device has a touch screen – Mostly this is a warning to Windows Mobile developers. Remember that Windows Mobile Standard devices DO NOT have touch screens. If your app really can’t work without a touchscreen, do everything you can to discourage a user from downloading it. Secondly, if they do download it, be polite and give them an error dialog indicating that the app is only compatible with touch screen devices.
• Don’t assume the device has the latest super fast processor – While you probably do, many of your users do not. They are one or two hardware revisions behind and the app is going to run a lot slower on their devices. Make sure you test on those devices before you ship.

After the long wait since CES, I picked up my Palm Pre yesterday from the Sprint Store in Sunnyvale, CA. Here is my quick and dirty review.

Positives

• Initial setup was easy and painless – created a Palm Profile with basically just an e-mail address and then watched a short video about using the device
• Added a Yahoo email account with just e-mail address and password (didn’t need to know server address, port, etc.)
• Added Exchange account using settings for Active Sync given by the hosting company that runs my server (a little tricky, but could have been much worse)
• All of my contacts / calendar entries transferred down to the Pre w/o incident and Synergy handled any duplicates (i.e. multiple contacts for the same person show up as one)
• App Catalog – Very easy to choose an app and download it. I recommend checking out the LinkedIn and Fandango apps.
• Web browser seems to support Chinese characters (useful for the site I get my Chinese lessons from). My BlackBerry Bold didn’t display Chinese, so this is an improvement.
• Streaming web audio on the Sprint network – I streamed a high bitrate (1 meg per minute) .mp3 file without any hiccups.
• Security / Lock – Able to set a simple 4 digit PIN that is easy to enter when unlocking the device
• The included carrying bag is felt or something soft and helps keep the device clean
• Google Maps quickly finds my current location and is very responsive
• The videos from the YouTube app look great

Areas to improve

• Application launch time needs to be about twice as fast – Every now and then after I have tapped on an icon I wait for the app to launch and I think, “Did I really tap it”. I am sure Palm made it as fast as they could, but it needs to be faster.
• Browser / PDF reader linkage – I clicked on a .pdf file on chinesepod.com and the browser told me the file type was unsupported. However, there is a PDF reader on the device. My guess is that chinesepod.com (and probably other sites), don’t set the correct MIME type for the .pdf file. It would be good if the browser could deal with that anyway.
• Browser – Would like to be able to download and save .mp3 files, not just stream them.
• App Catalog – I know that Palm needs to move ahead cautiously to make sure 3rd party apps don’t destablize the device, but it would be great to see more apps.

This was the scene outside the Sunnyvale Sprint Store this morning with all of us waiting for the Palm Pre.

It works!