Last week i had a personal rant about Facebook home in part I of this two part Facebook  home series . I wonder if many of you have come to terms with some of the issues and pointers i raised.  Well this a follow up feature to elaborate more about my thoughts on facebook future mobile plans and if and why google cares about it all.

Facebook’s plans for mobile domination

I think Facebook has done something that Google can only dream of doing, Google has been trying to cater to simplicity for the entry user and I don’t think they have been successful at that. So for me it’s not just about Facebook or the social network, this is about, that fact that in the process of trying to become a dominant player in  mobile Facebook is trying to leverage their core audience , who are the people who don’t care much about tech. This could always go haywire and expand, imagine Facebook comes out with an App Store and throws it into its Facebook home experience which will completely by pass the Android Market store. Do you have an idea what this will do for Facebook? You guys have to understand that this is huge; it’s not about Facebook the social network it’s about Facebook really rising to complete with Google and Apple.  In a nutshell it’s their plan for mobile world domination. This is the cleverest and smart thing I have seen in a long time. Now they have the ability to extend their influence to over 1 billion Android smartphones with their a billion subscribers. Ultimately it’s a matter of power and I think right now Google just got the finger from Facebook.

Does Google care?

The bigger question to ask is whether Google cares about the Facebook home. The answer is a definite YES, because it directly attacks Google Plus, and Google Plus is what Google cares about and not Android. If you thought Android is what Google cares about you are sadly mistaken.  Android was just a means for Google to get mobile and you now know they can do whatever they want with it. Another reason why Facebook home is a threat to Google is that there is no such thing as a sleek implementation of social networking on any of the Google services. Google plus is great and I love it dearly but its not nearly as sleekly implemented into Android ever,  even in stock Android with the Nexus the way Facebook has done for the Facebook home. By the way and for the record, not everyone will find Facebook home appealing, infact if you check on the Play store it has a poor rating of abou 2.2/ 5 starts as shown below.

But i assure you  even core Facebook fans could find it to be a little bit too much for them and they would be okay going into the app and not having to bring the app on top to the homescreen.

Is there Potential?

Am not even remotely suggesting or predicting the success of Facebook home, but there is a lot of potential, as Facebook made a smart calculated move. Technically and design-wise very well done, this is all very good and Facebook took us by surprise.

Another question I asked myself is to what extent will Facebook allow other apps to integrate deeply into home? Will they allow tweets in there or HTC’s blink feed? Seems there are certainly so many places Facebook could go to expand on their home experience. One thing I felt really strongly about and I hope they implement it soon is that they need to integrate their new Bing powered search engine called graph search.

Another aspect to this is app is the amount of data Facebook has access to as they will know which apps you are running, how often you running them and when you are running them. So they can actually preempt things; imagine if they start to be successful and they are worried about Google closing Android down and they need their own mobile OS, now Facebook will know which apps people use the most. All they have to do is pay these developers so that they can port these apps to whatever their new OS they come up with. Also I can see Google implementing a tight integration of Google plus with Stock Android as a response to Facebook home. Although that would be such a reactionary move if it happens. And ultimately here is the take away for me; Samsung is even more screwed in all of this because they have none of this. They don’t have an ecosystem, they don’t have data about you unlike Apple and Google, but Facebook has the most data about you for example what you like, what you do, etc.

If you think for a second that smart devices can’t know about you and be smart, then that’s not the future. The future we have seen is Google Now, and I think eventually Facebook will get to that, where the phone knows you so well it anticipates what you are doing and gives you helpful advice. Whether that’s creepy or not, that’s not for me to decide that’s for all of you to decide. But when I see the Facebook home Advert, I find it creepy but I can see lots of young people out there who find this awesome. Am sure the much younger demographic doesn’t even think twice about what Google and Facebook is gathering about them.

So Facebook home is not for me even if am a Facebook fan, i had to uninstall it within two weeks of testing it. Give it a try and tell us what you think

I assume as per now most Android owners who know about it have officially downloaded or side loaded Facebook home onto their Android phones. One thing is for sure, it’s a beautiful experience which is free and it will sit on top of your Samsung touch wiz or HTC sense UI experience anytime at any day. You don’t need to buy a new phone to enjoy this experience, with just a click or two you can enjoy the new Facebook experience and that to me is like the secret weapon it’s like the Trojan horse or some kind or holy grail for Facebook, assuming you want this on your phone in the first place.

Facebook has done some really amazing work in terms of UI and user experience and idea far better than stock Android the difference is that the goal is totally different. I personally don’t see myself using home for a long time as my skin but I know so many people who would kill just to have this experience. One this is for sure that this will not convert any one to Facebook it’s basically for the existing Facebook users. I think most will try it out and latter uninstall it, as there is totally no risk on Facebook’s part or on the part of the consumers as there is an easy opt in opt out option.

Settings Page – Enabling Facebook Home

I think the popularity of Facebook home will be a word of mouth thing, I think this is stealth marketing it will be so good to Facebook users who try it out and they are hardcore Facebook users. They will tend to stick to it because they know that even if the upgrade to a new Android phone they will be sure that it will look and feel the same way.

I have to admit initially I thought Facebook was going to release an actual Facebook phone but it seems they were very smart with their strategy and am sure I am not the only one that was taken by surprise. Let’s take a look at some of the alternatives they could have done:

• They could have come out with their very own OS, an idea which would be too risky considering the fact that they don’t have an ecosystem mature enough.

• They could have come up with a UI that basically forks Android like Amazon, which they never did.

Facebook instead decided to go for a Launcher an idea which I many describe as smart, which blows you away the first time you use it especially for a first version product. One thing I have been happy about is that Facebook is promising monthly updates and I have a feeling that they are actually going to hold to it cause this is such a big deal to them. If you take a look at the difference between how many impressions they get at each individual status updates now versus with Facebook home. If you watched the Keynote the Facebook CEO mentioned that the average person turns their phone on and just looks at it 100 times a day, which is certainly the case for me and for anybody who is into smartphones. But if you can take those 100 opportunities and covert those into just looking people’s status updates casually it will me more of a good pass of time than starting at a screen full of only icons. I actually find this concept very interesting and unique and seldom seen in the industry.

When I started using Facebook home I kind of really got tired of my friends as I was up-to-date and liking each and every comment my friends post, but the point I was initially missing and was the fact that it kept me engaged.

The good and bad

For the deep Facebook fans with the right devices they will love the new Facebook experience.  The UI its self is not in your face so much, it’s pretty genuine (for lack of a better word), once you get the idea behind it, I think it’s easy to get the hang of what you are doing.  For example you need to know that you have to double tap in order to like something, or long press to see the whole picture. I really liked the implementation of the Facebook notifications but don’t get me wrong not everyone is going to love it as some prefer the status bar as implemented by Google in Android.

On the down side it has to be made clear that on the HTC First there is a deeper Facebook home integration than the downloaded version from the Market place. The difference is that for the HTC First you can get all kinds on notifications on the Facebook home screen including emails, alarms, etc while for the downloaded version you only get the Facebook notifications.  Other cons about the Facebook home experience include that fact that you don’t have the option of putting widgets or folders on your lockscreen on the launcher. But if we come down to reality the average user on a smartphone may have 6 to 10 apps installed and they don’t necessarily have a shortcut on their screen for that. I observed many people’s smartphone trends and I rarely see people use folders unlike power users like us. We all know that Apple is been known to be liked for the simplicity of its user experience and I think Facebook is kind of stealing that page. They are technically beating both Apple and Google at their own game with this, that’s why Apple will never allow Facebook home experience on their platform.

Another big con of Facebook home is the amount of data that your phone is using. So let me illustrate, I played with my phone with Facebook phone for 4 days. May be before I start perhaps I have to mention that within Facebook home you have the option of going high, medium or low data usage. This is because if you have a limited data plan you don’t have to use all of it definitely and so Facebook will control how many status updates are coming in and how often it’s refreshing, which is a cool feature. Now with that said I was on the high setting throughout and I ended up using roughly 80 MB of data within in four days. So if you expand that out to a full month, which is about 600MB per month, so if you have a 1GB plan that’s like more than half of your data used on Facebook’s cover feed.  You definitely want to have an unlimited data bundle if you are a real Facebook die hard. And for this app to be popular in Africa this should be addressed.

The bulk of the Facebook demographic use mid range smartphones and such phones are not yet officially supported by Facebook’s new launcher. We have already seen people running Facebook home on phones that are not officially supported. If you look at stock Android, Samsung’s Touchwiz or HTC’s sense, all these user interfaces are really designed for people who are power users, there is a million tweaks, a million settings its gone so bad that even the Samsung Galaxy S4 has a grid a grid array version of the quick settings.  When the average user sees all that they will mesmerized, wondering what all those settings all do.   So what Facebook is doing is that they are getting rid of all that clutter and serving the average phone user.

In the next editorial (Part II) find out if  there is potential for Facebook home in mobile, If Google cares about Facebook home and lastly Facebook’s Plans for mobile domination.

It reminds me of a meeting we held at NTV Uganda offices back in 2011. Boaz Shani had just launched UGO, or Uganda Goes Online if you can call it that, and was involved in very intensive marketing. Sensitization, actually. He used to preach to different business leaders about how “there’s a new media platform called ‘the Internet’”; and prepared very animated slides showing details of the facts and figures behind the Internet.

This particular afternoon, the company on the receiving end of this “gospel” was NTV Uganda.

Then General Manager, Joe Munene, kept popping the questions; ‘so how do you make money? how do you benefit?’ To be honest, it was actually concerning me almost as much.

“At the moment, we’re doing everything for free. We want you to come online. We’re starting a revolution,” Boaz responded.

“Ah, so you’re like UN, huh?” Wondered Munene.

Boaz cheekily answered, “You could say that.”

For obvious reasons, I’ll not go into the rest of the meeting, except how it ended.

“Since we now have UN on the team, why not? Let’s…” concluded Munene.

I was equally unconvinced about Boaz’s UNness. So as we walked back to the car, I decided to continue the discussion with him. I asked him what was really in it for him.

“Eventually, people will remember that we started this. That’s enough for me!”

A target to “put Uganda online” seemed like a wild goose chase to me at the time. Boaz was motivated. “We have to do it now when we still have the energy,” he added.

The rest of the “general public” attended his presentation a few months later at TechFest 2011, and hundreds of others have been held week-in week-out.

I haven’t talked to him to know how he now feels about his contribution, but I reckon he’s very pleased that so many people have now “come online” that companies reserve some square units on their marketing material for their social media icons; including the MTN strip-banner that’s in between the menus on this website!

Don’t ask me about the other factors that have contributed to the online growth… I was just thinking about this one! For now, anyway.

“Best Regards,” it read. And some times, I’d sub-cautiously add a “Cheers” just before the preset signature!

I have been using email for over 12 years, but never really imagined how meaningless the hundreds of “XOXO” email goodbyes from people I’d even met, never much less hugged or kissed, were!

So today I was reading an email from someone whose last name I can’t even recall – for purposes of this blog, let’s call her Jovia. She was writing to me about a certain relatively insignificant partnership, and here was the first line:

“I take extreme pleasure in introducing…” And as I read, I felt it was a little bit separated from reality, because, as far as I can tell, this partnership isn’t anywhere high enough on their priority list.

It’s surprising no one is talking about this! Everyone has a breaking point, and for sure some one will get tired of the trend at some point. For me, it was the ridiculous variations on “Regards” that I received over the past few months. My transition from signoff submissive to signoff subversive began when Jovia ended the said email to me with “Warmest regards.”

Were these scalding hot regards superior to the ordinary “Regards” I had been receiving on a near-daily basis? Obviously they were better than the merely “Warm Regards” I got from a co-worker the previous week. Then I received a “Best Regards” from my client, yet most of the email pointed at errors in the job we were handling and expresses “deep disappointment” at some of the issues.

Apparently when urging me to engage my team more on work-related issues, the good people at [name-withheld] were regarding me in a way that simply could not be topped.

After 10 or 15 more “Regards” of varying magnitudes, I could take no more. I finally realized the ridiculousness of spending even one second thinking about the totally unnecessary words that we tack on to the end of emails. And I came to the following conclusion: It’s time to eliminate email signoffs completely. Henceforth, I do not want—nay, I will not accept—any manner of regards. Nor will I offer any. And I urge you to do the same.

Think about it. Email signoffs are holdovers from a bygone era when letter writing—the kind that required ink and paper—was a major means of communication. The handwritten letters people sent included information of great import and sometimes functioned as the only communication with family members and other loved ones for months. When we were in Ntare School—and later on Kigezi College Butobere — it was a really big deal to “receive”, and every day after supper we would pass by the notice board at Mbaguta House and eagerly read through the list of those with letters… Mostly, such a letter would be in response to yours sent at least a month or so prior.

In that case, it made sense to go to town, to get flowery with it (I actually did sell writing pads). Then, a formal signoff was entirely called for.

But those times have long since passed. And so has the era when individuals sought to win the favor of the king via dedication letters and love notes ending with “Your majesty’s Most bounden and devoted,” or “Fare thee as well as I fare.” Also long gone are the days when explorers attempted to ensure continued support for their voyages from monarchs and benefactors via fawning formal correspondence related to the initial successes of this or that expedition. Francisco Vázquez de Coronado had good reason to end his 1541 letter to King Charles I of Spain, relaying details about parts of what is now the southwestern United States, with a doozy that translates to “Your Majesty’s humble servant and vassal, who would kiss the royal feet and hands.”

I am not an important person. Nonetheless, each week, on average, I receive more than 400 emails. I send out about 200. These messages do not contain the stuff of old-timey letters. I’m trading thoughts on various work-related matters with people who know me and don’t need to be “Best”-ed. Emails, over time, have become more like text messages than handwritten letters. And no one in their right mind uses signoffs in text messages (actually, I remember two text messages I received recently with a signoff).

What’s more, because no email signoff is exactly right for every occasion, it’s not uncommon for these add-ons to cause affirmative harm. Some people take offense to different iterations of “goodbye,” depending on the circumstances. Others, meanwhile, can’t help but wonder, “What did he mean by that?” or spend entire days worrying about the implications of a sudden shift from “See you soon!” in one email, to “Best wishes” in the next. So, naturally, we consider, and we overthink, and we agonize about how best to close out our emails. We ask others for advice on the matter, and we give advice on it when asked.

The Internet is littered with articles that examine the strengths and weaknesses of various email signoffs and purport to offer guidance for those who just can’t close the deal. But rather than debating which to use and how best to avoid signoff-related disasters, can’t we all just agree to opt for “none of the above” and finally take comfort in ending our emails with the actual last thing that we want to say?

I realize that, at first, this new, message-minimalist fashion may feel unnatural. But we can do this—together. You see, all those work-day “regards” prompted yours truly to take a good, hard look in the mirror. And what I saw was someone who could not begrudge anyone on the signoff front.

And while we’re at it, why stop at the signoff alone? I think we can and should generally leave off the recipient’s name at the beginning, too. Including a formal greeting brings its own manifold headaches: Dear? Hi? Hey? Kill me now. The recipient saw your name in the sender field when she clicked on the email, and she knows her name, too, it’s generally safe to assume. There’s no need for repetition. Remember, we’re streamlining here. A married friend of mine was doesn’t write “Dear” because his wife may ask questions of who that is that’s dear to him!

See, our lives could get a lot simpler.

Seems Google has not yet learnt their lesson, as the first product they made from the USA, the Nexus Q a home media streamer,  never saw the light of day in the commercial market because of the price tag it carried due to the high cost of production. Google still thinks it makes more sense to do it closer to home so they can monitor the process.

Unlike Goggle’s Nexus 4 by LG and the Nexus 7 from Asus, this production will be much more limited in number and size. It’s not clear yet if the bigger, full-fledged manufacturing in the future  run will take place in the US as well, or if operations will shift back overseas read as CHINA.

We are yet to see if Google’s persistence to give American production another chance will bear fruit. Till then, we can only keep our ears to the ground.

The show host persists to ask about the Lumia 928 and in the process also tries to show him this iphone and asks Elop that he wants to switch his iphone with the Lumia 928.  “I’ll take care of that,” says Elop, before launching the phone onto a floor with a reassuring clonk. As per now we are not sure if that iphone still works.

In our usual spirit we bring you the evidence of what we talking about.

Today when I chat with different online publishers about their traffic, a lot of them give me numbers I can so easily guess are innacurate.

“Is that according to Google Analytics?” I asked one of them.

“No. We got a problem with Google. If you check, we actually no longer even run their ads,” he replied.

Problem with Google? I guessed he meant they had their Google AdSense account disabled for any of various reasons, and they “divorced” Google altogether.

Unfortunately, though, Google isn’t a company you divorce for long, and here is why:

Web stats programs tend to have different purposes and give different results. I don’t worry too much about the discrepancies between the various programs – and am going to explain why.

The main difference between Google Analytics, AWStats and Webalizer is that Google Analytics gathers visitor information via some JavaScript code you have to place on each of your site’s pages, but the other two interpret the site’s server logs which are generated and held, on your webserver.

This means that the point of data collection is different – for Google Analytics data is collected on the visitor’s browser (and we know how many of those there are with their infinite configuration, version, platform and addon possibilities), and for the others the data is collected on one single place – your webserver.

In fact, all three may even collect daily data in different time zones so ‘days’ begin and end at different times if you host your site in a different time zone to the one you live in. Your Google Account will most likely be in your local time zone, and your server based reports will be based on the server’s time zone.

Think about that for a moment. In the case of Google Analytics data collected from many thousands of your visitors, from a wide variety of locations and in the other, the information is passively collected in one location, directly from your webserver. And further, there is the possibility of time zone discrepancies. It is obvious that the data cannot possibly yield the same answers.

Google Analytics

How Google Analytics Determines Visitor Numbers

1. Google Analytics relies on the website owner adding special code to each page of their website. This is easy to do when you use a CMS like WordPress to build sites, but not everyone does of course. Consequently, some sites may not have the appropriate Google Analytics code placed on every page. This would cause inaccuracies if visits to some pages were not recorded because the code just isn’t there.
2. Even if a site does have the Google Analytics code on all its pages, if the site loads slowly, the Google Analytics code may not have a chance to run. This can be the case if the code is placed at the bottom of the page (as we’re advised to do).
3. Significant numbers of people have fears of the malicious use of JavaScript by some websites. These people routinely block some or all JavaScript from running in their browsers. If you are visited by such a person, their visits will no be tracked by Google Analytics.
4. Google Analytics relies on cookies to work out a number of things about a visitor. Cookies determine for example, if a visitor is a new one or a returning visitor and also allow Google Analytics to figure out how long a visitor’s visit lasts amongst other things. So, if a user cleans out his cookies, or if he doesn’t allow them to be dropped, Google Analytics will inaccurately record his visit.
5. Google Analytics does not record search engine bots and other crawlers on your site. This is good because you then don’t get robot visits confused with human visits. It means you need to look at your server logs if you want to understand which robots are visiting your site and where all your bandwidth is going. For this Webalizer or AWstats is perfect (you’ve just found a reason to use both types of statistics program).
6. Google Analytics starts counting a new visit after a 30 minute delay between visits. So if you visit a site, then go to lunch for 31 minutes, then come back to browsing the same site, that will count as two visits.
7. You get under-counting of visits in Google Analytics because not everyone allows Google Analytics to run on their browsers and because the old synchronous Google code (which many people are still running), if placed at the bottom of all your pages may not load before your visitor leaves. To fix the code issue, make sure you use the newer asynchronous code for your Analytics.

Google Analytics is a tool for website owners to market their sites online. It helps you understand where an indivudal visitor came from, how they found you, what they did on your site, how engaging they found your content to be, how they left your site and which website goals were acheived. With this information you can make changes to your site to further optimize it for marketing, sales or other conversion.

AWStats

How AWStats Determines Visitor Numbers

1. AWStats interprets your server log files and as such it defines what it thinks a visitor is, based solely on IP address and user agent. So if something visits several pages on your site with a user agent indicating it is a browser such as Firefox say, and on a single IP address, then that will count as a human visitor to AWStats. But if the user agent is GoogleBot, it will be defined as a robot and not count as a human visitor.
2. However, some robots don’t identify themselves and although AWStats tries to keep a database of known robots, it can’t know them all. Sometimes robots are counted as human visitors and sometimes, a person who visits a site on a number of different IP addresses in the same session will count as more than one visitor too. And if someone views a page they looked at yesterday or last week (and it’s in their browser cache), AWStats won’t measure their visit at all.
3. You can use it to see how much bandwidth various robots and crawlers are using, and where they come from. It is useful for finding out who is crawling your site, not how your vsiitors behave (or even what a visitor is) once on your site.
4. The other thing is that without cookies to help it determine which visitor is which on the same IP, AWstats uses a period of time of 60 minutes to gauge a visit. So if one person visits for 30 minutes, then 35 minutes later, visits again, this counts as one visit. But if they visit now for 55 minutes and then visit again 10 minutes later this counts as two visits.
5. Mostly, however, you get over-counting of visits on AWStats due to the mis-identification of robot visits as human visits.

AWStats isn’t a marketing tool. But it does allow you to get a good understanding of visitor numbers from both humans and robots, and how much bandwith is being used. You might also be able to detect if someone is hotlinking to your images or document files too, and taking your bandwidth that way. It is a tool for network adminstrators more than marketers. AWStats won’t help you with conversion issues, website goals, nor measure the effectiveness of your SEO or marketing campaigns.

Webalizer

How Webalizer Determines Visitor Numbers

1. Webalizer works in a similar way to AWStats – in that it interprets server logfiles. In my tests it consistently reported more visitors than either Google Analytics, or AWStats. The main reason for this this that it doesn’t try by default, to differentiate between robot and human visits. So when people have been used to Webalizer, and then get Google Analytics, they are often perplexed by the steep (apparent) drop in traffic.
2. Webalizer sets a visit at 30 minutes duration, rather than AWStsts’ 60 minutes. So more vists will be recorded due to this fact alone.
3. You can set Webalizer up to ignore certain spiders or robots, but maybe this isn’t worth doing as you can’t eliminate them all so why bother?

Like AWStats, Webalizer isn’t a marketing tool. It does however provide a simple answer to the question – where has all my bandwidth gone? By default, it lumps all visitors together – human and robot and has only a 30 minute visitor window. It is hardly surprising the numbers it reports are generally higher than those reported by Google Analytics and AWStats.

Information from Devon Blog was used in this article.

Till next time when iOS 6.1.4 update is released to fix this.

Its 15.03.2013, time check 2:00 AM Friday morning my Alarm goes off as I had set it to watch the Samsung UNPACKED event 2013 part 1 (yes there is  a part 2 later this year) . The event was live  at the 6,000 seater Radio City Music Hall in New york.  Just like the kind of dedication our soccer fans here in Uganda will have when watching the next World cup matches that will be in Brazil, I too woke up in the wee hours of the night to set my eyes upon this Samsung event that was streaming live on YouTube. Well somehow YouTube streaming disappointed me and I had to switch to streaming the event via a different streaming service nevertheless it was the same event I was watching.

For starters the viewers had to wait for some extra 20 minutes or so before the event could begin.  Well that’s not being late unlike a Ugandan event in Lugogo which can begin an hour later than the set time. For those with unlimited Internet bundles and huge Internet packages can watch these 50:33 minutes of event in its full glory below.

Just when I thought I was the only one left puzzled with what I had just watched, in came all tech blogs and websites around the world expressing similar pertains. Generally Samsung tried to astonish us with a full Broadway production of which they used a slew of what seemed to be expensive actors that tired to depict the different features of the new Galaxy S 4.

“We were disappointed that the phone is a Galaxy S III on steroids”

To start off the event, the devices where brought in a box by a little boy called Jeremy that Samsung paid as the phone’s Secret Messenger (wish I was that little kid). This was unique compared to other smartphone flagship launches, but was it really necessary? Okay not only where we disappointed that the phone is a Galaxy S III on steroids we also had the Mc clapping loud in the mic after very key feature was announced and all you would hear was the irritating hand stump in the microphone instead of the audience . He did it  especially when the 13MP camera and the LTE features were announced.

Before I continue, I have to make one point clear, the event was actually really good and this is why. This phone has like a laundry list of features filled with an endless parade of stuff but every single feature in this phone is esoteric and weird. Like a camera that can take 100 photos in 4 seconds, doesn’t mean anything to people, but Samsung saying that they are going to do a skit and hire a whole bunch of actors to show it off on stage is actually successful. Frankly it’s modest and it’s not what I expected to see because its super cheesy and lame. With over 6,000 people who were in the Radio City Music Hall and for the over half a million people who where following this event online found the show entertaining.

Unlike other Samsung keynote events; this one was quite mature as they talked about the phone all that time with no abstract “BS” of digital humanism they showed off in their past launches. There was no inspired by nature tag lines no water dripping sounds like on the GS III. Samsung was like, here are the features of our new phone and here is how we have chosen to demonstrate them, simple and clear. It was a gigantic improvement for Samsung and it was entertaining but also entertaining in may be all the wrong ways.

And this is why;

“What kind of rank consumerism is?”

To hit the nail on the head, the skits and the things they did to show case the product were so silly and so like out of touch with reality. For example at the beginning they showed a family and the kid was like “I have a play, ooh Dad your phone isn’t good enough to take a photo of my play?” And am like what the hell? What kind of rank consumerism is that to force you get a new phone or otherwise your daughter’s life would suck?

And don’t get me started on that Orchestra, at the beginning it comes up from the bottom of the stage and then it went away and at the end of the show they praise the Orchestra as if it has been performing throughout the show. I am just curious to find out the entire budget of this show, because I really asked myself, why are they paying that Orchestra that only appeared for less than 5mins in the entire show?

One of the most personally troubling skits for me was when they demonstrated some s-voice or voice driving feature, and to hammer home the fact that this was meant to be used in a car, they brought out a sideways mini copper that stayed on stage for the rest of the presentation and no one attempted to get in it or drive it sideways or even move it an inch; like that was Mini copper’s contribution to Samsung’s presentation.

“Not only was it sexist but also wrong”

For the first time it was shocking and weird as they had a hunky guy come on stage and take his shirt off and a gang of women drooled over him as they looked away from their phones and the video paused , and all this was like crazy stuff. And why would you ever want to use a feature where you have to wave your hand over the phone to interact with it instead of touching it? And they had one of the women say “because my nails are wet!” (Not only was this sexist but also wrong) and another was like “because I don’t want to put down the drink” just a relatable crazy spectacle, but an effective crazy thing I must add.

“Most of the features that Samsung has incorporated in the Galaxy s4 already exist on Android”

Let’s talk about the s-translate feature, seriously Samsung you are not reinventing the wheel here, Google already has this feature and it is  called Google translate unless Samsung is touting theirs as an offline version of Google’s online translator.  If you look at most of the features that Samsung has incorporated in the Galaxy s4, seems a lot of these already exist on Android and Samsung needs to promote them in this way or rebuild them in some other way. Its like they get an app make small tweaks put an “S” prefix before the app and vwaaaaala we have s-health, s-wallet, s-voice, etc

Next is the IR (Infra Red) blaster, seems like a feature of the phone that they never talked about that much on stage. It seems to be a weird trend on all high-end smart phones for 2013 as there is a notion that your cellphone will be your remote control for your television, well that’s great but its super useless. Let’s face it, this is technology that has existed in mobile phones in the late 90s and you can basically put in the phone at UGX 0.0/=  so it shouldn’t be a big deal and am willing to bet that people will use these phone as a dedicated remote control for their TVs. I think that’s not the problem Samsung should be solving, they are doing what every dumb universal remote control does and ultimately having an IR blaster in this mobile phone won’t fix Samsung’s experience because it never has. Don’t get me wrong it’s not a bad feature to have but it’s still gimmicky.

“The very sad truth is that the Lowest Common Denominator (LCD) is the stereotype of people”

It seems Samsung’s launch event was so terrible in some context because they were stuck between a rock and a hard place on how they will present the Galaxy s4 to the world, imagine launching a phone on almost every mobile carrier in 155 countries and considering all those people you can only end up at the Lowest Common Denominator (LCD). The very sad truth is that the Lowest Common Denominator (LCD) is the stereotype of people, and i think Samsung had to be smarter than that. You have to think to yourself that we are talking to this huge audience, but the people who are covering it and those who will be there to talk about it are not necessarily the huge audience they are basically the tech fans around the world or people who love gadgets. The only silver lining in this is that at least it was not as stupid as some of the other stuff they have done before.

Last year the tag line for the Galaxy s III phone was “designed for humans” this year round for the Galaxy s4 the tag line is  “life companion” with no irony at all. Generally this event left me with mixed weird feelings and emotions till i slept off at about 4:00 AM. The Samsung Galaxy s4 is going to sale like “tickets to heaven” in 2013 and there is nothing I will do about it however much I rant or have sleepless nights.