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Washington: In a bid to tackle the growing influence of China on the global stage, Indian American Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy unveiled his strategy on Thursday. Ramaswamy emphasized the importance of preventing Russia from further aligning with Beijing and outlined his plan to achieve this goal through a strategic "deal" with Moscow.
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Con solo un añito y baila como anuel. Dalianis desde Cuba #china #chinachallenge #anuelaa #anuel (en Camagüey, Cuba) https://www.instagram.com/p/B2DDiJDB31f/?igshid=8wd5j5whrnvj
Puro #GirlPower en este #ChinaChallenge ❤️ @marianacaasa @nicolemendez25 @andredancer *No tengo derechos de la cancion* https://www.instagram.com/p/B0oRqY1B7nW/?igshid=1pci5vxj8uw5v
#ChinaChallenge con estas bellezas❤️ @marianacaasa @nicolemendez25 @andredancer https://www.instagram.com/p/B0oIwYhBJ9Q/?igshid=1ewted6zon3hm
Living with UX failures - Automating yourself - Day 6 - China Challenge
I have now been using my 100$ china android phone for nearly a week and I have come around a couple of things that I like (and still have to write about) and a couple of annoyances. I was able to fix my chrome reader mode problem by tinkering some more. Apparently you can pinch zoom into the text and than the reader view reloads with larger fonts. So I have some of my browsing comfort back, that I left behind on my iPhone last Saturday.
The most obvious problem I am facing is, that my chinaphone keeps losing mobile data on different occasions. For example when I leave a wifi, more often that not the mobile data will stop flowing. Sometimes this also happens when I change my location by several hundred meters. Maybe this has something to do with changing the network cell and the cell tower my phone is connected to.
When this happens, I have to change networks and the easiest way to do this, is setting the maximum speed to 2G and then back to 3G after 10 seconds. Never to 4G, because 4G instantly loses mobile data again. I figured all of this out the hard way. Since this can happen anytime, I had to make a habit out of looking at the network icon every few minutes and whenever I leave a wifi or travel for several hundred meters.
Apparently this is really bad. This is most likely not an android problem, but rather a chinaphone problem, but still. This flaw forced me to create my own workaround to ensure proper functionality. This is the workaround:
monitor cellular status regularly
if mobile data is switched off:
a. open settings b. set speed to 2G c. wait for 10s d. set speed to 3G
It can be done, but it forces me to be a monitoring and maintenance device for my smartphone. I become an automated service entity for electronic that is supposed to provide services to me. When the tools we use to facilitate our lives require constant micromanaging, something is wrong. Proper functioning of your car does not require you to constantly check the air-gas-mix in the motor. You do not have to constantly check your fridge’s temperature.
However, while this case may be somewhat unusual, this is a behavior we see a lot with smartphones. People get very good at chaining together touches and swipes to achieve a goal that should be automated on the phone and not within the behavior of the user. We all used to unlock/swipe/go to settings/switch airplane mode before this became a more prominent button. Almost every android user has one of these annoying memory management tools that allows them to clean the system’s memory every 20 seconds - a task that every OS and even app should do by itself.
If you find yourself automated by your communication device, your relevant use cases are not designed into the workflows of the OS or launcher. We are good at selfautomation and glossing over these UX ommissions, but we should be aware of the fact, that in these cases the device is not working for us. Making it work somehow is not the same as working.
The things I miss - Day 3 - 100 Day China Challenge
I started my 100 day china challenge on Saturday. - i.e. substituting my iPhone for a 100$ china smartphone. After a weekend without my iPhone and with the cheap wonder, I noticed several things, that I miss.
Oddly enough, I don’t miss services that much. I guess everybody I know uses Whatsapp anyway, so it is fairly easy for me to keep going on with my daily chatter amongst family and friends even without iMessages. I also don’t really miss iCloud since I have never been a big fan of storing my personal pictures and documents on somebody else’s server. I don’t use Apple Music and I rely more on Netflix and Hulu than iTunes. So service-wise I am good.
But I do miss a lot of those tiny ux improvements that make using an iPhone such a delight. For example browsing history. On an iPhone you just swipe the website you are currently viewing sideways and you can go backwards and forwards in history. I do a lot of classic browsing /researching (not so much app based stuff) and I constantly use the swipe history. Or at least I constantly used it until Saturday morning. On android I have to use a physical ‘back’ button to go back in my browsing history. To go forward again I even have to use the drop down menu. This takes time and feels much slower.
Same with the multi tasking app overview. On iPhone I double press the home button and see all the apps I have currently open. On android I have to hold the home button for a period of time. While this seems trivial, it is easy to double press in under a second and be done with it. Holding for 2 or 3 seconds again requires more time and is slower.
The last thing I currently really miss is the reader mode in safari. Every article can be viewed in safari in an ereader like mode that is much easier to read since it is basically clutter free and the text is bigger and better formated. This functionality is not available in chrome. I googled somewhat and found out that you can enable the reader feature as a beta functionality in the chrome settings. They are in fact well documented, but it is a really long list of options and brief texts descriptions of the options’ functionalities. I had to read and scroll for a minute before I found the feature. I enabled it for ‘pages with article markup’ (or similar), restarted chrome and it did not work. So I opened the settings again and scrolled again and set it to ‘likely articles’ and restarted. Again it did not work for the articles on a major news outlet I was reading at the time. So I opened the settings again and scrolled again and found it again and set it to ‘always’ and restarted. Now there is an additional menu bar at the bottom of the browser, eating away approximately 5% of screen real estate. Upon activating the reader mode, the webpage is shown more or less as plain html. The text is not identical with the system font and is extremely small. In fact, it is smaller than the original website’s text. So small, that I opened the settings again and searched the option again and set the reader mode to ‘off’ and restarted again. This was not a great experience.
Of course these are minor annoyances, but I feel that it shows that android is not really optimized for use cases or at least not for the use cases I care about. Sure, android has way more options for configuration that the iPhone and iOS. But at least with these missing functionalities I have come across, I would prefer one working configuration over many non working ones.
There is stuff that is great though. You will never guess what it is:.... Tell ya later.
100 Day China Challenge - My Life with a 100$ China Smartphone - Day 1
I have something to confess: I am an apple fanboy. I never intended to be one. Actually I fought hard against it for many years. I knew it should feel wrong, but it feels so right.
I have been a linux user since the mid 90s, I have also been the annoying person in our family that forces everybody to migrate to linux. Not only do I think that tinkering with your hardware and software is fun, I think it is a necessity, if you truly want to own the technology that defines your life.
When the first iPhone came out, I thought that it was a stupid idea to combine an mp3 player with a phone. When Android came out, I was excited by the possibilities. A linux devices that not only works as an mp3 player, but also a phone, an ebook reader, a gaming device, a browsing device, a productivity device.... everything will be available on one device and one device only. All with the power of a mobile linux.
So I went ahead and imported a 1st generation single core china tablet to tinker with it and bought myself an Android phone and this is when the fun... stopped. Over the course of 3 increasingly powerful Android tablets and three Android phones and dozens of alternate ROMs I came to realize, that I much prefer multiple devices that each do one thing great rather than one device that is mediocre at every functionality. So the ebook reader became a Kindle, because I much preferred the epaper display. The gaming device became a playstation Vita, because I love physical buttons.
I was appalled at the way, Android phones get sluggish after a few months and at the way there are never any security updates ever. At all! I feel strongly about security and privacy and this just gives me an accident-waiting-to-happen-feeling. As a linux user I love the way you can update and even upgrade your entire system with a single command line entry. It baffles me how that never translated to Android.
So at one point a got an old iPad. As a joke! Just so I can badmouth it later with it’s walled garden and lack of freedom. Unfortunately or fortunately, it was the best mobile computing experience I ever had up to that point. I carried it around with me for a year and it truly became my one device for many things. One thing led to another and suddenly there was an old Macbook (white!). As a joke! Just so I can tinker around with garageband. Suddenly the old Macbook became a Macbook pro. The old iPad became an Air 2 128GB. At this point the iPhone fit perfectly into this setup. Because it somehow just works. Despite my best efforts to love another mobile OS.
The single most iconic that comes to my mind when thinking about Android and Android users is this: a buddy of mine got his new high end Android, let’s say a Galaxy S25 with 16 Gigs of RAM and a 32 core processor (it was probably less though ;) ). And the first thing he does is install his favorite memory management tool and start hitting the clean memory button every 20 seconds, like it’s crushed candy. Why do people buy hardware that is faster and stronger than my desktop PC and then have to perform core OS functions manually? This for me is Android in a nutshell. It just does not work.
But I want it to! I want it to work, I want this to actually be good. I want all this insanely cheap and powerful hardware to work flawlessly. I want this to be like the linux experience of taking that old PC that is windows-dead and give it new linux-live. I want this sustainable solution for mobile devices. I want at least a passable Android experience on new hardware. I see these cheap Android devices on gearbest and aliexpress and I can’t help but think: all this hardware should account for something. For some level of positive user experience. So I am going back. One last time.
From this day on, I will start a 100 day china challenge: I will substitute my wonderful iPhone with an 100$ Android smartphone from China. It has an octocore processor and 3 Gigs of RAM. It runs on Android 6 Marshmallow and is supposed to receive regular updates. Will it? I don’t know. We’ll see. Stick with me. I will let you know.
