"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our Lollipop, but in our apps." (Shakespeare, updated). Last week I described problems that some users of Android smart phones have seen since upgrading to Lollipop. At the time, I thought my phone wasn't substantially affected. It seems that I was wrong.
After only a few days on Lollipop (aka Android version 5), the phone was clearly using its battery faster than before, but it seemed manageable. On most days, the battery made it through the work day. Barely. But some days a fully charged battery could be exhausted in just a few hours. So I started looking for a way to lengthen the short days and see if "acceptable" performance could be improved.
Some people have "solved" the problem by reverting to KitKat (version 4) or by performing a factory reset on the phone. I didn't care for either of those options because I like some of Lollipop's functions and a factory reset involves a lot of work.
Factory resets are considerably less trouble than they used to be because you can recover the apps and data from backup, but still you have to restore icons to the screens where you want them and re-establish all of the settings that you changed from the defaults.
Holding the option of performing a factory reset or rolling back to KitKat in reserve, I decided to see if I could determine what was using all the power and make that stop happening.
Android phones are powerful devices. They have screens that, although small, have more pixels than are found on many desktop systems. Phone users also tend to want everything to be immediately available so there are lots of background applications running. Guilty as charged on all counts! But what can I do to fix the problem?
The screen seemed a good place to start. The background image I had selected was bright and colorful. That means the phone had to light up 3.6 million pixels whenever it was turned on. Assuming each pixel is made up of red, green, and blue dots, let's triple that number.
I wondered what would happen if I created my own background that consisted primarily of dark colors. So I used Photoshop to set up several images, some of which used a linear cross-fade from one dark color to another (from gray to black, for example) or consisted of just a single dark color (green and black were two of my choices). Would I miss the colorful background? No, I wouldn't.
The image I settled on is dark blue at the top and dark red at the bottom. It's understated. Maybe even elegant.
Click any of the smaller images for a full-size view.
Press Esc to dismiss the larger image.
Lux, an app that I use on an Android tablet to adjust screen brightness automatically never seemed to work quite right on the phone, so I uninstalled it and enabled the built-in auto function. It seems to be working OK, so I've retained it. Even more power could be conserved by turning off the auto function and setting the brightness to a lower setting, but I didn't do that.
These changes make a difference only when the phone is displaying an image. My expectation was that the real memory hogs were applications and background services that run all the time. So I wanted to search for features that I could turn off.
Before I could determine how to do that, I remembered the operating system's built-in power-saving functions. That looked promising and I enabled it.
Turning on power-saving offered a variety of options in 3 general areas:
Ultra Saving Mode: No sale on this one. The Ultra Saving Mode would be the right choice following a storm that has knocked out all electric power. Selecting this setting essentially transforms the smart phone into a phone with no smarts. Nearly all background apps are closed. Most regular apps are unavailable. The screen is monochrome. The phone can still be used to make calls, but that's about it.
Battery life on standby in Ultra Saving Mode was estimated at 17 days, though.
An Android smart phone has about 157 thousand menus, sub-menus, options, and choices. That may be a slight overstatement. I poked through them looking for features that I didn't need and could turn off.
The System Menu contains a Battery section and there you can see which apps use the most power and use that information to adjust those apps.
Not all apps are adjustable, but many are. It's worth checking to see if a trivial application that you don't use very often is gnawing away at the battery when you're not looking.
The e-mail client I prefer, K-9, seemed to be using more than its share of power, so I changed the background from light to dark. Other programs may have settings that determine how often they refresh their information. Weather Underground will update whenever I open the application, so I changed the refresh option from "as needed" to every 2 hours. That will reduce background data transfer and also Wi-Fi usage.
I also modified the way the phone alerts me. "Haptic notification" (also known as vibration) uses a lot of battery power. If the phone vibrates for every e-mail (mine did), battery life will suffer. I turned of all of the haptic notifications except for the one that vibrates if I enter my unlock pattern incorrectly. Warning: If you turn off all vibration functions and set the phone to announce calls by vibrating, it won't. Instead, turn off all the other vibration options and leave the function on for calls.
How many apps are running in the background? Lollipop makes it a lot easier to shut down applications that are still open. Just pop up the recently-used applications and close the ones you won't need for a while. Reducing CPU load by eliminating background applications goes a long way toward increasing battery life.
Oh, and remember to restart the phone from time to time. Sometimes there are background applications that may not necessarily show up when you display the recent apps. Restarting the phone will clear all of those.
After 14 hours, the battery now usually has 60% or more of its charge left instead of having only 10% after 8 hours. I feel that I haven't given up many of the phone's most useful features and performance is largely unaffected.
So before you head for the factory-reset button, try poking around under the hood.
The people who are in charge of purchasing computers and selecting operating systems for large organizations mostly turned their backs on Windows 8 and Windows 8.1, so Microsoft is making a concerted effort to encourage them to adopt Windows 10. Just how big that effort is became apparent this week in Chicago.
This week Microsoft held its initial Ignite Conference in Chicago to show IT managers features of the upcoming versions of Windows management, Microsoft Office, hybrid cloud infrastructure, and SQL Server. Many IT managers considered Windows 8 to have weak management tools, but they want to see what Windows 10 has to offer.
More than 23,000 people attended the conference and thousands more watched online as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella showed some of the upcoming changes and enhancements. According to Nadella, "No business can succeed and scale without IT innovating and transforming."
Nadella addressed some of the challenges IT managers face today. Chief among these is the desire by users to personalize their computers and applications. Nadella says that the Windows Update for Business is a new management option for Windows 10 that's intended to keep devices up to date with the latest security patches and Windows features. The objective is to provide faster security updates and better control for IT managers while allowing users to do what they want to do.
A new System Center Configuration Manager is available now in the Windows 10 Technical Preview. This feature can be used to deploy, update, manage, and secure Windows 10 and Microsoft plans to release service packs for existing Configuration Manager 2012 and 2012 R2 customers during the week of May 11.
The public preview of Office 2016 was also released this week. (Warning: You'll have to uninstall Office 2013 if you want to give it a try.) The new version improves existing co-authoring functions in the Office applications. Collaboration tools have been present to one degree or another in some of the applications, but the move to cloud-based computing opens the door to more widespread use of this ability. This is not a trivial function to implement. The applications must allow more than one user to access and modify a document simultaneously while making it impossible for more than one person to work on the same part of the document. For example, only one person at a time might be allowed to work on a paragraph in a Word document, but many users could have the document open and be working on other parts of it.
Although Microsoft has owned Skype for several years, it has been slow to institute changes. Skype for Business was introduced as part of the Ignite Conference and it enables customers to broadcast meetings to up to 10,000 people. The service uses Azure Media Services for streaming audio, video, and PowerPoint presentations. It can be extended with 3rd-party applications to add audience polling, formal Q&A, and other functionality.
Exchange Server 2016 was shown at the conference, but won't be available for preview use until later this year. Features that were first delivered in Office 365 will be included in the new Exchange Server version. Examples include more powerful document collaboration, faster search, and developer extensibility for mail, calendar, and contacts.
IT managers who are concerned about security, and that should be all of them, may find Microsoft's Advanced Threat Analytics both interesting and useful. ATA is based on the recent acquisition of Aorato. It is now available in preview. ATA is intended to identify security breaches and threats by using behavioral analysis and machine learning. This isn't a new concept, but it's a welcome addition to the security suite.
The cloud will play an increasingly important part in Microsoft's offerings. The Microsoft Azure Stack, which will be available in demo mode later this year, will add Azure functions in both infrastructure and platform-as-a-service modes. The Azure Stack is built on the same core technology as Azure.
Whether IT managers choose to support the new features or not, at least this week's announcements have given them numerous things to ponder and lots of shiny new toys to play with.
Speech recognition software is getting better and the market is expanding. In the days after the terrorist attacks in 2001, I needed to modify flight plans from Boston to Columbus -- twice. Airlines were in chaos at the time, but American's new speech recognition system worked amazingly well. In the nearly 15 years since then, the process has improved to the point that even hand-held devices can understand what we say.
And ... we ... don't ... have ... to ... talk ... like ... this ... any ... more.
A $2000 research report covers the industry's 3 major vendors -- Microsoft, Nuance Communications, and Validsoft -- and it predicts a compound growth rate of nearly 10% by 2019.
Speech recognition software is able to decode human voices into instructions that can be understood by a computer. In the early days, it was used to transcribe voices for word processors. The programs had to be carefully trained and still often made errors.
Today's applications are used for many more purposes and with much better effect. The technology is even used for biometric security purposes to identify a person who should be granted access to a room or a service. It is popular in mobile banking functions that require authenticated users to speak their instructions.
The report covers the present situation and growth prospects for the global voice recognition market through 2019.
To calculate the voice recognition market size, the report considers revenue generated from sales of hardware systems and sales of software applications. The research includes detailed analysis of software applications like ASR, Voice biometrics (including revenue from speaker identification and speaker verification systems), and text-to-speech. It also presents a vendor ranking and a corresponding detailed analysis of the top four vendors in the market. The report also discusses the major drivers that influence the growth of the market and outlines challenges faced by vendors and the market at large, as well as the key trends emerging in the market.
Along with Microsoft, Nuance Communications, and Validsoft, other prominent vendors such as Advanced Voice Recognition Systems, Agnitio, AT&T, Auraya Systems, LumenVox, Raytheon BBN Technologies, Telisma, Voice Biometrics Group, Voice Trust, and Voxeo are described in the report.
ReportsnReports.com is an online market research reports library of half a million studies of more than 5000 specialized markets.
Microsoft has filed suit against the "John Doe" owners of a Verizon IP address (74.111.202.30), charging that hundreds of pirated Microsoft products have been illegally activated through it. Verizon owns the address and it appears to be located near or in San Diego.
Microsoft says the address was used to activate numerous Windows 7 installations using stolen product keys or keys that have been used more times than their license allows. The suit was filed in US District Court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle. The defendants are identified as "John Does 1-10 using IP address 74.111.202.30."
The complaint says that the defendants appear to consist of one or more commercial entities that subsequently distributed systems to customers who were unaware they were receiving pirated software.
"As part of its cyberforensic methods," the complaint states, "Microsoft analyzes product key activation data voluntarily provided by users when they activate Microsoft software, including the IP address from which a given product key is activated." The complaint lists 3 types of invalid activations: Product keys known to have been stolen from Microsoft’s supply chain or which have never been issued by Microsoft with a valid license, product keys impermissibly used, and any type of product key used more times than is authorized by the applicable software license.
If the "John Does" are identified, they could be in for a heavy whack. According to the suit: "As a result of Defendants’ wrongful conduct, Microsoft is entitled to recover its actual damages, Defendants’ profits attributable to the infringement, and treble damages and attorney fees pursuant to 15 U.S.C. § 1117(a) and (b). Alternatively, Microsoft is entitled to statutory damages under 15 U.S.C. § 1117(c)."
Comcast and Time Warner called off their plans to merge recently, but not until they had spent more than half a billion dollars on the project. Half a billion dollars! Why, that's probably more than you have stashed away in your credit union savings account.
Comcast proposed the acquisition of Time Warner early in 2014. It would have been a $45.2 billion deal. (That small-sounding "point 2" equates to 200 million dollars, just to put this whole mess into perspective.) Federal regulators and most of the organizations that were promoting Net Neutrality seemed not to like the idea.
No "break-up fee" was involved, though, because the deal was structured without such a fee. That's good news for Verizon's stockholders because break-up costs can be huge, at least when viewed through the eyes of mere mortals. When AT&T's attempt to acquire T-Mobile was quashed by the Department of Justice a few years ago, AT&T had to pay T-Mobile $4 billion in cash and spectrum. That, in fact, is how T-Mobile is able to afford its current marketing campaign to steal AT&T's customers.
Comcast's most recent earnings report reveals that the company spent more than $330 million in what the report calls "transaction-related costs" as it attempted to acquire Time Warner Cable. Time Warner shelled out more than $220 million during the process. Most of that was probably in employee wages as people from both Verizon and Time Warmer tried to reach each other on the phone and kept getting a recording that said the call was very important and that they should just hold on for the next support technician and that all calls were answered in the order they were received.
