Voice actions for Android and Chrome to Phone extension? Really?

Oh well. I’ll interrupt this rant to jot down a bit of about these items.  But I’m a piece peeved, so  I’ll come again  to the rant at the tip of this post.

_________________________________________

Voice Actions for Android. It\’s a voice service for Android phones (thus far) , where you speak various commands into a phone, it recognizes them and performs certain actions. Currently the service supports 13 actions. Google mentions right here:

send text to [contact] [message]
hearken to [artist/song/album]
call [business]
call [contact]
send email to [contact] [message]
go to [website]
note to self [note]
navigate to [location/business name]
directions to [location/business name]
map of [location]

You can ask your phone to “Call Blue Ribbon Bakery in The big apple”, “Navigate to Rockefeller Plaza”, “Take heed to the Decemberists”, write an e-mail or SMS – and your Android phone will perform this action automatically. Here\’s the video of it:

Pretty nifty stuff, and I will see lots of use for it.

Except that Google says that Voice Actions currently are 70% accurate. That’s otherwise of saying that it  may be wrong a third of a time. Which, I suppose, is okay for navigation, music or note queries. But, no less than for me, those “call”, “e-mail” and “text” someone actions go out the window. Can you imagine what\’ll happen if the Actions mixes up the names and sends that juicy SMS to the inaccurate girlfriend, or your boss?

Another thing announced today was a Chrome browser extension and Android app called Chrome to Phone. It permits you to push stuff from the internet directly in your phone. Which can also be pretty cool, however it has already been around for Android 2.0 devices for several months.

According to Google Chrome to Phone:

adds a button on your Google Chrome browser that instantly sends the current online page, map, YouTube video, or selected phone number or text on your Android device running Froyo (or Android 2.2).

Here\’s a video about it:

And that\’s about it. Back to the rant.

_______________________________________

Dear Google,

This was the stuff that you just think warranted a giant press event?

As someone who was present there remarked – “this could be the largest turnout we’ve had for a non-Apple event”. Really?! Apple, at the least, has the courtesy to announce new devices, or discuss stuff that\’s really important to them and attracts numerous media interest (e.g. Antennagate).

Where you afraid that we forgot about you? Or did your engineers just get bored? It\’s been 3 months since Google I/O, in spite of everything. Did your Android guys  miss mingling with outside folks, and decided – what the heck,  let\’s do a presser, it\’ll be fun…?

Well, the subsequent time you select to do thing like this, consider our time too. Think that a number of people wasted half a day to your press event.  For a project -browser extension – developed on a 20% free time by one employee?!

So the subsequent time you might be announcing an update to Google places service, better mobile Youtube, Google Docs Viewer, or opening of Google Voice to the public, keep it to the Youtube upload and your blog, please.

That all happened due to capacitive touchscreen technology. Touchscreens were around for ages before the iPhone, but essentially the most used type were resistive touchscreens. These are more accurate, but require a press in preference to just a splash most often, and the extra layers they need to have make use a tad less intuitive.

It feels like capacitive touchscreens will make up 40-50% of the touchscreen market in 2011, as touch panel makers continue to expand their capacitive touchscreen production facilities.

Of course, resistive touchscreens are still essentially the most used, and should stay next year, because they’re cheaper and they’re more well-known in Asia. Because a resistive touchscreen is more accurate and operation with a stylus is so easy, some countries with complicated writing patterns still see great demand for phones featuring this sort of technology.

Capacitive touchscreens are commencing to get styli, but they’re still a piece more cumbersome to exploit for precise touches.

Elsewhere on the earth, resistive screens are only used for low-end devices because they’re cheaper. Capacitive touchscreens reign supreme within the high end smartphone market.

Yet there are two forms of capacitive touchscreens in the market: film based and glass based. Glass-based capacitive screens are still used rarely, and only inside the most costly phones, akin to the iPhone range. Film-based capacitive touchscreens are a chunk cheaper and therefore used in many more midrange devices.

So, not all displays are created equal. You should definitely choose the sort that fits you and your use-cases best, otherwise the frustration may overwhelm you.

Via Digitimes

Just last week they started selling WiFi-enabled iPhone 3GS smartphones.

And a source inside China Unicom now claims that they’re preparing to launch Apple’s latest and greatest smartphone, the iPhone 4.

This will apparently happen in early September, but not on September 13th, as previous rumors had it. Either way, “early” September can’t mean anything past the half of the month, so those desperate to purchase an iPhone 4 in China (and who haven’t gone the grey market import way) only have at most one other month to wait, which may only be good news.

Micro SIMs will make their debut on the Chinese market with the iPhone 4 launch.

According to a similar source, China Unicom has also secured a take care of Apple to be the only real distributor of Apple’s iPad within the Chinese market. There’s no release date yet, but it surely feels like China Unicom may only sell the 3G version of the iPad. Which is sensible, as they’re a mobile operator and thus most occupied with revenue from iPad 3G data plans.

We’ll bring you more details once they are available in.

Via Caixin