December 13, 2011 by Yuval Brisker
There was a lot of negative buzz in press over the past few days about the Kindle Fire and now that buzz has turned into scorching criticism. Jakob Nielsen, one of the world’s foremost experts on usability, issued an alert saying that “Kindle Fire…suffers from plain old bad UI design in many areas” and “a disappointingly poor user experience”.
The NYTimes prominently covered the issues saying that Amazon is having some real challenges with the Fire in an article that went straight to the number one spot on the Times’ Most Emailed List. In it, the Times cautioned all the naysayers not to count Amazon out, but nonetheless described the problems in detail and raised red flags for consumers.
We should not forget that while there was plenty of criticism of the iPhone when it came out (remember no ‘copy/paste’?) or the iPad (‘who needs it…’) it was first to market; and the sheer wonder of the new was enough to help people over the hump.
The Kindle Fire competes with the iPad, despite Amazon’s insistence that it doesn’t…I personally can’t see myself owing the Fire AND an iPad AND a Kindle eReader….I will choose one eReader and one tablet. And though Fire might be cheaper…given that it is not functionally on par with the iPad…I choose the iPad as my tablet.
Amazon, an inspiring company on many many levels, should have made sure that its product was perfect. It didn’t and the Fire’s future is not clear.
And here’s an update to this blog…a followup article in the NY Times.
October 17, 2011 by Yuval Brisker
Interesting article in ZDNet about the advance of the Android Army. It’s pretty amazing!
August 14, 2011 by Yuval Brisker
With the addition this week of the new Kindle HTML5 application, which allows amazon kindle users to access their full library of books from every HTML5-enabled browser (online AND offline) – it’s clear that the HTML5 revolution is in full swing. And those in the know are both impressed and supportive.
Being a natively cloud-based SaaS company – TOA is totally there:
On the back of our most fundamental founding principle – NO INSTALLED APP – we have embraced HTML5 in its totality in order to provide deep enhanced mobility to our customers worldwide. ETAdirect HTML5 Mobility (Called H5M) is a nothing short of spectacular – with the beautiful look, feel and a robust depth of functionality of a downloaded installed app but totally in the browser. TOA’s engineers have pushed the envelope on what HTML5 can do and provide our customers to the absolute limits…and beyond…Some things we can talk about (and some we absolutely can’t – being that they are huge innovations and everyone would LOVE to know what they are…). But we can revel in things like signature and document capture, document storage and manipulation which are just a few of the cool capabilities that this next generation markup language affords us and we can extend to our customers.
In TOA Tech’s ETAdirect H5Mobility we are definitely charting new territory, even for HTML5, with a groundbreaking offline persistence capability that will not only allow users to access all the relevant time sensitive information when the user is offline in an area where there is no coverage, but TOA’s engineers have taken it one huge step beyond just ‘plain’ offline – they have made the application data available to the user even if the browser and the device crashes!!! The user can reboot, log into ETAdirect and have all his information restored in the ETAdirect browser app to where he was pre-crash – all without having any access to the Internet. Now that is one of the huge feats that makes the ETAdirect H5Mobility app the most powerful and versatile app on the market today.
November 6, 2010 by Yuval Brisker
This little article on TechCrunch with it’s fantastic graphic is both incredibly precise AND hilarious:
What Your Phone Says About You
