Smartphone Market

I saw today the Gartner chart with the smartphone market shares for the Q2 2010. What really impressed me was the "jump" Android did:

What it is interesting is that the iOS won 1% which I think it's the 1% RIM lost but everyone else lost market shares in favor of Google. Looks like it doesn't matter if you have the best OS on the market today(iOs) , but it's better to be "open" - good adoption from the hardware makers, a lot of developers/fans porting/improving/updating Android OS on hardware already on the market (almost every WM owner hopes for an Android port for their devices), wide range of prices for the hardware and developers that have almost everything that they need (multitasking, access to all the resources of the device, error reporting of the applications).
In fact I still don't understand why Microsoft "blocked" the multitasking in favor of battery life. Let full multitasking and then implement a mechanism inside the OS which warns/reports to the user how much an application "eats" in terms of processor/battery. The user can than decide if he sacrifices or not battery life for a certain application. It's always better to warn and let the owner decide than to decide for them. A lot of developers at WP7 Lab in Milano did not agreed with the new tombstoning mechanism but developers obey the rules which might not the case for the owners.
I expected/wanted so bad WP 7 to be perfect, complete from the beginning to have every functionality that it had but with the new UI/programming model instead now it has what it was missing before and misses what it already had. There is still much to be done to get back Microsoft back do to where it was two years ago in the smartphone market.

NAMASTE!

WP7 Device Tests

No I didn't got lucky to have a dev device of my own. Last Wednesday I attended the WP7 Lab event in Milano and everyone wanted a dev device. We even tried to bribe Lorenzo to "forget" some devices in the bar, but as there was only 3 devices available and he had the same event the next day in Rome we didn't got lucky. Anyway I've spent some quality time meeting new people and testing the Samsung and LG dev. phones.

The first project that I've tested was the SqliteClient. Could be my impression, but there is a big difference between how an application looks&feels on the device and on the emulator (it looks a lot better on the device). On the speed part I did some tests on insert (the select/delete work almost identically) and here are some results:

Inserting 2200 Rows with transaction:

Emulator: 0.622 sec

L.G.: 3.35 sec

SAMSUNG: 3.244 sec

Inserting 600 Rows without transaction

Emulator: 7.067 sec

L.G.: 29.054 sec

SAMSUNG: 21.676 sec

On the beta release the device it's 4-5 times slower than the emulator. The Samsung it's faster as it has the storage on a microSd compared to the LG that has it on internal flash.

The other project that I've tested was the barcode reader. On both devices the test samples worked the same as on the emulator. When it comes to the integrated camera this is where the things get a little complicated. The camera app is one of those apps that the hardware manufacture will customize. None of the drivers had a macro function. The Samsung device had no settings to set, and the focus was pretty bad. The LG had the settings menu implemented and a better focus. Without the macro function it was hard to take a "clean" picture of a barcode but when the image was good the library works really fast and precise. I expect a lot on the camera part from HTC. I have to wait October and see.

One thing that got me thinking is when I've asked if Nokia is preparing a WP7 device they didn't say yes, but didn't say no also. It would be a nice achievement for both companies because Nokia does great hardware, but I've never liked Symbian and looking at the market shares they could take WP7 into consideration.

Namaste

WP7 ZXing Barcode

First of all I want to express my regret that I am not one of the 3.000 developers that received a WP 7 developer device (I read somewhere that there are more than 3.000 users that use Facebook from WP7). I really hoped to have a "real" device, but that's the way the cookie crumbles...

This weekend I had two days of WP 7 fun. What I've wanted to see was the use of ZXing in WP 7. There is already a C# port of the library in the ZXing trunk. Porting it to Silverlight it is quite simple (just have to replace ArrayList with generics lists and HashTable with Dictionary) more details here. So I've downloaded the latest csharp source code from ZXing trunk and compiled the library. This was the simple part because I wanted a "nice" test project. I've used the test images from the ZXing source zip as embedded resources and the gesture recognizer from Clarity Consulting this way the user is able to flick both direction between the test images. It was a project based learning because I've used MVVM and the application was following the pattern till I've ruined it with the CameraCaptureTask and PhotoChooserTask (I was not able to get them in the View Model because I don't receive the notification after I choose/capture a photo but if anyone of you can do it please enlighten me how it's done )

I cannot test CameraCaptureTask and PhotoChooserTask but maybe some of you, lucky enough to have a test device, can test it and let me know how/if it works (even in the beta dev tools the camera is poorly integrated with the apps - you will have to run again the app after selecting camera or photo and you should be able to see the selected photo in the central image of my app this way you can press the Decode button).

This is how the test project looks (don't forget to flick the image)

Here is the source code

Have a look also at this new post

NAMASTE

WP7 SqliteClient with transaction support

I've updated the preview and implemented the transaction-commit-rollback mechanism.

For 1050 rows the results are:

Without transaction: 13.088 sec

Using transaction: 0.474 sec

For more rows you will get even better results.

The link to the project is the one from the previous post

Enjoy the update

NAMASTE

WP7 SqliteClient Preview

WP7 developer devices are already out in the US and I still hope I will qualify for one here in Italy. I would really love to test one. Brandon PLEASE don't forget me :)

As my proposal was a better port of the Sqlite engine I did some optimizing on the engine and also implemented/adapted a SqliteClient that is easier to use than normal sqlite3 commands.

At the "engine" part I use the journal file persistent this way the engine doesn't delete and create the journal at each command. I've also eliminated SQLITE_DEBUG from conditional compilation symbols spares some temporary file access.

For the client at the beginning I've wanted to compile the System.Data and Sqlite class from Monotouch, but after looking a little bit at the source code I've realized that there are tons of things that doesn't make sense on WP7. I wanted to keep it simple and searching I've found the SqliteClient.cs written by Frank Krueger for Monotouch. I've adapted the class to run with our library and got a pretty nice result.

I've also improved the test project and now you are able to set how many rows will be inserted, select the inserted rows and see the elapsed times for insert/select commands. For the insert I've tested two methods: the first with prepare, step, finalize and the second one with sqlite3_exec (which should be the same) and the insert time are more or less the same.

Anyway it's only a preview as it was not intensively tested and because it can be improved. If some of you find ways to optimize the library please let me know and I will post it for everybody. Also let me know what you think.

Here you have the link to the source code

NAMASTE

WP7 IsolatedStorage speed improvement

If you remember some time ago I did some tests on the IsolatedStorage and the speed was not very impressive (it was 127 slower than the FileStream). In the new beta version there is a TREMENDOUS improvement. I rerun the old test in the new emulator and these are the results:

Dividing the two values 0.0632/1.1866=0.0532 which is almost the same with FileStream. At this point it does make sense implementing/porting a database engine on IsolatedStorage. Well done WP 7 Team on this aspect.

NAMASTE

Compact Framework Network Printing

As usual a lot of time without posting but I had no time. I am really excited about the beta tools of WP7 (2 days ago I felt asleep while installing the beta cause the only time I have is after 11 p.m.). I also did some improvements on the Sqlite port but I will post it as soon as it will be usable (I plan to compare the performance with Perst even if it's a different approach).

I am posting this because I lost almost two days and maybe someone that needs it will find it right away. My task was some labeling process using MC9090 devices and Zebra S4m printers. I decided to go for in-memory parameterized forms. The client application uses two method for connecting to the printer:

1) Some of the printers have ethernet port and it is quite simple to communicate with the printer as you will open a socket to 9100 port and send the commands to the printer. This is simple

2) Other printers are connected as shared printers from pc's. This one should also be simple but it gave me a lot of headaches and mainly from my fault. I have two approaches:

a. The classic one that you would also do on Windows applications is to invoke CreateFile with the UNC name of the shared printer. My mistake with this approach was that I set the main window as TopMost and when calling the CreateFile windows mobile it will pop up a networking window where you have to insert the user name and password to use for authentication (this even if Guest access is enabled on the shared printer). So this approach was working but as I did not see the pop up window I thought it doesn't work

b. The second one is a little bit more complex. I am invoking WNetAddConnection3 to map the printer as a local resource (when using this method you can also pass the username and the password) and than using CreateFile on the local resource. After sending everything to the printer I call WNetCancelConnection2 to remove the resource (not really optimized but works). The second one seems more stable

The only annoying thing in this moment is the POCKET PC networking pop-up that tells me that the job has finished printing. I want to disable it (I think that it's something to do with the registry) but didn't find the way yet.

I am attaching 2 files Print.cs and Networking.cs. Print.cs has two methods one with authentication and another without.

Hope someone will find it useful

PRINT

Namaste