Samsung Galaxy S4 is an advertiser's dream

The Samsung Galaxy S4 is an advertiser's dream. Why? Because of its eye and head tracking ability.

One of the new features of the Galaxy S4 is its ability to track your head and eyes. It knows when you are looking at the screen and it can tell when you look away. This feature is implemented when watching movies and video clips. If you are watching something and look away, the video pauses and only restarts when you look back at the screen. It is automatic and the eye tracking feature means that you will never miss a second of the video.

Picture this though, a video containing adverts. When the advert comes onto the screen you cannot look away. If you try to avoid the advert the video will pause until you look back at the screen. The eye tracking feature forces you to watch adverts and there is no way of circumventing them! Advertisers must love this feature - a captive audience that is unable to avoid sitting through an advert and watching every single second. Every  frame of the advert must be watched and there is no way to escape the advertiser's message. Try to avoid it and it stops until you come back and give it your undivided attention.

Eye/head tracking is a silly feature that is pointless and most likely irritating. I must admit I have yet to try it, but just thinking about it is enough to see the pitfalls. Sometimes I want to look away to see what's happening  around me, or to focus on something else to avoid straining my eyes - I can't stare at the screen for an hour without looking away. But I don't want the video to stop.

I like to watch music videos and concerts on YouTube. Not just the three minute variety, but sometimes half an hour or maybe more. If you have eye/head tracking then every time you look away the music will stop because the video is paused. This is the opposite of what you want. While watching a concert you want the music to continue even if you look away for a second or two, otherwise it would spoil the entertainment.

It's not just music concerts, but movies, news programmes and other things often have two people talking. You can look away for a moment or two without watching because it's just two talking heads. You haven't missed anything by looking away and you can continue to listen to the conversation without your eyes glued to the screen.

This is a feature I would turn off because the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. It's an optional setting, so it is nothing to be concerned about and on the whole I think the Samsung Galaxy S4 is a brilliant new phone that is better than most rivals.

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Microsoft's miserable Surface sales

I have just been reading an article on the Bloomberg website about Microsoft Surface sales figures. In a nutshell, they are awful. Sales of the cheaper Surface RT are thought to be just over one million and the more expensive Surface Pro, which hasn't been on sale as long, is said to be about 400,000. This compares to around 23 million iPads and probably a few million cheap Android tablets too.

These figures must be very disappointing for Microsoft, but it isn't hard to see why they are so poor. A major problem with the Surface is that it looks expensive. It costs the same as the iPad 4, but offers less. There are fewer apps, fewer pixels on the screen, and poorer battery life. A unique selling point is the combined keyboard/cover, but this raises the price by so much it puts people off. Here in the UK you're looking at £399 for the Surface RT plus £109 for the Type cover making a total of £508. Compare this to the iPad 4 at £399, which is not just a bit cheaper, it's a lot cheaper. And the iPad 2 is £329 and the Mini is £269.

Another big problem with the Surface is that it was initially impossible to find. No stores stocked it in the UK when it was launched. It was available only through Microsoft's website and we had to wait one and a half months before we got our hands on it to try it out. I went to the one store that had it (initially only John Lewis in the UK) and tried it.

There was one Surface demo model among several iPads. Someone had gone to the desktop and opened Office apps - Word and Excel. I wondered how long it had been like this and whether any potential customers trying it knew how to get out of desktop mode and back into the Start screen. It took me several attempts to work it out and I had been using Windows 8 on my desktop PC for over a month. Navigating the Surface isn't quite the same as a Windows 8 PC with a mouse. When I eventually got to the Start screen I tried a few of the bundled apps, but they all failed because there was no internet access. This is a complete disaster as far as trying to persuade potential customers to buy it. There were several people playing with iPads, but no-one tried the Surface while I was there.

The Surface is available at more stores now. Not as many as the iPad, but the situation isn't quite as bad as it was. I went along to a store to try the Surface. However, it was stuck at the log-in screen, asking me for a user name and password. I suppose I could have gone and found a member of staff and asked him to log in so I could try it, but I couldn't be bothered. The demo model did nothing. I'm sure potential customers would just move along to the iPads, which were on display just two feet away.

Contrast these Surface shopping experiences with what you find at the local Apple Store. There is no comparison and there are lots of iPads to try, they all work perfectly and there are lots of staff around to help you try it and demonstrate it.

Microsoft needs to do two things. Firstly it needs to reduce the price. It should be more like £349 for the Surface RT and £399 including the Type cover. Even that isn't really low enough for some people. Secondly, it needs to get the Surface into stores so that people can try it and it needs to make sure they work. Demo models that display error messages when apps are run because there's no internet access and models that are stuck on the log-in screen simply aren't good enough.

The Microsoft Surface isn't bad, but version 1 of anything is rarely the best that is possible. Even the original iPad, although popular, is nowhere near as good as the iPad 4 and I never bought one. I waited until the iPad 2 because this had the features I wanted (a camera, faster processor, etc.). The Microsoft Surface is OK, but it isn't outstanding and version 2 will be better. Let's hope it will be cheaper too.

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This is not news

Don't you get tired of the constant speculation of new products and the constant stream of news story that contain no news? I certainly do and it is very irritating. I have come across a couple of stories in the last day or two that illustrate this and one was a news item that reported that Microsoft is already working on the next version of Windows. There was even a leaked screen shot of Windows 9, which actually showed nothing important.

This is not news. It takes a long time to develop an operating system because of its large size and complexity and as soon as one is out of the door you start work on the next one. It is not news to say that Microsoft is working on Windows 9. Nor does it say anything about the popularity or not of Windows 8. It is just a fact of software development. Apple works on the next version of OS X and Ubuntu developers work on the next Ubuntu release as soon as the current one is done.

Actually, it is best to have multiple teams working on an OS and some people are retained to work on bug fixes, service packs and minor tweaks for the current release, while other people are put to work on the next version. There may even be teams of people dreaming up features for the version after that. I'll bet that there are people at Microsoft planning Windows 10, never mind Windows 9.

Another news story I read, today actually, was that Apple is planning to release a new iPhone this year, probably called the iPhone 5S. This is not a news story. Can you think of a year when Apple didn't release an iPhone? If Apple was not going to release an iPhone this year, then that would be news.

There is also the tiresome speculation of what new features will be in upcoming products. This is mostly about Apple products because the company is so secretive and so little is known. I often wonder whether people just make up these rumours or whether Apple puts them out to muddy the waters and make it difficult to know what the company is really up to. Put out a lot of fake rumours and no-one will know which the right ones are. But perhaps thats just the conspiracy theorist side of me.

The latest rumours are that there will be a new iPad in April. I find it hard to believe that Apple would release three iPads in the space of 12 months. The iPad 3 last spring, iPad 4 in the autumn and iPad 5 this spring? Surely not.

If there is to a refresh, then surely it would be the iPad Mini. The hardware spec of this is barely better than an iPad 2 and it has the same processor, same screen resolution, same memory and so on. Only the camera is better.

I would like an iPad Mini, but the spec of the current model puts me off. I can see this being out of date very quickly and being unable to use new features in upcoming versions of iOS to be released this year and next. The iPad 4's processor is twice as fast and has twice the graphics power as the iPad Mini's and it should last several years whereas the iPad Mini might get left behind. There are already things than my iPad 2 can't do.

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Find hidden gems in Google search results

Google is visited by millions of people every day, searching for this and that. It is a brilliant tool that can find all manner of information on the web, but this is only true if what you are looking for is on the first couple of results pages. The vast majority of people never venture past the first few pages of results.

Do a search and look at the number of results just below the search box near the top of the page. A search for 'daffodil' for example, produced 16,900,000 results. But how many people will look beyond page 5? We tend to look at the first page, click to go to the next one if what we want isn't there, click again, but then we tire of clicking the next page link and people don't go beyond page 3, 4 or 5. There may be hidden gems on pages 30, 40 or 50, but they are so far down the results you will never see them.

Of course, you can click the page links at the bottom of the page and 1 to 10 are listed. Click 10 and you can see links to pages 11 to 14, click 14 and 15 to 18 are shown. It is so tedious to get to page 50 that most people give up after a few clicks.

So how do you get to page 50 or more, and is there anything worth seeing there? On many occasions going beyond the first few pages will return results that are interesting and useful. Websites and companies know that most people don't go past the first page or two of results and they use tricks and techniques to get to the top of Google search results. With enough money you can get on page one of Google, which means that some websites, which may contain exactly the information you are looking for, get pushed down the search results and end up so far down most people never find them.

Here is how to go beyond those initial first few pages and find hidden gems in the Google search results. Enter your search term and search for it. Go to the bottom of the page and mouse over one of the page links, such as page 4. Notice that in the URL is 'start=40' and this means that when you click the page 5 you will see search results 40 to 49. (Page 1 is results 0-9, page 2 is 10-19, page 3 is 20-29 and so on.)

Right click a page, such as page 5, and select Copy Link Address.

 Click in the browser's address box at the top of the page and paste it in. Click in it and edit 'start=40' and change it to whatever you want, such as 200, 300, 400 and so on. Press Return and the search results start at whatever number you enter. You will see results from way down and setting 'start=500' for example, shows page 51. Who knows what you may find way down there in the search results. It could be just what you are looking for.

More Google tricks...

• Use Google Image Search in Chrome
• Access secret settings in Chrome
• Top tips for Google searching
• Google Chrome app privacy issues
• 7 tips for Google Mail's priority inbox

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Google Nexus 7 shuts down

I had a scary moment with my Google Nexus 7 tablet. The battery had been running low for some time and I kept meaning to plug in the charger, but never got around to it. Eventually I picked it up and accidentally hit the power button, switching on the screen. The battery indicator was red and I didn't catch the percentage because the device immediately shut down.

That was expected of course and so I plugged in the charger. That is where the problems started. After a few seconds on the charger the Nexus 7 started up. It showed the startup logo, but when it got to the normal screen a message said it was powering off and the screen started to flicker like crazy. A few seconds later it switched off. After a minute it powered up again, then shut down. This repeated.

A Google search revealed a few other people with this problem. I think the problem may be that there isn't sufficient power to charge the battery and run the device at the same time. It powers up and shows the screen, realises there's no juice in the battery and powers down. This cycle then repeats.

My solution, after a bit of trial and error, was to switch off the screen as soon as it appeared - the normal desktop screen, not the startup logos. I presume that with the screen off the device is using much less power, in fact it will be in power-saving mode, and this means that there is then sufficient power to charge the battery. A quick tap of the power button to switch the screen off at the right moment let the device charge and prevented it from shutting down. Ten minutes later I was able to switch on the screen. It's best to leave the Nexus 7 alone with the screen off when it is charging though.

You'll find other advice on the web, like 'Plug it in and immediately hold down the power and volume down until the boot loader appears. Press the volume down button to select the option to power off the device. Disconnect the charger when it is off and reconnect it. It should then start charging.' Try it if my technique doesn't work.

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Don’t Get Scroogled by Gmail

'Don’t Get Scroogled by Gmail' is the title of a new campaign by Microsoft to try and persuade people that Google Mail is evil and that they should switch to Microsoft's Outlook.com. Microsoft has built a website that explains how "Google goes through every Gmail that’s sent or received, looking for keywords so they can target Gmail users with paid ads. And there’s no way to opt out of this invasion of your privacy."


The way that Microsoft describes it, I think some people will assume that Google employees are sitting at desks reading your emails. This is nonsense of course. Literally billions of emails are sent every day and even if Google employed a million people it still wouldn't be enough to read everyone's email messages.

No person reads your emails.

When you read your email you are simply looking at a web page in your web browser. Web pages have adverts and the question is, what adverts should be placed on the page? Thousands of companies advertise products and services through Google, so what Google's email software does is to try to match the content of the email with the content of an advert. If the email contains the words 'photography' and 'camera' then Google's email software will place an advert that also contains the keywords 'photography' and 'camera'. It simply matches keywords in the message with keywords in adverts.

It's computerised, it's dumb, and it's not always right. But is the alternative really better? With Google you get an advert that you just might vaguely be interested in. If you are chatting about digital cameras in an email with a mate, you might see top digital camera deals. Looking at my Yahoo! Mail right now I'm reading an email about Android tablets and the advert next to it is aimed at people retiring with a portfolio of a quarter of a million pounds sterling. Firstly, I'm not retiring. Secondly, I don't have a quarter of a million portfolio. That advert is of no interest to me. Now if it had links to Android tablets I might be tempted to click them.

Personally, I'm not bothered if Google Mail displays adverts based on the content of messages. It's just a dumb computer program that doesn't understand what I'm actually saying and not a real person. What's more, the adverts might actually be useful.

Is this an invasion of privacy as Microsoft claims? What is an invasion of privacy? I think that it would be an invasion of privacy if information contained within emails was passed on to a third party. As far as I am aware, this does not happen. Google stores my emails and no-one else can read them. I don't think a bit of code on the web page that fetches a camera advert if a message contains the word 'camera' is an invasion of privacy. This campaign by Microsoft tells you little of the benefits of Outlook.com or why you might want to use it.

PS. I've had both Outlook (previously Hotmail) and Google Mail accounts for years.

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Apple wows with innovative new MacBook Air design

Apple has pulled off another blinder and has a new innovative design for its MacBook Air that will blow your mind. This new ultra light laptop will be fast, powerful, and will run the latest version of OS X, yet in a stunning display of brilliance it has endowed it with unique features that leave every other laptop maker grovelling in the dust.

The amazing new MacBook Air has a detachable screen and with touch built in, you can carry it around and use it like a tablet if you don't need the keyboard. Just tear it off and take it with you, it's great for presentations to clients, for lightweight travelling, and relaxing watching movies in bed. Yet with the keyboard attached it is a fully fledged laptop that runs desktop software. Once again Apple leads the way with a brand new and innovative design.

Oh, wait, Microsoft has already done that. It's called the Surface Pro,

I can vividly imagine Apple launching a MacBook air with a detachable touch screen to wild applause from a large an excited audience and then people queueing up outside Apple stores to buy this wonderful new gadget. But will anyone notice when the Microsoft Surface Pro goes on sale? (Any day now.)

Comparing the Surface Pro to an iPad is just plain wrong and it is hard to get excited about a tablet that is thicker, heavier, costs more, has less memory (free memory), and is awkward to hold.

Compare the Surface Pro specs with the MacBook Air and it's a whole new ball game. Microsoft's new device looks innovative and competitive. Both are around the same size and weight, both run the latest desktop operating system, both have Intel Core i5 processors with Intel HD Graphics 4000, both have 64GB or 128GB solid state disks, both have 4GB RAM and so on. The specs are uncannily similar. The Surface Pro is clearly a MacBook Air competitor and it has a serious advantage - you can tear off the screen and use it like a tablet too, complete with touch, apps, an app store, and much more.

I really hope Microsoft promotes the Surface Pro as an ultra light laptop similar to the MacBook Air and not a tablet. In many ways it is more innovative and has features Apple has yet to add to its laptop, and it's cheaper. What's not to like about that?

Unfortunately, I suspect that the Surface Pro will be compared to the iPad and scanning the news I spotted many stories with this theme. Microsoft has an uphill struggle to sell the device and making it look like an iPad competitor won't get many sales. It's not a tablet, it's a laptop! I'm not sure Microsoft gets this and I suspect it will try to market the device as an iPad alternative. I don't want a thicker, heavier, more expensive tablet thank you very much. I may be in the market for an ultra light laptop though.

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