Experiences with Google fuse location services.

Having tried for a prolonged period to get location via ibeacon working, with disappointing results (more about that in a future post), I've decided to give Google's fuse location service a try. Going down the beacon route wouldn't have been my first choice, but internal politics had, at the time, made using Google services all but impossible.

Before investing too much time on fuse location I have decided to test how effective it is in three already mapped locations, Waterloo railway station, John Lewis Oxford Street, and the British museum. The environment that I am developing for is probably closer to John Lewis, but testing a range of environments seems to be the best idea.

Location isn't the only issue I need to consider, platform is possibly more important, in particular the possibility of a system that can be used on a number of platforms, so for these tests I am using both an iPhone 5s and a Nexus 5.

The first environment tested in is Waterloo railway station, chosen in part because this is the station I come into every day. On arriving at the concourse I opened Google maps on the Nexus 5, and was immediately concerned and disappointed, the starting location that the Nexus gave me was at the far end of platform 1, almost the entire station away from where I was standing. Now I must disclose that the Nexus is the phone I currently use as my primary phone, and I know that my experience of mobile coverage using this phone at this location is often disappointing, so until I have tested this at all three locations I'll reserve judgement.

The iPhone however, bearing in mind that it was using the Nexus as a mobile hotspot, was very impressive, tracking my journey from one end of the concourse to the other with a consistent margin of only a couple of metres, and that margin was always the same bearing from where I stood. The location refresh was also very impressive, being almost real-time.

So in summary, ignoring the Nexus 5 for now, fuse location at Waterloo was very impressive, and definitely something that can be worked with. Next stop John Lewis Oxford Street.

Arriving at John Lewis and all concerns about the Nexus were blown away, using the in store WiFi on both phones, the position was tracked with a similar accuracy to that seen on the iPhone at Waterloo. Transitioning between floors was automatic for the Nexus, the iPhone needs you to select the floor your on, and apart from the third floor, I'm guessing the WiFi mapping might have been either in incomplete or out of date, neither phone skipped a beat.

In summary, at John Lewis, fuse location service behaved exactly as you'd want and expect it to, only gripe with the Nexus is that in Google maps the internal maps 'felt' zoomed in too much, an issue I don't expect to effect any apps written on the platform, using the fuse location service. Next stop the British museum.
Final stop on this fact finding mission, the British museum, and the one that I had been looking forward to, what a disappointment. Initially all looked as good as before, but as soon as you leave the central court yard the problems rapidly become apparent, art, antiquities and technology really do not mix.

Basically, for fuse location to have a fighting chance of giving an accurate position indoors it needs a decent Wi-Fi signal, and at the British museum Wi-Fi can be best described as patchy. Looking out for Wi-Fi access points, you fast realise that there don't appear to be any, I can only surmise that those running the museum did not want their exhibition spaces 'blighted' by unsightly tech, what a shame.

So to summarise, as an example of the fused location service, the British museum sucks. However in general across the three  environments, the service works incredibly well, and as far as my requirements are concerned this will be the solution I'll be using in the project I'm currently working on.

Nokia running Android?

Nokia to run on an Android?

So would Microsoft really allow, it's soon to be purchased subsidiary, Nokia, to build and release a mobile phone running Android? It's my belief that they will, and in this article I will layout the reasons why they would be crazy not to.

To fully understand what is at stake here, you need to go back to September 2013 when it was announced that Microsoft where buying Nokia. A big surprise and a big story that might have lead you to believe that it was the whole of Nokia that Microsoft where purchasing, in fact it was only the mobile phone part of the business, with the rest of the company remaining in Finnish hands.

If you look at what Microsoft are getting you see a business with two distinct sections, smart phone and feature phone, and many believe they only took the feature phone part of the business to get the smart phone part they wanted. This is being disingenuous to the feature phones that Nokia produce, because if you look at Nokia's most recent quarterly results, they shipped 55.8 million units, compared to only 8.8 million smart phones, and this is why even today Nokia are still in second place as far as sales of mobile phones are concerned, behind Samsung, but ahead of Apple.

And this gives Microsoft a problem, technically Symbian, the operating system that run's these feature phones has been retired, and until Microsoft came along, the developers at Nokia had been working towards a forked version of Android replacing it. So what has changed?

In reality nothing, Symbian is only being used until a newer operating system is put in place, and the Windows Phone operating system, for the feature phone part of the business, isn't it. We all know that the Lumia range of smart phones is being heavily subsidized by Microsoft, but even they cannot 'give away' the phones for free, especially in the volumes reported in the last quarter.

Microsoft could lower the bar as far as the minimum hardware spec for Windows Phone, but they won't, and they shouldn't, doing so will give a poor impression of the operating system, and ultimately under value it. The fact is, there is a large number of people who want a cheep mobile phone, and Microsoft cannot let those customers go, it would almost be commercial suicide, they need to keep building phones that will be sold for under $30.

Microsoft only have two options, one build an entirely new operating system from scratch, that is designed for low spec hardware, and looking at their history shows that they are not able to do this successfully. Or two, take an existing operating system, that works on low powered hardware, and cut out all of the unnecessary features. And this is the way that it looks as though they are going, forking the Android Open Source Project at version 4.4, stripping out those parts they don't want, and don't need, and then producing a home screen that will probably look more like the Window phone than Android.

From where Microsoft stand, the Android option is one they would want to take if there were others on the table, but they way can look at it is that this might not have to be forever, as an Agile development they could surprise again in a couple of years time with a version of Windows that can scale all the way down to these low powered devices.

It is also worth remembering that Android is already a bit of a cash cow to Microsoft it gets royalties from ever device sold that is worth a total of $2 billion per year.