

Google Now's smartphone is the real deal  - supersiteforwin
http://winsupersite.com/mobile-devices/bad-news-windows-phone-fans-google-now-real-deal

======
Irregardless
> But Windows Phone is entering a dangerous time, one in which its competitors
> are starting to catch up and even surpass the innovations of Microsoft’s
> mobile platform.

What alternate universe was this article written in? I've wanted to give
Windows Phone a chance since they released the newer version, but it literally
has nothing to offer other than a slightly more minimalistic default UI. Does
no one remember the "Get Smoked by a Windows Phone" contest that Microsoft
stacked in their favor only to get beaten by Android anyway? [1]

News flash: You can configure any Android phone to have the same interface and
functionality of WP7, and you've been able to for years.

[1] [http://skattertech.com/2012/03/i-won-the-windows-phone-
chall...](http://skattertech.com/2012/03/i-won-the-windows-phone-challenge-
but-lost-just-because/)

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swanson
A killer feature of Google Now that was _actually_ helpful (no, baseball
scores don't count) is when it detects you are traveling.

I had a receipt from EventBrite in my Gmail for a conference in Chicago. The
day I drove up there, Google Now knew about the trip (I didn't even add it to
my calendar) and had downloaded the trip directions. When I lost 4G on the
way, it was pretty awesome to have the map available offline. I usually print
off directions as a backup, but I had forgotten this time and Google Now
really helped me.

Just one anecdote, but it completely sold me on Google Now.

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RyanZAG
Google Now has a lot of promise, but I've been using it a bit since it was
first released, and it's never actually provided me with any really useful
information.

The promise behind Google Now is amazing, but it simply doesn't work well
enough yet to be any kind of consideration. Here's hoping they manage to get
the actual software in-line with the promise eventually!

~~~
cryptoz
The user experience with Google Now varies heavily depending on your usage
habits and the type of phone you have. The only thing Google Now showed me for
_months_ were outdated, inaccurate weather 'forecasts' that made absolutely no
sense (and opening it took more than 30 seconds on my old Nexus S). Boy, was I
disappointed.

But if you set your Settings to the right items, you enable all your Search
History, and everything else, and you have a modern phone like a Nexus 4,
Google Now _is amazing_. Really, really amazing. It's definitely there and it
works fantastically well, if you care to set it up right.

~~~
TillE
> enable all your Search History

This is something I just can't bring myself to do. I disabled it years ago,
along with all the other personalization options.

I don't mind giving them my location. I don't even mind them analyzing my
mail. But I search for all kinds of crap, and I really really don't want
anyone building a profile on me based on that.

The manual customization options in Google Now are sadly lacking. I've been
able to add a few sports teams, but that's about it.

I suppose I could switch all my default searches to DuckDuckGo, then only use
Google judiciously to deliberately train it. Hm, I think I will.

~~~
w1ntermute
Just train yourself to use Incognito Mode when you're looking for porn.

~~~
disgruntledphd2
This in wonderful advice. More broadly, use one browser and account for the
stuff you'd like to train Google on, and another (in incognito mode) for the
stuff you'd prefer not to add to your profile.

Of course, they'll probably still know its you, but one imagines the
algorithms will respect your preferences (as it would make the service worse
if they didn't).

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DominikR
I do not use Google Now that much but I've got to say that I am surprised how
well it predicts what I am going to do based on patterns.

First it knew all by itself where my home and where my workplace is (it named
both correctly) and when I am leaving the house - then it suggested that I
give that new place I am visiting more and more often a name. (my girlfriend)
And then it knew before I knew it myself that I will go to my girlfriend on a
monday because I've apparently been there the last 3 or 4 mondays. It's not
that hard to see such a pattern if you are actively looking for it, but I
wasn't really thinking that much about when I visit someone and if there is
some kind of pattern.

I am pretty sure that such a tool can be amazingly predictive and helpful
given enough time and data.

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WrkInProgress
I don't always agree with Thurrott but I think he is spot on here.

Google Now is the killer app/feature for Android.

And from the 4 players in the mobile space right now, only Microsoft is really
in a position to challenge something like Google Now.

And I don't hold out much hope that MS can get their act together to pull it
off.

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Nursie
"But Windows Phone is entering a dangerous time, one in which its competitors
are starting to catch up"

Pffft. Really? ROFL.

~~~
bitwize
It's Paul Thurrott. He's like the mirror-universe version of John Gruber who
only boosts Microsoft stuff instead of Apple.

~~~
asveikau
I haven't read Thurrott too often, but in the few times that I have, I've
actually been somewhat relieved that he does maintain some degree of cynicism
about how the company works. I am a former Microsoft employee and I get
irritated about a lot of MS boosterism I see on the web in recent years; it's
hard to read and more dogmatically pro-MS than most MS employees I know. But
Thurrott doesn't strike me as one of those people. He knows where some of the
bodies are buried and isn't shy to voice concerns.

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compilercreator
The submitted title is somewhat non-sensical. Google Now smartphone makes it
sound like there is a company/team called Google Now building a smartphone.

~~~
bussiem
I believe he forgot the word "app"

~~~
nivla
Not sure if you can call it an app if it is deeply integrated with the system.

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fidotron
Between Google Now, the anti fragmentation stuff in the SDK agreement and
learning about the way Google share names/addresses with app developers I'm
really thinking that Google are actually becoming Android's largest liability.

The problem is the GMail and Maps apps (as distinct from purely the webapps)
are used as gateway drugs to casual information leakage, and Maps in
particular becomes almost unusable unless you agree to let them slurp extra
info from your vicinity.

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chris_mahan
Well, my three month old android phone says: Your device is not compatible
with this version. I guess I'll check it out in one year and nine months when
I get my next phone.

~~~
freehunter
I actually have it running on my HP Touchpad running Ice Cream Sandwich. Isn't
one of the benefits of Android that it's so open you can make it do just about
anything? If I didn't want to hack my mobile device, I definitely would not
have gotten invested in the Android platform. In my opinion, that ability is
literally the only advantage it has over the competition. Without the hacker
community supporting it, it's basically an iPhone with fewer apps.

What I'm saying is, you can either get Jelly Bean on your device via
Cyanogenmod or you can get ICS and hack Google Now onto it with instructions
found online.

~~~
chris_mahan
I'm not rooting my phone. Not enough time to play with it. Need it to work
when school calls and I have to go pick up my son.

~~~
freehunter
I bought a Windows Phone because I wanted something that just works when it
needs to work, and also is slick, modern, well-integrated, and protected by a
walled-garden. I bought into the Android platform with a device that is not on
contract and is not a phone, because I am willing to accept hacking around on
and breaking a non-phone device.

Not that I'm denigrating your choice in any way, it has no bearing on my life
at all, but I'm genuinely curious as to why anyone would buy an Android phone
unless they're willing to hack it to bits. In my opinion, without root access
on an Android phone, you're using an iPhone without great software support.
The only draw of Android over the iPhone in the last three months that I can
see is root access and a hacker community supporting it. Especially when it
means buying an out-of-date and possibly out-of-support phone.

What drew you to the Android platform over the iPhone platform if you're not
willing to update your software manually and are resigned to not getting a
software upgrade until you buy a new phone? That seems ridiculous to me. Even
on Windows Phone, every device that came with WP7 got WP7.5 and WP7.8.

~~~
chris_mahan
On android: my phone does "just work" and it's got a good camera, and plays
youtube videos. I prefer hacking on the raspberrypi, personally.

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jackalope
As a user, I'm not sure I'm impressed. On my WP8 phone, I pin a live tile to
the home screen exactly where I want it, at the size I want it, and it
displays the information I expect to get from it. But Google Now sounds like a
live tile knockoff that's constantly changing because it's guessing what I
want to see based on personal information that I agree to share with it. I
don't recall this approach ever working, and it practically guarantees that it
will only have information I want a _fraction_ of the time, so I'm unlikely to
give it a prominent place on my home screen (or even use it if it affects
battery life). If/when they start slipping in ads, it will be even less
attractive.

But in the field of personal agents, it's definitely a significant milestone.
At some point, we'll want to be able to ask what's on today's schedule when we
wake up in the morning, or immediately check messages when we walk into our
homes, or find out where a movie is playing and buy tickets when we hop into
our self-driving cars that will take us right to the theater. Nobody's going
to want to talk into a quaint little smartphone when all this becomes
possible, but it's probably where personal agents start getting refined into a
usable state.

~~~
notatoad
>I don't recall this approach ever working

yes, failure in the past is definitely an indication that this concept will
never work.

The linked article takes a very narrow view of google now, trying to shoehorn
it into windows phone terms. It's way more than a live tile. It's a homescreen
widget, a lockscreen widget, an app that is a scrollable list of cards, and it
integrates with notifications. Essentially, it is predictive google search -
instead of having to search for something, it provides you with the results
you were about to search for.

The future that you talk about for personal assistants has already been
surpassed by google now.

------
abcd_f
I think this over-estimates the number of people who are OK with opening their
lives to Google to this degree. Amazing - possibly, invasive - you bet your
porn collection.

------
27182818284
It is disappointing unless you live in a large city. Even in areas of about 1
million it doesn't know the mass transit, etc. It ends up just displaying
weather and being able to answer the age of Abraham Lincoln, but the latter
could be found by Wiki in nearly the same amount of time.

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JulianWasTaken
It's cute. I've been using it for the past couple of weeks on a Nexus 4.

My opinion on it currently is that it looks promising but it's quite useless
until there are finer controls on when and how cards appear (the controls
there are now are really simplistic), and more importantly the ability to
create my own cards, which would give me a reason to get back into SL4A.

As an example, the commute card that shows your distance from work/home is
nice, but I have two jobs and commute home->work->work->home. I'm not sure I
expect Now to figure that out quite yet, though it wouldn't be hard, but I do
expect to be able to teach it that, which I can't currently do.

~~~
freehunter
It would also be nice to be able to tell it "I'm going to my girlfriends house
after work". In that situation, telling me there's a traffic jam on my route
home isn't useful information at all.

I also would love the ability (if it exists, I haven't seen it) to have it use
geocoded reminders, like "remind me to get milk when I'm near the grocery
store".

~~~
jordonwii
I'm actually surprised that location-based reminders aren't already part of
Google Now. It seems like a really natural feature given everything else it
already does.

~~~
commandar
I'd have to imagine that's something in the works. It likes to give me transit
information heading to work or home, and seems to be fairly smart about it
since I don't work a normal 9-5 schedule.

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korva
Small anecdote: I live in Finland, and in the 2 months I've had Google Now on,
it has given me any barely any info at all. How well can this be localized
worldwide and how long will that take?

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boi
Hummm another app that will know where I go, what I eat, dress, with whom I
speak, meet, have sex, what I read, what music I like, and where I am all the
time, sweeet and free. A real killer app. I hope one day It can make choices
for me, ow wait, It is already happening.

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whaevr
I apologize ahead of time for my childish humor but...I appreciate the time
the screenshot was taken for the Google Now widget on the phone

~~~
_neil
I don't recall the origin of this, but it's also true of most Apple
screenshots.

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hnriot
Very misleading title. The predictive power of this sounds really impressive,
but utterly useless. I don't have alternative routes if there's traffic, and
if there is, I already know what my options are, because I drive it every day.
(coincidentaly this morning I was followed by one of google's white lexus self
driving cars, with its silly spinny thing on top making it look like an
attempt at being a TARDIS, although it was self-driving (it said so on the
rear bumper), the driver was clearly driving it.)

I feel like Google Now will just take much of the fun out of life. If I want
to see a movie, it's not exactly hard to look it up or walk down to the
theater. Buying a ticket on Fandango is pointless, my movie theater has people
selling tickets and completely unused machines right next to them. I also use
the machine because there's never a line. I don't want to go into a restaurant
and have google pick what I should order!

The only useful integration technology I have found useful recently was
Passbook. I bought a United ticket on my smartphone which issued a Passbook
boarding card when I checked in. I walked through SFO in about 15 minutes from
curb to sitting on the plane, waving my iPhone at scanners along the way. Even
when I changed my return flight the Passbook info changed dynamically with
information and my boarding 'card'.

I am happy to pick my own restaurants, I enjoy looking on Yelp and making my
own mind up. I don't want to go to the place that has paid google the most for
ads, or who has hired the most fake reviewers. I have my own mind and I'm
happy to use it.

Maps, Email, Search, all wonderful innovations from google, they have
revolutionized these areas, but I still want to think for myself once in a
while.

~~~
visarga
It's not that you don't think for yourself. You just move up the ladder a
notch - now you are in symbiosis with Google and instead of doing the low
level work you do the high level work. You can still enjoy life just as much
in different ways.

The same kind of argument has been brought by people against cars, telephones
and recordings. "I like to walk on my own feet, or ride a horse." "I like to
speak to people face to face, not on that contraption." "I prefer to play the
song on the piano, no need to use recordings!"

And especially agains Google Search & Wikipedia - many have voiced that we
have become generalists and don't remember anything anymore, instead relying
on Google to bring information to us all day long. Well, instead of learning
dates and places and APIs by heart, we learn to efficiently search for them on
Google. It's like meta-learning vs direct-learning, it's not worse, just one
level up on the abstraction ladder.

~~~
hnriot
symbiosis with Google - no thanks

I do prefer to walk, and I do prefer face to face. I am not against
technology, in fact quite the opposite, I am just against useless technology
like this.

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OGinparadise
I used it for a while, it's cute but my life is not that complicated. And I
don't want to sell my digital soul to a company in exchange for "suggestions"
and tips. That's me though.

I predict that in a year or two, Google's top engineer Patrick Pichette, will
ruin this by stuffing it with ads. Ads everywhere.

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recoiledsnake
The Windows Phone team had its hands full in the past couple of years with the
Win CE to Win NT migration and porting the NT kernel to ARM.

While WP8 is still good, I am guessing/hoping that we'll see more user facing
changes in the next version.

