Meet the app: UTS by Indian Railway for Mumbai and Chennai suburban trains

Indian railway finally launched the UTS (Unreserved Ticketing System) app on mobile to book tickets on suburban railway straight from your mobile phone. This app is currently available only on Android and Windows Phone. And an iOS version is on the way.

There is nothing to be said about the design of the app. It feels like someone has thrown some buttons over a background. There are crashes, and overlapping text and a billion other design flaws. Let’s move towards to functionality it is supposed to serve.

First comes the setup where you have to provide your Mobile number, Name, ID proof and number of the ID proof, and the city of preference. Once you complete all these you will receive and OTP for confirmation.

In subsequent steps, you can choose your default configuration. Class, the number of adults and child, train type and payment mode. For now if I select Mumbai, only Ordinary Train is available as Train Type and RWallet is available as the sole payment option. You can also select default route of the journey. All these configurations are changeable.

One of the major downsides of the app is that you can’t recharge your wallet from the mobile. There not even a quick button or a text informing that you have to go to UTS website and recharge your wallet unless you dig into the “Getting Started”. Even UTS website looks like a school project. You can enter text into money field.

Payment is done via PayTM but there is no option to pay through PayTM wallet, only the gateway is used. After a couple of frustrating tries, I finally managed to get my recharge done. Minimum Recharge is Rs.100 which is good enough for a non-frequent traveller.

Despite the app being bit slow booking process is fairly simple. The app allows you to quick book your ticket if you have done your default configuration. Which helps you for instant ticketing. Otherwise, you can pick two stations, the number of passengers, class etc. and get the fare. Then you can pay from your RWallet and your ticket is booked. You can also add up to 5 stations on the route.

There is an option called show ticket, which keeps the copies of your tickets. Other options include Checking your recharge history, Balance and Profile view/edit.

Although this app needs a lot of work on both looks and functionality, it is a good step towards convenience and digitalization of the local travel.

The Experience Era of mobile

At the start of the millennium, one of my father’s friend brought a phone for emergency use. It was the first mobile phone, I owned.

Heck, I had seen a lot of pictures on my painstakingly slow dial-up internet and had seen a couple of people use it too. But, for the first time I used it for myself. It was an old Ericsson model. Heavy as a brick, with the antenna peaking at the top. And the screen or a strip was just a size of a finger. SMSes were a pain to send and receive. Calls were the easy way to communicate.

Later on, this era evolved into ever popular phones like Nokia 3310 and 3315. They didn’t provide you with much functionality. But they brought the mobile experience to more general mass. Mind you, they were still costly.

I call this period “Talk and read” era as, most of the time, the primary use of the mobile phone was to receive calls and messages.

Then arrived the plethora of multimedia phones. Mp3 songs and ringtones, cameras ( of very mediocre quality mind you). People began to listen to the songs, watch videos, click photos using their mobile phones.

A mp3 player or a camera was considered to be a different entity before the arrival of phones like Nokia 6600, Sony’s walkman series and Motorola’s Razr series. The quality of the sound and resolution of a camera sensor was now an important factor for people buying the phones.

I call this period “Listen and see” era. Or alternatively the “Multimedia era”.

In year 2007 iPhone was launched by Apple, a prominent touchscreen phone. I bought Nokia 5800 (One of the many to be labeled iPhone killer). It had a resistive touchscreen, which gave you a feedback jolt (vibration is a mild word) whenever you performed an action.

Even though, the operations on that phone were slightly difficult and moving from the keypad to the touchscreen took a bit of time, I loved the experience. Many of my friends ridiculed me for the decision. Yet, I was fascinated by the touchscreen technology, bigger and brighter screen, easier access to the internet.

For many years, iPhone was not easily available or affordable in India (Situation hasn’t changed much). But Google worked on Android and that brought the touchscreen-internet revolution to India and the world.

Apple revolutionized computing by introducing iPad to the world. They stopped the march of PC and Laptop sales to a large effect. Yes, in last quarter or so tablet sales have been slowing down and PC industry might have picked up a bit of pace. But, users now had an option of a different form of computing.

The question remains,” what next?” in the world of mobile or computing. In

In 2012, Google launched their ambitious Glass project. They had the best keynote ever, but eventually the pace of project slowed down.

What Google wanted to do was to provide a heads-up display for the smartphone. They failed to woo the consumer. However, there are many potential enterprise mobile applications for the Glass.

And recently they announced to close the Glass Explorer program and then eventually revamp the whole Google Glass experience.

Meanwhile a company called Oculus did a revolutionary work in VR space with Oculus Rift, but mostly that was related to gaming. Sony also threw in their Project Morpheus last year.

But one of the most eye-catching announcement from recent time has come from the people at Microsoft. They unveiled something called HoloLens. This VR experience will embed the Windows Operating system with your real-life settings. This may provide developers and software makers with an unlimited opportunity to use the space around people.

Till now solutions to many problems have been limited by the screen size. Innovations like HoloLens and Oculus Rift might change this. And users would also have the benefit of ‘experiencing’ the technology. In the near future, VR won’t be available to the  mass and won’t necessarily replace the mobile phone.

Another development in the  mobile technology space is SmartWatches and the Internet of Things. They are in the direction to be a part of the daily experience. Both VR and Smart Watches are not capable of operating at the independent level at the moment.  But, they can be great companions of the smartphone.

We are in the direction of bringing the technology and mobile computing to our surroundings. We are entering the “Experience Era”

A pat on the back of Microsoft

Before the era of iPhones and Android. Before even a Google, there was only one mammoth and That was Microsoft. The PC industry was at the center of the tech world and there was no stopping it. Smartphones came along and changed the way for that industry. It fell hard on its head, and Microsoft was affected the most.

They later on tried to enter that space with formulating a partnership with Nokia to make Windows Mobile friendly and popular. They later on acquired Nokia to make serious inroads. But honestly it hasn’t been stuff of the dreams. Microsoft made progress on making phones and built a better software, but it hasn’t had the growth and success of iPhones and Android. But after the appointment of the new CEO Satya Nadella, things have been a bit different. They are still not making any threats to Google or Apple, but they have been making their presence felt.

Recently, Microsoft announced the Office suite (Word, Excel, Powerpoint mainly) will be free for iPhone, iPad and Android users. Before this announcement users could only view the documents created but for editing and advanced features they needed the Office 365 subscription. Another notable distinction is that Microsoft has partnered up with Dropbox for file sharing and storage. Initially, users had to store their files to OneDrive. Now, that restriction has been lifted.

Microsoft have been developing interesting things in their creative labs. They first came out with a version of One Note for Android wear which allows users to take voice notes on their smartwatches. Another interesting development that followed was the analog keyboard for Android Wear. This was a development that allowed the users to draw the characters with gestures.

 They also made the Bing Torque app. This app allowed users to activate search phrase screen with the shake of the wrist. This was a change from routine “Ok Google” hotword to wake up the search. The limitation of this was that the search can only show results like web that you have to open on the phone later on. I wish they can work more with Google cards.

Microsoft has made a lot of changes to their fleet of apps. They made changes to Skype for iPhone   and Android making it better. They released the Office Sway app, which allows users to create websites with just text and images to iOS and Android users. A few days ago they released a new productivity based lock screen app to Android Devices.

There have been speculations of Microsoft not keeping the voice assistant Cortana not Windows exclusive. The company has been working on iOS and Android versions of it.Recently they also declared their programming language and framework .NET open source. This might not relate to the smartphone world directly but at one point we might see .NET based apps running on various platforms.

Microsoft have seem to accepted the fact that they are certainly no giant in this world. But they have taken the road of so called ‘Productivity’ and innovation to make their presence felt. So far they have made tremendous progress in doing so. The quality and usability have been top notch. I hope Microsoft keeps developing more products like that and keep us engaged.

Pick your house

Take Game of Thrones or take Harry Potter. Whichever is your favourite.you love to pick your houses. And support them with all might. Buying their merchandises, creating Facebook pages and communities, promoting it on twitter. People even rigorously fight to defend whatever they are supporting. Welcome to 2014 where in a year of two we would have similar situation in the Technology world.

The History

Let’s us go back couple of years to 2005. We didn’t have many gadgets to choose from. There were bulky keypad smartphones and heavy, windows dominated  laptops or desktops. Nokia was leading the mobile bandwagon. Sony was distinct second, blackberry had a foothold in the corporate community. Google and Apple were nowhere to be seen. People buying the gadgets were not worried about the software it contained.

“Oh, This phone has X megapixel camera. It would be awesome”.

“Look at the keypad of this phone. It is so smooth.”

“This phone has 3.2 inches of screen.”

Touchscreen phones were there but people were skeptical to use them. They had typing problems in those resistive keyboards. Then came 2007, the launch of the big daddy iPhone and it changed the course of how people looked at the touch screen phones. It was stylish, easy to use and having an iPhone became an USP. Most importantly they had concentrated on software. They created pleasing to the eye, intuitive UI.

Andorid came around in 2009 but they truly started to make the mark from 2011 when they launched phones with Gingerbread update. This update was less buggy, users beyond geeks started to turn towards this operating system because they had options to chose from dozens of manufacturers. And like a king determined to take over the world every month and with every update they started dominating the smartphone market. By this time Nokia was out of the picture and in rugs like Stark family in GoT.

Changing The Game

Apple had its fanbase growing while Android’s openness and cheap phones lured more people into using smartphones. As the technology grew, smarthphone’s integration with laptop became a necessary thing. A lot of people wanted to access and edit things on the fly. While these services and smartphone functionality was growing Apple came out with another Ace card. iPad.

Tablet computer was not a new thing, many devices had launched. But in 2010, the launch of the iPad made it an attractive option to have. An option between smartphone and laptop/desktop was open for many people. Executives quite liked the idea of it as it was easy for them to carry around a tablet rather than a laptop. For a year or so tablet sales were limited because the app development ecosystem had not developed. Gradually when Apple released APIs that would make things easier for the developers. So consumers can access the apps of smartphone with functionality of a laptop.

Tablets

By 2011 Android tablets were growing, reason being release of Honeycomb version of android which supported tablet development. Later on Google integrated the tablet and smartphone APIs which helped a lot because now app maker had to develop one application for both smartphone and the tablet.

Tablets caused PC and laptop sales to drop. Software companies were also more interested in providing the support for tablets to do enterprise work. Which was earlier could only be done from a laptop. Lot of users started to say,”I haven’t started my laptop since days as I bought this tablet.” For most of the users laptop was a mean to surf a bit of internet, watch movies or videos and do simple stuff like document editing. So laptop became redundant.

There was a downside to this. Earlier tablets were generally about 10″ size, so no one could operate with one hand. Typing was also difficult for many on the huge screen, they had to buy docked keyboards. Device makers came one up to solve this. They released mini versions. 7″ tablets which can be held in one hand and can easily be operated as a big smartphone. iPad minis and Nexus 7s became the leaders of the tablet pack and the sales rocketed.

The Present and The Future

Now here we are in 2014. Where people have 2-3 devices. The task for the companies is integration between the three of them. I have a huge problem if I have a windows baed laptop, an iPad mini and an Android smartphone. Sure there are ways to have them partly integrated but there is no deep integration in the root of the system. Internet of Things is looming large. Soon there will be devices in my home, car, office which can be controlled digitally by smartphones or tablets.

First of them is a smartwatch. After the wave of Pebbles, Galaxy gears and Sony smart watches, Google and Apple have entered the race. Those watches were geek’s curiosity devices. People still say “Why would I need a smartwatch”?. But the leaks of Moto 360 and iWatch has shown that it can be a thing of future. Consumers are doubtful over what use can it be. But there were doubts over touch screen phones and tablets too.

For normal users the question stands is whom to pick. I can’t run Samsung Gear watches with other Android phones. I can’t run an iWatch with Android phones. I can’t sync my Windows tablet with my Macintosh. At this point If I need multiple devices, I can’t have different platforms. Even if the other platform or device is better than the other, it won’t fit into my ecosystem.

So while the software developers and device makers reach to a peaceful solution, chose a side. Because a storm of devices is coming!