I’m with my family in Papua New Guinea at the moment, carrying a couple of Android phones and a tablet with us. There seems to be a growing number of Android phones which gels with my experience of the number of countries represented in my app download stats (about 90). While I’m obviously most interested in how my music apps might be used in this context, there are other issues to be addressed for interface and design useability more generally.

PNG village pic

Patchy, low bandwidth data connections

In the village, although there are places with data reception, it’s very low bandwidth and tends to drop out from time to time. Apps that deal with that well are really appreciated. Gmail is one, as it has outstanding offline capabilities. Sharing using Bluetooth is very common here, and is something I hardly ever do at home so with music apps, sharing via intents in a common format is essential. Yesterday we made a really important recording of a family member (born in 1919) talking about land and traditional songs. My app Twotrack records in wav format, and my brother in law tried to send a copy of the recording to an uncle via bluetooth on his phone. The phone didn’t play wav files, hence the obvious need to be able to convert to mp3, but that’s the subject of a forthcoming post…

Harsh light conditions

I’ve used the phone a fair bit while on the water on the way to and from fishing spots so apps with highly visible controls while in a protective pouch are best. Button size and colour makes a huge difference. The record button on “My Tracks” app, for example, was easy to find when I couldn’t really read anything else in bright sunlight this morning on the boat.

App size

When you might struggle to keep your phone account charged with K5 (about USD$2.50) then data useage is really tight. 5Mb can be a lot in that context, so keeping app sizes down makes a lot of sense. Finally, the Asus Transformer tablet we are carrying with us is by far the best computing device I’ve ever brought to the village. I’ve brought a late 1990s Toshiba laptop here, an old powerpc Powerbook and white macbook here, with various charging options (solar, petrol generator, car cahrger). The tablet with its keyboard that has a battery not only lasts for days of use (maybe 12 hours or more with the extra battery in the keyboard) but is good for kids to watch movies, take photos, and connectivity in general (it has both a micro and standard SD slot). Doesn’t take that much to recharge it either, although you’d have to have a decent solar charger, and not the tiny 2000mAh thing I’m using for the phone.