What is Swaish?

Swaish is the answer when you don’t know the question. Swaish is the agreement when there is a fight. Swaish is the word when there is no word. Swaish is the conclusion to all arguments. Swaish is a religion when you have lost all faith. Swaish is the light when there is night. Swaish is I love you when you are feeling shy. Swaish is the beauty we cant find. Swaish is the food which warms our bellies. Swaish is a thank you when you don’t want to thank openly. Swaish is culture, swaish is a code, swaish is everything which is otherwise missing. Swaish is the tradition which separates men from beasts. Swaish is the honor which is difficult to keep. Swaish is the bird when there aren’t two in the bush.

When there is nothing there is swaish, when there is swaish there is everything.

I bid you all swaish!

RE: Facebook; hot, warm or cold

While I am personally more active on twitter and find it to be a more clutter free, open and convenient medium of social networking, one can never undermine Facebook on that front. With all the advantages of twitter one does end up on Facebook for sharing pictures, planning events and staying connected. The only break in that rut seemed to come from Google Plus recently, but Facebook has been pretty aggressive on protecting that front. However, the speed with which Facebook has been absorbing features & benefits which made Google Plus unique is a double edged sword.

For more tech savvy and aware users this means that google plus doesn’t offer the USPs which coupled with the fact that there aren’t enough users on the service to network, minimizing risks Facebook faced from Google Plus. Which also means that unless there is a massive discomfort with Facebook people do not really need to leave this comfort zone and move to a new product.

On the other hand pushing so many features and updates in quick succession leads to a considerable amount of confusion for a more casual user (which is the majority). While already being natorious for being too jumpy with it’s look, feel and accessibility, pushing these updates as quickly as Facebook is would create bumps in the user experience and subsequently decrease customer satisfaction.

Having said all that, Facebook does not have any major competitor in the market which bolsters the same amount of user base and as such can tweek around without worrying about losing users since they don’t have any realistic options to move to. Not the best strategy or way to treat your customers/users but definitely an advantage which the market leader & virtual monopoly enjoys.

The Road to Gingerbread – The Sony Ericsson Ordeal

So after months of bearing the badly designed Éclair distribution on my Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, which by the way has been a really unworthy introduction to an otherwise expansive platform, I received a random notification t from the update server tonight that the Gingerbread update for my hand held is available. Through various friends & colleagues I had been hearing about the upcoming upgrade to the latest Android version, however, I was personally not keeping tabs on it. In short, the update notification came as quite a pleasant surprise.

Sadly, the pleasantness of the surprise was limited to the notification only. First of all, while the hand held itself had the common decency to notify the user that an upgrade is available; the desktop application which goes around by the title “Sony Ericsson PC Companion” does not possess these primitive etiquettes. So much so that during my first attempt at locating the update on Sony’s server the PC Companion actually informed me that my hand held (running Android 2.1) is completely up to date and I should check back at a later date for more updates.

Googling and looking up Sony Ericsson support website was not much of the help either regarding the availability of an update. Eventually, doubting that I had somehow mistaken the notification on my hand held earlier I had to verify the update status manually and from there I was able to get hold of the link to much required www.sonyericsson.com/update link. Subsequently, the availability of Gingerbread update was verified from the website. Honestly, finding if your phone’s OS has an update available should not be such a painful experience.

Our problems don’t end here. While the website announces its triumph in releasing the latest upgrade the PC Companion continues to inform me that the Éclair version installed on my device is up to date. Turns out, PC Companion itself is out of date and somehow it does not have the capability of determining the latest OS version available for the hand held nor access the availability of its newer version.  Thankfully, the online support was not a complete pain this time around and the PC Companion update was easily located, downloaded and installed.

And thus begins the third part of our journey to obtain the much talked about Android 2.3 OS. Armed with the latest version of the crappy PC Companion, a broadband internet connection and a USB Cable the OS update should now be a breeze right? Wrong! PC Companion decided to crash as soon as it had finished downloading the upgrade. With patience reaching the point of no return the only consolation left was that the software didn’t crash before the download finished. Thankfully, after the restart PC Companion was not much of a nuisance and allowed me to successfully upgrade to Gingerbread without any further suffering.

By now however, I am in no condition to impartially assess the improvements (if any) the Gingerbread upgrade brings to my Android/ Sony Ericsson experience. However, for the sake of other poor souls out there wanting a Gingerbread upgrade on a Sony hand held I would summarize the following points:

1. Check for the upgrade availability of your phone at http://www.sonyericsson.com/update/
2. Download and install the PC Companion version 2.0 from the link provided below before starting any update activity.

http://www.sonyericsson.com/cws/support/mobilephones/downloads/subject/pccompanion/xperiax10?cc=pk&lc=en

1. Remember patience is a virtue and you would be rewarded with the latest version of the Android OS once all of this is over.

Hopefully, I would be sharing my Gingerbread experience sometime soon. Meanwhile, feel free to follow me on twitter (@taimoormq) for random, routine observations regarding the Gingerbread experience.