Scott’s nanny just went out to buy new shoes at the evening market on Hongmei Lu. About 30 minutes later she came back, without shoes but obviously very unhappy about something. After she calmed down a bit she told us what had just happened. She found a nice pair of shoes and wanted to pay for it with a RMB 100 bill. The sales person took the bill but gave it back to her a few seconds later, telling her that it was fake. She looked at the bill and noticed it was a clean, unfolded bill. However, she always keeps her money tightly folded in her pocket. So this was not the money she gave the shoe seller!

She got very upset because he was trying to cheat her and RMB 100 is a lot of money for her. Luckily for her there was a witness who had seen what had happened and helped her. After a long verbal fight she got back her bill, but of course she did not buy the shoes anymore. I am sure the shoe sales man will try the same trick afterward on someone else and change the fake bill for a real one. Most people would have no idea they are being tricked, and in a badly lighted outside evening market you have no chance to prove you are being cheated.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the fact that outdoor LCD advertising would be illegal, but that the environmental watchdog could not do anything about the LCD screens in taxis. Well, it seems new rules banning ads inside taxis have come into effect this week, according to today’s Shanghai Daily. That does not mean that all screens will disappear overnight, but taxi operators have to remove them once contracts end.

Not good news for TouchMedia that operates most of these screens in Shanghai and that has VC funding from among other LG Ventures and Mustang Ventures. I hope they have back-up plans in place already, I assume this did not come out of the blue.

For taxi passengers it’s a good thing however, I don’t think I ever met anybody who actually liked the screens. I normally put the touch screen on mute and threw a coat over it (if I carried one), so it did not bother me too much. But I have friends who said they got car sick from watching the screens.

Could TouchMedia have avoided this? Nobody knows for sure, but I think that had they put an off button on the screen and sourced better content, they would have had a much better chance to continue operations. People generally like entertainment, just not forced entertainment.

That’s also what Hu Guang, a lawyer and a member of Shanghai’s chief advisory body, said: “Passengers should have the right to choose the services offered by taxis”. He was the one who put forward a proposal to stop video commercials in taxis, and it seems likely that he would not have done so had there been an off button on the screen. Too late.

I like to take videos, but either the quality is not good enough (when using my regular digital camera) or the camera is too big so that I don’t take it with me (my normal HD video camera). So today I bought a Flip Mino on taobao.com, a high quality video camera just a bit bigger than my business card. I first planned to buy one during my last trip to the US, but at BestBuy it was sold out and I could not find one shop in downtown San Francisco nor on SFO airport that sold it. They all told me to order it online!

The best thing about the Flip is not the design (I think they could use an Apple designer), but the usability. You click the on/off button and hit the record button to start recording. When you’re finished you click on the top part and a USB connector comes out. Plug it into your computer (both Mac and PC work fine) and you can watch the videos, edit them (software is loaded on the Flip) and immediately upload them to YouTube. Not Tudou, but if Flip should ever start selling this thing in China I think we should look at that.

It’s the simplicity that makes it brilliant to use. No need for cables, no need for additional software, just plug and play. Even my parents could probably use it :). And it’s small, so you just put it in your pocket. A simple but great gadget. There is also a Flip Mino HD version, but I decided to go for the standard one for now. The quality is excellent and the sound is amazing, especially if you compare it to the sound you get with a digital camera. I’ll put some videos on YouTube and Tudou over the next days, so you can see it for yourself.

Update: This is the first video I shot with the camera when I got home: http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/3ls9KprhAUs/

I have been using Google’s G1 phone for about a week now, after being a loyal iPhone user for over a year. Several people asked me which phone is better after suddenly seeing me with a white Android Gphone, so I decided to put some of my thoughts on my blog.

To start off with, as regular readers of this blog will know I am a major fan of Apple products. I basically only use Apple computers and since 2003 I did not buy any other mp3 players than iPods. I think Apple currently has the best electronics design in the world and the usability of its products is top. I loved using the iPhone despite its major software flaws (that will mostly be resolved when the 3.0 version of its firmware comes out) and despite the fact that the system is closed. Linking the iPhone with iTunes and the app store was a super smart idea for Apple, but it’s not necessarily the best for its users. Apple decides what you can do with the iPhone and what not, something I’m not too happy about.

Comparing the design, for me the iPhone is still the clear winner. The G1 is a bit bigger, has a smaller screen (3.2 inch versus 3.5 inch) and just does not look sleek. Luckily I don’t buy my phones for the way they look, but many people do, so in that respect the G1 has a hard time to compete. However, don’t forget that the G1 is built on the Android platform that can be used on every phone, and the next gen gPhones will come out soon, surely with much better designs.

What I like about the G1 is that it has a slide-out keyboard, even though I am so used to typing on the iPhone’s virtual keyboard already that it’s not as important to me as it used to be a year ago. For new users it can make a difference though. Strangely, the G1 does not have a normal headphone jack and you need an adapter to use your normal headphones. Well, my first generation iPhone has a similar issue (only half of my headphones are compatible with it) but still this is something I don’t understand for the G1.

Both phones have a touch screen, and they work similarly. The iPhone has multi-touch, the G1 not because Apple owns the technology… Thanks Apple 🙁 It’s not a big deal because of the + and – zoom buttons, but it feels like a step back. Generally the G1 phone is more like a desktop computer screen where you see your notifications and from where you do all your actions. It feels more like a mini-computer and less like a phone. I like that, but I think most users are less geeky and might prefer the iPhone screen.

The big advantage of the G1 is how open the Android system is. It’s easy to change settings (after you find out how it works, I had to rely on a Google search several times) and everything is customizable. With the menu key you get a pop-up menu wherever you are that allows you to make changes, and also touching the screen for 2 seconds normally more options. With the iPhone you just cannot do as much, you are much more restricted to what Apple allows you to do. This is what I like most about the G1, I feel I have almost unlimited options to do what I want to do.

The G1 fully integrates with Gmail and all other related Google applications. All my Google contacts where automatically in my G1 when I booted it up (after it was unlocked and I managed to change it to my own Gmail username, which took almost 30 minutes to figure out), and every time I make a change it syncs automatically. Very neat, but not useful if you’ve mainly been using Apple Address Book and iCal. I exported the address book to Gmail, but for iCal I still did not find a good (and free) solution. The G1 is also a portable hard drive: you just put music in the music folder and it’s ready to play, the same for pictures. I like the freedom it gives you, but I miss the iTunes sync with playlists etc. I suppose that had the G1 been there before the iPhone, I would be criticizing the iTunes sync, but now I am so used to it that I wish it would be possible with the G1.
Most functionalities are the same for both phones. The Android Market is very similar to the Apple App store, with a huge number of free and paid apps. Not as many as Apple, but everything I was looking for I could find right away. Even the games are the same: I just downloaded PapiJump and it looks and works exactly the same as on the iPhone (both phones have the accelerometer function). I guess having a keyboard gives developers more opportunities to make games for the G1, that might be an advantage.The built-in browser works fine, the experience is similar to what the iPhone offers. The G1 also has a trackball, but I found I don’t really need it while browsing because of the touch screen. Email work perfect, the experience feels better than with the iPhone, but it’s not as good as using a BlackBerry. The G1 camera has 3.2 megapixels compared to just 2 for the iPhone, and generally the camera’s pictures turn out a lot better. However, the delay after pressing the camera button is sometimes up to 3 seconds which makes the camera less useful to me (I understand there are apps that alleviate this problem).

I think the G1 is a great phone and it would have been a major hit had there been no iPhone. But I think it cannot compete against the Apple product for the most users, especially after the iPhone will upgrade its firmware to 3.0. Android has a lot of potential because it is open, but it will be very difficult to lure customers away from the iPhone. For me, I will keep using the G1 for now. I like the many functions it has and I like to play around with the phone and further customize it. I might switch back eventually to the iPhone, however, but I think that might be a lot harder after getting used to the Android platform. I’ll keep you posted.

All over Shanghai you can find traffic cameras hanging on light poles, bridges and traffic lights. If you break the traffic rules you are supposed to get a ticket if the police catches you, so most people watch out when they see a camera. So far most cabbies knew pretty well where all cameras are located (my driver is a former taxi driver and he has a good knowledge of them), but many others notice the cameras only when they see a flash or when they are in slow-moving traffic jam.

It seems the police decided that a wider knowledge of the location of these instruments might reduce the number of people breaking the law, so they now put all traffic cameras online. You can see all cameras in the city on Shanghai’s traffic police site. According to the website there are a total of 1739 cameras in Shanghai and hidden cameras, e.g. cameras that are not on this list, are not allowed. The camera locations were opened up to the public earlier this week, and a lot of people were eager to find out the locations: as a result the site had 4 million hits in the first 7 hours the police cameras were published there! I did not see any mash-ups with Google Maps or Baidu Ditu yet, I think that would be a big hit as well.