I’ve dabbled with a few of the check-in and location apps;  Foursquare, Google places & Facebook and all require the user to manually check-in to a location, which in some cases like the Facebook app make sense where its all about letting people know your location when you want to tell them. However, apps like Foursquare however that require a manual check in to earn points or benefit from deals etc are falling way short of where they need to be.

I’d like to see two new pieces of functionality added to location / check in apps:

1. Notifications A built in notification capability that informs the user of offers, deals and bonus points for example available at or near their current location. This would drive up the number of check-ins and encourage users to visit places they may not naturally visit e.g. the cafe next door as it has an offer on for a free drink with any order.
2. Auto Check-ins  These apps should learn from the users history. If everytime I go down the highstreet I check in to Subway the app auto check me in if I go there, simple. Everyone benefits the user, the apps developers and the merchant.

The major downside of this are battery life and the constant buzz of the notifications informing you about deals that you arent interested in. There isnt much one could do about battery life but with a bit of history and social magic the apps could learn your friends likes and suggestions to aid the app in only notifying you of useful checkins.

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HTC this week have had a shocker. They had previously announced that the much loved but now a little dated HTC Desire would receive Gingerbread (Android 2.3). Spin forward to this week and the caused outrage on their facebook page when they informed their customers that there wasnt enough memory on the phone to support gingerbread. This update doesnt even bring that many major features and still customers were far from happy.

Luckily 24 hours later HTC changed their mind and said that they would role out the OS update, now possible by removing some of the bundled apps that are part of the HTC Sense offering.  So customers are happy but now concerned what applications they are going to loose.

Those like myself who already have 2.3.3 through a very well made custom Rom are a little confused why small development houses / collectives / teams can enable any app to be installed on SD card, provide the latest software far quicker than companies like HTC.

We have recently seen Apple release iMessage, an application built in no small part by a developer who had no connection with Apple who built a far superior app than Apples previous messaging app who later became an Apple employee.

Samsung have taken this a step further. Having had success with their Samsung Galaxy S, they noticed that cyanogen had managed to build their flavour of custom rom adding and in many cases improving the phone. On releasing the Samsung Galaxy S 2, the most powerful Android handset on the market to date, they embraced the developer community by sending the developers at Cyanogen free handsets to actively encourage them to root and customise their phone.

Large phone manufacturers could learn alot from what the developer community has managed to do. For along time now many people with older phones like the HTC Desire have struggled with the limited amount of space on the phone for applications which cant be moved to the SD card. The dev community came to the rescue and on some custom roms any application can be installed on SD freeing up huge amount of space on the handset.

Samsungs recognition of the dev community is a good start, I just hope that many follow suit.

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