Faster Field Service with LTE April 2, 2013

Leasing agents from Domus Student Housing are highly knowledgeable of the properties in Waterloo. They also know a lot about you and your viewing appointment, thanks to a central database that brings information to their fingertips. With a recent deployment of iPhone 5 on Rogers LTE, this access just gets even faster.

Since we now have numerous mobile devices in the field, we took this opportunity to try out some of the new features of Gyroscope. In particular, adaptive screen size and inverted rotation.

The current version of Gyroscope mobile, which was designed for iPhone 4 and all its previous generations, already works on an iPhone 5. The database app detects the orientation of the phone and offers different layouts for landscape and portrait view respectively. The iPhone 5 has a wider (or taller) screen, only part of which is utilized by the mobile app. The viewing experience on Samsung models was also not optimized.

The new version of Gyroscope detects the screen resolution. On a regular computer screen this is a trivial task. The logical resolution on a mobile device is ever changing. When the user rotates or pinches the screen, the resolution changes. The adaptive screen size feature figures out the physical screen size and arranges layout accordingly.

On some "odd" devices such as the Blackberry Playbook, the orientation is inverted. Portrait mode was shown in landscape view and vice versa. The new version fixes this issue as well.

In short, the new Gyroscope works on all the mobile devices we have at the office, and for those with LTE connection, the app runs blazing fast. So just exactly how fast is Gyroscope mobile on LTE?

We measured the average bandwidth consumption of a typical task during a property viewing, namely answering a student's questions about leasing specifics. The total download was 210K. LTE speed ranges from 5Mbps to 25Mbps. At 5Mbps, the task is completed in 0.04 seconds. In other words, you can get an answer from a leasing agent faster than you can ask the question!

So the next time when you're with a Domus agent, feel free to learn more about the property you're interested in renting. If you're not thrilled by the technology behind the service, at least you'll make a more informed decision.