Something big came along

A few days ago, the nice postman brought this to our home

and the android experience hasn’t been the same since. I think the Samsung Galaxy Nexus has brilliant design, the curved look adds to this, and the little bumper at the bottom back does as well. Since as a Nexus device it doesn’t feature Touchwiz either, it also dropped the “cheap-iphone-ripoff” look that has always been a dealkiller for me with all the other Galaxy devices up to this point.

The real surprise though was Ice Cream Sandwich. It looks really good. It features the basic surfaces of the redesigned Play Store, I think you can tell that the designers work at a web company. It’s fast and it’s beautiful.

Having seen this review some time ago, I was worried about a few things. First off, dropping the search button seemed like a bad idea, as I use the physical button a lot. Along with the “back” and the “right mouse click” buttons, it is a big advantage about limited iOS. But it really works and I find the new setting really flowing. Especially the “recent apps” button is gorgeous. The second issue was the missing mSDHC, which was another of those android staples: Just plug your device into any USB port like your friend’s computer and copy your or his files around freely (when I tried that with my iPod many years ago, it just wiped everything clean. I hate iOS). With the Galaxy Nexus, it’s not that simple. It only has internal storage, no mSDHCs, so you can’t just switch out the storage (and I just bought a brand new 32GB mSDHC…) and when connecting to a computer what happens then depends: On a Win machine, you will nearly have the same experience, using the built in MTP in the Windows Explorer. On Mac OS, you’ll have to first install Google’s “Android File Transfer” from here, and you’ll get a wrap-around to browse some designated sectors of the internal storage. ubuntu users have to work the most and resort to a web search to find the most convenient method at the moment, just in order to get two Linux devices to work together. So, it’s not a dealbreaker like the iOS devices are for me, but a big step back. Google should have provided a good way to access the internal storage via Linux right at the launch. Lastly, the big bad screen has the most stunning black I have ever seen but the whites are more of a greyish blur.

After having been an HTC Sense user for a long time, I’m really happy to see a few gripes of the Sense launcher go away: The deep integration of facebook, which makes it impossible to use the “People” widget if you don’t have an account and let facebook take over your phone, the random resetting of all your sound settings, the device setting itself on “silent” without your input, the warm resets after using the browser or youtube, the device taking screenshots if you push the home button etc.

So, while there are of course constantly new upper echelon devices on the horizon and already available (hello quadruple HTC One X and hello Sony Xperia S), I think of the current Nexus as the goto android flagship device and will be unable to put it down for a long time. Until Alienware step forward with their iteration.

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The shoulders of giants

Galaxy Nexus frame by nikosrs4 from the Nexus forums.

An in depth discussion of the behaviour of the new internal storage and the reasoning behind it here.

Full specs here.

A merry merry christmas. Frohes Fest!

Our obligatory little well-wishing.

 

If you cannot keep track, mayhaps with so much on your mind, you might want to deploy a christmas countdown widget.

If you’re sporting one of those shiny iPhones, there are alternatives here.

#android and smrtphone #wishlist for the #end-of-the-year-blowout

After the first few happy people got their hands on the new android flagship/developer phone, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, we’re eagerly awaiting their performance reports. I personally would look out for three main points on this device.

1. Samsung dropped the iPhone copycat home button and the iPhonelike UI/launcher (yes, Ice Cream Sandwich vanilla and all), but the new Nexus’ bezel is still made out of plastic. Does this feel cheap or in anyway subpar?

2. I’m told they went for the RGBG subpixel set, which could mean a more greenish colourset in some instances. Is this true? Is the display somewhat green?

3. Last but not least – the battery. Some of the other android flagships (Galaxy S II, Sensation) give you two days with moderate use and one day with heavy usage. Could we expect these numbers on the Galaxy Nexus as well?

The curved line feeling however is pure rock ‘n roll.

Now for the hashtag-overflow title – three things I would wish for the near future in smartphones.

1. Smudge-free displays. I would wish for some display technology that permanently eliminates the smudges and stains a typical human hand leaves on capacitive touchscreens. As it so happens, there is some research being made, with possible results under way.

2. Bummer, who-d’a-thought-it, of course, etc. – but it seems really hard to achieve: Longer battery duration. I would like to be able to turn all antennaes ON and leave them that way, and so much more. Meanwhile, manufacturers could at least deliver the best possible battery as a default. Which they don’t, seeing that you can quite often purchase something like the Anker 1900 mAh for the Sensation and extend your battery life noticeably.

3. A dream of the future – undestructable handsets. A typical user will get a lot of mileage out of his shiny little handset, and much too often the computer dream-come-true comes to a sudden halt by dropping it on the sidewalk or by leaving it on a cupboard with vibration on.

So, a bit of standard fare as to numbers 2 and 3, but I think these are the remaining issues with handset devices and also, with christmas getting nearer and nearer, you should find some comfort in things that are to be expected on blogs.

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Broken LCD screen jpg by http://www.desktopnexus.com/ . Appreciate.

Something new this way comes (Google+)

As more time goes by, the people at Google+ will introduce more and more features. The last few weeks have seen the games tab, starting a hangout directly from youtube (although I personally haven’t seen that button around yet) and the reshare function on its android app. Possibly, it could at some time feature designs, just like a wallpaper on a smartphone or desktop. This already exists in various Google instances like the classisc homepage, GMail, and the Chrome browser.

Your “edit profile” tab could give you the option of choosing a Google design, an authored one by the usual artists (see the “Designs” section at the bottom of the Chrome web store) or even one of your own choosing.

Google has been quick to feature the 4-5 photo-art-wall thing that was introduced to facebook a while ago.

This is just our guessing, and many people could opt to keep the minimalistic design it has now.

The next thing would definitely be brands on G+, with an open API coming at the same time or little later. The possibility to make G+ corporate friendly doesn’t necessarily mean an API, but the roof would be off with the latter, since this particular network is the darling of techies at this moment, and many of those would surely unleash the programming skills.

The other things we would like to see are the option to sort your sparks on the stream tab and the stream itself to be able to default to a certain circle’s posts. On the mobile end, there still are no sparks at all, but your stream may default to a certain circle – the one you left it on the last time checking. Also, the handling with +users could be more sophisticated here, as you are not able to put a user’s name in a comment.

Ah, and if you would like to see an “nearby” stream just like on the mobile version, head to this destination - https://m.google.com/app/plus .

Power regression in Nux kernel versions 2.6.38 and 2.6.39

Bummer.

 

Power regression in Nux kernel versions 2.6.38 and 2.6.39

 

 

 

…and I was just wondering how. On my previous laptops, ubuntu always had a good 10% more battery than the side running Win XP. Don’t know about the HTC Sensation, but the Desire HD is running version 2.6.35. So, no battery boost via OTA update for this little baby.

 

Android 2.2 Froyo: Likes and dislikes

Now that we’re hearing some rumors about Android 2.3 Gingerbread coming to the HTCs (engadget says “june”, the official 2.3 ROM with HTC Sense seems to have popped up on the web), I wanted to do a little round up of the things that could be improved upon (dislikes). The likes are very obvious – even on 2.2, android is the ultimate smartphone os, and to me spells h a p p i n e s s.

Two peculiarities should be resolved with gingerbread: the recently launched Google android web interface lets you name your devices – a first step into a direction we fancy? – and screenshots should be included this time. Just thinking of that post back in january.

So let’s talk about Sense itself. HTC’s digital surface is a very sleek and well thought-through interface and gets constantly new widgets and skins etc. It might be because of my not activating facebook on the device (?), but some of the widgets I always use are a bit slow, change their appearance by themselves if you “match contacts” (the “People widget”) or shred your private messages (the “twitter widget”) and even obmit messages and “@ mentions” altogether (still, the “twitter widget”). These would be the albeit very few instances where Sense falls short of being perfect.

Turns out to be a very short post. Blame it on the Taiwanese and on Google.

On another note, and yeah, I’m talking to you, dear iPhone 4 using @hans_san : ), the business capabilites of said HTCs are nothing short of gewd – yes, you may setup multiple MS Exchange accounts on the same device, you don’t even need an app for that, and you can schedule peak times and different setups for push updates. So there ya go.

Ah, before you ask, the “Zombies”-tag? It is not at all related to this post, no, really, but them zombies are everywhere.

Android crowd, green and gold…five apps to start with

Of course, once the golden dust around my new shiny Desire HD had settled a bit, I immediately proceeded to pull off some essential apps from the market, and so a little review might be in order here. Things I do all the time on the phone while out in the wild are reading feeds, ebooks and listening to podcasts. So tell us all about those apps there, and break them down in sweet little categories while you’re at it.

First off, feed readers.

This is my primary news source, my newspaper, and the primary way I access web content. So this better be solid.

One remarkable app in this category is alphonsolabs’ pulse reader. It is by far the best looking and wets your mouth to read more just by looking at it. It’s free, but it does have some drawbacks, at least on android: It is limited both horizontally and vertically, meaning you can add only up to 25 news sources (oi! I got 81 at the moment, and I need them all!), and once you read the first dozen entries, that’s it. You need to go to the website to access more content. Finally, this thing keeps crashing on me on seemingly random entries. Those are the reasons I can’t use this one as my primary reader, and only keep it around as a sort of gadget.

Next up it’s time for Feedsquares. We talked about this cute way to read your feeds a while ago, and it got an android version around that time as well. It’s usage is seemless, it let’s you use the day/night themes, and organize your stuff into folders, for all the Monikas out there. Get it here:

And of course, for anybody who wants the whole real deal, without compromising, you’d need the native Google Reader app. It’s on the market, and while not being among the prettiest looking apps out there, it does offer nearly everything the web application has.

Second base: eBooks.

This one, even more than the other categories, is an ongoing quest for me. I do read the occasional ebook, and I liked the quasi-paper look they gave the screen on the kindle. So I have been looking for an app that offers some comfort and looks, but most importantly, let me display my imported, free ebooks. On that account, I failed, and haven’t been able to find an ebook app that just does that. Meanwhile, I went with aldiko, which features a nice interface, good choice of different reading methodes, and an overall good handling. I was able to get the free ebooks I wanted to read from the built-in shop, but was lucky, I guess. Still looking for that simplest of things, a state of the art ebook reader that is able to display my own ebooks And now that version 2-oh is out there, I can do just that. Case solved. That’s right. Buhaa.

Aaand count three – podcasts.

I tried three promising podcast clients this far.

PodCat (lol witty appnames galore): Looks like a simple, clean catcher and player, but it isn’t: I just keeps crashing. So, not suitable for use in this version.

Hapi Podcast/xuluan android: This one features a pretty awful design and interface. The first thing in order would be to import your existing podcast list, which in my case is quite long, similar to the RSS feeds up there in category #1. This only worked after a stubborn few dozen tries, and only after realizing you had to rename your *.OPML in a certain way and put in a certain place, whereas this podcast client wouldn’t tell you this by itself. Also, at a random point, your podcast list would be erased, and look at your face when you skipped the *.OPML importing step and punched in the RSS feeds of your wished for podcasts by hand. Lord, what a terrible app. Finally, after deleting this thing, it leaves its own sort of permanent footprint on your system, as a sort of reminder of what you dealt with here: An unerasable folder in your system’s garbage bin.

This sometimes happens on my work Mac OS too. I sincerely hate that.

Enough of this, let’s get to the good stuff: BeyondPod. This one finally is the stuff. It lets you import your ‘casts seemlessly and without a fuzz. You can than sort them into folders, download the latest shows, schedule for automatic updates anytime, keep certain entries from updating or getting deleted, and so on and so forth. It just works perfectly. And I mentioned that before, but you do not need iTunes anymore. Thank you very much, some more bloatware finally gone! I even just updated to the paid “PRO” version for $5, without really getting where the difference was, but anyway in order to support the perfect standalone podcast app on android.

Join the green and gold android crowd.

Lord knows, it’s been a while since I’ve been hungering that much for a single device. Maybe it’s getting worse.

Following my own personal smartphone holocaust however, and after venturing through some rather strange places on the ecommercing web, I walked into Saturn am Alexanderplatz and ordered the HTC Desire HD. That got me waiting for many weeks of course, since this badboy has been sold out completely and utterly since day one if one is to judge by some tweets we saw out there.

Anyway. First impressions in this case last.

Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way.

I thought I just just briefly mentioned the things I don’t like on this fella, to then pass on to indulging you with the good things. First for android itself, I am missing two very very little things. You can’t name the device as of version 2.2 Froyo, so in a WLAN you will have to look for a thing that calls himself a12341717#a12 etc. No prob if you got only one android in your home, but with two or more, well…good luck guessing. Also, you can’t do screenshots. There are several applications in the marketplace, but you’d need to root first.

HTC’s overlay, called HTC Sense, is a very good one for that, but some of the promised features can’t be used, eg. it should be possible to log on to the website and locate your cell phone in your apartment or elsewhere, but the site just won’t let you do that. So, until further notice, no hatemail to your phone’s thief.

The handset itself has got the one flaw that is really worth mentioning, as in “this shouldn’t be this way”. The parts of the device apart from the giant screen itself are of a rather lesser quality build. This means that you can push the bottom and side covers in when holding the Desire HD, and you can even hear little crunching noises. It may even break off when trying to insert a new micro SD or SIM card.

We will just have to wait and see what lifetime we can expect, but right now I’ll have to state that I really loved the build and finishing of my first iPhone 2G compared to this. Well, at least the exterior.
With a monster like this, you’d think that you would keep it in your hand all the time and play around with it. And this sorta thing drains your battery. So the first step in order was to buy another two chargers and place them anywhere I would happen to dwell. But a bigger battery would have been very cute there.

Kingdom come

With those issues out of the way, I could write 300 posts just about how smart, cool, and beautiful the system and the whole device is. All things I didn’t like or that were kinda dealbreakers with the iPhone are gone now with #android. Sorry, twitter and all. Anyway, your don’t need iTunes or any other dumbed down bloatware. You mount your phone with a finger tip and put on your media, docs and other files, also without decoding it. To sum it up, it is smartphonewise just as ubuntu is an experience OS-wise: I start it up the first time with a certain idea of how it should look like, the look and feel etc., and either it delivers right from the start or you can tune it with a few tips/mouseclicks. This I like, this I wantwant. Even though the locked up, dumbed down, making you pay for everything experience on an iPhone is said to have the advantage that each piece relates beautifully to every other part of the system, that is exactly what Froyo with HTC Sense does. There may be some apps on the marketplace that try to add some usabilily you already have, but my overal impression is just that everything just falls into place and feels right. To sum the whole experience up, I would say “android is about being nice to you.”

(o_O)

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On the shoulders of giants

Look up the specs of this badboy on HTCs official site, here (although, beware – the test praises the build and the battery life, the two major shortcomings of the Desire HD, and we don’t know what exactly they be smoking when doing a test at their “lab”), and here.

Browse a few apps on the official site, or on the imperative appbrain. Check the market stats here.

And what happens when you put dust on it?

…it becomes *broken.

Name the one device in this pic still working after more than ten years of service. I'll give you one little hint: It's the blue one in the frontrow. Aw, never been good at this hinting-business.

Some time ago, I noticed that the power/USB grip at the bottom of my iPhone 2G was filled with dust layers, which made it barely fit into the USB connector and stand in an awkwardly odd angle on all the charging stations scattered across my home and office.

So I took a small and very-not-sharp paper clip and slowly, and very carefully, took out the big bad bowl o’ dust. Shouldn’t have done that. Because, as of that moment, some time ago, the phone wouldn’t connect to the USB port of any computer, be it ubuntu/Windows powered or Mac. It simply told me that the USB port was “overpowered” because the iPhone demanded “too much energy” and would subsequently shut down. So I force-drained the device of all its energy by switching on Bluetooth, Wifi, the works and opening up as many useless tabs on Opera mini as possible while listening continuosly to my voicemail – basically, all of the multitasking the iPhone could offer. Funny that this was to be my last web-browsing session on this little fella, since the above mentioned error persisted, and trying to tap into the USB-less home jack just gave away a small lightning. That was basically it. Nothing worked anymore anyhoo. No turning off – turning on, no cold reset, not even the little known third method, also known as “hard reset” or “hard kill”, which would set up the recovery mode. All that is left is to send it in and pay 210€ for a repair-as-new-treat. Now, I tend to compare options like these with a possibly available update-your-life, apparently unlike people who buy used stuff on ebay that costs slightly less, the same or even more than the same stuff bought unused from amazon (at least in Germany). I’ve been eyeing those fancy, world-conquering androids for quite some time now, and though I really liked my 2G for the time being, and do have a lot of respect for what Apple accomplished with its Jesusphone, the androids simply seem to let me be doing what I want with the smartphone of my choosing. And I don’t even mean any crazy technological techstuff here. I just want to be able to delete podcasts I’ve already listened to from the device while on the device, upgrade the storage space by simply switching the microSD card inside of it, and oh yeah, get rid of iTunes, and please forever pretty please. Not to mention the slightly nervous thought that if I had been able to open up the phone, I might have not ruined it at all. And if there’s ad revenue I could possibly generate, even without knowing it, the cash upstream should go to Google, and not Apple. So, I am currently on the lookout for pretty much the same thing a good friend of mine was looking for some time ago.

If you have an iPhone, be very, very careful with the USB connection at its bottom. Since I myself acted precisely like that, better yet, don’t ever even touch it. Maybe this could save others from suffering the most dreadful thing that could happen to an iPhone user besides getting robbed.

And in the meantime, and also in order to explain the peculiar first picture of this entry, what do I do? Cram out every single phone ever used in the household, and put the SIM into a truly ancient piece of hardware.

I have to hand it to Nokia. They may be losing the smartphone race, and didn’t understand android, but I think this phone will still be working when my grandchildren find it long since forgotten in an attic of theirs. It even once flew all the way down from a trainstation to the streets below, more than five or six meters, with me drunkingly putting together its severed pieces, and survived without a single scratch.

On the move, it is party like it’s 1999 2001 again, because at those times, when you wanted to listen to music while commuting, you had to pack a special separate device for that.

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Picture of iPhone 2G’s bottom side by Gearlive

What-if episode, but without science fiction

You remember when Apple overtook MS in terms of market value, a few weeks ago? While I was dumb struck reading something like that at the time, it kept me wondering what could be the possible outcomes if a development like this continues. So here’s our little list, futureproof and all -

1. Nothing really happens. Too often one fails to set the variables right, and the utmost part of speculation remains just that. But it might just give you an opportunity to be funny.
2. The IT world as a whole continues to shift, and up to a third of all things digital could be done on smartphones and all sort of handsets, where we would be seeing Android (160 000 new activations A DAY? Still can’t believe it) and Apple as market leaders.
3. Microsoft discontinues Windows. That would make Mac OS n the dominant “you’ll have to pay for that, my son”-OS out there. Every other manufacturer would need to adapt by either making Mac OS its native system like this

or, go ahead and try to delevop its own operating system, which is quite hard and costly. So why not take a long established standard, that costs nothing, while you may even claim money for it? Case in point, a little CD from South Africa? That would also mean the end of dual booting…like this.

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On the shoulders of giants

Cupcake by Adam Powell on the Android Developer’s Blog.

Mac OS on a tiny VAIO by daharder via boingboing.

Fused logo by dedoimedo.com.