I want a hardware refresh of the G1 (original google android phone)

I see all those new android phones come out with faster hardware and better camera, but no real keyboard and other deficiencies…

After having lived with the shortcomings of the G1 and comparing to that for a while, I feel that I really just want a hardware-refresh of the existing G1 phone and not the new droid nor the N1.

I want to have the faster cpu, more RAM, better camera (led flash, light sensitivity) and faster USB read speed (12MB/s instead of 5MB/s) of the N1 but I do not want to give up the hardware keyboard of the G1, the hardware buttons of the G1 (accept call/home/back/hangup). I actually love the slide-out keyboard design, it allows me to switch to real typing mode real fast.

The droid hardware keyboard is a joke, it is worse than the on-screen keyboard in terms of accuracy.

I love htc’s special usb cable that allows me to connect any headphone as well as my car stereo to it, with a microphone on the connector plus a button that allows me to skip mp3 songs and accept calls mostly hands-free while driving.

The G1 is a pretty good smartphone, just the cpu and ram deficiency makes it painfully slow.

I even like the form-factor, fits well in my pocket.

Can I just get a hardware refresh instead of a new broken design please?

Michael

Review Nexus One (N1) comparison to G1 android phone

What I like better on Nexus One (N1) compared to my G1

+ faster cpu and more RAM make web browser and switching between apps much more responsive. However, once you do your day to day things you will notice that some of the apps depend on remote resources and those will be as slow as the network, i.e. Where, so more CPU+RAM is NOT a cure-all for performance. It is now easier to open lots (15+) of web pages in the browser and leave them open in the background.

+ reading files (i.e. importing images from the phone) from SD now is 12MB/s instead of 5MB/s. Writing is the same 5MB/s.

+ battery life twice as long (not measured)

+ flash on camera actually works, it is finally possible to take pictures while clubbing. However whitebalance is expecting flash, so if you take without flash then the colors look off. As usual having more megapixel does not improve the picture quality which depends largely on other factors (light sensitiveness, sharpness, color truthfulnes)

+ android 2 features like facebook / contacts integration is nice

+ can take backside off and battery-out much easier than on G1

+ normal audiojack, but thats not only a plus, see below

What I don’t like on Nexus One (N1) compared to my G1

- some apps are not ready for it, i.e. commodore 64 emulators who would direclty benefit from faster cpu only use a small portion of the screen as their framebuffer size is hardcoded. (tested two of them). Moxier Mail (enterprise quality exchange email) just force-closes while authenticating and is not useable.

- no hardware keyboard. While the onscreen keyboard does work somewhat nice it still is a major drawback when trying to type larger amounts of text or while doing other things… it just consumes more percent of your attention to correctly enter text.

- voice dictation not a real substitute yet, integration into keyboard only available in some apps? Sometimes loses connection to servers while waiting to upload data for interpretation and aborts, does not work offline. Quality varies, between garbage and suprising accuracy.

- no hardware keys for phone pickup/hangup. You now actually have to navigate through the touchscreen keyboard to hangup a call when you navigated to say the contacts to look up or take down a new phonenumber.

- oversaturated colors

- new screen technology (better viewing angles) does not have as natural colors?

When comparing photos displayed on g1 and on n1 then the g1 ones look a bit desaturated and the ones on the n1 looks overly saturated in a bad way. Maybe I have a bad engineering sample, but if it is representative then I am less excited about it then everybody else.

- connector for charging now no longer standard micro USB, means you forget the special cable and you are out, but at least when you forget your special usb2audio cable you can now use it without the in-line microphone and accept/hangup/skipsong button from HTC.

Overall I am less excited than I thought I would be and will probably hang on to my G1 until I get something drastically better.

Mobile application development middleware?

I am the author of an ExtJS based cluster management web-application (Scyld IMF at Penguin Computing) that allows controlling a high performance compute cluster from any web-browser, be it from your desktop or from a mobile device. This works fairly well already even without writing a special view for the mobile devices as current smartphones (iphone, android) come essentially with a full blown javascript capable web-browsers and lots of processing power. However performance still could be better by having a native app that uses the same data sources / api as the full blown web-application (javascript app running on the browser being the client to the webservice-api on the server side), but implementing the view natively.

After hacking up a proof of concept for the iphone (thanks John for your awesome iphone JSON flickr tutorial and xcode example for download) and thinking of how to do the same for android without duplicating effort, I realized that it would be nice to be able to have some kind of middleware that allows me to create and populate native gui components without code duplication.

One such middleware is phonegap which requires you to write your application in javascript and html, and allows accessing phone specific features through javascript calling the middleware. It then is bundled as a native application that can be submitted to the app store for purchase and can run completely offline once downloaded, unless the programmer chooses to access remote resources. Their initial focus seems to have been allowing access to smartphone specific features like the address book, vibrate and sound, gps location and such, but there also is code in there to use native gui components as well.

I have two problems with the approach:

1. development of javascript – while palm pre developers might tout this as an advantage, I find javascript development and debugging rather tedious and would prefer writing my code in java or objective-c and be able to run it through a full control debugger on my desktop before deploying it to the simulator. I know about and am actively using firebug, the javascript debugger for firefox, but a lot of the bugs I had to deal with were incredibly hard to hunt down and rather than the debugger it was the forums and interacting with developers on #extjs chat, as well as using jslint and manually analyzing code, that helped me figure out a root-cause, workaround or fix.

2. performance – developers report that the phonegap version of their app appears to consume more resources rather than less compared to a remotely hosted javascript app, accessed through the mobile devices web-browser. Apart from the overhead of having to parse javascript at runtime, developers sometimes need platform specific knowledge and implement different than for a web-application, i.e. iphone onclick events being much slower from the touchscreen than ontouch events.

The advantage on the other hand appears to be that it is relatively easy to add new mobile platforms to phonegap. So far they appear to have iphone, android, blackberry and some nokia platforms covered, with palm pre being on the horizon to be added beginning of next year.

And according to phonegaps website, there are already several real-world phonegap powered apps in the marketplaces of both the iphone and android.

Thoughts?

Josh sold his first picture on jmatz.etsy.com

Maybe I have to look into doing the same thing, my friend Josh today on his blog reported he sold his first photo through etsy.com:

“Well, there it is. My first sale. And my first positive feedback. I sold a print titled “Daybreak at the Lake” this week and the buyer loves it. (For that matter, so do I!) I’m putting a bit of effort in up front to get some traffic into my Etsy site, and hopefully that traffic will amount to more and more sales. If was great fun to post things to flickr and get all the feedback there, but actually producing something that someone will have hanging in their home is a whole new thing. If you haven’t visited yet, stop on by http://jmaz.etsy.com/ and see what’s up on the block. Thank you! JMaz”

Here is the photo he is refering to:

Congratulations, Josh!

What I like about my macbookpro – Top 5

1. no more out of battery issues

I used to run Fedora 9 on a toshiba laptop to work on the train while commuting. Every so often I would have forgotten to charge it, and then it would shut down before I could do anything useful. Very annoying, compounded by the fact that the estimate of runtime tends to be wrong, so by the time it warns you that it will shut down soon, and you scramble to find the power supply to connect to, it will shut down right in front of you while you try to plug it in.

So yesterday was one of those mornings, my macbookpro had run out of power over night and was in hibernate mode. I noticed right before I was getting ready to get out the door. I connect the charger and get everything else ready and then disconnect and go after about 10min. Once in the train I open it up and am surprised to see a full 1.5 hours of runtime, and sure enough I can work all through my commute and have plenty of power left when connecting it back to power at my desk. Yay!

2. The powerful apps!

I created some tunes with Garageband, it is real fun and the loop database that comes with it is amazing for somebody that just starts like me. Anyways, so I wanted to share some audio mp3 on facebook with my friends, but facebook does not like uploading mp3, it only allows videos. So I drag and drop some photos out of iPhoto onto the iMovie app, and add my audio as a background song. This is done in minutes, and I am uploading the video to facebook…

3. safari detects network up and reloads tabs.

A typical thing I do is open up a bunch of tabs with the news websites so I can read it in the train while offline. When I command-click on the links to further stories they open up as ‘network disconnected’ in the additional tab as expected. But unlike what I am used to with Linux + Firefox, I don’t have to find the ‘reload all tabs’ menu item once I reconnect to the network – it automatically reloads the tabs…

4. apple remote control

Its a simple thing but so effective – be it itunes used to DJ at the party, VLC to watch a movie, or my iPhoto presentation, I can always switch around and adjust volume from the small remote while sitting on the couch. Very nice.

5. X applications – while I am certain that professionals do the right thing when paying $$$ for photoshop, I think I can do most of what I want to do with GIMP – and it works really well, just like I know if from Linux.

I am changing my mind on G1/itunes – now that I have a new MacBook !

I was so wrong!

With all the frustrations that I had in my early iphone days, and being forced to use itunes on windows because it was not available for Linux, and having no other way to import/export stuff to it, I was returning it and got the google android g1 phone from HTC.

Less than half a year later, I am ready to reverse my decision – mostly because I jumped ship and finally bought in a macbook to find out if it is really so great as my colleagues keep telling me. And I find IT IS! Further, I get to understand itunes better, and see it as highly functional – the windows version is terrible, but the mac version is working great.

I have it set up so I can just plop in one of my audio cd’s and it will start ripping it into mp3 files, adding them to my itunes library. The files are also accessible as real mp3 files through the filesystem, so I can just drag and drop them on my g1 phone attached as usb storage. All the software that was included with the OS is slick and highly functional, i.e. the photo importing/management iPhoto.

The days where I used to have to do certain things in windows xp are over – both Skype as well as netflix streaming work on the mac. I bought parallels just in case I would have to run xp in a virtual session next to my mac stuff, but so far have had no reason to install it yet. I installed ubuntu into parallels so I can access my linux environment that I am used to, but have to admit that I use it less and less.

So it looks like this:

1992 – switching from windows to linux
2009 – switching from linux to macos X

There is lots more to say but I will just sum it up as ‘buying the macbook pro was the best decision, and am tempted to ditch the htc/g1 in favor of a new iphone. I just had to factory reset my G1 this morning again, the second time in 6 months…

Of course there are also downsides, of which I found only a few minor ones yet and will probably soon discover more… but so far I am in love!

more ec2 playtime

Turns out it is much easier to launch fresh images and configure them on the fly than to keep doing iterations of download, unbundle, mount, customize, unmount, bundle, upload… also I don’t really like that a command line tool has to invoke a jvm to get simple things done.

The perfect tool for this is aws which is a standalone (mostly, invokes curl) script allows you to command ec2 and s3 with minimum of configuration / parameters. (key and cert go into a single file .awsecret and thats it).

Now if I want to start 20 instances of my cluster nodes, I can do that with a shell script I wrote which invokes aws to start the instances, waits for them to become available, and then deploys the necessary pieces to them and distributes the /etc/hosts so all nodes know about each other.

Apple has nothing to fear – amazon mp3 store on android g1 phone is keeping buyers out

I can’t believe how hard they made it to purchase music. Months ago I was bored, browsed the mp3 amazon offerings and wanted to purchase a song on a whim. A message informs me that I will need wifi to complete the purchase. So I abort it and lose interest.

Another month later I have wifi on and really want to purchase a beatles album. Surprise is I find tons of covering artists but not the original albums as mp3? I guess apple / itunes store has an exclusive contract for those. I give up.

Now today I want to really purchase the queen greatest hits album – yes its available, yes I have wifi as I am home. So I select buy, and it asks me my amazon account info. It goes through a list… authenticate ok… charge credit card failed. Please update payment info. Only two choices are retry or cancel. So total stop again. Luckily I am at home and get on the laptop to log into regular amazon.com and review my credit card info. I delete the old expired ones and leave only two that should be current. Nowhere I find where to select one for the mp3 store. Purchasing it only gets stopped out again claiming I have to download and install a download manager first. Well that’s why I am not an itunes customer. I am tired of trying to jump all the hoops. Logout…

They have no future.

Amazon EC2 / cloud computing

Today I got a chance to play with Amazons cloud AWS and was impressed how quickly I could get a machine with my web application online, without having to study a lot of the infrastructure detail first.

All I had to do was go into their AWS management interface, click on create instance, pick one of the 2000 public virtual image templates (picked centos 5.2-git), download the ssh key for it while it was installing, and in less than 2 minutes I was logged into my new virtual machine through ssh without having to enter a password using that key.

I scp’ed my tarball at 450KB/s into the image, extracted it, yum installed httpd and php, and was able to access my webapp.

I had to shut it down to not incur per hour online costs, but it appears to me that I will be back with more

Here is the breakdown of public images that I saw on their interface:

293 ubuntu
80 debian
69 centos
54 fedora
18 gentoo
13 redhat
3 suse
78 windows
1 opensolaris
and the remaining 1400 where appear to be ‘other linux’

Now it’s time to study how to build and test my own images offline and how to do secure virtual networking between them when they are online…

G1 android phone app ShopSavvy saves me money

I was shopping for wireless pci cards at best buys and narrowed it down to a netgear marked $59. Out of curiosity I scanned it with shopsavvy and it listed several local alternatives starting at $35 at walmart. After clicking on that it offered to call the store or get directions.

Wow if this happens more often I will save the cost of the phone in no time…

I wonder if once this is more common stores will cover barcodes for products on the shelves, but I guess then we can just type in model numbers…

PS: posted from my G1 with wptogo application