Nate's Gadgets, Tips and Reviews

Revisiting the iPhone, versus Windows Mobile and Android on the Motorola Droid

2010-06-27T15:40:00.001-07:00

About 6 months ago one of my clients gave me an iPhone 2G (the original, first generation iPhone) when he upgraded to a 3GS. Prior to that time, I didn't really toy around with the iPhone much, but this gave me a great chance to experience the iPhone and understand how it works. I had been using Windows Mobile as my primary phone, but definitely leaning towards a switch to either an Android or iPhone platform. My wife has had the Motorola Droid on Verizon's network for 6 months, and I've gotten to play with that as well ... it certainly has it's advantages.

Three of my friends got the iPhone 4 on the very first day it was available. I got to play with it quite a bit (including discovering the "death grip" problem with the external antenna without 5 minutes of using the phone).

I remember seeing a news item about a prototype of the iPhone 4 being discovered in a bar, and it was in a case that made it look like an iPhone 3G. I wonder if all of the prototypes were field tested in those disguise cases -- maybe that's why they didn't catch the death grip issue before launch? Or maybe some executive just said "ship it" and the underlings had to obey ... we'll probably never know.

I previously posted a blog about the top 20 reasons why I wouldn't switch to an iPhone -- I thought I would re-visit those reasons relative to the new iPhone 4 and the Motorola Droid.

1) The iPhone has no physical keyboard. Once you type a text message with a real keyboard, you can't go back.

1-Now) After using the iPhone screen keyboard, I've found that you can get pretty fast with that keyboard. It's still a little slower than a mechanical keyboard, but definitely usable. Add a little application called "Dragon Dictation" and you can talk to your iPhone pretty easily ... it works great in the car. The mechanical design of the keyboard on my Fuze is the best physical keyboard I've found so far. For speech input on Windows Mobile, we have Vlingo or Tellme - but neither are really available, just hack versions, and they don't work well in WM6.5 yet on the Fuze. Droid's speech recognition works amazingly well, and is built into the onscreen keyboard no matter where you are in the OS. Winner: Motorola Droid.

2) Can't cut and paste on the iPhone with built in software - and I like cutting and pasting.

2-Now) Cut and paste works great on the iPhone now. The selection method works better than Android. Winner: iPhone

3) No GPS software that can give voice guidance. I use GPS software that gives me voice prompts on my phone, and it works great (Currently using iNAV 4.02).

3-Now) Droid has built in Google based voice guidance, for free, works very well. iPhone has plenty of solutions available (TomTom, CoPilot, Navigon). Winner: Droid if you're in cell network range. Navigon on the iPhone or Windows Mobile iNav iGuidance if you're outside of cell range.

4) No Voice Command. Nothing beats being able to just say what you want when you're driving, and not worry about voice tags to record, etc. Microsoft Voice Command actually works.

4-Now) With Froyo 2.2 on Android, and with the 3G and 3GS, voice command is now built into these more advanced smart phones. Winner: Android (with the latest enhancements), although iPhone is a close 2nd.

5) Most of the useful apps that aren't toys require money with the iPhone. There is an incredible library of free, useful applications for Windows Mobile (mainly found at XDA Developers website).

5-Now) Android and iPhone have incredible free apps! The world of mobile apps has come a long ways in 2 years! For the general consumer, the iPhone has the best apps, hands down. For the IT professional, it's a hard one to call - both platforms have a lot of great tools now (especially if you jailbreak the iPhone).

6) No Video built-in. My camera can take videos as well as still pictures, without paying for an add-on piece of software.

6-Now) The iPhone 4 camera is hands-down the best video and still picture camera I have personally tested.

7) Poor Outlook Sync. I use Outlook on my desktop/laptop - activesync works for Notes, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, and Email, and I use all of these things ... iPhone and Outlook sync with Tasks? Notes? Not yet anyway. And with the iPhone, you have to install iTunes, and it has to be running to sync things up.

7-Now) Seeing the writing on the wall, about a year and a half ago I migrated to Gmail for calendar, email and contacts. I created contacts that I have just used the notes field for in order to have notes that sync. By doing this, I don't rely on any local software on my computer for those basic functions, and can sync with Google on an iPhone or Android phone with no problem.

8) No built-in voice recorder.

8-Now) Lots of voice recorder applications on both Android and iPhone platforms, and some really great ones, if you're willing to pay for them.

9) No File System I can access and understand -- anyone know where their music, files, etc are actually stored on the iPhone?

9-Now) This is still an issue with the iPhone. Winner: Android. You can jailbreak your iPhone and access all of the files, but that is definitely not for the ordinary user.

10) No USB tethering. I can tether my phone to my laptop, and get high speed internet with my phone's unlimited data plan on my laptop. No Wifi Tethering. I can share my phone's internet connection via WiFi with WMWifiRouter ($) or ICSControl (free).

10-Now) Android and iPhone both support tethering - using PDANet on Android is very simple. If you jailbreak the iPhone, you can use MyWi - it supports USB and Wifi tethering. And the operators are finally getting around to creating billable options for this. WiFi tethering is available on both platforms. MyWi works incredibly well on the iPhone - I haven't tested Android options with Froyo 2.2 yet, but all reports seem positive.

11) No removeable memory. I have a memory card I can take out, put in a USB reader and back up at high speed.

11-Now) Android has this. iPhone doesn't but gives you plenty of internal memory. This one isn't as big of a deal any more, now that the USB connection options to the phones are faster than they used to be.

12) Non-standard power plug. My phone uses standard mini-USB for sync and charge - no custom cables, and I can buy an extra charger for $6 on ebay.

12-Now) Still stuck with that with the iPhone, although the widespread adoption of the iPhone dock interface actually makes it pretty cool when you can plug it into a speaker system and have a mini-stereo. Android phones have stuck with mini and micro USB standard chargers.

13) Can't search large lists of contacts easily. I can search my contacts by dialing part of their name on the keypad, or search by typing their name on my keyboard.

13-Now) iPhone added contact search, Android works great. This is a tie between the two platforms.

14) Slow calendar launch, and time consuming calendar entry interface. The calendar program in windows mobile launches quickly, and with Pocket Informant I can get a month view that actually works for dragging and dropping events between days. Even with the built in calendar I can cut and paste between days, and drag across a time section in the day view and just start typing to quick-enter a calendar event. Beat that iPhone!

14-Now) Windows mobile still has the best calendar, even with the latest operating systems on the iPhone and Android -- but you can learn to put up with the bad calendar for the sake of the other benefits.

15) No scroll wheel or navigation pad on the sleek iPhone. I read a lot of ebooks on my phone, and it's very nice to have hardware buttons to advance the pages.

15-Now) Although I miss it, I have gotten used to just touching the screen to advance a page.

16) VERY limited multitasking on the iPhone (basically music + one other program at any one time). With Windows Mobile, I can simultaneously can run multiple programs: read a book, browse the web, share the network connection with my laptop, switch to navigation program and see how long until we get there, switch to contacts, talk on the phone, and leave them all running at the same time.

16-Now) Android and iPhone with IOS4 both support multi-tasking, and do it quite nicely. Android is further along on this road, but suffers battery issues because of it.

17) No native support for Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint. I've actually calculated a mortgage payment in Excel before on my phone to help someone out. I guess I'm that geeky.

17-Now) Apps are available (for $) that can do this on both Android and iPhone now.

18) Hardware buttons! For answering, hanging up, hitting ok, taking a picture -- I like having a few hardware buttons.

18-Now) The hardware buttons on my Fuze really ended up annoying me. The on-screen touch buttons on Android and iPhone work great.

19) iPhone centralized application police! Bill Gates can't suddenly decide one of the apps I installed doesn't meeet his approval and remotely yank it off my phone -- but Steve Jobs can do that with the iPhone!

19-Now) Android is way more open than the iPhone. Jailbreak the iPhone does give you lots of options though.

There used to be 20, but I lumped USB and Wifi tethering into one category now.

After all of that -- currently I am using an iPhone 3GS as my primary phone. I bought on ebay for a great price when everybody was dumping their 3GS phones for the iPhone 4. As a phone, it works far better than the Windows Mobile phone did -- it's more responsive to touch input, the call quality is the same or better, and it doesn't keep disconnecting from my bluetooth headset like all of my Windows Mobile phones have.

As a "swiss army knife" of applications - the iPhone and Android phones are really closely tied. If AT&T had a good GSM based Android phone, I definitely would consider it at this point. There is a new Samsung phone just coming out, but it may have GPS issues, so I'm waiting to see how that pans out.

HP Laserjet 2605DN Issues and Thoughts

2010-06-08T09:58:00.001-07:00

A few years ago we picked up an HP Laserjet 2605DN printer at Costco for a great price. Our previous color laser was having color image quality problems, so we decided to pass that on to a friend who 0nly needed black and white printing, and we started using our brand new HP. At first, all was well, and the print quality was great.

2 years later, 3,769 pages later, we have replaced the black toner cartridge once, and we just finally ran out of toner on the original color toner that came with the printer (per the official toner readings ... although there appears to be plenty of toner left once we turned on the over-ride - more below on that).

Several observations over the years.

1) The default RAM included with the printer proved to not be enough when we were printing images from Photoshop - so I upgraded the RAM to 320MB by adding a 256MB memory card. That seemed to solve the out of memory issues we had. Cost: $50.

2) The printer sometimes fails to respond when printing, even with the latest ROM upgrade. You have to power cycle the printer to get it working again.

3) Interestingly enough, even though the printer is reporting that it is all out of color toner, I found a work-around that lets you continue to use the "empty" cartridges and continue to print. If you want to force the Laserjet 2605 to continue to use empty toner, just follow these instructions:

The "cartridge out override" feature is documented on page 134 of the printed User Guide, and is accessed from the control panel and buttons on the printer.

(a) From the main menu, press the "right arrow" button to get to "System Setup". Then push the green check "select" button.

(b) Press the "right arrow" button to get to "Print Quality". Then push the green check "select" button.

(d) Press the "right arrow" button to get to "override out". Then push the green check "select" button.

(e) Press the green check "select" button.

If "stop at out" is selected, the printer will stop printing when a cartridge reaches the recommended replacement point.

If "override out" is selected, the printer will continue printing when a cartridge reaches the recommended replacement point.

The factory default setting is "stop at out". Once you set this, you can get many more pages out of your toner ... although I expect that the colors will begin to fade as supplies eventually run dry.

4) I replaced the Black HP OEM Toner with a "re-manufactured" toner cartridge. I had attempted to purchase brand new toner from a supplier online, and they shipped me recycled stuff instead (I was not happy about that, but that is another story ... and the vendor did give me a partial refund when I called and complained, so I have to give them credit for that at least). Since putting in that recycled toner, I have three little black dots that show up on every print job. No big deal, but kind of annoying when printing something official.

5) After several months on the recycled cartridge, I now have a strange light gray background on every print ... which many people have experienced with this printer (see this series of posts) and I sometimes get big black streaks down the side of a page, but only once in a while. I did some cleaning, shaking the toner around in the black cartridge, following tips I found on that forum, and things got somewhat better, but I'm still seeing this issue.

I have a new set of toner cartridges that I can put in -- once the current set runs out I will put them in and see if it improves the print quality.

7) I did a quick cost per page analysis of this printer versus a Canon Pixma MX870 -- and it was interesting to see that I calculated approx $0.06 per page on both printers. An inkjet is typically more expensive, and a Laserjet is typically cheaper ... but HP is charging a lot for toner (making profit on the toner instead of the printer) -- and Canon is doing a great job of getting the ink costs down.

8) I have a little meter than measures power usage that I like to put on various gadgets in my house to see how much power the little hungry power vampires are sucking out of the power grid. We are trying to go as green as possible, to reduce our impact on the planet, so I'm doing what I can reduce our consumption. A happy side benefit is a lower power bill of course! So I discovered that the HP Laserjet 2605 uses 13 Watts when it's just sitting there in a low power standby state. That's $32 a year at our current power cost. So I have now put the printer on a $10 timer that turns it off at night and back on in the morning, cutting one third of that annual cost out just by turning it off when no one will be using it (and paying for the timer in the first year).

9) Our HP Scanner uses 7 Watts - which is $16 per year. Even with the timer power switch we have, it makes me see some merit on one of those all-in-one printer / scanner combo units. The MX870 literature states that it uses 4 Watts on standby -- which makes it look somewhat appealing. $50 a year for our current printer and scanner, versus $9 per year for a combo.

Macbook Unibody 15.4" - Part 2

2010-02-26T14:06:00.000-08:00

Well now I have lived with the Macbook Pro for 9 months or so, I've come to admire the good parts of the design, and to reluctantly live with the bad parts.

The good:

Speakers are great
Screen Brightness and Clarity
Hotkeys to easily change volume, tracks, brightness
Glowing keyboard at night
Quiet when using the 9400M video card
I love the Expose feature for switching between Apps.
The Dashboard widgets are great - very useful and fun
Smooth scrolling, multi-touch trackpad rocks!
The screen zoom in any application works very smoothly, and I've used it a lot - Windows 7 has a zoom (windows Key +) but it doesn't work nearly as nicely
The built-in screen shot utility is great, although Windows 7 has the snipping tool which works fine as well

The bad:

Boot camp on Windows 7 64 Bit -- it runs nice and fast, but the battery lasts 1.5 hours - come on! I upgraded my Thinkpad from XP to Windows 7 and got an additional hour of battery life - now I get 4 hours on a 3 year old battery! Apple needs to fix the drivers so the CPU and GPU can clock at a lower speed. Right now the machine just runs full tilt, and gets very warm in the process.
Noisy under boot camp. I enjoy the quietness of the Mac -- but Boot Camp ruins that. The fans slowly kick up and down in speed, as the machine can only utilize the hotter 9600M GPU, and the CPU never clocks down.
I really miss Forward Delete, Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End Keys. There is a FN right arrow, left arrow combo that is supposed to map to those things, but for some reason that doesn't work consistently in half of the programs on the Mac. It works fine in Boot Camp, strangely enough.
SMB (Samba) networking in Snow Leopard just doesn't work with Standby. After putting the Mac to sleep for the night, half the time I can't ever reconnect to my Vista file server unless I reboot.
The bundled apps like iMovie and iPhoto are really nice, but they store the data in such odd folders, tucked away and hidden from the user. I guess it's all well and good for those who just use a Mac and nothing else. But if you like to store your info on a server, the Mac really doesn't work as well in that setup.
The line-in jack on the side of the Mac doesn't include a pr-amp -- which all PC laptops have. So if you take any ordinary headset / mic combo that worked fine on the PC, the headphones will work great, but the Microphone won't work. You need to get a USB headset to work with the Mac.

Interestingly enough, I've found that the Office applications, file management, shortcut keys, and ability to sync files with my server make the PC the winner when it comes to getting work done and creating things.

But when it comes to browsing the web, reading things online, watching YouTube videos -- i.e. consuming information rather than creating it, the Mac is actually my preferred platform.

So I'm currently running my Windows 7 64-Bit boot camp partition in a Parallels instance, booting from the Mac side, and dealing with the networking problem by not turning the machine off. I still haven't fully decided which way I will go long term....

Trying out the Macbook Pro Unibody 15.4"

2009-05-27T09:41:00.000-07:00

I recently purchased (on Craiglist) a Macbook Pro (late 2008) Unibody 15.4". I've been using Windows PCs for the last 15 years, but I started with Mac for several years before that, so I thought I would give the Mac a try again, especially considering the Mac can now run PC applications with Boot Camp and in virtual machines using Parallels and VMware Fusion.

So I am going to do a series of blogs on my experiences attempting to switch to the Mac, and in the end, whether I decide to keep it or sell it.

The first thing I did after getting the laptop was upgrading the Ram to 4GB, and upgrading the 250GB hard disk to 500GB. It was relatively painless, and there are plenty of YouTube videos available to guide you through the upgrade.

Screen

My previous laptop (which I'm going to hold on to for a while still) was a Thinkpad, 15.4" non-glare high resolution screen (1680 x 1050 - aka WSXGA+). That has been the perfect resolution for me for about 5 years now -- it has a very high pixels per inch count, and when looking at spreadsheets you can see a lot of information on one page.

Unfortunately, this resolution isn't available on the 15.4" Macbook Pros, so I had to go with the lower resolution 1440 x 900 screen. Some might say it's a just a few pixels different, but I must say I noticed the difference right away, particularly in the way fonts are rendered, and how much I can see of particular web sites. Fonts on the Mac look a lot more choppy, and less like paper than the higher resolution screen. On the other hand, everything is larger, which means I strain my neck a little less looking closely at the screen, so there is an upside.

I was concerned about the glossy screen - I'm a fan of anti-glare (matte) finished laptop screens. But it really hasn't been a problem. The LED backlight on the Macbook Pro is amazingly bright, and as long as you keep it bright, it pretty much washes out reflections.

Keyboard

The chicklet-like keyboard on the Macbook Pro is quieter, and a little easier to press (less mechanical force required) than the Thinkpad keys, but I must say the flat tops to each key make it a little strange to type on for me still, compared to the curved contours of the Thinkpad, and the overall tactile experience of the Thinkpad keyboard is superior to the Macbook Pros.

Update: After months of using the Macbook keys, I'm finding that I don't mind typing on it that much at all. But I do definitely miss several keys that I used all of the time in the PC world: forward delete, home, end, page up, and page down.

Multimedia Hardware (Camera, Speakers and Mic):

The iSight camera is nice, but honestly, when comparing Skype video call performance between my Thinkpad with its built-in camera and the Macbook Pro with the iSight ... the Thinkpad wins, by about a 20% quality improvement. I thought that it might be due to the Thinkpad running the 4.x verison of Skype, versus the 2.7.x.x version running on the Mac (the Mac version is behind in features and capabilities), so I tested Skype running in Virtual Machine, and got the same results. The video was slightly out of focus and a little more fuzzy than the Thinkpad, which was putting out nice, in focus, crisper video.

The Mac built in speakers are definitely superior to the Thinkpad - the bass and treble are richer, and watching a movie on the Mac is a far more pleasurable thing.

I was using a Shareware program called Reaper on the PC to do simple multi-track recording for song ideas that I had. GarageBand on the Mac fills that need just fine. The interface took a moment to get used to, but it works simply enough, and the microphone on the Mac is definitely a good quality Mic, and better than the Thinkpad.

The relative silence of the Mac (no whirring fans) is also a welcome change from the constant droning of the fan on my Thinkpad. The only sound the Mac makes when running is the faint vibration of the hard disk. But when I have done some more CPU intensive things, or changed the video card from the 9400M to the 9600M, then the little fans on the Mac have kicked in. There are pretty quiet, but have a more annoying high pitched whine than my Thinkpad.

Applications

I installed Microsoft Office 2008 - not quite what I was hoping for in a native Mac app. Office 2007 on the PC launches incredibly fast, is easy to use, and looks great. Office 2008 applications take a lot longer to load when you click on them, and just don't look as good, nor are the functions and menu options in places that you would expect.

The built in Mac apps - like iMovie, iPhoto, etc - these are great fun, and I am still enjoying playing with them more.

I will write a more detailed review of VMware Fusion vs. Parallels - as I have been testing both of them with Windows Vista SP1 (and just updated to Vista SP2).

Networking

I have a Windows Vista Ultimate machine running as the file server in our house, with a RAID 5 array as the main file repository. I have an 802.11G wireless network with WPA2 encryption running, and a Gigabit LAN wired up to most of the rooms in the house. I must say that I was impressed with file copy times from the Mac to the server and back (once I figured out how to connect to the Vista machine - which wasn't the easiest thing in the world). I think the file copy times are twice as fast with the Mac, versus my XP Thinkpad to the Vista machine -- with the same hard disk in both machines (so the hard disk wasn't the limitation). I am getting around 55MBytes/sec (440 Megabits per second) over the Gigabit lan with the Mac, and more like 25 to 30MBytes/sec when moving files between the Windows XP laptop and the Vista Server.

The wireless LAN proved to cause some problems - I had periodic disconnects when using the Macbook Pro Unibody with my Tomato Version 1.23 equipped Linksys WRT54G router. After doing some research, it turns out there is a strange incompability between the Macbook and this particular router running the Tomato firmware, if 802.11B/G is enabled, and the Macbook is running on battery. I disable 802.11B so it ran in only 802.11G mode, and things seem to be working fine now.

Update: With Windows 7 now on the Thinkpad, file copy times are almost identical between OSX Snow Leopard on the Macbook Pro, and my old Thinkpad z61m. After updating the Macbook to Snow Leopard, the periodic wireless disconnect problem is back. Also, with Snow Leopard, I can't put the Macbook to sleep with a file open from the server -- when the laptop wakes up, it loses the connection to the server and I have to save the file locally and then copy it back over -- very annoying. So I've started just leaving the laptop on all of the time if I'm in the middle of something -- which isn't very earth friendly.

Fit and Finish

The Macbook Pro looks great, but it's made of soft aluminum, and I could see that just tossing it into my backpack without some kind of cover would quickly result in scratches that could never be removed. The lid over the screen flexes worryingly when you push on it, and I could see that if I packed my backpack full of things, something might smash the screen in or at least dent the lid (which many people online have reported happening already to their macs). I found a simple plastic shell on ebay called the iPearl mCover that I got for around $25 with shipping -- it's working great so far, but it adds almost another pound to the weight of the laptop, which is kind of lame.

Having only two USB ports is pretty lame, and they are too close together. My Thinkpad has 3 USB ports, as does the 17" model of the Macbook -- but I couldn't bring myself to pay quite that much for a laptop. I purchased a Firewire 800 to 400 converter, and it works great with my Motu Ultralite for portable recording -- it can power the Ultralite through the firewire cable, meaning one less wall wart to carry around.

AT&T Fuze Review

2008-12-06T11:35:00.000-08:00

I recently purchased the AT&T Fuze at my local AT&T store, and thought I would share my thoughts on the phone.

Pros:

Great screen – love how things look with VGA resolution, way better in sunlight!
Screen has much wider viewing angle – watching videos in landscape is way better than previous PPCs
Like the feel of the keyboard that slides out
Like where the USB charger port is, with little beveled edge to guide cable in when plugging it in while in the dark
Like the G-sensor – seems accurate
Like the touch screen with dialing – the buttons are more responsive when dialing than the Tilt
LED light for camera is very bright – with torch application makes a great flashlight (I missed the LED light when I upgraded from Tytn (8525) to Tytn II/Tilt)
Microsoft Voice Command works with Bluetooth headset right out of the box, and actually really well
Smaller and a bit lighter than the Tilt
Built in FM radio if you install the app
Bluetooth Range is great
Camera is pretty good – better than Tilt (colors look much better if you change the light source from auto to bulb)
AT&T includes a screen protector – nice!
Works with my favorite navigation program – iNAV 4.02 from iGuidance (as long as you use the appropriate workarounds with an intermediate GPS driver like Franson GPSGate)
The smaller form factor is nice – it’s the smaller PDA I’ve owned yet.
The keyboard keys are a good size, and feel good to type on

Cons:

MediaNET tethering disabled by default in stock ROM (but works on cooked ROMs or with Registry fix)
AT&T doesn’t include headphones for the proprietary headphone port – not nice.
Slippery and prone to getting fingerprints all over it.
The design of the back cover means the phone doesn’t lay flat – it moves when you are using the stylus on it.
The design of the back cover muffles the speaker of the speaker phone if laid down, and the ringer volume when the phone rings, due to the angles on the back cover making the phone tilt just right to cover up the speaker when sitting on a table. Also, the diamond points on the cover design are already starting to show wear after 3 weeks.
Battery life with stock ROM is not as good as the Tilt – on a brand new battery I will go from 100% to 72% in 3 hours, with zero phone calls and one 30 second sync with the exchange server. Note: I have seen much improvement with battery life by flashing updated ROMS and alternate radios from this forum: http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=440
Radio Reception seems slightly worse than my Tilt in the problem areas, but I can live with it.
Can’t change desktop themes if disabling Manilla 3D interface in stock ROM (can in updated ROMs from the XDA forum however.
Slightly popping noise while in calls, keeps coming and going on stock ROM – fixed with updated Radio and ROMs.
Sharp edge to phone by speaker is uncomfortable on my ear with long conversations unless you flatten the phone to your face – and then you’ve got the face oil to wipe off!
When in Mass Storage Mode, transfer rate is 8mbps (i.e. 1MByte/s) – basically USB 1.1 – don’t see USB 2.0 in action on transfer rates
FM radio requires headset plugged into work, and phone doesn’t come with a headset, only an adapter. Reception isn’t so good on the radio, but it is cool to have.
Light sensor is too directional – if am in a room with overhead lights, you can see the display change brightness every time you tip the phone back and forth away from the overhead source. The light sensor needs to be re-engineered to pick up ambient light better.
Back cover creaks when you pick up the phone – feels a little cheap
The button choice and arrangement at the bottom front of the phone doesn’t work – up and down works, but left and right don’t work well at all – half the time you are trying to go left, you end up hitting the home instead, which is very annoying in the midst of a game or while navigating in an app
Why have a home button AND a hangup button on the front, AND a back button – they all essentially do the same thing.
Phone switches from H to G during phone calls, even when there is plenty of 3G coverage (voice quality is better on the 3G network than the old 2G, so I prefer to stay on the 3G one if possible). This is probably a battery saving technique, but I’d like to have a choice about it – like a threshold slider or something.
Ebook reading would be much better if you could use the touch scrolling area to advance a page, but so far that doesn’t seem possible
Not enough hardware buttons – and no scroll wheel – I miss the Tilt’s scroll wheel!
GPS lags by a block or two in nav programs (including iNAV and TomTom) – the current theory is that this is a driver issue that will be addressed soon.
Stock AT&T ROM has a really loud rocketship sound when you first boot up.
Fuze Keyboard layout – why did they change the TouchPro?! I don’t want a dedicated key on the keyboard to launch Cingular Video – I want a control key, and a tab key!
No standard headphone jack – still using propriety HTC headphone jack
PTT button is useless unless you hack the phone to remap short and long key presses. Why didn't they just put that button the standard Windows Mobile button list and let users choose what they want the button to do?
Have to use more pressure with the stylus around the edges of the screen (like the ok button) than in the middle

Future Design Suggestions (if HTC people ever read my blog):

Offer different back covers for $19 on their website – one with a leather feel, one with the rubbery TilT feel, and make some of them flat so the phone can lay flat on a table
Bring back that tilt feature – the screen tilting up was great for reading ebooks – although if it added significant weight due to the mechanical design, then I could live without it
Add a standard headphone jack
Get a Control and Tab key back on the keyboard!
Change the Home Key to a Windows Key, and make all of the hardware buttons flexible so users can choose what functions they want to map to them
Even out the screen in terms of what pressure is required to activate the pressure sensitive portions - the corners require a lot more force than the middle

With all of those pros and cons, I just can’t get over how good the screen is. I can actually see things on it in sunlight – it’s truly trans-reflective! And the VGA resolution is amazing. Even though I’m really not happy with the user interface of the actually hardware buttons, the screen, extra RAM, and smaller size is winning me over – I think this is a keeper, at least for now.

Top 20 issues I have with the iPhone and will stay with Windows Mobile until they are fixed

2008-09-18T17:24:00.001-07:00

For anyone out there contemplating buying a smartphone, and thinking about an iPhone versus buying a Windows Mobile based phone, I'd thought I'd give you some of my decision factors:

The iPhone has no physical keyboard. Once you type a text message with a real keyboard, you can't go back.
Can't cut and paste on the iPhone with built in software - and I like cutting and pasting.
No GPS software that can give voice guidance. I use GPS software that gives me voice prompts on my phone, and it works great (Currently using iNAV 4.02).
No Voice Command. Nothing beats being able to just say what you want when you're driving, and not worry about voice tags to record, etc. Microsoft Voice Command actually works.
Most of the useful apps that aren't toys require money with the iPhone. There is an incredible library of free, useful applications for Windows Mobile (mainly found at XDA Developers website).
No Video built-in. My camera can take videos as well as still pictures, without paying for an add-on piece of software.
Poor Outlook Sync. I use Outlook on my desktop/laptop - activesync works for Notes, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, and Email, and I use all of these things ... iPhone and Outlook sync with Tasks? Notes? Not yet anyway. And with the iPhone, you have to install iTunes, and it has to be running to sync things up.
No built-in voice recorder.
No File System I can access and understand -- anyone know where their music, files, etc are actually stored on the iPhone?
No USB tethering. I can tether my phone to my laptop, and get high speed internet with my phone's unlimited data plan on my laptop.
No Wifi Tethering. I can share my phone's internet connection via WiFi with WMWifiRouter ($) or ICSControl (free).
No removeable memory. I have a memory card I can take out, put in a USB reader and back up at high speed.
Non-standard power plug. My phone uses standard mini-USB for sync and charge - no custom cables, and I can buy an extra charger for $6 on ebay.
Can't search large lists of contacts easily. I can search my contacts by dialing part of their name on the keypad, or search by typing their name on my keyboard.
Slow calendar launch, and time consuming calendar entry interface. The calendar program in windows mobile launches quickly, and with Pocket Informant I can get a month view that actually works for dragging and dropping events between days. Even with the built in calendar I can cut and paste between days, and drag across a time section in the day view and just start typing to quick-enter a calendar event. Beat that iPhone!
No scroll wheel or navigation pad on the sleek iPhone. I read a lot of ebooks on my phone, and it's very nice to have hardware buttons to advance the pages.
VERY limited multitasking on the iPhone (basically music + one other program at any one time). With Windows Mobile, I can simultaneously can run multiple programs: read a book, browse the web, share the network connection with my laptop, switch to navigation program and see how long until we get there, switch to contacts, talk on the phone, and leave them all running at the same time.
No native support for Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint. I've actually calculated a mortgage payment in Excel before on my phone to help someone out. I guess I'm that geeky.
Hardware buttons! For answering, hanging up, hitting ok, taking a picture -- I like having a few hardware buttons.
iPhone centralized application police! Bill Gates can't suddenly decide one of the apps I installed doesn't meeet his approval and remotely yank it off my phone -- but Steve Jobs can do that with the iPhone!

What do I use?
A slightly customized AT&T Tilt. How did I customize it? I learned everything I know from XDA Developers section on the AT&T Tilt, also known as the HTC Kaiser. I'll write more later about my favorite apps, and how to "pimp your windows mobile".

Technorati Tags: iPhone, Windows Mobile, Pocket PC, Review

Crysis Review

2007-12-31T09:39:00.000-08:00

My wife gave me a video game for Christmas - a game called Crysis from electronic arts / Crytek. I must say, it was a blast playing through the first person storyline. Games and movies are starting to intersect - the last game that I got hooked on like this was Half Life 2. The graphics in this game were actually more intense than Half Life 2, but my hardware and video drivers certainly weren't optimized for the experience. I could run Half Life 2 at 1600 x 1200, 32 bit color, max detail with no problems. (my main rig is a Core 2 Duo 2.6Ghz, 2GB Ram, Win XP Pro, GeForce 7900 GTX 512MB video). But I had to run Crysis at 1024 x 768, medium detail, and it still stuttered on me from time to time.

My two criticisms of the game: I got to one point near the end of the game where I kept dying and having to go back to a saved state. The 30 seconds that I kept repeating had one of the other game characters it in saying "F!#k" really loudly ... there were people over at my house downstairs visiting with my wife, and eventually I realized what audio pollution the game was adding to my family experience and put on headphones. The game would have been just the same without the swear words mixed into the script - I'm sure there will be more than enough swearing in the multi-player mode (which I haven't tried yet).

Criticism two: the end-game was lame. The whole game unfolded with a fun plot, had challenging missions, let you drive tanks, fly VTOLs, use sniper rifles, etc. But at the end, it suddenly felt like a cheap old '80s game. A big mothership that looks like an ice covered dog shows up, and you have to go to station 1, shoot out 2 turrets, got to station 2, shoot out 2 more, then pretty much you're at the end of the game. The rest of the was incredible flexible, let you accomplish your missions with either stealth, overwhelming brute force, or anything in between. So just a warning to anyone out there playing Crysis - enjoy the journey, because the end is pretty anti-climactic.

Windows Home Server Review

2007-12-29T18:45:00.000-08:00

Well, now that I've purchased Windows Home Server OEM edition, and am 1 week into using it, I thought I'd post some of my thoughts on the software, as well as some of the things I've had to work around.

Installation went pretty well. I installed it to a Hitachi 500GB IDE drive, in an Intel motherboard, with a Pentium 4 2.6Ghz processor, 1.25GB of RAM. After updating and patching (required downloading a bunch of security patches) and three reboots, I was ready to go.

I have a backup hard drive that has a huge 450GB encrypted file on it that I use for back up of several computers in my house (mine, my wife's, our music studio computer). Prior to using WHS, I was using a windows XP box with this drive attached via USB, and Truecrypt to encrypt the file. With Truecrypt, I can open the file up and mount it like a drive, and then share it with specific password protected privileges for network based backup over my home gigabit ethernet lan.

Getting TrueCrypt to Work with Windows Home Server (WHS)
There were several posts saying Windows Home Server was not compatible with Truecrypt, but I wanted to share that I did get it working. I mounted a USB hard disk to WHS, but left it as a stand alone hard disk, rather than merging it into the storage pool for the server. I installed Truecrypt for Windows 32 bit, mounted the huge file with TrueCrypt and another drive then showed up in my drives list (my encrypted drive). But when I shared a folder on the Truecrypt volume, I couldn't get to it from anywhere on the network. I kept getting this "not enough server storage is available to process this command" error. So I found a tip on another web site (http://www.pcdoctor-guide.com/wordpress/?p=174) and several other tips.

Solving this problem requires a Registry edit:

Click Start, and then click Run.
Type regedit, and then click OK.
Navigate to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services
\LanmanServer\Parameters
In the right pane, double-click the IRPStackSize value.

Important: If the IRPStackSize value does not already exist, you will need to create it: - In the Parameters folder of the registry, right-click the right pane. - Point to New, and then click DWord Value. - Type IRPStackSize.

Important: Type "IRPStackSize" exactly as it is displayed because the value name is case-sensitive.

Change the Base to decimal.
In the Value Data box, type a value that is larger than the value that is listed.
If you created the IRPStackSize value using the procedure described in step 4, the default value is 15. It is recommended that you increase the value by 3. Therefore, if the previous value was 11, type 14, and then click OK.
Close the Registry Editor.
Restart the computer.

I followed the above steps for a several rounds of reboots, and nothing work. Finally I changed the value of IRPStackSize in the registry to a decimal value of 30. Low and behold, after a reboot, the shared folder on the encrypted volume can be written to on the network.

Getting Console Access Remotely
When you login WHS locally with a monitor, keyboard and mouse, you can login as the Administrator with your administrator's password. I tried logging in from another computer using Remote Desktop Connection, and instead of seeing the same view as on the monitor, or taking over what was on the monitor, I got a whole new session on the machine. Given that WHS is based on Server 2003, I asked a friend of mine for a tip, and he said you can login to the local console login by using a command line argument for Remote Desktop. You have to start up a DOS prompt, and type: 'mstsc.exe /console' -- this will launch the Remote Desktop program, with no visual indication that anything is different, but when you put in the IP address / name of your server, you can get console access, meaning you take over the session that is presented to the user at the keyboard. I tried installing logmein (logmein.com) while at the console for the server, and then accessed the console that way from another computer via logmein, and it worked fine.