I keep on playing with an iPhone 4 for a few days now. Why? I have one of the best smartphones on the market at the moment, namely the HTC Desire. It’s got one of the best OS’ in existence at the moment: Android by Google. It does almost everything I need it to do and shines-on except for a few small “unimportant” details, like battery life and the lack of pushed-email (Vodafone’s fault on this one!). Then why looking over the fence where everybody says the grass is greener?
Well, curiosity. Inquisitive curiosity. And hype. A job at which Apple’s always ace.
While I’ve only used it seldom, I’ve been able to go thru quite a few situations of an everyday smartphone user: I browsed the net, posted to Twitter, used various applications, downloaded a free application from the App Store and…fell-out of love with the iPhone 4. You take a picture. You wanna share it with friends. You can’t beam it thru Bluetooth, there is no option to do it. You can’t send it on TwitPic by uploading it on the site – the “browse files” button was greyed-out (no, it wasn’t a Flash button, works like a charm on my Desire) due to the fact that the iPhone has a security procedure in place (enforced by a password) of not allowing anything in a browser to read the files in the phone. Plain stupid? Yes, if you ask me. You can’t email it to Posterous or to other emails because for example, you have a problem with your SMTP server, like I did.
And why is this all happening? Just because Steve decided to “protect” the consumer. Who asked for this? Not the king, the customer himself. Of course, I can understand the logic and the logistics behind this great, great progressive undertaking but I’m not sure it was done in our best interest.
Looking over the fence again, I see a regulated but self propelled market of innovative, useful and mostly free apps that can be installed at user’s free will. Are the Android users less protected? No, I don’t think so. The system is different. There will always be hackers to combat and holes to plug.
But you know what they say: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”.

Posted from WordPress for Android

You know what they say: “the road to hell is paved with good intentions!”.  As I wrote the other day, people say task managers are useless. While I tend to agree with them, as I already said, there are times when you need them for additional purposes. And yesterday I had to find out the hard way: I used Motonav all day long while receiving lots and lots of calls. The navigation would go in the background allowing the call to go through and would comeback to foreground when I finished the  call.
I’ve been very happy to see it worked flawlessly until it just went black. The screen went black. I could see the Motonav launching but it wouldn’t show me the map and so on. Now what? Well, I thought that once I don’t have the Advanced Task Manager (it’s absolutely useless, remember?), I’d wait because it will ultimately go away by itself, like I read in that fancy article!
Half an hour later I tried to start Motonov: though luck! I really needed to get to the hotel, so I did what every Android power-user would do: I downloaded the first task manager I could get my finger on, shut down the Motonav app (and the camera, the Market app, etc) and restarted it. Job done.
Wait! A restart should’ve done it! Damn! I gotta stop use this damn pointless task manager thing:)

Posted from WordPress for Android

Well, it seems it’s true. I’ve been using one since the Symbian days. Without one my Sony-Ericsson P910i wouldn’t function. My next smartphone, the Sony-Ericsson P1i became sluggish in operation and would reset at the end of the day. Those particular Task Managers were quite specialized: they would automatically shut-down unused applications, double as file managers, etc.
And now, yes, it seems we suffer from a Placebo effect: we seem to need it. It “seems” because Task Managers are still good with shuting-down apps when you need the battery juice. They are good with switching between the Alps because my Task Manager Pro places an icon on the upper taskbar.
Truth being told, after reading the above article I went and fired-up the camera, then left it idle (see the picture) for a few hours. Sure thing it wasn’t there when I checked.
So I will uninstall it for a week and see how it goes. I’m interested in battery life especially.

Posted from WordPress for Android

And 2 short videos “thanks” to WordPress; no videos bigger than 2 MB are allowed! Are you kiddin’ me? In 2010?

Later update: I found the answer: Aragorn’s . Quite simplistic but it illustrates the solution perfectly.

In February 2009 I left the Symbian UIQ 3.0 O.S for BlackBerry. Of course, some of my friends knowing me and using more or less the same Symbian platform ( UIQ 3.0 and/or S40, S60 Nokia) were skeptical: “BlackBerry is a professional platform, a closed and rigid environment, no way you can thrive under that rock” they said. What they didn’t know is that at the time R.I.M already decided to go forward with the plan to conquer a new kind of customer with the multimedia phones: the much-debated Storm 1, the Bold 9000, eventualy the Javelin and the Tour later on. Platforms are becoming more and more multimedia and social cause that’s where the money is today.

And that was exactly what made me go first BlackBerry and now,  Android: while the UIQ 3.0 was great and rich in applications (O.K, maybe not so rich by today’ standards or by iPhone/Android markets standards), it lacked the new applications for the social media. The only reason I kept it until February 2009 is the hacking community. They “developed” the O.S much more than Symbian itself did and a lot more than the developers did. While BlackBerry had all these applications, it lacked the diversity one enjoys on Android and iPhone.  In BlackBerry’s case, the developers deserted the booming wonderful community formed around R.I.M’s products. Or maybe I am wrong; I know there aren’t many developers pushing-out BlackBerry applications. The applications themselves are rare and expensive. The price is the main issue: while an average app for Blackberry is 2.99$ (price imposed by BlackBerry App World) , the others go as low as 0.99$. This happens EXACTLY because there aren’t many developers (anymore) and the remaining ones they profit on the fact that the demand surged. But even with this situation, the BlackBerry users aren’t benefiting much. For almost 2 years I look for a working Call Filter aplication. Because I was paying for it, I asked for a few features (existing already on Symbian S40 and UIQ 3.0 for years!) like:

• accept all calls
• reject all calls
• accept phone-book only
• drop unwanted calls and/or mute the ringer
• reject Black List numbers and accept White List numbers
• automatic profile switch based on time schedule

And that was about it. All of the above were supported by other applications, most of them free or charging very little money. And I’ve tried half of those while using the Sony-Ericsson P1i and afterwards, even on BlackBerry. On BlackBerry, I couldn’t find a satisfactory application. Most of them are very basic and extremely expensive – 19,95$ I had to pay for mCall Manager Light (sic!), the only one working as it should but without the scheduling.  After I updated from 4.7 version OS to 5.0 OS, the app stopped working and when they did update it (3 months later) it wasn’t working properly anymore. This experience sums-up all my experiences with BlackBerry applications.

And then there is the support issue: being so fragmentary as it is, the BlackBerry application market is divided between some developers interested in keeping the customer happy and the rest. The rest don’t give a shit about the customer. It’s enough if you buy it once and never comeback ever again, 10$ from each customer is more than enough for a single application. I bet there are a lot of  “developers” hitting the market only once with one single (bad) product and then move on to another platforms; from what I’ve been told developing for BlackBerry is neither cool or money-rewarding.

And now it’s time for a new challenge: the Android O.S. I’ve been playing for a few months with a T-Mobile Pulse but in order to enjoy the full-power of the new O.S, I had to go full way. And I chose the HTC Desire
. While it lacks stamina ( my usage will kill the battery in just a bit over 5 hours!), I have faith in the platform and its ability to deliver a better product later on with rooting, custom ROMs and Froyo later on.

The 1st truly keyboard Android device! Hope Motorola will ship it to Europe, too, diff’rent name and all! Motorola Charm.

via Examiner.com

via Engadget

If you look over the Internet rooting is everywhere! Rooting an Android device used to be simple.  Easy. You’d download a file, you’d unzip it, copy it to the phone and that was that. Well, not anymore. Nowadays you need to do a lot of workarounds. You need to find the right versions, due to the Android fragmentation you need to look for them on Internet, you need to learn how to do a Goldcard and other things – I only got to the Goldcard business!

I need to root my Desire in order to gain access to simple things like screenshot application, the ability to increase the sound volume on the headset and especially on the speaker  – I like my podcasts and I can’t hear them at all when playing it thru the speaker. And that’s about it. Just for that. It’s not much and it should be default but it’s not. There are other advantages, too:

• you can  uninstall all the Google crap that comes with the phone: Gmail widget, stocks, Peep Twitter client, Sense U.I, clock widgets.
• you can install another ROM: lighter, faster and less crappier; with or without the Sense U.I .
• you can get full access to the O.S.
• edit system files.
• relocate apps cache and  the apps themselves over the SD.

Taking into account it’s some time since the Desire root emerged improvements are surfacing. I just tried a safe-fail method ( usually once you start there is no turning back) and….it failed, of course. I was expecting this. There are just too many variables. But I will try again.

The benefits are huge for an Android geek.

I knew I should wait some time before checking out another OS while using the BlackBerry. And I did for almost 2 years. But now the OS’ are refreshed much faster than years ago when I needed to wait more than a year to get “the next smartphone”. And now Android is on the high horse despite the rise of Apple’s OS No.4 and the new iPhone. While I never considered getting an iPhone, it was exactly why I didn’t, because of the lack of certain features like multitasking and easiness of using the sync features (read I hate iTunes). To make matters worse, I consider myself a power-user which means battery has to be strong and in iPhone it wasn’t. I still think it’s gonna be weak in iPhone 4 although they show faith in improved battery life.

And talking about battery life, that’s what’s keeping me in defecting to the Dark Side. No, not that D.S , the iPhone, but the other D.S – the Android platform as a whole. See, I live in a city. I work in an office full of power outlets, employing a laptop full of USB ports, I drive a car with multiple (Mini and Micro) USB connections&chargers but still can’t get enough juice for my newly acquired Desire. As I said before, the today’s battery technology is not up to par with smartphone usage around the world. There are going to be advancements like the fuel-cell but taking into account they’ve started research a long time ago, I can assume it’s gonna be another couple of years until it’s gonna be feasible and economically viable. So, what’s to do until then?

Google pushes Android towards the masses to be used with simpler phones, too. I think they never thought that the producers will be using the platform for smartphones only but rather to give the producers the ability to step-up the “features” game in the market, to provide them with the necessary tools to improve user experience thus shaping the tastes of customers and driving up the consumption by doing that. Apple did it with the iPhone, why Google couldn’t do it taking into account the huge audience? Simpler smartphones or entry-level smartphones like T-Mobile Pulse I used , LG Ally for Verizon network or Samsung Jet are designed to replace the small, inexpensive but featureless Nokias and Samsungs in those networks. By selling those to Average Joe, they’ll never have the “flat-battery-in-4-hours” issues they encounter in power-users usage but this doesn’t mean that the producers and networks aren’t aware of the sad situation we’re in.

Instead of an epilogue, I will ask this: how can one compare apples with BlackBerrys especially when we all know that forest fruits are so appealing and have so many “vitamins” over them apples?

Today I was finally able to play a little bit with Vodafone’s HTC Desire. I could’ve done it in a Vodafone shop but usually those smartphones are right out of the box and have no Internet connection, no apps, media, nothing. Everything you can find on shelf is usually dummy.
So I used the UI ( Sense U.I 2.1), some apps and saw how the battery depleted 10% in about 20 minutes to half an hour of usage. The screen is superb (though useless outside), the U.I and the processor are extremely fast. The manufacture quality is top notch!
One thing I noticed is that the phone is getting VERY hot for the light usage I’ve made. Not good for prolongued usage.
All in all a nice phone which sets the standard very high for other smartphones.