TechieMoe.com

Goodbye, Sprint

noreply@blogger.com (Maurice) — Mon, 07 May 2012 17:15:00 +0000

Introduction

A little over a year ago, I embarked on a quest to rid myself of the Death Star once and for all. It's only fitting that over the weekend, on May the Fourth, I decided to once again embrace the dark side of cellular phone service. If you're familiar with my previous posts regarding my experiments in Android, prepaid phones, and my ongoing battle for connectivity and call clarity with Sprint, feel free to skip the next section entirely. Otherwise, allow me to regale you.

The Saga Begins...and Ends

Around May of 2011 I decided I was paying too much for two iPhones. My bills were close to $300, and I just couldn't sustain that much longer. Though it pained me to part with the iPhone 3GS, I cancelled my service with AT&T and proceeded to try several lower-cost phones. My first device was a Samsung Messager Touch from Cricket. I learned two important things from that experience: Cricket is a horrible company, and I just can't deal with dumb phones any more.

Next I tried Virgin Mobile, and the LG Optimus V. The phone was actually quite nice. I traded up (or so I thought) for a Motorola Triumph, which proceeded to randomly reboot and refuse to connect to the network...anywhere. I returned it, and went back to the Optimus V until I could find something else.

Next I tried a major carrier, Sprint. I bought the top-of-the-line phone at the time - the Motorola Photon 4G. The phone was quite nice at first, but eventually started to emit a high-pitched whine whenever I listened to it with headphones. After some back and forth (and 2 replacements) Sprint eventually gave me a Samsung Epic Touch instead.

The Epic Touch was a pretty phone, very light, with a ridiculous UI that looked like something from Sesame Street. Nevertheless, it had no high-pitched whine or connectivity issues so I was happy for a while. Then I started to get hand cramps from the larger screen, and embarrassing typos from the Android keyboard. Finally, it began randomly rebooting itself. I downgraded to an Epic 4G, which was smaller and had a hardware keyboard.

The Epic 4G was a decent phone, but I noticed strange pops and clicks on the line when talking to people. I got a replacement, which had the same problem. A Sprint rep in my local store suggested that the problem was with the network. They said it was likely congestion that would be cleared up as soon as the latest build-out and upgrade was complete. This theory was bolstered by my own experience. I found that I got much faster service in more rural areas, where there was likely a lot less cell traffic. I asked her what I should do about it. She advised me to wait six months.

An Apple a Day

Instead, I bought an iPhone. Since I was well past my trial I had to pay full price for it. I did manage recoup a little bit of the price by selling back the Epic 4G to Sprint. This was November of 2011. From November, through the new year, and into May of 2012 I still had the pops and clicks, but I just dealt with them as I had other issues to deal with in my personal life.

I also had intermittent data connection issues with the iPhone that I hadn't seen before using the Android handsets. Sometimes the phone would report that I had full 3G signal and not connect to the internet, other times it would show the asshole of doom (an "o" icon that means 1xRTT speed) and refuse to send picture messages. Sometimes text messages would send only to arrive hours later, or not at all.

I made note of when and where these things happened, and made a call to Sprint. The rep told me to get it checked out by Apple, so I did. They couldn't find anything wrong, but gave me a new phone anyway since I was still well within the factory warranty. Sadly, the pops and clicks remained. I called Sprint on April 16th and was told two tickets would be opened on my behalf. One was for the data connectivity, the other for the line noise.

Two days later a CSR from corporate called me with an update...sort of. She said both my office and home zipcodes were due for tower upgrades, but one would not be completed until Christmas 2012, and the other had no completion date on the books. She said technicians were looking into the call quality problems I'd reported.

One week later I heard nothing (and still had pops) so I called Sprint again. The CSR said they had no new information. I was then called the following week by corporate asking if my issue had been resolved. It had not. She said they would dispatch another technician to my area (no idea which area - home or office) to try and resolve the issue.

I received another phone call three days later that said the technicians had looked at my tower and found nothing out of the ordinary. I told Sprint the issue was still unresolved (listening to pops and clicks as I said it) and they said they would send out another technician.

At this point I decided saving $20 a month on phone service wasn't worth the frustration. Since I wanted to minimize the amount of money I had to spend on new hardware and I liked the idea of a no-contract deal, I decided to call up Verizon. Despite the fact that the Sprint iPhone hardware is identical to the one for Verizon, the rep on the phone told me they couldn't port it. When I asked why, he said, "Because we use different radios."

When I pointed out that both Sprint and Verizon use CDMA, he said, "But we also have 4G LTE." I said that this was irrelevant because no current iPhone handles 4G, and he became frustrated. "We just don't port them." He offered to transfer me to tech support to explain why that was, but the automated system wouldn't let me talk to a tech unless I was a current customer.

Interesting fact - the iPhone I had, which was a refurbished replacement from Apple, had some difficulty when I tried to activate it. Over the course of my conversation with Sprint I noticed that the carrier info in General Settings said "Verizon 12.0." Nevertheless, the rep was able to activate it on Sprint's network. QED, the hardware is portable between those carriers.

I called Verizon a second time and got much the same answer - not that Verizon couldn't port a Sprint iPhone, but that they simply wouldn't. I scrapped any plans for Verizon as they obviously didn't want my business. With a considerable amount of trepidation, I called up AT&T.

There and Back Again

This leads me to today. I've called and set up service with AT&T, and I'm just waiting on my new iPhone 4 to come via UPS. As soon as that happens and I activate it, I'll sell my Sprint iPhone to Amazon and call this whole experience a very long, very frustrating illustration of how cell phone service in my area is hopeless. I've tried every avenue available (save T-Mobile, who doesn't sell the iPhone) and ended up right back where I started with AT&T. At least, hopefully, I won't hear popcorn in the background the next time someone calls me.

Goodbye, Hulu

noreply@blogger.com (Maurice) — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 21:51:00 +0000

Introduction

I deleted my Hulu account today. I canceled Hulu Plus service months ago, so this was a long time coming. When I got rid of my pay TV subscriptions last fall, I saw Hulu as my safety net for the few current shows I still enjoyed watching. I'm sad to see that after a very promising start, Hulu has become just as bad (and in some cases worse) than live TV. Goodbye, Hulu. You shall not be missed, at least not in your current incarnation.

Decline of a Promising Product

When Hulu came into existence the concept was good. Current TV shows, within a week of their live debut, for free? My interest was piqued. So there were still ads, no problem. I could mute them and make a snack break. They even offered the option to vote ads up or down depending on how relevant they were to me.

Sometimes I'd get an option to watch one long ad and have no more interruptions for the entire length of my show. For hour-long dramas this was fantastic. There was even talk of a premium service with no ads at all, that would allow me to stream to my TV rather than my laptop using one of many devices I already owned. All was good.

I watched and enjoyed many seasons of my favorite shows, barely cognizant of the fact that the ad-free offers dwindled to the point where I never received them anymore, or that my shows which used to be broken up with two thirty-second ads were now divided into five or more commercials of up to a minute and a half a piece.

The reality didn't hit me until fairly recently that the service I used to love and thought quite reasonable has turned into a worthless miasma of un-targeted marketing and just plain idiotic product plugs. On what planet does the fact that I'm a 29-year-old male watching House, M.D. make me the target audience for a Marshalls women's clothing sale, or the latest season of American Idol?

Is this Ad relevant to you?

I remember when clicking the little "No" button on the top right corner of Hulu's AdTailor feedback mechanism would actually stop the currently-running ad. Now, it tells me my feedback will be used to better tailor ads in the future, but I see the exact same ad I just voted down three more times before my show is finished.

I abhor advertisements, but I'm willing to put up with ones that are funny, or at least partially relevant to my interests. Over the last three episodes I've watched on Hulu, I counted approximately zero relevant ads, and at least a dozen repeated ads I'd previously marked irrelevant. No, Hulu, just because I like one show on Fox doesn't mean I want to see the same stomach-churning ad for The X Factor or Glee four times over the course of a one-hour show. Remember the fact that I'm male and 29? Yeah. Pay attention to your demographics.

I find your lack of vision disturbing...

The thing that irks me the most about Hulu is that it's a wasted opportunity. I would gladly pay for an ad-free version of Hulu for a reasonable rate. I already pay for this with Netflix. Their service is great, and it doesn't rely on hounding the paying customers for products or programs they don't want.

Even if I paid for Hulu Plus, the only thing I received in return was the ability to watch certain select programs on my TV, with just as many ads as the free account. Don't even get me started on the logic behind allowing certain shows to be watched on the web but NOT on streaming through other devices. What possible benefit does it offer to a user to see a listing for their favorite show on Hulu Plus only to get a "Due to licensing restrictions, this is only available through the web" error screen?

You would think that Hulu would want as many eyes watching shows (and compulsory ads) as possible regardless of the platform. That's how a truly forward-thinking company would work. However, Hulu is not that.

Showing their true colors

Hulu is owned by some of the largest media conglomerates in the world. NewsCorp (owners of Fox), NBCUniversal (owned by Comcast), and Disney are the people paying to keep this service afloat. They aren't interested in making Hulu actually compete with paid TV, and have in fact tried to sell off the company unsuccessfully.

Hulu could easily replace cable and satellite television across the US for folks who have access to broadband internet. With a reasonable fee structure and a compelling lineup of shows from major studios they could even become the "live TV" version of Netflix. However the problem they face now is that the owners do not want Hulu to succeed. To do that would undermine their old cash-cows. They would be forced to restructure their entire business, which needs to happen anyway. Apparently Rupert Murdoch and Bob Iger would rather see their companies fade into obscurity than milk the new business they already have established.

The Bottom Line

What this whole experience has taught me is this: television, like the ads Hulu tried to foist upon me with increasing frequency, is irrelevant to me. I've discovered in the last few months that I spend much less time watching TV and more time doing other things I enjoy. Writing books, spending time with friends, being productive. If more people came to this realization, perhaps companies like the ones behind Hulu would wake up and try more than half-assed ways to get us interested again.

Goodbye, Hulu. It's a shame your creators never really wanted you to succeed.

UPDATE 05/01/2012 - A Sad Footnote

Not a week after I posted this, an article came out saying the owners of Hulu want to make the service into something that will require a cable subscription, which will effectively kill the entire reason most people use Hulu. Corporate America, especially in the entertainment industry, continues to show it's run by a bunch of clowns who need a very harsh reality check.

News flash: this is going to kill Hulu! Or was that your plan all along? To dangle something new, something better than existing cable/satellite services and then yank it out from under us so we'll all come crawling gratefully back to your trough? Screw that. To quote poster ovalseven from Consumerist.com:

"This is kind of like restricting bus tickets to only people who own cars."

Antennas Direct ClearStream 2 Digital TV Antenna

noreply@blogger.com (Maurice) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 20:27:00 +0000

Introduction

In 2012 I set a goal to trim the fat in my life. I've done this literally (lost 27 pounds since October) and figuratively by way of my gadgets and services. I was simply paying way more for my lifestyle than my cash flow could afford, and racking up credit card debt because of it.

So far, I've sold off several gadgets I no longer use and reduced or eliminated a lot of services I could live without. The most recent luxury to get the axe was my satellite TV service. I'm not going to rant about DirecTV in this post. Suffice to say that although I had no issues with their service, I found it hard to justify the price I was paying every month with the infrequent use I got out of it.

Once I pulled the plug on DirecTV I decided it would be good to have something for those rare occasions I needed background noise or wanted to watch a live show. Enter the wonderful world of old-school free TV.

Everything Old is New Again

I grew up in the piney woods of East Texas. More often than not you couldn't get cable TV service out there. It simply didn't make financial sense for the cable company to run the lines. I have many fond memories of working the rotation control on our huge twenty-foot antenna so I could pick up a broadcast of Star Trek: The Next Generation. We got most of our TV like that. It was snowy and unreliable, but it was free with the proper equipment.

Fast forward to today, and most of the local TV affiliates in the US still broadcast for free over the air. The technology is a little more high-tech (digital signals instead of analog) but the principals are the same. In fact, from a consumer standpoint not much has changed at all. You still just need an antenna and a TV with a tuner in it. As long as your antenna has the proper range you can pick up free television, often in high-definition.

Don't Cheap Out

Given that my entire purpose for dumping pay TV was to save money on something I used only sporadically, I was tempted to buy a cheap set of rabbit ears and call it a day. I've done this in the past, and had mixed to awful results. Most indoor antennas (which are practically all you can buy at places like Walmart and Target) are only rated for a range of up to 25 miles. You can buy ones with signal boosters built in, but the bottom line is unless you're close to the broadcast tower you won't get anything watchable.

I do not live close to the broadcast towers for my metro area. Thanks to AntennaPoint I know that the nearest one to me is about 36 miles away. An antenna with a 25-mile range may pick up something, but it's not going to be the clear, sustained signal I need to sit down and watch an entire show from beginning to end.

Outdoor antennas are generally the recommended method for people my distance and further. They're mounted up high and have much larger physical arrays so they can pull down a stronger signal than anything that fits on your TV stand. The downside to outdoor antennas is that they're, well, outdoors. If you live in an apartment or a neighborhood with strict HOA rules, you probably won't be able to mount something like that.

The good news is, there has been some advancement since my childhood in the size of antennas. It's possible to get a reasonably small antenna (one foot by two feet) that has a range of up to 50 miles. I've seen several companies with antennas in this range. They're anywhere from $60-150 depending on the store and the brand.

In my case I'm well inside a 50-mile radius, so I decided to look for one of these. The idea was that if it was too large to keep in the living room, I could always stick it up in my attic. The one that got the most consistent positive reviews was the ClearStream 2 from Antennas Direct. At $60-100 (give or take) it's more expensive than the top-of-the-line indoor models I looked at, but significantly less than the super-long-range outdoor ones that let you pick up signals from Mars. If it worked, I could justify the expense in a couple of months of no pay TV charges, so I decided to give it a try.

Hooking it Up

The ClearStream 2 is about two feet by one foot and six inches deep. Imagine two medium pizza boxes side-by-side. It looks like an infinity symbol bolted onto a piece of wire shelving. It's actually not very large considering its 50-mile range, but it's much too big to sit on your TV stand. The box says it's an indoor/outdoor antenna, but I don't see anyone leaving this one in their living room. More than likely the "indoor" part was meant for people like me who want to shove it in the attic.

Assembly is required, and it's not intuitively obvious. The infinity symbol comes in two parts, one of which you need to thread your coaxial cable through (cable is NOT included, so buy accordingly). Once you've threaded the cable, you bolt on the grill assembly and (optionally) the mounting arm and base. I didn't do that last part, since I didn't plan on mounting it anywhere.

As a dry run I plugged the antenna into my TV downstairs just to see what I could pick up. From the ground floor of my two-story house it picked up most of my local channels (NBC, ABC, CBS, UPN, CW, and ION) but not the weakest signal, which is our PBS affiliate. Everything except NBC was clear and relatively blip-free. I decided it was time for a full-on trial.

I climbed into my attic with the ClearStream 2 and plugged it in, then pointed it in the general direction of the broadcast towers. In my case, that meant south/southwest. I went back downstairs and had my TV scan for channels. This is the least exciting part of the whole process.

You can, however, get a false sense of excitement when the "detected channels" number goes up into the thirties or forties. I'm not sure what most TV sets count as "channels" but I've never actually seen thirty watchable station come in over the air. In my experience the number of "channels detected" really just means the range of channel numbers into which your local stations fall. For instance, "67 channels found" may only mean a dozen or so actual stations, but the highest numbered channel is 67.

When the scanning was done, I flipped through what it picked up. All my local affiliates were present, including not one, not two, but three PBS stations. I watched each of the channels for several minutes and noticed no pixelated noise or dropped signals. I also learned that there are an awful lot of Vietnamese and Spanish stations in Houston. Go figure.

I just so happened to do this experiment on Superbowl Sunday, so I saw the game in high-definition. ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX broadcast almost all of their prime-time shows in high-definition. I've had pay TV for several years, so I'd forgotten how crisp the picture could be when it isn't being compressed over a cable line.

What's that, you say? Yes, cable television has to be compressed so companies like Comcast can send 300 channels of nothing you want to watch through a pipe with limited bandwidth. This means what they pass off as "high-definition" is often times significantly lower quality than what you can pull in for free with an antenna. Over the air broadcasts don't need to be compressed. The end result is that for major local broadcasts (like sports events or prime-time TV shows) you're likely to get a much crisper picture.

Verdict

My search for free HDTV is over for the time being, at least until I move somewhere that doesn't have an attic or somewhere I can mount the ClearStream 2. Meanwhile I hope to enjoy years of casual TV watching for no contract, and no monthly fee. For everything else, there's Netflix.

Gadget Quest: Mouse

noreply@blogger.com (Maurice) — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 22:47:00 +0000

I recently sold my Sony VAIO laptop for a 13-inch MacBook Pro. As with most new toys, there are a number of accessories I want to compliment my new acquisition. Since I plan on doing a lot of point-and-click gaming (Torchlight) I decided to look for a good wireless mouse. My search so far has yielded mixed results.

My first mouse (and the one I keep coming back to) was a Logitech M215 that I purchased to complement my Dell Mini netbook. It was small, cheap and light. My only real complaint about it was that for long gaming sessions my hand started to cramp up due to how I was forced to hold the tiny device.

Naturally, since I just bought a Mac I first tried the Apple "Magic" Mouse, their latest Bluetooth wireless accessory. It's a very svelte and elegant looking gadget, and the fact that it's also a touchpad is pretty geeky cool.

Apple Magic Mouse

Pros:

Pleasant to look at, great conversation piece
Apple product, so build quality is quite solid
Small footprint, very low profile
Uses regular, user replaceable AA batteries
Had no communication issues with my MacBook Pro
Multi-touch surface is just really neat and works well

Cons:

Too small for my hands, forces a "claw of death" grip
Heavy, and has a tendency to slide off my lap desk
Takes a few seconds on wake from sleep for the mouse to reconnect

The bottom line for the Apple Magic mouse that convinced me to return it was comfort. I used it for an evening of browsing and some light gaming. By the end of the night my hand hurt quite a bit, due to the unnatural claw-like position I had to use to operate it (you pretty much have to use your thumb and ring finger to move it around and keep your first two fingers in the air). No bueno.

My next attempt was with the current flagship mouse from Logitech: the Performance MX. It claims to be able to track on clear glass using its "Darkfield" tracking technology. It actually cost me more than the Apple mouse, which is saying something. I used it for an evening and into the following day. Although I had significantly less pain in my hand, other issues cropped up.

Logitech Performance Mouse MX

Pros:

Full-sized, comfortable design
"Unifying" nano receiver works with up to 6 devices (mice, keyboards)
User-replaceable, rechargeable battery that can charge via USB while mouse is in use.
Configuration software that works with Windows and OS X
"Darkfield" tracking really does let you use the mouse on just about any surface
Faux-leather zip case for storing cords and accessories

Cons:

Heavy as a brick
Very large, and strangely shaped
Tracking laser is under your thumb, not the center of the mouse
Tracking is very unstable while playing games in OS X.
Slides off my lapdesk a lot

I beat Doom 3 with the Peformance MX, and I was feeling pretty good about it. It felt good in my hand, although I noticed just how massive the thing was. My arm felt some of the strain of having to keep the heavy mouse from sliding backwards on my lap desk (I tend to use it at a slight tilt).

The mouse is rechargeable, but it just uses a single NiMH battery which you can replace with any brand you like. I got a good solid four hours before I went down one bar (out of 3) on the charge so it seems like it would last a while. You can plug the included mini-USB to USB cable into the mouse and use it like a regular USB mouse while it charges. It also has a wall adapter for overnight charging. All of these accessories fit in a nice zip-up bag that's included.

The buttons are easily configurable using the Logitech Control Center software, either from the included CD or the Logitech Support Site. There's a button under your thumb that brings up Mission Control on OS X Lion, which is handy. All in all, it was a very cool mouse, with one fatal flaw.

When I fired up Torchlight the next morning, I noticed my mouse cursor had started to jump around like it was on crack. I tested it with a few different programs just to make sure, and all of them exhibited this behavior. I looked up the problem on several forums including Logitech Support, and there was no clear-cut answer to why this happened. Whatever the reason, I couldn't justify paying $80 for a mouse that skipped around on me, so I ended up taking it back.

Where does that leave me? Currently I'm stuck using my M215. It's small, but it tracks just fine and doesn't slide off my desk every time I let go of it. Honestly, I don't know what I'll try out next. I'm considering giving Microsoft's mice a try. I've had good luck with them in the past.

UPDATE 12/26/2011 - I purchased a Microsoft Wireless Mobile Mouse 4000 today and noticed the same crazy pointer behavior while I was playing games. This leads me to believe that the issue I had with the Logitech Performance MX was not due to driver issues as I previously suspected, unless both Microsoft and Logitech have the same bug in their software.

The issue seems to be confined to when I'm performing something that's CPU-intensive, like playing a 3D accelerated game. I haven't seen the same erratic behavior during normal usage. I find it strange that my low-tech M215 is unaffected by this. The only explanation I can give for that is both of the mice I used that exhibited the jumpiness had newer sensor technology ("Darkfield" and "BlueTrack"). Whatever the reason, it's very frustrating.

iPhone 4 (not 4S) and Sprint

noreply@blogger.com (Maurice) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 18:04:00 +0000

My history of phones with Sprint has been something of a comedy of errors. I've come to know the people at my local Sprint store by their first names, and annoy them greatly. I've traversed the bowels of their corporate phone network and found the experience lacking. Finally, I've pleaded to their king for relief, and actually received an answer.

One thing I can say about Sprint is that they remain only major carrier with truly unlimited data plans. That alone is probably the main reason why I haven't jumped ship back to AT&T or Verizon at this point.

However, as I pointed out in a previous blog post, since switching to Sprint over the summer I've had to replace my phone SIX times due to either hardware or software issues. That's a sampling of two major brands and three different models, all Android-based devices.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I received my second Epic 4G. It exhibited the same strange clicks and pops during phone calls as the original Epic 4G. When I called the Sprint store, the best they could offer was a third replacement. I decided I'd had enough. I went to my local Best Buy and bought an iPhone 4, for a full retail price of around $600. Yes, it hurt.

Everything Old is New Again

The last iPhone I owned was a 3GS, so the iPhone 4 (even though it's not a 4S) is still a new shiny gadget to me. And boy is it shiny! Front and back are covered in slippery glass and the sides are smooth metal. Before I had a case for it, I constantly found it sliding off my endtable in the living room. Thank goodness I have carpet.

The iPhone 4 is svelte compared to my android phones, with a tiny screen and compact design. Despite its size, Apple's Retina Display is ridiculously sharp. I didn't miss the extra inches at all. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I didn't need to hook the phone up to iTunes to download the latest iOS update.

Once I was running 5.0.1, I went to work getting my contacts to sync. This is something most Android phones do through a wizard when you first start them up. I have all my contacts in GMail, so I used the "Exchange Sync" process detailed here to get everything working. Soon I had a functioning phone, and it was time to play.

The processor on the iPhone 4 is the same as the original iPad (Apple A4), so in theory at least it can play any game you could play on the larger device. In practice I've found...well it actually does. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Infinity Blade worked flawlessly on the iPhone 4 and looked every bit as pretty as it did on my iPad, despite the smaller screen.

I found as I redownloaded all my essential apps that the iOS versions often times were superior to their Android counterparts. Little bugs that drove me crazy in apps like Lose It! were fixed, and new enhancements were introduced. Here's a short list of the apps that I used on both Android and iOS and found to be much better on the latter.

Lose It!
Pandora Radio
FaceBook
Twitter (official client)
TeleNav GPS (free version)

Since Apple launched it's iCloud service, several small but welcome enhancements popped up in the App Store. The most notable for me was the addition of a "Purchased" list. This is old hat for users of the Amazon App Store on Android, but it's a welcome addition for iOS. I was able to browse and redownload apps I bought for my 3GS years ago and had forgotten about.

Two Weeks Later

I purposefully held off posting this rant until I'd had some time to get past the "ooh, shiny!" stage with the iPhone 4. Now several weeks later I can say that I'm very happy with the phone hardware and software. They work well together, and the device feels comfortable to use.

There are some caveats, of course. Sprint's 3G network is noticeably spotty and slow on the iPhone 4. For whatever reason, I've seen the dreaded "o" of death on my status bar more often than not when I'm in my office. For those of you unaware, that means my shiny new iPhone is surfing data at 1xRTT speeds. I could mail a letter to you faster than it takes me to download anything at that speed.

None of my previous 6 phones had this kind of 3G reception problems in my office. Not only that, but even when I have a full five-bar 3G signal I'm still only able to pull down a little over 1Mbps downloads and 0.5Mbps uploads. Speedy it is not.

Sprint promises that 3G speed enhancements are coming to my area, and I damn sure hope they deliver. I know I'm not the only person having speed problems on the iPhone, and if they want to keep anyone past their contract termination date they need to upgrade, and fast.

To be fair, AT&T has had several years to build out its network in response to the iPhone, so I don't expect Sprint to be able to compete overnight. I do however hope they can give me reliable, faster 3G within the next year. That's about how long I can justify staying with them after paying full price for the iPhone.

Update for my Epic Tale

noreply@blogger.com (Maurice) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 19:36:00 +0000

Over the weekend I received my first replacement Epic 4G, and I've spent the last few days testing it out. The rampant clicks and pops during Pandora streaming are gone, and for the most part my calls are coming through clearly. I still have the issue of echoing (where I hear snippets of what I just said echoed back to me) but it's limited to one specific person who lives an a rural area, so I can't necessarily blame Sprint for that one.

I'd like to say thank you once again to Al at the Total Communications Wireless store in Atascocita for all of his help. He apologized for my replacement taking so long and even threw in a case for my trouble. Al always works to make sure I leave the store happy. This is what customer service should be.

At this point, unless I have a windfall and can afford an iPhone 4 at full retail price, it looks like the Epic 4G is going to be my phone for the remainder of my contract term. Should anything crop up good or bad I'll be sure and let you all know.

TechieMoe out.

Phone Tag

noreply@blogger.com (Maurice) — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 20:11:00 +0000

UPDATE: I just downloaded the Gingerbread 2.3.5 update that Sprint is rolling out this week, and one of the notes in the changelog is improved media streaming and call quality. I've only used it a little while, but so far I'm cautiously optimistic that this will fix the crackling. If you're interested, I used the manual install instructions here. Otherwise, Sprint has promised a full rollout over the next 10 days.

Two weeks ago I became fed up with the string of poor software keyboards I tried on Android and decided to downgrade my phone from an Epic Touch to an Epic 4G. The main feature of the older phone is the presence of a physical QWERTY keyboard.

I immediately saw my accuracy and speed for text messages and Tweets go up, as well as my overall comfort with the device. For all the advantages Android offers over iOS, I still haven't found a keyboard that responds as accurately as the one for the iPhone. Having a physical keyboard helps, a lot.

Sadly, when I tried to listen to music or field calls with the Epic 4G I got a horrible random crackle/pop noise from both the internal speaker and the headphone jack. I looked around online and some people's theory is a faulty sound driver, but no one has a fix for it yet. I took the phone back to Sprint and they're going to swap it out for another Epic 4G.

For those of you keeping score, that's SIX phones I've shuffled through since about May of this year. I offer for your own personal amusement the list in its entireity, with my issues in italics.

LG Optimus V (Virgin) - Good phone, just didn't care for Virgin's plans
Motorola Triumph (Virgin) - Poor reception, random reboots
Motorola Photon (Sprint) - High-pitched squeal from headphone jack
Motorola Photon (Sprint) - Same as previous
Samsung Epic Touch (Sprint) - Random reboots, touchscreen not responsive
Samsung Epic (Sprint) - Crackling/Popping noise from any audio source

I'm a demanding user. I'm fully aware of this. I expect my gadgets to perform perfectly most of the time. I know there are going to be glitches here and there and I have no problem rebooting my phone every couple of days if need be. At this point however, I'd just like to have a phone that performs all of its advertised functions without, you know, breaking.

It's worth a note that the staff at the Atascocita Sprint store (Total Communications) have been very patient and willing to help me out with all these problems. They might groan when I walk in the door for yet another hardware problem, but they've never tried to accuse me of doing anything untoward (which I've had AT&T do before), so I keep coming back. Donna and Al in particular are quite helpful and have pulled strings to ensure that I walk out the door happy. Props to them.

My replacement Epic 4G is on backorder, and I'm calling the Sprint store every day to check on it. In the meantime, my current Epic 4G has started having strange battery drain issues and refusing to wake up its data connection or connect to wifi at random intervals. Joy.

Where do I go from here? Provided the second Epic doesn't have the same problem as the first, I'll probably hold on to it until my contract is up in 2013. Then I'm going back to an iPhone, more than likely. This product return shuffle is for the birds.

Library Lending on the Kindle 3

noreply@blogger.com (Maurice) — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 15:01:00 +0000

I've owned several eReaders over the years. My first was a 3G Kindle 2, replaced later by a wifi Nook, and most recently replaced again by a 3G Kindle 3 (now called Kindle Keyboard). One of the biggest missed marketing points for all eReaders on the market today is the ability to check out books for free from your local library and read them on the device.

Until a few months ago, this was the sole territory of the Barnes & Noble Nook, and a handful of other EPUB-reading devices. The process was overly complicated, but if you had the patience and technical know-how you could indeed check out and read books from the library on the device. The hoops you had to jump through were as follows:

Logon to your local library's Digital Catalog website (Usually provided by Overdrive.com)
Browse to a title you want and make sure it's available in EPUB
Add the title to your cart and checkout using your library card number
Download the file to your local machine
Download, install, and open Adobe Digital Editions (ADE)
Open the file you downloaded (which isn't the actual book) in ADE
Wait while ADE verifies the file and downloads the real book
Plug in your Nook and wait for ADE to recognize it
Drag the book to your device
Unplug your Nook and start reading

As you can see, the process was made more complex than necessary due to the licensing and DRM involved with lending these books. Adobe provided the lockdown mechanism and required users to download their proprietary software to "unlock" the books they checked out. I had many a frustrating day trying to explain this process to people in my office who were less than tech savvy.

Amazon promised when they announced their own lending system that it would make the process much easier. I got a chance to try it today, and I can say with certainty that they did indeed accomplish this. It's not perfect, but it is significantly easier than the way you have to do it on the Nook. Here's Amazon's version:

Logon to your local library's Digital Catalog website
Browse to a title you want and make sure it's available in Kindle format
Add the title to your cart and checkout using your library card number
Click the link that takes you back to Amazon.com, where you choose your delivery method
Log on to wifi with your Kindle or download the file to your computer, and then drag it on via USB
Start Reading

Step 5 is what got me confused. I was under the impression that those of us with a 3G Kindle would be able to download our books via Whispernet 3G. After I finished checking out and chose my method of delivery (my Kindle) I woke up my Kindle and chose "Sync." I waited, and waited some more. Nothing obvious happened on the screen.

Then I went browsing through the menus, and chose "View Downloading Items," which showed me my book but said "Wifi Required." What's the point of limiting people who have the more expensive, 3G model Kindle to wifi? The whole point of purchasing the 3G model was the freedom of being able to download books anywhere. Apparently that's only true for books that you purchase from Amazon. Annoying, but I guess it's a fair distinction.

I reluctantly connected my Kindle to the wifi network in my office, which requires a login. The K3 browser worked fine and I was able to connect. I then told the Kindle to sync and within a few seconds I had my library book. This is definitely easier than the method for the Nook (especially because it doesn't involve any special software, or acess to a PC at all), but Amazon really could have eliminated a step there.

To be fair, they do let you download the AZW file directly to your computer so you can drag and drop it using the USB sync cable, if for instance you're at your computer and don't have a shared wifi connection.

I haven't tested whether or not Kindle library books let you check them in if you finish before your return date. This is something you could do with ADE on the Nook. It's not a deal-breaker, more of a courtesy to other readers, but it would be nice if this were supported.

UPDATE: Thanks to this helpful article, I discovered that you can in fact return your Kindle library books early, using the "Manage Your Kindle" section of Amazon. An option comes up to return them, and you'll receive an email confirmation. Good deal.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the process Amazon has in place. The system works, and it works more cleanly than the method currently used by the Nook. Props to Amazon for this: they were late to the game with library checkouts but when they came in, their way of doing things was much more elegant.

Samsung Galaxy S II (Epic 4G Touch) on Sprint

noreply@blogger.com (Maurice) — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 15:09:00 +0000

No doubt some of you have been keeping up with the trials and tribulations of my Motorola Photon 4G. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I managed to convince Sprint to give me a different handset. It arrived last night, and I've had some time to play with it today. Here are my impressions.

Samsung apparently couldn't decide what to name this handset, so they gave it one of the longest names I've ever seen: Samsung Galaxy S II (Epic 4G Touch). I'm biting my tongue not to add in "Alpha - EX Tournament Edition" and bring it to Capcom levels of ridiculous. At least the name is suitably...epic.

The Epic borrows a lot of its packaging from Apple. Even the power brick is a tiny cube that looks eerily similar to the one for the iPhone, only black. That's where the comparison stops, however. The Epic is an Android (2.3 Gingerbread) phone through and through, with the Samsung TouchWiz 4.0 interface installed by default.

When I first picked up the device I wondered if there was anything inside it at all. It's extremely light, especially compared to the glass-and-metal construction of the Photon. Once you install the battery it's a little heavier, but not by much.

The first thing I tested after getting the phone activated was the headphone jack. I'm pleased to report that the only thing I hear when I pause music on the Epic is silence. No whine, no weird clicks, and so far no jittery playback on Pandora either (another annoyance with the Photon). So far so good.

The phone has a very large screen (4.52" Super AMOLED) that does 480x800 resolution. The default setup doesn't really show this off because the brightness is turned way down. Once you turn it up a bit the sharp, colorful display really shines...no pun intended.

The back of the phone is textured, so it has a nice feel to it. Also, it doesn't hold fingerprints. That's a definite plus in my book, especially since there's very few cases available for it at the moment. Mine is going au naturale until the cheap TPU case I ordered on Amazon comes in.

The screen is the same Gorilla Glass as the Photon, so I'm not worried about scratches. Over the course of two months with no screen protector the Photon's screen looked pristine. That stuff is seriously tough.

The TouchWiz interface is going to annoy some people. The icons are big and cartoony, and the colors are bright. Everything is on a black background, which causes readability issues sometimes in the notification area since not all of the apps seem to understand how to make their fonts white.

When I was downloading several apps from the Android Marketplace, I could barely read what percentage they were at. I installed LauncherPro, my own personal favorite Home replacement, which helped a little. I couldn't do anything about the cartoony UI in the system menus, but the home screen looks better.

The battery life seems about on par with the Photon 4G, which is to say it's normal, nothing special. I'm able to listen to Pandora from the time of my commute (7am) to around 10am and still have 75% battery. The capacity is 1800mAh, which is pretty beefy.

My SkullCandy headphones with mic work just fine for answering calls, as does my Samsung bluetooth earpiece. The aftermarket wall and car chargers I bought for the Photon, and even the old charger for my Samsung Messager Touch, all work with the Epic. Once again I'm in no dire need of new accessories.

Other review sites have complimented the camera on the Epic, so I'll be sure and play around with it even though that's not really my thing. The label on the back says it's 8 Megapixels. It can also record either 1080p or 720p HD video. Again, not my thing but nice to have.

In a couple of days of use, so far I only have a couple of small complaints. I can't quite figure out how to get the phone to silence its notification noises when headphones are attached. For some reason even if I'm listening to music on my headphones all my notification noises (and ringtones) still play through the speaker. It's likely just a configuration issue.

Also, the Epic seems to have issues staying connected to 4G. My Photon, for all its flaws, did not have this problem so I know there's sufficient 4G coverage in my area. This might be fixed by a PRL update.

So far, the Epic 4G Touch is looking like one seriously slick device. I almost said "little" there, but that's not an accurate word for this gadget. It's skinny and light, but the form factor is big enough that some folks won't be able to operate it with one hand. More updates to come as I use the phone a little longer.

The Sprint/Motorola Photon Jerk-Around

noreply@blogger.com (Maurice) — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 14:29:00 +0000

I took the day off from work last Friday to get this high-pitched whine issue with my Photon taken care of once and for all, and after nearly eight full hours shuttling between stores and sitting on hold with several different departments of Sprint customer service, I have solved it: by getting a different phone. The quest to have this happen was not easy.

First, I'd like to compliment Adrian from the Multiple Returns Department. He and his supervisor were the ones who finally found a way through Sprint's red tape and shipped me a new phone. I wish I'd just had to deal with him instead of the myriad script-reading cronies I ended up with.

Now, with the positive out of the way it's time to regale you with a tale of headaches, replacements, and lots and lots of dropped calls and hold music. Sit back, grab a beer and laugh at my expense if necessary.

Background:

I've posted before here and here about this strange dog-whistle kind of sound that happens any time use headphones on my Photon 4G. It's not confined to phone calls (as many of the tech reps I talked to tried to say), but happens constantly for any kind of sound coming through the headphone jack.

Throughout this debacle I've been posting updates on the Motorola User Forums, in this thread. You can follow along with what happened there, and I may repost my parts of the thread in another article later. For the purposes of this rant, I'm starting on Wednesday the 21st of September, the day I received my first replacement Photon from Sprint in the mail.

As soon as I took the new Photon out of the box, I checked for the whine. I wasn't disappointed. I went into my local Sprint store and informed them that the replacement had the same problem as my original. The store in question was this one, and I've had extensive dealings with two of their employees, Donna Hodge and Pam Tengbergen. Donna has been sympathetic and tried to help every step of the way. Pam, on the other hand, simply quoted company policy and offered an "I'm sorry."

On Wednesday I dealt with Pam, who basically told me I was SOL. I'm past my magical 30-day return period, after which all phones suddenly become toxic and unsellable. She couldn't hear the whine I described (though she did say she believed me that it was there). She didn't offer to have their tech take a look at it.

Before I left the store I talked to a customer service rep on the phone and he told me it was Sprint's policy to try and replace a phone two times before they give you a different handset. I told him fine, ship out the third Photon and I'll return it just the same.

The Day in Question:

Thursday and Friday came, and I had no tracking number and no third phone. I called Sprint again, and was transferred to the "Multiple Replacements Department," which I didn't know existed. I spoke with Adrian, who told me to try going to the Sprint corporate store (here). He also gave me the direct phone number for his supervisor, and said he'd call me back in a few hours to check and see if the issue was addressed.

Adrian provided above-and-beyond customer service, and he was by far the exception among his coworkers at Sprint that day. I just wanted to state that again. This man deserves an award.

I went to the corporate store, and their on-site technician said he could hear the sound. He said it looked like something was wrong with the wiring in the headphone jack and that it would take 2 hours to fix. I left the phone with them and came back in 2 hours.

When I received my phone back, no work had been done. The tech left me a note saying that the whine was a "known" issue with Motorola and I'd have to wait for them to fix it. Keep in mind that up until Friday morning, all the Sprint techs I'd talked to claimed to have never heard of my particular problem. I find this sudden discovery suspect.

I told the rep this was unacceptable and asked to speak with his manager. The manager was sympathetic, but offered nothing to help. He said, and I quote, "Honestly, that's why I never by the latest and greatest."

Small note: Adrian from the Multiple Returns Department did call me back as he said he would, but the phone was still in the hands of the useless corporate tech at this point so I couldn't answer. When I called back, his supervisor was busy so I left a voicemail.

I went back to Total Choice Wireless in Atascocita and asked if perhaps, since they were a third-party retailer, their company would be willing to eat the cost of a new handset for me. They said basically, "If Sprint won't do it, we won't do it."

At this point I was ready to cancel my service with Sprint and go somewhere else, so I began my horrible, stilted dance with Sprint Customer Service. Over the course of roughly four hours, I called at least a dozen times and was transferred as many times to tech support, sales, and "Advanced Product Returns," where I was given to a supervisor who said he could help, but then hung up on me.

I repeated my problem every time, with every rep to whom I was transferred, because although all of them had access to the ample case history for my phone none of them seemed to be able to read it. Most often I was asked to "confirm" that the problem was something completely different than what I'd just told them.

I called back and asked for "Advanced Product Returns" again, which landed me with a regular rep who put me on hold for 45 minutes, checking in with me every ten or fifteen, only to tell me the same thing: "We can't replace your phone with a different model."

I asked to speak to the Retention Department to cancel my plan. I got someone from Retentions, who said "Hello, this is <inaudible>, how may I--" and hung up on me again. I find it ironic that throughout the day I dealt with several dozen people who work at a phone company, and most of them seem to have very little knowledge on how to properly use a phone.

In an act of total (and fortunate) desperation, I called the number Adrian gave me earlier that day, and this time his supervisor answered immediately. She said she did get my voicemail, but due to a snafu with their phones my phone number was cut off.

She transferred me back to Adrian, who listened patiently as I detailed the run-around I'd been given all day. Adrian asked what my desired outcome was, and I said simply "I want a different phone. Not a new Photon, a different phone from a different manufacturer with the comparable features."

Adrian emailed the whole thing to his supervisor and put me on hold while he waited for her answer. He came back and asked if there was a particular model of phone I was interested in. Samsung recently released the Epic 4G Touch, which at least on paper is pretty much feature-identical to the Photon, so I told him that one.

After another brief hold, Adrian gave me an order number and told me I could call the number he gave me for his supervisor if I had any more issues in the coming week. Late Saturday I received an email confirmation that a replacement phone had shipped, and was due the following Thursday (September 29th).

Conclusion:

Adrian and his supervisor single-handedly saved Sprint my account. Had it not been for their common-sense, helpful service the company would have lost all of my money for good. Theirs is the example of what customer service should be, and the rest of the company should take lessons.

There are obvious failures at every level that Sprint needs to take notice of. First and foremost: it is not the customer's fault that Motorola hasn't acknowledged or fixed an issue with a phone, and I should not have to suffer with a faulty device while they figure it out. Sprint is the front line here, and they should have taken the phone back and given hell to Motorola, not me.

Second: train your reps on how to use the phone system without cutting off the caller. It's ridiculous that I was cut off five times over the course of the day by incompetent hold button abilities. Also, make them actually read all those copious notes they take every time I call in. It would save me having to repeat my story fifteen times.

Third: Lose the "after 30 days you're pretty much screwed" attitude. Electronics fail, especially when they're a first-generation device. Sometimes issues aren't immediately apparent, or (heaven forbid) the customer spends their 30 days trying to find another way to work around them. Telling a customer that they're just unlucky to have bought the most expensive and newest device you advertised is bad for business. You very likely would have lost me had someone not intervened at the last minute.

For now, I wait. I'll post a rant on the Epic Touch as soon as I get it and have some time to play with it. Hopefully *fingers crossed* Samsung didn't buy their headphone hardware from the same OEM as Motorola. We shall see.

Update 09/29/2011

I emailed dan@sprint.com (the CEO's personal feedback email) and talked to a lady named Robin B. in his office. She said that Adrian would be given proper recognition for being the only person able to resolve my issue and that they were taking all my other suggestions into consideration. She apologized for the runaround I received, and asked if all my concerns had been addressed.

So far the Samsung Epic 4G Touch is performing just fine, so I told her I was okay for the time being. I have her desk phone number and the one for Adrian's supervisor should any new issues crop up. Rest assured, if I do have any more problems you all will be the first to know about.

The Sound of Silence, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Maurice) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:17:00 +0000

I went through several levels of tech support at Sprint and eventually got someone to send me a replacement phone over this high-pitched noise issue. I received my replacement last night and immediately plugged in headphones to see if it had the same problem. Sadly, it did.

I went to my local Sprint store. They took it in the back and did some diagnostics on it. Their tech said there was something screwy with the wiring in the headphone jack (actually he said it was put in backwards) that might be causing the feedback. He said it wasn't something they were equipped to fix in-store.

I asked if could just get a different phone, since all the Photons I'd tried (including their store demo) had this problem. They said basically their hands were tied. I'm past my 30-day return policy so I have to follow through all the official channels to get a working phone. I called tech support again, from the store, and pleaded my case. What I wanted was for them to bypass the "must try two replacements before we give you something else" policy and just send me a different phone of equal value.

I got no love. The Sprint tech said he had to send me a second Photon just to satisfy their policy, so I'm stuck listening to a dog whistle every time sound comes out of my phone for another couple of days.

For what it's worth, everyone I talked to at Sprint both on the phone and in person were very pleasant and understanding. I could tell they genuinely wanted to help, but they had to follow their company's no-exceptions, "three tries before you're out" policy. The woman who helped me at my store, Donna, was ready to give me another phone on the spot, but she couldn't get approval for it until they'd exhausted the third replacement.

After the issues I had with the Motorola Triumph and this problem with the Photon, I'm done with Motorola for some time. Perhaps completely. In the past their products have been very good, but in their current crop of smart phones (the Bionic has been reported with this same whine issue) they dropped the ball on quality control. It will take me a while before I trust them again.

Should my second replacement have the same problem (and I'm betting money it will), stay tuned for a rant on whatever phone I get as a replacement. At the current time that looks like it will be a Samsung Galaxy S2, or Epic 4G Touch (the Sprint website lists both names).

The Sound of Silence

noreply@blogger.com (Maurice) — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 13:18:00 +0000

I've had my Photon 4G for a little over a month now. By and large it's an excellent, beefy little gadget. Motorola has issued two updates to the software since its launch and reportedly another one is due out this time next week. Even though they seem to be on top of things, one glaring problem remains with my device: it gives me headaches.

How does this happen? Well, like many folks with recent Motorola phones, any time we listen to our devices using the headphone jack, there's an obvious whine in the background. To me, it sounds like a quiet tea kettle, and it's always present regardless of what kind of sound I'm piping through it. Calls, music, even notification noises. Any time sound has to come through that headphone jack, I hear that whine. If I play something and then pause playback, I hear the whine by itself for about 3 seconds, followed by a click and silence. Likewise, just a few seconds before sound comes out I hear it click and start to whine again.

Some folks have reported the whine also comes out of the speakers on the back of the phone, which I can't verify. All I know is that it's painfully obvious with headphones. I've taken the phone to Sprint, and all they could offer was a loaner while they sent it in to Motorola. Unfortunately, I tried out 2 other Photons while I was there and they all had this problem so I'm not sure getting a refurb is going to help.

I'm past my 30-day return policy with Sprint, or I'd just trade it in for a cheaper EVO. Motorola and Sprint tech support have tried many software-related fixes (battery pull, factory reset, jiggle the headphones in the jack, look for any wonky settings in my sound menu) and none have offered any relief.

One of the main reasons I have a smartphone to begin with is so I can stream Pandora Radio and listen to music while I'm at work, in a relatively quiet office. With this whine, I can't listen to music for more than a couple of hours before I get a headache.

At this point my best hope is the update coming on the 22nd. I'm not entirely convinced this is a software issue. If the update doesn't address it my only other option is to send it in for service with Motorola. My biggest regret is not discovering this problem before my 30-day return policy.

I'll keep you all posted if anything comes of this.

The Quest for Headsets

noreply@blogger.com (Maurice) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 11:57:00 +0000

I have an affinity for toys that beget the purchase of more toys. When I buy a new gadget, I immediately start looking for useful accessories for it. In the case of my Photon 4G (rant here) I needed something to listen to music, and perhaps field the occasional call. The quest begins.

I like the concept of wireless headsets. Over the course of the last six months I've bought and returned several pairs of stereo Bluetooth devices. I've learned that by and large, most of these gadgets just aren't built with my head in mind. When you're talking about listening to something for eight hours at a time, comfort matters a lot.

At this point I switched gears to wired earbuds. They're comfortable, don't require charging, and generally have good sound isolation. When I had an iPhone, my go-to headset was a pair of Sony MDR-EX38i earbuds.

Sadly, the button and mic don't work with the Photon 4G, nor did they work with my previous phone (the Motorola Triumph). I can't really fault Sony on this though; the earbuds stated clearly on the box that they were designed for Apple devices.

Next I purchased a pair of Motorola EH20 earbuds with mic, hoping that by virtue of brand parity they would work okay on the Photon. They did, sort of. The button on the EH20 is weird. It doesn't actually click, it just kind of mushes. It was hard for me to tell when I'd successfully clicked it. I inadvertently hung up or never picked up on several calls because of this.

Also, even though the box claims it can be used to control music and calls, any time I mushed the button while listening to music I got the voice command menu instead. The earbuds also emitted a high-pitched whine when I listened to quiet music (more on that later).

By virtue of a ridiculous sale at Fry's Electronics, I came across a pair of Bose On-Ear headphones with mic, and tried those out on the Photon 4G. The mic and button worked as advertised, which is to say they're only an answer call button and mic. The button doesn't control music except when using the "control headset" option in Winamp, which in itself is a pain because it would try to play music when I wanted to answer or hang up from a call.

It's surprisingly hard to find a mic/earbud combo that doesn't say "Designed for iPhone." I looked high and low, and ended up with a pair of SkullCandy 365J earbuds with mic. The sound quality is decent, the cord is nicely hefty and feels tough, and the button actually clicks. Sadly, it's really no better for music control than the Bose OEs.

Throughout my testing of wired headsets, I've noticed that all of them exhibit the high-pitched whine when playing any sort of sound. I can pause my music and the whine continues for about 3 seconds, followed by a click and silence. I thought perhaps it was a grounding issue with the headphone jack, and I haven't ruled out that possibility. My calls to Sprint tech support have yielded nothing useful.

The well-meaning but clueless tech rep told me to see if there was music running in the background at a very low volume (there wasn't) or try a factory reset (didn't help). I have a running thread on the Motorola Support forums here if anyone is interested. The fact that several wired headsets have exhibited this behavior makes me think it's a problem with the phone itself, specifically the headphone jack hardware since Bluetooth headsets did not exhibit the whine.

The best way to describe the sound is a very quiet teakettle. Imagine hearing that in the background of everything you listen to all day, and you'll understand why I want to get this fixed. It's possible by the pitch of the sound that a lot of folks never even notice it (to me the pitch is a very high C).

Long story short, for my Motorola Photon 4G, the best earbuds with mic I've found are the SkullCandy 365J (link). It helps that they're relatively inexpensive. I assume these would also work on other Android devices, but if they don't please give me some feedback. I'll post an update if anything comes of the whine issue.

Motorola Photon 4G and Sprint

noreply@blogger.com (Maurice) — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 00:46:00 +0000

Introduction

Some of you are no doubt confused, since I just bought a Motorola Triumph last month. Wasn’t I perfectly happy with it? Didn’t I give it a glowing review? Well, some issues cropped up after the fact which I’ll go into more detail in a followup post. Suffice to say, my wife and I were in the market for new phones, and Sprint was the last major provider we hadn’t tried.

We perused the store and my eye gravitated to either the EVO or the EVO Shift. I liked the physical keyboard on the Shift, but the screen was much larger and looked nicer on the EVO. The sales person, Donna, was very knowledgeable and didn’t pressure me in any way.
She did however see that I was leaning toward the EVO and led me a little further down the row to a phone that they had just put on sale the week before. The specs were drool-worthy and the price was reasonable ($200 on contract).

I played with it for quite a while, asking every question I could think of. Donna didn’t flinch. She was very honest about problems and returns they’ve received for the various smartphones I looked at, even telling me that their number one return was the EVO for its brittle screen. After some discussion on plans and a number port later, I had myself a Motorola Photon 4G.

Hardware

The Photon feels very comfortable in your hands. The edges are rounded and the Gorilla Glass screen is very responsive. The display has a slightly blue tinge to it when you look at it sideways in the light. It reminds me a lot of the iPhone 3GS from a strictly tactile standpoint. You want to hold this phone, which is something I couldn’t say for the Triumph (or any other boxy phones like the Evo or Droid).
I didn’t have any of the ear-splitting volume problems with the Photon that I did with the Triumph. The lowest volume setting was (shock) actually quite low, and I had no difficulty finding a comfortable listening volume.

There’s 16GB of storage available on the device, so the lack of an included microSD card doesn’t sting too much. Before this phone I was getting by with a 4GB stick, so unless you’re just a serious audio/video person the stock memory is probably plenty for most people.

The camera is 8 megapixels and records HD video. I’m not a shutterbug, so I can’t really say what kind of quality it has. For the occasional home movie and snapshot of a strange street sign, it works fine. It has a dual-LED flash that I haven’t had the chance to try out yet.

The Photon has a SIM card, and it’s GSM compatible. In theory you can use this phone overseas, and Sprint is more than happy to charge you for it. I doubt I’ll use this capability, but it’s nice to know it’s there.

Software

The Photon 4G ships with Android 2.3.4 (Gingerbread). I believe all smart phones should do this from now on. Unfortunately for some, the Photon also comes with the MOTOBLUR user interface slapped on top of it. I’ve not been terribly annoyed by it in the first few days of use.

The Android Marketplace has had a facelift since Froyo. It looks a lot more like the Windows 7 Mobile interface. Apps are just one panel now; you also get search results for books and movies. They’re separated, so it’s not too annoying.

Sprint has a number of apps on the phone by default: NASCAR, QuickOffice, Sprint ID, Sprint Mobile Wallet, Sprint Music Plus, Sprint Radio, Sprint TV & Movies, Sprint Worldwide, Sprint Zone, TeleNav GPS Navigator, and Webtop Connector. That last one is only useful if you buy a $100 dock accessory. No thanks.

Of the apps listed, I’ve only played with a few of them. I will never touch the NASCAR app. The Sprint Zone is basically a collection of web links for managing your account and offering generic suggestions for apps to download.

Sprint Music Plus plays your local music tracks (if you have any) and offers a store for music and ringtones. I didn’t see anything that made it better than Amazon MP3. Sprint Radio is exactly what it sounds like: a streaming radio app. You can choose local or internet radio stations to stream, and there are ads that pop up from time to time. You can also subscribe for no ads and a few extra features. I was unimpressed.

Sprint TV & Movies is kind of interesting. It offers a sort of on-demand service of pre-recorded shows as well as live streaming TV. Only about four channels are available for free, but Disney is one of them if that’s your cup of tea. The video quality was okay, but nothing special.

Unfortunately, probably due to licensing trolls, your GPS and cellular location info must be enabled to stream anything, or evn see the available channel list. That means you’re not going to want to use this app very far from a power outlet.

So let’s recap: Sprint has offered poor imitations of Amazon’s MP3 store, Pandora Radio, and Netflix. Not a great value proposition in my opinion, but they were “free” apps included on the phone, so there’s that.
Not all the included apps were useless, however. Sprint has a battery management app (accessible from Settings) that does a lot of the same things as my previous favorite: JuiceDefender. With Battery & Data Manager you can tell your phone to turn off background downloads after a certain amount of idle time, which helps the battery considerably. Several preset configurations are available and you have the option to create your own.

There’s also a Task Manager which lets you kill open applications and create an “auto-kill” list for when your phone is asleep. These two I can see myself using pretty reqularly, so props to Motorola for including them.

I downloaded one app that’s specifically made for the dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor: TegraZone Games. Basically it’s a gallery app with links to the Android Marketplace for games that are 3D-intensive or really power hungry.

Using TegraZone, I downloaded a game called Galazy on Fire 2 HD. It’s a free-flying space combat game. I played through the first couple of levels and the 3D graphics looked quite nice. There was a little stutter during the cutscenes but once I had control of the ship it was smooth sailing.

I’m also happy to report that Plants vs Zombies runs beautifully. The loading time I’d gotten used to on the Optimus V is basically nonexistent, and the graphics look pretty nice. It’s obvious where the developers used vector versus fixed-resolution though. Some animation really pops on the Photon’s larger, clearer screen where other graphics are rather blurry.

The stock Music app has been replaced with one that offers suggestions based on your music library. You can turn it off, and I did almost immediately. The added features didn’t add anything for me, personally.

Service and Reception

In my regular day-to-day activities I received an average of 3 bars (out of 6) for 4G and 5 bars for 3G. On my morning commute I had 5 bars of 4G. My office is kind of a 4G dead zone (thick concrete walls) so I got 1 bar of 4G, but 5 bars 3G. For those of you who prefer exact numbers, I ran the Speedtest app in three different spots (with 1 bar, 3 bars and 5 bars signal) with these results:

ConnType	Download (kbps)	Upload (kbps)	Latency	ServerName
EvdoA	7563	245	147	Houston, TX
EvdoA	9824	1229	143	Houston, TX
EvdoA	4535	537	142	Houston, TX

Download speeds for apps of the Android Marketplace were *very* fast on 4G. It took me all of 2 seconds to download the 2MB Pandora Radio app. Setting the phone up with all my favorite apps from the Android and Amazon app stores took less than thirty minutes, and that includes several large games from Popcap (Plants vs Zombies, Chuzzle, Peggle). Any time I’ve tried getting an odd app here or there they’ve downloaded almost instantly. I’m impressed.

The plan I’m on with Sprint now is their middle-tier “Everything” plan, which gives us unlimited mobile-to-mobile minutes, unlimited texts, and 1500 landline minutes a month. Nights after 7pm and weekends are free. All that is pretty standard stuff. The thing that brings Sprint out in front of the pack (for now) is that the plan also includes unlimited data. Note that I didn’t add quotes or an asterisk.

As some of you know, I’ve had issues over the years with what most companies call “unlimited.” For Clear 4G, Virgin and Cricket 3G, and most of the major providers (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile) you might get what they call unlimited, but what they really mean is “we’ll give you up to a capped amount at the speed you paid for, and after that you’re essentially on dial-up.”

Technically they can call this unlimited because you’re never really cut off, only throttled to the point where your mobile data becomes unusable. The size of the cap varies, anywhere from 2.5GB (Virgin) to 5GB (T-Mobile), but once you’ve reached that point you’re slapped down like a misbehaving child until your billing cycle resets.

I haven’t had Sprint for very long, so I can’t say for certain there isn’t some theoretical soft cap on their service. What I can say is that the literature of my contract (and their recent ad campaigns) says that I’ll get my 3G and 4G speeds for the duration, regardless of actual usage. If I bump into any caps, I’ll be sure to let you all know.

Battery Life

The battery in the Photon has a 1700 mAh capacity. From a strictly numbers game, that beats out the Triumph(1450 mAh) and the Optimus V (1300 mAh). I haven’t done thorough testing yet, but for my normal use (games, occasional app downloading, web surfing and Pandora radio) this translates to several more hours on a charge than the Triumph gave me. It might help that the Photon downloads things in a blink, so the processor isn’t stuck chugging away at dial-up speeds for several minutes at a time.

Random note here: the Photon uses the same charger as the Motorola Triumph and the Samsung Mesager Touch. It’s a mini-USB plug. All the chargers I had lying around the house for those two previous phones worked fine. If you don’t have any spare chargers, you can buy a 3-pack (wall, car, data) from Amazon for about $10 shipped.

Downsides and Weirdness

Not everything was sunshine and roses. The first model I got had a faulty battery compartment that wouldn’t snap shut in one place, leaving a slight bulge in one corner. The battery door clips on with six clips, and one of them was bent. I had it replaced.

Pandora Radio gave audible blips and stutters when I listened to it while navigating menus. Not sure what the deal is with that. This is my first experience with Gingerbread, so it could be a bug in either Android or the app. Either way it was annoying. I didn’t notice any interruptions in the music when I had the phone idling with the screen turned off.

The battery percentage seems to jump from 100% to 90% in a blink. The manual says it may take a few charge/discharge cycles before things get “optimized,” so that might be the problem. I’ll keep you all posted should it not rectify itself.

The Gorilla Glass picks up fingerprints something fierce. I’m glad it’s there, and that it’s not as susceptible to damage as a polycarbonate or even regular glass display would be… but I find myself constantly having to wipe it off.

As a Phone

Yeah, so it’s got a dual-core processor and more features than you can shake a stick at. All that would be useless if, you know, it didn’t actually work well as a phone. I’ll post back if this changes, but so far my experience using it for text and voice has been stellar.

The Photon gets clear, strong signals everywhere I go, in either 4G or 3G. I have yet to test it in the notorious dead zones around my house (Target, for instance) but I’ll post back when I do. I had no issues hooking the Photon up to my Bluetooth headsets (either the Samsung earpiece or the Motorola headphones).

UPDATE - I did have a chance to play with my Photon in the most common dead zone near my house: the Target electronics department (ironic, I know). I’m happy to report that although I didn’t have 4G, I did have a full 6-bar signal for 3G. My previous phones (including the iPhone) swapped to EDGE or reported no service in this area, so that’s a definite upgrade.

Conclusion

It’s been a while since I’ve played with a phone and had that “Ooooooohhh” moment like the little green guys on Toy Story. When I first picked up the Photon 4G in the store, that was how I felt. It’s just…superbly shiny. The thing is a beast in the hardware department, has great reception and call quality, and it manages to do all of it in a form factor that feels good in your hand.

And Now for Something Completely Different...

noreply@blogger.com (Maurice) — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 20:19:00 +0000

Some of you may know that I write fiction in my spare time. After a resounding success at last year’s Nanowrimo, I decided to try and get the book I wrote published. It took some time but I got a contract, and now it’s up for sale on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks and Smashwords via my publisher Paperbox Books!

You can read more about it on my writing blog, The Lawless Pen.

In Appreciation of Notepad++

noreply@blogger.com (Maurice) — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 00:30:00 +0000

Over the course of performing my job, I use a lot of software. Some of it gives me fits. I’ll hack away at it for days trying to get it to do this or that specific task, weaving a tapestry of obscenity that is probably in orbit somewhere around Beetlegeuse. Other programs perform exactly the way I want them to and are so essential and interwoven with my day that I rarely give them a second thought.

One of those applications is Pidgin, but I’ve already talked about that one. Another program I use every day for just about every single work function is Notepad++. Whether I just need somewhere to dump a chunk of code or a SQL query to do some operations on it, or I need to scour several different code files to find one pesky reference, Notepad++ is my go-to application.

I can’t stress enough how absolutely essential this program is for doing my job. The text transformations, search capabilities, and syntax highlighting for just about every language imaginable have proven its utility for me time and time again. I’m sure I only use a tenth of its capabilities (for instance, I never use the many scripts it can be programmed with) but the features I do use are readily available and perform exactly the way I expect every time I need them.

Like Pidgin, Notepad++ is one of those apps that I never seem to need to update. I’m running a version that’s probably two major revisions behind and I’ve had no trouble with it at all. It’s also free, which helps in this economy. I’d like to offer a HUGE virtual pat on the back to the developers of Notepad++. You guys ROCK!

Motorola Triumph on Virgin Mobile

noreply@blogger.com (Maurice) — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 21:28:00 +0000

Overall I’ve been quite happy with Virgin Mobile as a wireless provider. Their prices are reasonable, their data plan (though not ideal) is certainly one of the most sane out there on the market, and their coverage in my area is good enough. Their main weakness up to this point has been a limited selection of handsets.

I bought and loved the LG Optimus V. It’s a great low-power Android phone that offered most of the experience I wanted coming from an iPhone 3GS. The fact that it could be had for less than $200 without a contract was icing on the cake. I think it’s down to $150 or less now, depending on the retailer.

When Motorola announced a new Droid-like model was coming to Virgin, my ears pricked up. The hardware they advertised looked impressive: 1gHz Snapdragon processor, 512MB of RAM, 720p recording and micro-HDMI output.

Best Buy started taking preorders about a month ago, and I found out it was going to cost only $300. I began to get excited. I ordered, hoping my early initiative would land me one around launch day.

Sadly, Best Buy’s preorder system failed, and I ended up being backordered. I canceled the order and drove to my local brick-and-mortar store, which had two of them in stock and ready to go. Irony, thy name is Best Buy.

I went home and charged the phone. While I was waiting I went through the process on Virgin Mobile’s website to swap my plan over to the new handset. This could have gone smoother.

The swap happened almost instantaneously, and I was sent an email. So far so good. The email told me I just needed to program my phone (read: activate it). I used the handy-dandy “Activate” app, which thought really hard for about five minutes and then belched out an error message, telling me to call customer service.

The problem was, without an active phone I couldn’t call anyone. I decided it was probably a network congestion problem (launch day and all) so I hooked up the phone to my wifi and started getting it the way I wanted.

Three hours and innumerable downloads later, I decided to try to activate again. Still no luck. For those of you interested, the error message was: “Service is not available. Error 06-07-5910.” For whatever reason, my brain focused on the indecipherable error code rather than the sentence before it.

It was pretty late, so I decided at this point to go to bed and deal with it in the morning. Once I was upstairs and settling in, I figured on a whim to try activating again. This time it worked. My best theory was that I got a better signal upstairs, thus “service was available.”

I’ve played with the Triumph for about a day now and I’ve come away with several impressions, which I’ll list below.

Positives:

The screen is a lot crisper than the Optimus V. I felt like I was going from 640x480 to 800x600 (which I think is pretty close to reality).
The speaker on the Triumph is very strong. I was able to listen to Pandora with it on my nightstand and hear the music clearly from the next room.
There’s no background hiss when using my headphones on the Triumph. This is an improvement over the Optimus V.
The camera has an LED flash, and can record 720p video (in theory)
Angry Birds Rio runs beautifully, and every game I’ve thrown at it so far plays just as well.
Recessed buttons feel solid and well-made.
It does Flash…not that I use it much.
There’s a front-facing camera. I’m not sure I’ll ever use it, but it’s nice to have I guess.
No MOTOBLUR! Like the Optimus V, the Triumph has stock Android 2.2.

Negatives:

The colors aren’t as vibrant as the Optimus V. Everything looks slightly washed out when you look at them side-by-side.
The media volume (especially in games) is ridiculously loud. I have to turn the sound down to almost nothing just to keep from bursting my eardrums.
No cases are available for the Triumph just yet, and being a prepaid phone it’s not likely to have a wide variety when there are.
Battery life isn’t as good as the Optimus V on default settings. Juice Defender helps with that significantly, but the battery itself has a lower maximum capacity.
Reception seems to be worse than the Optimus. I rarely get more than 2 bars on the Triumph, but then again it only has 4 bars total (the Optimus had 6) so it might just be my imagination.
It’s heavier than you might expect, especially if you’re holding it for a long time while playing a game.
The buttons one the sides are a little *too* recessed. It’s kind of hard to feel my way around the volume when it’s in my pocket.
Gingerbread (Android 2.3) would have been a nice thing to have at this point. Hopefully Motorola will give us an update soon.
No micro-HDMI cable in the box.

Some other odds and ends I’ve come across: the spare charger and USB data cables that I bought for my Samsung Messager Touch actually fit the Triumph, so I didn’t have to immediately go out and buy more chargers. Also, the screen film that came out of the box is actually not bad. I’m leaving it on for now until I get a more permanent solution.

I didn’t have any trouble with my Sony MDR-EX38i headphones, aside from the expected lack of volume control. This seems to be an issue with Android 2.2 in general. Otherwise, the button worked fine for answering the phone and play/pause/skip media playback.

I haven’t tried syncing my Samsung Bluetooth earpiece yet, but I don’t expect to have any issues there either. I’ll post back in a week or so if anything positive or negative jumps out at me. For the moment, I consider the Motorola Triumph a worthy upgrade to the Optimus V, and a great contract-free option for average smartphone users that don’t need a dual-core processor or gimmicky 3D cameras.

Postmortem Defense of the PSP Go

noreply@blogger.com (Maurice) — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 01:19:00 +0000

Recently I had the opportunity to acquire a used (but still mostly mint condition) PSP Go for what amounted to a couple of old videogames and $2.00 cash. It seems since even before its release this little handheld has received nothing but jokes, jabs and venom from gamers.

Even as I swiped my card to pay for the system the other fellow behind the counter snickered and asked why anyone would want to buy one at any price. I feel it necessary to give a different opinion. I quite enjoy my PSP Go, and I intend to tell you why.

Introduction

I’ve been a Nintendo kid most of my life. As I’ve said in previous posts, I’ve generally tended to stick to whatever Shigeru Miyamoto tossed my way. All other game systems were a curiosity, but not much else. It wasn’t until I purchased my first gray PlayStation with my first real paycheck (from Kroger, if you’re counting) that I was introduced to the world of Sony videogames.

I fell in love with Final Fantasy 7, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Resident Evil, Silent Hill and Spyro the Dragon. I spent the better part of a whole summer between my junior and senior year of high school holed up in my room exploring the worlds of PlayStation. I held on to the discs for these games for many years, through several PS2s, a redesigned PSOne, and finally a PS3.

Up to the point where I got my PS3 I’d always done my portable gaming on a Game Boy or other Nintendo-branded handheld. Sony never really entered my mind. Then my brother acquired a PSP-1000 in a barter for a light bill from one of his roommates, and he let me borrow it. I was simultaneously impressed, and disappointed.

The graphics on the PSP-1000 were quite impressive for a handheld. They easily equaled the original PlayStation and nearly rivaled those on the PS2. I enjoyed games like Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles and Mega Man: Maverick Hunter X, once I got them to load.

That was the killer for me: the UMD discs. Games on UMD (especially older titles) took forever to load, and sucked the battery something fierce. Not to mention, the original 1000 model we had was godawful loud when accessing the discs.

The wireless connection on the PSP-1000 was weird too. It basically wouldn’t connect to anything but unsecured networks, which limited my options since I refused to downgrade my home wifi. It also had a strange design decision that made the square button hard to press, due to it being halfway blocked by the edge of the screen.

It wasn’t all bad. I did enjoy the concept of PSOne classics on a portable. The idea of being able to pull out the PSP and explore the city of Midgar was compelling enough to make me purchase FF7 again. Unfortunately, the PSP-1000 proved just a bit too bulky and awkward for me, and I eventually gave it back.

Enter the Go

That PSP sat on a shelf for several months before we decided to trade it in, along with all its UMD discs and a couple of memory sticks. Armed with about seventy-five bucks in store credit, my brother and I wandered around our local game store looking for nothing in particular. Eventually, I noticed something curious. Hanging in a plastic bag inside a locked cabinet was a lightly-used white PSP Go.

There were actually two models available, one black and one white. My brother was intrigued by the idea of a much more portable PSOne for basically $15. He looked at both models and eventually chose the white one for the novelty of it.

We took it home and were pleasantly surprised to find it actually supported WPA encryption, although only on wireless B. It took some trial and error to figure out I had to set my router to “Wireless B/G/N” mode to get it to work.

The Go has 15GB of storage on-board, without the use of a memory card. Previously, my brother had all of his PSOne classics stored on a handful of 2GB and 4GB memory sticks. Final Fantasy 7 took up basically all of the 2GB stick by itself. With 15GB to stretch out in, he was able to download all of his PSOne games directly to the device and play them without having to juggle memory cards.

We downloaded a few PSP demos just to see what real PSP games looked like on the Go. The screen is slightly smaller but seems clearer and brighter than the PSP-1000. This might just be due to the Go being a newer device in general.

When you hold it in your hand, it’s immediately apparent how much more…well…portable, the Go is compared to the regular PSP. It’s roughly the same size as my cell phone, and it fits in the front pocket of my jeans quite nicely.

A few weeks later we came across another Go (a black one) which I picked up for the aforementioned $2.00. I bought some accessories for it too, mostly on clearance. Ever since the discontinue notice, most of the stores near me have tossed their Go stuff in the bin. The good news is I was able to pick up a charging cradle, screen-protecting film, spare USB cable, and a neoprene case all for around $30, and all of it was first-party Sony branded gear.

I was curious about the downloadable version of Dracula X Chronicles. I really enjoyed the game on UMD, I just hated having to wait five minutes between popping it in and actually playing it. I ponied up $15 and downloaded the game. The load times were much more reasonable. In fact, they were so short in comparison to the UMD that I barely noticed them at all. The Go is now my primary source of entertainment for long shopping extravaganzas and travelling.

I also have a growing collection of some of my favorite PSOne games, most of them acquired for either $6 or $10 a piece. I know that some of you balk at the idea of re-purchasing something you might still have the disc for, but I don’t mind. If you can still find a good copy of most of these games you’re probably going to pay that much anyway. If the games had been more expensive, it might have been more of an issue.

What Happened, Sony?

If it’s such a nice system, why did it basically tank? I lay the blame squarely with Sony. I was late to the game with the Go. In fact, I first played with one the weekend Sony announced they were discontinuing it. Most of the hype surrounding its launch was lost on me, because at that time I really wasn’t interested in any PSP, let alone one that cost $50-100 more than the existing model.

Sony botched the launch of the PSP Go by pricing it into irrelevance and marketing it to the wrong people. Existing PSP owners likely had a full library of UMD discs that they didn’t want to just throw away, and potential new customers (like me) just saw it as a lot more money for less features. After all, why pay $200 for a Go when you can have a new or used PSP and a library of cheap used games for half that price?

The PSP Go should have been priced less than the full PSP models. Would Sony have taken a hit on the hardware at first? Sure, but it’s not as though they’re strangers to the concept. The PS3 was $600 at launch and still cost more than they made on it. The advantage to pricing the Go less is that not only would more people have been willing to give it a shot, Sony had a complete monopoly on game content. If they’d marketed it as a “bargain” PSP with a strong library of downloadable game titles, their money would be made back in software for sure.

Sadly, this was not the case, and gamers (rightfully) refused to pay more for less. New PSP Go systems stayed at their ridiculous $200 price point despite constant discounts on the latest PSP hardware. At one point I saw a hardware/game bundle with a PSP-3000 for $120, sitting right next to a PSP Go with no games for $200. Did Sony really think that would ever work?

The real tragedy in my mind is that the PSP Go is actually a very cool gaming device. I never had a big UMD collection, and the discs loaded horribly in the first place, so I won’t exactly mourn the loss of the format. My primary use for the Go is to play PSOne games I’ve purchased on PSN and the occasional downloadable PSP title. For that market, the Go works perfectly. Would I have got one if it hadn’t been on sale? Not a chance, but now that I have one I can’t imagine not having it. For folks looking for something that really embodies the name of “Playstation Portable,” the Go is an under-appreciated gem.

Ubuntu 11.04 on my Dell Mini Netbook

noreply@blogger.com (Maurice) — Sat, 28 May 2011 01:00:00 +0000

Almost a year later, my article on Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.10 has remained the number one most viewed article on the site, so I think it’s safe to say that interest in this particular topic is high. Today I’m going to talk about the latest incarnation, Ubuntu 11.04, as it relates to my Dell Mini.

While surveying the Ubuntu download site after the 11.04 launch, I was a little confused at first by the lack of a specific “Netbook Remix” or “Netbook Edition” download. As of 11.04, Ubuntu has rolled in the netbook version of the OS onto the same disc as the regular PC version, largely due to the fact that both versions now use their Unity interface.

If you recall my last look at Ubuntu on a netbook, I had some issues with control of the various radios and a strangely low battery life. I intend to test those on this new system. There’s actually a Linux version of Scrivener in beta that I might take a look at as well.

Last time I had Ubuntu on the Dell Mini I used a USB stick to install it. This time around I’ve acquired a USB optical drive instead. Hopefully, should worse come to worse, that will make restoring my single-OS setup much easier than before.

I booted up the CD and chose to install Ubuntu alongside Windows 7 Starter. I gave the two OSes a pretty even split of my harddrive, around a hundred gigs a piece. Considering the only files I plan on shuffling around are word processing documents, I figured that was more than sufficient.

I got a cute little slideshow while the OS installed. The name of this release is “Natty Narwhal.” I have to admit I’d never heard of a narwhal before, but they look pretty vicious, like mobile shishkebobs. Speaking of, the installer skewered itself right around the “Removing Extra Packages…” stage, throwing up an error and telling me to file a report with Ubuntu.

This did not exactly ingratiate me with this version of Ubuntu. The OS was smart enough to at least kick me back to a live desktop session, which is how I was able to pull off my screenshots of the above problem. I looked around online and found this bug report, which suggests I uncheck the “download updates” option. I decided to give it a try.

Reboot, install attempt number 2. This time I did not check the “Download updates” or “Install third-party software” options. I got a new installer window, which asked if I wanted to do anything with the existing Ubuntu install. This told me perhaps the first install completely hosed. To be on the safe side, I went ahead and chose the “erase Ubuntu and reinstall” option. This time the installer completed without errors.

On next boot I saw a GRUB bootloader. Time from the GRUB screen to a usable desktop was a minute and five seconds. Not exactly the speediest boot I’ve experienced on the Mini. For comparison, Windows 7 Starter takes roughly thirty seconds, as did the previous version of Ubuntu on this same machine.

All the buttons along the top of my Mini’s keyboard worked as advertised, except the one that’s supposed to bring up the wireless network status. I was able to adjust brightness, volume, and display my battery information however.

The Unity desktop has had a few upgrades since the last version I played with. Several programs use an integrated menu along the top of the screen, sort of like OS X. The application bar along the left side doesn’t have scroll buttons any more, instead electing for a folding approach. Extra panels fold into a stack at the bottom of the screen that expands when you mouse over. It’s a slick effect.

The apps menu has been greatly simplified. I would say too much, because the default panel that pops up is all but useless. It’s also not the most new-user-friendly, because in order to find an app you pretty much have to know its name already. You can browse all the installed apps, but they’re not grouped in any particular logical order. At least with the old system of menus, I could look for games in the “Games” directory.

I attempted to connect to my work wifi, which has a click-through authentication screen. I’ve never had any issues doing this on the Dell Mini before, but for some reason Firefox timed out before I could get to the login screen. So much for looking for updates. I noticed a Bluetooth radio control icon in the taskbar at the top of the screen, which is a welcome touch.

The word processor of choice with 11.04 is LibreOffice, the most recent splinter of OpenOffice. I admit I’m not the most caught up on the news of this, but here’s an article explaining their split with Oracle. As far as I can tell, LibreOffice Writer performs exactly the same as OpenOffice Writer did.

To really test the usefulness of LibreOffice, I tried to open an annotated Word document from my publisher. I copied the document to the desktop, opened LibreOffice Writer, and tried to open the file. Nothing happened. I couldn’t close the window, so I had to force quit the app. Not a good start.

I tried opening the file directly from the file system. I got a “document recovery” screen for the untitled empty document that was open when I force closed the app. I chose not to recover it, and waited. Nothing happened again. I copied over a non-annotated version of one of my books and tried to double-click it. Again, nothing. The files I’m working with are 300-400kb a piece, so I doubt it’s a memory issue.

I tried opening LibreOffice manually. The launch icon flashed, but nothing came up. I checked the System Monitor and saw no processes that looked like LibreOffice or OpenOffice. What’s going on here? Needless to say, my hopes of using Ubuntu 11.04 for writing were looking pretty dashed.

I saved my manuscript in different formats, thinking perhaps the issue was that I had a Word 2010 document. The Word-converted OpenDocument file (ODT) version did not open from the file system, but would open from inside LibreOffice. I tried the RTF version. That one opened just fine from the desktop. I was beginning to wonder if this is a problem with Unity and not LibreOffice.

It’s worth mentioning that once I tried to double-click on a document, LibreOffice stopped responding entirely until I rebooted. I couldn’t launch the app after a double-click attempt. Not cool. The annotated version of my manuscript never opened at all, even after a reboot. Attempts to open it inside the LibreOffice application caused it to freeze.

The battery indicator said I had roughly 4 hours and 10 minutes on a full charge with Wifi turned on, and the screen at full brightness. Disabling wireless and reducing the screen brightness only reported an extra 45 minutes. Now, either Ubuntu is doing some serious background heavy lifting or their estimation logic is wonky, because with those same settings in Windows 7 I get around 10 hours of battery life on the Mini. That’s not an estimate either; that’s actual real-world use.

Because I’m just a glutton for punishment, I decided to try and install the Linux beta of Scrivener on the netbook. Fair warning, that’s quite possibly the longest URL you’ll ever see. Since I had no internet connection it had to be done via USB stick. Sadly, it requires the Qt library, and since I couldn’t get online to download it that idea was dead in the water.

Lack of internet connectivity also kept me from getting to try out the new Ubuntu One client. It’s a pity, the window that popped up looked pretty slick.

Conclusion:

The look and feel of Ubuntu 11.04 is quite nice, and it certainly gave my Dell Mini a pleasant facelift. Installation could have gone smoother, and I think the dev team simplified the apps menu a bit too much, but overall it’s a nice looking system. I do appreciate the idea that Ubuntu is now a unified experience across netbooks and their larger PC cousins.

The OS fonts have had a nice smoothing job since the last time I played with Ubuntu. Everything looked slick and pleasant to the eye. I see what the marketing people were saying on the Ubuntu site about the “new computer” feeling. Unity is a fresh perspective on my netbook compared to the Windows 7 Starter look and feel.

All the more shame that nothing worked properly. The main purpose of my netbook is for writing. LibreOffice does not handle my annotated MS Word documents at all, and it seems to have trouble even with the plain versions of my manuscripts. Click-through wifi doesn’t seem to work, which makes it useless in most of the places I like to write.

Looks like once again I’m going to stick to Windows 7 Starter on the Mini. The harddrive partitioning dance begins.

LG Optimus V and Virgin Mobile - Update

noreply@blogger.com (Maurice) — Tue, 24 May 2011 01:00:00 +0000

I’ve had time to really settle in with my new phone and provider now, so I thought I’d let you all know how things are going. Long story short: so far so good. Just a note: this is a follow-up to my article here.

Hardware:

The Optimus V is not the fastest smartphone I’ve ever used (given, I’ve only ever used iPhones). I do find myself having to reboot it more often than the iPhone 3GS, but never more than once a week or so. It has frozen a couple of times and I’ve had to remove the battery. That’s annoying.

Angry Birds doesn’t run very well on it. I think it has something to do with the processing necessary for the physics engine. I read about a version of Angry Birds (Lite) that was supposed to make the game run faster on less powerful handsets, but all I’ve been able to find is an out-of-date beta that crashes on the first screen. All the other games I’ve tried on it worked just fine, including Zenonia 2.

I find it kind of funny that LG has a model of the Optimus on just about every major and minor carrier, and every carrier seems to have a different price for it. So far Virgin’s $199 and below is the cheapest non-contract price I’ve seen, so I’m feeling pretty good about the investment.

Service:

For the most part, all my dealings with Virgin Mobile have been automated through their website. There was a bit of a blip the first time my auto-bill was supposed to go through which made me have to actually call a human being, but the one I talked to was pleasant and helpful. We’ll see after my next billing cycle if the problem was fixed.

Virgin uses Sprint, so coverage is exactly the same as the Cricket phone I had. Over the past month I haven’t run into any places where I had no voice service, but data has been all over the place. Sometimes I have five bars and only 1X data, other times I have 1 bar and 3G data.

My phone seems to have issues moving between Wifi and 3G data sources. Sometimes I have to put the phone into airplane mode to essentially wake it up that it’s changed data methods.

Speaking of data, I haven’t yet run into the soft cap of 5.5 GB that someone mentioned in my last rant. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time, since I tend to stream Pandora 8 hours a day. When it happens, I’ll be sure and report on how Virgin handles it.

If I may get on my soapbox for a moment, I think it’s pathetic and dishonest how so many cell phone carriers claim they just “don’t have the bandwidth” to support truly unlimited data. I’m talking to you, AT&T and Verizon. You’re making record profits and instead of paying back your loyal customers by building out your infrastructure to support all their devices, you’re slapping them with a cap and charging 1990s-era data rates.

It angers me to no end when AT&T touts some new mobile device with “blazing fast internet speeds” and then says you can only pull down 4GB a month. What good is it to sell someone a Formula One racer and then tell them they can only drive it 20 miles an hour? There’s no technological reason for data caps, it’s strictly a cash grab. AT&T and Verizon can build out their networks to support unlimited data, they simply won’t.

Okay, stepping down from my soapbox now. So far Virgin Mobile hasn’t throttled me as far as I can tell, nor have I received any nastygrams from them saying I’m “abusing” their network. I sincerely hope this trend continues, but as I’m an admittedly high volume data user, I think it’s just a matter of time before I run afoul of someone.

If I have one complaint about Virgin Mobile (and this is true of just about any carrier who offers “unlimited” service with asterisks after it) I wish they’d just come out and tell the truth. Unlimited up to 5.5GB is not unlimited. It’s service up to 5.5GB. Don’t bury that in your FAQs ten pages deep, and don’t put it in asterisks or fine print. I much prefer a company who’s up front about what I can expect than one who clandestinely monitors my data and has some random employee determine when I’m “abusing” the system. I had that problem with Clearwire, and I’m no longer a customer because of it.

Operating System:

The Optimus V has a relatively plain vanilla version of Android 2.2 “Froyo” (with promises from LG that 2.3 will come soon). I’ve replaced the default home screen with LauncherPro, the default web browser with Dolphin HD, the default messenger with chompSMS, the default Twitter app with TweetDeck, and the Android Marketplace with the Amazon Appstore.

I check the Amazon Appstore regularly for their “Free App of the Day.” I’ve picked up quite a few apps this way, including Angry Birds Rio, Zenonia 2, Chuzzle and Trillian. So far I have yet to spend any money on apps for the Optimus V.

The only time I find myself opening the Android Marketplace is when I either need an update to one of the baked-in apps that Virgin installed and I can’t get rid of, or when I can’t find an older app on Amazon. This second case is becoming more and more rare as the appstore fills out.

The Android version of Pandora is buggy and lacks features the iPhone version has. Shame on you, Pandora. I pay for the ad-free version of your service, so getting the second-tier experience is especially galling to me.

Pandora freezes or crashes to the home screen at least once a week for me, and I can’t keep track of the music I’ve bookmarked on the app itself (which I can do on the iOS version). Also, at random times the app will skip to the next song without any action from me. Fix this. There’s just no excuse for it. It’s not as if Android is a new OS at this point.

UPDATE: In fact, just while I was writing this article my Pandora app has frozen once, randomly paused once, and skipped a track I didn’t tell it to skip. Lovely.

Battery Life:

I almost put this in the “Hardware” section, but I think it needs to be addressed by itself. Battery life on most smartphones just plain sucks. The LG Optimus doesn’t buck the trend. Over the past month I’ve tried several scenarios and tried to figure out just the right setting that gives me the most functionality for the longest amount of battery.

The phone has 3 screen brightness settings. The lowest is sufficient for indoors, but in sunlight you pretty much have to go middle or full brightness to see anything. This of course will suck your battery like nobody’s business. My Optimus stays on the lowest brightness most of the time.

Turning off the radios helps a lot. Unless I’m actively trying to figure out a route somewhere in Google Navigation, I keep my GPS radio off. I don’t use Bluetooth all that much, so that stays off too. Whenever possible, I also turn off background data syncing, but this one is kind of hard for me to do with my job. It’s worth mentioning that all these settings can be easily toggled on or off with the Power Control widget from your homescreen, no menus needed.

There’s quite a debate on the various Android forums as to the usefulness of “Task Killer” apps. This was a new concept for me, since the iPhone doesn’t really do multitasking. Once you leave an app, it’s essentially frozen in a save state until you open it again. With a few notable exceptions (iPod, Pandora) most apps on the iPhone can’t run at the same time.

If you take a look at the “Running Applications” section of your Settings menu in Android, you’re likely to find at least half a dozen apps you never remember launching just hanging out resident in memory. The theory in some circles is that these are bad and must be killed.

I’ve played with several task killers. They do what they claim: kill the apps you tell them to. However in most cases the apps will just respawn themselves at seemingly random times, so you spend more time killing apps than using your phone.

The other side of the coin says that all this constant killing and respawning uses more resources (and by extension, more battery power) than just letting the processes go. I’ve gone without task killers for several days and with for several days. In my own unscientific opinion, neither one seems to matter. Smart phone batteries in their current incarnation just suck.
As is usually the case, if I leave my Optimus V in my pocket while I’m running around town and only use it for actual phone things (voice and messaging) the battery lasts me a day, sometimes more. The moment I open up Pandora or surf the web, the percentages drop off quickly.

Conclusion:

Provided I don’t have any particularly nasty pushback from Virgin regarding my data usage, I’m pretty happy with the phone and carrier. I started out using their $25 a month plan with 300 minutes and “unlimited” data and texts, but now I’m on the $40 a month that gives me 1200 minutes. For the convenience of not worrying about my minutes, I’m willing to pay the $15 more.

Compared to my wife’s iPhone plan, which costs us $110 a month for 900 minutes and unlimited-only-because-you-bought-it-two-years-ago data, I’m still getting a much better deal. When her contract runs out next spring, we’re seriously considering buying her an Optimus or whatever the equivalent is at that point. We could nearly cut our collective phone bill in half that way.

New Site: The Lawless Pen

noreply@blogger.com (Maurice) — Mon, 09 May 2011 22:25:00 +0000

I’ve started up a new blog where I’ll be talking exclusively about writing fiction, so if any of you enjoyed my posts about Self-Publishing Websites or National Novel Writing Month, that’s where I’ll discuss things like that in the future.

I’ll still be posting tech-related stuff here, I just thought it might be best to divide my interests to keep things relevant.

TechieMoe on Writing: The Lawless Pen

Rocketfish RF-MAB2 Bluetooth Headphones

noreply@blogger.com (Maurice) — Mon, 02 May 2011 19:30:00 +0000

Introduction:

My quest for Bluetooth headphones found me browsing Amazon’s reviews this weekend, where I made a strange discovery: an in-house brand of headphones from a major brick-and-mortar retailer was actually getting decent reviews.

The fact that a Best Buy product would even show up on Amazon was odd enough, but reviews for the Rocketfish RF-MAB2 headphones were pretty good. I checked several other review sites and they all said the same thing. Color me intrigued.

The design looked attractive, but they were a little pricey on Amazon ($65), so on a whim I decided to see what my local Best Buy wanted for them. I went to the Mobile section and saw the same headphones on the shelf for $49.99. I immediately wondered if I’d just misread the price on Amazon.

I scanned the headphones with Google Shopper, and found that my memory hadn’t failed me. I had officially stepped into Bizarro World. I have trouble coming to terms with the idea that for once, Best Buy actually had the best buy. I purchased them immediately, and went home happy.

Retail Fail:

My jubilence was short-lived however. After waiting the compulsory 3-hour charge time (more on that later) I paired the phones with my LG Optimus and started testing, only to find I wasn’t hearing anything out of the left speaker.

At first I thought it was just a setting somewhere that needed tweaking, but after fiddling with the audio settings on my phone, iPad, laptop, and the device itself I determined that I’d just picked a defective pair.
Normally I would have asked for a refund and called it a failed experiment, but the quality of sound I got out of the right speaker (and the relative comfort of the phones on my head) made me want to give it another shot.

Bright and early the next morning, I marched back into Best Buy and exhanged them. The customer service rep didn’t ask questions, which could mean she was just exceptionally nice or this sort of thing has happened a lot. She politely suggested I might want to purchase their $8.99 2-year extended return policy (they call it a “Replacement Plan”), and for once I agreed.

This time I was not going to leave the parking lot without testing the phones, even if that meant charging it with my USB car charger for half an hour. Thankfully that wasn’t necessary, as the second pair had a charge right out of the box.

Sound Quality:

I hooked them up to my phone and immediately tested for sound in both ears. So far so good. Next came the stress tests. I tested the bass response with these tracks:

10,000 Days (Wings Pt. 2) by Tool
Indigo Children (JLE Dub Mix) by Puscifier
O Fortuna from the Carmina Burana by Carl Orff
Teardrop by Massive Attack

I was also curious to see how quieter tracks fared, so I chose these:

Carnival of the Animals: Aquarium by Camille Saint-Saens
Mr. Nagano’s Foolish Proposal by the Yoshida Brothers
Preludio by Curandero
Love Theme (from True Blood) by Nathan Barr

I was pleasantly surprised at the very nice bass from these headphones. They were close enough to my Sony earbuds that I didn’t feel I was taking a technological step back. The volume output was pretty good too, and the headphones themselves had independent volume control from the device they’re attached to.

This actually led to a bit of an awkward incident when I got home and hooked up the RF-MAB2s to my iPad. Apparently the iPad puts out a significant bit more sound than the LG Optimus. I was sitting in my comfy chair in the living room when I tried it, and my wife snickered at me when I suddenly jerked to attention and ripped the headphones off my ears.

Speaking of which, the RF-MAB2 didn’t have any problems connecting to my devices. Phone, laptop, and iPad all detected and synced up just fine. All the function buttons (Play/Pause, track advance, Call Initiate/Hangup) worked like I expected.

According to the manual, the RF-MAB2 is capable of syncing with two devices at once, so in theory you could listen to music on your laptop and field a call from your phone when it rang. I’m not sure I care to do that much bit-juggling (and most of my music is on my phone anyway) but it’s a nice option to have.

There’s also a set of “3D sound” options that do some strange things with the sound. I didn’t play with this much, since it had a tendency to make my music sound either way to tinny or like I was listening in a large, empty room.

Hardware:

I haven’t used the headphones very long, so I can’t comment on battery life just yet. I am pleased to report however that the charging cable is just a standard micro-USB (wall adapter included), so I already had several on-the-go charging solutions handy.

The buttons on the RF-MAB2s have a sturdy feel to them. They didn’t click or shake when I moved, and I even tested them jumping up and down (much to my wife’s amusement). So far so good.
Sound isolation is surprisingly good for these phones. I was able to listen to them while walking to my office through a busy downtown without having to jack up the volume. Most can-style phones are basically useless in situations like that.

The headphones still beep from time to time (when they’re reconnecting from sleep mode, or when I hit the Play/Pause button) but they don’t beep every time I press something, which is good. I can adjust the volume and swap tracks without a beep. The volume of the beeps seems to correspond to the volume of my headphones, which is also good.

Comfort and Look:

The RF-MAB2s aren’t quite as bulky as the Motorola S-305s I played with before, so I feel a little less like a Star Wars character wearing them. My wife was a little put off by the shape of the ear phones (they’re triangular, not round).

I’ve worn the phones for several hours at a time. They’re actually pretty comfortable, which is unusual for wrap-around, non-earbud phones. Usually my ears feel hot and constricted wearing can-style headphones after a while, but there’s pretty good ventilation on the RF-MAB2. The pressure behind my ears isn’t too noticeable (although I’d still recommend periodic breaks).

The band on these phones is pretty small (more in line with the Motorola S9/S10-HD), but unlike those devices it’s much more flexible. I didn’t have any issues with the phones pinching my head, and the problem I had with the S305 where the band kept rubbing against my collar is much less pronounced. This is probably due to the fact that it doesn’t stick out as much.

Conclusion:

Provided these headphones can stand up to the abuse of my everyday music-listening, I think I might have found what I was looking for in the RF-MAB2s. The sound quality is good for what I listen to, and they feel pretty good on my head.

At $50, they’re pretty mid-range between the cheapest Motorolas ($35) and the exorbitant offerings from Bose or Sensenheiser ($150-300). If you can get over the idea of buying something from Best Buy, you might want to give these a try.

Motorola MotoRokr S305 Bluetooth Headphones

noreply@blogger.com (Maurice) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 19:42:00 +0000

With every new personal gadget it seems I’m constantly tethered to something. At any given time during my work day, I’m wearing headphones attached to my phone, which is plugged into the wall, while using a keyboard and mouse that are attached to my computer which is also attached to the wall.

My primary use for my current phone (the LG Optimus V) is for music. Whether it’s MP3s from my personal collection or streaming Pandora, it’s sometimes the only thing that gets me through the day. Usually, that means headphones. With the advent of Bluetooth stereo headphones, I hoped that at least this one cable could be cut.

I do most of my shopping on Amazon these days, so I started there. There were a number of models available in various form factors from different companies, some I knew and some I didn’t. The two devices that had the most reviews (both positive and negative) on Amazon were both from Motorola: the MotoRokr S305 and the S10-HD. Out of sheer morbid curiosity, I went to the Apple Store to see what kind of price these fetched retail.

My closest Apple Store wanted $69.99 for the S305, and $79.95 for its earbud-style cousin the S10-HD. On Amazon, the S305’s were $34.95 and the S10’s were $69.95. Since I’d never used Bluetooth headphones before, I decided to err on the side of caution and pick the cheaper S305.

Setup:

One positive thing I can say about the S305 is that I had no trouble at all getting the thing connected. In fact, in a bit of electronic luck, the wall charger for my LG Optimus V actually fits and charges them, so I didn’t need to use the one in the box. It only took an hour or so to fully charge, and I got several hours of playback with them. My LG Optimus V connected to the headphones just fine, with no codes or other syncing weirdness.

Comfort:

I’ve had a spotty past with the behind-the-head wraparound headphones in the past. I had some ten dollar Sony wired phones at one point that were just horrible. I’m pretty sure it was a pair of these, the MDR-G45. Generally these kinds of wraparound can headphones either have a strange angle to them that doesn’t fit my ears or put a lot of pressure on my head just behind my ears (since that’s where the weight of the headset has to be supported).

I realized when I ordered the Motorola S305 that I ran a risk of them being just the same. It did take some adjustment to get the S305 to feel comfortable on my head. Let me just say that the way you’re “supposed” to wear them according to the manual didn’t work for me.

The band that wraps around the back of your head sticks out quite a bit. I imagine that’s to offer some flexibility for people with larger noggins, but if I rotate the headphones completely down like the manual says, I basically can’t use them sitting down, or lift my head very high standing up, without the band digging into my neck. I’d almost rather the ear cans be connected just by a floppy cable that I could tuck under my collar or something.

The whole reason I bought these headphones was for freedom of movement. Aside from not having to be tethered to my phone, the S305 didn’t deliver that. As I said, the plastic piece that wraps around the back of your head stuck out so much it kept either digging into my neck or bumping against the collar of my shirt. In both cases this caused the cans to shift slightly.

I could use the headphones for several hours in relative comfort. They’re still a bit of a strain on the spot just behind my ears, so I’m beginning to wonder if I just have a strangely shaped head.

Using the on-device buttons was awkward. The buttons require a good bit of force to use, and I ended up smashing my right ear whenever I wanted to change tracks. Also, the headset finds it necessary to make little beeps and blips whenever you press a button, which is distracting.

This is something I’ve noticed with a lot of Bluetooth devices. Word to the designers: just stop it. I don’t need audio confirmation that I’ve pressed a button. If you simply must do that, turn the freaking volume down! It’s jarring to listen to a quiet classical piece and hear an obnoxiously loud BEEEEP when I change tracks.

Sound Quality:

I have a pair of Sony MDR-EX38i earbuds that have been my workhorse for quite a while. They’re light, the buttons work with just about every phone I’ve ever had, and they block out sound pretty well. Going from in-ear phones to can phones is a bit of a nasty jolt. Can headphones simply don’t offer any decent sound blocking at all, and the bass performance is significantly worse.

If you’re wearing the S305 outside, pray there isn’t any wind. Once it picks up, you’re going to feel like you’re in a wind tunnel. Good luck if you’re trying to use them to make a phone call. The best scenario for sound quality with the S305 is indoors, in a quiet room. Even then, a decent pair of noise-isolating earbuds (the kind with silicone cups that block out sound) will give you a better experience.

Also, at least on the pair I had, there was a constant high-pitched whine from the headphones that was distracting on quieter tracks. That, above all else, was the main reason I ended up returning them.

I did test out the range on the headphones. I was able to listen to them from three offices down while my phone was on my desk (about 60 feet), but not quite far enough to go to the water cooler and back (about 100 feet) without losing my connection.

Build Quality:

The headphones feel cheap. There’s no way around it. They look and feel like my ten dollar Sony wraparounds, and that’s not good for something that retails for $60+. Given, I only paid $35 for them, but that’s the same price as my wired MDR-EX38 phones, and they have significantly better sound.

In some of the reviews on Amazon people were complaining about how the volume and power buttons were loose, causing an annoying rattle when they walked or ran. I don’t know if my phones were an updated model, but I didn’t notice that at all. The buttons did feel a bit loose when I used them, but they didn’t rattle.

I felt weird and a little dorky wearing the S305s in public. They’re just not stylish at all. I kind of felt like Lobot from the Empire Strikes Back, with a little more hair.

S305 and S10-HD:

I was lucky enough that someone in my office had a pair of S10-HDs that I could borrow. If you have a larger head and have to choose between these two devices, go with the S305. I personally found the S10-HDs to be much too small, and because of their earbud-like design most of the weight is in the band behind your head. That bugged me a lot.

The S10-HD certainly felt better made. I wasn’t worried they’d fall apart if I dropped them, but at the same time they didn’t really have any give at all in the band, so it’s basically one head size for all. I was also disappointed that although the S10s are earbud-style and have silicone cups, the sound quality and noise isolation wasn’t really any better than the S305.

The volume output on the S10s were actually worse than the S305 to me. I had to turn up the volume quite a bit on the S10s to match the same sound level I’d received at half-volume on the S305s. Even then, the bass was tinny and the treble was airy. Overall not what I’d expect from something in this price range.

Conclusion:

The S305s have the dubious distinction of being the only gadget I’ve ever had to return to Amazon. Judging from my test-run of the S10-HDs, I won’t be buying those either. My quest for a decent pair of Bluetooth headphones continues. If any of you have had better experiences with another brand, please let me know in the comments. I’m trying to stay under $100USD, but if there’s something spectacular out there for a little more I’m willing to give it a shot.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx"

noreply@blogger.com (Maurice) — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Introduction:

Lucid Lynx is an important release for Ubuntu. Not only is it the latest and greatest from Mark Shuttleworth and company, the moniker “LTS” means this version of Ubuntu will be supported for many years to come. It’s become the new base version that many users will stick with for another several years, regardless of how many new releases are made.

The last LTS release was 8.04 “Hardy Heron” in 2008. As of the day of this release, many folks out there are likely still using it. There’s an expectation with anything that says “Long Term Support” in its name you’re going to get a certain level of stability. I have yet to determine whether Lucid lives up to that, but early indications give me no worries.

NOTE - This rant is based on the 10.04 Release Candidate, so some things I describe may be slightly different from the final product. I’ll update them accordingly should anything change. In the past, the RC has been pretty much identical to the final release.

Install:

All aspects of Lucid Lynx have received a noticeable change in appearance compared to previous releases. As far as I can tell so far, they’re an across-the-board improvement. The predominantly brown color scheme has been replaced with mostly black and purple. I like it.

One thing that hasn’t changed, and that’s the content of the install screens. It’s not really a problem, since they do what they’re supposed to and get out of your way quickly enough. I won’t go into that since there’s really nothing exciting to report.

The time from boot splash to login screen was very fast. We’re talking five seconds, tops. This is a marked improvement over… well pretty much any other OS I’m currently using. The time from logon to desktop was a respectable 6-10 seconds. There’s definitely some background loading going on here.

The slide show during the install showed off a number of new features I’m interested to try. The biggest is the introduction of a great deal of configuration data into the cloud, via Ubuntu One. The idea behind this (from what I gather) is to make your personal data and program preferences universally shared among many computers.

I find myself constantly reconfiguring Firefox on new installations as well as copying over bookmark files and other various tweaks, so the idea of this struck a chord with me. I don’t keep anything particularly damaging on my personal computer, so the idea of leaving documents or music on a remote Ubuntu server somewhere doesn’t bother me.

Ubuntu One requires you to set up an account. All it asks for is an email address. I ran through the account creation and verification process in roughly five minutes. I actually already had an account with Ubuntu (from ordering a few CDs on Shipit) so I received a warning email that someone (me) was trying to create a new account with my email.

I went back to the account setup page and logged in using my email. It took a few tries because I hadn’t updated my password recently and this particular password was several versions behind my current. Once I was logged in, I updated my name and password and went back to the One client on my machine.

The local app didn’t register my credentials, so I looked around the Ubuntu One website and realize I needed to “subscribe to a plan.” I immediately recoiled but relaxed a bit when I saw that the base 2GB plan is free of charge and open to everyone. I of course picked that. For $10 a month you can upgrade it to 50GB, but I didn’t see myself needing to store that much.

I followed various links after that which led me to a wiki page (live link here) on how to “add my computer” to Ubuntu One, which apparently needed to be updated to include Lucid.

I opened up the local client, which was hidden in System->Preferences rather than the Internet menu, as was described on the tutorial. I clicked the “Devices” tab and the “Connect” button under my machine. The button went gray, but I wasn’t given any other indication of anything happening. I made sure I was connected on the website, but the Ubuntu One app still showed nothing.

I decided to reboot. Apparently the kinks haven’t quite been ironed out of their new service yet. I sure hope these issues are documented and get squashed by the time of the rollout or there’s going to be a lot of users scratching their heads. Upon reboot the Ubuntu One website popped up and asked if I wanted to grant access to the computer I was using. I did.

That made everything on the local client come to life. I saw my account information and disk usage and had the option to choose what I wanted to be synchronized. It’s unfortunate that this didn’t happen the first time I tried it.

Aside from the cloud additions, Lucid also introduces the Ubuntu One Music Store, about which I was supremely curious. I launched Rhythmbox, which opened to a screen warning me that MP3 support needed to be installed. I clicked the button and it asked for my password, then I watched a little progress bar fill as it was handled in the background.

Not once did I have to leave my music application during this whole process. That’s a good user experience. When the codecs finished installing, I was brought to the main screen for the music store. I did a quick search on a couple of mainstream artists I enjoy and was happy to see most tracks available for 99 cents and albums for around $10. Amazon is still cheaper, but having options is never a bad thing.

It would be nice if at some point in the future Ubuntu is able to negotiate deals with their store so that other formats (such as the patent-and-royalty-free Ogg Vorbis) could be purchased and download as well, but for the moment DRM-free MP3 is a good standard.

I noticed a variation in price of full albums ranging from about $8 to $16, and it didn’t seem to follow any particular pattern. I searched old and new albums of various artists and the prices for individual tracks fluctuated between 99 cents and $1.49 as well. I couldn’t see any discernable pattern.

The organization of albums on the music store is not well-suited for browsing. Search for a particular artist and you’re fine, but searching under genre just gives you a monstrous alphabetized list. The Home screen does offer a top 5 of popular albums and new additions, but if you dig any deeper you’re just looking at the same alphabetized list.

For those more interested in indie artists that play in the keys of C (as in cheap) or F (as in free), there are links in Rhythmbox to Jamendo and Magnatune, both sites I visit quite frequently. Options abound for legal music acquisition on Lucid Lynx, and that’s a good thing. I’m interested to see what kind of an impact the Music Store makes in the Linux desktop world.

Software Selection:

There have been some notable additions and omissions in this version of Ubuntu. Perhaps the one that got the most press is the omission of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) that’s been a staple in pretty much every desktop Linux since my early days with the OS.

I have surprisingly no opinion on the subject. I like GIMP, but most of the things I do with it can be easily serviced by lighter weight programs. I’m not as familiar with F-Spot (the current replacement) but I’m sure it will handle my needs just fine. Also, if I ever decide to do something more complicated such as pick up my web comics again, GIMP can be downloaded easily from the Ubuntu repository.

The games menu has seem some changes. Most of the games that I tended to hide (because I couldn’t uninstall them individually) are gone, at least from the default menus. A new game has been added, GBrainy, which looks along the same vein as BrainAge. Overall I like the cleaner games menu. It saves me some housekeeping.

Emphasizing the social aspect of Lucid Lynx, a new app has shown up in the Internet menu: Gwibber. I’m not entirely sure what the purpose of it is, but from what I gather it’s a way to organize your Twitter, Facebook, and other statuses in one app and broadcast them to all in one shot. For people who are into that sort of thing, I’m sure that’s very cool.

Of my previous “usual suspects” (Firefox, OpenOffice, Pidgin and GIMP) only two remain. I don’t see Firefox going anywhere any time soon, and OpenOffice is quite simply the gold standard for cross-platform office suites. I don’t generally use office suites at home, but if I did, I’m sure OO would be sufficient.

Pitivi Video Editor showed up in the Multimedia menu. I don’t really do video editing, so I can’t judge how well it works. Suffice to say the interface looked clean and I could tell off the bat what most everything did even though I’d never seen the app before in my life.

You’re probably getting the impression by now that there’s a lot of new stuff in Lucid I simply don’t care about. You’d be right. I don’t begrudge these things being in the default install, though. They’re just not things I’ll ever use. I’ll probably just remove them later.

On the subject of adding and removing things, Ubuntu Software Center is the new Add/Remove Programs. It looks nice, and it installed Frozen Bubble like a champ. I also used it to download my new favorite eReader software, Calibre.

Not expecting much but nonetheless curious, I plugged in my Kindle 2 to see what Lucid did with it. Ubuntu thought it was a music player (which I guess technically it *can* be) but Calibre recognized it no sweat. I was able to transfer books to it just fine (no jokes about my choice here - it was just what I had handy).

Conclusion:

I’m very glad that Linux distributions in general (and Ubuntu in particular) have matured to the point where I get the luxury of talking about shiny new features and visual tweaks to the OS instead of getting bogged down in system errors and wonky configurations.

The process for getting hooked into Ubuntu One needs to be polished, but the service itself is promising, and with new features like the Ubuntu Music Store I’m looking forward to see what Canonical has up its sleeve next. Lucid Lynx is the most user-centric Linux desktop I’ve used in recent months and I hope it raises the bar for other distributions.

Overall I’m quite happy with Lucid, and pleased that this will be the next Long Term Support release. I could think of much less pleasant environments in which to spend the next two years. Okay, let’s not kid ourselves here. I’ll probably replace it with 10.10 in six months… but the sentiment remains.

In Appreciation of Bach, and Amazon's MP3 Cloud

noreply@blogger.com (Maurice) — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 01:00:00 +0000

I’m a music nerd. In my own defense, growing up with two music teachers for parents will do that to you. I was exposed to a wide variety of music from all eras and genres, and the end result is a pretty eclectic taste in music. I have a very special affinity for classical composers, probably because my father had an extensive collection of them in our family tape (and later CD) collection.

Growing up, the local KRTS classical music station was our usual driving soundtrack. I was quizzed sometimes if we started listening in the middle of a piece. “Who’s this by? What’s it called?” It’s a game I still play with myself when I hear a snippet from a classical number on commercials or movie trailers, much to my wife’s chagrin.

Of all the composers I’ve been exposed to over the years, one has stood out time and time again: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). Ever since I was exposed to Toccata and Fugue in D Minor on a plane trip back from Disney World when I was five, I’ve been fascinated with his music. I have several recordings of his Brandenburg Concertos I keep with me at all times.

What, if anything, does this have to do with technology? Well, I recently started experimenting with Amazon’s Cloud Player. Basically anyone with an Amazon account has 5GB of storage from Amazon, for free. You can store anything you want on it, but if you store music you have the option of streaming your music from Amazon’s servers using their Cloud Player either on a computer through your web browser, or on an Android device with their app.

Still not getting where this ties into Bach? Okay, so 5GB is pretty decent for a couple dozen albums depending on the length of the tracks, but what if you want more? Amazon says all you have to do is purchase an album from their MP3 store (which is DRM-free, by the way) and they’ll upgrade your storage to 20GB for a year.

As an added incentive to buy from their store, any purchases from it can be pushed directly to your Cloud drive, and won’t count against your storage limit. Pretty good deal, right? Well naturally, within hours of the cloud service going live, people had found ways to game it.

For instance, currently Amazon doesn’t really have any restrictions on what albums count for your upgrade. The top downloaded albums right now are 99-track classical music collections that cost 99 cents (that’s for the whole album). I’d be willing to bet most of the people who purchased these albums did so just to get their 15GB storage upgrade.

I purchased The 99 Darkest Pieces of Classical Music (link) yesterday for 99 cents, and I’m probably one of the only people on Amazon who actually plans to listen to it. Quite frankly, it’s beyond a steal. Allow me to list just a few of the 99 tracks I’ve enjoyed:

Toccata and Fugue as well as some of Bach’s more somber Brandenburg Concertos
Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 (otherwise known as the “Moonlight Sonata”)
Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite (most famous for In the Hall of the Mountain King)
Carnival of the Animals: Aquarium by Camille Saint-Saëns (If you’re familiar with any of the Tim Burton/Danny Elfman films, this track will sound very familiar.)
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by Paul Dukas
Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber (one of the saddest pieces of music, EVER)
Carl Orff’s O Fortuna from the Carmina Burana
Mussorgsky’s A Night on Bald Mountain
Mars and Venus from Holst’s Planets

With 99 tracks to fill, they have a lot of wonderful pieces that are each well worth the asking price on their own. The quality of the recordings are quite good, and they’re performed by professional symphonies. If you’re any kind of classical music fan, these 99 Pieces albums are pure gold. They have albums for various moods: opera, romantic, springtime as well as particular composers.

My only real complaint is in the tagging for the individual tracks. Most of them list the performers of the piece rather than the composer. In classical music, the person performing the piece is usually irrelevant, unless that performer is someone particularly famous (like Yo Yo Ma or Andrea Bocelli).

Okay, music geek mode off. What about this Cloud Player? How does it perform? In my experience, pretty well with some caveats. Streaming music takes a little while to cache when you first start it up, especially if you’re on the Android app. Also, if you’re on a limited data plan for your Android device, this isn’t going to help. Over wifi, the caching and data usage weren’t really an issue.

The PC/Mac player off the website operates about as expected. As a backup and emergency music outlet for computers that aren’t mine, the Cloud Player is a very cool service. The fact that it’s free certainly doesn’t hurt.