Small, Medium, and Large Tablets

In 2007 I called the first generation iPhone a mini tablet. Since then I have had every iPhone generation (iPhone, 3G, 3GS, 4), and switched my personal phone a year ago to a Samsung Captivate (My office phone is the iPhone 4 now, replacing the much disliked-by-me Blackberry line).

All of them are small Tablet Computers. Not the Blackberries, the other ones. Apparently the Blackberries are "smartphones".  Maybe when QNX comes out they will be tablet computers, or at least some of them will be, like whatever the QNX version of the Storm is. I like RIM, and I hope that they can get it together. At the time of this writing they are still not getting it and getting beaten to death by Android and Apple. But I digress.

I had an iPad 1, but that has moved to a Motorola Xoom. Now, another tablet has entered the scene: A Nook Color.

The means I while I am still a slacker in this department relative to some, I now have 4 tablet computers: The iPhone4, the Captivate, the Nook, and the Xoom. All rest on my nightstand when they need to eat:

Hungry Computers

I should say that I was a bit leary of the idea of a 7 inch tablet. It seemed too fine a split between the 4 inch Captivate and the 10.1 inch Xoom. My wife got one, and while she mostly uses hers as B&N intended, I.E. a reader, I was interested in the way the the little Nook pushed her iPad out of the way for most things. It was more portable. It was lighter to hold for long periods of time. It had a very nice, very readable screen, with good 169 DPI across its 7 inch, 1024x600 screen. Not as good as the iPhones 326, or the Samsungs 233 DPI... but better than the iPads 132 and slight better than the Xooms 160. DPI (or PPI if you prefer) are not all there is to a screen of course, as I have noted here that I prefer the saturated colors / viewing experience of the Captivates AMOLED technology screen over the higher DPI, less saturated, yellower iPhone. It is an interesting comparison point, and I am nearly certain that the iPad3 will answer the current iPad critic's with a higher DPI display. It pretty much has to. I am guessing they'll double it, like they did the iPhone, for about 264 DPI. But I digress....

(side note: Nifty DPI page on Wikipedia)

• Small: Captivate: CyanogenMod Nightly build, Android 2.3.4 (Gingerbread). As of this writing its build 48, but that changes every night of course...
• Medium: Nook Color (AKA Encore): CyanogenMod 7.1 RC1, Android 2.3.4. Nightlies for the Nook are actually higher than the Captivate, at Build 122 at the time of this writing, however as easy as the Nook is to install CM7 on, it takes almost that same process to update it everynight, so I settled in on just installing the release candidates for now. The problem is that the way the internal partitions are set up, there is not enough room in /mnt/sdcard to hold even one nightly build. But this works...
• Large: Motorola Xoom, Android 3.1 stock.

Medium Tablet

Like my wife, I find I use the 7 inch NookDroid quite a bit. I prefer it for reading books over the Captivate or the Xoom for example, although the Nook app on Android is not as good as it was in the native B&N 1.2 OS release. That is a bit odd, since that was just 2.2/Froyo under the covers, so clearly B&N does not release the latest/best/most optimized version of the Nook reader to the Android Market. This compensated for by the fact that:

• I can run any reader I want now: I like to shop all the eBook shops to get the best deals. I do buy from B&N when they have the best price.
• The web browser options are much better (I mostly use Dolphin HD on it)
• Most all the 'droid apps work on it, and most work better than they do on the Xoom for some reason: You would not think there was that big a difference for an app between managing the screen real estate of 1024x600 and 1280x800 but there is.
• Gingerbread is rocking fast on this unit: Hardly any lag anywhere. The Nook 1.2 software was OK, but it stopped to go think about things all the time, for no apparent reason. My wife, who still runs the stock version most of the time is often frustrated by its lagginess.
• I have the overclock kernel on it (The Nooks TI OMAP processor is amazingly flexible about speed) , and can watch video, although I prefer that on the Xoom (screen size) or the Captivate (color saturation). It's nice to have the option if it is all I have with me at the moment.

The things holding back the NookDroid are:

• It really needs 3.1's tablet optimizations. I guess that really means it will get Ice Cream Sandwich when it comes out, since that will have source for the CyanogenMod folks to use.
• I miss the GPS: The Xoom has an awesome GPS chipset, and the Captivates GPS works like a champ now with CM7. It's amazing how many things, like maps and navigation and whatnot, are used without thinking of their reliance of GPS.
• It would be cool if the FM radio worked. As shipped from B&N, the radio chipset only enables Wifi, but it has Bluetooth and FM radio on it too, and the CM7 crew has the bluetooth going.

Still: It has convinced me that there is value in the 7 inch form factor, and at half the price of anything else out there, it is an amazing little unit.

Small Tablet

I have not talked here very much about the Captivate since I got it. I replaced the tiny 1500 MAh battery with a 3200 MAh unit (almost as big as the Nooks 4000 MAh battery), which has been a lifesaver, if looking slightly like a humpback whale. No heavier than the iPhone in its Mophie skin though.

I have been through quite a number of ROM's on the SC. The Captivate must be one of the more ROM'ed phones around. That is probably due, at least in part, to the hardware being great, and the OS, as shipped by Samsung... not so much. In addition to the stock 2.1 and later 2.2 releases, I have run all sorts of versions of Andromeda, Cognition, and Serendipity. Now CM7. Originally it was to get the AT&T apps off the phone, and get it to 2.2 fast than AT&T/Samsung were doing. Later it was to just replace the much slower version of the OS that ships stock. 

After messing around for the better part of the year in custom ROM space, last month I went from a botched CM7 nightly back to stock AT&T Froyo (2.2). I wanted to know how much better 2.2 was over 2.1. When the battery started lasting 1/4 the time it was before, and the phone lagged and generally acted like there was sand in its bearings, I realized that I had no idea just how much better the custom ROM world, with its occasional hiccups, was to the stock world. It's like Samsung has no idea what to do with their own hardware. I read on and on in the forums, as I suffered through the long week on stock 2.2, about how bad the device drivers were, and why the aftermarket had created the "Lagfix" and so forth.

The minute I got back from that trip, CM7 went back onto the phone and in the 20 or so builds since has not had any major issues. Right now, on build 48, I have to remember to turn back on the phone ringtone because it is defaulting to vibrate for some reason. Nothing major though.

That being said, I am watching for what the next phone will be. Front runner right now is the Galaxy II S once it hits AT&T... and I see a CM7 build for it.

Large Tablet

The main thing to say about the Xoom at this point is that I wish Google / Motorola would get the lead out, and get the update that supports the SD card into place. As a "Google Experience" unit (and the reason I went with it instead of the A500 or a Samsung 10.1) it is weird to not be having the full experience. The forums go back and forth about why there is no SD card support, and in truth the reason no longer matters. It is just silly now. The ROM market has hacked a version that does have SD card support. There is SD card support outside the US in the stock OS. Why does not matter. It just needs to be fixed.

Ice Cream Sandwich can not come soon enough, except to get the merge between the 2.x and 3.x lines right. Seeing the seams around the edges of 2.3.4 on the Nook, it is clear that running a tablet benefits fro having an OS that "gets" the screen size. 3.1 is nice, but in small and medium spaces, I have seen the advantages of letting the community have the code and fixing the problems. The Captivate and the Nook are far better for the AOSP (Android Open Source) version for the code. The Xoom needs that too, because it is clear that Google / Motorola are not able to deliver feature / function in a timely manner.

None of this is to say I am ready to run back to the iPad. I'd be interested in seeing one with a high resolution screen, and the Android feature functions of iOS5 like notifications, but as I have said here before I am tired of the jailbreak cat and mouse in that space. I don't care about jailbreak for my iPhone 4 because it is really my employers and so it is bone stock. I use it for work things only, not most of my daily life. At this point every app I was using on the iPhone is either on the 'droid, or has an alternative that is as good or better.

Cables and Power

One thing that is interesting to note is the different ways that the phone/tablets go about solving their battery charging needs. The Captivate comes with its own charger that seems to talk to the Captivate differently. The phone does not report being on a USB cord when plugged into it It also seems to charge more quickly with it, probably because the Samsung Charger is 700 MA (Milli Amp) rather than a standard USB ports 500 MA. Still, to charge the 3200 MAh battery takes a while. The nice thing is that the cables can be standard, OTC, MicroUSB. Nothing special required cable wise. It will charge more quickly if I hook it to the Nook charger, or the 2000 MA iPad charger (I still have the charger), but I usually avoid fast charging it for fear of not knowing how well the internal parts can deal with the higher wattages.

The Nook has a standard looking MicroUSB cable, but closer inspection reveals it is longer: The shank goes more deeply into the socket. it turns out the cable is not standard (at least not currently standard), and has extra wires at a second depth. The charger is 1900 MA (1.9 amps) and that charges the Nook even while in use. If you hook a standard cable to it, it will charge slowly while turned off, or extend battery life while on, but the Nook uses more than 500 MA cables provide while on, so the battery does drain if it is, for example, hooked to your laptop USB port. I have no qualms about putting the Nook on the iPad USB charger, as there is not that much difference between them in terms of milliamps.

The Xoom has a MicroUSB port on it, so it can use the same cord as well... but only for data. The power comes in via a tiny barrel connector (or a couple pins on the docking station), The Xoom charges faster than either the Samsung or the B&N unit though. The special power cord means that they did not have to play USB voltage games, so the 6500 MAh battery of the Xoom, despite being the largest in the group, is the fastest to fill up. The advantage of 12 volts at 1.5 amps (19 volts at 1.58 amps for the docking station with speakers). That also makes the car charger for the Xoom pretty small, since nothing much has to be done with the voltage coming out of the cars accessories port.

I like that the Xoom charges so fast, but I would like a USB port option. As USB evolves to charge more and more things, I am wondering if the Nook USB design might go wider. I can see nothing in the standards about such a thing though. I am guessing that once the market is as full of MicroUSB devices as there once where MiniUSB devices, and the people that make cords need to make some more cords that we might see another standard emerge. If it does, at least it will solve the needing 2000 or more MA@5v on the USB cord problem...

Hopefully.

iPhoneless

The thing that surprised me the most about getting a Samsung Captivate running Android 2.1 was just how apprehensive I was about it. After a bit of introspection, I realized I was actually worried about "leaving the nest": that the new experience would not be the match for what had come before it.

I was not expecting it to be the same: Just that I would somehow lose some functionality I had come to expect or depend on from the iPhone ecosystem. Further, the iPhone 4 is a beautiful piece of work. I have held one in every death grip I could think of, and got pretty much nothing. The same can not be said of my Blackberry which drops bars when held. But it is Verizon, and I get lousy signal at my house for Verizon, even though I get 5 bars on ATT.

I really wanted a Droid X, or an EVO, but neither of those phones was available on AT&T, and unlike the many that love bashing AT&T, my experience with them has been mostly positive. With a family plan and 5 phones on it, moving to another carrier was not financially feasible, and I also will not get anything but a GSM phone, and that let out the main units I was looking at.

Enter the Samsung Captivate.

ATT now has to really nice Android based phones: The HTC Aria, and the Captivate, which is the ATT version of the Galaxy S world phone. I was sorely tempted by the Aria: I have never seen a more pocketable phone, and it just felt really nice in the hand. But I wanted a big screen: Bigger than the iPhone if possible, and on AT&T, that is the Captivate right now.

Pushed from the Nest

Oddly, it was three things that Apple did that made me make the jump:

1. The constant cat-and-mouse games between the jailbreak community and Apple. Apple really wants to control what I put on my phone, and I really want to control that instead.
2. Related to point 1 is Apples policies around their App store. 
1. I don't dig censorship, and I really hated that, for example, they had not allowed Google Voice onto the phone. 
2. The Zinio magazine app was defanged and largely useless.
3. Then they went and bought a map company, clearly so that they could move away from Google even further. 
4. Then there is the whole Flash thing. I am an adult: I can choose to eat my battery up with flash if I like. I totally agree that Flash has problems, but it is not for Apple to tell me how to deal with them.
3. The iPad. With it, I have access to all the things I care about. I like the iTunes store. I like the rental system. I like being able to grab TV shows when I miss them and forgot to set the DVR. I like Audible, and the new iPad Audible apps is very very nice. But with an iPad, I do not need and iPhone to consume these things.

Features

Even though I am a Linux guy, and Android was the premiere Linux based phone OS, I had waited, reading the trades, till appeared to me (as much as you can tell by reading) that ANdroid was more or less on feature parity with iOS4. Clearly it has always done multitasking, and such. I was more concerned around speed, stability, and size of the Android marketplace: Could I get things like Pandora there? My iPhone was ladden with apps, and I loved messing with them. I wanted that on my Android.

Another thing I have been waiting for is AMOLED screens to be feasible. The concept behind them is just too logical, and makes way more sense than LCD: Direct light generation, and no power used when a pixel is not on. The Galaxy S class of phones was the first that had the combination of size, maturity of execution, etc, to make me ready to switch. It is not the iPhone 4's retina display, but it is probably the second best display out there right now.

The camera has EV settings! I have wanted that forever on a cellCam. And it has a cool feature letting me tap on the screen for it to pick where to meter. All told, it is probably not as good an automatic camera as the iPhone 4, but it is a far better manual one.

Issues

There have been two problems of note so far:

1. The MicroUSB charge port
   
2. Syncing to my Mac

The charge port has a nifty sliding cover, but it also has the same issue as the first generation iPhone had with headphone: If your cord has a fat rubber grip near the microUSB connector, it will not easily slide in, and stay in. And there is no way to charge and talk at the same time, even with the provided MicroUSB cord. It just won't stay put.

In my MS Windowsless world, I never even thought to ask about sync to a smartphone. Everyone supports Mac these days... not. The Captivate / Galaxy S has no native way to sync to my Mac. To get media on Captivate, I have to put it into media mode, and turn on USB debugging. Then it appears to the Mac (or Linux) as a flash drive, and I can just drag content onto it. Its fast, and gives me ultimate content control, but I do miss iTunes.

Also, I would like a bigger battery option. The 1500 mAh is OK, and does better than my iPhone 3GS ever did, but that is damning with faint praise. I could not pass a charging cable with that phone, especially once it had iOS4 on it. But the 30 pin dock ecosystem is a rich place, and there is nothing like that on the Captivate. I would kill for a Mophie JuicePack. Barring that, a 2500-3000 mAh battery would be just the thing.

Probably more as this goes on: This is only day 4. But so far I do not, by and large, miss the iPhone, and I do enjoy having access to the Google world in a very high fidelity way. I set up Google Voice yesterday...

The iPhone 3GS and the Storm

I am sure there are about a million posts on the Internet comparing the iPhone to the Blackberry Storm (and soon, the new Storm 2). This, as they say, is one of them.

I have an iPhone 3GS as my personal phone, and I recently got a BB Storm as my work unit. It replaced a much unloved Blackberry 8830. I did not expect to like the new Storm as much as the 3GS, and I do not. It has been pretty much exactly what I thought it would be. It is better than the 8830 in most ways though.

Chiclets

At the core of my dislike for the 8830 were two things: Crummy (small) screen and tiny mechanical keys. I am firmly in the virtual keyboard camp. I had a slight hope that the Storm's virtual keyboard would be better than it is, even though none of the reviews supported that hope. I based it off one thing: That every review I read of the Storm virtual keyboard was that it was *not* a mechanical one, like a proper BlackBerry should have.

I had not really realized it till I was reading about the Storm ahead of getting one but there is a huge contingent of people that like... even prefer... mechanical keyboards on their cell phones. Watching someone that is really good at the BB keyboard is pretty amazing, I have to admit: Their thumbs blazing at what is probably 50 or 60 WPM.

Getting going that fast on the 3GS would be a real challenge, and doing it in the Storm would not be possible. The Storm does have a virtual keyboard, but it is hampered by several things:

1. The processor is too slow / the OS is too slow. I do not know which it is (I have the 3rd release of 4.7: The latest Verizon has issued), but there are pauses and herks and jerks that keep the keyboard from being a fast-to-register-a-keystroke affair.


2. The entire screen has to be pressed to register the keystroke. the Storm 2 is supposed to fix that. I supposed the idea was to make the virtual keyboard more like a real one, and it utterly missed the point *of* a virtual keyboard.


3. The idea of the feedback to register the keystroke was the illuminate the key being pressed is blue, with a slight halo: All well and good, except I have wide fingers and I can't see it.

For all of this, I prefer the Storm keyboard to the 8830. I can at least read the markings, and the blue backlight of the 8830 was useless in the dark: I had to find a strong light source to use the keyboard.

The 3GS keyboard is more or less the same as it has been since the Generation 1 iPhone, except that more apps work in landscape mode, and in landscape mode I can fairly fly on the iPhone. Not as fast as the Mini 9, or the Macbook, but not too bad either.

Screen and Flip

The Storm display is very nice, and reading email on it is *far* easier than the 8830 every was. It is not just the size of the screen, or its better colors and backlighting, although those are all huge helps: it is also that the email app uses a better, more readable font, and when you are looking at letters that small, that really helps.

The apps listing is OK: Readable, if not easy to configure. The 3GS's way of allowing icons to be re-arranged is infinitely better than the setup process you have to use on the Storm, but at least it can be done.

The Storm 2 is supposed to add inertia to the screen flips, and that is sorely missed. Having to page up and down the screens on the storm is far slower than being able to flip your finger on the 3GS and the faster you do it, the faster and farther then screen rolls, in a very intuitive way.

Looking at pictures on the Storm is way better than the 8830, and nearly as nice as the 3GS, but pan and zoom are horrible.

Smile

The quality of the 3.2 MegaPixel camera is OK, and not that much worse than the iPhone (in bright light), but once again slowed either by the OS or a slow processor: it takes forever to focus and snap a picture on the Storm. Movies looked more or less the same on either unit though. The Storm overall seems to favor slight overexposure of the images relative to the iPhone.

In low light, the Storm camera is far better than the iPhone's, other than having to wait forever for it to focus. It also has a "light", which I have never used, but should mean that the Storm is good for even lower light situations than those I have tested: Places where the iPhone would not work at all.

Going to the Store

This really has very little to do with the Storm per-se, since the same App StoreWorldthingy is on all BlackBerries. It is easier to "shop" on the storm, with its superior-to-keyboarded-BB's screen. If this comparison was to any other BB, then Storm would be killer here. However, the 85,000+ apps of the iPhone, and the far better in-phone store app, not to mention the iTune Store shopping option just make the BB's couple of hundred apps appear quite feeble. Wimpy. Not even trying.

The few apps I have loaded are also pale shadows of their iPhone brethren. The Facebook app for example is truly wretched on the Storm. I can not imagine what it is like on any of the smaller screened BB's. The new 2.x iPhone version is in some way better than the web interface.

The Web

The built in browser on the BB used to be a joke. The one on the Storm is actually not too bad. It is slow, and does not render everything the 3GS built in Safari will, but it is light years ahead of the old browser. I put Opera on, and that helps, especially for things like zooming in on areas of pages to be able to read them.

None of them use the gestures of the iPhone, and in Safari, with flicks and pinches and amazing speed, the web is still more accessible on the iPhone.

Maps

Really RIM? Why did you even bother? The built in Map app is a complete waste. No OS integration. No gestures. No resolution in the maps. No composite views. No GPS or Compass integration. Low resolution. Slow slow slow. Not even trying. The Storm 2 or at least OS 5 *has* to have a better map app than this... right? Or at least Google maps in the app store?

This app is the very definition of a checkbox exercise:

"Hey! They have a map app! Do we have a map app?"

"Yeah Boss: We got a map app. Got it right here. See, It says 'Maps' on it and everything."

I went to our office in Minneapolis this week, and I was told that people with Tom Toms and other GPS had gotten utterly lost because of how weird it is to get to the building. I'll have to admit that the iPhone Maps gave me some choices about possible locations, and the first one I went to was not it: but the second one was, and it knew the weird route to get to the building. All the really means is that Google knows that route though, and that is what the BB needs: Google Maps.

(update: I have been told by some that there are Google Maps for the BB. They are just not in the App Store. You have to manually install them.)

Verizon and AT&T

My Storm came from Verizon, and of course the iPhone is AT&T. I have to say that I do not understand anyone that says that AT&T's network is not as good as Verizon's. I can not imagine where that is. It is no place I go.

At any given place, and at any given time, the iPhone and the Storm have about even chances of having or not having a signal. And I can move two feet, and have signals invert in strength between the two, especially in downtown areas.

Standing on Fishermans Wharf in San Francisco, both are strong. In North Beach at Rogue Public Ale House the BB is weak, and the iPhone slightly degraded. Up the street towards Chinatown, the BB gets a slightly better signal for a few blocks.

Most places they both have 4 or 5 bars. Same in Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Minneapolis, Dallas, Alpine, Fort Davis, Marfa .... on and on. Neither one is obviously better than the other, with this single exception: when the signal is weak, and the phone is powering up its amplifier to pull in the weak signal, the Storm, and the 8830 before it, will eat its battery in a matter of a few hours: Far faster than the iPhone will. Not that the iPhone won't eat its battery fast: it does. Just not as fast.

This inverts when Bluetooth is the radio in question. If the iPhone can not find the Bluetooth ear piece, it will burn through the juice in the matter of less than 8 hours, where as the Storm and the 8830 seemed to not obviously use any more power when their paired earpiece was off or out of range.

(Update: Actually, the Storm does appear to use battery far faster when it can not find it's headset. Still not as bad as the iPhone, but the 8830 was the king here.)

As for speed: There is no comparison. As long as I have digital service the iPhone is far faster. the iPhone in Edge is about the same speed as the Storm on "1XEV'. That probably means the high speed EVDO is not the bottleneck more than likely, but the speed of the OS and the hardware is.

Smart Phone

If there had never been an iPhone to compare it to I would be amazed by the Storm, but the fact of the matter for me and my virtual keyboard loving ways is that it is not as good a design as the original iPhone was, more or less the 3rd generation iPhone. I assume the Storm 2 will be better on all points, but I also assume from some early reviews that it will be only reaching some sort of parity with the Generation 1 iPhone, and still be a long way from where the iPhone is today. If nothing else the push-the-whole-screen-to-register-a-keystroke thing is gone.

I rode in an elevator the other day with a man who had a Storm. I asked him how he liked it. He shook his head, and said "I had a Google phone before this one. I wish I had it back".

On the plane the other day I sat next to a man with a Palm Pre. I watched with interest as he flicked about the bright, beautiful screen. It looked very iPhone like, at least until he opened the keyboard. Gaah! Chiclet keys! What were they thinking?

Still, from what I can tell, the Storm is not as good as iPhone's, Palm Pre's, and Android based phones. It is not just a hardware problem either: the OS is a mess. It feels like three of four different OS's crammed together. Configuration screens don't match in style or function, and are spread all over, The Apps are weak, and un-unified in look, feel, and OS integrations. The Storm, running WebOS or Android would be leaps and bounds better, and not having the push-to-click screen of the Storm two would fix the Storms major weakness: Really: That idea is like New Coke. It may have tested well, but in reality it is a pain.

I'll have this Storm for another two years I guess. Hopefully by then RIM will get it right. In the meantime, it *is* far better than the 8830 that came before it, so I am not ungrateful. And the camera isn't bad.

A week with 2.0.1

I have been on vacation in Far West Texas for about a week now. This is actually my real home out here, as I just rent in the Space City.

2.0.1 has been a mixed bag: Stability is better, but still not great. keyboard hangs are still there. Battery life is pathetic still.

On the Amtrak train out here, I exhausted the Lenmar external battery and was at about 50% of the internal battery when I finally arrived in the Alpine, TX train station. We were running about two hours behind because every time a freight train needed our tracks, we pulled over on a siding and waited. It is a crime of epic proportions that we in the US have let our railroad system decline like this, now when we need it most. Really: Tracks in both directions guys! The carbon footprint of me on a train going 600 miles to Far West Texas is just a tiny fraction of me in my Honda Fit driving the same route. But I digress...

The Lenmar was good for about two full charges, so that means in 17 hours I charged my phone twice, and then used it down to 50% again. First company that makes a decent auxiliary battery I can just leave strapped on gets my business.

Here is what I was doing: I watched about five hours of movies, listened to 10 hours of audiobook, and occasionally used the GPS to get a fix on what city I was near. From the specs, I should have used slightly less than two charges worth, and it did not seem to be the movies or audiobooks doing the damage to the battery. The visible drop came when I was using the GPS / Map function.

This matches an observation I made when I was in SanFran a few weeks ago: I went to the city with a full charge, and I *only* used the GPS / Map function while there. Nothing else. By then end of about 8 hours of walking around the city and getting fixes (mostly for fun: I knew where I was most of the time) the battery was in the red.

GPS eats battery.

Another thing I have never really thought through about this: If you can not see a cell tower, the GPS is worthless. If it can not load a map, so it can draw a pin on it, it just goes into la-la land. Not even a basic longitude and latitude readout appears. That seems like an oversight: Another assumption that people will never be out of sight of a cell tower.

On the train, we were following I-90 most of the way, but at one point we skimmed within feet of crossing over into Mexico. For a while, I had no signal at all. Then I had only signal from Mexican cell infrastructure, which AT&T warned me about with a nifty IM telling me that International rates now applied.

I slapped it into airplane mode for an hour, and when I took it back out, it was back to "no signal". I was glad to see it went in and out of Airplane mode: I had read that some were having trouble with that after the 2.0.1 upgrade.

Since arriving, the iPhone has been in Airplane mode most of the time: my house sits in a Caldera, and the rim walls of the volcano contain enough iron that no cell signal penetrates. No Internet either, although that is because of a problem over at the cable company.

To Jailbreak, or not to Jailbreak?

So far I have not Jailbroken my iPhone 3G. The App Store has for the most part kept me fairly happy with the things that it offered. Fairly. I will more than likely jailbreak it though at some point: Whatever it will take to get tethering going. I seem to be spending a fair amount of time lately in places where the only electronic communications I have working is my iPhone.

As I write this I am sitting in the Amtrak train station in Houston. It is a total backwater of the Internet. To write this post "natively" on Blogger (I.E., Web 2.0 style, with Internet access to the Blogger built in editor) is just not possible from here: In fact, I am sharing the one electrical outlet I could find in the train station with another guy who is working on a report for his job on his iBook. (addendum from the future: I created the post in HTML in Komposer on the Mac. I uploaded the HTML to Blogger, and then I had to go back and fix all the messed up carriage returns and line feeds that Google had added to the HTML: Instead of honoring the CR/LF and other tags, it made a right mess of the posts... so I had to come back with the online editor and clean it all up. Grumble. Now back to our regularly scheduled blog, already in progress..)

This is in the heart of Space City, just a few blocks from downtown! No Internet at all!

The train is over two hours from leaving yet, so it is the perfect time to write, except that my Macbooks battery is now getting old, and I have to be near power plugs to work.. and to charge my iPhone to the top for the upcoming 15+ hour train ride, in case there is no power near my seat. My handy Lenmar battery is already topped up and ready to go.

In this situation, and in other recent one where Internet access meant iPhone only, I really need to be able to tether. It does not have to be 3G. It does have work. I used to have this with my
Samsung A series phone, and it was way less sophisticated than this iPhone is. Null River ever released a 10 dollar application called Netshare that would allow one to tether with an iPhone. Apple took it down. Then put it up. Then took it down. (As of August 4th, 2008, when I was fixing the CR/LF mess, Nullriver's web site still said they were "working with Apple to get NetShare back up on the AppStore") I do not wish to be subjected to the vagaries of Apple for things like this. I like the App Store, but as soon as I see a Jailbreak app that makes it work, this phone is getting jailbroken. Till then, I will wait. And fume.

My wife tired of the un-jailbroken 3g faster than I did this time. She spent a long and frustrating time getting hers opened up, only to find out that Installer.app was not yet ready, and that the reason she had Jailbroken it did not really exist yet. It was long and frustrating because the pwnage tool was still a work in progress as well: I read it is easy now.

I watched her in interest to see how well the new tools worked on the 2.0 / 3G phones, and it looked to me that the hackers were pretty close to getting around the roadblocks Apple had thrown up with 2.0. I wonder why Apple even tries?

My son got my wifes "old" iPhone, and we told him to leave it at 1.1.5 and jailbroken rather than upgrading to 2.0 because sadly:

1. It was more stable
2. It was better on batteries. My daughter has my original
   iPhone, put 2.0 on it, and can't pass an electrical outlet anymore.

That has been the big disappointment of 2.0 and the 3G for me so far. Well, these three things:

1. Crashing apps
2. Crashing OS
3. Dismal battery life

And that is with 3G turned *off*.

Don't get me wrong. I love the 3G: The GPS and location based stuff are huge fun and deeply useful. And after some testing I have noticed that the WiFi signal reception is better with the 3G than the first gen unit. That is goodness. And badness. I preferred the first generation units aluminum case overall: Less fingerprints and the like. Cooler to the touch. And I preferred the feel in my hand of the first one to the new one, but I am in a huge minority there. Most like the tapered edge case of the 3G. People that have not held a 3G pick mine up and usually saw "ooohhhhh.... I like that". Guess I just have to be different. For me, the Wifi improvement is worth the plastic case, even though I view it as a tradeoff.

I did put the 2.0.1 upgrade on that came out today. So far, the main thing I have seen it do is make a few apps I had installed but that had disappeared re-appear. New apps install from the app store a little faster too. Backups via iTunes still take forever. I have not had it on long enough to evaluate if it does anything for battery life or stability yet. Before I did this I researched the state of the Jailbreak and Installer.app for 2.0.1 / 3G. Looks like when I get back from vacation it will be ready.

I'm ready now... here in the train station...without Internet.

The only reason I can see not to jailbreak it will be if Apple and Nullriver set the tethering app free again. Or there is no tethering possibility coming anytime soon on the jailbroken iPhones. I guess there is one good thing: I went way longer leaving this one un-hacked than the first gen one. I guess that means Apple is making strides in the right direction.

Still: If I have to buy a different phone that already had tethering working, and flip the SIM back and forth, I am not above that, but it will be silly, and all Apple and perhaps AT&T will have proven with their roadblocks is that they do not want people to use the tools the way that we want or need to.

One last thing about the 3G hardware, and this is on the annoyance side: Why in the world can't I charge off Firewire and other older devices? I get that the data side may be costly to keep dual circuits a around for, and that Apple has capitulated to USB, but still: 5 volts is 5 volts. Use it! It is not just my firewire charger brick that is not working: I have a Maxell USB charging stand that it won't use. And my Altec Lansing portable speakers. My wife even has a battery backup unit that is nothing *but* 5 volts, and the iPhone 3G says "Nope: not gonna use it", but the 1st gen iPhone does.

Stupid. Annoying. Unnecessary.

iPhone 3G and Firmware 2.0

.... or, in the ever confusing parlance of computers, firmware 1.2.0.

I am one of a minority in this world when it comes to the 3g: I did not get one for the 3g bit. I wanted the real GPS and flush headphone jack and mostly the 16GB of flash storage. My 8GB unit was always stuffed and actually the 16 GB of the 3G will be no different.

I had a few hopes for the unit that have not really panned out.

1) I had hoped with the 3g feature turned off (which it has been since two hours after I bought the unit: As soon as I could stop playing with it enough to search out the setting to turn off 3G and revert to EDGE) that the battery life would be better. Nope. If anything it is worse. I will probably never leave the house without the Lenmar rechargeable auxiliary battery. With 3G on it is horrific to watch the battery drop.

2) I had hoped with the plastic back on the 3G case replacing the metal back of the first generation iPhone that wifi and edge reception would improve. It didn't get worse but it is not noticeably better either.

One other quibble, and this is not limited to Apple: why is this called a 16GB when it has 14.6 GB? Even if I play the stupid marketing game that they play on counting memory... where marketing says there is 1000 per GB where computers are 1024 per GB (and dropping some zeros) . 16 times 1000 and divided by 1024 is 15.6 GB. There is a missing GB.

I assume that the OS and control data structures are using that space but I wish it would report it!

My daughter ended up with my "old" iPhone, and she put 2.0 on it, so I had a chance to compare a 3G to a first gen unit, both running the same OS. As you might expect location based stuff is way better on the 3G, thanks to the real GPS chip. In fact, so far, location based stuff is not working very well on her unit.

Her unit was Jailbroken originally when I had it, but we looked at the App Store and she decided that it had everything she wanted, and brought hers up to 2.0.

Similarly, while there is a Jailbreak for the 3G / 2.0 out, I am going to wait a few weeks before I decided to jailbreak mine. This is not the same thing as "unlock" mind you. I am not trying to hook up to a different GSM carrier than AT&T. I am not unhappy with their service other than the basic concept of lock-in itself. I am an adult, and I walked into it with open eyes: I agreed to two years of lock-in for the less expensive up-front price. Always the devils bargain.

Jailbreaking pre-2.0 for me was about getting the iPhone to do and be more than Apple was letting it be at the time. The platform has so much more potential than was being used! Besides, I had to have Solitaire.

The App Store brings about 80 or 90% of what the open stuff brought to the table... and then adds in a whole pile of news things the Jailbreak apps never had: Tons of games and location based apps.

What is missing for me so far are all the themers and BSD subsystem based things like file managers and one of my personal favorites "sysinfo". I like to be able to look at the iPhone as the computer that it is, and see what apps are using all the CPU and memory, and kill things that I want gone. It was also a handy way to reboot the entire phone.

If these things *stay* missing, then back to the Jailbreak. If nothing else the free version of Solitaire was much cleaner looking and had better controls!

The App Store is a terrific thing: Do not get me wrong when I say I *might* jailbreak mine. I love some of the new things like the news widgets, and I have purchased a test Solitaire game that is not too bad.

Some App Store sourced stuff is not ready yet: One called 'Where' has yet to load up. Several other apps have caused the iPhone to crash and burn, which is odd because I thought part of the point of having the whole SDK was to keep everything in the box and far enough away from the OS to keep that from happening.

In the comments of my last post, Akshun J provided a link to an article:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/zd/20080618/tc_zd/228825

In that Article, titled "Hacking is No Solution" Sascha Segan of PC Magazine takes serious issue with the whole idea of Jailbreaking. Here is one quote:

"Here's the rub. You can bet that all of these apps will appear for jailbreaked iPhones. Instead of kicking Apple's butt and speaking out against the artificial deficiencies created by the restrictive license terms, geeks will just jailbreak their phones and use the apps anyway. Mainstream users won't get StyleTap or TomTom or Firefox."

I think this is missing the point of what happened. The App Store now exists! It has tons of stuff the mainstream users will love, and it is going to have way way more things. It has free things too, despite what many feared was going to be the case. There are all sorts of things that one used to have Jailbreak a phone to get that are now in the App Store and free: things like the "Flashlight" app from Erica Sadun for example. I have used the heck out of that little thing, and I *still* have it, now on my unhacked iPhone.

The App Store exists *because* the geeks jailbroke their phones. In the never ending tug of war between the hackers and Apple, Apple decided to join them (to a degree). It is not Open Source mind you, but the SDK *is* free. My wife has a copy. She can write apps for the iPhone if she wants to.

If I end up Jailbreaking my iPhone again to get to Sysinfo or other apps not in the App store, I am pretty sure that what I am after will *not* be mainstream. How many people really want to watch the processes running on their iPhone? Really? How geeky is that?

No matter how geeky it is, if it is popular, I bet it will show up in the App Store sooner or later. The Mainstream and the Geeks will be happy.

And finally, to the point of my last main post, the Blackberry has been seriously left in the dust now. I know they are working on a device to try and compete, but it is hard to imagine catching up if Apple keeps the peddle down like this. Shoot: The next iPhone might even have decent battery life!

iPhone and Blackberry

Been a while since I wrote anything for this blog. Life has a way of getting in the way of writing, especially when one is getting ready to move, and to change cities at that.

I have had this short post knocking about in my head for a while now. A few months ago a new, second phone appeared in my daily life. I now have a work phone and a personal phone. I wanted the new phone to be able to see and stay in sync from my calendar at the office (since we don't have enterprise iPhones... yet)

The new unit is a Blackberry 8830 "World Edition". It is not the latest and greatest, but I have since held and played with a Pearl and Curve, and they are not that different from the 8830. World edition in this case means it has both GSM and CDMA radios. CDMA for the US, and GSM for the more wirelessly sane rest of the world. Two radios! I guess the AT&T / T-Mobile version of this phone just has the GSM though.

Going back and forth between the iPhone and the BB requires getting used to a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. Modern phone. Ancient Phone. Intuitive interface. Learn by rote interface. Easy to use keyboard. Nasty hard to read hard to use keyboard. Beautiful screen. Not as pretty screen. Etc.

The BB does the one thing I need it to do: It syncs extremely well to my calendar. Meetings will get canceled 15 minutes before they start, and the BB knows about it right away.

Other pluses:

• Battery life is pretty good
• Sound quality of the earpiece is good, although the mic is tinny
• Bluetooth headset works well with it: At least my Motorola H681 does.

When the new iPhone 2.0 firmware is released, and there is a real, enterprise way to get calendar and email going with it, the BB loses its only advantages except maybe battery life (and the new iPhone 3G may address that with a better battery). Then its disadvantages become even more painful by comparision:

• Tiny, hard to read keys with lousy backlight and non-standard special symbols placement
• Smaller screen
• Worse Calendar app (if you can get a meeting onto the iPhone, it is much easier to read and manipulate there)
• Worse email app
• Worse phone book
• Far far far worse browser. Did I mention far? And I have Opera 4.1 on the BB, but that only makes things slightly tolerable.
  
• Both of my supplied cases broke within the first week! That would be a leather case with pivoting belt clip, and the hard plastic dock looking thing. Both broke at the same place too: who thinks a pivot made with a 1 or 2 mm plastic center axle is strong enough?

The whole thing has the feel of an OS / hardware platform that was not designed but sort of grew organically. Stuff was bolted on to the side over and over again. It is a hodgepodge of stuff, none of it intuitive. I had to read the stupid manual to find the *mute* button for the movie theatre, never mind the goofy way the ringer volume is managed!

I know a large number of people are not happy with Apple and the things they have been doing with the iPhone. Lock in to AT&T, controlling the application delivery mechanism, and so forth. I sort of agree, but you know what is also true? It is easier to hack an iPhone and install whatever you like on it than it is to use the approved install mechanism on the BB.

If the trueism about why Linux is not winning the market space is the MSWin has all the apps is true, then the same thing applies to the iPhone and the BB, with the BB playing the part of the application underdog. And all that is *before* the iPhone App Store even gets going.

One of unhappy sets of folks has to be RIM. They are really going to have to re-think their device line and their OS, and soon. Right now they are bringing a pen knife to a machine gun fight.

More iPhone Support Center, plus World Domination

Akshun J , well known Internet Apple non-fan, humorist, Blogger, and generally good person (if for no other reason than he likes my stuff.... :) ) posted a comment on my last post about the experience I had with the Apple support center, and it went this way:

"It's all a secret plot. A Romulan conspiracy to overthrow the Federation.

Although the best cosmetic surgeons have made him look human, Steve Jobs is clearly a Romulan. Who could doubt this? "

And here I thought he was a deity (humorous first minute of this video):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2gO8blNd4A

Actually, I can not complain. Turned out the second iPhone return box was because someone at Apple had read my comments in the first attempt to get the iPhone fixed via the Apple web site, realized I needed to send in the iPhone, and sent the box. Another call to 1-800-my-iphone got everything cleared up.

More importantly: I talked to two very nice people at the support center. Bridgette and Jamey. They were helpful, knowledgeable, and also clearly both native speakers of my language (which is a Polyglot of AmerEnglish and Geekish). They both realized right away they did not need to run a script with me on how to do things to diagnose my problem, and jumped right in to actually solving my problem. Add to that the whoever read my web submission at the support center realized that the "headphones" (that ended up being a docking station for some reason) being sent were not going to fix the problem, and sent the return box.

I did get an email noting that the dock had been returned and that there was no charge. Nice.

In this day and age, getting to talk to competent people in a support center was a pure joy.

I use Linux all day long every day, and I love it dearly. The new Ubuntu 8.04 is looking very spiff. I can't wait for the Mint 5.0 version of it! The people I have dealt with for support on Linux have all been very good as well. But that is a different deal. This was a good support center experience from a commercial vendor, and that is rare. Good on you, Apple. Keep up the good work.

Honesty also forces me to admit one last thing. When my little Internet tablet was gone, even for only two days, I felt amazingly bereft. My backup phone is a Motorola C168. Nice sound quality, and loud enough ringers. Light weight. Impressive talk time. But it was just a phone. I am used to being able to look things up on the Internet no matter where or when. At dinner the other day my daughter was telling me about "Red Pandas", which I had never heard of, and right there in Taco Palace I was able to get a quick look at one, and see what they were related to, and know that there are only 2500 of them left. The ability to do this was so very cool. Made the time I was spending with my daughter that much better because I was able to get up to speed fast.

I borrowed a Blackberry Curve the other day to see what its Internet access looked like. Yuch. I welcome the day the iPhone has competition, but as of right now, it does not.

I totally get Akshun J's dislike and distrust of Apple. It is not very far away from how I feel about Microsoft and the things they did to stomp out anyone and anything in their way to world desktop domination. Apple could very easily (now that they have something like 14% of the laptop market) be positioned in the near future to begin to do and act the same way as MS. In fact, in an odd turn of events, they might even force MS to become more open as they continue to watch their market share eroded from the bottom by Linux and from the top by Apple. The way MS rigged the OOXML fight shows us that that day is not yet here though.

Similarly Apple has proven that they will deal roughly with small companies and developers, although in the case of the iPhone SDK there is at least some concession that Apple is not able to fully control the iPhone platform, as much as they dearly want to. Apple needs the developer community to support them. Unto itself the iPhone is a blank slate waiting to be written upon. Example at lunch today:

We were waiting for the veggie dumplings to steam over at Lai Lai's, and my daughter asked me if she could borrow my iPhone. She looked at it, then at me and said is disgust as she handed it back "You haven't hacked this yet." I admitted that I had not. She wanted to know what was taking me so long. I had had the phone for over a day at that point.

Without all the extra things I put on the phone when it is hacked, she did not think it was any better than her RAZR. Of course she was not looking to Netsurf. She wanted to play games.

I am trying to decide if I will hack it at all, or if I will wait to see what the App Store looks like. The guys from iPhone DevCamp think that their way is better of course, but I have to admit that the idea of being able to get stuff for the phone in a vendor supported way is tempting after this little experience.

Or, I may put Linux on it. They say the new PWNED way of getting into the iPhone is going to let them be able to put whatever they want on the iPhone. I won't for now because the experience at the support center is going to keep me on the Apple side of things (even if I decide to hack it in the near future). It is not blind, unthinking loyalty though. Quite the opposite. I am always watching to see what the vendor is going to do next.

Beside, if I go too darkside, Akshun J will reach through the Internet (being a series of tubes) and poke me.