Posts Tagged ‘Mobile technology’

Top ten Android Apps I miss from my T-Mobile G1 (HTC Dream)

Friday, September 11th, 2009

So here’s the story. My G1 has stopped working and being in the USA at the moment I have to return it to the UK to be replaced, in the mean time I’ve found myself missing both it and the applications on it. I’ve really grown to love Android and the apps on it. In fact it has become something of a mobile computer to me. With the easy WiFi connectivity and built in GPS (and the help of Locale) I’ve found using WiFi hotspots almost as easy as having a (cheap) 3G connection. Of course being on a UK contract I’d rather not incur the massive roaming charges for data in the USA.

In the last few days as I’ve started to miss it I decided to write a ‘Top Ten Roundup’ with a difference, the top ten that I miss. I’ve reverted to my Windows Mobile smart-phone so I still have a few luxuries. I expect that I’ll mention several things which made me prefer my G1 to the HTC Hermes I was on. Firstly though I’ll compare a few core components that I miss.

  • The email program. When I first used Android I wasn’t that excited about the email app; sure, it had starring which Windows Mobile didn’t, but that was about it for me. However I’ve come to really appreciate the way it synchronises and the way that I can apply labels and generally use it as I do the computer front end. Windows Mobile makes me synchronise manually or set a time, this is nice and I used to find it very useful but I really appreciate being able to use Locale with the Gmail application to trigger synchronising only in a WiFi hotspot.
  • The contacts application. There are some trade-offs here. Windows Mobile supports a birthday for a contact, unless I’m severely blind my G1 does not. Windows mobile however attacks my contacts list on Gmail adding Mr’s and Mrs’s which in turn adds extra contacts. This is fixable, the G1 lack of birthdays will surely be fixed in a future release. Incidentally the birthdays can be shown on the calendar with a small work around. Simply go to the calendars listing under settings, click browse interesting calenders and find your birthdays under ‘More’.
  • The browser. I really miss the Android browser and its speed and zoom features.
  • Marketplace. Do I even need to say anything here? The ease and simplicity is so nice.

Now for my top ten list of Android applications that I miss.

  1. Locale. I had rules set up to do everything I needed all based on where I was. It came into extra brilliance while abroad where I couldn’t use my normal data connection.
  2. ConnectBot. Having a well rounded SSH application is essential.
  3. Android IRC. Who can exist without IRC? I mean, what true techie can exist without IRC? Android IRC supports SSL, multiple servers and message notification, what’s more it doesn’t die if you leave it and open other applications.
  4. AndNav. This is my most memory heavy application, it uses tiles instead of vectors so pre-download is essential for any sensible routing. Also routes are calculated away from the client which causes network use. However, all this is well known to the developers and is being worked on. I would personally love to see (for example) POI search for off-line (maybe import gpx POI’s). I would be even more excited to see off-line routing, maybe data sets could be split further just to contain roads with no additional data? However all the Windows Mobile alternatives that I’ve found have not done what I needed or had some major problems.
  5. Quickipedia. Wikipedia has become the defatico source of information these days. Want cable layouts? Check Wikipedia. Want information about a penguin that flies? Check Wikipeida. Having a mobile client is like carrying it around as a book… just without ink or weight or that book smell or worrying about pages falling out.
  6. Movie Finder. It’s great to be able to quickly find out the times of a movie or check which ones are on locally. This isn’t a new concept I know but I found this the easiest to use, far easier than my previous experiences on Windows Mobile.
  7. Telegraph.co.uk news. Although this requires a connection and can’t horde its data off-line it’s still a great application. I’ve used other news applications and I’m open to suggestions but I found this to be the best. I do miss Viigo.
  8. Listen. I’d only just started using this but I’d become adicted pretty quickly. It’s a nice product from google themselves and it provides me with a stream of podcasts straight to my device. What’s more it can be run offline.
  9. FML. This would be one of two things that I use to entertain myself.
  10. Lolcats. This would be the other.

There are more I miss, there are more I used regularly and there are more I’d probably like to put on this list in the future. A couple in the running were:

  • My Tracks. A GPS tracking application that I’ve found to be absolutely excellent.
  • Beeb Player. BBC iPlayer application, not much use here as I have a US IP but it was great when I was in the UK.
  • Meridian Player (and now Meridian Evolve). A great player. Unfortunately I don’t watch much on my phone as my laptop has a better resolution for that.
  • Dizzler. A music on demand player, very useful for those moments where someone doesn’t know a song and you want to *show* them.
  • Barcode Scanner. Most sites about Android offer 2d encoded barcodes for content, I think this is a great way to move stuff from one device to another.
  • Better Keyboard. A great on screen keyboard. I certainly miss it.

That just about makes up my little Android tear story. Hopefully I should see a new G1 working perfectly within the next few weeks and I’ll be able to tell you which applications I’m adicted to right from the word go.

Kind regards, Robert.

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HP Pavillion DV7 2050ea and Linux.

Friday, September 4th, 2009

I am now a fortunate owner of an HP Pavillion DV7 2050ea. The first thing I’d like to say is that this is a very nice laptop and I’m very happy with almost every aspect. It’s comprised of the following hardware:

  • AMD Turion X2 Dual-Core Mobile ZM84, 2.3GHz
  • 4GB of RAM, I haven’t checked the brand but it seems fast
  • 320GB of hard drive space on a Western Digital drive
  • ATI M92 (Mobility Radeon 4500 series, 4530), seems to have 512MB of RAM
  • eSATA, USB and FireWire
  • ExpressCard
  • XD/MMC/SD slot
  • HDMI and VGA
  • QuickDock (v3 I think)

HP Blurb

The biggest problem so far has been the graphics card, so far I’ve been unable to get it working with fglrx. I have the standard X drivers working and they give me full screen output but that too was a bit of a fight. However under Vista the card seems incredibly powerful for a laptop and it has no problems playing DVDs using the standard X drivers under Linux. However the iPlayer will not play without major chopping. Hulu plays but only at standard resolution and without full screen.

The sound works perfectly using the snd_hda_intel module and one small adjustment to its config. In fact I’m quite impressed with the volume and power the speakers can create. The file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf now contains:

options snd-hda-intel model=hp-hdx

eSATA, USB and FireWire all appear to work correctly. All I’ve noticed is that the eSATA port’s USB functionality seems to be a little low power, I can use everything except for hard drives which act as if I’d plugged them into a USB 1.1 port.

Strangely I can’t get the XD/SD etc slot to work, this is pretty normal though so I’m not too bothered. It does seem to help if I disable the power saving for them and FireWire in the BIOS. No idea why, maybe someone else will have more information on this.

The laptop can take two hard drives and I’ve found a second miniPCIe slot. Unfortunately the second hard drive needs a ‘kit’ to be installed, I’ll blog more about this when I get a chance to install one. However, with hard drives the size they are these days this makes for at least 1TB of space without too much heat overload.

I haven’t yet worked out the obligiroy IrDA, it seems it’s somehow hooked through the BIOS to allow the included remote to function (including the luxury of a power button). I haven’t had any other problems with it yet, the ExpressCard slot seems to work perfectly as do the other various ports.

Over all this is an excellent laptop with a lot of power, although it’s large enough to watch DVDs on it is also small enough and light enough to be portable.

Kind regards, Robert.

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The Linux GPS project has commenced!

Friday, December 7th, 2007

The Linux GPS project has been started, it’s aimed at providing useful information about Linux related GPS projects and how to get GPS devices working correctly with Linux. I have a CF based Holux GPS device and a Bluetooth/USB based Holux device, I’ll provide as much information about these as possible.

We hope to provide information on the protocols we come across and the ways they can be made to ‘play’ nicely with Linux. In the end we may develop programs to provide unavailable features to Linux users. Although there are several projects which seem interested in providing GPS support for Linux they seem to lack a central place for a user to start, a place for you to pick what you need and get everything working; Linux GPS is being developed with this in view.

www.linux-gps.org

Your support would be appreciated.

Kind regards, Robert.

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Unboxing Sony Ericsson K800i.

Wednesday, October 31st, 2007

[Photo's to come.]

I’ve recently bought a Sony Ericsson K800i, it’s a nice little thing. I say thing because it’s one of those multitudinous devices which contains a camera, a mp3 player, expandability via memory cards, a radio, a basic web browser, video calling and all the rest. What’s more it can be used to call people when you’re out and about!

In short I wanted a phone which I can use (unlocked) in the States without breaking a warranty. To use my MDA Vario II I’d have to break a warranty which I intend to use within the next few months, my Vario being slightly broken. Before some clever person points out that I can use my Vario in the states without unlocking it, I want to use a pay as go SIM from the states to lower charges and I can’t do that without unlocking.

So, I went to CarPhone Warehouse and purchased one. It’s the cheapest 3G phone I could get with T9. T9 is what I’m used to from my old old phone, a nice little Sharp. So, I have a phone which suites my requirements; it provides 2G/3G for the best coverage and T9 for my comfort.

It also has a ~3mpx camera, not too bad one either. I’ve taken a few photo’s with it and give it a test in most conditions, one thing I noted was that it actually handed both the dark and near dark with relative ease. I was very surprised that it even handled flash compensation reasonably well. The camera is covered by a shutter and when you remove the cover it automatically starts the camera application, when you close the shutter it closes the application. I thought this was quite useful.

It has a music player and radio, these leave a little to be desired. The radio is analogue, but other than that quite a reasonable little device, it requires the headphones to be plugged in as it uses them as an aerial, but it doesn’t restrict your listening to them. The music player is integrated enough to prevent the two running together and it has a passable interface for using to play a track at a time.  It didn’t like my music, in fact, it seemed to hate it. It (apparently by random) truncated it’s readings of my ID3 tags, it also doesn’t allow playing by album, this is not good if you’re in the habit of using compilations.

The web browser seems OK, as does the RSS reader, I haven’t tested this to the full because I have limited credit on the SIM which came with the phone.  I’m always hesidant about web browsers on phones, the screens are small and the typing facilities are minimal. However, if such things please you I think they should be adequate for most average needs.

I’ve not tested video calling, I see it as pretty pointless but the camera on the front seems to be OK.

So there you go, that’s me unboxing it. I’ve liked what I’ve seen and found it pretty usable, the leather strap for carrying makes it feel rather like a camera and adds a bit of character, the screen is clear and the camera is of good quality. Most importantly it makes calls, if it made coffee I’d be far happier than all the gimmicks.

Here’s me, signing off, Robert.

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TuxOnIce a most excellent hibernation/suspension tool.

Monday, October 29th, 2007

I started using TuxOnIce when I switched kernel’s to the kamikaze sources. I’ve been doing a few things to try and get the best power usage out of Linux and my IBM X31 possible, TuxOnIce seems to do an excellent job suspending and resuming my entire OS. Without giving it any extra kernel parameters and only changing a few options within the configuration. For those of you who haven’t met TuxOnIce, it’s the new Suspend2.

Some of you may know that I’ve recently purchased an IBM X31 and that I’ve been trying to get the best battery life from it possible. One of the things about this is not having to restart whenever you have to change a battery, hibernation as it was dubbed by the windows developers is a useful trick for this. I can wait till my battery is almost run out, hibernate, change batteries, then start up again and resume where I left off. This can be done in a short enough time to preserve a net connection and not ping out on IRC! I’ve actually considered creating a ‘blank’ suspend image which has the main core of the OS and the DE loaded already and simply resuming to that instead of ever starting a new session, the problem with that would be resuming from a different partition when I’d actually suspended. I’d also have to create a new version of this image each time I updated my kernel or certain bits of core software, this will take some thought before I decide to go into it but it does provide something for thinking about.

I’m intending to build my father a media centre, this will (of course) use a Linux core and a probably a MythTV front end. This project would greatly benefit from a suspend image booted from a CF card, in fact, it would be almost instant boot and instantly be usable from where it last was. This might be a method of producing a very fast unalterable distro, your entire filesystem could be on ram-disks and your entire operating system could be stored on a suspend image, all you’d need is an initrd image and a kernel. The entire system could be updated by a bootable dvd which simply replaces the suspend image. If anyone has any comments on this then please do leave them as I’ve become interested in the concept within the space of writing it. Before I get attacked for breaking freedom and closing an OS, it wouldn’t be closed at all, the suspend image could be disassembled and edited with absolute ease; to prevent this some for of checksumming or signing would have to be implemented and I would not support that. Tell me your thoughts.

I used to use Suspend2 when I first experimented with Gentoo a few years ago, now I’ve returned to it for my IBM X31 I’ve resumed my interest (pun not intended). Back then I was looking to completely replace windows and show my school that it was possible. Although I proved this to myself they were still cynical and blamed every problem on Linux, even when the camera refused to work on their windows PC’s. There are none so blind as the willing. I do find it both sad and somewhat frightening, people believe what they’re told by the people they believe are right; even after being shown categorical results to the opposite. I’m rambling.

Do leave my any thoughts on the suspend image based OS.

Kind regards, Robert.

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