iPhone 5 thoughts

I held off on posting about the iPhone 5 for a few days, just to let the initial reactions and waves of joy and hate flow over me, so I can clearly reflect on what's been announced, and the impacts it will have on the industry as a whole.

When the rumours first surfaced over June through to August, I had a strong feeling that this might have been a deliberate distraction from Apple, a sort of "look over there" approach so they could ultimatly wow the audience at the announcement with a completely different product. With this in mind, the launch (which due to me being in Australia mean't waking up and seeing the whole announcement splashed over most news sites) really took me by surprise...

"Really, the leaks were actually right. Oh..."

Given that I had recently moved to Android, more specifically, a Galaxy S3, my initial reaction was one of relief. My "spec sheet" was still longer (screen res, NFC etc). All is well with my call to switch. I knew this would still sell well, iPhone's always do, especially if nothing is especially broken. A lot of tech pundits saw this as "it's just the iPhone 4S with a few things better", but most consumers will see it as "an iPhone 4S, but better", and seeing as the 4S was still selling quite well, this is exactly what people want.

A lot of geekier people may look at the iPhone 5 and think "meh", but there is a much deeper difference to this phone that the current generation of Android based phones, and much, if not all of it, stems from the "Apple way of doing things", ie, everything under 1 roof.

An Android fan that thinks the iPhone 5 is a better phone

There are 2 main reasons why the iPhone 5 is a very good phone, and probably a better choice than an Android based phone for most people right now, and if Android based devices adopted these 2 things, the playing field would be much more level.

CPU
Apple typically announces features in a phone that even the least tech minded person can understand. "The CPU is twice as fast" is a fairly plain statement to make to your average consumer, but such a line immediately sends geeks into a tailspin. The initial reaction is either one of two things when a tech company makes a claim. You've either doubled the core speed (and killed the battery) or doubled the cores (which isn't really "twice as fast" and also kills the battery).
What Apple appears to have actually done, is made their own ARM based architecture cores, and optimised the crap out of the OS to take advantage of this. Because the CPU team and the OS team all have the same security badge, the OS guys can say to the CPU guys "Hey, we want to do this, but the current CPU can't handle it, can you put something in there to make this work." "Sure, can do" is usually the answer, pending design issues etc. Now obviously this process is far more complicated that that, but can you even begin to imaging Google talking to the ARM guys about Android based optimisations, let alone the 3 CPU manufacturers that actually make the CPU's in Android phones (Samsung, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments). If this actually happened, Android guys and girls the world over would swoon, and the Android ecosystem would ultimately benefit.

4G modem
This was the big one for me. After owning a HTC Velocity 4G (one of the first 4G phones in Australia) and having what could only be described as horrendous battery life, I gained a fairly clear understanding into how the 4G modem in a smartphone works. As 4G doesn't do voice (yet), and the 4G modem in an Android phone is separate to the 3G modem, both have to be on when you want to have your phone run at 4G speeds. So even when the phone is sitting idle, both modems are on. This is crazy, and any decent hardware engineer should have looked at this and gone "that's not the best way to do that". Aparently no-one at HTC, Samsung, Qualcomm etc saw this. Apple has now seized on this, by doing something that the other guys should have done in the first place. 1 modem. It's that simple. While the phone is sitting idle, I do need it to be able to accept a phone call, and messages etc, so the 3G modem needs to be on, and I accept that. Now the following is an assumtion, but this is what I expect the iPhone 5 to do in an LTE area. If it's asleep, the LTE connection will essentially be off, and any push based items (email, notifications etc) will come down the 3G pipe. Once you turn the screen on, the LTE connection will activate, and then data will flow over this connection. On this basis, the battery life will remain basically the same, which is what Apple has indicated. We won't know the real battery cost of LTE until the review units are out, but Apple has never underestimated their battery life numbers on announcements before, so I doubt they would start now. Plus, their customers wouldn't stand for it.

I'm still happy with the Galaxy S3, but I like the iPhone 5

While I won't be changing phones at the moment, I really like the iPhone 5. I would be happy to drop the customisations I can do with Android to get a phone that gets the core functionality so right. If the CPU and modem guys could get their shit together, and get these sort of hardware based features into an Android phone, the playing field would probably level out again, but until there is motivation (which is a corporate term for more money) for the modem guys, the CPU guys and the OS guys to get into the same room and nut this stuff out, I fear Android may be stuck....for now at least.

My switch to Android

Why?

Boredom. Hard to expand on that, as that's the sole reason. I had an iPhone 3G for 2 years prior to the iPhone 4, which I got on launch day here in Australia. The phone I have is not the same phone I left the store with, as a dodgey home button was relieved by an EXTREMELY pain free experience at the Apple Store at Chermside. That swap was about 9 months in, and again, about 9 months from the swap my home button had all but given up, with only the most aggressive of pushes registering. And forget multitasking.

I suffered a mild case of fanboy in the early days, almost going out of my way to payout Android users, which proved difficult. You could almost say there was 3 different types of buyers, with 2 of them falling into the "above average tech background" catagory. The people that "hated" using Apple computers, and therefore refused to give them any money so far as a cellphone goes, the other side was the people that were smartphone users from the early days, Windows Phone 6 users and the like, that had tried an iPhone, but wanted more "freedom" as it were to customise and the like. The 3rd catagory is a massive market for android these days, people who went to a Teloptuvoda Store and bought a "phone." Nothing more, and nothing less. As mentioned in this article by thestreet.com's Eric Jackson points out, a lot of these android users aren't hooking up to Wifi, or browsing the web with their devices.

As the old saying goes, know your enemy, I figured I'd best hop on the train and see what this Android thing was all about. With that, I wondered into my local Telstra shop, and signed up for a HTC Velocity 4G.

HTC Velocity 4G

Why the Velocity

While it was hard to ignore the iPhone 4S on the stand in the corner, I narrowed it down to 2 phones. The Galaxy Nexus and the HTC Velocity. The store had a number of other devices for sale, but most were far to low end for what I use my phone for (HTC Wildfire) or I knew they were too far along their lifecycle (Motorola Atrix).

So why did I choose the Velocity? 4 main reasons:

The screen: I'm one of those freaks that can spot a Pentile screen from 10 paces, and the Galaxy constantly made my eyes feel like they were shifting focus. It's hard to describe, but hard to ignore. 

Guts of the phone: The other part was the CPU and video card. A small amount of researched seemed to show that the Snapdragon at 1.5Ghz and the Adreno 220 was a better performer than the Cortex A9 in the Galaxy Nexus. They were comparible in size, and looks don't mean a hell of a lot to me, as I always end up wrapping my phone up in some sort of Otterbox style case anyway.

LTE: Telstra in Australia, have rolled out their LTE network to a lot of regional centres very quickly, but most importantly, there's an LTE tower about 100m from my workplace, and with no Wifi, it makes for a much better internet connection when I'm away from home. In fact, it puts my poor home internet (ADSL 1) to shame.

Upgradability: The device shipped with Gingerbread (2.3.7 to be exact), but HTC and Telstra both promised an ICS upgrade when the device was announced. It took a month or two, but it's now happily running 4.0.3 with Sense 3.6. 

The good times

Speed - Importance - 40%

My god this phone is fast. I never have any lag as far as opening apps, changing screens, locking and unlocking etc. Everything runs well. Speed in this case also refers to the speed at which I can get a multitude of things done. The multitasking for ICS, as implemented by Sense 3.6 (which is basically the same as stock, allows for good switching between apps when your trying to accomplish something of significance on the phone. Not that you need it that often, but it's nice to be there.

Customising - Importance - 60% 

The inner geek in me loves the fact that I can try all these different keyboards and launchers, and muck around with widgets and home screen layouts. I've got the home screen of my phone setup just the way I like it.

App controls and associations - Importance 90%

This is a big advantage to Android, and not something that gets talked about. In iOS, you can have associations to files (eg, PDFpen on android shows as an option when you ask iOS to "throw" the file to another app), but what happens is the file is copied from whatever app has the file, and placed inside the app that you send it too, which means to end up with 2 copies. With android, apps have hooks into the OS in a similar way to desktop OS's, in that, if you have a PDF, you can save it to the phone, and any number of PDF readers/editors can open, edit and save, all while only having 1 copy. 

The bad

Inconsistency - Importance - 20%
This is slightly annoying, but about half the elements follow the Holo theme from ICS, and the rest follow the Sense theme...or something else..it's not a huge issue for me personally, but it would be nice if it was all tidied up.

App polish - Importance - 20%

In general, it's rare (but not impossible) to find an iOS app that it's polished off nicely from an interface point of view. It is, however, quite easy to roll into the google play store and find some absolute trainwrecks that look like poor shareware from the Windows 3.1 days. You can steer clear of them, and the general day to day apps all look ok.


Virus - Importance - 50%
This had me worried from the get go. Even the fact that there is antivirus available says to me that something is up. It's like reading the recommendations for travel to a foreign country and seeing "make sure you get ALL your shots before you go, including some special ones." I've never encountered a virus yet, and I steer clear of installing APK's that aren't from the store, but that doesn't mean I don't think about it, and the information that is stored on a phone is downright scary. I don't have that worry with iOS. It doesn't mean that it's not there, but the fact that it's talked about concerns me.

Battery Life - Importance - 90%
All this wonderful customisation, speed and control is all useless if the battery is dead, and my god, does this phone chew battery. When I bought this, I read up on the specs, and noted that it had a slightly bigger battery than my iPhone 4 (1640mAh vs 1400mAh), and I figured with the LTE and bigger CPU, my battery life would suffer a bit. My iPhone would usually have 30% battery at bed time (about 11pm) after pulling the plug on the charger at about 7am. In an LTE area, I'm lucky if I make it to 1pm before the dreaded 14% battery alarm goes off. It's totally unacceptable, and I'm actually in the process of seeing if Telstra can do something about it. I've sent it off once already to the repair centre, who said they did a software upgrade (I have no idea what this was) and it was now "working within manufacture specifications." If they can't give me a better phone, I'll have to invest in an extended battery, because I can't go on with this as it is.

Reflection

Would I do it again, yes and no. I think I would still switch to android, but to a different device. I bought right before all the usual suspects released their big guns (One XL and Galaxy S3), so I'm left with the most powerful last gen phone available. With terrible battery life.

Advice

What you should do if you're in my situation? For all but the most technically minded people, stick with an iPhone. It's likely to have whatever fun and new iPhone app all your friends are playing, with find my phone it's easy to set it up to track (android can do this, but to be honest, Apple's setup is WAY easier), and the after sales support is second to none. If you've been using PC's fairly heavily for a number of years, the additional options android gives you as far as actually getting things done will come as a blessing to you.


Just make sure it's got a decent battery.....


Damo

My test Lumia 800 arrived....and it's going back on Monday

So I'm back from Holidays, and a Lumia 800 that Nokia sent me was waiting for me. I was super excited to give this a try, as I hadn't really sat down with Windows Phone 7 properly.

The hardware and the packaging were very well done, nice materials, comes with a case, all good.

Then the downhill spiral started....I turned it on.

I currently have a HTC Velocity 4G, and when I was buying this, the fight was between it, an iPhone 4S, and a Galaxy Nexus. I would normally default to the iPhone, but I wanted to try the android universe. And while I would have preferred the battery life and the stock ICS on the Galaxy, I just couldn't get past the Pentile display. The jagged edges of text and other UI elements is a constant distraction to using the phone. The Lumia's screen, with the lower res, makes this worse. I've got a feeling the UI of Windows Phone 7 doesn't help this either, with it's stark contrasting colours and skinny fonts. I've used my friend's HTC Mozart (with a Super LCD screen) for a short period of time, and the screen on that was fine, great even.

That's my only gripe about the phone hardware itself. A SLCD, or possible a SAMOLED+ screen would have fixed this. So straight away I can't recommend this phone.

Now onto Windows Phone 7. I couldn't get my gmail to work, so I was pretty much dead in the water for contacts, calendar and email (all of which I use google for). It appears to be a common problem, however not an easily replicated problem. Turns out Google was having a bit of a hissy fit over Friday night with new Sync connections, so I'll give this another go. On top of this, the review unit was for UMTS 900Mhz, and I'm on Next G (850Mhz) so reception at home was lousy to say the least.

If I could get it on 850Mhz and get gmail working, Windows Phone might be an option, so I'll reserve my comment on that when I can get my hands on a phone that works to use for a few weeks.



But my god that Pentile screen has GOT to go.

Buying a new phone sucks at the moment


Mobile phone shopping at the moment is a bit of a nightmare.


iPhone 4S is now a few months old, and while that's not very old, the design is pushing 18 months old, which is starting to seem....old is the wrong word...less interesting is probably more appropriate.


The Galaxy Nexus is out, but it's currently in what I think will be the new standard "akward period" on Andriod releases. The latest version comes out, with a new device, but then all the other devices lag to get the updates so bad it makes buying any of them a tough decision. The GN is very nice, beautiful screen, good design, but the apps are playing catchup. Want any other Android phone? Here, cop Gingerbread and a roll of the dice that you will get a factory upgrade to the next version.


Windows Phone is really starting to interest me, but the hardware that is available in Australia at the moment is very meh. The Lumia 800 is the first one that will have the "wow" factor, but the 900's already been announced in the states, which makes that a tough buy on a 2 year contract.


If I walked into a Telstra shop today, I don't know what phone I would buy. There is no modern WP7 hardware, none of the Androids run ICS yes, except the GN, and the iPhone looks like it's been there since I signed up my last 2 year contract.


Ugh.....

iPad vs the laptop

iPad vs the laptop.

It's an argument that started with the iPad 1 launch event about 12 months ago. Mr Jobs announced that they wanted to have a device that sat in between the phone and the laptop. It had to web browse better, email better etc. It's been about 3 months now since we've had the iPad, which i think is a good amount of time to reflect on the impact that it's had on the family laptop.

And I think the laptop is feeling the pressure. When you really think about it, the laptop was designed (in my opinion anyway) firstly to allow people to do the work they do on their desktop computer when they are on the move, and secondly to allow people to do their work in multiple locations.

The multiple locations argument is getting very thin nowadays. The Internet, and that technological marvel that is the $5 flash drive start to make carrying a laptop device around a waste of time. I've recently been promoted at work, and one of the unwritten rules of becoming a manager is that you get a laptop rather then a desktop. Now i have a fairly substantial desktop setup at work, and a 27" iMac at home. What good reason do i have to give up those to do work, just to be relegated to a 15" hp notebook. Yes, the notebook can (and probably would) have as much guts as the desktop machine, but what's the point if it just sits on my desk all day. If i need to get anything home, i have a thumb drive on my most of the time, as well as access to mobile me, drop box and google docs.

So that just leaves the "work on the move" argument. Now I have a 5 minute car drive to work every day, so this really doesn't apply to me, but for people with a 1hr+ commute each day, this is valuable time that could be spent doing something. So what do you do sitting on the train with your "device" on your lap. Your not going to be doing any serious gaming (although I'm squre there are people that do the odd WoW instance on the train), and i doubt any a good quality Photoshop work came from a notebook on the lap of someone on a train.

So your basically left with reading emails, which my phone has been my main device for that for over a year now, web page reading, media consumption, and some text editing. Media consumption (and I'm including web page reading in this) is much more palatable with phones with high res screens, but the viewing experience isn't what your would call totally enjoyable.

I'm sure once I was set up, the 17" hp laptop i had would have been a better experience, until the battery ran out 2 hours in (which for the record is about......now), but lugging that beast to and from the station and the motel would have been a nightmare. I'm glad a brought the iPad, it's done everything I've asked of it, land not once have had the foretold "shit, i wish this had flash" moment. Its a light, easy to use device that does almost everything i need, without being burdened by a desktop os, and i think it's awesome.....

...until the guy with the 11" MacBook air just walked in, and made my whole post irrelevant.

Bastard.

Best knock knock joke ever, thanks Xander

Xander: Knock Knock?
Me: Who's there?
Xander: Vegetable
Me: Vegetable who?
Xander: Vegetable in!

Huh?

Me: What do you mean? I don't get it.
Xander: Vegetable in!
Me: Na...still don't get it.
Xander: You know, vegetable in!
Me: Sorry, still no idea..
Jaime: Do you mean lettuce?
Xander: Oh yeah! Lettuce in!!!

Comedy gold...

Keyboards and Parallels 


When we got the iMac, one of the first accessories we got afterwards was the full size keyboard. The iMac ships with Apples bluetooth keyboard, which is nice, but it doesn't have the normal number keys:

I really wish there was a wireless version of the full keyboard, because I hate having that cable running to the keyboard. I tried putting the big keyboard under the mac and using the little one for day to day use, but Jai and I both use the number keys too much.


So in the draw it goes. At least I can use the bluetooth one with an iPad when if we get one.


The other thing I have been playing with is Parallels for Mac. This software lets you install windows on the mac, and use windows programs. Now I've had experience with Virtual Machines in the past, however Parallels differs in that once the machine is set up, the windows background and task bar fades into the background, and then windows programs run as if they were just running on the mac natively. It's really slick, and the setup is very intuitive. 


I got it all set up with a 64bit version of Windows 7, and all the necessary drivers were installed automatically, and away it went.


But then I had an issue....what do I run on it. Mail, browsing and iTunes are all on the mac, so no need there. Steam is now mac compatible, and while not all the games I own on steam are mac yet, the main ones are (HL2, CS:S etc). Blizzard games are all mac native as well. So I say staring at this great windows explorer screen (which looks awesome on the iMac display).


I went and made a cuppa, to think about how there surely must be some program that I'm missing on the mac that I could use this to run. One of the reasons I had little resistance to purchasing the mac was the fact that programs like Parallels and Bootcamp existed, so if push came to shove, I could always run windows on this if OS X ended up giving me the shits.


But after an hour of staring at this screen, browsing download squad to see what great windows apps were around (which I did with Safari on the mac, ironically), I eventually came to the conclusion that this was, for us at least, and very well executed, highly integrated and professionally developed waste of time. I'm sure there are people out there that use some sort of windows program in day to day life that this would appeal to, but for what we are doing here at home, it just doesn't make sense.


So I uninstalled it...


Carry on OS X.... :)

A week with a Mac

Well, where did that week go!

I thought I'd share my experience here, mainly so I can go back after a few months/years and recall exactly wtf I was thinking perhaps...but we'll see.

I've gotta say, right now, at this second, I'm now a Mac convert. My opinion may change over time, but right at this point in time, I'm loving it. There is two main reasons for this:

1. I don't have time to deal with "crap"
2. I dont like dealing with "crap"

Now "crap" may be a harsh word when it comes to describing windows configuration tasks, but really, this day in age, no-one should have to go through some of the driver pain that people go through to get windows to do everything they want. Chipset, vid card, sound drivers, change resolution etc. Now, unfortunately, this is the nature of the beast, IE, an OS for every machine. Windows on mac hardware via bootcamp still has all these problems, but at this point in my life, I don't want to have to deal with this "crap". Fire it up, bam, working. New driver out? Thats cool, system update will sweep it up next week and install it for me.

I'm also not missing any software from windows. I was living in the iTunes ecosystem anyway from my iphone, so that was no biggy. All my chat gear was there, and safari runs on webkit, so I don't miss chrome (although chrome for mac is available). Echofon for twitter is great, as it syncs read tweets with echofon on iphone (so awesome). Steam is up and running, and I played a few rounds of CS:Source and Portal, so thats all good. SC2 I assume works for mac, so I might grab that soon...if I feel like it.

So, thats all the good....and seeing as I appreciate balanced reporting...what about the negatives?

Well, the big negative is the fact that one of the ram sticks died within 6 days of owning it. The machine came with applecare, which means that they can send someone to fix it, however I'm too far from the nearest centre for this to happen. I rang the service centre, and they wanted me to post the whole thing to them, which is ridiculous given it's a single SO-DIMM that is the problem. I've posted it to them, and I'm awaiting a return part....hopefully to arrive soon.

The other negatives revolve around the learning curve of using this thing. Most things are the same, however after 15 years of Ctrl-C being copy, changing to Command-C (with the button effectively where alt is on a pc keyboard) takes some time. Most of the rest of using it is fairly straight forward though.

So....time will tell how this goes, but in the mean time, I will enjoy the simplicity that is OS:X.

So much so that I put it on the Dell Mini 9 I have here :)

Well, 24 hours into having windows 7 back on the netbook....and things seem to be going well. I can certainly understand people wanting to run linux variants on these things. The last 2 OS's i had on this were Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and then Meega. UNR was certainly feature packed, and Meego was DAMN fast, but now I'm back on a windows variant, it's nice to be able to actually install programs I use. AzSMRC is the main bugbear of running linux. While it's supported, putting it on is a labour of terminal windows and multiple downloads. Windows version is an installer...a gazillion times easier.

Everything is a bit laggier, but I really don't mind it.....in fact, you almost expect it with hardware like this.

Time will tell if it will last.....

maemo.org - Talk - View Single Post - Overclock the N900?

Just OC'd my new phone.....so much faster now, but only confirms the fact that this phone is ONLY for hardcore geeks :P

maemo.org - Talk - View Single Post - Overclock the N900?

Ok, 3rd try at actually getting this working properly...IE me actually updating it :)

More to come

Hello again, we will try this again!

Just started it