Tag Archives: android

An evening in the company of the delightful Mr Samsung Galaxy S4

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I’m sure you’re dying to know how I’m getting on with the S4. How many of you struggled to sleep last night with the anticipation?

Where to start? That screen, OMFG that screen. 5″ of bright full 1080p HD. I played the classic Big Buck Bunny 1080p video and everything was crisper than crisp. I haven’t used it in bright sunlight yet but I’m sure it’s as crap as all modern phones.

How does the phone look? I couldn’t give two hoots. I buy phones as tools, not fashion accessories. Having said that, I wouldn’t be seen dead with a white one ;-)

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The lightness of the S4 can be disconcerting when the buzzer gives haptic feedback but I’ll happily take lightness over a brick in my pocket any day. Oddly, the phone doesn’t feel big at all. In some ways it feels smaller than the HTC Sensation.

Whilst I always hated HTC Sense and far prefer the Stock AOSP Android experience, I don’t find TouchWiz that objectionable. Given that I spend 95% of my time on a phone inside apps, it doesn’t really affect me that much. It still has the powerful system-wide sharing features of Android and the still excellent (but now very cluttered) notification bar.

Of course it comes with a ton of Samsung junk Apps, just like HTC. I tried them all (Hub, Fitness, Story Book etc etc) but just can’t see the point of using single-vendor apps when I can use third-party ones from Google, Endomondo, Evernote or Amazon and bring everything with me if I switch to another vendor in the future.

Games, as you’d expect are blazingly fast and look gorgeous. I did find one or two that crapped out at launch tho. I’d love to know why.

I’ve read a lot of negativity about the “gimmick” features involving hand swipes and eye tracking but I was surprised to find that I really liked both.

By tracking the location of your eye, it can auto-scroll web-pages etc when it notices your head tilt. I was easily able to start, stop and rewind a web-page using it. The big down side is that it only seems to work in Samsung apps. I’d love to see this in Twitter apps in particular.

The hand-waving is more gimmicky and allows you to scroll through photo albums etc. I just liked the ability to check the lock-screen for messages/missed-calls by waving my hand over the phone on my desk.

I’m looking forward to trying out Bluetooth 4.0 on my Fitbit. I don’t think the sync is currently working but they said on Twitter that they are going to test this week. I also don’t know if Android finally has BLE support to avoid big battery drain on connected devices. I’m a big fan of the idea of NFC for payments so I’ll give that a go when I have a chance.

Another gimmicky thing that I like is the IR blaster built into the headphone socket. My eldest daughter thought it was pointless but I liked being able to change channel/volume on the TV without hunting for the remote.

One annoyance, not specific to the Galaxy is the term “16GB”. This is total storage so you only start out with 9GB user storage, which I have already filled. Hence the absolute need for an SD card slot. I have a 32GB microSD on the way from Amazon. Side-note: This is a UHS-1 card which has 48Mbs throughput in certain cameras. Standard Class 10 SD is only 10Mbs. So I’d love to know if Samsung has implemented a UHS interface on the S4 or if it’s normal SD.

A big word of warning on the Dropbox integration. I just discovered that 4GB+ of the storage used on the phone was because it decided to auto-sync everything from Dropbox. Everything! Eventually I ran out of storage on the phone and it stopped syncing. To avoid this, disable the “DocumentSync” feature in Settings->Accounts->Cloud. Stupid stupid default Samsung, what were you thinking?

The phone is LTE and it should be fun to check out the download speeds the next time I’m in London. Given that I’m in Old Chapel, I can’t even get GPRS without major arm-waving. I’m looking forward to the 30Mbs that Pat Rabbitte has personally guaranteed we’ll all have, as a minimum, by 2015.

And now, back to reality.

I haven’t had much chance to try out the camera. But the few initial pics were superb. I’ll definitely be giving 1080p 30fps video a try out this week. Here’s a quick example in bad light in my office:

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A few other notes. The charger is 2 Amp and a useful compact size. The charger cable useless at a metre too short. The phone uses microSIMs so make sure you leave the shop the right kind.

I’ll try out some of the more obscure features in the next few weeks and then promptly forget about them.

Vodafone will force you to “upgrade” to Red Essentials at a minimum if you are on an older cheaper plan. So I’m now paying €5 a month extra for 500MB a month less data. You stay classy Vodafone.

One final note to Samsung. It would be a huge help if you’d do a phone-specific Samsung-branded sports armband, particularly since you now have this sports app. I’m really shooting in the dark with ordering on Amazon.

Look, you can’t really go wrong with most mid to high end Android phones nowadays. If you get the S4 or the One or the Z or the Nexus4 or the whatever,  you’ll probably be more than happy. The S4 packs an amazing raft of features into a pleasantly small package. I think I’m going to be happy with it for the next two years.

 

My Smartphone evolution from N95-8GB to Samsung Galaxy S4 #SGS4

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smartphones

My first actual “Smartphone” was a Nokia N70 but it has the dubious pleasure of being the only phone I ever lost. The one that really got me using Apps and understanding the importance of SoLoMo was the classic N95-8GB which I loved despite its numerous flaws. It was also the most I ever spent on a phone.

When I realised that Android would be an unstoppable juggernaut, I got a HTC G1 back in Nov 2008, shortly after it was released. Still a fine phone and I do love that slidey keyboard.

I followed that with the HTC Desire which was many people’s first Android phone and still a firm favourite with lots of them. Our 13 yo has had it for the past 2 years and the only thing he dislikes even now is the lack of storage to install Apps.

I bought an Orange San Francisco (ZTE Blade) for my Dad as a test intro to Android. He took to it no problem and now has a Nexus S. Our 11 yo has had the Blade for the past year. A shockingly solid piece of kit for something that cost £99 without contract.

In Aug 2011 I was chuffed to learn I had won a HTC Sensation from Vodafone. That’s what I’ve been using until today. It was and is a superb piece of hardware let down by pretty awful software from HTC and some really ropey build quality. It is also unfortunately not that popular with the creators of custom ROMs and I’ve never had a ROM which works 100% reliably with all the features. Bluetooth is a particular pain in the ass. But the Cyanogenmod ROMs still beat anything HTC themselves released.

And then we get to 2013. It’s currently a three horse race for most people between the HTC One, the Sony Experia Z and the Samsung Galaxy S4. On paper based on raw specs, the S4 wins. The other two are better looking phones and apparently are better built. I don’t trust Sony in general with maintaining products and they always overprice, so the Z is out. Loyalty should have me buying the HTC One but three drawbacks have forced me into the arms of Samsung for the first time.

The first, and worst, is that you cannot ever replace the battery in the One. This isn’t like the iPhone where it’s awkward and requires tools. You have to physically destroy the HTC One to get at the battery. In a world where people are starting to return to the idea of repairability in products and owning things for longer, this is a disastrous decision by HTC. I have had spare batteries in my pocket for my phones since N95-8GB days, I can’t go back to worrying about my phone running out of charge.

Add to that the lack of an SD Card slot and a weirdly de-specced 4MP camera and I’m afraid HTC will be sold for spare change to someone like Microsoft before the end of the year.

So SGS4 it is. Hands-on in the shop was a very impressive experience. But I haven’t even turned it on at home yet. More when I do.

What the inside of an €88 Android Tablet looks like

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My daughter’s Eken T02 is still going strong after nearly a year but it still has the same two problems as ever. [a] the accuracy of the touch screen is awful and [b] it barely lasts 45mins on battery.

I don’t think I can do anything about the first problem but I decided last week to sort out the second one. Particularly considering Scribblenauts is now fiiiiiiinally available on Android (currently requires a US VPN, Market Enabler, Amazon App Store and a US virtual credit card. Slick ;-p )

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I popped it open quite easily by removing 4 screws and a few plastic tabs. It’s surprisingly neat inside but has a really weird smell!

Obviously the batteries are garbage based on how long they last so I ordered a replacement on eBay. It’s a “3500mAh” unit with the usual proviso that Chinese mAh tend to be a bit different from the mAh the rest of the world measures in. It’s also the usual China story where they’ll arrive at some indeterminate point in the next few weeks. Should only take a minute to swap them. Fingers crossed it sorts the problem out.

I’ll let ye know how it goes.

 

My 4 years of Android today and Ireland’s first Android App

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Today is the 4th anniversary of me paying $499 on eBay for a HTC G1, the first Android phone. Whilst some of my tech predictions over the years have been a little off (*cough* iPad) I couldn’t have got it more right with Android.

When I heard about the Android project mid-2008, it was obvious Google wasn’t going into things half-heartedly. The G1 itself was a mixed bag. Ugly as sin but with a slide-out keyboard that I still love. Android 1.5 was rough but very functional for someone like me who spends their time on Google products like GMail. I still have the G1, running Android 2.3 and waking me up every morning.

The reason I got the G1 was not for pointless bragging rights, it was because we had decided to build an Android App to show-off the LouderVoice API to some Enterprise customers we were trying to land in the mobile space.

I created the spec and wireframes for the App and also figured out what extra features our API would need. The basic idea was “Review Anything Anywhere”. Essentially what Kevin Rose tried to do with Oink several years later. We both failed because no-one wants to do that :-)

Marino Software in Dublin did the App coding for us and we finally launched Ireland’s first Android App in May 2009 for Android 1.6. It never had many users but it was a fantastic tool for showing potential business customers what our system could do.

The same back-end API is now used to power the reviews in the Riverdance Android and iPhone Apps.

Last week I installed the old App again on my HTC Sensation running Android 4.1.2 and whaddyaknow, it still works! Sure the graphics-scaling is horrific on that big screen but you can still browse and submit reviews to our API.

In those 4 years I’ve gone through a HTC G1, HTC Desire and HTC Sensation. I’ve also bought a ZTE Blade and Eken T02 tablet for others. There is no doubt that my next phone will be Android but sadly not HTC, as I insist on my phones having replaceable battery and SD card. At some point next year I’ll get a decent Android Tablet too.

There are two upcoming areas I find exciting in the world of Android:

  1. Ultra-cheap single board Android computers in the style of Raspberry Pi. Most of these are being sold as 1080p media players but they can do a hell of a lot more for very little money. Which feeds into point 2.
  2. Hardware interfaces like IOIO. Once I finish a couple of my fun Raspberry Pi and Arduino projects, I want to do some car projects using IOIO. Rather than your phone/tablet just being for calls/music/GPS in the car, imagine if it was connected to a wide range of sensors and interfaces. Every car on the road acting as a generator of a wide range of interesting IoT data, all location-tagged and uploaded live over a mobile data connection.

We’ve come a long way baby.

Lunchtime review of Eken T02 7″ Android Tablet for €88

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This quick n dirty video covers most of it, but in summary:

Pros:

  1. It’s €88, in total, including EMS shipping
  2. Android ICS
  3. Capacitive Screen
  4. Full Android Market
  5. HDMI/USB/SDCard
  6. 1080p video
  7. Strong GPU for all games
  8. It’s €88, in total, including EMS shipping
  9. It’s €88, in total, including EMS shipping

Cons:

  1. Screen is only 800×480
  2. Touch can be unresponsive at times
  3. CPU may struggle on heavy-duty games
  4. Some current strangeness with Android Market means apps incorrectly absent
  5. Upgrading OS a bit fiddly
  6. No Bluetooth

I got mine on Pandawill.com. Took approx a week to arrive. Make sure to setup an account first before using PayPal to buy. I didn’t and never got any confirmation email from them that order had even been received.

Did I mention that it’s €88, in total, including EMS shipping?

First two trivial parts of getting App Inventor working on Raspberry Pi done

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I’ve been playing a small bit with the Raspberry Pi VM on VMware to see what’s possible and what isn’t. One thing I am eager to try when it arrives on the week of May 14th (YAY!), is to get App Inventor working on it.

There are three basic user parts to App Inventor. The browser-based Designer, the Java-based Blocks Editor and the Phone Emulator (if you don’t have a phone).

Yesterday I got the first two bits working with about 2 minutes work. All you need to do is install the OpenJDK. SUN Oracle Java is not available yet.

The bit that will need more work is the emulator. I think. Ye see, I grabbed the code for the Linux version of the emulator and followed the simple instructions to build it. Then I saw it was building for i386 and of course the RPi is ARM-based. Damn.

A bit of poking around and I realised we were almost in a recursive loop. I was running ARM Linux in qemu i386 emulator on a Virtual Machine and I was trying to run an ARM emulator inside a another qemu i386 emulator inside that. Yes my head exploded too.

But then sense prevailed and I realised that Android is ARM and RPi is ARM, so do we need an emulator at all, or just an Android image compiled for ARM11 inside some sort of wrapper/container?

As an old Embedded guy I should be all over this but I’ve forgotten more than I ever learned about cross-compiling and building OS images. Anyone have any ideas on where to start? I popped a question on the relevant App Inventor Google Group too.

Of course all of this may be moot if the 256MB of RAM and 700MHz CPU is not enough to support all of this. But it’s worth a try.

Unofficial Mario Kart 64 on Android and an $89 Tablet

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Two completely separate stories joined together nicely this morning.

First was the news that Mario Kart 64 now runs on Android. I initially thought [a] it’s an official port and [b] therefore it’s an April fool. But I installed and ran it perfectly on a HTC Sensation running ICS.

Then I got an email from MP4 Nation in Hong Kong offering their Herotab C8 Android Tablet for $89. Yes, that’s €66 for a 7″ multi-touch capacitive screen tablet with 512MB RAM, 4GB storage, Wifi, HDMI, USB, USB OTG, microSD, 1.2GHz CPU and (sadly) Android 2.3.

Now this tablet is entirely generic and they even warn that it will probably have cosmetic nicks and marks on the body but it’s €66!

My daughter was looking at the Nintendo 3DS in the Argos catalogue yesterday and it was €182. As for the PS Vita pricing, are they all on crystal meth in Sony? Not a hope.

Which do you think your kids are going to go for? An overpriced clunky web-clueless 20th century device with games that cost upwards of €44 a pop. Or a web-enabled handheld computer with hundreds of thousands of apps and games where most cost less than €5?

The perfect example of this is Scribblenauts which is €21 on DS and 79c on iPad. None of our kids play it on DS any more, as the 10″ screen on the iPad blows it away for playability. Yeah yeah I know Scribblenauts isn’t on Android yet. But you get the point.

I know they won’t do it, as they (like Apple), make a profit on their hardware, but at some point Nintendo is going to have to bite the bullet. The Sony Experia Play is the sort of thing they should be looking at but for a younger audience and with really great gaming controls.

It’s time for the Nintendo Andro-DS. It would offer the absolute best playability for DS games. They might go the route of locking the games so that they only play on their Android device and they also give owners access to the full standard Android market. But if they were really brave they would make the games available on all Android devices for €4.99 each. They should still make an Andro-DS as it would be the best way of playing the games.

Scribblenauts has sold 1m units on iPad. Mario Kart Andro-DS would sell 20m units easy.

Back to that el-cheapo tablet. Android 2.3 is horrible on tablets so it really needs to have ICS before I’d consider it, no matter how cheap. There are some community ROMs out there but they all look very early-stage. If I could be sure ICS was coming, it is a no-brainer at that price. Still I’m very tempted to take a flutter as it’s a 1-day deal only.

No I don’t want to install your stupid hamstrung iPad App, I want your web-site

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I saw a tweet along those lines the other day (sorry can’t remember who) and it really struck a chord. These “please install our App” pop-ups are infuriating in general on both Android and iOS. Every single vbulletin site I have gone to recently has done it. Why the hell would I want a separate App for every damned site I visit?

But yesterday was the new nadir with Dropbox. Not only do you get the pop-up, they won’t let you visit information/download pages for any other platform on the iPad, they just auto-re-direct you to the iPad page!!

For fucks sake Dropbox, I wanted to read what was involved in installing on a Linux server. Do I really need to use a desktop to read that page?

This finally revealed a very good reason for jailbreaking your iPad – you get a User-Agent Switcher and can pretend you are running Firefox on the Desktop. Also handy for those stupid sites who want to force a dumbed-down mobile web-site on you.

Piss-poor reduced functionality Apps are the scourge of iOS and Android. Last weekend I ended up uninstalling the iPad Facebook App and now use the website in Safari just so I can have a goddammed Share button.

Cyanogenmod – The Community Android Firmware – Now 1 million users!

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As a longtime Cyanogenmod user even I’m a bit shocked by this number.

 

In case you aren’t aware of it, Cyanogenmod is a community built version of Android AOSP (Android Open Source Project). Every time Google releases a new version of Android, they release the source code shortly afterwards so that anyone can build a phone or phone software using it. There are hundreds if not thousands of community projects which take this code and port it in different ways to all the different handsets.

Cyanogenmod is the best known and usually the best. You get lots of great extra features, usually a speed improvement and most importantly, it excludes all those HTC/Samsung/Motorola bloatware UIs that those manufacturers insist on adding to their phones.

Cyanogenmod is also fantastic for getting the latest version of Android on to old unsupported phones. I’ve even run Gingerbread 2.3 on my old HTC G1 which was the first ever Android phone.

But I’ve always seen Cyanogen as a niche geek thing that would never have big numbers. I assumed the hassle of rooting your phone so you can install it was too much for most people. But 1m users is stunning. I could see this number going through the roof if a bunch of no-name Chinese phone makers use it and release $50 no-contract Android phones this year.

Well done to Steve Kondik and all of the Cyanogenmod teams out there. We’re all eagerly looking forward to CM9 which is the Cyanogenmod version of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.