Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/10/24/g1-versus-sidekick-2/
I have been a Sidekick user since the black and white days. Prior to receiving my G1 on Tuesday evening, I had used my Sidekick 2 pretty heavily for nearly four years. I loved its solid feel and the membrane keyboard. The applications mostly worked together pretty well, though the web browser was butt-slow. I have high hopes that as the spiritual reincarnation of the Danger team, the Android team will spawn a worthy successor to the Sidekick 2, which I regard as a peculiarly satisfying pinnacle in the evolution of the mobile phone.
I have been playing with my G1 for three days now. Here’s how it has been so far . . .
Setup
I fault the Quick Start guide for going over what the buttons do and the user interface, then half way through the booklet it tells you how to put the battery inside the phone. That was somewhat annoying because the very first thing I wanted to know is how do I get the battery in the phone and turn it on. Transferring the SIM card was easy enough, and the “tap the Android” process worked rather well.
Unfortunately, the night I tried to first use the phone there was a bug that surfaced in Google’s internal systems so I could not log on to the phone through my hosted domain account. It tossed out a bizarre error code and as usual Google’s support was no help: another customer with Premier hosted domains was incorrectly informed that the G1 didn’t support domain logons.
In retrospect, I should have tried T-Mobile technical support, who have through the years done a solid job at escalating Sidekick issues appropriately. I give the device an extra bonus point for putting the “factory reset” feature within the options panel, rather than making it a voodoo process that involves a paper clip.
Hardware
I wish the Android could be incarnated within the Sidekick 2’s hardware. The Sidekick 2 is built like a tank, with a solid feel and rubber bumpers. You could bash a fool in the skull with a Sidekick 2 if you had to, wipe off the blood, and get back to writing an email on that awesome rubber membrane keyboard.
The G1 is smaller in each dimension, and feels more rickety. It is solid enough, but it is no Sidekick 2. My biggest gripe is that the keyboard, while not truly awful, leaves something to be desired: there is little tactile feel and it took a little retraining to hold my right thumb further out over the keyboard in order to clear the right-side wedge. I am not sure how that will do for prolonged typing. The space key is also narrowed and at least once I have typed an ‘@’ instead of a space.
I like that it charges through the Mini USB port. Yes, I would prefer if it had a proper headphone jack, but that’s not a huge deal for me.
I really look forward to the day that the screen rotates based on how you are holding it.
Gmail
The Gmail client is very nice: it integrates really well with Gmail on the web and my contacts list. If you compose a new message it can check not only your contacts list but also other addresses that you have corresponded with, which is nice. When I read a message on the phone it is marked as read in Gmail and vice versa. It is also easy enough to switch between tags.
Camera
The Sidekick 2 takes muddy pictures on a good day. The G1 has a 3 megapixel camera that takes some pretty nice photos under decent lighting conditions. Unfortunately, the G1 fails a few things the Sidekick 2 got right: the lens is right where I’m apt to put my thumb, there’s no flash, the shutter lag is substantial. The Pictures application is decoupled from the Camera application, so you need to switch from the one to the other to review your photos.
Contacts
I was at first disappointed that there is no practical way to export my contacts from the Sidekick 2. I went through my Gmail Contacts list and cleaned everyone up, integrating phone numbers to email addresses. I had a lot of fun finding pictures of everyone on the web and cropping them into my contacts list. There seemed several instances where updates I made on the phone or on the web didn’t make it across. And one contact I swear got eaten and had to be re-added.
One feature lacking from the Sidekick 2 is the ability to put friends in groups. At the very least it is nice to be able to pull up a group of coworkers versus the rest of your friends. Maybe there is a “tag” feature I have overlooked, or things will improve in the future.
Another unfortunate bug is that in the Gmail interface, you can not add a photo to a contact who has only a phone number.
Web Browser
The Sidekick 2 web browser was horribly horribly slow, and would tend to get upset if a page had too much JavaScript. The G1 web browser is fairly zippy.
That said, the interface can be extremely frustrating: wide web pages require a lot of dragging up and down and back and forth. Sometimes columns of text will be shrunk to page width, but not always. You can not easily resize text. (You couldn’t do this on the Sidekick 2 at all.) The Google Reader app works well enough but there is no way to make the font larger. (I hate squinting.) I am not yet used to the zoom feature: you need to hold your finger down on the screen, without clicking a link or scrolling, then you need to go catch the + or – button that appears and hold that down . . .
The Sidekick 2 allowed for bookmark folders: the G1 web browser has no folders or even a provision to reorder the bookmarks. This is really frustrating because one of the great features to me was to have a folder of Nextmuni bookmarks so I could quickly pull up information on approaching transit vehicles. I look forward to this being fixed. It would be even more awesome if bookmarks could be synced with say a Firefox subfolder on my computers.
The web page links are often quite tiny, and my big beefy man fingers are constantly clicking on the wrong thing.
Messaging
The G1 data plan includes I believe 400 SMS, whereas the Sidekick data plan was $5 cheaper and included unlimited SMS. I like that the SMS application groups messages by sender as in Gmail: tapping a thread brings up what amounts to a conversation with a contact. Deleting SMS messages is a little annoying: you get to confirm that you will delete an entire thread.
The Sidekick 2 supported AOL instant messenger and you could add a Yahoo instant messenger application. What it did do well was to proxy the connection through the Sidekick service so that if you lost reception temporarily messages would queue on either side and be delivered asynchronously. I do not know if the G1 does this.
The G1 supports Google / Jabber, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL within a single IM application. I prefer the way Pidgin works where contacts are grouped together regardless of their protocol. This IM application seems to require a lot of navigating up and down the hierarchy: I have no idea if it will be much fun if you are chatting with a friend through Google at the same time as you are chatting through Yahoo. Anyway, I don’t intend to use instant messaging much.
Maps
The Sidekick 2 had no navigation features. The G1 Maps application so far has been slow, inaccurate, and unstable: it crashed once and other times it would take a long time to inaccurately figure out its location. GPS is disabled by default to conserve battery power. There’s no turn-by-turn navigation. The first time I tried to grab directions the service was down, and the next time it took some fidgeting to figure out how to tell it that I wanted directions to the destination from my current location. (Click on the destination label on the map and then hit Menu > Directions.) Another frustration is that if I go to my location and then switch to Street View, I still have to click on the map near my location, and then figure out how to navigate the street view back over to the original location.
Map searches are very slow (often 10 seconds or more) even on the 3G network.
The Maps app could use some polish. I also need to get used to it. I am very disappointed that there is no transit support.
Calendar
Yay! My mobile phone now syncs with my calendar! I can not really offer a thoughtful review of the Calendar application, because whenever I launch it the user interface makes me want to vomit. I guess it will take some getting used to.
EvilFidgety Touchschreen
The “desktop” pans across three screens, which offers some possibility. It is easy enough to trash the analog clock widget on the middle screen. Alas, the touch screen takes some getting used to. For example, the first dozen times I tried to trash the Google Search widget I failed and concluded that Google had hard-wired it so that I was required to keep that widget on my desktop. I didn’t want the widget, and I hated having it forced upon me: how evil! After ranting about that here I gave it another try and successfully trashed the thing. I’m sorry I doubted your integrity, Google! Unfortunately, the wide Google search bar on the right screen can not be trashed. I google-search from within the web browser. I do not need nor do I want a Google search bar widget on my phone “desktop”. Forcing it upon me is evil and Google should apologize.
Android Market
Both phones have a marketplace where you can shop for and install additional applications. The Android Market is new and somewhat sparse. Apps download and install in the background, and have ratings and reviews so you can avoid the schlocky ones. The “Translate” app is kinda cute and potentially handy. And “cab4me lite” promises to help you map out your location and then call a local cab company, which sounds awfully neat.
What I really want is a nice note pad–I was always scribbling notes on my Sidekick. I also want an SSH client: preferably one that supports key authentication. Give it some time. I guess if I urgently desire a notepad I should jump on the developer tutorial.
Summary
People ask me what I think of the G1. I answer that it is okay and it will get nicer with time. the conventional wisdom that it is “good for a 1.0 device” works for me. If pressed I say that I miss the solid feel and membrane keyboard of my Sidekick 2. I like to think that in the next two years the Android platform will mature and someone will release a model with a form factor more to my taste.
10 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/10/20/where-is-my-android/
My new toy is due to arrive on Wednesday. This morning I asked myself “where is my G1?” I cast about on the ‘net for answers. T-Mobile’s web site explained to look up the tracking number on at UPS’es web site, so I wrote them and asked where’s my tracking number? Then I peeked at the forums and saw that I can use my cell number as my tracking number! Pretty slick!
The next thing I did after that was to get my real tracking number from the UPS web site, stick that in Google, then bookmark the link to that page so I can just check that bookmark over the next couple of days to see if my widget has arrived yet in the mail.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/10/20/collocation-versus-colocation/
In terms of spelling, I favor “colocation” or “co-location” to describe the facility where the servers go. My mind says “colocation is the fruit of cooperation.”
A lot of people use the word “collocation” which is a linguistic term to describe the frequency of word sequences. I believe this term is favored by sales and marketing people because when they type it in the word processor it appears without a red squiggle underneath.
What annoys me the most about “collocation” is that the pronunciation is different:
colocation: “KOH-location”
collocation: “COW-location”
For what it is worth, Google implies that the Internet is still 3:1 in favor of “colocation” when searching for a “colocation facility”:
“colocation facility”: 38,300 results
“collocation facility”: 10,100 results
The Linguists responsible for the word “collocation” have another term for people who use the word incorrectly: “hypercorrection.” Hypercorrection is when someone who aspires to greater social prestige will attempt to use what they regard as more prestigious language, but they end up getting it wrong.
2 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/10/17/android-no-porn/
I tittered at this comic last month, where the Android phone defeated the iPhone in a brag-off by claiming “we’ll have porn apps.” It is all about the open platform, right?
According to phandroid.com, porn is excluded from the Android Market Terms of Service:
Unacceptable Content. Google has listed practices that are unacceptable, prohibited and will result in having your account banned. They are: Nudity & Sexually Explicit Material, Violence/Bullying/Threats, Hate Speech, Age (must be 13+), Impersonation, Private Info, Copyright Infringement, Illegal Activities, Malicious Products, Prohibited Products.
Way to go, Google! Of course, I think you’ll be able to install applications from outside of the marketplace, and besides I hear that social networking is now more popular than pornography.
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/10/17/new-york-times-reviews-g1/
I should receive my first new mobile phone since 2004 on October 22. I don’t really need a new phone: the old Sidekick 2 is built like a tank and shows no sign of giving up the ghost any time soon. But I went and pre-ordered a G1 for three reasons:
1) I have a friend on Google’s Android team.
2) To annoy the iPhone weenies.
3) My employer made its targets, so I spend a little of my bonus check.
I haven’t actually used one yet, so I was pleased to catch a review in the New York Times. Some of what I enjoyed:
One crucial improvement over the iPhone: a Menu button. It summons a panel of big buttons for functions related to what you’re doing. It’s the equivalent of right-clicking a computer mouse.
“Right mouse button!” HA!
Where Android really falls down is in the iPod department. There’s no companion program like iTunes to sync your photos, music and videos to the phone; you’re expected to drag these items to the phone manually after connecting via USB cable to your Mac or PC. More time-consuming fussiness.
This is a win for me: I hate iTunes. Dragging and dropping files is just the ticket, in my book. I’ve been dealing with that interface metaphor for fifteen years and its more comfortable than dealing with the quirks of some new software package. (Back when I had lots of issues with iTunes doing stuff like copying my library over twice.) That, and I run Linux desktops.
Some of the goodies in Android will reward the iPhone holdouts: voice dialing, picture messaging, built-in audio recording and the ability to turn any song into a ring tone are all included — no charge.
Voice dialing? That should be nice. And audio recording might be fun, too. Too bad the camera is supposedly crap, and no video. But that’s why I have my Canon.
The big news is the physical keyboard. It’s not pure joy, though. The keys don’t click down much. Worse, you have to keep turning the phone 90 degrees from its customary vertical orientation every time you need to enter text. That gets old fast. And it’s bizarre that, even though the phone contains a tilt sensor like the iPhone’s, it’s not hooked up to the screen. Turning the phone 90 degrees to get a wider look at a photo or Web page doesn’t rotate the image. You have to do that manually, using a menu or by popping open the keyboard, which makes no sense.
The keyboard is my biggest concern. I think the Sidekick 2 keyboard is nearly ideal and it is a big reason I shun the iPhone. Software bugs (sounds like the e-mail client is a mess) can be addressed by future patches or possibly third-party applications. I like to think rotation can be sorted out down the road.
Overall, it sounds like the G1 will be the dowdier, more adaptable PC to the flashy smugness that is the iPhone. And, I have to admit, while I love the turtleneck sweater I bought in France, I am a PC guy. (I think that’s the point of the new Microsoft ads: Bill Gates is as big a schmuck as Jerry Seinfeld or any one else.)
Lastly, this is just sad:
Finally, there’s no headphone jack. (Hello?!) If you want to use headphones, you have to buy and carry a special adapter that connects to the USB jack.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/09/28/google-opposes-gay-marriage-ban/
Go go Google!
We do not generally take a position on issues outside of our field, especially not social issues . . . however, while there are many objections to this proposition — further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text — it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 — we should not eliminate anyone’s fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love.
Sergey Brin,
Official Google Blog
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/09/24/android-g1/
I hate mobile phones. I have had a Sidekick2 forever because it lets me jot down notes and do e-mail and IM and check things on the web. But I fricking hate talking on mobile phones! I have been tempted to ditch the expense and hassle of carrying a device around all the time and move back to index cards and save myself $50-$60 per month. Alas, a mobile phone is basically required of any SysAdmin. In the past year I have had the good fortune of working at a larger company, where I’m only on-call for two weeks every other month. So, I have begun to leave the mobile device not-on-my-person when I’d like to relax. It is kind of a bummer for people who want to call me, but the tranquility does me good.
Anyway, the HTC Android “Google Phone” was announced yesterday. I bit the bullet and pre-ordered an upgrade for my trusty old Sidekick2. After all, a lot of the same team who designed the Sidekick went to work on Android, and the large company I work for is sending out the bonus checks this week. I’m starting to get a little excited at the idea of having a GPS device, because mapping is so hot. But the other win for me is to annoy the iPhone people.
Because I am a cantankerous old mobile-phone hater, I’m also naturally annoyed at the whole iDong Mac fanboy spectacle. The iPhone is that first fancy phone, but my soul reviles at the thought of paying a premium to get locked into the whole iTunes racket and . . . ugh. It is a toy! The open development platform is going to be a nice improvement on the Apple-mediated iPlatform. Anyway, the other reason I’m looking forward to getting the new Android is to steal the self-satisfaction from my iPhone comrades. “My phone does all that janky stuff too, but it costs me somewhat less and I have greater freedom.”
What is neat about mobile phones and other “micro-computers” is that there is no dominant operating environment yet. Apple and Google are trying to get in early, and doing a better job at it than Microsoft, and it is refreshing that Google’s device emphasizes open source and platform portability. We’re going to get to replay the “OS Wars” of the 1980s and 1990s all over again and I honestly think the Android platform has a lot of potential to dominate. I personally believe that in the next few years it will have surpassed Apple a great deal, because much as MS-DOS was licensed to a growing horde of PC makers, Android seeks to live on many devices, and Apple, just as in the old days, will become that special province with 10% market share of loyal Apple weenies. I liked Apple weenies a lot more when they were persecuted oddballs. These days they’re just irritating.
Anyway, blah blah blah blah, The Joy of Tech has the best analysis of why Android will whoop Apple’s ass.
2 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/09/24/dating-advice-do-not-answer/
The following bit of advice, while not of my creation, has been well-received of late:
You’ve been meeting folk but there are those who you’d rather avoid, and you delete them from your phone. Later, they call and you answer because the number looks familiar: maybe it is a family or coworker! Awkwardness ensues.
Solution? Keep the number, but change the name to “Do Not Answer” — especially if you may have a tendency to get drunk / lonely.
I do not actually use this strategy, but I read it a couple years ago and its re-telling was recently well-received, so I thought I’d share.
/d
Me? I recently changed my voicemail to explain that I tend to avoid my mobile phone altogether and that e-mail works far better. I really dislike talking on the damn thing. It makes my brain warm and leaves me feeling anxious. Yeah, I’m weird.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/09/10/spore/
Will Wright’s latest software toy is out, and while I would be excited over such an ambitious project, I have also been underwhelmed by SimCity 4 and other games of that type in the past several years. There’s also a protest afoot against the game’s copy protection, so it has just over one star on Amazon.com. On a mailing list at work I explained that instead of rushing out to buy the new game, I’m taking a wait-and-see approach:
My interpretation is that it is an intriguing idea, but rather than building an interesting and educational toy, EA smashed it into an over-hyped high-priced bauble aimed at mass-market appeal. You can download the creature creator for free, but instead of being constrained by say, the amount of metabolism your creature would require or how fast it could reproduce given all it attributes, the only trade-off I could find was that if you spend more “money” you can buy more “features” . . .
My approach for now is to boycott the initial sales to see if they come around on the DRM, and wait to hear what other folks think of it, as well as maybe a price drop.
2c,
-danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/08/17/systems-administrators-salary-survey/
When people ask me what I do I answer either “computer stuff” or “Unix systems administration” and when asked what that means I answer that I keep the servers up and running. If you happen to be curious about my technical background you can review an old copy of my resumé online.
SAGE members and survey participants now have access to the 2007 System Administrator’s Salary Survey at http://www.sage.org/salsurv/. It is nice to check in an see how well one’s compensation aligns with that of one’s peers. I like the summary:
“A technically challenging profession that pays its entry people as much as US$50,000/year is an interesting one. System administration appears to be a fine way to make a living. Experience, education, and enhanced skillsets seem to be the growth path of choice.”
My current employer is known for its generous compensation, and the current survey is an affirmation of that. More importantly I’m enjoying my experience of my present employer and with any luck may actually hold this job for a few years.
I still hope to eventually return to Chicago to work. The San Francisco Bay Area has the highest average salaries, though Chicago averages not much less. The catch is that most Chicago jobs are in the financial services industry, and that is a less enjoyable work environment than the Silicon Valley culture.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/05/26/dont-reinvent-penis/
O’Reilly has some fun and insightful reading on the whole Microsoft-Yahoo! drama. The idea is that instead of chasing the competition because you have “penis envy” and spending your time and energy re-inventing what someone else already kicks ass at, you should figure out what awesome new things need to be built, and go do that instead. Yahoo! shouldn’t waste its time on search when what it is really good at is building a great media portal and user experience. Similarly, Microsoft should probably focus on building better network-enabled user software.
“So, my advice to Yahoo!: continue with your plan to outsource search to Google, just like you did before 2002, and plow those increased profits and reduced costs into your own innovation, strengthening the areas where you are #1, exploring new ideas that will make YOUR users insanely happy, and generally focusing on what makes Yahoo! great, rather than on what doesn’t.”
I kind of figure that building search is a waste of Yahoo!’s energy, and that if Microsoft wants to ditch their own failed effort and give Yahoo! a chunk of cash for its also-ran technology, well then hooray for Yahoo!
I was also reading about Sugar, which I have gotten to play with on the OLPC XO-1. It is somewhat frustrating to deal with because I really really really like having access to the file / folder metaphor for tracking my work. I do like the “history” interface to “activities” via the Journal, and the built-in collaboration, although I have not had a chance to actually “collaborate” with any one, seems like a really big win–the sort of thing that has a lot of potential not only for education but in the office environment that we adults use as well. It is too bad that collaboration via shared applications is such an under-developed idea. That strikes me as the sort of thing that ought to be within Microsoft’s grasp to run with, and a nice answer to the Google “spreadsheet in a web browser” mentality.
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/04/28/yahoo-hostile-takeover/
Marc Andreessen had some lawyers do an analysis of the current situation between Microsoft and Yahoo, and then posted an excellent summary on his blog on what could happen, what is most likely to happen, and how things work. It is a good read, and a compelling conclusion:
We are learning that hostile takeovers have arrived in our industry. This is the second major hostile takeover so far — the other was Oracle’s takeover of Peoplesoft — but there will be more.
This is significant because historically hostile takeovers practically never happened in technology. Potential hostile acquirors assumed that hostile takeovers wouldn’t work because the target company’s employees would bail and the target company’s business would collapse.
It turns out that as technology companies become larger and more mature, acquirors are becoming increasingly convinced that neither of these assumptions hold. Perhaps employees of large tech companies aren’t that bonded to current management, and perhaps many of them would actually prefer to work for a larger, more dominant combined company. And maybe as a consequence, the target’s business would do just fine in the wake of a hostile takeover — in fact, maybe it would do better, due to advantages of combined size and scale.
My bet is that hostile takeovers, particularly of larger and more mature companies, are going to become increasingly common in our industry.
One theme is that Yahoo’s corporate structure leaves it more vulnerable to a hostile takeover, and that as hostile takeovers becomes more commonplace in the technology industry, you should see more companies willing to adopt conventions like the dual-class share structure you see at Google.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/04/25/wordpress-251/
There’s a notice on the WordPress dev blog that WordPress 2.5.1 is out. Alas, they neglected to link to the upgrade documentation. My favorite? Upgrading via Subversion:
0-11:17 djh@ratchet ~> cd public_html/toldme
0-11:17 djh@ratchet ~/public_html/toldme> svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5.1/
[ . . . ]
Updated to revision 7839.
When I logged in to post this little note, it blocked me and ran the upgrade procedure, then I had to log in again, and here I am!
There’s a further note about the secret key setting:
Since 2.5 your wp-config.php file allows a new constant called SECRET_KEY which basically is meant to introduce a little permanent randomness into the cryptographic functions used for cookies in WordPress. You can visit this link we set up to get a unique secret key for your config file. (It’s unique and random on every page load.) Having this line in your config file helps secure your blog.
It leaves me to wonder: if the secret key can be randomly generated by a machine, why not go ahead and do that and then stash it in the database? There may be a good reason for that . . .
In unrelated news, I upgraded to the newer Ubuntu release at home yesterday. The only trick I have noticed so far is that it runs with Firefox 3.0, which is beta, and I lost use of my foxmarks plugin, for now. So, I’m waiting until that is supported before I upgrade my workstation.
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