National Monument (Holland).
Taken from directly outside the Grand Krasnapolsky… Quite possibly my favourite shot…
Jul252010
Amsterdam
HTC Desire
Initial thoughts in chronological order:
#1: Wow… that is a REALLY REALLY unimpressive box. I’d be more impressed by multicoloured toilet paper. That’s how unimpressive it is.
#2: Why is this Sense UI so confusing? Or is the Android UI itself confusing… and the Sense UI just adding a little more confusion on top of it? I may no longer be the gadget freak I used to be, but I’m pretty sure I have enough brain cells to figure out a well designed UI.
#3: One major disadvantage to buying HTC is that you need to wait for the dudes over at HTC to add their own ingredients to any Android updates that are released… meaning you are instantly at the back of the bus in terms of Android updates.
#4: This should have come earlier the chronological order but I managed to forget about this; the HTC Desire I received came with a flat battery. NEVER give a geek a new toy with no juice… it’s like flaunting perfect boobies in front of a blind guy.
#5: You had me at Hello. Losing interest in the HTC Desire surprisingly quickly. Not entirely sure why…
#6: The vibrate on the HTC Desire is solid… or maybe the phone is just solid fullstop. Hmm…
#7: I have nails (and am unable to cut them too short)… this in combination with the capacitive touch on the HTC Desire makes me want to stab, punch, and step on babies. EVERYTHING becomes more difficult.
#8: Credit where it is due… the screen on the HTC Desire is amazing. It should be pretty obvious even from the picture above. I love the screen… and wish I could transplant it onto my N900.
#9: WiFi reception… disappointing. On the verge of disconnecting from my AP, when I’m sitting at (a maximum of) 10M away from it. Sure, there’s a wall or 2 in the way… but I have no such problem with any of my other wireless devices (including the N900).
#10: Attempted to use the HTC Desire to tweet (http://www.twitter.com) while watching the first match of the 2010 World Cup (RSA vs MEX). Gave up about 10 minutes in thanks to the capacitive screen, nails, et. al. Instead, stood up, took a walk, grabbed my Macbook Air and proceeded to be content until halftime when I duly fell asleep.
#11: I really like music. I like to take a crap in the morning. I like to listen to music while I take a crap in the morning. I was unable to get the HTC Desire to play my music library over the air via DLNA/UPNP despite doing some research.
Currently sitting at 25% probability that I would buy the HTC Desire (20% of which is the screen).
I’m slightly unclear on the logic behind binding people to long (or any) contracts at all; especially when, the majority of the time, the customer has absolutely no (other) choice if he/she chooses to terminate the contract. Malaysia seems to be full of these people who seem to be unclear on what the main purpose of the contract is (beyond the obvious). In countries with an open last-mile (and as such, numerous competing ISPs in the same area), contracts tie down customers to a certain ISP for a certain amount of time… giving the ISP time to bleed make some profit from said customer over the contract period without having to worry about the customer scurrying off when another ISP offers better value. Now, over here in Malaysia… Let’s just say that Ah Kao is staying in landed property, this leaves Ah Kao with only 1 real choice (which makes it NOT a choice I guess?); Telekom Malaysia StreamyX. Now, why do I say 1 real choice? *Random shouts of P1, Amax, Maxis, DiGi* All of the aforementioned ISPs delivery method is wireless… meaning:
(a) they tend to be as reliable as Astro in Malaysia (which is basically a pile of shit but Malaysians don’t have a choice) – completely unreliable
(b) have completely retarded data caps
Any remotely heavy user (if you are heavier than a starving African child then you are a remotely heavy user) will most likely not be suited to any of the wireless ISPs… leaving StreamyX. So, Ah Kao signs up with StreamyX, but notices that there are some minor perks to signing a 2 year contract (like a free mug or something that costs the ISP almost nothing). Why lock down Ah Kao to a 2 year contract (everybody hates contracts) when it’s pretty obvious that Ah Kao has absolutely nowhere else to turn to? It’s not like Ah Kao can ring up TeliaSonera or BredBandsBolaget and get the service of an ISP that isn’t completely full of shit (like 99% of ISPs in Malaysia).
But hey, keep going ISPs in Malaysia… continue to extort money from customers in return for your subpar and overpriced services. Yes, I said subpar and overpriced… stop comparing Malaysia to Zimbabwe, Zambia, Vanuatu, Sudan, and other war torn countries and pick on any one of your direct neighbours. The half-assed opening of the last-mile will solve and improve nothing… just like 2 year contracts when no other real option exists.
Jan252010
Gentoo rsync
PORTAGE_RSYNC_INITIAL_TIMEOUT=60 fixes rsync error: received SIGINT, SIGTERM, or SIGHUP (code 20) at rsync.c(544) [generator=3.0.6]
Jan092010
The Nokia N900 – Nokia’s Saviour?
Been about a week since I got my N900 here in Malaysia; a quick bitesized review:
Battery Life
Pretty bad. I’ve never even considered buying a car charger for any of my previous phones (and believe me when I say I’ve had a lot of phones). So, me ordering a car charger for the N900 should give you an idea of how bad the battery life is. It’s even bad enough that I just keep the phone plugged in to a charger whenever I’m at home. Right now, I’m typically getting 6-8 hours from a full charge. There’s some talk on the Maemo forums about battery life suddenly (drastically) improving about 2 weeks into usage so we’ll see what happens then… but for now, I’m going to have to say the 1320mAh battery Nokia decided to include for the N900 is a fair bit short (the 1500mAh N97 battery would still probably be a fair bit short but likely a little better).
Apps
One of the things that iFanatics typically heap praise on is the abundance of apps for their beloved iPhone. The Apple AppStore has 100000 apps (or something to that effect)… of which most people use (maybe) 20 of. The Maemo store has about 100 apps, of which I personally use about 10. The word ratio comes to mind but I can’t quite figure out what to say with it. The heavily anticipated apps have yet to make their way to the stable branch of the Maemo store sadly; VLC, Vagalume, etc. are all still in extras-devel. Firefox (Fennec 1.0.0) just made it into stable about 5 hours ago.
UI
4 desktops, integration with SkyPE and GoogleTalk (and MSN to come apparently?), Expose style multitasking. If I don’t say something negative right now, iFanatics may hunt me down and kill me. So, it isn’t as “smooth” as the iPhone (occasionally when I’m doing 10 different things). Enough said.
Hardware
Somewhat undecided on this. The 600MHz ARM CPU may be a tiny bit slow considering the availability of the 1GHz Snapdragon CPU on various other available and upcoming phones. 256MB RAM (with 768MB swap for total 1GB in theory), hmmm, a little short too. PowerVR SGX GPU… fair enough. Not too shabby, could be better… but then again, if I have 6-8 hours of battery life with these specs, would I have 2 hours if I had all the specs I wanted?
Camera
Holy crap?
Conclusion
Well, compared to the (completely horrendous) N96/N97 (which I both owned), the Nokia N900 could be the holy grail, the reinvention of the wheel, and the 7 wonders of the world… all rolled into one. Unfortunately for Nokia, compared to everything else that’s available on the (global) market (ie. Motorola Milestone, Google Nexus 1), while it isn’t behind by any means… it isn’t something that would make your eyes pop out of their sockets either.
On the other hand, if you take into consideration that the N900/Maemo 5 is what Nokia calls step 5 out of 6 (the end product being the N920 (rumored name) based on Maemo 6), then I supposed you could say that things are looking up for Nokia. The question is if Nokia will choose to piss off the majority of Asia AGAIN by not officially launching the N920 (again, rumored) here.