Archive for the ‘Tech’ CategoryAndroid now most used mobile platformMonday, May 23rd, 2011The Q1 smartphone sales figures that were released yesterday by Gartner show that Android has surged and now leading all other smartphone operating systems. These numbers are Q1 sales figures and not reflective of overall market share but the show the direction the overall market is going.
Review: O2 Samsung i5700, Google Android phoneSaturday, February 6th, 2010Firstly, before I even bought the phone I was dubious of my new Android being a Samsung manufactured model, generally not a mobile I would ordinarily go for preferring a HTC a Sony Ericsson handset if available. That aside, I was buying it for the OS and on those terms first imprressions of Android is impressive. It is highly expandable with a good choice in the Market with a lot of free apps, which compensate for some of the limitations of the phone’s natively installed applications. The phone system settings are a bit all over the place with some illogical menu choices to get to what you want, could be laid out better and more obvious. Saying that setup with a Google Account is stragiht forward, and it accepts Google Apps account with no hassle by simply entering full email of Apps domain as Google Account username. For me this is a big thumbs up. The Gmail client and Google Talk offer push notifications on email and IM’s while the apps are running, calendar events are also synced to phone quite conveniently, a usable task list/mobile calendar with the familair Google usability offered by Android under the hood. I notice that several apps make use of Gears, I had an inclination Gears would run on Android, makes sense to have offline capabilities, particularly on a mobile device. The basic support for Google Docs is somewhat dissappointing but I’m sure this will improve with time. Of course, with Android, its all about the apps. But decent hardware is needed to back it all up, with HSDPA, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS connectivity and also 3.2 MP camera with video. The device is powered by a Qualcomm 6246 800 MHz CPU with 256Mb RAM, when you think about it makes it about as powerful as a PC of the late 90’s. Sound quality for music is only so-so, one thing that could be improved on, but voice is crystal. The software stack and Android itself appear to based on a linux kernel gathering from a debug app I installed. Good choice. The native support for DivX is most welcome, simply a matter of copying a movie direct to phone’s SD card. It is worth reducing resolution of video to 320 x 240 to save space on the memory card, many free apps can do this, I use mencoder myself. Getting to the Apps, essentials to get immediately on this device are jkAppSwitch, as the phone lacks a basic task manager, and also the Astro file manager is definite must. The usual crop of apps one would expect are available and for the most part implemented quite well. Facebook, Twitter, WordPress are all very well supported and really do make Android a killer social networking platform when coupled with Google notifications. The first app I looked for after sorting out the basics was an SSH client, connectBot works quite nicely for this. This was the most impressive feature for me as it is so useful to have. I had yet to come across a phone that would read a QR code successfully with built-in camera, including the iPhone, an was mighty impressed when the Barcode Scanner app picked it up straight away and decoded it- these are appearing everywhere now more and more. I think this was mostly to do with the camera, which has a very intelligent auto-focus and image stabilizer, probably the best I’ve seen on a phone. Of course with live mail, twitter, facebook, gtalk, etc all running one gets inundated with information overflow so I suggest just running the apps you need updates from at any given time, and watch out for data charges if operating on phone network and not a wifi zone. There are the usual batch of cool-for-the-sake of cool apps, GPS tracking, send a file with gesture movement, disco lights and all sorts of other weird, wonderful and wacky apps. It looks like an Android 2.0 firmware update will be available soon, which is nice to know, 1.5 (Cupcake) is on the model I purchased. In the end I have gotten past the fact it is a Samsung and Android can fill any gaps missing natively on the phone until something better comes along on O2. Battery life is an issue however, but time will tell this more as I have being using it a lot since I got it.
Google Wave: First ImpressionsFriday, November 27th, 2009There has undoubtedly been a lot of hype on Google Wave in the blogosphere, and to be honest I believe most of that is noise arising due to the limited number of accounts available. It is still in preview, which gives it earlier than beta status, and it shows. I am certain that Google are working hard on the protocols and federation technology behind the system as for the moment the interface is a little clunky and takes some adjusting to. The plugin system is neat and allows for a lot of scalability and expandability within wave. Its hard to know what to compare it to, its far removed from twitter/facebook micro-blogging model, if I had to choose I would compare it to a forum, where one can add any sort of content and gadgets. This is one of the oversights in wave also, I would have assumed waves to have been non-linear and being able to jump in at any point and edit/insert anywhere in the wave. The timeline concept used does not seem immediately useful but I guess some more time will have to pass to judge this fully Drag and drop file upload is nice, tho embedding images could be handled a bit better. Things I would like to see are support for other Google services, like Docs and Calendar spring to mind immediately. Wave has potential, but seems to have quite some way to go yet.
Incompetence of 3 IrelandWednesday, March 4th, 2009I would like to take the time to advise anyone contemplating buying mobile broadband from 3 Ireland on bill pay not to do so. I signed up for this service in December 2007, while the connection speed was somewhat ok to use I no longer required this service and went to cancel. This was when the fun started. I rang 3 to inform them I would like to cancel my contract last novemember. First they said they would give me 2 months free broadband, I did not want this I simply wanted to cancel the contract. In January 2009 I received another bill was quite frustrated my cancellation had not been processed at which time they said I must give 30 days notice, which I had done in Novemember previously. It is now March and they have still yet to properly cancel, naturally I cancelled direct debit with my bank only to recieve letter the other day saying my account had been restricted and that I owe them money for a months usage and when I rang them I was told my cancellation was ‘on hold’ until payment received. Each time I called it was a call centre with what sounded like an Indian each time, and I really hate talking to these pompous arrogant people. Long and short that pissed me off is that I do not want to see my impeccable credit rating tainted by inept employees at 3 Ireland.
Moving the Desktop to the Web, Chrome to run native x86 codeFriday, February 6th, 2009Google Chrome is implementing support ton run native x86 code from within the browser. One could argue that this is the turning point for transforming and migrating the desktop to the web. The final nail in the Desktop’s coffin. Of course one has to take a pragmatic look at this and realise the potential for serious security issues, giving up the system almost directly to a remote internet application is somewhat of a Pandora’s box for exploits and holes to be poked. And who among us here remembers the same visionaries and their grandiose talk using terms like ‘paradigm shifts’ in the dawn of the Web, back in the Netscape days when Java was heralded to be this online world browser desktop that would change the desktop forever. The vision was certainly clear, but with obstacles of the day such as slow connection speeds in a dial-up era, lack of browser standards support in any regard or form. We have come full circle to this thinking now as web technologies have vastly improved and standards have somewhat levelled out into uni-lateral support across modern browsers. The first stride forwards towards providing a quasi-desktop web was AJAX and DHTML, to simulate at least some interactivity and responsiveness. Flash has been around for a while, and more recently efforts from Adobe and Microsoft in the guises of AIR and Silverlight respectively, but these still have the problem of standards with proprierty software. All these so-called WEb 2.0 makes use of AJAX and it works quite nicely. Gmail and Google Docs have taken email and documents on to the cloud for me and off the desktop.
There is also Google Gears which allows offline access to web apps and associated data, another important bridge away from the Desktop and onto the Web, or at least within the browser, but Gears is secure with only limited access to the local system.
Of course the power inherently available in running native x86 code opens up a world of hitherto unimaginable ports of Desktop apps, such as media intensive tasks like image editing, video processing and audio editing, and not to mention a new realm of gaming possibilties. It may have taken a while for the visions of Marc Andreeson and Co to become reality, like the story of Alexander Graham Bell and Elijiah Grey on the coming to be of the telephone, the vision is not enough to be recorded in history for fame and accreditation unless delivered on promises timely.
The reral concern that remains is how well sandboxed this native x86 code be.
High quality DVD ripping using MEncoderSaturday, May 10th, 2008For a while now I have been searching for a simple and elegent solution for backing up my DVD’s to divx. There were plenty of Windows freeware and trialware that did the basics, but none of what I tried seem to properly encode 5.1 channel AC3 surround, for me a movie is nothing without surround sound once you get used to it, why settle for stereo when surround is possible? Much of the software had clunky interfaces and didn’t behave as expected. Then I came across the gem that is mencoder, I came across this as part of the Linux mencoder rpm for Fedora Core. With the liba52 audio library and appropriate Xvid codecs installed, a simple two commands will produce a top quality rip with 6 channel AC3 sound. A 1:30 hour movie will produce a 1.2Gb file, give or take. mencoder dvd:// -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=1 -alang en -oac copy -channels 6 -o /dev/null Mencoder can also be installed on a windows machine, as part of the windows mplayer installation, neccessary codecs along with mplayer itself can be found on the mplayer.hu website. It is worth using the 2-pass method for highest quality, even though it does add considerably to ripping time.
Remember The Milk!Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008Remember the Milk is a great online service for task management, with many cool features such as integration with Gmail, email reminders/sms reminders (although unfortunately not available in Ireland at this time). There is also offline access available for task list on RTM web site and in Gmail. Unfortunately this only works with new version of Gmail which leaves some Google Apps users in the dark until those accounts are upgraded.
Mobile Broadband a reality in IrelandTuesday, January 1st, 2008I have just recently started to use 3’s HSDPA mobile broadband service, it is most impressive and speeds, while as expected seldom reach the advertised 3.6Mbps, but this is not unexpected with mobile services, coverage is never perfect, I have however achieved speeds of up to 2.4Mbps in and around Limerick city centre, Dublin is well covered also I have found so far. The sweetest part is the train routes are relatively well covered, i.e. adequate to do some work at a decent connection speed.
Ubuntu - Moving Linux closer to the desktopTuesday, August 29th, 2006The recent releases of Ubuntu show the massive strides being made in making Linux a more desktop-friendly OS. With support for OpenOffice as a replacement for Word, Evolution as a replacement for Outlook, and of course Firefox for a browser. Is it time for everyone to ditch Windoze? Probably not just yet, wireless support is still a litte flaky along with screen resolution tweaks which are invariably needed. Anybody who wants to dip their toes in the Linux waters could do worse than giving this a trial. Installation is quite straight forward, just don’t forget to configure the automatic partition re-sizer or you might risk loosing all your existing data. We are Linux advocates here at Blue Star and were well impressed with this distro.
Download: Ubuntu home
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