Lessons that I think Google has learned since the Nexus One:

• Heavy phones weren’t as desirable. The Samsung Nexus S, Nexus S 4G and Galaxy Nexus are all plastic cases and quite light compared to HTC’s Nexus One and its metal case. Granted, the Nexus One “felt” like a substantial phone.
• Trackballs suck, but notification lights do not. The multi-color trackball on the Nexus One was great for notifications, but in the year I had the phone, I almost never used it. On the Nexus S, I don’t miss the trackball, but miss the notification light. Thankfully the Galaxy Nexus will have a notification light but I haven’t heard anywhere if it’s multi-colored or not.
• Curved glass is nice. Yeah, maybe it feels better holding it to my face, but honestly, I haven’t seen other manufacturers step up on this one. Obviously not a *necessary* ground-breaking move by Samsung.
• SD cards are so last year. While I was initially annoyed by the lack of SD card in my Nexus S, I get along fine without it. I have an rsync tool that I use to sync my phone wirelessly with a NAS drive at home. The Galaxy Nexus will take the internal storage one step further by removing all partitioning. The downside is that Linux and Mac users don’t have the “plug and play” capability over USB, but as long as my rsync tool keeps working, I won’t mind.
• NFC is the future. For now, anyway. The latest Facebook app update includes NFC capabilities, and I read more about NFC uses every day. I’ve used NFC on my Nexus S exactly once: at Google I/O in May 2011.
• Buying phones online was great for people with agoraphobia (fear of going outside), but it was too risky. The Nexus S was sold in Best Buy stores and later at Sprint stores with the Nexus S 4G revamp. The Galaxy Nexus sounds primed (no pun intended with the rumored device name) to sell at several carrier stores in the near future, as well as Best Buy and Radio Shack.

Knowing all of that, and the latest buzz around the Galaxy Nexus, I need to ask: Was Verizon really the best choice to launch the Galaxy Nexus?

When the Nexus One was released in January 2010, it launched on T-Mobile with 3G capabilities but you could only buy it online, which was risky, and was a solid phone. Rumors of having it on all 4 of the major US carriers flourished, but only AT&T picked it up, and it was quite a while after launch. Verizon and Sprint eventually admitted they weren’t going to carry the device. In December 2010, the Nexus S was released, and again only a T-Mobile version was launched; Sprint picked it up half a year later.

Verizon, aka “Big Red” has had a lot of news coverage about blocking tethering apps, installing permanent bloatware, and then it leaked that they were installing a few apps on the Galaxy Nexus, which is supposed to be entirely free of Carrier applications. I read a lot of “quit whining, it’s only 2 apps” on Engadget, but the truth is that this device wasn’t supposed to have ANY. Over the past few days, it was announced that Verizon and Google were at odds about Google Wallet on the Galaxy Nexus, and today the news broke that Verizon broke some federal rules about the spectrum deal from a few years ago when they blocked Google Wallet from working.

I was quick to criticize Google a few days ago over letting Verizon stipulate the terms of what is supposed to be a “pure” Android device, and that criticism still holds true for me. I don’t believe that Google should have to bow to anyone in that regard, and that the carriers need to just back off and let Google lead the charge. T-Mobile let them. Sprint let them. Yet Verizon is causing so many problems, it’s like they don’t WANT to release the device now.

Frankly, I was ready to pony up $300 of my dollars, plus a $50 ETF to T-Mobile, to switch my service to Verizon, plus pick up several of the accessories, but lately I’m regretting that decision and wondering whether to hold out for another carrier to carry the phone. If Sprint would allow the device on their network, I’d consider it, but not sure I’d want to stay with T-Mobile as they have poor coverage where I live. AT&T isn’t even an option. They’d have to give me the phone for free including cell/data if they ever want me back as a customer.

I know that Google has some sort of “bidding” process where handset manufacturers compete for the rights to build the next Nexus device, but I wonder whether they do the same for carriers, and whether someone’s legal team is going after Verizon over the many delays of this product.

Given the pentaband radio support in the Galaxy Nexus, would it make more sense to just sell an unlocked device where you got to choose your carrier based on the SIM you insert? Should I pick up a Canadian model over the holidays and see which GSM carrier to use?

@jeffthms: Session times and locations are hidden, just view the source of the session page to see them - http://bit.ly/gAkyah #io2011

... which is correct. View the source, look at the 'noscript' tag for where the div tags are rendered, and voila, you see the day/time/room of every session.

So after some quick parsing during a coffee break this afternoon, here's a CSV file for everyone. Sort it however you want.

Update: April 28, 9am
The CSV file is now auto-generated when you click the link below, but only if I can scrape the dates/times from the Google IO "Sessions" page. If scraping fails, you'll get an old copy.

download: google io session schedule (google.csv, ~48kb)

Update: April 28, 6pm
Google released a public schedule today, but their schedule doesn't specify rooms, or 'level' (101, 201, 301) of the sessions, so I reworked my scraper to build a better schedule.

download: google io session grid by track/level/times (google2.csv, ~8kb)
 
 

Let me back up a little.

I like T-Mobile. Let's make that clear. Their service is decent, call quality is good, and their Android phone selection is pretty great. And the fact that their spokeswoman, Carly, is also Canadian, y'know, just icing on the cake.

What they DON'T do well, however, is handle customer service when it comes to insurance.

Backing up a little more: in early 2010, my wife and I switched from AT&T to T-Mobile after several years of AT&T "service". Or, as some might call it, "serv..hello? hello?" I got the HTC Nexus One as my first Android device, and my wife got a Motorola Cliq because she needs a physical keyboard on her phone. Over the years, we've both been using Google services more and more, and the idea of sharing a calendar directly on our phones was extremely appealing. Unfortunately (for her), the Cliq was already close to end of life (EOL) but T-Mobile never told her that. They also sold her a $5/month insurance policy against loss/damage. A month later, she needed to get her Cliq replaced because the touch screen wasn't responsive. A few months later, she lost it, and T-Mobile told her to go through the insurance group, Assurion, to get a replacement. Assurion sent her a refurbished model with a broken keyboard. They replaced *that* one with one with another unresponsive touch screen. Finally, they had one that sorta-kinda worked, but the Android 2.1 update was just coming out and then her newest replacement phone started having serious lag/responsiveness issues.

We called T-Mobile, who told us that because THEY hadn't replaced the phones, they could only exchange the phone at a store for another refurbished unit, and that they'd have to replace it in-store three times within 90 days to warranty getting an entirely different phone, but that they got to choose the model and couldn't guarantee it would have a keyboard. Or even be an Android phone. We tried in vain to argue with the customer service rep about how Assurion was sending out bad replacements, and they told us they couldn't do anything about that, and the replacement phones given through Assurion didn't count towards T-Mobiles 3-in-90-days replacement guarantee.

So why the heck were we paying T-Mobile $5 a month for insurance if they weren't counting those replacements?!

Bewildered, we gave up trying to argue our point. I tried to convince my wife at Christmas to let me get her a new phone. I had already written a review for Sprint's Epic 4G for AndroidPolice.com in August 2010, but she didn't want to spend the money at Christmas. Thankfully, Sprint ran a special through March and April this year where porting your number to Sprint with a new contract would give you a $125 credit to offset any ETF fee. Since her ETF with T-Mobile after one year was now only $100, we actually came out money ahead in that regard. So, we got her the Epic 4G, and she loves the AMOLED screen and the bigger keyboard. Now if we could only get Froyo/Gingerbread on there for her without rooting it and going to CM 7...

Update: April 27: Speculation is that since Sprint is launching their Nexus S 4G on Mother's Day, May 8th, and Google IO is on the 10th, that maybe Google will be giving away the Nexus S 4G at IO2011. If that's the case, I might offload my T-Mobile phone, too, and switch to Sprint. If that IS the giveaway, and if it comes with 30 days of free service like the giveaways last year, it'll give me some time to see whether the Sprint version has better coverage than T-Mobile at home and office.

I've been trying off and on for a few weeks, as I have free time with work and family (now with two kids), to install Gentoo on my Dell XPS15 laptop. Until recently, I had gotten the OS installed, including grub, in a tri-boot Gnetoo/Ubuntu 10.10/Windows 7 configuration, and Gentoo was smart enough to start in text mode with the framebuffer on, so I got a full 1920x1080 with small text, and very little running in terms of services.

And while I've decided to install KDE on it (and finally got it working thanks to several tutorials I'll mention another time), I plan to keep the Gentoo setup mostly text-only as much as possible so it can be a (hopefully) very low-power setup. Even though I have the extended 9-cell battery, I'm curious whether I can maintain a full day of coding in vim, browsing in elinks, and using my phone for Email while at Google IO in May, without needing to swap the battery for the spare 9-cell.

There weren't many gotchas when it came to getting Gentoo installed, however it's important to note that with the i5 processor, just about everything inside the laptop is Intel-based (wireless, bluetooth, framebuffer graphics, etc), and having the Intel/Nvidia 'hybrid' graphics was challenge enough in Ubuntu to tell it not to run nvidia drivers.

Here are some placeholders for where I'll post my necessary configurations for anyone else attempting a Gentoo install on a similar rig:

• /usr/src/linux/.config
• /etc/X11/xorg.conf
• /etc/make.conf
• /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
• /etc/conf.d/net.wlan0

For what it's worth, WPA_supplicant works great for tethering from my Android phone, although I do need to issue an "/etc/init.d/net.wlan0 restart" whenever I need to switch wifi. Kind of a pain. I'll have to see if there's some auto-detection scheme to detect and change to another wifi setup if available. Obviously this is easy enough in KDE/etc, but I haven't found an easy way to do this via cmdline when in text mode.

http://interactive.nfb.ca/#/pinepoint

Having looked through it several times, I've found pictures of my dad, my sister and I, and several friends. The Hyrniuk brothers who were part of the project were my next door neighbors.

Here's Richard Cloutier's site: http://pinepointrevisited.homestead.com/Pine_Point.html Please forgive his crazy HTML layouts, etc., the guy has a disability which means he has to design and build the site using voice recognition software.

In the past, they handled my freelance business books, but I closed that down two years ago, and last year's tax prep bill was still $400 "just in case they missed anything..." Our tax prep representative this year had no good reason to explain why our bill was only $50 less, and told us we had to pay $350. "That's just what we charge." That bill ate up what little refund we actually got back from the state this year, and then some.

But $350, really? A couple of W-2's, no itemization, no stock sales, etc., we were *literally* in their office for 35 minutes (we got there 20 minutes early for the appointment).

Next year we'll use H&R Block or just buy TurboTax or something.

But I manually downloaded the leaked OTA, installed it, and then realized that whatever the update was, broke EVERY widget I had installed on my phone. Even widgets by Google. Every widget I had, had to be removed and replaced. In the grand scheme of things, this is an annoyance, but your average home user isn't going to be thrilled about this.

And after deleting them, I couldn't even long-press on the home screen to put them back. Turns out the phone was busy doing something else. I finally left the phone alone for several minutes and tried again, and only then would it let me re-add the widgets. But after putting them back, a reboot of my phone took several MINUTES (again) to reload the data. "My Coffee Card" widget loaded its data in 24 seconds, Latitude in 42 seconds, and all other widgets (including Google Calendar and Google Places) took 183 seconds once the phone had booted. The only fix for the 3-minute delay was reinstalling the programs that created those widgets (SimiClock, a Calendar widget I forget the name of, and a "folder" organizer app which lets me make folder widgets to store apps), then reconfigure them all, and then put all of the widgets back.

After several more reboots, the phone finally settled down, but what a hassle. I do understand that the first reboot after a ROM upgrade on an Android device will take much longer, but it *shouldn't* break widgets without telling the user ahead of time, and certainly shouldn't take a few hours of 4-minute reboot cycles (1 minute to boot to home screen, 3 minutes to load widget data) to clear up the problem.

The title on the FCC label schematics include the text "(Europe common)" so I speculate that this is just a European model. Maybe it has to clear the American FCC (Samsung filed the petition from their California offices) before going to the European counterpart? I don't know how that sort of thing works.

The Tx/Rx test report describes the device as an "850/1900 GSM/GPRS/EDGE/WCDMA/HSPA" device, using GSM850, GSM1900 and WCDMA1700, and a 2.4GHz WLAN interface. The actual text looks something like:

Tx Freq Range:

• 824.2 - 848.8 MHz (GSM850)
• 1850.20 - 1909.80 MHz (GSM1900)
• 1712.4 - 1752.5 MHz (WCDMA1700)
• 2400 - 2483.5 MHz (WLAN)

Rx Freq Range:

• 869.2 - 893.8 MHz (GSM850)
• 1930.20 - 1989.80 MHz (GSM1900)
• 2112.4 - 2152.5 MHz (WCDMA1700)
• 2400 - 2483.5 MHz (WLAN)

And if we look back at the FCC data for the original Nexus S (GT-I9020-T) from late November, see see these transmit frequencies:

Tx Freq Range:

• 824.2 - 848.8 MHz (GSM850)
• 1850.20 - 1909.80 MHz (GSM1900)
• 1712.4 - 1752.5 MHz (AWS WCDMA)
• 2412 - 2462 MHz (WLAN) <---- slightly different than the i9023 up above

... but I couldn't find anything about the i9020T with regards to reception frequencies. But if it transmits on 1700, then it must receive on 2100 for the WCDMA1700 "band 4"

In short, seems to be the same device as far as radios go, so that should quash the rumor that this device is equipped with HSPA+ radios.

Just to be sure, and to compare it to a known 4G device, I took a quick peek at the Dell Streak 7's FCC report, and I saw transmit frequencies like this:

Tx Freq Range:

• 824.2 - 848.8 MHz (GSM850)
• 1850.20 - 1909.80 MHz (GSM1900)
• 1852.50-1907.60 (WCDMA1900, Band 2)
• 1712.4 - 1752.4 MHz (WCDMA 1700, Band 4)
• 826.40 - 846.60 (WCDMA850, Band 5)

My conclusion: if the Streak 7 can utilize T-Mobile's 4G, then it must do so on the WCDMA1900 Band 2 and WCDMA850 Band 5 frequencies to get the 4G speeds. If that's true, then the new Nexus S model i9023 may not be 4G after all.]]> http://iandouglas.com/2011/01/12/fcc-tests-new-nexus-s-model-i9023/feed/ 0 http://iandouglas.com/2011/01/11/is-this-another-gingerbread-bug/ http://iandouglas.com/2011/01/11/is-this-another-gingerbread-bug/#comments Wed, 12 Jan 2011 06:33:31 +0000 ian douglas http://twitter.com/iandouglas736/statuses/25077899480530944 Tonight, I installed Google Books for the fourth time on my Samsung Nexus S. I've never manually uninstalled it. In fact, whenever I see that there's an update for it available, I go to my app dock and sure enough, I see it listed as an installed app, I can open it and continue to read a free Sherlock Holmes novel where I last left off.

Is this another bug in Gingerbread, or is it a fault with Google Books?]]> http://iandouglas.com/2011/01/11/is-this-another-gingerbread-bug/feed/ 0 http://iandouglas.com/2011/01/11/new-android-market-client-finally-pushing-to-the-nexus-s/ http://iandouglas.com/2011/01/11/new-android-market-client-finally-pushing-to-the-nexus-s/#comments Wed, 12 Jan 2011 02:21:40 +0000 ian douglas http://twitter.com/iandouglas736/statuses/25014516660043776 Android Central reported tonight that the Nexus S was getting the new fancy Android App Market client. I've tried a *#*#checkin#*#* and several reboots, and I got nuthin'. Thank for getting my hopes up, guys.

I've had the new market on my Nexus One for a little while now, and frankly, it's not earth shattering by any means. Yeah, it's nice to look at, it's got a cleaner design to it, perhaps less "industrial" looking, but all in all, it still functions the same. Some of Android Central's users claim it runs slower on their devices, but I haven't noticed any speed difference on my Nexus One.]]> http://iandouglas.com/2011/01/11/new-android-market-client-finally-pushing-to-the-nexus-s/feed/ 0 http://iandouglas.com/2011/01/06/skype-bought-qik-for-100m-150m/ http://iandouglas.com/2011/01/06/skype-bought-qik-for-100m-150m/#comments Thu, 06 Jan 2011 18:33:35 +0000 ian douglas http://twitter.com/iandouglas736/statuses/23084782451687426 I read today that Skype made a move to buy Qik.

On one hand, I'm excited, because I'm a user of both platforms. I'm also excited because as a die-hard Android fan, both platform merging into one could give Android a healthy boost into the video chat arena. How well will it work against Fring, Tango, etc.?

On the other hand, I'm a little wary. Skype and Verizon have some exclusivity deal going on where the Droid family of devices have access to Skype features that the rest of us don't, yet Qik has a similar deal with T-Mobile (and I think Sprint as well?), so how is this Skype/Qik deal going to play out for the big carriers?

Frankly, I'm still disappointed that T-Mobile hasn't included the Nexus S in their branded Qik video chat app yet. I haven't looked at benchmarks, but aside from 4G capabilities versus the MyTouch 4G, I'd wager that the Nexus S matches or beats any of T-Mobile's other front-facing-camera devices.]]> http://iandouglas.com/2011/01/06/skype-bought-qik-for-100m-150m/feed/ 0 http://iandouglas.com/2010/06/10/apple-ios-3-and-4-vs-android-2-1-and-2-2/ http://iandouglas.com/2010/06/10/apple-ios-3-and-4-vs-android-2-1-and-2-2/#comments Thu, 10 Jun 2010 17:51:51 +0000 ian douglas http://twitter.com/iandouglas736/statuses/15867031579 http://www.androidpolice.com/2010/06/10/apple-ios-3-4-vs-android-2-1-eclair-2-2-froyo-fight/]]> http://iandouglas.com/2010/06/10/apple-ios-3-and-4-vs-android-2-1-and-2-2/feed/ 0 http://iandouglas.com/2010/05/20/new-froyo-features-announced-at-google-io/ http://iandouglas.com/2010/05/20/new-froyo-features-announced-at-google-io/#comments Thu, 20 May 2010 16:40:07 +0000 ian douglas http://iandouglas.com/?p=1220 Besides giving away an HTC EVO 4G to all attendees, here’s the big news announced about Android 2.2 Froyo at Google IO today:

Features Announced At Google IO

• Just-in-Time compiler confirmed
• Microsoft Exchange integration including auto-discovery and remote wipe
• New services just as data backup APIs for carriers to move your data from one device to another
• Tethering announced for Wifi and USB, shown in demo, pokes fun at iPad; no word on whether carriers can disable it
• 2x-3x performance boost in the Browser, new Javascript engine is SO much faster
• Optimizations for using the camera, orientation (accelerometers) within the browser
• Speech control and recognition is so much smoother, including Mandarin and Japanese, including speech recognition to make phone calls
• Real-time language translation
• Announced support for Flash Player 10.1 Public Beta and AIR developer pre-release, showed Flash working on Nickelodeon
• New ways to work with apps:
  • Finding new apps (app search)
  • Searching data within apps (showed Mint.com app search)
  • Installing to SD memory with a “Move to SD card” button within the Application Info screen, demoed Need for Speed game
  • Update All and Auto-Update confirmed
  • Bug reporting, can view stack trace online
• Sneak peak of new Android Marketplace, because demo user is logged in, you can view your installed apps and over-the-air app sync
• New Marketplace feature: over-the-air music sync
• Sync your Android device with your iTunes library to live-stream your music to your device

TechCrunch reports that Android 2.2 (Froyo) will support USB and Wifi tethering, though it remains to be seen whether carriers will have an option to disable this feature. TechCrunch leaked some information about availability of tethering within Froyo, and dozens of other sites picked it up, not to mention countless tweets about it. It made some serious headlines, and has had a lot of feedback from users hoping to get a 2.2 upgrade to their Android device when they haven’t even had a 2.1 upgrade yet. All I can say to them is good luck.

What is T-Mobile’s Position, Though?

Shortly after getting my own Nexus One in February, our office Internet connection went down, I had the opportunity to try some of the thirt-party tethering apps in the Android Market, such as PDANet and EasyTether. Having successfully installed PDANet, plugging in my Nexus One via USB and getting the client running on my MacBook, and sharing my MacBook’s new Internet connection with my coworkers, I sent a quick tweet about my successful trial:

Three minutes later, T-Mobile sent a reply tweet:

Early Morning Tethering

Early on a Friday morning mid-March, I awoke to find our home WiFi on the blink. This time, I used EasyTether with my M17x running Windows 7 Ultimate, and sent another tweet about being able to get online:

Within 5 minutes, another reply from T-Mobile:

And, Now That Froyo is Announced …?

After reading the TechCrunch article, and several others about Sprint wanting to charge extra for the EVO “experience”, I decided to ping T-Mobile again about tethering, but this time asking whether they’ll charge us extra for it:

This time, T-Mobile took almost two hours to reply:

What’s the Verdict?

I guess we’ll have to wait for the Froyo announcement from Google, and then a follow-up announcement from T-Mobile, as to whether they’ll let the Nexus One have an untouched 2.2 build, or whether T-Mobile will tweak the software to disable USB/WiFi tethering and/or charge its users more per month. It’s already been announced that T-Mobile will slow down our cell network bandwidth once we’ve transferred 5GB/month, but so far they’ve been very cool about allowing tethering on their network — via third-party apps that users are unlikely to run for extended periods of time. AT&T has allowed tethering on certain devices if you pay a premium monthly data plan price ($60/month), Verizon charges extra for USB tethering, and WiFi tethering on their Palm Pre Plus devices, and Sprint has announced they will charge extra for the EVO’s data plan which, coincidentally, allows tethering — is that Sprint’s way of charging for WiFi tethering?

If I were King for a day

If I were T-Mobile, I’d leave tethering alone on Froyo, let the users have access to it, continue to slow our bandwidth after 5GB, and use that as a serious advantage against the other 3 major carriers. It would bring in lots of additional customers, especially road warriors, and would most definitely increase their brand popularity.

Rumor has it of course that the Nexus One will get the first roll-out of Froyo, so it remains to be seen how T-Mobile will handle themselves with this new OS build. Personally, I can’t wait to see what’s in store for the Nexus One when Froyo is announced.

Over lunch today, I did some benchmarking with Linpack on my own Nexus One, using a stock Android 2.1 build, and the Nexus One provided by Adobe. It was astonishing to see the difference in MFLOPS (Millions of FLOating-Point operations per Second), essentially a high-precision mathematics sequencing instruction set that tests how quickly a CPU can run a known number of calculations. Since Linpack themselves publish a benchmark Top 10 for Android devices, I’m not disclosing anything that hasn’t already been publicly confirmed by others.

Dare to Compare

The stock Nexus One with Android 2.1 averages in the high 6.9 to low 7.0 range for MFLOPS, but the Nexus One running the Debug release of Android 2.2 (aka FroYo, “frozen yogurt”) can apparently achieve a score of up to 40 MFLOPS. My own testing confirms it at a high-36 to mid-37 range:

How it’s Done

Google has already confirmed that a new JIT (just-in-time) Java compiler will be in Android 2.2, but I don’t pretend to know how the Java virtual machine works or how JIT would improve it. Rumor has it that Android 2.2 will be announced at Google IO next week, so hang tight!

Update, May 12 10am PST

As specified above, I don’t know whether this is JIT in action. I can’t confirm or deny that JIT is part of the Froyo release. The Nexus One provided to my employer has a developer release of Froyo on it, but I’m not allowed to disclose the features of the OS — but if this stuff makes it into the official release WHOA BABY.

Update, May 20, 9am PST

Google announced at Google IO that Froyo does indeed have the new Just-In-Time compiler.

For as quickly as the HTC Incredible came to market, there are already some HTC Incredible Accessories shops popping up online. You may well want to check out some of the Droid Incredible Cases available, or at the very least a Droid Incredible Screen Protector to protect against scratching. I’m always paranoid about scratching the screen of my Nexus, but I do protect the device with a silicon case.

Is the “Incredible” a Nexus One “killer”? Verizon seems to think so, since they’ve pulled their support for the Nexus One at Google’s phone ordering page. Personally, I think it’s a bit arrogant to use an attention-seeking adjective to name the phone. What will be their next phone? The “Stupendous”? The “Ridiculous”? The “Ginormous“?

If I were up for a contract renewal or wanted to change carriers, I would pass on the HTC Droid Incredible. I multitask quite a bit with my Nexus One and already drain the battery every day — I even purchased a second battery for emergency use — so I can’t imagine having significantly less battery life on the new HTC device. That, and given that Verizon’s network is yet incapable of letting you talk on the phone and use the Internet on the device simultaneously, I would wait until their network expansion is complete before considering this phone. However, if you’re locked into Verizon and looking to pick up an Android-based device, the HTC Droid Incredible does have some significant advantages over the Motorola Droid like nearly double the processor speed, an FM radio, and 802.11n wireless.

Disclosure: this blog post was sponsored by talkietech.com, but all opinions are my own.

C’mon, Google, get your act together. I’m not gonna drop $55 on a car dock without a LOT more details.

Combined with the prevalence of micro-blogging such as Twitter and Facebook status updates, writing out full-length quality postings seems to be quite old-school now. While in the process of migrating my old blog articles back to WordPress, I’m reading through all of them again and finding some oldies but goodies, such as “Reasons to Date a Geek” and “I, Geek, take you, Mini-geek” among others. I also see lots of failed potential such as setting up thedouglasclan.com as a photo site for our family, and I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve switched from one blog engine to another or posted about new layouts on the site.

Like most full-time employees, I fear blogging about my workplace or what I’m working on, so as not to get dooced which really only leaves a few areas of my life to share that I feel could help others: running a freelance business, web development, marriage, finances, and being a new dad. And since I’m not particularly an expert in any of those areas, I imagine iandouglas.com will be a culmination of all of those topics. I’ll do my best to categorize and tag my ramblings so you can filter out only what you really want to read.

First off, my apologies for lack of photos. I thought about documenting it while I worked, but it was late last night. However, I do need to replace some of my handiwork with proper stuff like heat shrink and insulated wires to cut down on some radio interference.

First, I cut the iPod/iPhone adapter from the Pixxo unit, and saw that there were 8 wires (red, black, white, green, yellow, brown, purple and orange). Next, I cut a micro USB cable and saw that while it was well shielded on the outside, inside the foil insulator were only four wires (red, black, white and green). I twisted the matching wires together, taped it up enough that nothing was shorted, and tested it in the car, and my Nexus One started charging. w00t

Only thing left was to trim the wires back as far as I felt comfortable, shorten up the micro USB plug, and get everything taped up better. Which worked like a champ, except that I had no electrical tape, and I’m sure that as good as blue 3M Painter tape is, actual electrical tape or heat shrink would do a much better job.

Then, I shortened and spliced a stereo 3.5mm audio cable, as the one that shipped with the Pixxo unit was about two inches two short.

The net result:

(hosted at picasa)

For me, the flexibility of a multi-tasking phone with a fast processor, decent screen resolution, and the new Android 2.1 feature set. For my wife, the superb MOTOBLUR tool on the CLIQ (running Android 1.5 or 1.6, I forget) gives her a means to combine all of her social/texting/facebook/etc feeds into a single experience. She’ll get an Android 2.1 upgrade in the near future, according to Motorola, which will give her even more voice commands.

Another nice feature is that both phones sport a micro USB connector for charging — for the first time ever in our marriage, we have similar phone charging needs. Using a $5 coupon for newegg.com, I ordered two more three-foot micro USB cables for $2.99 each, so we’ll have enough cables for our laptops, desktop PC, etc. Next purchase will likely be a two-port USB charger for the car so we can keep both phones charged on road trips.

Our experience with the Android Market has been pretty nice. I’ve found myself looking over her phone to see which apps she’s found, and she’s found some great apps and widgets. She found some text-to-speech tools, and is looking for a decent voice recording app. I found Android versions of the iPhone apps I used the most: Bump, Pandora, last.fm, Dropbox (Droidbox), a mobile Bible, Stitcher, Shazam, Instamapper, Flixster, and a Starbucks Card manager. Sadly my Starbucks Gold card has been so overused the card’s numbers have worn off.

We’re both spoiled with the voice search tools, and yesterday I transferred our family calendar into a shared Google Calendar so our phones will update with appointments, etc., so we both have a better handle on who’s where and when. No more “I’ll have to check the calendar when I get home…”

Overall, it’s really nice to finally have a decent multitasking phone, not a uni-task setup like previous Nokia/WinMo/Pantech/Samsung models or the iPhone. Finally, I can stream Pandora music, use turn-by-turn directions, while constantly updating my location on Google Latitude all on one device.

There are a few key differences in our phones, but they share many commonalities thanks to the Android OS. The Nexus One is a touch screen device only, whereas the Motorola CLIQ has a slider keyboard (which isn’t always needed, but my wife needs the physical keyboard. Both have a 5 megapixel camera, and I think the CLIQ’s cpu runs about 600MHz to the Nexus 1GHz speed. They both have similar RAM/ROM sizes, and I may upgrade her microSD memory to a 16GB card for her birthday (shh!)

Moving to a new platform wasn’t without its hiccups of course.

We had difficulty getting her old contacts from her AT&T SIM to her CLIQ. Ultimately, we put the SIM in an old Samsung Blackjack II, sync’d it with Outlook, used a third-party tool to sync Outlook to Gmail, then had to set those Gmail contacts to family/friends labels, at which point the CLIQ sync’d them over the air (OTA). What an ordeal.

We also had to figure out how to get the camera gallery to send photos to Facebook on the CLIQ. While MOTOBLUR has Facebook integration (it only does status and contact sync’ing), the CLIQ doesn’t include the full Android app for Facebook; simply installing the app immediately gave us an option to ‘share’ a photo with Facebook. The CLIQ also came preconfigured to show weather in New York, which we really only need to know to tease a SoCal friend who recently moved to the frosty NYC area, and it wasn’t completely intuitive how to fix that. There were some other minor things she asked me to handle for her.

On the Nexus One, my only pain point was getting my productivity apps installed as soon as possible, and that T-Mobile took nearly two days to get the data plan working on my phone so I didn’t have to rely on wifi. Nowhere was it documented that I needed to remove my battery to cold-boot my phone.

Now it’s time to learn some Java so I can tinker with some app building of my own. Now that I have a commute to work, I may revisit my old w98podfetch application and build a nice UI for it. There are a handful of podcast downloaders for Android, but I see a lot of comments about how there are too many limitations.

In a quest last night to find a cheaper alternative to giving AT&T $180 of my hard-earned cash every month for our two cell phones, I decided to take a page from BillShrink, and include some of the other phones that their users were requesting, along with additional phone features.

I’ll add more to the list as I have time, but this was my evening project last night. It’s ugly, it’s not written well, but it gets the point across. I’ll work on the overall look of it if enough people find it useful. Specs were gathered from several sites including the carriers, the phone manufacturers, a site called “pdadb” and a few items from the BillShrink chart.

http://iandouglas.com/cellphones.php

My chart will let you view specs from a single phone in the list, or multiple phones side-by-side so you can see their capabilities. I thought it would be interesting to list screen resolutions and DPI (calculated from the diagonal size), internal vs external storage, USB connector types, and more details about what the minimum/maximum carrier plans would include for the money you’ll pay for the phone over two years of ownership.

Since nginx was already compiled with redirection support, I simply had to locate the correct configuration file and add a few lines of code, and away it went.

First, I checked out /etc/nginx/ and opened the site configuration file within the /sites-enabled/ path. For this example, let’s say the site was m.iandouglas.com:

# vi /etc/conf/nginx/sites-enabled/m.iandouglas.com

In here, I’d look for the ‘server’ block and add my redirection rules:

server {
	listen      80;
	server_name m.iandouglas.com;
        root /var/www/m.iandouglas.com/public;

	# redirect iPhone/iPod users to the new iphone site
        if ($http_user_agent ~* '(iPhone|iPod)') {
                rewrite ^/$ http://m.iandouglas.com/iphone/index.html;
        }
.
.
.

Then a simple nginx restart:

# /etc/init.d/nginx restart

… and we were all set.