Category: Computing

All I.T. related rants/posts.

Google Nexus One: first impressions

This blog post is being done by voice from my new phone. Yes I finally caved in and bought a Google phone.

Well, the first part was voice captured, analysed, and shipped back in 95% accurate transcoding within a few seconds. This part is being written on my old laptop.

My recent trip to SF saw me meet up with an old friend (Mikolaj) who works at the so-called Mountain View Chocolate Factory that has become a part of all our on-line lives. And I was impressed; nice big bright screen, good integration with various on-line services (many Google run, but still ones I already used, like Calendar). And the reviews showed it to be good, with a “fast” processor, etc, etc. It looked like a slightly smaller iPhone, which seemed nice.

And then Linus spoke to the masses, and yeah, he professed he was pleased. While the rest of the community complained about forks and support, I found my 5 year old Nokia, with 1″ blurry screen, half-day standby time, 5 minute talk-time was a bit long in the tooth. So I caved. I got a Google phone; the Nexus One.

I ordered it around noon on Monday. By Wednesday night, a little over 56 hours later, it was in my hands in London, England. Nicely engraved with my name, in its small white box.

The open box experience was similar to what opening Apple products was like; a nice box, smoothly opening to reveal the well mounted product, sheathed in a cardboard mount to ensure it is… displayed… as the box is opened.

The ray of sunshine came down, and all was good.

So, a few second later an the device was free of its transport. It comes wrapped in a cellophane sleeve that tries to explain how to open the case. Accompanying it is a warranty paper, and a single sheet of numbered instructions, 1 to 5, indicating that you need to put the battery in, give it a full charge, and then turn it on. Back on the cellophane, how did it come off. Was there a release button, a catch, a lever, a… hang on… no, slide and it pops open – wow, that was easier than I expected!

Charge charge charge. Tap tap tap. Green LED! Go!

The set up was smooth and straight forward. Since I didn’t have a SIM in phone to start with (it was in the aforementioned Nokia device), it asked me to set up WiFi. Then my Googlemail account, and woosh… my calendar, contacts, and Gmail all came down.

And then.. it advised a new firmware, would I like to install it? Yes. And woosh, it did what it should, and it was all good. Pinch to zoom on maps works (multitouch).

A few seconds later and my rcpt.to email IMAPS and SMTP/STARTTLS was up and running.

Later, a browse the “Marketplace”, the Android App store, And it advised of an updated Maps application.  Then add in the compass, and Snake.

So,w hat are my favourite things:

Google Goggles: scans pictures for things (bar codes, objects, logos) and then displays information on it.

Voice search: someone (Eric) mentioned a book title today but couldn’t remember the author, so I whispered the title to my phone and it showed me the cover, summary, author, etc.

Maps: well, as ever. I have had this on my Blackberry Bold, but the Nexus One has a screen twice the size, and a magnetic compass.

The only downside was the battery life with the GPS turned on today. Admittedly, I did play with it a fair bit. And to its credit, it showed me what was responsible for the power use: the display – it breaks down the consumption of power to the various components of the phone, which is neat. I’ve turned off the GPS for tomorrow trail!

I’ve fired up Facebook and all my contacts from Facebook have (at my choice) been sucked into my phone contact lists (with all their pictures). So I think my contacts are now not stored in my phone, nor on the SIM, but in the cloud.

I’ve had the phone for 24 hours now. I like it. It’s light, and does everything. It was cheaper than an iPhone, and is more open.  What’s not to like thus far.

Dreamscreen update: same problems

Yesterday (Feb 7th) my HP Dreamscreen advised on-screen that there was a firmware update (1.6.0.0, 2/1/2010). “Hurrah!” I thought. They’ve seen the issue with the Snapfish app being unable to load images and crashing to the “home” screen.

Sadly, not. It still fails to load most thumbnails in both the list of all albums, and when browsing a single album. Aghhh!

And there’s still no SDK. No way for me to write my own app to make it work like I want it to. There’s such a potential for this as a platform, but HP isn’t allowing this to be realised. *sigh*

JEB’s rules of IT

  1. Always have a backup.
  2. Always monitor your backups.
  3. Always backup your monitoring.
  4. Always investigate failures; work out how to monitor it to catch it quicker next time (hopefully before it fails).

Backups without monitoring is no backup at all; if your backups fail, you won’t know until you try to use them.

A note about RAID

Unmonitored RAID 1/5/6/10 is no better than a single disk; as each disk pops, you’ll never notice until the last one goes.

A note about UPS’s

UPS’s fail, OK.

Resilience and cost

Resilient, fast, and cheap; chose any two.

Lies in status messages

Just because something says OK, doesn’t mean it is OK.

HP Dreamscreen 130 – first impressions

It’s a very clean, crisp screen. It’s a neat package, but boy — is it heavy. Even the stylus-like “stick” that screws into the rear of the frame to make it stand up feels like a fishing weight rather than a mere stand.

The default installed firmware was fine – it powered up, and within 30 seconds I was on the wireless network. Like most geeks, first thing was to tell the unit to go and perform a firmware check, which id dutifully did; and thus is downloaded and applied its first update smoothly. Well done, HP.

There is a “home screen” type of interface, with which you can launch any of the apps the literature talks of, or via the configuration of the device, you can tell it to launch a slide show when its idle. Sadly, the “slide show” it does when “idle” (which will be most of the time) is only from local storage. That’s not what I want; when idle, I want it to go and load some online content – photos from Facebook, Snapfish (or Flikr). I basically want it to be a hands-free automatic updating remote display for my online photo album. HP: please address this!!

The Facebook app is very good if you know what pictures you want to show, but for my taste seems to require far too much interaction. Your only choise here is to select which friend’s albums you wan tot see, and then browse their albums. I’d just like to see (or chose) which friends albums are going to be displayed (probably with their name somewhere on the screen, maybe with the caption as well).  Like a “recent photos from FriendA, FriendB, FriendC”, and have the “standby mode” of the DreamScreen just go find recent items from this selection.

Here’s something HP got correct: you can tell it to turn on at one time, and off at another. Great for night time in the bedroom: photo frame goes of at 11pm, and back on at 7am.

Next up – when idle, it would nice nice if we could get the “clock” app to display the time(s)  (with an alpha channel??). Or, for that matter, the weather for the configured location.

Minor bug bear for me; entering a password doesn’t obscure the entered password as you type it from the on-screen keyboard.

There’s a calendar app in here; it shows… a calendar. Wouldn’t this be so much better if you could give it a URL to an ICS or ICAL file and get it to display your calendar appointments? (Don’t forget to set a refresh period, and have the calendar be able to always show the current day/week/month).

More interesting tid-bits as I keep playing with this.