android adventures

I sold a couple of my WM smartphones on eBay to pay for a 1st-generation Android device, the original G1. Stop laughing.

Thumbnail: Android is awesome. Highly configurable/hackable. Plenty of free apps. Screen is beautiful. Awesome user community. Battery life is terrible.


On my love/hate relationship with Apple
Apple hardware is well-designed, but is not IMO suitable for power users. It's great for folks that want to do stuff but not understand how it works or venture off the official trail. I don't say this dismissively; that approach meets the needs of many people who have $ to spend. Using Apple is like wearing a great suit that gets you many compliments but you can never take off. (Exception: flashing rockbox firmware onto iPod is the best of both worlds).

I also find it annoying that good technology exists for years, then crApple* puts a slick design on it and the crowd goes wild. Then other companies knock off the crApple knock off.
Examples: smartphones, tablets, mp3 players.

iTunes is an abomination. I am pretty sure that iTunes use is a kind of litmus test for whether or not you will like The Apple Experience.

On this annoying swipe interface
Oh, Minority Report. How I hate you for those scenes with Tom Cruise manipulating/swiping/flicking data on a screen. That meme has positively infected high-end mobile devices. Arghhh. Cpu intensive, self-consciously blingy, and not terribly useful.

One of the nice things about Android is that the interface allows you to put things like nav dots on the screen to change homescreens more efficiently.

Android in general
I'm sold on Android. Good stuff. I even downloaded the SDK and look forward to compiling the 'hello, Android' app. :-P Will keep you posted. My understanding is that Android uses the Java language but not the official Sun/Java/Oracle libraries. The VM is different but I don't understand the significance of that yet.

I'd like to see less attention on bling and more on performance and battery life.

Battery
I think Android is pretty bad on Android in general. I don't think it's necessarily a function of my old G1.
Recalibrating the battery gauge may help somewhat.
Turning off unneeded services (wifi, gps, whatever) will help, as will dimming the screen backlight.
I do not pay for a data plan on my carrier so I use wifi; this probably makes matters worse.

I had gotten used to plugging in smartphones every 2 days or so to top off. Android requires a paradigm shift; if you are near a power source it is in your best interest to plug it in. A dock would be nice.


Multitasking
Android multitasks for real and does a good job of it.

Quasi-"Multitasking" on the iPhone is derided by many folks but I don't have a problem with it. Task switching plus limited background functionality is good enough for my purposes. It's basically what PalmOS did and it works fine. Should be easier on the batts, also.

Android apps and market
As of this writing the Market is populated enough with freeware that I unplugged my Treo 650 and cradle and put it away. I put the Dash phones up for auction without a moment's delay.

G1 specific
The G1 looks incredibly ugly in photos. In person it is only a bit ungainly. It is not aggressively ugly.

I don't use the trackball except in the Amon RA recovery image menus or to keep the screen active if I don't want it to time out (I use the 15sec backlight for batt purposes).

The hardware is minimal (528 MHz. 256 MB ROM, 192 MB RAM) so I needed either SD swap or compcache to run without lag. Currently using compcache.

The camera is pretty bad.






*crApple is a term used by Fab on the Linux Outlaws podcast, which was a tweak on his penchant for saying "it's crap!!!" about whatever he didn't like. Using it here for amusement rather than evaluative purposes.

Apple serial number decoder

This page takes an Apple serial number and dumps what it knows about it.

Here's sample output from my iPod serial:

Serial number: [redacted]
Name: iPod Mini (Second generation)
Model: Mxxxx iPod Mini 4GB Silver
Group1: iPod
Group2: Mini
Generation:
ModelCode: ipod_mini_2g
Screen size: 1.6 inch
Screen resolution: 138x110 pixels
Colour: Silver
Capacity: 4GB
Factory: JQ (China)
External link: Technical specifications by apple-history.com
Model introduced: 2005
Production year: 2005
Production week: 15 (April)
Production number: 34353 (within this week)

rockbox forums

But first, a frank word about the Rockbox forums.

Rockbox is very, very good for the end user. The Rockbox forums OTOH are vicious, pedantic, and needlessly brutal. It's the worst stereotypes about programmers come true. Do Not Want.

For your peer-assist forum needs I recommend the "anything but iPod" forums.

rockbox report: iPod mini 2g 4GB

Second traded mp3 player came in the mail. This one is a silver iPod mini 2nd gen, 4GB player.

The clickwheel functionality and build of the Mini is superior to the sansa, but it weighs more and has no place to attach a lanyard that I can see. The screen is larger but is monochrome and has much slower refresh. There is a bit of lag in the iPod UI. That's odd, as both units use dual 80mHz ARM chips that appear to be very similar (pp5022 v. pp5024 PortalPlayer stuff). Maybe it's just a slow screen refresh making the UI look slow.


Rockbox slipped right on painlessly. Rockbox for iPod mini 2G (manual in .pdf) will let you dual boot; rockbox for when you want to control your destiny and Apple firmware for when you want your iPod's electromechanical soul to get savaged by whatever hellspawn invented iTunes.

Hey, have I mentioned how much I hate iTunes? I do. It's an abomination, an informational lobotomy, a power of attorney granted to an elderly uncle who wasn't that stable before senility hit him full force. It's the signing away of your birthright for a pot of soup. It's no way to live. Say no to iTunes. Say yes to something else, anything else.

rockbox report: sandisk sansa e260

Got my hands on the e260, put it in normal USB mode (MSC "Mass Storage") and plugged it into my linux box.

Ran the installer (requires sudo or root access): it found the device. Pressed the Install Bootloader button (only necessary the first time) then the Install Rockbox button. I looked around and installed some themes while I was at it.

It is not an exaggeration to say from the time I opened the box to the time it booted up into Rockbox was less than 5 mins. Probably less than 4 mins. First track played? Eno's Music for Airports, Track 1, which I bought off Amazon in 2009.

Rockbox makes the stock firmware look like a child's plaything. Rockbox puts the user in control. I recommend rockboxing your player if it's in the list of supported devices.

rockbox

rockbox is free / open source firmware for mp3 players. Probably most common on iPods and Sansa players, but it runs on many platforms and adds features like video playback, game emulation, small apps, and massive amounts of customizability. See what yours would do.

I've been intending to snag a used mp3 player that is amenable to rockboxing, but hadn't done it until recently. I traded a handful of serviceable (but not rockboxable) units to get a Sansa e240r e260 and a beat up 2G iPod Mini. I'll install the firmware on them and will report back when I do so. Until then I've got a Sansa c240 that is officially not supported (classified as "unusable" with rockbox) but I've got it loaded up and am listening to mp3 and FM Radio on it now. The "unusable" rockbox is already better than the firmware that came with the unit.