Optimizing podcast playback on Optimus

I ran CyanogenMod Froyo 2.2.1 on my old G1 but am trying to keep the vanilla 2.2 on the Optimus T.

The only thing I miss is the CM hack that allows you to do a no-look skip to the next track by holding the VOL UP button even when the screen is locked. I have reclaimed 90% of the CM podcast goodness using $3 of android apps.

ButtonRemapper (~$1) will remap your hard buttons to your liking. I remapped my completely-unused Search hard button to be Next Track. Works great.

WidgetLocker (~$2) replaces your lockscreen and lets you put widgets there. This way you can interact with the widgets without having to unlock the phone. I put the Music app widget on there so I can start/stop music from the lockscreen. If I had another hard button I wasn't using I'd map it to Pause so I could do that no-look, too.

The little bluetooth-badged droid up there is the BTmono ($1) widget for routing audio over a regular mono BT earpiece. I started using that after the author of BT Super Mono decided he didn't need to make his menus fit on screens anymore. He says this is because he only has hi-res screen Android devices to test with now. My responses to that are:

1. emulator in the SDK
2. stop hardcoding things like that. You introduced the problem for no good reason. Android allows you to let the device handle the display of such things.

Here's what it looks like now:

2nd impression, LG 509 Optimus T

The bluetooth is incredibly solid. If I leave the phone centrally located I can listen to BT audio all across my house. Strongest BT I've experienced.

VNC Server works great on android. :-) The blurred widget is Pure Calendar. Cheap, and interfaces nicely with the free Dato GTasks app.

Battery life is vastly improved by underclocking with SetCPU. Performance unaffected. The phone spends about 85% of ticks at 122mHz, and 10% at (max) 600mHz. Before at the 12hr mark the phone would be about 60%; now it's 90%.

Lurv. This is a great platform on great hardware.

First impressions: LG 509 (Optimus T)

As I mentioned before, my G1 is getting very stressed out with all I'm asking it to do. Not angry birds or anything like that, just some practical multitasking.

The Optimus reports 205MB completely free RAM and another 95MB accessible if needed (non-critical app memory). This is huge, huge, HUGE for me. No stuttering, no hangs, just multitasking goodness. I am a happy boy.

Although I do not really care about cosmetics, it is definitely a better-looking handset than the G1.

Better battery life so far, although this may just be my imagination.
{Update: not my imagination. Optimus lost less than 10% overnight; the G1 lost 25-40% in the same time period.}

Will post more as my familiarity increases.

More thoughts on Diamondcard SIP/VOIP, and phone service in general

I logged in to check my balance on Diamondcard today. Haven't looked at it in a while since I've been using Google Voice for my VOIP needs, since that solution is (currently) free rather than 1.6 cents/minute. So my balance sits on Diamondcard awaiting the moment Google pulls the free rug out from under us.

I was wandering through the Diamondcard site and re-read something I had seen before:

Diamondcard contributes, promotes and supports the following open source projects: Ekiga, Twinkle, Asterisk, FreeSWITCH, OpenSIPS, WikiPBX, Podwiki, FreeRADIUS, Linux, FreeBSD, Apache, Perl, Python, GNU arch. Our entire platform is built using these great tools.

Diamondcard funds Twinkle and Ekiga projects. The more calls you make with Ekiga and Twinkle softphones using Diamondcard, the more money donated to these projects. 10% of every recharge or online shop purchase is donated to these open source developers.

Diamondcard handles this kind of thing well. They put up detailed instructions how to use FOSS (like Ekiga and Twinkle) with their service, and donate back to the kinds of projects that they use or who send customers their way.

My current setup is that Voice rings both my TMO line (Android phone) and Ekiga on the desktop, set up to listen for Gizmo calls. Works fine.

Hitting the wall with the G1

I think I could continue to use the G1 for a long while if it had more RAM.[0] The CPU is fine at 528mHz, the screen size is fine. The formfactor is dated but fine. The battery life is adequate if I exercise good charging discipline.

I've shoehorned froyo 2.2.1 onto it in the form of Cyanogenmod, and also used the 14MB of newly-freed RAM hack, which, IIRC, freed up some memory previously consumed by non-optimized radio code. I stuffed a Class 6 microSD in there and devoted some of it to a Linux swap partition which is mounted from the terminal. It works, but the poor phone is creaking.

What I need:

1. 512MB RAM
2. more battery life (one of the newer, larger lithium batts like in the G2)
3. either vanilla Android, a tastefully vendor-modified Android (yeah, right) or the ability to slam in a custom ROM of my choosing.

What I would like:

1. A bit more flash memory space for custom ROMS, in case I want them.
2. A bit more flash memory space for apps; currently running 15 apps in my maxxed-out G1, and that is including things like update Gmail, Google Voice, Google Sky.
3. Comes stock with a modern Android like Froyo, or will get it OTA without hackery.
4. dock
5. miniUSB connector, quite out of style these days. I don't like those tight-fitting microUSB connectors. Ick.
6. Lose the trackball. I keep hitting it accidentally.
7. Physically kb, maybe. Up in the air on this one.
8. LED flash for phonepics.

Things I don't care about:

1. faster CPU
2. bigger, better screen
3. pretty / fancy
4. HD video or 92-kerbillion pixel photos. I usually crank down phonepics to 640x480 in the config anyhow.

My options

My first instinct was to try to secure a used Nexus One, which was at the time the One True Google phone. Specs are what I want (except the faster-than-I-need 1gHz CPU) but it has such cult status that used ones are going for $300+.

So I started googling android 512MB RAM and started stumbling across some promising hardware. The one I settled on was the LG Optimus T, an unlockable GSM phone. It's been getting good press (including a top 5 best phone list from Cnet), and several reviewers point out that while it competes in the android low end market (on price), it is no slouch. They are going for ~$150 on eBay.

1. 512MB RAM. Yay! Over 2x what's on the G1, and same as the Nexus One.
2. 512MB flash storage, ~170MB accessible by user. Again, over 2x what's on the G1 and very close to the 512MB, ~190MB on the Nexus One.
3. lost that trackball. Yay!
4. Stock with 2.2, OTA to 2.2.1 and allegedly to 2.3 Gingerbread.
5. downside: no physical kb; guess I'll have to learn swype. No LED flash. Volume buttons are supposed to be hard to find without looking.

[0] not the internal space for system or apps, but the actual memory in which apps run.

Tasker for Android

[This post is derived from an email I sent a friend who has an extraordinarily nimble technical mind. "Normals" can read along, too.]


If you haven't looked at Tasker, check it out. It's priced in Pounds; when I pulled the trigger the exchange rate made it ~$5.

Basically tasker it's a macro system that can automate most functionality of the [Android] phone. When any given macro exits the phone settings are reset to their original values unless you specifiy otherwise.

Examples from my own usage:

Silence during meetings: watch the Google calendar. When starting an appointment marked "Busy", turn phone to silent mode.

wifi battery conservation: even when wifi is turned off, scan briefly every X mins to check if near a specified wifi access point. If nearby, turn on wifi, connect, and turn on auto-sync. Disconnect when leaving the area.

Same for celltowers, gps, etc. Name your poison.

This may be particularly important for folks that are too cheap frugal to have an unlimited dataplan.

To give you an idea how clever this stuff is: if you pick more than one location type Tasker starts with the lowest-power-consuming one. For example, a celltower + WAP requirement would use celltower first for a power-inexpensive sanity check to see if you are in the general
area, and only then trigger the battery-hogging wifi for fine-grained checks. So if you never get within celltower visibilty of the target the wifi check is never activated. Good stuff, Maynard.

Find missing phone: when receiving an SMS from a given number with a given string as the
message, turn on GPS, get a lock, and SMS back the coords, battery level, etc. This functionality is $99/yr for iPose users.

Podcast listening: when I connect with one of my named BT headsets it brings up an app that streams normal audio over BT. When I connect with a different, A2DP-enabled earpiece it dooesn't run that app because a2dp handles that duty.

Night mode: turn off wifi, bluetooth, and phone between 1-5am since I'm not going to answer
it anyway. Saves battery if I forget to cable it up for the night.

Power conservation: when on power cord turn on all the power-expensive toys you want;
bright screen, gps, wifi, 3g, whatever. Or maybe only turn them on
when the batt is fully charged, so you get fastest charge possible and then get the fun stuff.

Low battery: when below 20% battery, disable 3G and autosync, disable wifi+GPS,
turn screen to minimum, say the arbitrary words "arrrrghhhh, low on
battery!" or play a particular sound or whatever.

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.

Because it's there.

Some wundergeeks recently unveiled a couple of early versions of a LiveCD release of Google Android. Early and creaky (and thinks it's a phone), but it boots.

The problem for Micro$oft is that Google has free (admittedly basic) cloud-based documents including word processing, spreadsheets, etc. And now they are toying with free OSes (Chiefly Chrome OS, but also Android as you see above).

All this must be a little scary if your main source of income is selling people a new (versionwise) Office suite and operating system each year or two.

I think that folks are just about ready to realize that the universe does not revolve around Micro$oft. Shades of Galileo, no?