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.

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.

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.

Smartphone, again

You may remember (or have suppressed) my ancient smartphone geekout.

Since then I swapped to a WM Dash I got for $4 off eBay.  :-)  They thought it was dead but it just had an alarm bug which I fixed and patched.  The hardware is fantastic BUT:

1. google Tasks cannot be synced yet.  Boo!  Tasks are essential to my PIM life.
2. WM calendaring is awful on smartphones and Today screen hackery doesn't get me where I want to be.  PalmOS PIM handles this nicely.  Interestingly, the Calendar on the older Treo 600 is better (IMO) than that on the Treo 650.  {After writing that sentence I found freeware KSDatebook, which duplicates the functionality of the old 600 calendar.  Perfect.  Kerbillions of useful, free apps is one reason the old PalmOS rocked. "Yeah, there's a free app for that."}

So I am using the Treo 650 at the moment.  If Google ever publishes the Tasks API I might swing back to WM earlier. My old (pre-Dash) WM phones are sealed in bags in my bug out gear.  They have wifi and miniUSB charge ports, which makes them more useful in emergencies IMO.

War of the Smartphones

I've got three of the main types of smartphones here on my desk. They are all older but are good representations of type.

SDA (HTC Tornado) - Windows Mobile smartphone. No KB. Wifi/BT.
MDA (HTC Wizard) - Windows Mobile PocketPC. Slide-out KB, Wifi/BT
Palm Treo 600 - chiclet KB, no connectivity other than phone data (gprs or whatever)
You will notice I did not include whatever sparkly fashion device Apple is pushing this year.

Hardware
MS wins.

Connectivity
MS wins. MS phones dominate on connectivity.

Interface
Palm, absolutely. It's a primitive UI but is immediately usable and understandable.

Syncing
Palm syncs to everything; windoze, linux, bsd, unix, a toaster, a clump of dirt.
MS might sync to one workstation if you have good karma. It's a train wreck. Much easier to sync over wifi than over the supplied cable, believe it or not.

Software
Palm wins kerbillion to one. PalmOS software is falling from the skies like manna, and most is free. Take your pick. Go crazy.
MS software is hard to find and is usually $$$. I have found exactly two useful free MS apps: the freeware version of btaudio and TCPMP.

Conclusion
So what do I use? I go back and forth. I get about 6mos out of each one before I get cheesed off and rotate. Right now I'm running the ancient Palm and loving it. Too bad Palm is corportately suicidal.

Sync your smartphone/PPC with Google Sync

Right now it only does Calendar and Contacts, but that is pretty cool. That means I don't have to keep a Windoze around for syncing duties. Works great. When they start syncing Tasks then my smartphone life will be complete.

I use synce to move files back and forth between the linux workstation and the phone. Doesn't work great. No wildcard support, so when you are moving files you have to do some shell scripting to build the list of files, strip out the path and other data, etc. Works, but barely.