Stefan aka Noneus

I sort of got upset with Android. A side from the usability issues there were two major problems, which made me a Palm user:

• The web experience on Android is horrific. After watching the browser comparison on Engadget’s Nexus One review, I was surprised. The 1GHz Snapdragon wasn’t any faster then my G1 in webbrowsing. Seems like Google has a major problem with browser-performance. I guess the problem is network related.
• The Android-Market is a mystery. Just google for android market problems. Some phones weren’t authenticated devices after a OTA-Update. As a result all copy-protected apps wouldn’t show app in the market.

I put my eye on the Palm Pre for some time now. It’s quite similar to Android. Linux-based, hackable, easy to develop, multi-tasking and perfect Gmail integration. After playing with the palm-emulator (it’s in the webOS SDK) for a while I decided to buy a Pre. That’s one and a half month ago.

I won’t write a full review. There are plenty in the internet. However I will list my major up’s and down’s with the Pre.

Up’s:

• Exchange and Gmail synchronisation are flawless. It was never that easy to handle appointments for work and private life. And the most important part: It all syncs automatically via internet. No manual sync required.
• Really easy to hack. Just check out webos-internals and PreCentral. Way easier than on Android. No flashing of custom system-images required.
• Touchstone Charger: After I got my Pre I ordered a Touchstone charger. I just love wireless charging. Much easier than stupid cables.
• UI is pretty and constitant: Overall the whole UI looks much nicer than Android’s UI. It’s very smooth!
• The use of gestures is amazing. No UI is clonked up with buttons. The gesture-area helps with that.
• MyTether: MyTether is an app that requires root access to your Phone. But tethering never was that easy. And I love USB-Tethering. It just works!

Down’s:

• No navigation solution for Europe. Google Maps is ok. But a full fledge navigation software with offline maps would be great.
• App Catalog looks so empty in Europe. This will be fixed in March, when Europe will get payed apps.

Google just announced a phone sold through a new Google Webstore called the Nexus One. Go to http://google.com/phone to buy one. Google sells it unlocked without a carrier contract for 529$. BUT: ONLY to the US, UK and Hong Kong! What? It is unlocked. So why not sell it to the rest of the world, even if there is no dataplan here in Germany? All I get is this stupid page:

Cyanogen release a new version of his mod, that is legal. It features the latest Donut release. Check it out here. I didn’t have Cyanogen’s Recovery Image, so installing this version was not very easy. 4.1999 won’t install without Cyanogen’s Recovery Image. I always got an “Installation aborted”.

• Get the cm-recovery-1.4.img from here
• Get fastboot tool from here and follow the instructions below the downloads:

On OS X and Linux, you can store the fastboot executable anywhere on your machine. On Windows, you must store the fastboot executable where it can find the AdbWinApi.dll file (included with the Android SDK), otherwise it will not work properly. The recommended place to store the fastboot executable on Windows is with the other tools in the Android SDK, in the <sdk>/tools directory. On all platforms, you may want to add the location to your PATH, for convenience.

USB Driver

If your development machine is running Windows, you should make sure to update your USB driver before continuing. For your convenience, the Android SDK (1.0 r2 or later) includes an updated USB driver that you can install. For more information, see Setting up a Device for Development on the Android Developers Site.

• Get the device in fastboot mode:

To enter fastboot mode, power up the device (or reboot it) while holding down the BACK key. Hold the BACK key down until the bootloader screen is visible and shows “FASTBOOT”. The device is now in fastboot mode and is ready to receive fastboot commands. If you want to exit fastboot mode at this point, you can hold down the keys MENU+SEND+END (on the Android Dev Phone, SEND is the “Call” key and END is the “End call” key).

• fastboot boot cm-recovery-1.4.img
• now you can apply the update.zip for 4.1.999

I just printed some stickers for my Lenovo X200. I probably add more stickers to it soon and replace the ones that are on in the process.

First stickers for my Lenovo X200

So I bought the Android for a reason. Developing. And that’s what I did. Since there is no really great Podcastfetcher for the Android Platform I decided to write my own. It’s called APodder. (Guess what the A stands for. ) After a few days of work. I got some base functionality going:

• Downloading and parsing RSS2.0 feeds
• Storing podcasts and their shows in a SQLite databse
• An Interface that has a podcast-view and a show-view (see the pictures below).
• Possibility to download shows with showing a progressbar (see the pictures below).

Not everything works 100% as I have it in my mind. But I’m getting there. This is my first bigger project in Java. Until now I only developed in C++, C and Python.But thanks to Eclipse and its awesome AutoCompletition I’m doing quite fine. Expect to see more APodder news in February. I have exams in university in the end of january. So I will minimize developing hours.

I couldn’t resist… I bought an Android Developer Phone. It was quite expensive. The device itself was 399$. Getting an Android Market Account 25$ and a whopping 91.71$ for taxes. 42.60$ for shipping. So in Total I paid about about 550$ for this phone. Shipment from the US to Germany took about 5 days. I won’t make a review about the phone-software. Just search Youtube for G1 Android Review. But I will review the Development Tools shortly in this post (In more detail in about a month).

But first things first. The device came in a simple white box. There was no fancy boxing. No CDs. Just the device with a charger for America (I charge the phone through USB), and USB-cable and Headphones:

The box of my Android phone.

The Box opened with the phone inside.

Contents of the Android Box.

You can find the complete specs for the phone on Wikipedia. A great feature is the supported UMTS speeds. 7.2MBit/s down and 2.2MBit/s up (in theory). The build quality of the device could be better. Especially the mechanism to open and close the keyboard. When the device is closed the display wiggles, which is kind of annoying. But enought about the device. Let’s talk developing.

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I really like what AMD is doing. They opened up graphics card documentation and are contributing to the opensource radeonhd driver. All that is part of their new opensource strategy. They also released an “AMD Performance Library” on Sourceforge called Framewave. Of course Intel did that too. But my heart is with AMD (Too bad their new processors suck.)

Apple announced the Macbook Air. It’s a really thin Macbook. Apple says it’s the thinnest laptop in the world. It’s 13.3″ and features a normal Core 2 Duo processor. So its sort of fast. It has a Multitouch trackpad. It has a LED backlight LCD panel. Of course it has the other Apple stuff like backlight keyboard and so on. So would I buy one?

Are you serious? I think that thing is completly pointless. Yeah it’s thin. But let’s look at the normal Macbook(which I might actually buy or the Dell XPS M1330). It’s just a bit thicker. They look great too. They have way more powerful processors. 400MHz more is alot. The Dell also has a LED backlight. The Macbook and the Dell have optical drives. They have more than just a few USB slots. They have a replaceable battery. Oh. but they don’t have the multitouch trackpad. Oh I really need to rotate my images by a gesture on my trackpad. I just can’t hit a short key combination. Oh and the Macbook Air is about 600Euros more expensive. Why? You get less power. You don’t get an optical drive. Did I mention the lack of ExpressCards? This thing is just a complete failure. But of course the Apple guys adore it? Do you remember the picture with the shit with a BMW sign on top of it saying something like this: “You would buy everything with our badge!” Someone should make the same thing for Apple.