Android running on an Apple iPhone 2G

It had to come, I suppose. Yet another demonstration of the power of Open Source generally and the flxibility and versatility of the Linux and Android operating systems, in particular.

Android running on an iPhone. Thanks to MobileCrunch.

I'm off to check out OpeniBoot to see if it will work on my iPod Touch.  I'll probably make a donation, too, as David Wong is clearly doing some amazing work.(Update: I donated US$20).

Comparing 3G network speeds: Vodafone vs Telecom XT

Here is how it went down at my house. I'm in the Beach Haven North area of what will soon be the North Shore area of a united Auckland. I have NO IDEA where the nearest cell tower is for these two carriers. They are anonymously strewn up and down the nearby streets.

I used the "Xtremelabs Speedtest" app three times in succession, with a two minute break between each test. I did not restart the app or the phone. The battery had plenty of power. The phone is an HTC Magic running the "as-sold" version of Android. I sat in the same place and held the phone the same way for all tests.

The sample is small and proves nothing about either network, except perhaps 3G speeds are pretty good, though variable. Telecom does seem to be consistently "half-speed" on the upward leg. I saw the same thing last night when I was doing speed tests. That may be a function of distance to the nearest tower. I'm assuming it's easier for the phone to "hear" the tower than it is for the tower to "hear" the phone.

The Vodafone tests were done between 20:11 and 20:18 and the Vodafone results were as follows:

1. Max down: 1229.0Kbps / Avg down: 1152.1Kbps
   Max up: 273.8Kbps / Avg up: 273.6Kbps
   
   
2. Max down: 806.1Kbps / Avg down: 795.4Kbps
   Max up: 294.8Kbps / Avg up: 255.6Kbps
   
   
3. Max down: 885.7Kbps / Avg down: 804.9Kbps
   Max up: 310.3Kbps / Avg up: 309.2Kbps
   

Telecom XT network tests were between 20:26 and 20:32. Here are the Telecom XT results.

1. Max down: 1455.5Kbps / Avg down: 1447.2Kbps
   Max up: 139.2Kbps / Avg up: 156.6Kbps
   
   
2. Max down: 1360.1Kbps / Avg down: 1212.3Kbps
   Max up: 150.7Kbps / Avg up: 142.5Kbps
   
   
3. Max down: 885.4Kbps / Avg down: 580.4Kbps
   Max up: 154.9Kbps / Avg up: 113.6Kbps
   
   

Do your own tests....if nothing else, it's fun. :-)

Apple-verse vs HTC Magic - Android phone

I've been looking at various smart phone options for almost a year. I'd pretty much narrowed the choice down to either an Apple iPhone 3G S or a phone based on Google's version of Linux, known as "Android". I considered the Palm Pre to be a wild card worthy of investigation. Blackberry's are too boringly business-oriented for the lone-wolf mobile phone user like me.

I already have an Apple iPod Touch 8GB. I have used it daily - hourly! - (minutely?) - since I got it in December. The interface is pretty good, though I grew tired of risking hand cramps from pinching and squeezing web pages constantly trying to make links accessible to my large finger tips. That magnifying glass thing when trying to place the cursor when editing text also annoyed me. The predictive text only offered one word (that I could see) and it wasn't clear how to either select it, or make it go away. The requirement to use the wretched iTunes, combined with Apple's chokehold on the platform itself put me off deepening my investment in the Apple-verse beyond the bare entry-level access the wifi-only iPod Touch affords. For example, what do I now do with the music I have bought via iTunes? It's locked up tight in the Apple-verse. I can't listen to it on anything else.

I wanted freedom.

Last Friday I took delivery of my new Android-based HTC Magic mobile phone. I got it for $519 from Vodafone on a new, two-year Smart 80 plan. I'd always been on prepay. I went for Smart 80 because that roughly matched the amount I have been spending each month on my prepay. Well....it's a 'wee bit' more...but in the zone. The Smart 80 gave me access to 250MB / month and additional 3G data at only 10 cents / MB. A lower plan would have seen additional data costing 25 cents / MB. So with this plan, I can do 500MB / month for $105. That's cheaper than the Smart 130 which gives a lot of minutes and txts I don't use anyway, beyond the time provided with the Smart 80 plan.

Since then, I've been playing with it fairly intensely, working out what it does, what it does well, what it could do better. I have to say, I'm happier than I expected to be. The Magic has some great features that struck me right up front.

I can connect to a PC, mount the phone and copy MP3 files or video files onto the phone and just play them. No iTunes. It also plays happily downloads and plays *.ogg (Ogg-Vorbis) sound files.

When editing text, I can place the cursor where I want it with a simple touch. The predictive text offers me a list of words and I can pick one before I've even finished typing my current word.

When web browsing, the trackball on the Magic allows me to scroll through page links and select the one I want without pinching or spreading my fingers again and again. Easy. The web browser also has a magnifying "square" I can scroll around the page using the trackball and then select the area to be magnified. Good.

The 3.2 megapixel (woohoo!) camera integrates nicely with any new app that can accept a photo or video as input.

The Magic is a nice, handy shape. It's thin and slips easily into any pocket I use. It's light. The 3.2 inch screen is big enough.

The phone is stable. No crashes so far. (My old Vodafone 715 used to crash frequently, especially handling image data.)

Android multitasks. You can have several diverse, 3rd-party apps open in the background doing their basic functions. Twidroid notifies me of new tweets. Earthquake tells me of the latest earthquake anywhere. BuddyMob tells me about new posts. Or I can shut any or all of them them up and check manually. I can move away from Skype for a few minutes and when I come back, I'm stilled logged in. It does time out though. Not sure how much time I have, but it seems to be at least 3 minutes.

The wifi on the Magic is more sensitive than my iPod Touch. Yesterday morning I found myself connected to the wifi at work while on the next street over from the office. By comparison, the iPod Touch would lose the connection if I crossed the street. Similarly, parked at the local shops near the offcie I was on the office wifi, whereas this just isn't possible with the iTouch.

I'm not saying no other device does these things. I'm saying the HTC Magic, running Android, does do them.

The apps for Android aren't as many or diverse as for the Apple-verse, but most of the core apps I want are there and good enough and judging from the Android Market's list of apps, there are new apps every day.

But I still have my iPod Touch. It's not going anywhere. After I turn my HTC Magic into a wireless AP (because I can!), my iTouch will be even more useful than it is now...and I'll have simultaneous access to both the Apple-verse and the growing Android community of applications.

Freedom. Loving it.

[2009-11-24 - Update: I rooted my phone and got wifi tethering running. The tethering part was as easy as installing an app (either "tetherWiFi" or "Tethered wifi for root users"). No tricks or fiddles. I'm now using my Apple iPod Touch anywhere, tethered via wifi to my HTC Magic and sharing its 3G data connection. That happily works in the background thanks to android's multi-tasking ability. I'm currently running Cyanogen Mod 4.2.5 as the android version on my phone. Yay! ]

Apple iPod Touch vs Linksys WAG54G2 Wi-fi DSL modem router

Google Fodder: My Apple iPod Touch could NOT connect to my new Linksys wireless WAG54G2 modem / router.

My other devices worked fine (PC with DLINK DWA-110 USB Wi-fi and an HTC Magic phone - with Android OS).

In attempting to get the iPod Touch to connect to the router I tried all the security protocols and changing passcodes. Nothing worked.

THEN, I changed the WAG54G2 router from the default wifi channel of 11 to 9....and the problem was gone.

Immediately.

It looks like the channel 11 on the Linksys WAG54G2 and the channel 11 on my Apple iPod Touch do not align closely enough to get connected. But other channels are sufficiently closely aligned to allow a reliable connection.

This may also be true for other devices. Try another channel if you have trouble connecting to the Linksys WAG54G2.

iPod Touch and Skype

Today I received the Apple iPhone Stereo Headset I ordered on Sunday. I bought it because this headset has a microphone as well as the two earbuds. Google searches had suggested the mic worked fine with an iPod Touch 2nd generation.

Yes! They worked perfectly with Skype, allowing me to use Skype Out to call any landline or cellphone. I was also able to receive a Skype-to-Skype call. The sound was good, though perhaps a little on the quiet side. People I spoke to on their phones said they could not tell I wasn't using a normal phone. None guessed I was using an iPod Touch, Skype and WiFi.

So along with all the other things my iPod Touch can do, it is now also a telephone if I'm in an area with WiFi available.

The only limitation is that Skype can't run in the background as iPod Touch (and iPhone) optimise the user experience by limiting multitasking. Skype must be the foreground program running if you want to receive any calls.

UPDATE 2010-01-18: I now use my iPod Touch anywhere by wifi-tethering it to my HTC Magic android phone. Skype from the iPod actually works over the phone's 3G Internet. This is cool because I don't have to choose between Apple and android. Instead, they work together to make each other better. Android has the freedom to access any file from anywhere and the iPod has access to the Apple Store apps....though that is less important each day as more apps come out for android.

iPhone / iPod Touch v3.0 beta

The other day I saw a tweet from Stephen Fry saying he was enjoying using the iPhone 3.0 beta update with his iPhone. I tweeted in reply asking where I could get it. I got a tweet back from @tapthatapp pointing me to a page that explained the what, where and how of trying out the beta version 3.0. Check out these pages before you start doing anything.

The first thing I discovered was "Rapidshare" is anything but rapid. Unless you pay them at least a per diem charge, you getabout 15kbps....which is a slow go for 250MB of data. So downloaded from the free direct links at about 60kbps. Much better.

To upgrade an iPod Touch or iPhone, you restore the contents of the downloaded IPSW file onto the device via iTunes. This wipes out whatever was there, but don't worry too much, as I'll explain later. In order to ensure the device remains usable with iTunes (and isn't effectively orphaned forever from the Apple eco-system), you must also subscribe - directly or indirectly - to the developers program. The direct cost is US$100. I went instead for the indirect option, offered by Jarrad Hall, of US$5 and provided the UDID of my device and waited.

It took Jarrad just over a day to inform me I was ready to go and that my iPod Touch would be usable with iTunes. My first attempt to restore the update to my iPod Touch didn't work, with iTunes telling me my firmware level was wrong. I asked Jarrad via email if he could help and he quickly replied, saying I should re-download the IPSW from his web page rather than the one at the original link. I think the original link may have had me downloading the iPhone version even though I had clicked on the iPod Touch 2gen link, as the first download had a different name to the second one.

Whatever, the second attempt worked and beta 3.0 IPSW installed flawlessly. On syncing, it also installed all my existing applications and copied over my playlists. My apps, music and videos were quickly as they had been before.

The beta is clearly a beta. I have had some issues, some of them serious but oddly enough, none of them have been reproducable. Here is a short list:

• Power funkiness. A couple of times the iPod Touch has gone into suspend mode - sort of. The icons are still visible, but dimmed. I had to hold the top power-off button for 6 seconds to effectively force a re-boot. I can't reproduce this.
  
• Safari sometimes won't rotate the page to landscape. If I Home-button out of safari and go back in, it will them rotate the loaded page. I can't make this happen on demand, but this is how I get out of it when it occurs.
• Twitellater 2.0 couldn't open any web links on one occasion - either directly in Twitellater or externally in Safari (a settable option). Powering off the iPod Touch appeared to sor this out. I can't reproduce the behaviour.
• The worst problem by far occured last evening when I tried to copy / paste a URL from Safari into Twitellator. The paste didn't happen, but after the attempt almost every app started crashed immediately. Only a handful would run (Contacts, App Store and a couple of others). Powering off and on repeatedly made no difference. Everything else just went splat immediately. The device was all but unusable. After 90 minutes of playing around trying to get it to work properly - and failing - I thought I was going to have to restore back to v2.2.1. In preparing for that, I sync'd the iPod Touch with iTunes. Happily, following the sync, the iPod Touch resumed normal function. Everything worked again. I tried to reproduce the event by doing the same copy / paste operation and could not reproduce it. Copy / paste worked fine. The only difference may have been the use of the app Free Memory the first time around, several minutes before I attempted the copy / paste. Free Memory may no longer be compatible with v3.0. That would be no real surprise. I probably shouldn't have tried using it in the first place.
  

Other than these mostly minor issues, the past two days on the v3.0 beta have been pretty good. I'm looking forward to the final version when it comes out in a few months. Function without funkiness will be much appreciated.

Update: 10 minutes after posting the article above. I pulled my iPod Touch out of my pocket and it is lights-out. Dark and unresponsive. For the moment.....dead. I'll see if I can revive it.

Update 2: Googled and found this site explaining how to re-boot a frozen iPod Touch. Following these instructions, my iPod Touch re-booted after holding both buttons for about 45 ....long.... seconds.

Update 3: After almost 3 weeks on the 3.0 beta, I went back to using v2.2.1. The added function of the beta wasn't worth the continued instability of the beta and the failure of many or my apps to run at all.......sometimes. I couldn't work out how to make most of the bug repeatable, either, so work-arounds weren't possible as the behaviour was unpredictable. I suspect lots of memory leaks, which would be fatal in a device with 128MB of system RAM and no ability to swap to virtual memory when the real thing runs out. I'll wait for the final release of v3.0.

Vodafone (Europe) releases HTC cell with Android

Vodafone's "HTC Magic" smartphone (CNN), running Google's 'Android' smartphone operating system, will released in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy in the next few months.

The HTC Magic....

"... includes a 3.2-inch QVGA touch screen display, navigational buttons and a trackball."

"It also comes with several Google applications including Google Mail, Google Maps and Google Search as well as YouTube, which is owned by Google."

So how does it stack up against the Apple iPhone? CNN was gushing:

CNN's Adrian Finighan, who is at the...(Mobile World Congress in Barcelona)... said that as an iPhone user he had spent much of his time at this year's event looking for something to rival his device.

"The Magic is, well, magic! I think I've found it. It really is the first device that I could consider swapping my beloved Apple device for.

It's coming! It's coming! Fingers crossed New Zealand won't have to wait as long for an HTC Magic equivalent as we did for the iPhone. You can see some good pics of the device here.

In no particular order

The news is a bit thicker than usual this week. These stories broke through the mass into my consciousness.....in no particular order.

The iPhone 3G appears to have problems. Dropped calls (3% vs the normal 1%) and choppy Internet (as the devices swap frequently between low and high speed access) are the main issues, it appears. Fingers are pointing at Infineon Technologies' 3G chips. But Infineon says they work just fine in other phones and cites Samsung as an example.

Whatever. I'm glad I didn't go for one.

For the last few days, I've also had Georgia on my mind. Where the heck did THAT come from? I'm trying to make sense of it. I can see some long running threads amid the mess.

Russia (Putin) has grown tired of Bush-lead America following a "me first, screw you" approach to almost every aspect of foreign policy. 'Might makes right' wears thin over time. The EU and NATO are encroaching on Russian borders and Russia is frozen out of closer relations with the rapidly growing 'United States of Europe'. But thanks for all the oil and gas. The US continues to set up its missile shield setting up on Russia's doorstep in Poland, Turkey and elsewhere (supposedly directed at "rogue" states) despite Russia's vehement opposition. Then, the president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, tried to assert control in break-away South Ossetia immediately after US-funded joint military exercises began last month in Georgia. Those exercises were matched at the time by a Russian anti-terrorist operation on the other side of the border.

Georgia wants to join NATO. Hard to imagine Russia letting that happen.

Who is the US 'saving'? Georgia is nominally a democracy. No need to fight for 'freedum-n-dumocrasee' there. South Ossetia has a large Russian population and doesn't want to be part of Georgia. They've made that fairly clear. Russia compares it to Kosovo in that respect, which the West assisted in seceding from rump-Yugoslavia, though it would not be fair to compare Saakashvili to Serbia's now-dead former leader, Slobodan Milosevic.

Looks to me like some (unnecessary) brinksmanship going on and Russia either took the bait (October Surpise!) or called US President George Bush and Georgian President Saakashvili's bluff.

Either way, the US elections would have to feature in the overall calculations somewhere....especially on the American side. One of the key tools Bush has for helping out Republican nominee, John McCain is the ability to stir up trouble as a background for McCain to posture in front of. Democrat contender, Barack Obama has sensibly spoken of a more moderate and co-operative approach to foreign policy. What better way to make him look soft than to go around the world stirring up trouble making it look like talking isn't an option? Meanwhile.....real people die. Bush couldn't give a rat's arse about that, as his record clearly shows. For its part, Russia will be betting the US and EU don't want their oil and gas supplies disrupted by a wider war and anyway the US is busy with all the other endless wars it has underway.

I'm sure it will get worse before it gets better. Obama is still ahead in the polls. It's a risky strategy. The Republicans are already in trouble with many voters for starting stupid wars and waing Everests of tax money. Intensifying the apparent stupidity heading into an election could backfire. Though many Americans are suckers for some flag-waving war-mongerig and might go with it no matter how stupid it is. After all, they backed the invasion of Iraq on he evidential equivalent of the smell of an oily rag.

The Beijing Olympics are on. There was never any doubt in my mind that China would put on one hell of a show. The intelligence, energy and creativity of China are enormous and a set piece like the Olympics is the perfect platform to display all of the above. Virtually every person I know of Chinese nationality or extraction is bursting with pride - and rightly so. Having said that, I'm either working all day, spending time with the family, walking the dog or reading and thinking or sleeping, so haven't seen more than a couple of minutes worth of coverage here and there, now and again. Much like the last Olympics and the several before that. Not being one to spend endless hours in fromt of the tube watching anything (let alone sport) the O-rings aren't getting much of a look in.

The last time I sat and spent hours watching an Olympics was in 1976 in Montreal, where I had a friend attending as an alternate. He won gold in the heavyweight class in Edmonton in 1978 at the Commonwealth Games. He was to be the primary competitor in 1980, but the Soviets invaded Afghanistan to forestall muslim extremists taking control of the place and almost every Western country boycotted the Moscow Olympics....and my friend was very disappointed. He'd spent most of a decade preparing for that day. He left Canada after winning gold in the heavyweight plus class at the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane in 1982 and still doesn't live there full time even now. Last time I spoke to him, he was spending about half the year in Beijing and half in Vancouver and has done for over 20 years. His experience at the hands of cynical political interests sort of ruined the Olympics for me. It's even worse now we know the US funded those muslim extremists in Afghanistan in the first place and Canada was suckered into supporting a boycott regarding a war the US had played a part in provoking. Another one.

iPhone? Hmmmm......

Consumer.org.nz have a thorough review of the new Apple iPhone 3G. It's well worth reading.

The iPhone has a lot of very cool features. The touch screen. The ability to rotate the content on the screen to remain "level". The Safari web browser is probably the best on any cell phone to date. The ability to work out where it is via GPS. Total coolness and by themselves great additions to a full-featured 3G phone.

Unfortunately, the iPhone isn't a full-featured phone. There is no video camera. There is no voice-activated calling. You can't move files on and off the phone easily via a memory chip. Photos have to be imported via iTunes.

Setting aside the $80 / month, account-only, two-year contract to buy one for $549, the lack of these features make the iPhone less useful than my current phone.


OK, my $128 Vodafone 715 has a smaller screen and can't do voice commands, but it can make video and check my Internet e-mail and play Flash videos and I can move MP3s photos and any other data on and off it easily via USB. I can make a video and instantly upload it via Vodafone e-mail to YouTube or any of many other video-sharing web sites. I can even recharge the battery via a USB connection to my laptop if I'm caught without access to a power point. Converting vids to 3g2 format and copying them to the Vodafone 715 has been fun for my daughter. She makes videos with her digital camera, edits them and then takes them to school on her phone to play for her friends. The V715 lets you play vids "fullscreen" (rotating the video to play landscape on the screen instead of portrait). This makes the actual video display area on this small phone larger, for example, than the more expensive Samsung a900 or the Motorola Razr phones.

My next phone will have a big screen, 3G, WiFi, Video and still camera, web browser, voice commands, MP3 player, at least 1GB of removable storage, support USB data transfer on and off and be a good phone with reasonable battery life. It will work with a pre-pay SIM if I want it to. There is already a lot of choice out there for these features. I'll be buying my next phone soon. I particularly want the voice-activation for calling in the car, via the bluetooth earpiece I use with the V715 to receive calls.

Given that list, my next phone won't be an iPhone. Besides....cool as it is, I don't really need a touch screen. I don't really need to rotate the content or use GPS to find out where I am. I usually know where I am. If I wanted a true mobile office Smartphone, I'd get a Blackberry.

Sorry, Apple. Almost....but the iPhone's extras aren't extras I need and some of the stuff you left out, I use a lot more and don't want to do without. The proprietary marketing iTunes and other stuff have no value to me. Worse, I'm a Linux user....not an aphid to be stroked for cash. I use tools. They don't use me.

Vodafone's 3G iPhone offerings

I like the iPhone. I think it's a very cool piece of technology and I'd love to own one. Vodafone's initial $199 iPhone offering exacts a heavy premium for the low acquisition price.

To get the iPhone for $199, you're looking at being on a $250 / month plan (+ GST?) for two years.

I'm sure there will be takers, I just won't be one of them. Paying $3000 a year for a cell phone / cool toy is far more than the fun stuff in the iPhone is worth......to me.

Much more reasonable is buying an iPhone outright for $549 (8GB version) or $699 (16GB version) and then sign up for the $80 / month plan (presumably plus GST) with 250MB of data. That isn't much data, but at 10 cents / additional MB, it won't hurt much more ($25 + GST) even if you used double the data quota....which still isn't much, especially in a WiFi context where you can use 30MB-50MB in barely an hour.

My $128 Vodafone 715 on a pre-pay plan is costing me about $80 / month, so I'd be better off buying the $549 iPhone and going onto the basic plan. That also frees me from any long term commitments with respect to the phone or the provider. I like to keep my options open. This is an area where things change rapidly.

Having said that....am I REALLY paying $1000 / year for my current "cheap" cell phone? Looks like I am.

I wonder if I really need it....or need to use it differently. That's more money than I'd like to think I spend on my cheap phone.