I guess it’s time for an Android update (see original rant); short answer – I still have an Android phone, my iPhone is sold and gone to a (hopefully) happy new owner! Long answer follows, if you’re interested …

On the downside, my Android phone continues to have poor battery life, worse than my iPhone 3GS and much worse than Josh’ iPhone 4 – but it is now useable for a full day, so I’ll just learn to charge it every day. Other than that, this phone sucks at taking pictures in dim light – it “green balances” when using it’s built-in flash! And finally, the choice of useful Apps for Android remains poor in comparison to iPhone …

On the upside, it’s VERY nice to customize the Android lock screen, and to have useable and useful access to notifications. This is my lock screen, customized with WidgetLocker:

I chose the iPhone-like unlock slider, giving lots of space to add stuff – at the top I have live counters for home and work unread email, as well as any Google Voice notifications (of course, AT&T non-visual voicemail is rubbish, so it’s necessary to use Google Voice!).
At the bottom above the unlock slider is the SiMi Clock widget, showing date and time, current weather, and battery charge.
In between are four “slide-to-action” devices that give quick access to phone features without needing to go to the main home screen and open an App – my four do “Camera”, “Camcorder”, “Phone”, and “Call Margaret”.
Really nice, and iPhone has nothing so good (maybe if you jailbreak? But not built in).

Note also all those notification icons across the top of the screen – new mail, USB active, Bluetooth, WiFi, etc. Once the phone is unlocked, you can touch/slide down that bar, to access descriptive linkable information for every notification, like this:

So there’s a new email notification – touch it to go to the message; there’s also USB notifications (touch to change how the phone is connected to the computer). The strange “USB debugging” is because stupidly that is currently the only way to capture screenshots on Android – yes, iPhone still wins for some things!
At the top is a left/right slideable list of recently accessed Apps. Easier to get to than double-tapping the home screen!

If you do go to the home screen, you’ll find it (on HTC at least) with nice animated time/weather, as well as icons for Apps and/or folders (like an iPhone):

I had to purchase Folder Organizer to really make folders work well on Android – but now I can (better than iPhone) have folders within folders! So for example all my Apps are organized in one Apps folder, with sub-folders for different categories – and taking only a single icon position on the home screen …

Tapping an icon in this folder gives a new sub-folder:

There’s lots of “geeky” things about Android too – pattern-based unlock, System Panel to track phone activity, 3G tracking to monitor data usage, and of course Juice Defender configurable to extend battery life (yes, not needed on iPhone!) …

Sadly I’ve not found anything like Photogene to edit photos, and the built-in photo handling cannot for example resize a photo when emailing it! Similarly there’s nothing to edit videos. But to great benefit, Google influence means that Gmail, Google Voice, Google Reader, all work very well on Android – you can even configure Google Voice to automatically take over any international calls that you dial!

I’d wish for a longer battery life, and for Photogene, but other than that, this phone with huge display, useful lock screen, and can’t-lose-them notifications, is an improvement over todays iPhone. But if Apple could finally do something smart with notifications (and a dashboard-like lock screen configurator) on iOS 5, they would be easily ahead of Android again. Competition is good!

It’s a rant, and it’s not MINI related – but I’ve posted about iPhones a few times, and there’s an amount of overlap between the communities; something about wanting form and function, perhaps.
But I’ve been frustrated with my iPhone 3GS for a while; primarily the screen is just too small, expecially since getting an iPad last year. It’s also probably related to poorer close vision as I approach 50(!), though I guess glasses might solve that.

Margaret switched from T-Mobile to AT&T this past weekend, renewing my plan as now a family plan, so I’m staying with AT&T – in any case, Verizon doesn’t work in England! So I figured I’d get myself a new phone too, and the current iPhone 4 might have more dots and a better camera than mine, but it’s still a small display … I got tempted by the much bigger display of an Android phone, the HTC Inspire 4G.

Problem #1 is, of course, that it’s different to an iPhone that I’ve used for the past three years; little and big differences – one is that there’s no screen capture function, so here’s a picture of the HTC Inspire, taken by iPhone!

That screenshot is the best bit of this new Android phone, and what sold it to me – a big clear colorful screen with useful information right on the home page, courtesy of customizable “widgets”; I’ve got time and weather but I could have chosen lots of other things. Customizing is an easy drag-and-drop affair, too.
Notifications are really nice on Android too, all clustered in to the status bar at the top as little symbols, but a quick drag down gives a list of all of them – and tapping any one takes you to the “trigger” (email, or whatever). Very nice!
iPhone notifications are pathetic, with a single message box when you turn on the phone, which I always half see just as I slide to unlock, and it’s gone before I properly read it. Now it’s “hunt the non-zero count” among all Apps, but you may never discover just what that original half-seen message was …

Even with the lovely big screen, and notifications, as the post title hints, I’m less than enthusiastic so far. There’s a long list of issues, and some might yet be sufficient “show stoppers” to get this Android phone returned …

#1
Battery life is poor, or worse. The first day, with some experimenting, it struggled to last 8 hours; today, we’re down to 33%; you’ll see on the screenshot I had to install a battery percentage widget, since the built-in status symbol doesn’t give enough indication of remaining battery.
This phone will need daily charging – never had to do that with my iPhones.

#2
This might be AT&T fault (maybe because my account switched from Apple to Android?); I can’t get voicemail to work. There’s no visual voicemail of course, but calling the AT&T voicemail says “we need more information to direct you to the appropriate voicemail box” – what does that mean? Meanwhile unanswered calls to my phone don’t go to voicemail anyway!

#3
Perhaps because the phone is brand new, there’s minimal documentation anywhere; this led me to follow the screen instructions initially, which gave me HTC-branded mail and FaceBook Apps, that work annoyingly different (The HTC mail keeps creating new IMAP folders in my Gmail for example).
Eventually I had to do a factory restore and set the phone up all over again.

#4
Having set up syncing to my Gmail (mail, contacts), it seems that syncing is not reliable. More than once new messages have not appeared – and sending a message took more than an hour one time (with available WiFi continuously); as an additional annoyance there’s no lovely “whoosh” or any sound, to confirm that a message has been sent.

#5
Talking of WiFi, it seems flaky too – apparently the HTC Inspire WiFi antenna designer used to work at Apple as holding the phone at the bottom seems to drastically reduce WiFi reception.

#6
Getting music, ringtones, and photos on to the phone is challenging, at best. You can connect to a computer as a USB drive; but there’s no default folders to put anything in to.
A Google search suggested to create an “MP3″ folder and put ringtones in to it, then access them from the Music player in the phone, from where there is a “set as ringtone” function. Hardly easy – but it did work. Except for the >300K ringtone file I had, which always worked fine on my iPhone, but is rejected by Android.
Even though iTunes is criticized for doing music/photo/App/etc syncing, it’s far better than the Android/Mac solution of “figure it out if you can” …

#7
Much worse is that the Android phone might be incompatible with Mac computers! After writing some music to the phone, it decided that it’s microSD card was now “read only”. Read only means you can’t take photos – oh, and you can’t format it to solve the problem either!
Solution, after Google search – remove microSD card and connect to Windows computer using adaptor (which thankfully a work colleague had); use CHKDSK/F on the Windows computer (which did find issues).
So for now, the phone can again take photos – but will it fail again when I connect to my Mac next time?

#8
This issue of microSD cards seems stupid anyway! There’s “internal” memory (1GB) in the phone, and there’s the card (8GB as delivered) – and apparently some things must go in one or the other place. Why must a phone user deal with such technically detailed stuff? Just have “storage” like an iPhone, not different types of storage!

#9
Other annoyances include the “HTC Hub”; not sure what it is yet – because for more than a day it couldn’t “connect to server”. Oh, it just worked when I checked it, but failed after a few seconds. And now it’s working again. Slow and unreliable access to a few sounds and extra widgets, ok.

#10
And then there’s Bluetooth … my iPhone syncs to my Audi Q5, and from the car I can access all my contacts. Say I choose “Margaret”, then the car lists her details including two phone numbers (home and mobile); I can voice command “Call Margaret Mobile” to call her.
Well, the Android phone also syncs to the Q5, and makes contacts available – but somehow it doesn’t distinguish different phone numbers. So now Margaret has two separate entries, both identical except for the actual number. I can’t say “Call Margaret Mobile” any more, and if I say “Call Margaret” then the car offers two choices – Margaret, or Margaret. I can’t tell which one is her mobile number!
Maybe it’s the cars fault, but how did Apple get it right and Android wrong?

#11
Well, that’ll do!
If I can get voicemail to work, that’ll be a start; maybe I’ll use Google Voice to give me something similar to Visual Voicemail. I can learn to charge the phone more – but I need to be able to trust syncing for my Gmail mail/contacts/calendar, which I don’t, yet. Someone at Android has to figure out the Bluetooth phone directory issue, too.
But it is a nice big display!

iPhone users have been waiting a long time, and now – with a bit of effort – I have iOS 4 on my iPhone 3GS (though honestly I’d much prefer to have it on my iPad!)
Initially, everything is rather too busy – because the install ported my lock screen picture to my “home” background, too!

I went in and changed the background to something less busy; a quieter background makes the App icons a bit easier to spot, but there should be a way to reduce brightness/contrast as well as scale/position the photo:

I set up a couple of folders – doing it in iTunes 9.2 beta is a serious pain as the interface is much too ready to create a folder when you drag an App, rather than inserting it between other Apps – on the iPhone itself though, this works quite well. Hopefully they will fix iTunes before it is fully released.
To be honest, folders are a bit of a let-down; they should have existed so long ago and now that they are finally available, there’s no “wow” moment, at least not for me anyway:

And of course, background Apps don’t work – presumably because they have to be rewritten / updated; if I “background” Pandora, it stops playing just like it always did:

Hopefully Pandora and a few other “critical” backgrounding Apps will be available when iOS 4 is officially launched, otherwise there will be lots of disappointed iPhone 4 users …

(if you’re interested, I started from this site and then did quite a bit of Googling!)

I’m not driving GPMINI (since She’s in Florida) and I am having fun with my new Apple iPad toy … but I didn’t want to overload GBMINI.net with iPad stuff, so I put up a new website
If you’re interested in my iPad Thoughts, head over there …
http://ipadthoughts.net/

My iPad arrives! A little trouble, as we were away from Captain Lord Mansion when it arrived, and for security UPS wouldn’t leave it – I realize now that I could have “pre-signed” for it online which might have solved the issue, but luckily we were just a few minutes away, Captain Lord called us (thanks, Michelle!), and the UPS truck driver was prepared to wait a short time (many thanks to that mystery man) …

I do think it’s strange, wrong even, that you can’t do anything with the iPad unless you have a computer to connect it to, and run iTunes – seems like a significant error in Apple’s concept there; maybe non-computer owners get the chance to set it up in the Apple store if they purchase there. Luckily, I did bring my Macbook Pro with me.
Right now, iTunes is busy syncing Apps, music and photos – but I can’t use the iPad while that’s going on; so instead I’m posting here

The iPad looks lovely, feels much lighter than a Macbook Pro, but rather too heavy to hold for long in one hand. The screen is much too reflective, so it’s nowhere near as easy to read as it should be, sitting here with an open window behind me.
Also, I’m still shocked that Apple didn’t change the screen layout to put more than four Apps across – as you see in the screen shot above, there’s a lot of wasted space. Finally in the “not magical” list, that background picture is awful once you realize that those scratches on the screen are just star streaks!

On the plus side, I can’t say much yet since sync’ing continues … the iPad successfully picked up WiFi and has visited MargaretAndIan.com, so it’s all working fine … more later, maybe.

Further thoughts:
I’m getting on fine typing one fingered on the virtual keyboard in portrait mode, sneaking a thumb in on the space bar. For a while I was hitting shift instead of delete, because I’m used to the iPhone version.
Just tried two hands and it was poor!
But lets try two fingers in landscape mode – yes, thats much better. I can type at full speed without neding to check what im doing. And see ere jysta. A few errors!
Or, there’s just a few errors.
What’s weird is that the auto correct to insert ‘ marks doesn’t seem to work when typing with both hands – do I overrun the corrections with new keys?

Apps tried so far; some iPad ones are really not good, while a few are vey nice. In the free ones tried so far, I’m very impressed with the innovative styling of AP News. Still trying to figure which weather App is best, either Weather.com or WUnderground I think.
Oh, and this iPad version of WordPress is excellent

Another small annoyance – iTunes doesn’t continue downloads if you exit to another App … Did I hear someone say “multi-tasking”?!

Although I cut my computer teeth programming on a home designed & built microprocessor, toggling individual bits on/off, my original work experience with computers was with CP/M in the early 1980s … Microsoft’s DOS was basically a mimic of CP/M, so it was easy to transition.
In the world of Apple, people were clicking with mouses and doing all sorts of strange non-keyboard things; it made no sense to me!

In the late 1980s, I began to use a mouse when computer design of PCBs became common enough for my work to do it (prior to that, we created PCBs by sticking black tape to sheets of transparent plastic!); for this type of “art”, a mouse made sense … but for all my other computer work, it was keyboards and command lines all the way!

Of course in time, Microsoft Windows took over from DOS – but I know lots of keyboard shortcuts in Windows, and regularly dip to the DOS prompt to run things (some of our products in development today used a software development tool that I began using in the mid 1980s!)

I’d occasionally looked at Apple machines – but they appeared to have no right-click, no command prompt and no keyboard shortcuts.

In mid 2006, I did buy an iPod – I wanted a way to listen to music during the long drive of MINI Takes The States; I wasn’t very impressed with the user interface (not enough buttons!), but it was very portable and easy to get my music on to.

Fast forward to March 2008, when I happened to try an iPhone in the local Apple store – and quickly succumbed to a purchase!
That iPhone began a surprising Apple path … I learned the “it just works” mantra that Apple users sing. Within two months, I bought a Macbook Pro – helped by the fact that due to the Intel processor and Parallels, I could keep using PC / DOS tools.

By the end of 2008, Margaret was looking for a new computer and found the iMac to be much better for her – it looked great with it’s “screen only” design, and she’s eliminated all computer hassles.

Then in early December 2009, we bought another iMac, this time the amazing new 27″ screen version.
After that, I decided to replace my home PC with another 27″ iMac, and also to get an iMac for the office! Still today, most development tools are PC only – but Parallels emulation makes them work perfectly, and the benefits of Apple sneak in to the edges of my work day (for example, Time Machine gives instant access to backups and historical file changes).
I’ve been unable yet to settle on what to use for documents and spreadsheets – traditional Microsoft Office running in Parallels is super fast and I’ve used it for years (my fingers know all the shortcuts); Microsoft Office in Apple is really slow, but can look nicer sometimes; and Open Office seems more compatible with Office-for-PC, but does a few things really strangely.

But back to the topic … today I “sold my soul” for yet another Apple product, and this time (like everyone else) I’ve not seen or touched it! I’m gambling that Apple will create another device like the iPhone that “just works”:

Primarily, I see the iPad as an instant on, instant access device – I do keep my Macbook Pro by my side when watching TV, but it’s heavy and bulky to pick up for a quick browse, I see the iPad being much more practical for such uses. And hopefully, it will offer many new things too – I’d want to be able to use it for sorting / editing photos prior to posting them online, for easily keeping up with online news, reading online versions of magazines, and surely playing some games that due to the larger screen should be much more enjoyable than they are on the iPhone.
I felt no need for the 3G version; I expect the iPad to live at home (or in WiFI equipped hotel rooms) and I still have an iPhone for online access while out and about.

Work colleague Josh and I have been talking about the iPad a lot, and I think he’s right about the possibility that an iPad could be a “magic” device for all the “Joe Average” folks out there who don’t do computers today … they can get a device which works by touching exactly how they expect it to work, and for $30/month or less they’ve got access to the Internet with no need to install and configure modems, routers, etc; software installation is super easy, and doesn’t cost hundreds of dollars per program.
We techie folks might see limitations of the iPad, but if Apple get their marketing right I think they can create another new business. We will see, and meantime I get another new birthday toy, next month!

And about that “bushel” … in two years I’ve gone from one Apple (if you count the iPod, which really I don’t), to seven or eight, when the iPad comes (and including the work iMac, which I do count since I use it more hours a week than any other computer!); I’m not sure if seven is a bushel – but it’s a lot for a DOS guy

A huge detour for MINI owners – in the huge=27″ way

1-1/2 years ago, I got an iPhone; shortly after that, I got my Macbook Pro. While the Macbook Pro was mostly an expensive toy and little more than a photo editor / iTunes repository and web browser, I did use it sometimes for work tasks when I was away. Enough to learn that running Windows is feasible when necessary.

Now, with the 27″ iMac, I’ve chosen to replace my #1 PC at work with a Mac (PC’s #2-#5 remain PC for now); this week I’ve been setting up the Mac to “play nice” at the office, and configuring it to run Windows programs, resulting in …

The screenshot shows Apple Finder and Windows Explorer both viewing the documents directory, our PCB design program which runs fine, and Apple and Windows versions of command line (CMD / DOS prompt, and Terminal). You can click the image for full size 2560×1440.

I knew that the Apple iMac would be capable of running the Windows programs I need (PCB design, and code development in C, assembler for Freescale and Microchip parts, and Visual Basic Windows and DOS versions for customer and in-house test programs!); but I wasn’t sure what solution would be best – I’ve used Parallels on my Macbook Pro, but decided to test VMware Fusion and VirtualBox as well.

My test was to do something I do many times a day; compile the source code of our GP400 product (some 60K of compiled code for the Freescale HCS12X), and load it in to the processor ready to debug (using a USB debugger). On my current work PC#1, this timed 38s.

I liked VMware Fusion the most; it installs nicely, with a small menu on the top that gives access to Windows programs and the Start Menu, even when VMware isn’t running. It opens tidily and works well. Loading Windows XP from cold took 30s, and the compile/debug test time was 28s.

Parallels isn’t as tidy as VMware; it offers perhaps too many different screen modes and while “crystal” mode” gives a menu in the top bar, it opens not to a tidy list of Windows programs, but to a menu where you have to click “Start Menu” to call up the Windows Start Menu in Windows style. While in “crystal” you have to ALT-click to get to Parallels to adjust anything (while VMware puts it all in the one menu).
Parallels also isn’t as good at opening tidily; it does a lot of Windows screen resizing as it loads. It offers many “bells and whistles” (such as Maclook that makes the Windows look Mac-like), but it feels a bit less professional than VMware – maybe deliberately, if it’s targetted more to home users.
However, Parallels blazed the timing test, at just 22s (after taking 22s to load Windows XP)!

Finally VirtualBox, which offers the significant benefit of zero cost! It also offers few extras, which results in the fastest click-to-load time (Windows XP is up in 21s).
However from there, VirtualBox suffers – it’s especially slow at USB; while I was able to access the debugger, and a USB serial cable, communications over USB is very slow. The compile/debug timing test came in at 54s, twice as slow as the competition.
VirtualBox also is poor at graphics support – on my Macbook Pro I had tested it too, and it couldn’t run most Windows games. Finally, both VMware and Parallels can share Documents/Desktop etc between Mac and Windows, which VirtualBox can’t do.

Oh, not finally, since I did also temporarily set up and test BootCamp – it took 20s to do the compile/debug (fastest of all, not surprising really); however BootCamp quickly lost it’s mind and crashed, and I couldn’t be bothered to figure out why. Also in the typical Windows way, it takes 10s or so before Windows finds the Magic Mouse.

In conclusion, as you likely noticed in the screenshots, I purchased Parallels V5; all three virtual Windows solutions work, and seemed reliable; while I liked VMware, the speed that Parallels offered was hard to argue with – basically running at within 10% of the theoretical maximum of BootCamp.

Some time, I’ll have to look at native Apple code development – see if it’s possible to do the RS232 communications programs we use on PCs; but meantime, the Apple is the best Windows machine I have!

Since Apple released their new 27″ iMac machines, I’ve wanted one … and now having tried it, I’m hooked! Here I have two “full size” browser windows open, one to enter my weblog post and the other to access the Gallery pictures I want to paste in … Wonderful

(of course, it’s best to click here and see a bigger version – which is still a quarter the actual 2560×1440 size!)

The iPhone 3GS is much much faster than my original iPhone (“2G”); Apps seem to load about twice as quick; on WiFi websites load significantly faster – again it feels like at least twice as quick; and away from WiFi, of course the combination of 3GS phone and 3G instead of EDGE makes everything amazingly improved! I’m sure built-in GPS will be useful some time, but so far the compass is only a gimmick (and one that isn’t happy with nearby computers, etc either).

The upgraded camera is quite impressive too – I snapped this pic of my PC monitor, while reading an Engadget review of the iPhone 3GS:

(click for full size – much bigger and clearer than the original iPhone camera!)

The only annoyance so far is that the WordPress App is seriously damaged on V3 iPhone software (but it was also after I upgraded my original iPhone – it’s not the fault of the 3GS); WordPress categories are no longer visible (though the App does know about them), and the App regularly squishes the edit box down to a tiny 2-3 lines
They say an update is almost available – I hope so!

Of course the biggest annoyance remains AT&T; but at least upgrading now locks me in for two years from now instead of two years from when my initial contract expires, next year …

It’s out … amazing what two enormous companies can do, isn’t it?!
The Google search app for iPhone has just been updated, so now you can speak your searches – I tried it with “GPMINI” and it worked perfectly first time(see below) – and it’s really neat not to have to press any “speak now” button first … Of course when I tried it a second time to get the screenshot, it took about 10 attempts before it heard me correctly again!

Right now, ignore that the App Store thinks there’s no update, and ignore that iTunes says the current version is v0.1; just click “get app” inside iTunes and you’ll get it!