It’s not really surprising that the iPhone has such a smooth interface considering Apple has it pretty easy from a development point of view.  They develop for one platform (the iPhone) and anyone else developing apps for that platform, needs to develop in the ONE Apple development environment.  This makes design, programming and testing a piece of cake when compared to the technical prowess required of the Android design team.  It’s kind of like the Apple design team never has to leave their sandbox.  But that’s the way it’s always been with Apple, even with the Mac environment.

The Android design team, on the other hand, has the freedom to build using a wide array of development environments and the apps can run on the full spectrum of Android devices out there, giving the end user a ton of choices, which is the reason that Android devices are making significant inroads into the market.  it’s certainly not because they function better than an iPhone, or cost less than an iPhone, it’s because people have a choice!

I might add that another reason I tend to like my iPhone is because it’s JAIL BROKEN.  If I didn’t have the capabilities to bypass the Apple stronghold on MY DEVICE and install whatever I wanted on it, I would have thrown it in the garbage by now.  It’s pretty amazing, to me, that so many people will purchase a device that they are pretty much locked out of, and be happy enough to not break into it.  To me, this is like purchasing a laptop and not having admin rights to install anything on it (except of course those apps chosen by the vendor).  I guess this is just my rebellious nature and the world also needs those who just do what they’re told to and not stir the pot.

First off, notice the “Reply Requested By” date.  This will give you an idea of when I received this in the mail.  Now keep in mind, that I don’t use, nor have I ever used Domain Registry of America as my registrar, so they are fishing, hoping that I’ll freak out because some of my domains are expiring, and pay over three times more than I typically pay.

Take a look at the first sentence telling me that they are concerned about my domains that are expiring “in the next few months”.  Now look at the date that they are actually expiring (Sept 27th 2013!) 2-1/2 YEARS FROM NOW!

THEN!, they have the unmitigated audacity to expect me to pay $35 USD a year for a simple domain name that I’m currently paying only $7.00 a year for!

Now I can understand, and fully support, marketing but this is so insulting, its nothing short of saying something along the lines of “Hey Idiot, you want to buy some ocean front property in Arizona?”  The only way that someone would fall for this kind of SCAM is if they were so busy that they didn’t read it and didn’t stop to think about who they use as a registrar.

Why would anyone knowingly do business with a company that’s so disrespectful?  I just don’t get it.  Please link to this blog so that we get the word out about this kind of scum.

Thanks

International Phone

I recently built a Droid phone that can be used just about anywhere in the world where there’s either wifi or a mobile network, and thought I would share that experience.  This isn’t meant to be a ‘how-to’ guide or to be the ultimate answer for everyone.

I started out purchasing a Motorola XT701 not necessarily to build an international phone but because I’m programming droid apps and I needed a development phone.  It just turned out that the family is traveling internationally this next year and I was curious about the different methods for taking a phone along.  I could do the same thing with my iPhone, however, its tied to an AT&T subscription that I can’t cheaply get out of right now, and their international roaming fees are a bit steep so this solution is a bit more frugal.

First, you need the right hardware.  For this method, you must have a  GSM phone.  In short, this means it uses a standard SIM card.  AT&T and T-Mobile use these kinds of phones, while Sprint and, I believe, Verizon are using CDMA technology.  I’m not going to get into which is better, cheaper, faster or how to convert one to another, I’m just saying that for this solution, the phone must be GSM.  The phone must also operate on the right frequency bands.  North American networks pretty much operate in the 800 MHz and 1900 MHz spectrums while Europe, Asia and Africa are mostly 900 MHz and 1800 MHz.  South America seems to be a mixture of all of these.  This means that to truly have a global phone (for this method anyway) you need to buy one of the new Quad Band phones.  The iPhone, along with many of the new droids, come this way now, just look for one that says something like “GSM 850/ 900/ 1800/ 1900 MHz”.

Another thing to think about, as far as hardware, is that unless you’re willing to pay US network roaming fees, you should get an unlocked phone, or unlock the one you have.  There is plenty of information out there on unlocking phones, just Google it.  I purchased an unlocked phone from China (off Amazon) so that I wouldn’t have to sign up for yet another subscription with one of the US carriers but as I mentioned earlier, I could use my AT&T iPhone that I have both unlocked and jailbroken.

Control Central

Ok, enough on the hardware.  My quest, after buying this extra droid phone, was to figure out the best way to make phone calls without swapping my iPhone’s SIM card all the time, so I started out looking for ways to make a SIMless phone call.  Of course, you need some kind of a network to make a phone call and if you have a GSM phone without a GSM SIM card, you’re pretty much stuck with using the Internet as your network.  There’s a few ways to do this, one is Skype, or other similar services, where you can call anyone with a Skype account (who is online at the time) for free and you pay a little extra for calling landlines.  So I downloaded the Skype app from the Droid market (there’s one for iPhone too).

A SIP phone is another online option, where you can get a phone number from places like ipkall.com and then using a free service like PBXes.com, you can setup your own SIP phone.  There’s plenty of instructions for doing this stuff if you just Google it, so I’m not going to go into the details here, but I tried going the PBXes route and, although I did get it to work, it didn’t work all the time for both sending and receiving so I went the Google Voice/Gizmo5 route using the SIPDroid application off the Droid Market.  This solution requires that you have both a Google Voice account and a Gizmo5 account with phone number.  Fortunately for me, I already had a Gizmo5 account and number, because since Google acquired Gizmo5, they are not allowing any new subscriptions until they can figure out what they’re doing with it.  You can use just a Google Voice account, which will give you a phone number so that you can receive calls but to make them, gets a little goofy if you don’t have a Gizmo or regular mobile number to assign to your account.  Of course you can make calls from your browser but that kind of defeats the purpose when you have to carry around your laptop.

Now, with Skype and Google Voice working for me, I can virtually make and receive calls from any wifi spot in the world but I needed to go one step further and have some kind of SIM card for operations outside the wifi hotspots.  I studied the various ‘prepaid’ options and finally decided to go with the SIMple US card from http://www.simplecallingservice.com/ There are countless companies and plans so do your research because it really depends on where you travel and how often you’re going to be outside a wifi hotspot, along with how much time you spend on the phone.  This solution gives me a global UK phone number, along with a US number, and I can use it in a couple hundred different countries.  You can recharge your prepaid minutes either online or with a free phone call but none of the plans are really what I would consider ‘cheap minutes’ and data plans are simply outrageous so you’re going to look for a wifi hotspot whenever possible.  I consider the GSM network as a last resort method for making and receiving calls and I will certainly look around for free wifi before using it.  Just a final note, you can also just purchase a country specific SIM in each country you visit and probably get cheaper minutes but your phone number keeps changing, making it difficult for friends and family to get a hold of you.

Well, so there you have it.

Enjoy!

Unfortunately, you do kind of need to go back and forth between the iPhone and the PC because when you put a picture in your blog from the iPhone, the smallest you can set it at is 640 x 480??  That’s huge when you come in and look at it on a PC.  It looks fine on the iPhone but hideous in a PC browser.  Maybe I’m missing something, I haven’t googled the forums on any of this.

Another downside is that there is no landscape mode (BOO).  So, OK, off to the RSS feed reader.  I posted a couple comments on this blog and it works OK, the bummer is that I need to know the RSS feed URL.  It seems that you would be able to browse and select a blog.

Anyway, I guess the app is okay for quick little blurbs, I mean, I’ll use it from time to time and it only cost $1.99 so what the heck.

Ok, I got the free version to connect and post a text based blog so on to the $1.99 version. See next blog

Dave

I’ve had the Kindle 2 for about six months now. When I purchased the Kindle, I  envisioned loading it up with the latest bestsellers so that I would always have  something to read while sitting around the airports or lounging around the swimming pools while on vacation. However, I have found it much more useful than that.. I love the fact that I can get the Seattle Times delivered to it daily. It’s great to sit down in the morning with a cup of coffee and read the paper without getting ink all over my fingers. It would be nice if my local paper, The Oregonian, was visionary enough to offer a subscription on Amazon but I guess that will have to wait. As an IT professional, I also like being able to subscribe to industry magazines. I won’t go into plugging names, I think I’ve done enough of that for a blog that is suppose to be about the Kindle.

Another big Ah-Ha that I hadn’t foreseen, is that I find myself sending a lot of my technical manuals, which are usually in PDF format, to my Kindle, simply to keep them all in one place, instead of scattered all throughout my laptop. After using my Kindle, as my technical manual library, for a few months now, I’ve found that the searching and bookmarking features have saved me a lot of time when trying to find that one paragraph, which contains the vital information I need. With my workload ever growing larger and my brain ever growing older (and in dire need of a memory upgrade), this aspect of the Kindle has been a very pleasant surprise.

I have downloaded a few bestsellers, to have when the opportunity arises, although I still have a stack of paperback versions that I need to get through, which brings up another advantage that should be mentioned. Many times I have an hour or more to kill and, believe it or not, I’ve left my stack of paperbacks at home! I’ve always got my Kindle with me, so now I’ve got something to read and hey, its not the most graphical browser in the world but it sure is quicker to open up my Kindle and google something than to crank up the laptop and connect to the Internet.

One thing that I would like to have seen is the ability to create folders under the Documents (Home) folder so that I could organize all those technical manuals and light reading material a bit better. Although the Kindle is good about coming up to where you left off last, its not a real quick task to locate a book or manual when your list is four or five pages long.

Another thing that I would change, if I had the opportunity, is that joystick. It’s not really an issue when reading a novel, because you’re typically not jumping to the next chapter, however, reading through the newspaper can really give you a kink in the thumb joint. Typically I don’t read an entire newspaper, and I doubt that many people do. I usually read a headline, and maybe a paragraph or two, and if its interesting then I read the whole article, but more times than not, I skip to the next headline. In the case of the Kindle 2, that functionality is provided by a little square joystick, at the very bottom of the unit, that looks like an IBM Thinkpad eraser head, without the eraser. This is not only awkward but I found that after reading through my first long Sunday newspaper, my wrist felt like I’d just spent four hours playing Asteroids. That probably dated me but my point is that this joystick should be farther up the side of the unit, like maybe right above the Home button. This would allow the user to balance the Kindle while keeping a thumb on the joystick. Oh, and maybe put an eraser head on it so its comfortable.

Ok, enough venting, I truly do love my Kindle and I’m very happy that I bought it, even though my wife could kill me for spending $350 bucks during the worst recession of our lives.

One last note; about the music, I guess a little background music while reading a novel around the swimming pool, isn’t bad but I truly hope that Amazon doesn’t try and add a bunch of mpeg player buttons and bells to the future Kindle versions. I love that it is as simple as reading a book, and if I need music too, I can use an iPhone. What the heck, you have to carry a phone anyway.

Dave

The internal wireless card on my laptop bit the dust and considering the thing is close to four years old, I decided to just buy a new laptop.  I looked around and with the financial slump we are all going through, decided that $350 is a pretty good deal for the little Acer Aspire One Netbook.  Now that I’ve been using it for a few weeks, I can give my unbiased, and of course unopinionated, view of this little piece of crap!  Just kidding, I actually like it.

Just to set the record straight, this is the larger of the many Netbooks out there, with an 11.6″ LCD screen and kind of a full keyboard.  The keyboard is big enough to type fairly comfortably, although some keys, like the ‘Home’ and ‘End’ key, which I use more often than I would have guessed, are incorporated with the ‘Pg Up’ and ‘Pg Down’ keys so you have to hit the ‘FN’ key simultaneously to use them.  I’m not sure why they didn’t reverse that.  I seldom, to never, use the ‘Pg Up’ and ‘Pg Down’ keys.

All in all though, I’m pretty happy with it.  It came with XP, which I like much more than Vista.  I’ve loaded a lot of high end software on it (Office 2007, Adobe CS, AutoCAD) and they all run just fine.  I would be interested to see how one works with MobLin on it, since it is using the Intel Atom processor.  Maybe after I’ve had it long enough to wear off that “New Laptop Smell”, I’ll blast it and load Moblin on it.

The downside… it is small.  Its just fine for writing blogs, checking mail and doing some light work on but I certainly wouldn’t want to write a book with it.  I can’t imagine what the smaller 6″-8″ models are like.  I think typing on my iPhone would be comparable although I haven’t tried one out.  If anyone has, let me know what you think!  I imagine that after some practice… I mean even my big fat thumbs are getting pretty quick on my iPhone

Til Next Time!

db