I was not a big phone geek until the T-Mobile G1 came out. Before the G1 I was using a Treo 680 running PalmOS, which seems so antiquated to be called a smartphone, yet it wasn’t even a year and a half ago that I was using it. The integration with my corporation’s Exchange server worked well enough,though, and that was enough in added productivity to make up for the lousy built in browser. But when I saw the G1, it was time to upgrade. I’m a big fan of Google’s web apps, use Google to host all my mail, and love Google Talk. Just over a year later, the Nexus One was released I had to have it. So after playing with it for a few weeks, I’m putting out this review.

My first impression with the Nexus One was the display is amazing. The graphics are bright and crisp. The extra resolution over the iPhone is definitely noticable. The speed as great too. Upgrading from a G1, i was impressed with how fast everything ran. I was up and running on the new phone after less than a half hour. But I don’t want this to be about specs, so I’m going to just talk about some reasons I really love this phone.

Google Integration

If you use Gmail or Gmail Apps a lot, you will love how smooth the integration is with Google’s mail. There really isn’t much to say. I have four gmail accounts setup, all syncing and letting me know when I have mail. Only your main calendar syncs directly, but there are ways to work around that. Google Voice works well for calls, and ok for SMS messages. Some people I know have complained about the Google Voice SMS integration but I don’t use it enough to really know. Google Maps, Google Buzz, Google Reader, etc, all work great.

Corporate Integration

My G1 didn’t have native Exchange support, so I had to use a third party app. I ended up using NitroDesk’s Touchdown software. I’ve seen this app really grow over the last year, from a really basic mail only viewer, to a fully integrated productivity app. One feature I’m really getting used to, is having my mail read back to me. It’s pretty neat.

Android 2.1 has native Exchange integration, but I’ve heard some complaints about it. I would recommend Touchdown to everyone. I have an iPod Touch which I hooked up to our company’s exchange server, and I can tell you Touchdown blows it away.

Battery Life

The first couple days when I was playing with every gizmo on the phone, batter life sucked. Once I settled down in my normal daily routine, the battery life was fine. It runs all day just fine. There are third party batteries already that increase your battery life as well.

Google Maps Navigation

It plain rocks. I’m waiting for the car dock’s to come out to have the full on GPS experience. I’m hoping the dock will allow me to use my bluetooth headset to use as a phone as well as audio. Listening to podcasts with 1 year while I drive would *rock*.

Camera

I’m not a big camera person, but the camera on this phone works nice and I’ve been happy with the speed and clarity of taking pictures. When the weather gets better and I take some trips later this year I expect it will work out pretty good.

App Store

Apple likes to point out how many apps they have in their store and it is indeed impressive. However, I’m of the opinion that most people will use 10 apps for 90% of the time, and that the functionality of these 10 apps is duplicated in the Android Market. Because the app store is open, eventually they will probably be pretty equivalent when you look at the short tail of apps sold.

Intangibles

I wanted to have integration with my company’s Cisco vpn, but this isn’t one of the vpn types supported by Android 2.1. So I took the plunge and put on the Cyanogen Mod on my phone. Yes, I violated my warranty, but it was definitely worth it. I found a vpnc client for the phone, and *viola*, I have Cisco vpn capability over WiFi/3G/Edge. I also have full shell access so it really feels like a real little netbook. When I use my iPod Touch, I feel like I’m back using a PalmOS era OS. Multi-tasking isn’t the end all be all, but I can download a podcast, while I’m calling my wife, while I have GTalk running.

For me, and I know this isn’t the same for everyone, I like the ability to change things about my phone, I like having an open app market, and I like being able to download the source code to my phone and make changes (and I have some on the way). Not everyone likes or wants that much freedom. Maybe there are some rough edges on Android, though I think many complaints are simply due to what people are used to. I’ve used both the iPhone and the Nexus One and I think I have a good feel for both.

The Nexus One and, hence, Android is a great phone platform. They allow me to work, play, and communicate almost anywhere, and I expect to enjoy both for the foreseeable future.

When we moved into our new home almost two years ago, we chose a sun room to be our main office. It doesn’t really lend itself that well to an office in that there aren’t great places to hook up phones or to put network drops in. My thinking was that wifi would work well in a big open house with out a lot of walls. It did work pretty well with our laptops, but with desktops, we had varying results. The wireless cards in the back of the computer meant that the antennae were usually blocked by the case itself. The speed would shift back and forth, which would make the connection kind of flaky.

My first solution was to bring a Linksys WAP54G into the office to act as a second wireless access point. That did stabilize the connection, but it still wasn’t perfect. Plus, Kelly’s computer contains our music collection and sharing over wifi wasn’t always that quick. So, recently I acquired two Linksys WRT65GL wireless routers to attempt to build an isle of wire computers in my house. The builtin firmware didn’t cut it though. I did a couple quick Google searches, and found my way to OpenWRT.org and wiki.OpenWRT.org. The directions were simple as hell, and within a few mins I had flashed my routers with the Kamikaze 8.09 firmware.

The configuration was simple enough. Give each router an ip other than 192.168.1.1 and put it into bridge mode. Setup the wireless security and set the router to be a wireless client. Reboot, and viola! I created a wired isle inside my office and a second one in my hobby room/podcasting studio. I have an older iMac that can’t easily have a wifi card added to it, but now I can just wire it in.

Links that helped:

http://www.openwrt.org
http://wiki.openwrt.org
http://oldwiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs

Techcrunch is reporting that development on the Netscape browser will officially end on February 1st, 2008. This kind of signals the end of an era. Those of us who were on the web early on, remember the great advance Netscape was over other browsers such as XMosaic. I remember when Netscape 2.0 came out, and the great advance tables seemed to be in HTML.

However, the Browser Wars were not kind of Netscape, and by the late 90’s even I had switched to Internet Explorer. By then, Netscape 4.x was a bloated mess that I remember crashing about every five minutes no matter what I did. It became unusable, and I, like so many grudgingly moved to IE.

What seemed like a desperation move (and it really was), Netscape was bought by AOL and soon open sourced the browser, creating the Mozilla Foundation. Years later, I was still using IE as the project had nothing had come of it. I did use Netscape a little here and there, but it never really worked right. Finally came Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox in 2002 and we finally had a modern browser to use. IE was forced to update to catch up to Firefox, and we’re all better for it.

Netscape has long been left behind, and no one I know really uses it. I can’t remember when I last actually used a Netscape branded browser. Though its spirit lives on in Mozilla and Firefox, it still stings a little to see Netscape come to the end.

During the holiday season, I was given an iPod 1GB shuffle (pictured above), my first iPod. I’ve not been a big fan of the majority of the iPod product line. I think they tend to be overpriced, have clunky interfaces, and I’m not a big fan of iTunes either. For the money, if you’re looking for storage and a good price, Creative and iriver are probably better bets. I also have an Apacer shuffle like ripoff that I’ve been using for a couple years, which at the time seemed like a good deal.

So, now I have an iPod. When I opened it up, i was surprised how damn small it is. It’s small enough that I would worry about losing it. The docking station is a little inconvenient because you can’t use a normal USB cable at all to connect or charge it, but to keep the unit simple I see why they did it the way they did. The first thing I tried was installing iTunes, version 7.5. What a failure that was. No matter how many times I installed, uninstalled, reinstalled, iTunes would never come up. What I finally ended up doing, was just using an older version (7.2) that installed and worked. I’m afraid to upgrade now, in case it doesn’t work and I screw up my library trying to downgrade later. It’s running, though, and that’s all I can ask for.

I don’t actually like using iTunes though, so in reality, I’m using Winamp to manage my songs and transfers. I find it less clunky than iTunes. Using the actual iPod is easy. The buttons make sense, the battery life is great (> 12 hours), and it’s nice to just clip it on and go. When checking the prices, I found that they can be bought for anywhere from $70.00 to $80.00, which seems completely reasonable for the form factor, battery life, and easy of use. The tiny size is definitely a premium feature worth paying for.

So, I still don’t think I would buy a regular iPod, but I am a fan of the small shuffles. I’m enjoying mine, listening to podcasts, music, and audio books for hours and hours on a tiny device.

I found this article yesterday titled “Some in Silicon Valley begin to sour on India“. The theme of the article is that the pay of Indian engineers is getting closer to what engineers are paid in America. When you factor in the overhead associated with outsourcing, the costs savings have dramatically shrunk. Two years ago Robert X. Cringely wrote an article that said pretty much the same thing. The overhead of managing outsourcing is bound to make the cost savings a wash.

To me this illustrates how powerful and fast the market is. While our politicians are blathering on in Washington about the “evils” of outsourcing cheap labor, the market, at least in the high tech sectors, is already solving the problem. Silicon Valley has been creating wealth and jobs in this country with outsourced labor, and India, a poor country for the most part, has a new and growing 40 billion dollar industry. Everybody wins.

My Christmas celebration with my wife was delayed a week this year due to the unfortunate passing of my grandmother on December 20th of 2006. Being that we’re atheists, the day itself doesn’t have any special meaning other than tradition. So, we ended up celebrating on December 31st.

The favorite gift I gave my wife this year, was this multi-purpose media box that I put together with some parts I had laying around and a couple new things I bought.

First, here are the basic specs:

1 Athlon 1800
1 GB memory
45 G hard drive
NVidia 6600 video card with S-Video out/512 MB
1 wireless Nic
1 Abit MicroATX motherboard

The case I found was made by Shuttle:

http://global.shuttle.com/Product/Barebone/SN27P2.asp

Mind you I didn’t get the “barebones” package. I acquired just the case. The next key part was how to control the computer from the couch. I looked a couple basic remotes, but I thought that would end up being limiting. Sure I could use some software to build an “On-Screen Display” menu, but I think that would have limited the usefulness of the box. So I ended up settling on something I found on Ebay:

http://www.gyration.com/en-US/ProductDetail.html?modelnum=GC1105CKM&accshow=3

The mouse control is pretty good, though I could see how my arm might get tired after a while. It’s sensitive enough though, that you can just use a little wrist action to move the mouse around. The keyboard comes in handy when you need to do something quick that can’t be mapped to the mouse, such as mute the sound. The wireless receiver works well hidden in the back of the box.

The next step was installing software. I included emulators for Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis, and general arcade games. I installed XaMp Studio so Kelly can listen to the online XM Radio feeds from the living room. The last thing I installed was Creative Media Source and mapped to Kelly’s mp3 drive, so she can listen to all her music from the living room as well. All via a wireless mouse remote and a wireless net connection.

The box hooked into my TV and stereo system smooth with RCA and S-Video cables. There is some initial noise upon bootup, but the machine runs as quiet as my Dish Network PVR box. Throw in some 10 foot USB extension cables, and you never have to leave the couch (once you power it on). Overall I’m really happy how it came out. I hope we get some real use out of it.

While running some errands today, I had to stop at Best Buy. I knew the Nintendo Wii was coming out tomorrow, but didn’t really expect to see anything. However, I did see people camping out waiting to buy it tomorrow:

I have to admit, the Wii looks cool. It’s at a good price point, the games are priced nice, and it has the most innovative controller out there. In Madden 07, you have actually make a throwing motion to throw the ball. Crazy.

By far my new favorite podcast:

Audiomartini

I have a friend who is currently working at AdMob, and it looks like to me they’re doing some good work over there. They are using, what I would call, the “Bottom Up” method of building a company and platform. They started small, let the business grow according the existing market conditions, and now are on the cusp of being massively successful. I don’t know how much money was used to found AdMob, but I’m judging by the blog that the business started out with a relatively small amount of investment, and has been bootstrapping its efforts with profits. This is the same method I would use.

I, on the other hand, work for a company that would take what I call the “Top Down” approach. This means, that my company would start out by finding large advertising partners, begin long term studies and revenue projections, and then begin building the product from the existing advertising partners and revenue projections. There are reasons why we have to do it this way, and I fully understand the reasons. In some cases, we have no choice.

However, it seems clear to me that “Top Down” is almost always slower to innovate than “Bottom Up”. Entrenched corporate polices prohibit my company from really starting something like AdMob (not that we’re interested). It would be hard to convince the appropiate board members, sales staff, and IT managers to take a flyer on a product like AdMob.

I think this all points to a certain sweet spot for a size of the company, and it’s ability to innovate. If I had to guess, I’d say the perfect sized company for innovation would be made up like this:

• 1 Founder/CEO who has the vision
• 1 Marketing guy who also handles most of the general business functions
• 3 Senior developers with copious amounts of skills
• 4 Junior developers who could innovate the designs of the senior developers
• 1 Sysadmin to handle setting up servers, etc.

What do you think?

I’m not sure why Dembski pointed to an article that points out how evolutionary genetics have weakened the dog species.  He comes up with another snarky title, I guess hoping that his readers don’t bother to read the full article.

I’d like to see how this stories disproves evolution.

http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/1326