Tag: Geek Stuff

A Novel Idea by Cellular Providers

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the new cellular data standard that is being adopted by Verizon and AT&T Even Sprint is considering switching their WiMax network to LTE. I’m rather excited for the technology as it means we’ll be able to blow through our impending data caps even faster now.

Currently there are two competing cellular standard in the United States, GSM and CDMA. Verizon and Sprint use CDMA while AT&T and T-Mobile (and the rest of the world) use GSM. Both standards have pros and cons. While CDMA is less susceptible to interference GSM allows a user to access their data plan while on a phone call. Data networks give a means of bypassing limitations of both GSM and CDMA but cellular providers haven’t been willing to utilize this potential until now.

AT&T and Verizon have both announced plans to do voice over LTE (think Skype). This would allow both carriers to use their upcoming LTE networks for voice and data through the wonderful fact that voice really is just data (as both CDMA and GSM use completely digital voice networks). Utilizing voice over LTE would alleviate many of the problems faced by nothing having a universal cellular standard in the United States, namely you could take your roam on Verizon’s network if you were an AT&T subscriber and visa versa (so long as both companies used the same voice over LTE protocol and had roaming agreements). This would be great being many locations in the United States have great coverage for either GSM or CDMA but not both (for instance my hometown has CDMA coverage but not GSM coverage).

I’d love to see this happen. It also makes economic sense since there wouldn’t be a need to support multiple radios and protocols for separate functions of phones. Likewise anybody who has used Skype on their phone has already done what AT&T and Verizon are looking into. It’s not a difficult idea to implement as the technology is there and the LTE networks are being built.

Going Extinct is More Fun When You Have Company

What do you get when you combine a bleeding phone company with a stagnant software company? You get Nokia phones running Windows Phone 7. Nokia has been feeling the pain from competitors as of late and even lost their crown as most popular smartphone manufacturer (they’re still the large phone manufacturer, just their smartphones numbers are lower than competitor smartphone numbers). Likewise Microsoft seems to be having a problem getting people to buy phones running their Windows Phone 7 operating system.

The natural thing to emerge from this is the two companies combine to create… Hell I don’t know what they’re trying to create. I guess it makes sense when you consider Nokia’s new CEO is a former Microsoft employee.

Since the Cat is Out of the Bag

My interest in Palm’s WebOS should be well known to anybody who’s read this site for a while. Although I’ve had a lot of interest and did eventually get a used Palm Pre I never ended us using a new Palm device as my primary phone. The main reason was the fact their hardware was woefully behind once I finally decided to upgrade form my Palm Treo 755p.

Palm (well technically now HP but I like calling them Palm better) has been running a discount program form developers. If you’re a developer Palm will give you $200.00 off of an unlock Pre 2. It’s a pretty sweet deal when you consider it’s an unlocked phone that gives you access to WebOS 2.0. A couple of weeks ago I inquired with Palm about this program and they sent me back a couple of e-mails asking about the applications I was planning on writing. This was basically a quick screening process to ensure I wasn’t just trying to get a cheap unlocked phone, but instead actually planning on developing for the platform.

After a couple of e-mails they offered me a free Pre 2 for development purposes. I figured that was a pretty good deal and took them up on the offer. I’m not exactly sure when the phone will arrive but I was told it could arrive as early as this week (although being Palm is having their big event tomorrow I was told that was no guarantee).

Either way I didn’t say anything as I was unsure if this was something Palm was doing but wanted to keep if to developers expressing interest in the discount program. Well it seems that’s not the case and Palm has 100 99 Pre 2 phones they’re planning on giving out to developers free of charge. So if you’re a developer and have interest in WebOS you could get a hold of Palm via the Pre 2 discount program. It’s likely you can nab yourself free reference hardware (that will function properly on either T-Mobile or AT&T but will only have 3G speeds on AT&T).

Remember When You Could Just Play a Video Game

Remember the days of the NES, SNES, PlayStation, PlayStation 2, and pretty much every other game console that has previous been released? You just pop your game into the console, power it up, and play it. Those days are sadly dead and buried as companies try to find ways to inconvenience paying customers while doing nothing to stop the piracy of their products. It seems Capcom is going to require you be connected to the Internet in order to play their upcoming released, Bionic Commando: Rearmed 2.

What’s most annoying is the simple fact that the game is mostly a single-player endeavor so there is no actual need to be connected to the Internet in order to play it. It also means at some future point when Capcom shuts down their servers you will no longer be able to play this game. So in the end at some future point you will have to pirate the game in order to play it.

What many software companies don’t seem to understand is the simple fact that pirating is easy. Digital “Rights” Management (DRM) makes life complicated and difficult for the user. It’s actually less of a headache to find and download a title illegally than it is to legitimately use some software. How is making the customer’s life more difficult supposed to prevent piracy? The simple answer is it won’t. DRM simply causes further loss of sales since potential customers (such as myself as I was previously planning to buy Bionic Commando: Rearmed 2) are willing to put up with the headaches.

Companies seem to believe an Internet connection is a constant and stable item. For most people this isn’t the case as their Internet connection dies with enough frequency to warrant a lot of complaining. Tying a piece of software to an Internet connection when there is no need only makes your software worthless when said Internet connection dies.

Google Not Happy with Android Market Performance

Hey Google and I share something in common, neither of us are happy with the Android Market. It’s for different reasons of course, they aren’t happy with the number of application sales, while I’m not happy with the fact Google lost all records of every application I purchased from the Market. Maybe they just wanted me to rebuy everything to bump their sales figures (that was sarcasm in case anybody decides to claim I’m just making up a conspiracy theory).

Either way I think Google needs to do two things in order to improve the Android Market. The first one is to make it easier to search for applications. If you do a search for an application there is a very good chance you’ll get pages of unrelated applications. When I do a search for an application Google of all companies should provide me with great search results. The other thing Google should do is create some kind of real customer support for the Market. Current Google only has their Market forum which I’m doubting they even monitor (I still haven’t seen a single reply to my question from back in November). If Google at least setup a monitored e-mail address customers could contact when they have problems it would go a long ways in my not so humble opinion.

What the Hell Have You Done

It’s probably no surprise to anybody that I don’t like things that work changed. Usually I don’t bring it up because it’s pointless but today when I opened up my browser for my hourly dose of Slashdot I saw this. Yes they completely changed the site overnight.

And I only bring it up because it’s actually… better. Facebook could learn something from Slashdot when it comes to site redesigns (i.e. make the new site more useful to users).

HP/Palm WebOS Tablet

Engadget has a couple very nice renders of a possible upcoming HP/Palm WebOS tablet. It looks very much like an iPad with a plastic back and running WebOS.

Even after running Android for a while and now iOS I must say there is a soft spot in my heart for WebOS. Of the three WebOS is the only operating system with a combination of actual mutli-tasking and a good interface for swapping between tasks. Android’s interface for swapping between applications is pitiful while iOS lacks what I’d consider real multi-tasking. Likewise WebOS has remained the most open of the three operating systems in that is includes and easily activated developer mode which has helped create a very good homebrew community around the little platform that almost nobody knows about anymore.

HP/Palm have sent out invitations for an event in February where I hope to see a lot of new and interesting WebOS based products announced.

Mobile Hotspot on AT&T iPhone

One of the things Verizon advertised when they announced their iPhone was mobile hot spot. The latest iOS 4.3 beta includes this feature on the AT&T iPhone 4 as well. I have the beta in hand but am usually very wary about loading beta code on a device I use every day and I’m not paying AT&T $20.00 for tethering (which is required to get the hot spot feature working). It’ll be interesting to see what Verizon does for pricing vs. AT&T.

From the comments in the article is seems Verizon offers mobile hot spot on some Android phones at the cost of $20.00 for 2GB of data with each additional GB of data costing $20.00 (so it’s not included in the unlimited data plan). I wonder if Verizon will change the price of leave it alone for their iPhone.

Strange Android SMS Bug

Here’s an interesting short message service (SMS) Android bug that has been making some headlines today. I don’t believe I’ve ever head this happen on my phone but there apparently is a bug in Androids SMS’s application that can cause a text message to be sent to a random person on your contact list instead of the person it was intended to go to. You can imagine some embarrassment when a text message meant for your girlfriend ends up going to the phone of your mother or other such nonsense.

I find this bug interesting mainly because it seems like a rather difficult thing to screw up and honestly the consequences could be hilarious.

Why I Ban URL Shortened Service Links

It’s no secret to anybody who knows me but I absolutely hate URL shortening services. My problem with them stems from the fact when you click on a shortened URL you haven’t a clue where it will actually take you. This gives you a great vector for an attack by linking somebody to a bit.ly link which sends an unsuspecting user to a malicious website that uses a browser exploit to infect their machine.

What I never thought about was using a URL shortening service to perform distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Hit the link to details (which are actually pretty trivial).