Tag: General Hardware

Maybe I Spoke too Soon

You know all the bitching and complaining I’ve been doing about the lack of an update to fix some glaring issues on my Evo 4G? Well word on the street is Sprint is finally releasing a patch to fix some of these issues. Multiple GMail account synchronization is listed as a fix but I don’t see any mention of a fix for audio streaming issues for applications like Pandora and Last.fm. If the multiple GMail account synchronization and audio streaming issues are fixed I’ll consider that a win and be a happy camper even if VPN is still borked.

Palm Pre vs. Evo 4G: Hardware

OK I’m late to the game but hey I do finally have a Palm Pre to compare against my Evo 4G. Today I’m going to compare the hardware of the two devices. Obviously being a newer device the Evo is going to have a faster process and more RAM so I’ll not concern myself with those. I’m also going to ignore the 4G radio in the Evo as that wasn’t available when the Pre was released.

Both phones have 3G, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth radios built-in. Likewise both of the phones I have are CDMA meaning they’ll work on Sprint and would work on Verizon if they were unlocked. All the radios on both phones work well so I can’t say much here.

Let’s start off with overall build quality. One thing that I like about HTC’s phones is that they are usually built pretty sturdy. The Evo is a pretty tough customer and I haven’t had anything on it break yet (keyword being yet). While the Pre has a plastic screen that scratches easily the Evo has a glass screen that is pretty damned scratch resistant. The default back cover on the Pre is a shiny plastic making it slippery and a fingerprint magnet while the Evo has a nice rubberized backing which improves gripping.

The Pre I purchased was used and it came with a blown out speaker and a bad power button (the power button sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, you really have to press it hard to ensure proper operation). I did a little searching online and both of these issues are common as is another issue called Oreoing. Oreoing is where the screen can not only slide up from the keyboard but also rotate around. Why is this a problem? Because the phone wasn’t designed to do this. An additional issue that appears common are the volume buttons breaking. Did I mention the fact that the little cover over the micro USB port have a habit of snapping off? I didn’t? Well they do and to rub salt in the wound the cover prevents many standard cables from fully plugging into the Pre (the corner of the tab obscures the edge of most cables from fully seating). Yeah the Pre has a lot of issue on the hardware side of things.

Palm built the Pre on a fairly shoestring budget and you can tell in the lacking quality of the device. One the other hand HTC built the Evo has a flagship device and spent an amazing amount of time making sure all the little details were covered. The one hardware feature I absolutely love on the Evo is the kickstand. Yes HTC realized the Evo would benefit from having a kickstand and tossed one on. It’s not a flimsy piece of plastic either, it’s a fairly substantial piece of plastic. Really the hardware on the Evo just screams quality build with the only real issue is some light leakage between the outside frame of the phone and the lit touch buttons at the bottom. The Evo’s build quality is far and beyond the Pre’s.

While the Pre has a built-in 8GB flash card for storage the Evo has a removable microSD card. The stock card that comes with the Evo is 8GB in size giving these phones the same amount of storage space out of the box. Unlike the Pre’s storage the Evo’s can be increased (which I did the day I got the phone) up to 32GB (32GB being a limitation of the microSD specification not of the Android operating system). The 8GB of on board storage in the Pre is pretty small by today’s standards and was out shined by the iPhone as that had up to 16GB when it was released. I stated that because the Pre was primarily competing against the iPhone and Palm had said some pretty antagonizing things about Apple’s pending phone release. If you’re going to say antagonizing things to your competitor you should be able to produce a product that is superior in every way. I like removable storage (if my computer had a fixed hard drive I’d be pissed) so I’m giving this to the Evo.

The Pre is a slider phone while the Evo is a monstrous slate phone. I’m pretty sure the Evo is such an advanced black rectangular object that throwing it into the monkey pen at the zoo would cause them to learn the use of weapons. The Pre has a much smaller profile than the Evo which comes at the cost of having a noticeably smaller screen. One thing I love about the Evo is the 4.3″ screen. In my opinion the Evo right on the border between being too large for a phone. The Pre is comfortably pocketable.

Being a slider the Pre actually has a physical keyboard. I’ve become accustom to the Evo’s on-screen keyboard but have to say I’ve always preferred having a hardware keyboard if all other things remained equal. The on-screen keyboard on the Evo is damned good so I don’t really mind the lack of a physical keyboard (honestly I’m glad it doesn’t have one otherwise it would be thicker than it is). I came from a Palm Treo 755p which has the ultimate in phone keyboards in my opinion.

The keyboard on the Pre is slightly smaller making it slightly harder to use than the Treo’s keyboard. Adding to the difficulty is the fact the keyboard is sunken into the phone leaving a lip under the keys which can cause some slight annoyance at times. One thing I really dislike about the Pre’s keyboard is the fact it’s a membrane board meaning instead of individual keys there is just one membrane covering all of the keys. These membranes have a habit of developing tears. One downside of a physical keyboard is the inability to type while holding the phone in landscape mode. This wasn’t an issue with the Treo as it had a square screen thus there was no advantage gained in holding the phone sideways. On a phone with a rectangular screen such as the Pre not being able to type while holding the phone in landscape mode is a pain. I actually have to give the Evo the win in this category even though I’ve always been a fan of physical keyboards.

With the keyboard out of the way let’s talk screens. The Evo wins here, hands down. The Evo screen is larger, brighter, and higher resolution. There really is no competition.

Both phones come equipped with cameras. I’m not really doing to say much on this because the camera on the Pre was standard affair when the phone was released. The Evo has an 8.0 megapixel camera (meaning the censor is too small for the number of pixels crammed on there and you get a TON of noise unless there is really good lighting) which is capable of taking 720p video (which ends up looking like shit due to the censor being too small). There is a flash capability on both phones which means you can have washed out shitty looking pictures regardless of the phone you used to take it.

How about the battery life? Both phones are pretty neck-in-neck here, which is to say they both have shitty battery life. Both phones can’t get you through the day with moderate usage of texting and web browsing so long as you’re in a good signal area. Unfortunately the second your signal quality turns to shit so does your battery life. Down in my hometown Sprint has pretty abysmal coverage (while there is zero GSM coverage). The last time I was there I noticed the battery life on the Evo went from acceptable to dreadful as it couldn’t get through the day (not that big of a deal for me as I carry an additional battery just as I can an additional magazine for my carry gun). The Evo can talk all day without any real drain to the battery which is nice. I’m not sure on the Pre’s talk time as I’ve not actually had a long conversation on the device. Both phones are tied for battery life, and by tied I mean they both suck.

One feature the Pre has available (for additional cost) is the Touchstone. The Touchstone is an inductive charger which means it charges the Pre simply by placing the phone on the charger. There are no cables to plug in, just a new (rubberized thankfully) back cover to clip onto your Pre. There is a magnet in the Touchstone that ensures the attached Pre won’t fall off. It charges pretty quickly to boot. I want to be perfectly clear on this, these types of chargers should be standard on every phone produced from here on out. This is one innovation Palm really did right and I wish every other phone manufacturer would copy them. Sure plugging a cable in isn’t too much of an inconvenience (unless it’s the Pre and you have to open that fragile tab every time) but damn it we don’t need to anymore so why are we doing it?

Hands down I prefer the Evo’s hardware without even considering the processor, RAM, or 4G radio. HTC can build nice phones and really pulled out all of the stops when they constructed the Evo. Palm has had slight hardware issues with most of the products they’ve released (for example I have a Palm T|X with a broken power button, a very common issue with that PDA). The Pre has a lot of known issues and suffers from a general cheapness of the design. One the other hand the Pre is much easier to fit into a pocket and has a physical keyboard which many people far prefer.

I’ll write up a comparison of WebOS and Android at a later date.

Palm Pre

If you look back to a time before I had my Evo the phone I was drooling over was the Palm Pre. Finally after roughly 15 months I found somebody willing to sell me one on the cheap (and it wasn’t even from a suspicious truck in the parking lot). Needless to say I dinked around with it last night and compared it to my Evo.

GSM technology allows you to swap SIM cards between phones which gives you the ability to easily use multiple phones without much hassle. The Pre is not a GSM phone meaning you have to swap your ESN registration. I found out that you can do this for free via Sprint’s web interface so this is actually damn easy. If you log into your Sprint account they have step-by-step instructions on activating a new phone and it’s pretty easy.

First let me say one thing, WebOS kicks levels of ass that can not be described in words. The interface for multi-tasking is friggin’ amazing. Applications have a clean and consistent look to them, and everything you want to do can be accomplished with little or no hassle. I can say I still think WebOS is the best of the four current smart phone operating systems (iOS, Android, WebOS, and Blackberry OS) with Android coming in at a decently close second.

Of course a great OS doesn’t make up for poor hardware. The hardware in the Palm Pre isn’t poor per se but it is long in the tooth. The Pre only has something like a 600Mhz processor while the Evo has a 1Ghz processor leaving the Pre feeling sluggish. Applications actually take notable time to open whereas I can’t remember the late time I had to wait for an application on my Evo to open. Even with the diminutive hardware the Pre is pretty capable. The Pre certainly can multi-task but if you have too many applications open there is a noticeable slowdown. Being the phone came out 15 months ago this wasn’t surprising to me in the least.

One thing I absolutely loved about my Treo 755p was the hardware keyboard. The Pre has an almost identical keyboard which was a plus but after using the on-screen keyboard contain within the Evo I can see I’ve moved to the point where I no longer need a hardware keyboard to be flexible. I won’t go so far as to say I prefer an on-screen keyboard but they are pretty flexible as they allow you to hold the phone in either landscape or portrait mode and still be able to type. Certain applications on the Pre can go into landscape mode but most are restricted to portrait mode as that is the only method you can hold the phone and type on the keyboard.

An aspect of the phone’s construction I don’t like is the shiny plastic backing. Although my Evo picks up finger prints on the screen the Pre picks up finger prints everywhere. The Evo has a rubberized back which improves a holder’s grip while also not showing every place somebody has touched the phone. Beyond that the volume up and down rocker on the Pre feels incredibly cheap as does it’s micro USB port cover. Speaking of the USB cover that little tab of plastic is a huge pain in the ass. It’s cheap, fragile, and prevents you from easily connecting any micro USB cable. The edges of most of my cables actually bumped into the tab preventing it from seating all the way into the port.

I can’t comment on the battery life as the battery in the Pre I have is probably as old as the phone. Needless to say I found out buying new batteries for the Pre is actually damn cheap so I’m going to pick one up and do a full battery life test at some point.

Either way you can expect some Palm Pre and WebOS related posts in the future as I dink around with it. Now I just need to get an old iPod Touch on the cheap and I’ll have reference hardware for every major mobile phone besides the Blackberry (which I’m not wasting my time writing applications for).

Android Fragmentation

I believe this will mark the third post I’ve made bitching about Android. Why do I spend so much time complaining about it? It’s quite simple, I really like the OS. My Evo 4G is a pretty awesome phone overall. But Google and carriers have been making some questionable decisions when it comes to Android that make it difficult to use and develop for.

Engadget has a great blurb posted titled Engelligence: Will carriers destroy the Android Vision? One of the key features of Android is it’s open source. This means anybody can download the source code an modify the operating system to their heart’s content. Google keeps some of the applications closed source such as Google Maps so they can add some value to the OS but overall you’re free to do as you wish with it.

Unfortunately this also means carriers have the ability to do whatever they want with it. Why is this unfortunate? Because they do stupid things. AT&T lock out all non-Market applications while Verizon recently switched out Google search for Bing. Basically having a phone that runs Android doesn’t guarantee anything, the carriers may have changed any number of features on the phone.

Hardware manufacturers have also been a pain in the ass. For every awesome phone like the Evo 4G, Droid X, and Nexus One there is at least one piece of shit device that runs Android 1.6. This is a headache for developers because you have no idea what version of the OS people will be running and really need to attempt making your applications run on a wide variety of Android versions. Android 2.x has made some good in grounds but many phones are still on 2.1 and not the newer 2.2. Of course that falls back to the whole point I previously made about hardware manufacturers being willing to drop support for one of their devices a short while after introducing it.

We we’ve learned with Windows fragmentation is a pain in the ass. Sure Windows 7 has some awesome new features you would like to utilize in your application but can’t because a majority of your customer base is still running Windows XP. There is something to be said about a manufacturer who controls both the hardware and software as can be seen with the Nexus One. Even though it’s no longer being sold to consumers the Nexus One is the flagship Android device because Google continues to maintain it with timely updates and didn’t give the carriers a chance to mess with it.

Since It’s No Longer Shiny and New

I generally refuse to do any reviews on devices until I’ve had them at least a month. Sure it means I don’t get to be the first out with reviews but it does mean the initial, “Oooohhh shiny” phase has worn off. Well I’m finally at that stage with my Evo 4G and although I love many things about the phone I have a list of major bugs that don’t seem to be getting fixed anytime soon.

As I’m mentioned the biggest bug that bites me in the ass is after installing the Android 2.2 update I can no longer automatically synchronize multiple GMail accounts. It seems I’m not alone. My phone is setup with two GMail accounts. The primary account automatically syncs correctly but the second account only syncs when I go into the GMail app and manually refresh. That’s a pretty big annoyance considering this is supposed to be Sprints flagship 4G phone.

The second problem I have deals with my work calendar. Some time back my work calendar got mucked up on my phone and it refused to continue automatically syncing. Figuring this was a simple sync issue I removed the account and attempted to re-add it. Well it seems that’s no longer an issue as when I tried to re-add the account it was unable to authenticate with our Exchange server. Luckily I had a backup of everything and restored the entire phone which brought Exchange e-mail syncing back at least. Of course there is a new hitch, if I tried to edit my Exchange account’s settings the account settings activity automatically drops me into the add account activity. I can’t add an account because it will fail to authenticate and I can’t edit the current account because the phone wants me to add an account before being able to edit it. Rock meet the hard wall.

What else is wrong? VPN, that’s what. I have a VPN server setup at home which I use to tunnel back when I’m out and about. Even though all my computers can successfully VPN home and even my Palm T|X from yesteryear can connect, my fancy Android phone can not. Looking into the matter it seems practically nobody can get VPN working on their Android phone and haven’t been able to for at least a year. This needs to be fixed.

We aren’t done yet. There is also a rather nasty calendar bug that overwrites the contents of the description field with the contents of the location field. As you can guess that’s pretty fucking annoying as well.

Did I mention that the new Android 2.2 update rendered the Last.fm client useless? I’m not sure what Google exactly changed in their audio APIs but it prevents Last.fm from buffering songs that are being downloaded. The app developer has been releasing updates like mad but has been unable to correct this issue. What happens is a song will play on Last.fm unless a data connection drops. At this point since the song can not be streamed and there is nothing buffered the song stops playing and when the connection reestablishes the next song automatically beings playing. I rather enjoyed driving around streaming my Last.fm client via Bluetooth into my Bluetooth FM transmitter. That’s no longer possible. Why not use Pandora instead you ask? Because ever since the 2.2 update Pandora’s audio quality sounds like shit. That’s saying something as I can’t tell the difference between a CD or an MP3 but I can tell the Pandora app sounds like complete shit over my Bluetooth transmitter.

And I have one last annoyance. Before the 2.2 update the on screen keyboard had a nice microphone button. When pressed you could speak and the phone would write what you said. The voice recognition was actually pretty decent although it left out punctuation. That button was replaced with a language selection button which is useless to me as I only know English. You can’t restore this functionality either.

The obvious solution would be to return to Android 2.1 right? Well yes but then many new applications won’t work on my phone as Google has been pushing out a lot of 2.2 only apps. Nice catch 22 isn’t it?

The last update for this phone was the upgrade to Android 2.2 which occurred around August 3rd. Since then nothing has been released to fix any of the above mentioned issues nor has any statement been made by Sprint, HTC, or Google. This is a throw back to my days used PDAs where companies would release a new device, support it for roughly six months, and then abandon the device entirely regardless of the bugs still giving users headaches. Frankly I’m rather pissed off. I love so much about the phone but the latest update (which is practically mandatory if you want to use any new applications) has hosed the phone and no fixes appear to be coming in. I’m really starting to think Google’s policy of letting phone manufacturers customize Android was a bad idea.

Kindle 3

My new Kindle 3 arrived last night and I must say it’s pretty sweet.

First thing to note about the new Kindle is the size, it’s notably smaller than the previous model. The screen itself remains the same size but the overall device size is smaller and the device is lighter. Of course to accomplish this shrinkage they removed the dedicated number keys on the keyboard and put them into the symbol menu which I’m not too wild about. The backside is no longer metal but a rubberized plastic making it easier to grip but at the cost of feeling slightly chintzier.

The new E Ink Pearl screen is fantastic. The improved contrast is noticeable the second you see the screen. On previous generation Kindles the background was kind of a very light gray. The new Pearl screen’s background is almost white making the text a little easier to read. Additionally the refresh rate of the screen is faster than the Kindle 2 by a notable amount.

Having both Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity is a plus for those outside of 3G coverage. I hooked mine up to my Wi-Fi access point to test it and it works perfectly fine. With that said I’ll probably just continue using the 3G network because it’s always there and has always worked well for me. Still it’s a nice feature and if you don’t spend a lot of time in areas with 3G Amazon does offer a Wi-Fi only version.

I also like the new color. I’ve never been a big fan of white devices. It’s not that I hate white devices I just don’t like how they look as much. When I purchase a device I want it to be blacker than the blackest black times infinity. Well the new Kindle is graphite which is close enough to black for me to give it the head nod.

Ultimately I only have on real complaint, collections don’t sync. One of the best features of the last Kindle firmware update was the ability to put books into collections. This greatly cleans up the book selection screen which without collections ends up being something like seven or eight pages long for me. With collections I have two pages worth of stuff to dig through. Sadly when I redownloaded my books they did not go into the collections I placed them in on my Kindle 2 meaning I had to manually re-add them all to their proper collections. Really that’s a slight annoyance but it’s something I’d like to see changed in the future.

Overall I think it’s a great device and a good upgrade. Is it work upgrading to if you already have a Kindle 2? Probably not. All the new features are evolutionary instead of revolutionary meaning you probably aren’t going to notice a heck of a lot of difference. If you’re happy with your Kindle 2 you can comfortably remain on it as there are no new features that will blow you away. The improved screen is very nice through and with the upgrade if you plan on selling your current Kindle (I don’t think the improved screen itself is worth $189.00).

So why did I upgrade? Because I’m a device whore that’s why. I saw something new and shiny which meant I had to have it.