Tag: Technology

Smartphones and Battery Life

Since I’m on the comparison of Android and iOS kick I might as well talk about battery life. Most reviews of high-end Android devices knock the reviewed device for having poor battery life. I know the biggest hit against the Evo 4G is it’s battery life. My iPhone has had great battery life compared to my Evo giving me two days instead of one on a single charge (I count battery life in number of days before needing to recharge the phone, my Treo 755p got roughly three days).

There are many things to consider when comparing battery life including the storage capacity of the battery. The other major factory in battery life is the operating system and applications. The iPhone’s multi-tasking capabilities are… poor to say the least. If you want to run something in the background that Apple hasn’t provided a specific service for you have up to 10 minutes (the iPhone allows an application to run for 10 minutes in the background before suspending it).

Android on the other hand allows true multi-tasking. Any application is spawn a service that can run in the background even when the main application is no longer being displayed. This gives Android far more flexibility. Allowing real multi-tasking can also take a toll on the battery life as a runaway process can run the CPU at 100% and turn your battery life into a mere couple of hours. Personally I find the tradeoff worth it as any application that slaughters your battery life is poorly written and really the fault of the developer, not the device.

What I blame Android for is it’s poor built-in battery life reporting tool. On the Evo if you go under Settings->About Phone there is an item called Battery Life. This little application tells you the rough percentage of battery charge remaining and what has been using the battery life. This reporting tools does an abysmal job unfortunately.

I still carry my Evo around and use it as a portable Wi-Fi hotspot (which it works great as). I noticed when I returned home last night the phone was reporting the battery was almost completely dead. Usually this means some application is going crazy either pulling down data or racking up the CPU. A simple reboot of the phone generally takes care of this but I’m more of a curious person and wanted to know exactly what process was draining my battery.

Well the battery usage reporting tool did say it was the Android system that was using a majority of my power… of course that’s a catchall for every application on the device. The battery usage tool lumps every application under the Android system category and does not breakdown by individual application. In fact it’s not possible with Android’s built-in battery usage tool to see how much CPU time (and thus a rough estimation of battery life) an individual application has used. This makes finding the rough process difficult if not impossible.

I really like the fact Android has true multi-tasking and accept the responsibility that comes with such flexibility. But I’d also like a mechanism to see how much power each individual application is sucking down. Having such information would allow me to determine if an app I downloaded was poorly written and remove it. As it sits now you practically have to download an app, test it for a day, see the impact on battery life, and hope it doesn’t screw up later down the road.

GSM vs. CDMA

It’s almost been a month of using the iPhone and thus AT&T. AT&T (along with T-Mobile) is a GSM network while Sprint (along with Verizon) is a CDMA network. For the end user the difference isn’t very noticeable in most cases although if you’re in the Midwest you’ll likely noticed better coverage with CDMA.

GSM has two major advantages over CDMA for the end user. The first advantage is the fact CDMA phones use a SIM card which can be taken out of one phone and inserted into another (so long as the other phone will work on the first phone’s network). If you want to swap CDMA phones the process is generally more difficult (for example on Sprint you need to log into your Sprint account online and enter in a series of numbers on the new phone). The second advantage is the fact on a GSM phone you can use both the voice capabilities and data at the same time. With a CDMA phone if you’re talking to somebody you can’t use data and if you want to use data you can’t call somebody. Even though there is no reason for this Sprint has even locked the Evo 4G into not allowing voice usage and 4G data usage at the same time (with 3G it’s a limitation of the hardware/protocol while with 4G the restriction is purely artificial).

Well it dawned on me when somebody called me and asked a question that required I look something up. I told them, “Hold on a second I’ll look it up and call you ba… wait hold just a second” and discovered the wonders of a phone that can use voice and data at the same time. Huge advantage.

I also learned that there apparently isn’t any additional cost to use call forwarding on AT&T, just just consumes your minutes. That means when I travel back home (where I have no AT&T coverage but have Sprint coverage) I can set my iPhone to forward calls to my Evo without having to rack up Sprint’s 20 cents a minute for forwarding calls charge.

There certainly are downsides to AT&T (their data plan is fucking horrible compared to Sprint’s) but there are also some upsides.

Rail Guns Kicking Ass

You know what’s awesome? Making a world record. Know what’s even more awesome? Breaking your own record. Following in the steps of Manowar who broke their own record for loudest concert ever, the Navy has built a rail gun that broke it’s own record for blowing shit up:

Navy scientists set a world record Friday during a test of an electromagnetic railgun, a tractor-trailer sized weapon that sends a 20-pound projectile rocketing through the air at seven times the speed of sound.

The futuristic gun was tested twice at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Va., and the first shot generated 33 megajoules of force out of the barrel, a world record for muzzle energy, the scientists said.

HELL YEAH! Think about that for a moment, a gun that propels 20 pounds of projectile to seven times the speed of sound. That’s 7,882 feet per second or 5,374 miles per hour. Roughly translated that equals about FUCKING AWESOME on the awesome scale. The video the Navy put out seriously needs a heavy metal soundtrack put to it.

Of course rail guns are still illegal to use for hunting in Wisconsin.

Biting Off More Than You Can Chew

Hot on the tails of attacking MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal the boys and girls that compose Anonymous are performing a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against Amazon. The funny thing is it doesn’t seem to be working as I can access Amazon without any issue.

I don’t think these guys make the connection that Wikileaks chose to use Amazon’s hosting service specifically because of how robot Amazon’s infrastructure is. Amazon makes their money on people visiting their website and thus have made massive strides in ensuring it’s always accessible. Amazon has been a victim of DDoS attacks before (usually to extort money from Amazon to make the DDoS attack stop) and know how to deal with it. It’s would be like trying to take down Google via a DDoS attack, it won’t work.

This also sends a bad message to web hosts. Basically Anonymous are saying anybody who has hosted Wikileaks and stopped is going to be attacked. Likewise anybody hosting Wikileaks will also be attacked by people from the other side of the issue. Why would any web host be willing to host Wikileaks at all if all they’ll get for their troubles is a big old helping of DDoS. If you want to set a precedence in favor of Wikileaks work to stop the DDoS attacks that are targeting Wikileaks, not a web host who hosted Wikileaks and later terminated the hosting.

I’m still finding the events surrounding Wikileaks far more interesting than the actual leaks themselves.

Voluntary Botnet

This is kind of an interesting premise that’s not at all new but being report as such by several source. MasterCard has been under a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The attack was set off after MasterCard refused to allow customers to user their card to make donations to Wikileaks. This story is so multifaceted that I don’t know where to begin.

First this shows what kind of power companies like MasterCard and Visa can wield when they decide to no longer be a common carrier (allow customers holding their card to make payments to whoever they chose). It’s even more interesting since Wikileaks hasn’t actually done anything illegal meaning these moves are purely business.

Needless to say if you piss off the Internet is pissed on you back. MasterCard is currently under a DDoS attack but not by the usual malware created botnet. News sources are saying it’s by a voluntary botnet. Basically people are downloading an application called Low Orbit Ion Cannon (not to mistaken with GDI’s weapon of mass destruction that really does a good job of shoving it up Kane’s ass). Low Orbit Ion Cannon apparently connects to an invite-only IRC server and allows your system to become part of a botnet. Once the connection is established you system sends out constant traffic to a targeted node on the Internet.

Even more interesting is the fact that performing DDoS attacks is generally illegal. Most of the times the owners of the systems that are in a botnet aren’t held accountable because they did not knowingly allow control of their system to be taken. This case is different since each participant is voluntarily becoming part of the attacking botnet. This shows once again though that simply making something illegal is not a deterrent.

Chrome OS

Yesterday Google officially announced Chrome OS. For those of you who haven’t heard of it Chrome OS is Google’s non-Android operating system that consists of a web browser and… nothing else really. Chrome OS is literally an instance of the Chrome web browser running on top of a Linux kernel. No applications exist outside of the web browser which basically means with the exception of HTML5 offline support the OS is worthless without an Internet connection.

You can probably tell I don’t find the OS all that useful especially when Google already has an operating system that could be adapted to small notebooks called Android. Either way there are a couple of interesting things regarding the web browser OS. First Google will actually offer some form of live support. My biggest headache with Android ended up being the complete lack of any support from Google. Google’s system lost all records of the Android applications I purchased and the only option is to post on their support forum which they apparently don’t monitor at all (I still haven’t received a single reply to my post). Of course Google also offered support for the Nexus One and in less than a year terminated it and sent you to HTC (who manufactured the Nexus One) for your support needs. Either way I don’t have much faith in Google supporting Chrome OS for very long.

The more interesting news item I found was the fact that Verizon will give all Chrome OS users 100MB a month of 3G data for free. I think a majority of people in the comments section are bitching that 100MB is nothing this day and age but for free what do you fucking expect? It’s enough to check your e-mail once in a while when you don’t have Wi-Fi available to you. Of course you can get unlimited data from Verizon for the rather steep price of $9.99… a day. Yikes! That’s actually worse than AT&T’s data plan which is already pretty fucking poor ($20.00 for 2GB and then $10.00 for each additional GB over that). On the upside that $9.99 a day doesn’t require a contract.

Either way I’m still not impressed with the idea of Chrome OS. Every small notebook on the planet already comes with a web browser plus a whole lot more. Being even more impressive these other notebooks are still useful if you have no Internet connection. But hey it wouldn’t be the first time Google hyped up a produce only to shit can it later when nobody really found it useful.

Google Nexus S

Yesterday Google announced a new developer phone, the Nexus S. Over all it’s not nearly as awesome as the first Nexus was (in comparison to other phones on the market at the time vs. other phones on the market now). Really the phone is just a rebranded Samsung Galaxy S running a stock version of Android which in of itself is a great feature (Samsung’s TouchWiz interface is all sorts of crap in my opinion).

The only real changes from the already released Galaxy S that I’ve noticed is the inclusion of a Near Field Communications (NFC) chip (which nobody else has so the feature is limited to Nexus S phones at the moment), a gyroscope, and the removal of the microSD card slot.

The first two features are kind of neat but the last one left a sour taste in my mouth. Almost every Android phone has a microSDHC slot on board which allows you to expand the amount of storage space up to 32GB (the maximum the microSDHC standard allows). The Nexus S has a fixed amount of memory on board which weighs in at only 16GB. If this was simply and included microSD card that wouldn’t be a big deal as you could simply upgrade it but the memory is fixed. I have no idea why this route was chosen when the Galaxy S currently has a microSDHC slot on board.

The phone does have a Super AMOLED screen which I’ve heard is absolutely gorgeous. Along with that the basic specs are still pretty bloody good. Over all it looks like a decent, albeit lackluster, successor to the original Nexus developer phone. It’ll be interesting to see how Android 2.3 handles when this phone is released later this month.

What Censorship Breeds

Censorship is a slippery slope no matter who you are. The main problem when you censor something is the fact you will inevitably get support from some and be damned by others. Recently Apple pulled an app from their App Store that related to some sort of declaration by a Christian group. I linked to this specific article because I found the comments most interesting. There are those who support Apple’s decision and those who detest it but the best part of the comments is the back and forth going on between several Christians and several Atheists.

Since Apple has declared that censorship will occur in the App Store they have set themselves up to be criticized by all camps. Those who found the app to be hate speech are applauding Apple’s decision while those supporting the right to all speech are decrying the removal of the app. You can’t win with censorship because at some point you will anger a group of people.

Basically if you want to do perform censorship you’re setting yourself up for a world of hurt.

Android Headaches Ended

A couple of weeks ago I made a post talking about a huge problem I have encountered with my Android device. Basically Google has lost all record of the applications I’ve purchased and if I want to continue using my paid applications I have to purchase them again.

The biggest headache here is the fact there is no phone or e-mail support for Google and thus if you have problems related to the Android Marketplace you have to post on the support forum. I did that on November 17th and have yet to receive any form of response. Worst of all I’m not alone. The more I dug into this problem to more obvious it became that there is no solution available and Google is worthless in providing any sort of help. The only solution so far is the following posted by user mjwhit3:

Update:
I had a conversation with a developer.
There is no way for them to change the account an app was purchased under (your apps account).

A workaround is (verify with the developer before doing anything):
1. Purchase the app again under your new primary (gmail) account
2. Provide proof of purchase for both transactions (apps and gmail)
3. The develop refunds your money for the first purchase.

This is a bit of work for them to do — especially to refund $1.50 or other small amount — so your mileage may vary.

Personally, I’m just going to safeguard my Titanium Backup files until Windows Phone comes out….

Yes the only solution so far is to repurchase your applications and ask the developers for a refund on the second copy. That’s bullshit through and through. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back after the previous series of failures I’ve encountered with the Android platform has lead me to this conclusion; Android isn’t a viable option as a phone platform. There I said it.

I’m willing to put up with a ton of shit but frankly losing all record of my app purchases without any method of getting technical support just crosses the line. I feel as though Google ripped me off and nothing pisses me off more than getting ripped off.

With all of that said I’m officially admitting to something now, I obtained an iPhone. Yes the platform I railed on more than anything else on the planet is currently what I’m carrying with me. As much as Apple pisses me off with their practices regarding the iOS platform I must admit the platform works. VPN works (which has never worked on Android as far as I can find), local backups of apps I’ve purchased are saved to my computer every sync (thus Apple losing all records of apps I’ve purchased it’s Armageddon), I receive no errors when syncing with my Exchange account calendar at work, and the media layer is rock solid. Between the options of an open and free platform that doesn’t work and a closed and restricted platform that does work I have to chose the latter because if my phone doesn’t work it’s worthless to me.

So what can I say about the iPhone at the moment? As I already stated all the features actually work which is a huge plus. The screen is gorgeous as Hell. Of course the phone does lose a lot of signal strength if you’re holding it in your left hand and having the front and back made out of glass if fucking stupid. The Last.fm app actually works and when I pause a podcast and come back to in five hours later it doesn’t restart from the beginning (huge plus). I also must admit that the built-in camera is the first phone camera that I can actually say does a half-way decent job (the Evo has an 8.0 megapixel camera but if the lighting isn’t absolutely perfect you get a ton of noise in the picture). Finally Apple’s practices with the App Store still piss me off to no end but at least if there is a catastrophic failure (like Apple losing all records of apps I’ve purchase) I can call somebody. Did I mention being able to use the phone function and my data plan at the same time seriously rocks?

I really tried to like Android but it fought me ever step of the way. Personally I’m not a fan of abusive relationships so I’m officially saying fuck that shit and moving elsewhere. I’ve eaten my words and realize I’m going to take endless shit for this but frankly I think the above makes a very valid case for my decision.

So why didn’t I jump to the Palm Pre instead? There are two reasons for that; I hold endless amounts of disdain for HP and the number of available applications for WebOS is sadly laughable. Considering the market share of WebOS has sunk to 1.3% I don’t know how relevant the platform will be in a couple of years. The last thing I want is to set myself up with a new platform only to have it die and thus have to perform yet another transition to a new platform.