Tag: Android

Android’s day-one advantages: how many are left?

When I chose my first Android device over an iPhone in 2009, each platform had exactly one device available and the decision of which platform was for me was clear.

Even back then, to those who had been paying attention to the smartphone world, the iPhone arrived as something that wasn’t quite a smartphone. It had an advanced web browser and slick Google Maps app that were both better than anything else available, but lacked a lot of features that existed in previous smartphones—the biggest omission being third-party app development. But the world very quickly forgot how anti-app Steve Jobs’ Apple was at launch, and how the ‘no, you can’t develop for iPhone’ attitude led to web app monstrosities skinned with brushed metal and pinstripes, which people quickly cooked up to look “iPhone native” in the early days.

Of course, the early days didn’t last long. An SDK and the App Store showed up a year later, but for a long time iPhone remained on my “still wouldn’t even consider” list because it was still missing things I considered basic functionality, things that Android got right, right from the start.

But it’s not 2009 anymore! So where are we now? Let’s take a look back and see how many of these Android advantages are still applicable today, 12 years later.

    • Devices available from multiple manufacturers
    • Outside-of-app-store apps available (not a walled-garden)
    • Almost entirely open-source OS
    • Third-party development possible
    • Multitasking
    • Custom input methods/software keyboards
    • Selection of devices with hardware keyboards
    • Cut and paste
    • Extensible, systemwide ‘share’ functionality
    • Not AT&T-exclusive
    • SIM-unlocking actually allowed
    • No desktop client needed for setup
    • Filesystem
    • Casually swappable battery

Things aren’t looking good! Apple (and Google themselves!) has chipped away at Android advantages over the years, though the two that remain on my list remain huge.

But I sometimes gaze jealously at the iOS world and its devices with competent support and five years of updates and wonder if the principles that led me to choose Android are still worth anything.

Compromise and Nexus 5: a review

I know a thing or two about compromise—I bought a Nexus 5 a few months ago. It’s not the phone I want, but it’ll do. For now.

It’s been years since I bought something that wasn’t the latest and greatest Nexus model, but this time I think it was the right call. Like other Android fans, I awaited the announcement of the Nexus 6 with every bit as much excitement as the entire world does when it’s new-iPhone-time. (Yes, this is a thing people actually do for Nexus devices.)

I found myself utterly underwhelmed by Nexus 6. Price, size, boring, etc. But I knew I needed a new phone, so I immediately ordered the fan-favorite Nexus 5.

It’s fast. My Galaxy Nexus—a phone from 2011—didn’t seem that slow, even towards the end, but I’m blown away at how fluidly this thing runs just about everything. (That’s probably the extra RAM talking.) Another RAM-based plus is that it’s awesome to switch between apps—and even browser tabs—without my seeing persistent background processes dying and restarting. I could have avoided this frustration by simply doing less with my device, but why would I?

Having 32 GB of storage shouldn’t be such a big deal in 2015, but after dealing with two phones that maxed out at 16-ridiculous-gigabytes, it feels amazing to not have to think about space, at least for now. Of course it’s still only 32 GB, so I’m not significantly changing the way I use the device to make use of the extra space.

Ick: I find it a little hard to believe that I own a phone with a not-user-swappable battery.1 After all, I thought that I object to these on principle. In the end, sigh, the Nexus pluses won out over the other devices I considered. But I feel as if the device comes with a built-in expiration date.

Speaking of power, I didn’t expect to pick up a wireless Qi charger for this phone, but I did. (Um, two, actually—cheap ones.) I love it. Wireless charging is not only the future of mobile devices, but for those on the Android side of the proverbial aisle, it’s the present.

Well, no shit there’s no physical keyboard. I immediately missed having one when I got my first candybar-style device in 2010. You’re getting on well with tapping, swiping, voice, autocorrect, whatever? That’s wonderful and I’m so happy for you. I miss having a real keyboard no less today than I did four years ago.

Months after its general availability, I’m still continuing to hold off on applying the Nexus 5 Lollipop upgrade. The same UI flash that got Apple-enamored design bloggers salivating actually saddens me. Exactly why is probably worth a dedicated post, but after months of using Lollipop on secondary devices, I still can’t see myself putting it on my primary phone (read: the only device that matters to me).

Nexus 5 feels like more of a stopgap than anything else… at least it was pretty inexpensive. It’s clear that the world isn’t turning back to the good stuff from the past (top want: badass Sidekick-style slider) but there is hope for the future — Nexus 5 just needs to last me until Project Ara is a thing I can actually use.

Someone will make an Ara keyboard module. I can feel it in my hands now.

  1. I know. There are disassembly guides that show you how to crack open the phone and replace the battery. But that is not the same as having a truly removable battery. For one thing, I can’t just casually carry a second battery to pop in for an instant top-up. And also, I imagine this complicating factor limits the market demand for replacement batteries, which I fear will limit the battery supply when, down the road, the day comes that I finally need a replacement. Sealed phones are a shitty, disrespectful design decision by which this dude cannot abide.[↩]

Yes, that’s a new laptop. Yes, I know what year it is.

lenovo-thinkpad-x230-frontI know it’s 2013 and as far as “mobile computing” goes, I’m supposed to be pinch-zooming and app-buying and poorly-typing on a tablet like the cool kids. And I do — my  O.G. Nexus 7 (the 2012 model) sometimes makes a nice companion1 to my Galaxy Nexus Android phone, by being slightly faster and having a slightly better screen. However, over the 15 months I’ve owned the Nexus 7, it never quite became the second mobile device that I wanted. Useful, yes… transcendent, no.

I knew something was still missing, so I recently went and bought a small laptop computer, a Lenovo ThinkPad X230, to carry around. It runs Debian Linux. It does the things I want. It’s a wonderful thing to have.

I needed this because…

The laptop that the ThinkPad replaced was from 2007, and while a decent computer from back then would likely still be good today, my old laptop was not a decent computer, even when new. Back then, I didn’t know just how painfully slow an ultra-low-voltage, low clock-speed CPU could be… I guess I thought it being dual-core would somehow make up for it. Also, the cooling fan was a bit of a whiner, and would constantly and very vocally disagree with Linux’s style of power management. The darned thing would constantly sound like a mini-jet-engine — too obnoxious to use around people I actually like.

Low on power, high on noise — not a good combo.

But these days…

In the last half-decade or so, mainstream humans seem to have accepted the smartphone, and seem to be doing the same for the idiot camera (“tablets”). It’s the “Post-PC era,” or something. Plenty of people seem to be doing okay without spending much time on their general-purpose personal computers, but over time I realized that as I tried to go along with this trend, I was missing out. For me, a computing life centered around mobile “smart” devices was one of unacceptable compromise. Composing more than a couple of sentences without a keyboard makes me want to just not bother to write, devices without expandable storage make one dependent on rent-seeking “cloud” services, and the mobile app ecosystem has handfuls of well-known problems (privacy, lock-in, and so on).

There’s a place for these devices, even in my life, but they just don’t replace a general-purpose computer. Ever.

So I did this…

I made sure not to make last time’s mistakes when buying this computer. The i5 CPU is more than adequate, and I have a ton of RAM. ThinkPads are known to play nicely with Linux, because they’re used by that awesome kind of geek who figures that shit out (and wouldn’t put up with a jet engine laptop). It runs Debian Jessie (“testing”) with only minor annoyances — not perfect, but nothing I can’t handle.2

Hardware build-quality and durability are major plusses for an everyday carry machine, and that’s what ThinkPads are known for. And of course, TrackPoint is truly the best way to mouse. A lot has been said about the new ThinkPad keyboards, and while this one suffers from the bullshit key layout (compare it to the awesome, ugly 1337-geek classic style), the keyboard actually feel pretty nice to type on, even if the bizarrely-placed PrintScreen key occasionally enrages me.

And finally…

In the spirit of burying the lede, here are some things I intend to enjoy while toting around this rock-solid, large-screen-and-real-keyboard device:

  • Full desktop OS that does all the things
  • Better web browsing; approximately 1,000 open tabs
  • Actually writing things, blogging silly ideas and such
  • Tons of local storage (SSD + HDD = yay!)
  • Semi-modern PC games, including lots of Humble Bundle goodness
  • Codecademy
  • Interactive fiction, perhaps (now, where did I misplace my patience?)
  1. My most common tablet uses are as follows: gaming, viewing TV episodes and movies, and web browsing. I’m putting this in a footnote so as not to sidetrack myself, but it’s an important point. One of the best things about having the tablet was that it gave me another 16 GB of storage, on top of the 16 GB available on my phone. A lot of people seem to think that Google intentionally limits the storage available in their flagship devices to push people into using their monetizable “cloud” media offerings instead of local storage. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were true, but honestly, the #1 reason I’d like more local storage in my devices is not to carry around more media, but more and larger apps — something you can’t put in the cloud.[↩]
  2. I imagine Debian Stable or Ubuntu would be better.[↩]

goatse mobile

I had a strange moment of serendipity earlier this evening.

I was reading some RSS feeds and I saw there was a new post to the Flickr tag “firstgoatse.” (If the term goatse is new to you, I’m not sure what to say except: don’t blame me when you look it up… now. The above link is safe to view, by the way.)

I felt like I hadn’t seen a ‘firstgoatse’ in a while, so I checked it out. The photo itself was unremarkable, but I was viewing it on my Nexus S phone and happened to glance away from the screen, at the phone itself. Something clicked in my head, and I thought of a way to breathe new life into the age-old pastime of showing your friends disgusting images and capturing their horrified reaction for sharing on the Internet.

HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS WE ALL HAVE SMARTPHONES WITH FRONT-FACING CAMERAS!! (It must be the future!) These tiny pocket devices are cornucopias of giving: lulz for us, lulz for the Internet, and horrific, can-ever-forget memories for our friends!

Basically, what the best app ever would do is display a horrific image of your choice… self-supplied of course, in case your poison is more tubgirl, or whatever kids these days show other kids these days. It would also capture the reaction of the person holding the phone via the front-facing camera, at the very moment of exposure.

A series of photos leading up to the moment would work nicely too. Heck, what about capturing a video of the entire reaction? For all I know, kids these days are showing each other the video equivalent of that guy bending over and… ugh. For bonus points, it might even combine the original and reaction videos into one, side-by-side, not that anyone would want to ever view that.

I’m ready to believe that a mobile app like this already exists. It clearly, however, can’t exist for iPhone, because Apple doesn’t allow that brand of awesome, and I can’t be bothered to check the Android Market (aside from, okay, my quick search for “goatse,” which turned up nothing), but this is clearly the kind of app that the wold today could use.

Well, there’s a Mac app, but who can fit that in their pocket?

Hey world — somebody make this!

Nexus S review

Owing to its status as the current hot Android phone, the reputation of and continuing support for the Nexus One that came before it, and the Nexus line’s no-crapware, pure Android nature, last month I made a Samsung Nexus S my next mobile phone.

My previous phone, for reference, was the first Android device, a T-Mobile G1 (HTC Dream).

I like almost everything about Nexus S. The device is, for the most part, blazing fast, smooth and completely open.

By “open,” I mean:

  • It’s sold SIM-unlocked, meaning I can switch between almost any service provider. This isn’t very useful on a daily basis, but is a great option to have for international travel.
  • Gaining root access to the phone is simple. Rather than relying on a security hole to get root, Nexus devices have official support for unlocking the bootloader, which opens up the phone to whatever you want to do, installing whatever you want, etc.
  • Even if you don’t root, the Nexus S—like all Android devices—is “open” in a very practical way: apps can be added to these devices from any source you as a user deem worthy. If Google doesn’t see fit to include a given app in the Android Market for whatever reason, the developer can provide an .apk file however they like, and you as an adult can make up your own mind as to whether you want to use it.

Here are a few things I like:

  • It’s fast. There’s almost never a hiccup in running apps, switching between them, having calls and messages come in when you’re doing something else, etc.
  • Front-facing cameras may be standard these days, but I love finally having one in my phone. Just need video support in the Skype app…
  • The screen is amazing. It’s bright, high-resolution, and the glass is actually curved, which lets it sit face-down on a table without scratching, fit the curvature of your face, and as some have suggested, there are ergonomic benefits for your thumb as well.
  • I don’t know the specs, but the battery life with active use seems way better than my G1.
  • Lots of onboard storage. 16 GB may not be enough for some people, but it is for me, and I prefer this over dealing with a slow, unreliable microSD card.
  • Small touches like the aforementioned curved glass, head sensor that disables the screen during a call, ambient light sensor for automatically adjusting screen brightness make for a nice experience.

Here are a few things I don’t:

  • The browser sometimes lags a bit while scrolling webpages with multiple large images. I don’t see a lot of this, so it’s not that annoying.
  • No 4G. Of course, T-Mobile doesn’t have “true” 4G service, and 3G speeds are enough for web browsing… and almost everything else I usually want to do. Where this has been a problem for me is in streaming high-quality music using the Last.fm app; the playback very often catches up to the loading. That said, I feel like Last.fm may be partly at fault too, as the app seems unreliable in other ways that make me doubt it.
  • In-browser Flash performance sucks, but I’ll take it over none at all so long as Flash elements can be off by default and loaded only on-demand (and they can).
  • I get annoying audio interference in the car when the phone is plugged to the audio while also charging. Not sure if this is the phone’s fault, as it doesn’t happen in the house.
  • Doesn’t shoot HD video, but instead, widescreen VGA… similar to my Canon PowerShot from six years ago. I can’t figure out who thought this was a good idea. I don’t do much video, so it’s not a deal-breaker, but an annoyance. I’d love to see them fix this with a software update, which should be possible given the beefy hardware in this thing.

The lack of keyboard worries me:

  • While the average person probably has to occasionally enter a simple password and a poorly thought-out status update, I’m a writer and a geek (did you guess?), so accuracy of text entry is important to me. Typing on-screen kind of bothers me.
  • I hate the lack of control when composing text, even if auto-correct takes care of most of the inaccuracies. It also corrects my intentional misspellings, colloquialisms, “big words” and many proper nouns. The thing to do here is obviously make sure it says what I want before clicking “Send,” but that’s not always easy.
  • Like I said, I’m also a geek. Who the fuck uses command lines these days? I the fuck do. I manage a Linux server at work, and very often remotely connect to the computers at home to do things throughout the day. Not only is typing awkward, but other things don’t work, like double-tabbing key for completing commands and filenames.
  • On the plus side, on-screen options like Swype and SwiftKey, and Google’s pretty good voice input makes this hurt a little less. Still, I’d totally go for an identical phone with a keyboard, even if it was a bit thicker and heavier.

But I’m optimistic about the future of my phone:

  • As a Nexus phone, its updates are managed by Google, so there isn’t any waiting for Samsung and T-Mobile to get their act together and release updates to future versions of Android.
  • Its open-phone status should make it appealing to third-party developers like Cyanogen, who will hopefully continue supporting it into the future.
  • While I’m a little concerned about buying a new phone now, given the upcoming wave of Android phones with dual-core CPUs (Tegra II and others), I’m not sure that my phone being left “in the dust” will be a concern for the next couple of years. After all, desktop developers haven’t exactly made great use of multi-core CPUs, which have been widely available there for at least five years now. They’re still good to have for multitasking, which is a nice feature to have your mobile OS support, but the sort of multitasking we expect out of our phones doesn’t usually involve two CPU-intensive tasks, but rather one that chugs along performing some menial task (playing music, routing GPS, etc.) while another in the foreground does what you want it to at the moment.

In all, I think Nexus S makes a pretty good G1 replacement, and will serve me well into the future. I’ll keep you posted, uh, Internet.

I basically have the mobile phone I want, and that is awesome

My G1, in its rooted gloryI just realized that I, basically, have the mobile phone I want. I use a T-Mobile G1 (HTC Dream), rooted, SIM-unlocked, and running the great CyanogenMOD.

I could not really say this about my previous phone, a Palm OS Treo. Though it had its strengths (read: the organizer features), I bought it pretty much right before the first iPhone was announced, which, for better or worse, redefined what a smartphone would be.1

My affinity for the G1 re-occurred to me as I opened the Terminal app to check something. I slid the screen open with a satisfying click, typed su and checked that something. I wanted to go back a bit through my shell’s command history, and a quick flip of the trackball made easy work of that.

Sure, I have my gripes… it’s a little sluggish sometimes, completely short on app storage space (rooting fixed that) and takes the crappiest videos I’ve ever seen (worse than my circa-2001 Nikon CoolPix). And now that newer Android devices are out, I completely have 1 GHz CPU-envy, high-res screen-envy, and Android 2.1-envy (Google Earth, want!).

But for the foreseeable future, my G1 and I are cool. Its form factor is perfect. Its physical keyboard is unmatched by newer devices with cramped layouts. It’s clearly no svelte iPhone, but it’s not too chunky either.

My satisfaction is matched only by my anticipation for whatever could materialize in the future and top this. Bring it, future!

  1. By this, I mostly mean “have a real web browser,” not “have no native app support and a charismatic CEO try to convince you that you don’t really want apps on your smartphone, anyway.”[↩]

The case of the disappearing, reappearing dictionary

I was a voracious reader from a rather early age. I recall having had my reading level, in first or second grade, assessed at that of an eighth-grader.

My reading prowess could be attributed to a few things, like my parents reading to me from a young age, and often encouraging me to read to them. More importantly, if I came across a word I didn’t know and asked them what it meant, they almost always made me go look it up in the dictionary. I had a children’s dictionary that I adored, but for words that didn’t appear in there, I’d use their musty collegiate dictionary. This fostered an environment where literally no word was beyond my comprehension, an empowering feeling for a pre-geek with a single-digit age!

As I grew up, I didn’t always manage to keep reading with such volume and tenacity, and today, while I read tons of bits and blogs from the Web, long-form content isn’t something I take in a lot of. When I do, it tends to be an e-book. (I read these, in epub format, on my Android phone using the excellent open-source FBReader. Yes, reading off of a small backlit screen sucks, but this is mitigated by a nice serif font and the knowledge that, as I’m often reading in the dark, I wouldn’t really be able to read any other way.)

As I read, still I come across the occasional word I don’t know. These days, my main dictionary (either Free Dictionary Org or Lexicon Lite) also lives inside of my phone. FBReader doesn’t have its own built-in, and to switch to another app is kind of a pain, so I’ve lately been finding myself shrugging off unknown terms. I have become the sort of person who stopped learning new words.

This bothered me, so I decided that, damn the inconvenience, I would start looking up words again. Once I tried, I learned that it actually wasn’t so hard, after all.

The secret (if you could call it that) was to long-hold my phone’s Home button. This is the equivalent to the Alt+Tab key combination in Linux and Windows, which allows you to flip through open apps (only, in Android, it’s a list of the six most recently used apps, open or otherwise). As long as the dictionary is among the last six, it’ll appear in that list… as does FBReader, when it’s time to switch back. This is much more enjoyable than going back to the home screen, flipping open the apps drawer, etc.

I guess that’s a passable not-so-new-anymore year’s resolution: to leave no word un-lexicized.