mobile | write/geek

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.

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-front I 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?)

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.[↩]
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.

QR Codes: great, but then what?

I keep a long and ever-growing outline of blog topics I may someday write about. Most aren’t fully formed, but each at least once struck me as interesting at some point or another, so I figured they’re worth keeping around.¹ (See one real example to right.)

<3 qr-codes
- bridges the physical and the cyber
- low-tech, lowest-common denominator
- cameraphones in every pocket
- makes a lot more sense than competing technologies, like that microsoft one with the different colors that requires color printing, etc. this one I could, if so inclined, draw with a pencil
- sadly, most of what I use this technology for is curiously decoding barcodes I come across on the web

I add topics to my list pretty regularly, but what doesn’t happen very regularly is someone reading my mind and writing my post for me. Okay, it’s only happened once: about a week ago, and it was geeking out on QR Codes.

I’m a bit behind on my RSS reading, but when I just came across this boingboing post, I was quite pleased. In it, guest blogger Glenn Fleishman pretty much lays out the case for 2D barcodes — QR being the most popular, good/open-enough format — as a useful sort of link between the physical world and the digital one. It’s an idea I happen to have loved for a few years now, and with Internet-enabled cameraphones all over the place, one that has the potential² to create some benefit to society on a large scale.

It should come as little surprise, then, that for as long as I’ve been aware of these codes, I’ve longed to find a use for the technology aside from the mundane let people scan your ad to go to your website, or send a URL from your computer to your phone. A handful of boingboing commenters pointed out a few real-world examples of ways they have used QR codes: labeling shared lab equipment or getting on the VIP list at Tokyo clubs. Interesting they are; world-changing they’re not.

Of course, there’s also the idea of providing richer information about wine than a simple bottle label could display, which I find a step above the others, and giving extra context to museum art, which I think gets us even closer.

Yet I still think QR Codes have even greater potential… but potential isn’t even half the battle.

Yes, they’re basically brain crack.[↩]
Naturally, the barrier to adoption is convincing the average person to bother solving for themselves a problem — easy URL/text/contact entry on their phone — they didn’t realize they had.[↩]

Why doesn’t my phone have a thermometer?

It’s getting pretty warm again (did it ever stop?) in South Florida, so today when I had the misfortune of being outdoors, I got to wondering why with all the sensors found in most modern smartphones, they don’t usually include a thermometer.

It’s common to find sensors for orientation, screen contact/pressure, video, sound and even location. However, for some reason, the task of telling me about the climate surrounding me gets outsourced to a third-party that is somewhere completely different.

Just think about that for a second.

What we’re missing is the ability to know the actual conditions we’re experiencing. If one happens to be indoors, in the shade, or somewhere else entirely, all they’ll get from their phone is the typical outdoor temperature for their general area. Even if they happen to be inside of, and get reception in, a walk-in freezer. (“It’s certainly not 90° F in here…”)

On the other hand, I can think of reasons why our phones tend not to handle their own temperature readings. Wireless carriers obviously prefer that customers pay for data plans to use as many phone features as possible. There’s also the matter of expectations: nobody (but me!) seems to demand the feature, so why include it, even if the hardware couldn’t be all that pricey?

But most importantly, the sensor would likely be unduly influenced by the temperature of our hand, the atmospheric conditions in our pocket, the heat generated by the phone itself, and so on. Heck, I distinctly remember how wildly inaccurate my circa-mid-90s Casio G-Shock thermometer watch (same model pictured at right) was.

But gosh, was it ever entertaining to watch that dial spin! I also used to watch that bar graph scroll through the last few hours of recorded temperatures and pretend I was in a boat watching waves go by. Ah, childhood…

I can’t quite place my finger on what I would do with the ability to keep a reading of my own surroundings’ temperature over time… but I know I want it.

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

I 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!

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.”[↩]