u l t r a m o o k i e

I was reading a review of the OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner in this month’s issue of Linux Journal and I had a realization about Linux.  Outside of the server market where Linux truly shines, Linux is just a bunch of (geeky) hopes and dreams.  In the second paragraph of the review:
I have carried the FreeRunner around [...]

I was reading a review of the OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner in this month’s issue of Linux Journal and I had a realization about Linux.  Outside of the server market where Linux truly shines, Linux is just a bunch of (geeky) hopes and dreams.  In the second paragraph of the review:

I have carried the FreeRunner around with me. It is just such a cool little gadget, and I love what it represents: a completely open mobile device, the hardware and all.

There’s the hope.  Here’s the reality, from the same review:

Even though the goal is eventually to have a general-purpose, consumer-friendly phone, the FreeRunner is not quite ready for the prime-time phone market just yet.

It’s very similar when you talk about Linux on desktops.  Ubuntu makes great strides at making Linux consumer friendly, but Windows and MacOS X have it done better.

On the subject of the Neo FreeRunner, $400 is steep for a phone that does not work well as a phone and has only GPRS connectivity.  According to the article, the FreeRunner “is a Linux-based touchscreen smartphone ultimately aimed at general consumer use as well as Linux desktop users and software developers”.  As a general consumer, an iPhone or Nokia Series 60 or Windows Mobile maybe a better choice as they cost about the same and have more features.

One could argue that Android-based phones would be an viable consumer oriented open mobile platform.  It can, and I hope.

It’s not bad to have hopes and dreams, but I think sometimes the Linux bunch (and at one time myself included) are a bit overly enthusiastic (or is it optomistic?) about the state of Linux when it comes to being consumer friendly.

What are you thoughts?

This is pure rant.  So, if you don’t want to read, feel free to skip.
Yea, I’m cranky.  I saw two emails today that made me even more cranky than I was when I stepped into the office.  They are both from the same individual.  The first:
“Hello everyone (list of 20 or so people).  We need [...]

This is pure rant.  So, if you don’t want to read, feel free to skip.

Yea, I’m cranky.  I saw two emails today that made me even more cranky than I was when I stepped into the office.  They are both from the same individual.  The first:

“Hello everyone (list of 20 or so people).  We need to meet about [insert something not so important].  I have scheduled a room from 2pm to 3pm so that we can all get together and discuss [the not so important thing].  You are required to attend.”

That’s it.  Annoyingly demanding about something not very important.  I did realize that this individual did not let us know which room the meeting was in.  Five minutes later, the second email from the same individual:

“The room is [insert room that is far away].  Thanks.”

WTF?  “Thanks“?  Thanks for what?  Thanks for understanding that I’m a dolt who forgot to put the room in the original email?  Thanks for not replying to everyone on the email list and calling me out as an idiot?  Dude, try using the right word instead: “Sorry”.

Maybe I can suggest:

“Sorry, I did not include the location of the meeting in the original email.  The conference room for the meeting is [insert room closer to attendees].”

Thanks.

After more than a week with my Moto Q9H, I have some quick thoughts about the phone, Windows Mobile and the iPhone:

Windows Mobile has a huge learning curve.  In old Microsoft fashion, somethings are not where they should be intuitively.
Windows Mobile has a large amount of 3rd party software, but no central “App Store” like [...]

After more than a week with my Moto Q9H, I have some quick thoughts about the phone, Windows Mobile and the iPhone:

• Windows Mobile has a huge learning curve.  In old Microsoft fashion, somethings are not where they should be intuitively.
• Windows Mobile has a large amount of 3rd party software, but no central “App Store” like the iPhone does.  If you want software, you’ll have to go scouring through the internet to find it.  Places like Handango and PocketGear are nice repositories though.
• With Windows Mobile, there are no restrictions on apps produced.  The same cannot be said about the iPhone platform — ie. No Opera on iPhone because it’s too similar to Safari, wth?.  And, no, Apple going through the apps in a heavy handed way does not guarantee any safety for you.  Nor does it guarantee that you’re getting quality applications.  It is very apparent that Apple doesn’t go through the apps very thoroughly before putting them up on the store.  Examples would be “I Am Rich” and “Netshare”.  All this guarantees is that Apple wants to have full control of what you get and what you don’t get.  You are Apple’s b*tch when it comes to applications on the iPhone.
• Tactile thumb board well worth the trade-off in screen real estate.  Sure, with the iPhone, you get all that extra screen space to view webpages, movies and other media.  But, when it comes to typing, it is just not the same.  The tactile feedback of a button click cannot be beat.  This all comes down to what you do with your smartphone though.  As a messenging device, a thumbboard is the best thing.  If you want a hybrid consumer device for media and some light messenging the iPhone is fine.
• The Windows Mobile UI is generally “laggy“.  Even with a 325Mhz processor, the screen redraws are quite apparent.  Launching apps is generally snappy.  There is actually a spinning beach ball in Windows Mobile.  Ironic.
• Moving around text with d-pad is a lot easier than with the touch interface on the iPhone.  When I am trying to back up and edit something (say a misspelling), it is a hell of a lot easier to use a d-pad to move around and put the cursor where I need it.  Using the magnifying glass and fat-finger on the iPhone to do the same is a pain-in-the-ass.  This is especially true when you want to put the cursor at in front of the first word of a paragraph.  The first word is at the edge of the screen, so trying to get the cursor there is near impossible.
• The Windows Mobile interface is too clicky — it takes too many clicks to get something done.  This is a considerable part that plays into the large learning curve of Windows Mobile.  There are menus, lots of menus.  But, most all menu items have numbers associated with them.  So if you use an app long enough, you can memorize the most used menu item’s number.  Then you can just Menu+# to activate that function.
• Most Windows Mobile devices have batteries that can be replaced by the user, go figure.  The Moto Q9H even comes with two batteries, a slim one and a fat extended one.  Take your pick which one you want to use.  And, no, a user replaceable battery does not help make a device thinner as Lord Jobs would have you believe. My original iPhone was 11.6mm thick.  The new iPhone 3G is 12.3mm thick.  My Moto Q9h is 12mm thick.  Huh.
• Want more storage on your Windows Mobile device?  Go buy an expansion card (Moto Q9h takes microSDHC cards for user swappable storage).  Want more storage on your iPhone?  Go buy a new iPhone.
• Hey, look, cut and paste.  That’s innovation at work.
• The webbrowsing experience on the iPhone cannot be matched. Mobile IE 6.1 is OK.  Opera 8.65 is OK.  But, neither matches Mobile Safari.
• Windows Mobile devices can multitask.  The iPhone doesn’t.  It can, but it doesn’t.  This means that if you want to have your instant messenger open, you can’t do anything else.  On my Windows Mobile device, I can have my IM client open in the background while I go and do other stuff.  Sure, Apple has promised “Push” notification for applications so that they can simulate running in the background, but Apple has slipped that promise.  Job’s continues to try to push the idea that apps running in the background will drain the battery faster.  Yes and no.  I ran my IM client on my 3G Moto Q9h all day yesterday (on the slim battery) and still made it throughout the whole day without recharging — and this included calls, RSS reading, and websurfing.
• I wish I could quit applications.  Some applications in Windows Mobile let you quit.  Some don’t (like Mobile IE).  The only way to exit applications that won’t let you do it nicely is to kill them via the Task Manager.  Microsoft could do us all a big favor and make sure that the user interface across the whole platform requires that an app have a Quit function — and maybe they can implement it themselves, say in Mobile Outlook and Mobile IE.
• Bluetooth functionality in Windows Mobile is not neutered like it is on the iPhone.  I can connect via Bluetooth wirelessly to ActiveSync on my Windows box and synchronize all the information on my box — including PIM stuff and files on the file system.  Not only that, I can use Bluetooth on my Windows Mobile device to send contacts, calendar events, and files to other Bluetooth enabled devices (except the neutered iPhone, of course).  I can use the Bluetooth connectivity on my Windows Mobile device for making calls on a Bluetooth headset.  Oh, and I can listen to music wirelessly using Bluetooth on my Windows Mobile device.  What about the iPhone’s Bluetooth capabilities?  Severely limited to one thing and only one thing:  Bluetooth headset for making phone calls.  How lame is that?  iPhone users, when it comes to Bluetooth, Apple wants to welcome you to the 90’s.
• I have to say on a whole, the stability of Windows Mobile and its apps have been a lot better than the stability of the iPhone and its apps.  The iPhone 2.1 update did a lot to fix the crash problems that iPhone apps had, but it didn’t fix them all.  Safari was one of the worse offenders, often dumping me back to the Home screen without warning.  So far, no Windows Mobile app has done that yet.  I have not had to restart my Moto Q9h to clear up any issues.
• The out-of-box experience on a Mac is much better for an iPhone since all MacOS X applications are built to work with the iPhone.  If you have a Windows Mobile device and a Mac (giggle), you’ll have to get something like PocketMac to get the two to talk to each other.
• The out-of-box experience on a Windows box is the same suck-ass experience for both Windows Mobile devices and iPhones.  Mainly, you can’t synchronize to a Windows box unless you buy Microsoft Outlook.

In the end, I still think each of the platforms has their own cubby hole.  The iPhone is an awesome consumer media product that makes things easy for consumers by limiting the way that things can be done.  If you can live with these limitations, more power to ya.  The Windows Mobile platform is a great business or prosumer product by making a platform that is powerful and open to third-party applications.

It all depends on what you’re looking for and how much freedom you want from your device.  Strangely enough, when it comes to actually doing things, the Windows Mobile platform is a lot more free than the iPhone platform.

After using the Moto Q9h for a little bit, I actually like the device a lot.  There was no instant out-of-box “holy crap, this device is heavenly” experience like I had when I got my iPhone.  But, there is no week later, “damn this thing is severely limited by Apple” or “crap, I wish Safari didn’t crash so much” experiences either.

Apple fanboys please refrain from posting comments.

The one thing that Apple got right with the iPhone as a smartphone is that (at least for their own MacOS X platform) they have all the tools to make the damned thing work out of the box.  You have iTunes that does media.  You have iCal that does calendaring.  You have Addressbook for contacts.  [...]

The one thing that Apple got right with the iPhone as a smartphone is that (at least for their own MacOS X platform) they have all the tools to make the damned thing work out of the box.  You have iTunes that does media.  You have iCal that does calendaring.  You have Addressbook for contacts.  You have Safari for bookmarks.  And you have Mail.app for mail.  Everything is included in MacOS X to make and excellent out-of-box expereince with the iPhone.

Now, imagine someone getting a Windows Mobile phone.  They open up the package and pulling out the shiny smartphone inside.  Great, now lets get syncing.  Rip out the included CD and there’s no Outlook on it.  So, you can’t sync your information to anything there.  But, wait!  Vista includes Windows Calendar and Windows Contacts.  Microsoft must have been smart enough to at least include sync-abiility for those two.   Nope.  Fail!  The only thing that syncs is Windows Media Player for media files.  If you want local synchronization of PIM stuff, you have to shell out an extra $90 for Outlook.  That does not make for a good out-of-box experience.  I hope Microsoft is learning a thing or two from Apple.  Either make the built-in Windows tools compatible with your phones or stick a copy of Outlook in each box.

A while back, I was trying to get my contacts and calendaring in the “cloud”.  Mainly, it was so that I could make better use of my iPhone without having to sync it via a cable with my Powerbook G4.  I found lots of solutions and eventually settled on using Google Calendar and Contacts via [...]

A while back, I was trying to get my contacts and calendaring in the “cloud”.  Mainly, it was so that I could make better use of my iPhone without having to sync it via a cable with my Powerbook G4.  I found lots of solutions and eventually settled on using Google Calendar and Contacts via Nuevasync.  The whole running my own ActiveSync server thing was cool, but the harddrive in my little notebook started whining and I turned it off.

While the whole Google Calendar and Nuevasync thing worked out well, I had issues with the Google Contacts app.  It seemed like an after thought that was thrown together for Gmail.  The app was basic and worked, but things like it not having fields for City, State and Zip were kind of annoying (everything was thrown in as “Address” which doesn’t map correctly when synchronized).  The other annoyance was that Google wants to add crap to the contacts list based on email activity — thereby cluttering up the contacts list if one does not keep on top of it.  Of course, there is still my paranoia surround Google having information about me.

A shortcoming of Nuevasync was that it only syncs two weeks into the past, no matter what you tell it to do.

So, after my iPhone bit the dust and getting my new Moto Q9h, I wanted to see what I could do to get away from the whole Google and Nuevasync setup.  I found out that if I used mail2web, I could actually survive.  My data would not be trapped on mail2web servers because I could do a local backup of my data on the Moto Q9.  I would also be able to restore the data back to the device locally without having mail2web setup in ActiveSync.  This would allow me to get my data “exported” if I did a backup, restore, and then an ActiveSync to another ActiveSync provider — or even if I bought Outlook and synchronized the data back to my local PC.

So, today, I shutdown my experiment with mookiesplace.org being host with Google Apps.  I deleted all my calendaring events and contacts.  And the whole Google and Nuevasync thing has been shuttered.  I’m now using mail2web Live fully.  I’m able to synchronize to my Moto Q9h calendar, contacts, tasks and mail.  All of them via push (during the day) and polling (during the “off peak” hours to save battery).