C. Scyphers // Just a bit over 140 characters...
When I was at #glueCon last week, I entered the booth prize for an iPad from Layer 7. And I won. This makes two free iPads I won as door prizes in the same year.
Clearly, I need to buy lots of lottery tickets.Have you noticed the number of advertisements ending with "go to facebook.com/<product name>" Last night's Super Bowl was chock full of them (as Ryan also noticed). Does no one in the ad world remember the "keyword AOL" trend of the early 90's?
As far as I'm concerned, this is yet more evidence that Facebook is heading full speed down the AOL walled garden route. And it will end pretty much the same way.Tonight, I caught Tron:Legacy. The short form of this review? Don't.
The acting was wooden, the plot absent and the 3D effects not worth the discomfort of the glasses. The visuals of the digital world were quite interesting, but hardly enough to justify the price of the ticket.I've written about this before, but being here at Open World raises more questions again. In between sessions, there's a display with four of the Iron Man suits (from the movie, presumably). Overhead, a screen runs a 60 second clip on repeat, showing each of the six times Oracle is name checked in the movie (including two which are just ridiculous and would never have been seen by anyone if it wasn't pointed out) and ending with Uncle Larry's cameo.
As a shareholder of Oracle, just how much did they pay for what seems to be a very minimal amount of exposure?I'm sitting at the Oracle Open World keynote, listening to Intel and Oracle drone on about how much their products will save us bazillons of dollars while also making everything more fun. And I'm wondering, why does anyone go to these things?
Keynote at vendor conferences like this are usually nothing more than well rehearsed marketing messages, focused on selling products/services/something. Very rarely will any useful information be imparted or news made. There's certainly no reason to drag yourself out of bed at 7am to get a good seat. However, occasionally, there is some useful information. The other night when Uncle Larry announced a Linux fork was a big deal. But at's the exception, not the rule.Why do people insist on movie clips -- and long movie clips at that -- during presentations? It's like a cinematic during a computer game; completely taking the audience out of the talk. Not to mention that the speaker usually just stands on the stage, trying to blend in with the furniture.
The keynote at Oracle OpenWorld from Fujitsu had both the good way to implement movies and the bad way. Stopping the talk entirely -- twice -- for a history lesson and a marketing promo was horrible; it added nothing to the talk and only broke what little rhythm the speaker had. Later in the talk, he talked about using super computers to model fluid dynamics within the human heart. While he was talking, a clip ran in the background showing a simulation of a human heart. *That* is the right way to use movie clips; it supported his point without overwhelming the speaker.Eric Scott Raymond opines on the latest news concerning the rise of Android over iPhone
CNET reported a few days ago (while I was busy at the World Boardgaming Championships, or I’d have blogged on this sooner) that Android hits top spot in U.S. smartphone market. There’s a boatload of bad news in the numbers for Apple fans, but no surprises for anyone who has been following my strategic analyses for the last seven months. In the first quarter Android new sales passed Apple’s but ran second behind Blackberry sales; in the second quarter, Android has passed Blackberry and opened up an 11% gap in front of iPhone sales. Other reports indicate that, at about 160K per day, Android activations now exceed the totals for iPhone 3, iPhone 4, and iPad combined. Apple’s bid to define and control the smartphone market is going down to defeat. I was going to describe the process as “slow but inexorable”, but that would be incorrect; it’s fast and inexorable. My prediction that Android’s installed base will pass the iPhone’s in the fourth quarter of this year no longer looks wild-eyed to anybody following these market-share wars; in fact, given the trends in new-unit sales a crossover point late in the third quarter is no longer out of the question.
I'll add to his last line:
As I predicted would happen months ago, the ubiquity game is clobbering the control game; Apple has wound up outflanked, outgunned, and out-thought.
At the risk of being a bit gloat-y, may I add "...outflanked, outgunned, and out-thought again." This seems to be a re-run of the Windows/Mac fights of the 90's:
It was Microsoft before, it's Google now. And the common thread seems to be Uncle Jobs' two pronged insistence both that he knows better than everyone else as to what his customers should want and that his company is the only one that can be trusted to deliver on said vision.
As it happens, I believe I will be keeping the EVO phone. The unreadable screen thing has been resolved (see below) and everything else works well enough. Here are some final thoughts:
Yeah, it's really, really, bad. I think I've mentioned this before, but it must be mentioned again.
Another strike against Sprint/Verizon (and for AT&T, interestingly enough). Both Sprint & Verizon use the bastardized CDMA standard. Which is great, unless you want to go anywhere else in the world and still make a phone call. Sprint's "workaround" to this problem was as follows:
The Evo will work anywhere that has CDMA service. You can find out if the country you are travelling to offers CDMA service by visiting http://sprint.com/international The Evo will not work in countries that use the older GSM standard. The Evo does not have a GSM radio. There will be no software patch to install a hardware radio. If you travel frequently and need to use your phone internationally, we offer several phones that have GSM and CDMA radios built in - including the HTC Touc >sic< Pro 2, a full function Windows Smart phone. Please be aware that international roaming calls, text and data are quite expensive - as much as $1.99 a minute. If you plan to stay for some time internationally, you may be better off purchasing a prepaid phone in-country for better rates.
Ah, I see. Sprint's flagship phone, and their suggestion is to get a different phone if I want to travel overseas to such benighted places like Germany or Australia (but it will work in Belarus or Kyrgyzstan! Lucky me!
After the debacle I had with the prior screen protector, I went out on a limb and tried an Invisible Shield protector. It works and doesn't white out in direct sunlight.
It's worth it, and unrEVOked makes it as simple as can be. Why root your phone, you may ask? If for no other reason, to install Juice Defender and Titanium Backup. Juice Defender will extend your battery by 40-70% (read here, hours); Titanium allows you to do a complete backup. Of everything (apps, settings, etc), which is more than the non-root backup apps do. And that's important, now that you'll have root and can quickly brick your phone.
Really? The "pay as you go" 1 month plan is capped at 1G of transfer and goes for $50? So, when I blew through 1G in 8 days (hard to imagine a techie working on documents and diagrams using lots of bandwidth), does that mean I can sue for false advertising?
Another week down and we're in the home stretch (at least as far as the 30 day trial period from Sprint). This week's observations:
Particularly in direct sunlight. Even at 100% brightness on the screen, it is essentially unreadable. I did a bake off with the iPod, the EVO and the BlackBerry. It's not even close; iPod is fine, my wife's iPhone is fine, Blackberry is fine, EVO is unusable. Granted, I'm a techie and more likely to be inside than out, but my conversion to total vampire is not quite complete. Off all the things I have found with the EVO, this is probably the biggest thing that may result in me not selecting the phone.
A caveat; both the EVO and the iPod Touch have screen protectors. While it seems like a reasonable thing to do in order to protect the screen, I expect there to be a decrease in readability. How much of a decrease I cannot say. --Update--As it turns out, the screen protector on the EVO is a massive hinderance. My faather upgraded his Hero to an EVO and I did a small bake-off between his naked screen and my protected screen. The naked screen is still somewhat hard to read but infinitely better than the protected one.
--Update 2--After I took the screen protector off, it is better; direct, right-angle sunlight is unreadable (but that's just about impossible for any screen) but reading in sunlight is acceptable, so long as it isn't going to be a long email. It should be fine for the occasional SMS message.
If you don't use power management software, you will drain your battery in about 4-5 hours on nominal operations (4G, GPS, wifi all on, etc). Having software automatically turning things on and off is critical to making the phone last even a single day.
Ironically enough, the "Power Manager" app uses quite a bit of power. I would recommend skipping it.Unless you are actively reading review sites (Gizmodo, O'Reilly, Mashable, AndroidTapp), you will have a tough time finding worthwhile apps within the standard Android store.
Download K9. No idea why this app is not in the app store (as Google doesn't seem to be all that picky about which apps do and do not make the cut, but it is very much so worth the download. Now if only if could do filters...
Remember when I said the holster works? Yes, well, sorta. I can feel it, but not as much as I could on my BlackBerry.
I should have mentioned this earlier, but I figured everyone knew about it. On an Android phone, Google Voice is natively integrated. No more 406 numbers, no more bass-akward dialing routines, just pick the number, hit call and the GV integration handles everything automatically.
Unless, of course, you want to send a text message. Sure, you can choose GV as the messaging app from the contact page, but you're still going to receive a text message on your phone; the Android GV app doesn't seem to notify me of SMS messages.I understand why the choice was made (slims the profile of the already rather large case), but it's still annoying. A standard USB port would have been nicer.
I was on the phone placing an order to a restaurant. I wanted to pop over to Evernote and check the order list to make sure things were correct. As it turns out, Evernote does not store notes locally (only in the cloud -- something you may want to fix, Evernote guys) and I could not do anything with the web while talking on the phone.
Believe it or not, this is a point in favor of AT&T. Apparently, according to the HTC Forum, such bandwidth multitasking is only possible on a 4G network. Which will be great, as soon as Sprint/ClearWire rolls it out to a more major market and I have a portable generator to keep the battery alive.
