Kieran’s Blog

Mobile devices are crap.

I love gadgets, I really do but I’m in the process of deciding upon a new phone for when I find employment to fit around college, and it’s made me realize, current devices are crap.

Ok, maybe crap is a little unfair, but there is nothing yet good enough to tempt me away from my HTC Excalibur, which while a little behind on the times is absolutely rock solid, which for a windows mobile device you’d think is rare. I think I’ve had to forcefully restart it once in the year and a half of ownership.

Which devices have I considered?

• Nokia E71
• SE Xperia X1
• T-Mobile G1

Let’s tackle the G1 first, as this was the device I was looking forward to (Well maybe not THIS device, but Android devices) and the biggest disappointment along the way. My problem is NOT with Android, which while it’s a little immature is a fantastic platform, my issue is with the device itself, there’s really nothing special about it and a lot of annoyances:

• HTC (the OEM for the G1) are up to their usual tricks with stupid MiniUSB ports, I understand the logic behind this, that is everything can be done via one port but it’s simply an annoyance, there is no standard 3.5mm headphone jack, meaning to use my shiny Sennheisers I have to purchase an adaptor, which either adds more mass or more cabling (as with my Excalibur).
• I’m not a shallow guy; in fact I prefer function over form, but it is hideous, amirite?
• That angled chin, again I understand the logic behind it, the microphone being angled towards the mouth but it adds to the hideousness and makes it awkward to keep in the pocket.
• The keyboard, it’s shit, ’nuff said really, the keys are way way way too flat, there’s next to no travel, they might as well have saved some mass and cost and slapped a nasty virtual keyboard on there

I’m not sure whether it’s that I got my hopes up too high for HTC delivering on this one or whether it’s just a crap device, either way it lets the software down, in a big, big way. I expected HTC to break away from the norm slightly and deliver something special, and while the half decent processor, nice chunk (192mb) of ram is nice, it just seems like R&D at HTC had a very boring year.

Now the Xperia X1. Such a fantastic looking device with some interesting concepts, and best of all, it doesn’t make me look like some blackberry carrying businesspersonthing. The ‘panels’ concept is interesting, even if it is a bit of a gimmick. The idea behind it is that you can have multiple ‘desktops’ (homescreens) that you can quickly switch, depending on the type of use currently in hand, be it business/personal/whatever, this is a nice concept in theory but why do I need to waste memory and cpu cycles when it would take me exactly 10 seconds to switch via the settings menu? The device specs are fantastic, accelerated gpu, 384mb ram, etc. For me, this device is almost perfect, my problems with it are: The stupid ‘optical joystick’ again, an unneeded gimmick, what is it with you and optical gimmicks HTC? (HTC is the OEM for the X1 also) I mean, didn’t you learn from the ‘JOGGR’ on the Excalibur that was almost universally disabled because it was about as useful as a feather duster in the sahara when it worked and had a mind of its own doing all kinds of funky shit when it didn’t (most of the time, then)? The second and most significant is SE’s unwillingness to comment whether they will be offering a Windows Mobile 7 firmware upgrade when it becomes available.

Windows Mobile gets a LOT of stick, most of it undeserved which I think stems from the “Windows” stigma and a slew of shitty devices with poor driver support (not WM’s fault) and shitty implementations(again, not the fault of WM). Windows mobile is fairly generic, and it’s up to vendors to provide decent drivers and implement features properly, if they don’t do this, it’s a piece of shit, simple as that. I absolutely LOVE my HTC Excalibur and it has been nothing but stable with the stock HTC Windows Mobile 6 upgrade (though I do frequently try cooked roms) which is why I am so reluctant to break away from it.

With that said, Windows Mobile, at least in it’s current form is starting to get a little dated and is in desperate need of an overhaul, which is basically what Windows Mobile 7 promises, scheduled for release in the second half of 2009. So essentially by not commenting Sony Ericsson are saying that you could be buying into a (very expensive, if not subsidized by a network contract) device that is obsolete before having even been in the market a year.

Now, onto the Nokia E71, it looks to be a good device, but the stupid shiny finger print attracting surfaces? Not so much. It looks a little too ‘blackberry’ for my liking (I know, I know, I own an Excalibur) and having owned an early N95 I am yet to get over the pain, the early N95 firmwares were dog slow, inefficient and ran out of memory routinely, buggy and the battery was nothing short of useless. So I suppose I’m dismissing it based on bad experiences with Nokia and S60.

I think I’ll hold on for a while and see what the next Android devices deliver, and/or how Windows Mobile 7 performs if SE decide to offer an upgrade.

Taking the first strides towards being a paramedic, I often think about how much the uniform sucks, I have a proposal:

While the green may be boring, it aids visibility which is important, so I shall continue with that theme. I propose excessive use of leather, sequins, big hair along with better lights on the (gl)ambulance, a disco ball or 2 would work a treat.

Finally, all paramedics should be mediocre musicians and Glam Metal montages en route to a job should be mandatory!

Boil ‘em, mash ‘em, stick em up yer bum?

Well you see, I was hanging curtains in the kitchen (naked; you see, we men of God are very poor and have to choose between robes and curtains, I alternate) and I had a sudden loss of balance, falling back onto a potato, conveniently placed on the table, which was then wedged (excuse the pun) up my backside.

Riiiight — http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1876886.ece

Onto the hateful term ‘roadwarrior’. What in the FUCK is a road warrior? I’m led to believe it’s a business user who stays ‘constantly connected’ but from what I’ve seen, most of the people who use this term are apple users who use it to justify their purchase of the Macbook “Im finner! ‘Onest!” Air as if they’re part of Mr Jobs’ secret fucking ninja army. So on that basis:

Roadwarrior (Noun):
(Idiomt) Pretentious little cock at starbucks with a turtle neck and an iPhone.

…Please for the love of God stop crippling phone firmware.

I’m not bothered that you want your shite logo and obnoxious ringtones on there, put them on, I’m not even bothered by you simlocking the phone — obviously you have to protect yourselves when subsidizing the cost of a phone; what bothers me is that you stop people updating via the manufacturers update service, which means we have to wait for you to release firmware fixing often very serious bugs.

I’m increasingly disillusioned by it, at one time the crippling was due to you wanting us to purchase ringtones/games/themes exclusively through you, that doesn’t seem to be [or at least, not as much] the case now, so why are you STILL crippling shit? Surely it’d be less effort for you to just provide the phone unbastardized?

The worst offenders for this? Hutchinson “You pay 700 quid cancellation fee to unlock upgrade phone, although you have no intention of cancelling the contract” 3, die.

Earlier this year when enrolling, one of my classes got dropped [without notice, of course, is there any other way?] which I wasn’t too fussed about, I still had the requirements to progress. My plans have since change and that one class is leaving me one short of the requirements for a job I wish to go for, meaning I have to spend an extra year completing ONE FUCKING CLASS as all of the alternate classes were full.

So up to now with college I’ve had to contend with:

• Being chucked from pillar to post because nobody knew where the fuck I was supposed to be because of me being in ‘no mans land’ age wise (I’m fucking 18, not 192,) with the older RTS course starting at age 19 and the other classes being filled with younger people.
• Having to take on a full time course that is considered part time because I didn’t fit into any of the above, so stringing together all the classes I need from the part time register.
• Having a class dropped because I was the only one who enrolled, they couldn’t have notified me when I could possibly have gotten a place on another class, could they? No, that’d be too fucking helpful.

Not that there’s much I can do about it aside from just get on with it, wallowing isn’t going to help, I just wanted to say GET ORGANIZED YOU FRONT BOTTOMS!

Annnnnnnd breathe!

And what a return! More speed, fire, pornography and murdering of prostitutes?

What kind of prudish, politically correct, fully paid up members of the twisty undies alliance are we becoming? The reason I say this is because of the possible ofcom investigation into a gag made by Clarkson because, and I quote… “complaints topped 500″.

I realize Clarkson’s comment may have been a little bit distasteful and people are a little bitchy with regard to ‘close to the knuckle’ comments in light of the Brand and Woss incident but taking enough offense to complain to regulators about a clearly tongue in cheek gag? Sad bastards.

“This is a hard job, and I’m not just saying this to win favour with lorry drivers. It’s a hard job - change gear, change gear, change gear, check your mirrors, murder a prostitute, change gear, change gear, murder. That’s a lot of effort in a day.” - Clarkson on lorryists

Having spent the last few days trying to get Asterisk to play nicely with google talk, I’ve discovered a few things:

• It fails to authenticate correctly if there is a full stop in the auth name. I’m unsure whether this is something in res_jabber/res_gtalk or whether it’s something in iksemel.
• It doesn’t seem to play nicely with ssl, which is rather annoying as it doesn’t tell you anything beyond “Authentication failed, possible bad password”, so build with gnutls if possible
• For some reason, res_gtalk doesn’t want to use the bind address from the other config files so if you want audio (which, lets be honest is rather helpful) you’ll have to specify bindaddr in gtalk.conf.

After making it play nicely, I am a happy happy….ohh, a kiwi!

Are shite.

Over the past few weeks I’ve had to deal with 3 new laptops, each of varying expense, why must manufacturers take the piss and install all kindsa of shite ware? God knows how many crappy games, trialware, etc etc.

Oh joy, new laptop, time to remove shit/fresh windows install, update bios, update drivers….argh.

End of rant.

Secured with what looks like zip ties, winnor.