Category: Google

The love affair is over: Nexus One a big pile of unfinished business

Posted by Martyn Drake – March 4, 2010

When I first got my Nexus One back in January, I was over the moon. Here was the very latest in HTC hardware and Google Android OS in one neat package. We had a wonderful honeymoon period in which everything seemed to work, despite all the naysayers on Google’s Nexus One forums.

Then the symptoms started creeping in. Losing the 3G signal in an area where 3G works well, Wi-Fi connections at home wouldn’t automatically connect and had to manually be connected through Settings, touchscreen would lose calibration, forcing me to twist the phone around like a baton until the bloody thing accepted the correct input. Google eventually rolled an update back in February which fixed the 3G part, but Wi-Fi was still giving problems and the touchscreen still is causing problems.

The last straw came when I went on-call for work. I found that I’ve missed out on emergency SMSes due to delayed sound alerts. Due to the speaker being positioned where it is, I also found that the alert sounds are quite muffled in comparison to our four year old Sony Ericsson non-smartphone. In short: I don’t trust the Nexus One in it’s current state. I was also hacked off that photos taken didn’t show up in the Gallery after the most recent OTA update. I could access them through USB and through the Camera application itself, but not through the Gallery. A reboot of the phone seemed to have fixed it and the photos then turned up in Gallery. I shouldn’t have to do that, though.

Thus I’ve stopped using it and gone back to the SE. The battery life lasts well over a week, I can hear all incoming SMSes just fine, and as a phone only, it does what it says on the tin. The Nexus One tries to be too clever and fails. The AMOLED is also a complete arse to work with in strong daylight. My wife has also been complaining about the quality of calls recently and has kept asking if I’m on hands-free when I’m not.

I’ve decided to go running back to Apple despite my earlier grumblings about them. Love them or hate them, they do make exceptionally fine products. Which work. I’m starting off with an iPod Touch 64Gb and assuming that I’m able to switch my contract to Memset late next year (or after the T-Mobile/Orange merger allows the legal purchase of an iPhone on my existing contract with T-Mobile), I’ll go iPhone. I’m finding it hard to go back to the Android platform right now – especially how well I’m finding the iPhone/iPod App store and how well multi-touch and Apple’s capacitive display just works. The quality of the applications seem a lot more professional too.

The irony is that I had no problems with the HTC Hero. It was a little slow, but it worked well. I hope the HTC Desire works better than the Nexus One – I’d so hate it to turn out like the Nexus after Sense UI has been applied.

I now split my smartphone use between the Sony Ericsson and my iPod Touch. Phone for the phone related stuff, iPod for the apps, calendar and everything else.

Buzz Off Buzz: Disabling Google’s Buzz..

Posted by Martyn Drake – February 11, 2010

1) Make sure that you’ve deleted all your Connected Sites that are currently connected (Twitter, Picasa, etc).
2) Delete any specific Buzz posts.
3) At the bottom of your Gmail page, you’ll see a list of options: turn on/off chat, turn off buzz, etc. Select the “turn off buzz” link.
4) Verify that no Buzz information is leaking by visting your profile: http://profiles.google.com.
5) Unfollow any other Buzz users. They will still be able to follow you, though. You can block them from following you by clicking on their username while looking at your follower’s list in Google Profile. You’ll be taken to their Google Profile where you can then block them following you.

All in all, this is a bit messy.

What I think Google should have done is turned Buzz into a snazzy RSS reader for Gmail. Here you can subscribe to Twitter RSS feeds, web site feeds, etc. and read them all from one place rather than having to switch to, say, Google Reader.

Nexus One: Days Three & Four

Posted by Martyn Drake – January 22, 2010

Battery usage is now most satisfactory.  Can happily Spotify/listen to Android’s music player for considerable amount of time while emailing, tweeting, reading news, etc.  Similarly taking and making calls (after all, this is a phone..) don’t drag down the battery too much.  I should mention that I am NOT using a task manager (auto or otherwise – I’m just not using one full stop).

Have become adept in typing using landscape mode and using both thumbs to “touch” type.  Getting a relatively decent word rate, but still prone to errors which, thankfully, the predictive text system helps correct almost instantly (although I keep referring to Google Alps and not Google Apps).

The only real issue at the moment is the phone has twice failed to automatically join our home wi-fi network and needs manual intervention.  But this isn’t too big an issue and I can live with it until I can figure out what’s going on, or if it’s an Android bug, Google fixes it in an Over The Air update.

The Nexus One is still the best damn smartphone I’ve ever come across.

Nexus One: Day Two

Posted by Martyn Drake – January 20, 2010

Battery life improving.  Lasted around 16 hours from single charge and medium-ish use, including an hour and half’s Spotify use on the bus into work this morning.  Experienced small lock-up during Twidroid application in that the keyboard wouldn’t respond properly, and whenever I tried to press the H key, I activated the voice input.  It was if the CPU was taking a bit of a battering.  After a minute or two the problem soon went away.

Still very impressed with the phone despite these couple of small issues.  Have been playing around with Google Goggles and am very impressed by the way it’s able to detect objects and locate information on them online.  Also very impressed with RingDroid which takes your music collection and turns them into ringtones or notification sounds.  It has one of the most impressive user interfaces I’ve seen for the touchscreen.

Call quality is excellent, and I love the way that the phone disables the screen while you have it up to your face (so you don’t accidentally hit any buttons).  As soon as you move your face away, the buttons are there and are easy to access.  Far better than the HTC Hero.

Nexus One: Day One

Posted by Martyn Drake – January 18, 2010

So far, everything has pretty much gone swimmingly.  The only issue I’ve seen is where I’ve been running TasKiller with the “automatically kill when screen is off” option enabled.  When pressing the power button to take the phone off standby, I’m greeted with the in-call display except I can’t activate any of the on-screen buttons.  If I hold the Home key, it then takes me to the security pattern draw unlock and all is well.  Disabling TasKiller’s automatic kill seems to have resolve this issue, so I can only think there’s a process that TasKiller is killing off that’s causing the problem.

As for the voice input, we’ve had marginally less success.  It comes out around 70-85% accurate now.  However, trying to search DediPower using voice input comes out as “Titty Palace”.  Working becomes “Wanking”.  And my name is really “Protein Drink”.  So there’s a fair bit of work to do, but I’d imagine Google will continue to improve this to almost perfection soon.

More later!

The Nexus One

Posted by Martyn Drake – January 18, 2010

I now have a Nexus One Android phone.  This runs the Android 2.1 operating system and comes with a massively impressive screen and a touchscreen that responds beautifully.  As all of my contacts are stored in my Google Apps account, as well as my email, transferring from my previous HTC Hero to the Nexus One took literally just minutes.

The touchscreen keyboard operates a lot smoother than the Hero, although the Nexus does not contain HTC’s Sense UI and consequently does not feature a few refinements that make typing numbers and punctuation which means that one has to press a few more buttons to get to them.  But this doesn’t particularly bother me, and I’ve been typing away like a madman.

I’ve yet to try the voice dictation system whereby input fields can utilise the phone’s microphone to allow you to dictate words and sentences rather than having to use the keyboard.  Apparently the hit rate is anywhere between 70-80%, but will hopefully improve as Google’s voice recognition technology improves.

From what little I’ve been playing with it, this is one very impressive phone.  Android is blossoming as a mobile phone operating system and it just keeps getting better and better.  Now the hardware is catching up, Apple have a serious contender on their hands.  I am very glad I’ve given the iPhone the elbow.

Update: The voice input is absolutely bloody marvellous – so far it’s had 100% success rate, but that’s with a very limited test (I’d like to see what it can do with a tongue twister!).  I shall continue to experiment and explore.

Minding the Gapps..

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 28, 2009

After just over two months I’ve decided to return to Google Apps.  The main reason is that I’m loving my Android phone so much, with it’s integration with Google services, that it’d be a shame not to make the most out of Google Apps.  The main reason for me leaving was that it felt a bit akward as somebody working for a web hosting company to be using what is essentially a competitor’s product.  Yet we do have customers using Google Apps and therefore I still really need to be on the ball as to what’s happening.

Therefore I’m heading back.  I’m still going to be using MDaemon for at least one of my other domains that I use on a semi-regular basis, so nothing will be lost there.  I’ll still be self-hosting too.

It’s a Chrome away from Chrome.. I’ve switched from Firefox on two platforms!

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 15, 2009

While I have given up Google Apps (no, it’s not because I fear the Google and it’s tight grip on my data – I’ll write a blog post about why I left Google Apps a bit later), Google still gets used an awful lot here at Drake Towers.  Google the Search Engine is the de facto here.  Then there’s Google Maps, Google Reader, Feedburner, Google Webmaster Tools,  Google Analytics, Google AdSense, YouTube, and so on.

I now use Google Public DNS on the Dell laptop at home and as a secondary DNS server for my MDaemon mail server.  And now I’ve converted to Google Chrome, Google’s efforts to produce a fast web browser designed for simplicity.  And it works exceptionally well on Windows.  And now OS X.  Despite Chrome being beta on my work Mac, I now use it as my primary browser despite a few kinks (the main one being the passwords are not saved if you’re browsing a site that uses an expired or self-signed certificate – I’ve filed the bug with the Chromium bug report system).

My dependence on Google will not end there either.  While I have no intention of running the Chrome OS on this PC (although if I had a netbook I would probably consider it), I am still very tempted by the T-Mobile G2 Touch which runs the Android 1.5 (at the time of writing) platform.  I’ll be carrying Google in my pocket too.

The Internet is a bit like an elephant..

Posted by Martyn Drake – November 29, 2009

.. in that it never forgets.

All this talk about Twibbles has brought home a good point about search engines and Internet archiving.  For those of us in our thirties, our parents used to embarrass us in numerous harmless ways – like your mum waving to you when you came out of school, or your dad dancing at the school disco.  Or your parents enthusiastically showing your girlfriend a video of your own birth, followed by all the baby and toddler pictures – usually the ones in which you’re nappy is being changed.

The Internet now amplifies this embarrassment by a factor of a thousand.

Young people (namely students and twentysomethings) who regularly blog, tweet or video themselves vomiting at parties will find that all of their activities are likely to be archived away by the likes of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft so that if these same people eventually reproduce or adopt, their children can then be embarrassed by their parents in a whole new way when they do a Google search on them fifteen years later.

It’s not just blog or Tweets that can come back to haunt your children and grandchildren (and many more generations to come), but as video is now being archived on the Internet at a phenomenal rate, your children can groan at watching their parents do all manner of embarrassing things as they did as youngsters.  The difference between home videos of the past is that the rest of the world has probably already seen your parents embarrass themselves hundreds of times before you have.

I think some of the children of more infamous celebrities are going to have to go into therapy for decades as a consequence of this..

(Yes, I do realise the irony of this blog post)

Google Streetview addiction..

Posted by Martyn Drake – March 19, 2009

For the latter part of the day, it seems a LOT of people have been looking up their homes, and the homes of friends and colleagues on Google's new UK Streeview service.  So far I've found all my old homes (Barkingside and Norwich) as well as the places that Jennifer and I have lived (Peckham and Kingston-upon-Thames).

This service reminds me so much of the BBC Doomsday Project which involved putting photographs and information, including the census and everything else in-between, on laser disc.