Samsung's Galaxy Player - Android-based iPod Touch

Hands on with Samsung's Android-based Galaxy Players | Crave - CNET



Samsung hosted a hands on event last week introducing the Galaxy Player 4" and 5" devices. These are Android based iPod Touches. All the features of an iPod, just bigger.



It surprises me how long it has taken the Android hardware manufacturers to come out with devices like this. I would love to have an Android device to try out. However, spending $600 or more to buy a full featured phone that I do not need, seems a bit foolish to me. A $200 or $300 Wifi based iPod Touch device makes a lot more sense. There has to be thousands of developers and gadget hobbyists out there like me.



Anyway, more updates to come as we still do not have a price or release date.

Steve Jobs goes Crazy and the Net Freaks Out!

While many people were watching the return of Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson's awesome win at the Masters, the Internets were freaking out about Apple's new license agreement for iPhone development.



The story was originally broken by Daring Fireball here. And has been commented on and expanded at the following sites. All three posts are awesome and I recommend you read each.

• Has Steve Jobs Gone Mad - Why Does Everything Suck Blog


• Why Apple Did it - Daring Fireball


• Steve Jobs Responds to Adobe - Mashable

Adobe has been developing a tool to allow Flash developers to compile Flash applications for the iPhone OS.  Thus, Flash developers could completely bypass Apple tools or compilers to create their apps. By changing the license agreement, Apple has made this Adobe tool illegal on the iPhone platform. It also limits development to Objective C, C, C++, and HTML/Javascript on Webkit. So any cross platform compiler written in Ruby, or .Net would also be illegal. So as you might imagine, this has angered developers who were planning to use these 3rd party tools.



In my mind Apple has a point. They are trying to provide a simple, stable device with consistent interfaces. Nontechie's do not care if the platform is open or closed. Regular folks don't care about multitasking. They just want their phone to work all the time. PCs crash, phones don't. By tightly controlling design and development, Apple can meet their stability and design goals.



Google Android provides the open alternative to Apple's approach. Right now it is messier and probably not as good. But it is open, and that allows developers to iterate and improve. Over time, it seems possible that it will match or surpass its closed adversary.



Developers, customers, and the market will determine which approach is best. It is going to be an interesting fight.

Hands on iPad

Well I finally got my hands on an iPad. It looks to be a very nice device for surfing. Plus I checked out some of the applications like the constellation app which is very cool.



I didn't care for the screen much. It has a very glossy finish and in the store it was hard to ignore all the glare. So that said, I think I'm gonna wait. I want to see some of the Google tablets before I make any decision.



The tablets are here to stay methinks. Now let the tablet wars begin!

iPad finally Released!

After much hoopla, the Apple iPad was released today. Since I'm visiting my parents in Alamosa, I'm nowhere near any Apple store. I can't find any coverage online and such, but I did find this story from the Chicago Tribune with techies commenting on the impact of the new device.



The conversation seems to be clustering around the Apple closed store and single tasking OS versus Google Android and its open store and multitasking operating system. I tend to side with the open tribe. In the long run, more open systems and software win out. Is this the PC versus Mac battle all over again? But this time, it is smart phones and tablets. With a new iPhone coming out this summer and dozens of Android devices on the way, it is going to be an interesting next couple of years.

NetNewsWire for iPhone

In an effort to expand the amount of information I can read on my iPhone, I decided to investigate RSS readers for the iPhone. What gave me the push to do this was the limited number of iPhone friendly websites there are on the net. All the major news sites have iPhone friendly pages (FoxNews, CNN, NY Times, BBC). But that is really about it. And even on the 3G network, loading pages can be kinda slow.

A number of options were tried before NetNewsWire for the iPhone. The Google Reader has an iPhone interface, but is sucks. Safari has an RSS reader build it, but it isn't any better then the Google reader. Since I used to use NetNewsWire on my Mac before I switched to online readers and it is a wonderful application. The application has been bought by NewsGator, so information about NetNewsWire for the iPhone can be found here. Turns out the iPhone version is free and can be downloaded from the iTunes store.

The application is great. It has a very nice tabbed interface much like the UI for the iPod application. Each feed has a nice finger sized line for each feed title. When you click on the title, you get a nice list of story headers. Click on the header and you get the feed summary for that entry. The feed is rendered in a very readable manner, often much better than it would look on the web page. In addition, if the web site includes the full entry text in the feed, you can read the whole post right there in the reader. I should also mention that if only a link is included, NetNewsWire renders the page inside the reader. This seems to work pretty good. You can also choose to render the page in Safari if you wish.

You manage the feeds from the NewsGator web site. You have to register an account, but once you do, you can manager your feeds here. Once you add a few feeds, click the refresh button on the front page of NetNewsWire and magically, all your feed data is downloaded and available.

If you have a iPhone, check it out. Highly recommended.

Open Source iTunes Player?

Check out this story on ars technica on Songbird. Its an open source MP3 player with some extras. It doesn't rip CDs yet, but that's coming. Worth checking out.

iPhone Review

A quick review of my iPhone g3 is in order, especially after all the negative press I have been reading. Complaints include poor battery life, bad reception, and the installation of apps from the app store bricking the phone. So far my experience has been this.

Speed

The new iPhone is faster than its predecessor. It renders web pages much faster. The g3 network has been only slightly faster than the edge network (a bit disappointing). From what I have read, the design of the 3g network simply does not scale well. But if you are running off Wifi you will notice a big improvement in performance.

Signal

For whatever reason, the iPhone g3 almost always shows 1 bar of signal strength, pretty much wherever you are. The actual signal is much improved. I talk to my parents once a week on my phone long distance. They have raved about the improved sound quality. In addition, we seem to have less trouble with dropped calls. So the signal quality is much better, even though it appears to be worse.

Battery Life

The stand by battery life is much better. You can leave your phone on for a couple of days and the battery hardly goes down. With the old iPhone, I had to keep it turned off as much as possible. Just leaving the phone on over night would run down the battery quite a bit.

The run time battery life seems to be worse. It looks like to me the phone will only last about 3 hrs if kept on constantly. That is not good for someone who uses their phone all the time. I think the screen, which seems much brighter, may be sucking up all the juice. But, I'm just guessing.

Apps

I have only installed a Disney Card game app and that is it so far. No problems. Leo Laporte suspects the bricking problems are caused by downloading applications directly to your iPhone. If you download to iTunes and then sync, there are no issues. I haven't found any apps that really interest me much. Thought about getting the AIM client, but it had bad reviews and Meebo seems like a better choice anyway.

Summary

In summary, my experience has been good. I don't talk on the phone all day so the run time is not a problem for me. A faster phone, better signal, no special headphone jack, and more capacity (16gig) all make for an improved phone.

Apple has to solve the battery life issues. People who use their cell phones a lot are not gonna be happy.

Got my new iPhone G3

Well after trying an Apple store once or twice more and discovering unless you are willing to get in line at 5am, you aren't gonna get an iPhone, I decided to to pretty much give up on getting one any time soon. However, I decided to stop by my local AT&T store just for the heck of it. Turns out, they actually have waiting lists! Simply prepay for the phone, select the model you want and they can tell you what the wait is for it. Sweet!!

I wanted a 16gig model. The black version had a 3 week wait, the white version 3 days. So yesterday it arrived and now I have it. Woo hoo!

My first impressions are this. The phone itself is definitely faster than the old phone. Pages pop much faster when surfing via wifi as compared to the old iphone. And if you use the iPhone sites I listed in a previous post there is a very noticeable difference.

Top iPhone Web Sites

Before my recent trip, I decided it was time for a redo for the all website links for my iPhone. On the Edge network, loading a normal web page is freaking painful. I swear it always takes 30 seconds just for the flash ads to fail.

So i decided to Google for a list of iPhone friendly sites. I found lots of iPhone focused mobile sites, lol, but not many links to normal news and sports sites. Anyhow, I found a few sites here and there. A lot of sites have a special iphone.domain.com or m.domain.com version of their site. I found a number of these that way. So without further ado, the list!

General News

CNN - http://m.cnn.com/

Fox News - http://iphone.foxnews.com/

Google News - http://www.google.com/m/news?source=mobileproducts&dc=gorganic

My Way - http://news.myway.com/index.html
New York Times - http://mobile.nytimes.com/

Yahoo - http://us.m.yahoo.com/

Sports

BBC Football - http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/low/football/default.stm

ESPN - http://mobileapp.espn.go.com/wireless/espn/redesign/index

Sports Tap - http://sportstap.mobi/

Tech News

CNET - http://m.news.com/2162-12_3-0.html

Engadget - http://mobile.engadget.com/

Lifehacker - http://mobile.lifehacker.com/

SiliconValley.com - http://m.siliconvalley.com/

Slashdot - http://slashdot.org/

And one final mention that is a must have. I have found the RSS reader built into the iPhone .... lacking. But the folks at Google hit a home run with their mobile reader. So for reading RSS feeds use:

Google Reader - http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/?source=mobileproducts&dc=gorganic

It is a great example of a well written web app for the iPhone.

I plan to keep looking for good sites and will repost this list periodically.

iPhone g3 Sold Out

Much to my surprise yesterday, I found out that the iPhone G3 was sold out at the ATT and Apple store in Broomfield. In addition, it was sold out in the Boulder and Denver Apple stores as well.

According to a store employee they have been sold out since Sunday. They got a shipment in Monday but it sold out right away. There are no waiting lists. There is no set time of day when shipments arrive. Basically, all you can do is check this URL for your state: http://www.apple.com/retail/iphone/availability.html?state=CO

Just replace CO with your state to see the status in your area.

I didn't run across this on any tech news sites or Gadget sites. This probably means they haven't sold out in the San Francisco Bay Area yet. :) But if you are in another part of the country and you were waiting for the lines to go away before buying the phone, you may want to get one sooner rather than later.

Update: It appears the link I provided, only works at certain times of day. Just be aware that at times, it may not seem to work.

iphone Upgrade Scoop

The tuaw.com blog has this excellent post giving us the scoop on upgrading to the new iphone. Looks like if you just upgrade and and sign up for the new $70 plan you can get it at the new low price.

Methinks I will be upgrading today. Can't wait for all that bandwidth!!!