I’ve finally upgraded from my old trusty Google Nexus One, the device which started the Android revolution, it served me and Google well :-) I waited for the Samsung Galaxy S III to be announced and once I saw it I knew I wouldn’t want it. I’m sure the S3 will be a top notch piece of hardware but the design, screen, shape.. just not for me. The HTC One X on the other hand looked very attractive so I spent a couple of hours playing with it at the HTC counter at the shopping mall. I finally got it over the weekend and I can say that so far it is fantastic.

Many things to like about it and so far no niggles. My points of reference are not just the old N1 but also my wife’s Samsung Galaxy S2 – which she no longer has but more on that later :-) So the HOX as people like to call the OneX has a ton of goodies: camera is really good, very responsive, very fast and great quality of photos. The audio quality is also excellent I’m now enjoying listening to it more than to any other device I have. The HTC Sense layer was tastefully done, not too heavy unless you insist and add a ton of HTC widgets which I don’t. In terms of speed it is lightning fast, as was expected from a Tegra 3 quad core device. Surprisingly the battery life is quite good. At first it looked it was really bad, even after updating to 1.28 which I did immediately after charging it. It seemed to go through the battery very quickly but then on subsequent days this “problem” was gone, maybe it needed another cycle of the battery to sort through the capacity thing. Moving, besides the excellent design and good looks the materials and build are top quality. The white polycarbonate feels really nice in the hand and has a bit of an ivory feel/tint. But by far the best part about this phone and one of the main reasons I got it is the screen which is absolutely gorgeous. Far better than on the Samsung S2 and I expect also to be better than the S3 which will have a pentile display based on currently available specs. The display, made by Sony I believe, is the same high density as iPhone 4S “retina” but instead of the miniature 3.5″ size on the iPhone (god how can ppl use 3.5″ ??) it’s a 4.7″ display. Overall a real pleasure to use and well worth its price. Highly recommended. Remember my wife’s GS2? She had an advance notice of this recommendation and went ahead to sell her S2 and got a HOX in white :-)

So now I’m on a bit of a shopping spree. First things first, cases. There’s no case in the box and I do need one, I don’t like those TPU / Silicone / Rubber / Plastic casings, not even the best ones from casemate / otterbox / seidio. I don’t like any bulk on the phone when I’m holding and using it. I’m getting a good leather pouch and a couple of cheapo colorful pull tab type.

Secondly I’m also shopping for a pair of earphones headset. The ones that came bundled are actually pretty good quality but they’re earbuds and don’t fit me well and I much prefer the in-ear type which are more comfortable, don’t fall out and provide some noise isolation. So far I’ve been looking at Klipsch Image S4i, Etymotic MC2/3, Nocs NS200/NS400, A-Jay’s One+. I prefer white color to match the phone but we’ll see, the sound quality will trump the color.

I already have a universal dock in the car and a charger so I think the above should do it for now.

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Tags: android, Earphones, Galaxy S2, Galaxy S3, Headset, HTC, HTC One X, Samsung, Samsung Galaxy

I’ve just spent a couple of days switching to another hosting company. I probably wouldn’t have bothered changing if I didn’t get an email all of a sudden that my hosting fee will increase threefold. Turns out my old hosting company sold the business to iWeb which then promptly issued me a new invoice (later cancelled). Turns out they did send an email, titled migrating servers but without timeline, without giving any options and with no details about the new servers, logins, etc. I just saw my site was down all of a sudden. When I called iWeb the tech support although very polite had no idea what was going on, why the site was down, where my account and data is. They asked me to change NS at the registrar and just wait. I was then sent login details which worked briefly and then just sopped. In short it was a big mess, at the end I got an email that my site actually hasn’t been migrated yet and is still on the old servers. By then I’ve already had enough of iWeb and just moved to a new hosting company called stablehost.com so far so good and hopefully it will stay that way. I also cut down the cost of the hosting from $13 a month (I know.. pricey, legacy plan which I didn’t bother changing) to a really low cost of $2.56 ($7.7 quarterly). It’s a really basic plan (enough for my needs) which explains why it’s so cheap, one of the cheapest cpanel hosting I could find, but also because of the coupon / discount promotion they’re having at webhostingtalk.com

Anyway, it’s not that I update the site much (ever?) anymore but some posts still attract traffic so people are still finding some useful tidbits here and I also get traders contacting me via the site which is nice so I’m keeping it alive for now. And make sure my backups are good, I had the wordpress db emailed to me automatically every day, a bit overkill, but helps when you need it.

Tags: backup, blog, cheap, cpanel, hosting company, iweb, servers, tech support, webhosting, wordpress

That this would happen eventually I had no doubt, but the speed by which it happened is still amazing. I still haven’t bought a Kindle 3G so I’m still using my old Sony PRS-505 but I’ve started buying and downloading booksfrom Amazon and loading them into the Sony reader (this sometimes requires a bit of processing). There are a bunch of things which are convenient with the Amazon model and its ebooks (the format not being one of them ;-), I especially like is the free sample you can request which gets sent instantly to either my PC or my Android phone. It’s much easier to check out books this way and look at the table of contents. If I were to change anything in the way Amazon sends the books I would have them send the Amazon customer reviews along with the sample. I usually just ignore the top reviews and go straight to the 1-2-3 star reviews to see what issues and drawbacks people found with the book. Saved me from buying a bunch of books which otherwise seemed like a decent read if you just look at the title and raving reviews.

Tags: Amazon, android, downloading, ebooks, ereader, free, free sample, Kindle, Paperbacks, reader, sample, sony, table of contents

Very creative, and fun, at least while it’s novel. Will people block this out technically and mentally like they do with advertising banners now? If they keep the interactivity interesting the ads might stand a chance. Potentially huge revenue source for Google, finally will be able to monetize Youtube?

H/T to Mark Moussafir

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It looks like my hate relationship with Facebook has recently transformed, maybe not quite to love but definitely not a hate / despise relationship anymore.

Yes, I used to hate Facebook, I disabled my account there and blocked all messages and communications. Why? Because it was very annoying, it seemed to add nothing while just wasting my time. It was like a more advanced version of a Solitaire game, but less fun. (I never really liked Solitaire to begin with, I’m more of a Mines guy).

So why the change? I asked myself the same question, and it wasn’t difficult to come up with the answer. I started liking Facebook more when people stopped sending me silly virtual fish for my non-existent virtual aquarium, and didn’t ask me to join even more silly farming games, or “empire” building fantasies and all that other annoying infantile time wasters, and instead started using it as a social site! Who’d have thought? So from a site associated with rejecting requests to pass around “hot potatoes” and such it became a means to keep in touch and share things with people about their life and work. Mostly people whom otherwise I would have little chance to interact with.

So that’s it, maybe I don’t quite love facebook, err it’s just a social site, but I certainly started spending more time there and I think I’ll stick around for a while. At least as long as Google’s new social experiment GoogleME comes out :-) Hopefully they learned a thing or two from Orkut and the Buzz fiasco.

Tags: Buzz, facebook, Games, googleme, hate, Love, orkut, relationship, social experiment, time wasters, wasting my time

I bought my first eBook reader, the Sony PRS-505 digital ereaderin late 2008, about 2 years ago. The Amazon Kindle was already out back then was quite a different device from the new one Kindle 3.

I really enjoy using the Sony reader, I like having a ton of books with me whenever I want to carry something to read and I like the fact that I can read on it PDF’s instead of strain my eyes on the LCD. So I was thinking maybe I should upgrade. Looking at the specs it is difficult to determine if the Amazon Kindle is that much better than the Sony Reader. It has 3G connectivity which I really don’t need, at all. It slimmer than the older Kindles but the PRS-505 is very slim. Memory wise I already have an expanded 2GB card in which is plenty of space. I don’t read books on my mobile phone, even with Nexus One’s large screen it is just not convenient, so I don’t care about syncing books. So the only thing left which has any kind of significance is the screen.

Both devices have a 6″ display, but the PRS-505 has a Vizplex eInk and the Kindle 3 a newer version which is supposed to be crisper and better contrast due to a “whiter” grey screen. How discernible is it? I can’t tell, I haven’t seen the Kind in real life and I haven’t been able to find an online comparison of these 2 models.

Then there is also the Sony Reader Daily Edition, with 7″ screen and a bunch of other features which are nice like landscape split page, but it is a bit more pricey. And there’s the Barnes & Noble Nook but I read that the color navigation section is slow and buggy.

If I can find somewhere a comparison or review of the new Kindle vs. the Vizplex Sony devices that shows any real difference I might go for it.

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Tags: amazon kindle, Barnes & Noble, BN, comparison, eBook, ebook reader, eInk, ereader, Kindle, kindle 3 vs sony, kindle 3 vs sony reader, kindle vs sony reader, Nook, online, PDF, prs, prs-505, review, Screen, sony, sony reader vs amazon kindle, sony reader vs kindle, sony reader vs kindle 3, sony vs kindle, Vizplex

Did a bit of geekery work this morning. My wife got the HTC Legendplus this cool accessoryover the weekend and joined the Android family, she totally digs it. I also noticed that since I got my device the Android Market has grown significantly and now has a ton of cool new apps.

Anyways, playing with the Legend prompted me to finally take care of the nagging message I’ve been getting on my Nexus that told me there’s a system update for my device. I haven’t updated my phone in a while. I was running the first Froyo build (FRF50) that I installed just as it came out but since then there’ve been a few more updates, more official ones. I’m not sure why I got the OTA (over the air) notification for the update as I rooted the device and I’m running a custom recovery (RA) and I read it wasn’t supposed to go out to such devices. Also when I clicked the OTA message there was nothing to install.. but it kept coming back. So I got the FRF91 full update zip plus the root zip and flashed them both (skipping FRF83, FRF85B as I already had Froyo radio from the FRF50). All was done via the nice RA recovery just booting in bootloader, scrolling to the zip file, clicking on it and waiting. Oh yes, I did do a full Nandroid backup beforehand just in case.
Everything installed fine, the first boot after flashing a new ROM takes a while, a few minutes instead of 30 seconds, and those minutes look pretty long :-) but as long as you’re not flashing a new radio component the risk of bricking the device is very low, so I’m told (do at your own risk blah blah). The first few minutes after everything booted up things looked slow and I was starting to get worried. I know it takes a while for it to settle in, I didn’t do a wipe or anything just installed on top, so all my apps and data are still there and I’m guessing it re-populates and checks some db’s with this stuff, but still slowing down is not nice. It took another reboot and everything is now even snappier than before the update. Good update from Google as I always.

Back to the HTC Legend, since it’s a HTC device rather than a Google one it had the HTC Sense on it, I was really impressed with it. Lots of small improvements and UI polishing over the stock Android that my Nexus is running. It has more eye candy, kindda like iPhone type of usability tweaks for the Android. I would not hesitate to get a HTC with Sense, such as the HTC Desire, as my next phone in the future. In fact I liked the HTC keyboard so much that I looked it up online and apparently I’m not the only one liking it as some good folks in the community extracted the APK’s and made them available for other Android users. I already had a couple of different keyboards installed so I’ve got the Sense one as well now which will probably see the most use. I could get the full Sense UI installed on the Nexus as I saw it’s available and was done but I think I’ll just pick and choose the components I like instead of changing the whole thing. Might be too much bloat getting the full UI.

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