YiBi's Life|Live Log

Android Orphans

A friend posted this article on my Facebook wall.

http://theunderstatement.com/post/11982112928/android-orphans-visualizing-a-sad-history-of-support

This article talks about how the various generations of Android phones are left behind while newer phones get the latest Android.

I don’t to leave this open-ended and have people think that I’m an Apple fanboy. I’m a Linux admin and I have been using Linux on my office laptop for a very long time. So why iPhone and not Android phones?

Upgrade Woes

I have never owned an Android phone. The number 1 reason is that I dislike the customizations that the individual phone makers do to the OS. The implication is that certain models will be left behind in the upgrade process. We have been this in the Windows PDA phones in the past. Because of the difference in hardware, there’s tremendous effort for the phone makers to ensure that every single model runs the most current OS. So the easy way out is to leave them behind. I forecasted this since the very first version of Android and I have been proven right all these while.

Android vs iOS

So came the Nexus One. Google supported, plain vanilla Android. I was actually contemplating getting that but I chose the iPhone 3GS. Why? My choice was very much affected by my experience on the Mac.

While I still use Linux on my office laptop, I find myself doing most of my work on my Mac. I bought my first Macbook in 2007 and after using OS X, the impression was: It just works! No tinkering. No fiddling. I don’t getting into the situation where I need to solve the machine problem even before I get down to doing work. It’s a lot of time wasted.

Similarly on the iOS, a lot of things just work out of the box. One example was configuring of L2TP over IPSEC VPN on the iPhone. It takes less than 2 mins to get the iPhone setup and connected. 3 steps to get to the configuration screen, enter configuration details and we are done. My colleague tried it on their Android phone. The first phone took us close to 10 mins to figure out how to configure the connection. He later gave up his Samsung Galaxy for a new iPhone  4.

Now Google has announced that the Nexus One is not getting the latest OS. To fair, I haven’t read the details and I’m not sure what’s the rationale. But if you look at the chart, even the iPhone 3GS gets iOS 5. While some features are not available, the major key enhancement are made available to the 3GS user. They are not left behind.

I was thinking of getting the Nexus Galaxy actually after looking at the features of Android 4, but it looks like my next phone will still be a Apple phone after all.

I just got myself a bluetooth keyboard to get rid of all the wires running on my desk. First thing I tried was to pair it with my notebook running Ubuntu 10.10. Pairing was ok. And that’s about it?! It was painful trying to get the keyboard properly connected. There’s no indication in dmesg that a keyboard is found, and after a few tries restarting bluetooth, restarting the keyboard, dmesg showed HID device detected, ie the keyboard, but it still doesn’t work.

At first I thought it could be the keyboard itself. Afterall, I got it from http://ww.taobao.com. So, I decided to pair it with my iPhone. Seamless. Paired, got it working right away. Switched off the keyboard, turned it on again and iPhone connected the keyboard automatically. My Macbook was the ultimate. Even in sleep mode, it was holding on to the connection to the keyboard. and I could wake the Macbook from sleep mode with this keyboard. The experience was perfect!

So, what’s wrong with Ubuntu? I know, with some troubleshooting and tinkering, I can definitely get it to work eventually, but it’s so much more troublesome compared to Mac. The Ubuntu desktop experience has improved and surpassed other Linux distros, but it’s still way way way behind Mac.

Enough of rants, I still need to try to get the keyboard to work. Shall update the blog once I solve the problem.

When the promotional video finally lands on the iPad, Motorola zings Apple by saying the iPad is nothing more than a giant iPhone.

Well, all the crtitics can keep laughing and making fun of iPad, but Steve Jobs has the last laugh when he sits down to count the tons money he made from selling the product.

http://www.tuaw.com/2010/12/20/motorola-calls-ipad-a-giant-iphone-in-honeycomb-teaser-video/

Popular game app Angry Birds, for example, sends a user’s username, contacts, location and phone ID along to Google/Chillingo (a unit at Electronic Arts, which markets the game) and to Flurry, an application analytics company. Do Angry Birds actually seem more menacing to you now?

It’s not only smartphone apps. Facebook apps leak alot of information too. That’s why I’m very particular when adding apps.

Read the whole article from the link below.

http://blogs.forbes.com/kashmirhill/2010/12/20/how-smartphone-applications-spy-on-their-users/

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

I was kidding with my colleague this afternoon about Apple TV. I was saying since it’s running iOS and can be jailbroken, we could potentially hook it up to a 47″ LCD TV and get a damn big iPhone/iPad. We were laughing about it and talking about how damn thrilled his daughter would be to play Coin Dozer on the giant iPhone. Only problem is that we don’t get touch screen, or the multitouch at that size in the market.

But who knows! I’m wrong! There’s actually this overlay multitouch that has sizes up to 103”. Looks like my wild idea isn’t that wild after all. Well, that is if you can afford to fork out about 3000 SGD for that overlay.

This is the link to the multitouch thing I’m talking about.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/07/displax-overlay-multitouch-turns-your-lcd-or-plasma-into-a-touch/

While updating my iPhone 3GS to iOS 4, I encountered an error on iTunes saying that my iPhone could not be updated. My phone went into recovery mode after that. This is not the first time I’m doing restore and update with Vmware, so I’m pretty surprise why the update process failed.

A peek into dmesg shows the following -

[52420.444795] usb 2-2: usbfs: interface 2 claimed by ipheth while ‘vmware-vmx’ sets config #4
[52420.460159] usb 2-2: usbfs: process 9345 (vmware-vmx) did not claim interface 2 before use
[52420.460222] usb 2-2: usbfs: process 9345 (vmware-vmx) did not claim interface 2 before use

Linux is now capable of detecting the iPhone over USB natively and automatically via the iPhone for tethering and direct access to the underlying filesystem, so it’s hogging the USB port on the iPhone and denying Vmware of accessing it.

Anyway the solution is simple. Just run

# rmmod ipheth

#  dmesg

[52445.922401] usbcore: deregistering interface driver ipheth
[52445.964038] ipheth 2-2:4.2: Apple iPhone USB Ethernet now disconnected
[52491.228075] usb 2-2: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 21
[52491.524073] usb 2-2: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 21

Linux releases the iPhone. On Vmware, disconnect and connect the iPhone again.

For some reason, I can get tethering to work natively on Linux after I did an upgrade on my unstable Debian.

This was not possible previously. Now the kernel detects a new device called ipheth (IPhone USB Ethernet device). This is the magic that made the tethering possible. And the best part is that it works out of the box with Network Manager.

This is really cool. I used to tether from Linux using Bluetooth, but the connection is unstable sometimes.

Screenshots of dmesg output etc. Click for the full size image.

I’m running the unstable distro of Debian, so I’m not sure if this is available on the stable release. It might be possible on Ubuntu, since they get all the cutting edge stuff.

This is an interesting piece of work. Imagine waking up to sceneries rom various parts of the world in the morning, instead of staring at the opposite HDB block….boring.

There’s an IPhone app to act as the remote, and the images and app to control the perspective runs from a Mac. It’s also mentioned in the Winscape website, that a Wiimote can be used to track the motion.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vqu9NuINKbc

It’s pretty surprising. I thought the IPad was intended for the education market when news of their collaboration with a renown published was leaked out before their launch. So now where is the IPad heading?

iPad banned from several American universities over ’security’ concerns

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Google Buzz

Google launched Google Buzz, a social networking platform. This is cool, because I’m an avid user of Google. But I’m wondering at the same time, what’s going to happen to Google Wave? The functions seems to overlap, although Wave seems to be more cutting edge.

Right now Google Buzz is only available on Gmail. I wished they had it on Google Apps for Your Domain as well. I host my email, docs, calendars etc on Google using my own domain. Unfortunately, I can’t use Buzz with my own domain. Same goes for Wave when it was launched.

Google Buzz *IS* available on Google Apps For Your Domain! For some reason it didn’t show up in the mail interface on the PC, but it works on my IPhone. Cool! That means now I can have all my stuff on Google. Mail, Calendar, Docs, Picassa.

Find out more about Google Buzz at http://buzz.google.com

And no. No IPhone app for Google Buzz yet. Probably never.