I finally got my new HTC G1 cellphone, the first mobile phone to come with the Android operating system. Here are my impressions so far:

POSITIVES

• GPS combined with information from 3G antennas (to help locate the satellites) works absolutely flawless. I can usually get a GPS fix within 10-20 seconds.
• The built-in rotation sensor also works really well. I have already programmed a simple compass application.
• The web browser (based on WebKit) works really, really well, and can easily compete with the browser on iPhone. Android still lacks the smart finger movements to control zoom, back and forth etc. but some developers have figured out to do it themselves.
• The whole OS is extremely well made. It is very easy to navigate, things just work as they are supposed to, and it is really fast. Flipping out the keyboard changes the screen orientation and it just happens like that, very short delay, and no redrawing artefacts (like my Windows Mobile phone).
• The Android Market, where you can download applications, works really great too. Many apps are still in development or not very well made, but a user-driven rating system makes them sink towards the bottom. Shazam and ShopSavvy are my favorite apps at the moment!
• The design: Many bloggers have commented on the old-fashioned outdated design, but I actually find it both beautiful and quite small. Easily fits in my pocket, easy to hold in the hand, and the sliding keyboard works well. Only minus is the USB cable connector. When a cable is plugged in the phone is awkward to hold, and typing on the keyboard is difficult. A separate plug for earphones would have been a plus too (I can’t charge and listen to music at the same time for instance)
• The camera is actually ok for a 3mbit phone camera.
• Debugging apps on the phone is a cakewalk! Plugin the phone with the USB cable, mark your Eclipse projectas “debug” and Eclipse now sends the output to the phone instead of the emulator! Could it be easier??

NEGATIVES

• No support for non-English input
• Battery life not as good as one could have hoped for (but not as bad as most people say). I was able to run it with 3G on all day, and with WLAN on the whole evening, and it is still running. GPS seems to be the real power consumer though.
• Almost no widgets. No widget SDK yet. (widgets are small programs that run on the main screen of the phone)
• SoftBank still charges me almost 10,000 yen for one month of flatrate 3G. I misread the small print… Damn.
• DoCoMo does not allow me to use their sim cards in my G1 because of some software that needs to be installed for me to use their 3G network (called FOMA) with flatrate. You can make regular phone calls though (tried it today at the DoCoMo store)

Ok, the phone is still a 1. generation product. Many things that are considered almost mandatory on cellphones these days are missing. Video camera? Calendar on the main screen? Answering machine? Etc etc. But the good news is that the SDK, even the whole OS, is open! Free for everyone to download. So, it is up to us, the community, to develop all these missing apps!

Update:

Today I charged the phone all night, then in the morning around 8:00 I unplugged the charger. I had it with me all day, and had the wireless connected for about 3 hours. Now, at 21:30 it is at about 40%. Not bad really.

Photos

The ShopSavvy application scanned the barcode on one of my books, and immediately found it in its database!

The browser can easily handle javascript controlled data intensive applications like this webcam.

Two photos of my own GPS application running on the HTC G1 Dream

SongBird, the Mozilla powered open source system for organising your music and putting it on your iPod, which has been developed to replace the dreaded iTunes, does NOT (and i repeat NOT) actually support syncing music to your iPod! At least not the latest generations of iPod, iPhone etc. Just a warning to those who thought that SongBird, which has been heralded as the best replacement for iTunes, could actually replace iTunes - it cannot. It is a beautiful product on its own, it just can’t do what it was meant to do…

Of course it is all due to Apple releasing produts with yet another undocumented protocol, so the developers of third party applications are left in the dark. In these days and ages I have stopped being suprised. I am not even disappointed, just… bleh.

Idag da jeg satte min iPod i PC’en for at synce noget nyt musik jeg havde koebt, kom iTunes op med en meddelelse om at min “iPod is corrupt”. Hvad i alverden der har faaet iTunes til at tro det ved jeg ikke, men nu kan jeg ikke mere accesse den med mindre jeg foerst formatterer den. Det er eneste valgmulighed. Ikke noget med recover eller rebuild song database. Nej, kun FORMAT.

Thank you Apple. Meget brugervenligt maa man sige. :(

Maaske det er paa tide at se sig om efter en afloeser til iTunes…

Update:

Det hjalp at flytte den til en anden USB-port. Nu er den ikke laengere korrupt! Meget maerkeligt…

You can now write directly to Junya on this email address:

junya@asmund.dk

He will be checking his email almost every day, but as he is still a slow typer, you might not get a reply straight away! Anyway… please write him, or comment on the postings on this blog, - that will make him very happy!

Today is the 1 October and Junya is 31 days old. We decided to celebrate his 1 month birthday today with… PIZZA!

Today also saw another visit by one of Takako’s friends and her husband (website) and their very cuuute daughter, Saiko!! Here are some photos I took while they were here. As you can see, Saeko liked to play with Junya’s toys, which is good, because Junya is not interested in them yet. But now we know, that there is nothing wrong with the toys. They are very attractive to kids in the right age!

Junya also tried a new “suit” which includes built-in socks. Very smart, but still a little bit too big for him. He needs at least another 3-4 cm!

In the evening I made pizza for everyone. Since Junya can’t eat real food yet, I decided to make something that everyone would like and hopefully he could feel our happiness. I made two pizzas, a meat pizza (with sausages, meat sauce, capsicums, mushrooms and aubergine) and a veggie pizza (with fresh salad, canned tuna, capsicums, auebrgine and mushrooms). The last one also had Caeser Salad dressing on it, and was surprisingly good. I used my usual pizza recipe but with a little less sugar than usual (sugar is needed for the dry yeast to work). The dough was ok, but the second was better. Dry yeast is difficult to work with. I think for the second one it had time to rise properly before I baked it. Next time I will try and pre-bake the dough before I put the goo on it. Also, I set the oven to 1-dan mode (which means only one plate in it at one time) and about 200 degrees for 30 mins. !80-90 would have been better.

Some photos to illustrate:

Finally while discussing cameras and other electronics, the subject naturally changed to cell phones. I had been thinking about getting an iPhone, but found out today that the Google Android platform might be featured on cell phones here in Japan soon! This interesting news made me want to investigate the SDK a little bit, so I downloaded it and made the mandatory Hello, World application!

Det her er bare alt for vildt. En ny type map service fra Google i Japan hvor man i bogstaveligste forstand kan vaere langdistanceturist, for med det her map kan man nemlig gaa rundt i hele Tokyo (og en del af Kyoto) og se billeder taget fra stort set alle veje i Tokyo!

Det er sikkert blevet til ved at en bil med et kamera med en fiskeoejelinse er koert rundt i Tokyos gader i nogle maaneder og taget billeder (med GPS koordinater) for hver 5-10 meter. Billederne er saa stykket sammen saa man kan navigere gennem dem ved at foelge vejene. Proev det ved at klikke paa nogle af mine favorit-startsteder:

• Akashi Kaikyo Bridge
• Tokyo Tower
• Indgangen til det lille tempel paa oeen i Ueno
• Min favorit-nudelrestaurant

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After 12 days of no internet I am back online again!!

Looking back it is hard to understand how I could manage for so many days without it. There have been more than a few times where I have said “Let’s go online and chec…” ohyea, that’s right, no internet, have to wait. And now all those things that have piled up have to be done. Scanning CDs, putting P-chan videos online, checking emails, cheking my internet bank, uploading photos, researching baby names etc. etc.

Vi har faaet noget meget maerkeligt. En ny kogeplade. Det gamle koekken her paa andensalen i Takakos foraeldres hus havde et gammelt gaskomfur der koerte paa flaskegas, men det var vi ikke saa interesserede i at bruge. Saa vi koerte ud for at koebe en ny kogeplade…

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Lo and behold, jeg har idag anskaffet mig en ny gadget til (min evigt voksende) samling af saere apparater. Denne gang en fin, matsort iPod Classic med plads til 80GB - i foelge reklamen - musik, video, podcasts, billeder osv.

Indtil nu har jeg faaet den til at spille musik, spille tetris, vise min fotosamling fra 2008 samt afspille nogle interessante podcasts fra DR’s P1. Det er ogsaa lykkedes mig at faa The KLF til at fremkomme ikke mindre end 8 gange i album listen (og med samme track listings!)

Men alt i alt en sjov lille sag jeg nok skal faa brugt til noget kreativt!

David sent me a link to this amazing demo today. It is a raytraced implementation of the rendering engine from Quake 4. I don’t know how much computing power is needed to run this, but it must be a hell of a lot more than what my AMD Athlon 64X2 can produced!

As the developer explains in the video (in the bottom of the page) it is part of a research project for intel, but let’s hope this makes it into a game soon!

http://www.pcghx.com/aid,646920/News/Video_shows_ray_traced_Quake_Wars/