Even more speed, speed, speed

Just two weeks after I upgraded my DSL line to 100/20 Mbps, my employer was nice enough to move our mobiles to a new contract where we finally have LTE/4G included.

116 M down/ 41 M up

Wow... that was from my Nexus 5 this afternoon in Vienna, i.e. I was not looking for an "empty" cell during off-peak hours... pretty good.

MWC 2016 - need to go offline

So, as every year, just after CES the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is starting right now. Time to go offline for a week... or be bored to death with all the new phone, screen, GHz, multicore and VR announcements.

My Next Android?

What should my next Android be?

HTC One M8 
As much as I hate HTC for dropping further support on the One S, they still have the best hardware (IMHO) of all the Android manufacturers. As this is their flag ship product, they wont kill support for it soon. Also, there is the Google Play Edition of it, so support of future Android releases is secured.

Google Nexus 5

Plain google, good HW, maybe not as fancy as the M8 but solid. A lot cheaper (in both senses of the word). Good choice for the money, I'd say.

And I think I'd love the wireless charging.

1+ One
OnePlus seems to have fancy HW and a weird go-to-market approach: selling hardware by invitation only... Only make me want to have it. You won :)

Oh boy!

Last Friday, late  afternoon, just when we arrived at our b&b for our 2 days vacation in Styria, my beloved HTC One S went into a reboot loop. Meaning, it would power off, restart and right after the HTC logo reboot again, and again, and again, ... forever.
Didn't change when connected to power.
Didn't change when I let the battery run out (which was fairly fast and easy with this behaviour).
Nothing.
After about 2 hours I was not only really annoyed, but also quite allergic to the Quietly brilliant logo and sound.

So I finally managed to get into the bootloader or diagnostics menu (or whatever it is called). The one you get when you press volume-down while powering up. There I - after some playing around - decided to go for a factory reset.
This helped.

Bad thing is, I only had a 2 months old Backup I took with My Backup Pro. Not only that, I didn't actually have it, because it was on the memory of the phone I just wiped...
At this time, I really wished, the HTC One still had physical SD cards...

And this in the middle of nowhere. I only had an Edge connection from time to time.
Luckily the b&b had at least free Wifi, so I could re-install all my apps from Google Play.

From there it was easy: all contacts were synched with Google. Nothing to do there.
My emails, tasks, appointments are of course all "in the cloud" and/or on our corporate server(s), so once I logged into the respective app, it was done.
My photos/videos got periodically backed up to Dropbox with the automatic camera upload. Nothing lost there.
Most podcasts I had in Google Reader, and BeyondPod does sync with Google reader. Good.

The only real pain (apart from losing all my achievements in Temple Run) was to get the application settings back again. Still working on some of those.

Lesson learned: always do a backup and do it to an external medium or the cloud. Will set this up tomorrow.
Really.
I swear.

Data Usage Monitor in Android ICS

Found this while playing around with my HTC One S running Ice Cream Sandwich (aka ICS, aka Android 4.0) while on vacation and roaming (!).

If you pull down the Settings menu or open it via the apps screen under *** more you will find a Usage menu.

Opening this will reveal some very useful and detailed statistics about the data usage of your phone.

You can see the wireless data as it accumulates over the data usage cycle as you define it. Since I am on a corporate plan where the billing cycle starts with the first of the months, I set the usage cycle to the month. If your billing cycle starts on the - say - 21st, you should change this to 21st to 21st of the following month. Set the Reset data count value for this.

You can also set two different thresholds.

1. A simple warning when a certain data volume is reached within the usage cycle - see the 1.0GB bar in the graphic
2. A real limit, where - once reached - the phone will no longer allow a data connection. As you can see I have not activated the hard limit.

If you scroll down further, you can see in detail how the data is been use per application. This lets you easily identify data hogs, giving you some good data points when you want to tweak your data consumption.

In my cases here (just for demo) a good idea would be turn of one of the podcast players (I have both, BeyondPod and Google Listen active right now... more on this later), and also restrict them to Wifi only... Or maybe do less Facebook while commuting :)

Very useful indeed. If you are running ICS already, take a look at it.

BTW: You can turn this on for Wifi, too. This will give a separate tab on this page.

HTC One S

For almost exactly one and a half years my son was the owner of a Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini pro. To be precise, he had two of them, probably three - since we had the first replaced immediately. With all three of them, the Sony showed huge problems with charging the battery after a while. We already went through an external charger, which worked fine. So it was never a problem of the battery, or the USB cable.

So about a week ago, I decided to get myself a new phone and pass the HTC Desire Z on to my son.

At first I could not really make up my mind between

• HTC One S
• HTC One X
• Samsung Galaxy S III

So I want to a A1 store, where they had all three of them on display.  The S3 and the One X are of almost exactly the same size (in all three dimensions; or four if you include weight :) ). Although the display of the One S is significantly smaller, the whole body of it is only marginally smaller than those two.

Since I still don't like the Samsung skin, and I - quite frankly - love HTC Sense, the choice was only between the two HTCs.

Or in other words:

• Do I need 1280 HD on my phone? - No
• Do I need NFC? - No... not yet, not sure if ever.
• Do I need a 4.7 display instead of 4.3? - No
• Is the One S display sufficient ?  - Yes
• Do the One X features justify 100 EUR more? - No

There. I ended up with a HTC One S and I'm totally happy with it.

Android 4.0.x (Ice Cream Sandwich)  and dual core are just ... wow.

I'll continue to report on my love for this gadget in the weeks to come.

Google Acquires Mobile Productivity Company Quickoffice

Google Acquires Mobile Productivity Company Quickoffice | TechCrunch: "Google Acquires Mobile Productivity Company Quickoffice

So, will Quickoffice become the long-awaited mobile frontend for Google Docs Drive? The current mobile HTML version just s.cks... So any  proper client is welcome... And Quickoffice is probably the best mobile office pack out there.

Good.

Why handset manufacturers love cloud storage

In the last couple of weeks, every new Smartphone seems to come with cloud storage attached, e.g. the 25GB you get with HTC - as announced in Barcelona earlier this year.
I think there are good reasons for the manufacturers to prefer cloud storage over SD slots/cards:

• A SD increases the cost of the device - not by a lot, but still.


• It imposes physical restrictions on the design, because the SD slot it obviously has to be accessible.


• Preferable not hidden behind the battery, otherwise you will get bad reviews


• The capacity of the SD card will for some weird reasons affect reviews, too. If you only include 8GB of SD storage, reviewers will tell their readers to get some other smartphone with 16GB... If you include a too large SD card it will drive up cost and price...


• Also, if a customer decides to replace his SD card with a larger one, the phone manufacturer will not see any revenue from it, but SanDisk and others will.

However, going for cloud storage

• will have no impact on the manufacturing cost


• will not impose any design restrictions


• and you can upsell your users to higher capacity and make mony from it.

So, no wonder they love cloud storage.

On Mobile, Apps and the Cloud

The other day I heard about a bartender app for Android that seems to only have a lot of drink recipes and some tips&tricks.
So basically this is a book(let) made into an app.
Yawn.

Why are so many phone and tablet apps just stupid books or references?

Dear developer, you have a full phone/tablet at your disposal, meaning:

• you know where you are (location)
• you have the time, date, durations, ...
• you have (more or less) full internet connectivity

So, e.g., for a cooking app, don't just tell me to do something for 5 minutes, start a freaking timer, and tell me when those 5 minutes are over!

With internet connectivity  you have unlimited compute power, currently called "the cloud". 

So please use it.

And not just by providing storage in the cloud (as cool as the HTC/DropBox deal is), use it for real computing.

Also, while we are at it: I venture a prediction:

Within less then 12 months, we will not only get free cloud storage with our phone, there will also be offerings for a free cloud-hosted virtual machine with your tablet.

So then, you'll get your Windows 7 or 8 PC as a VM and just use it from your tablet.

I'm pretty confident on this.

Back to the basics for my phone

As much as I love my HTC Desire Z (or Vision for the US guys), it had one major flaw from day 10 or so.

For about 90% of the incoming calls, when I answered them (drag, or click on the <Answer> button), the phone would not really answer the call, it would keep ringing... and the other party would continue to get the ringback tone. After 7 or 8 or so rings, it would finally put the call through. Sometimes it would take too long, and I'd lose the call.

Annoying.

Very annoying.

Well, my dear friend V. noticed this behaviour the other day on my phone (granted, after a couple of beers) and told me there was one of those creepy #*codes that would switch of some networking stuff and make it work normal.

So while he was searching his archives to find this code, I also did some googling myself and found this behaviour described like this:

If you sync your Facebook contacts (on an HTC Desire)  this could happen; and the solution -   delete the Facebook contacts - seemingly did help a couple of users.

Well, it was a convincingly high number of users that reported both the problem and the success through removing the Facebook contacts.
So I gave it a try, removed all my Facebook contacts, had a co-worked call me (a couple of times) and it seemed to work.

3 hours later, V. sent me the code.

Enter the following code in the dialer screen. *#*#2347#*#*

So I did.
(and got a "CFU query when camp-on is off" message... talk about non-cryptic :))

It still works fine.

Only problem now is, ... Against everything I learned and preached when I was working in software support decades ago, doing heavy problem determination work... never ever change two parameters at the same time, when you want to get to the problem source... never ever ... you understand?!

Well I here did... So I still don't know what made the phone work, removing Facebook contacts or V.'s cryptic CFU-query-when-camp-on... code.

So if anyone else runs into this problem, please try only one of them, and report back here.
Thanks

Anyway... my phone is now back to its basic functionality, taking calls.

How to build up a 1000+ € phone bill..,

... without you knowing.
And no roaming.
Or doing anything different ... compared to the previous month.

This is what just happened to a friend of mine:
She learned from their operator that she ran up a 900€ data bill, and the month (i.e. billing cycle) was not even over.
Did she have an app running, that kept data open? No.
Did she have a video running in the background? No. [1]
But she did have a 15MB email in her outbox that could not be sent for days.

The email app (on the iPhone) was trying every 3 minutes.
Could be tracked down with the operator's help.

My guess: it failed, because the mail server (or mta) did not let it send a 15MB+ email...
So it kept retrying, without any chance to succeed.

Simple math:
3 minutes a day = 20 times an hour = 480 times a day

Lets just say it successfully transmits only 1MB before the error[2], that's still 480MB ~~ 1/2GB a day.
Continue for a week or so, and you have 3.5GB... and through the 3GB ceiling and you hit the area where it gets really expensive.

And she really did not do anything wrong. Claimed that there was no error message, from the mail-app... And why should there, it kept retrying anway...

Well, the operator in an act of humanity - or to avoid the negative publicity of a court case - found a way to help here. But only because it totally breaks her data pattern until then.

--
[1] The operator really asked this... no pun.
[2] unlikely, it probably occurs after a lot higher transfer volumn, so those are best case numbers.

My Android Family

So, now my whole family (sauf moi) now has Android phones:

Relation	Model
wife	Samsung Galaxy S (i9000)
son	Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini pro
daughter	HTC Desire

And myself still with the old Nokia E71... (not for long, I guess).

So after a couple of days of use here's the quick breakdown:

Galaxy S	(Android 2.2) The largest of them...excellent display. Worst PC companion software (Kies). Updates only through the PC software.
Xperia X10 mini pro	(Android 2.1) Not really my kind of phone, mainly because it is too small. OK-ish PC-Software (Sony Ericsson PC Companion 2.0) installable from the phone.
HTC Desire	(Android 2.2) Best body/housing and general haptics. Also quite fast (to me it seems faster than the Galaxy). Also I prefer the mechanical 4 buttons over the soft buttons of the Galaxy. OK-ish PC-Software (HTC Sync)installable from the phone, but this does not really matter, because it updates over the air (!).

My favourite: The HTC Desire .. can't see why, but it seems to beat the Galaxy S.

Also the Xperia X10 did only last one and a half battery cycles. Simply does not charge ever since. Seems to be a bad contact in the USB/charging plug. I hope to be able to register this as a DoA. I'll be posting the results here.

The activation experience was the same and excellent for all of them [1] - as long as you are not paranoid of Google. Just exporting the contacts with the good old Nokia PC Suite from their old Nokia phones, import the .csv file into their Google contacts, and have the phone sync. Done.Gmail is there, market place is there.  No fussing around with iTunes etc etc...

I guess I should try the HTC Desire Z because of the physical QUERTY keyboard. But I have to test this first; I do have my doubts about Android with a physical keyboard... does not seem to fit (from my brief X10 mini pro experience). See how this measures against the near-perfect keyboard on the E71 (probably the best feature of the E71... along with the phone stability and battery lifetime).

--
[1] Well I can only guess for the Galaxy, because my wife activated and personalized it herself while she was on vacation during summer. I guess this is quite a good benchmark.

4G - Which is it?

I'm a bit confused now; both LTE and WiMAX seem to be labelling themselves 4G...
But which one is it really?
Any idea?

Facebook Phone ?

So the last 10 days or so saw a lot of rumors, denials, half-hearted confirmations and semantics about a Facebook phone.

Current state: they are obviously not manufacturing the hardware (what a surprise) but teaming up with INQ mobile to integrate facebook into (or rather:onto) the software stack.

Does it make sense to have a Facebook feature phone?
Not to me.
The Facebook apps for the various smart phones are powerful enough. Just to have your (phone) contacts synced with facebook[1], does not require or justify a Facebook feature phone. Much less the crappy Facebook chat.

Does it make sense for Facebook ?
Sure  - Three words:

mobile.
ad.
revenue.

As I'm saying, the are a (only) marketing platform...

I rest my case, your honor.

--
[1] if you want that at all - I don't.

Microsoft's Kin is dead

The Kin will be discontinued and never make it to Europe.

So what?
Is anyone really surprised by this?

First of all, Microsoft never had a good track record with or mobile phones (and their operating systems) nor generally with hardware...

Secondly, a pure social network phone that's cluttered with status updates, tweets and stuff does not make any sense. A phone is still a phone, and not a social network beeper or pager.

If I consider my social graph - any of them, be it Facebook or on Flickr or on Xing or on Twitter - I'd panic if I'd get all their updates directly on my phone.

So lets grieve for the Kin...
Then again.... No, let's continue to ignore it.

Qando learned how to use the keyboard

Finally, just when I was about to give up on Qando, the mobile info service for public transport in and around Vienna, they fixed their major [1] usability problem on the E71.

Like I reported months ago, they purposely emulated a T9 input even on the full querty/quertz E71 keyboard. So you only could use (by guessing mostly) the numeric keys of the full keyboard...

Finally, they removed that piece of code and seem to rely on S60 and JavaME to handle the keyboard by themselves ;-)

Thanks.
Might become more useful now... I'll be trying it.

GPS still does not work, btw...

--
[1] and we are talking really MAJOR MAJOR here

Yet another E71 discovery

... a bit embarrassing, to be honest.

I've been using my Nokia E71 now for about a year now, and only today discovered that I can delete an item in a list, e.g. SMS, eMail, Todos ... simply be pressing the delete button.

Until today, I always went through the menu...

Some E71 shortcuts

Here are some keyboard shortcuts for the E71 I discovered:

General:

• Press & hold * (star)
  Turn on/off Bluetooth... quite handy
• Press & hold #(hash)
  Should switch between general and silent profile,
  but does switch between line #1 and line #2 on mine
  I'd have preferred the profile switch...
  

In text edit / messaging:

• Fn-Ctrl-C [1]
  Clipboard Copy
• Fn-Ctrl-V
  Clipboard Paste
• Fn-Ctrl-X
  Clipboard Cut

Useful... yes, sort of...

But try hitting [Fn] [Ctrl] and [C] (or V or X) at the same time... and still hold the phone in one hand...
Almost impossible... see where those keys are located:



Lucky however, that you don't have to press and hold them at the same time. Fn, then Ctrl, then C/V/X is OK... so you can do it quite easily.
--
[1] Ctrl being Chr/Ctrl or Alt/Strg (on German keyboard) - the key in the very lower right corner

E71 usability

Just by accident I noticed that you can select (="mark") elements on a list on the E71 by holding the shift-key while scrolling over the items.... just like on Windows (and others).
Very convenient in the messaging application (SMS, email).

Don't know why I did it... I didn't try on purpose... I guess I just did it, because that's the way it ought to be...
Sad thing is, I noticed only after about a year...

Qando being really really stupid

Qando is an excellent service for quering up to date (and realtime) information about the (mainly) Viennese public transport.
I used to know it from the iPhone - or rather from my iPod touch only, where it was not THAT useful, because it only worked when I had a WiFi connection ... it does an excellent job on a fully GPRS/3G connected iPhone, though.

Found out that it is also available as a JavaME version for more or less or other handsets, including my E71.

Installs OK, starts fine, however, it could NOT access my GPS device (a common problem for JavaME apps).

But I wouldn't even let me enter station/address data by hand.
There is a search input field, but I failed miserably to enter anything there...

...except for numbers, I found out after a while.

And then I played with it a little more, and noticed that - get this! - emulate a T9 input, even when the phone has a full QWERTY keyboard!
So if I hit e.g. the 4-key 3 times it will walk through g-h-i... like it would on a 12 key phone[1].

Aaaaaa... how stupid can one be as a programmer. Who in this century (or the last 20-30 years for that mattters) codes keyboard input and key-stroke-decoding by hand! Let the opsys do that! That's what it is here for. Even on a phone.

So please, Qando programmers, you can do better! And it's a lot easier for you!
--
[1] or whatever the correct number of keys on a numeric-pad-only phone is.