I sold my soul to yet another wireless carrier (T-mobile) so I could be one of the first to try out the new Nexus One (N1). Gadgetlust has a firm hold on me.

I’ll likely be ditching the Droid and my Verizon contract because oddly, Verizon’s service sucks here (I figured they’d fix it after three years). I seem to be in a dead zone, so while the “Can you hear me now” guy is slogging through the bayous of Louisiana, there are some of us up here in Metro-west Boston who can’t get a consistent signal. Since I work at home, that’s a problem. The Verizon techs blame it on a body of water that’s not far from here. Apparently microwaves cannot pass across the flattest surface possible. I don’t know.

Having been an iPhone user since he first one came out, I didn’t like the Verizon Droid hardware very much. If I could have snapped the keyboard off and used the rest of the phone it would have been perfect. That’s essentially what the N1 is (but with much rounder edges).

While I think it is important to keep in mind when reading this that I’m a huge iPhone fan, that’s all I’m going to say about the iPhone in this review. Comparing the two is a subject for a different post, and a topic that’s being hammered on by the A-listers all weekend.

Here’s what I like about the Nexus One

(though most of this is Android 2.1 stuff)

• The hardware form factor. It is a great size. The case is slightly rubberized and seems like it will wear well without a third-party case.
• The glowing trackball is fun, but almost useless. The fact that it works as the camera button saves it.
• Google Apps integration. Gmail on Android kicks ass. Google Voice integration is extremely well done as well.
• Voice Search. Really cool, and it works very well.
• The camera hardware is nice. It takes great pictures and the LED flash is a nice thing to have in a pinch.
• Facebook phonebook is an awesome idea. (though the Facebook app still sucks)
• The multi-tasking is nice. Best part is the notifications, but it’s also nice to be able to listen to Pandora while doing other stuff, or take a call or tweet while the GPS is running.
• The turn-by-turn GPS works great
• There are finally some really great apps appearing. I think 2010 will bring us some well done Android apps.

Here’s what I don’t like

• The Marketplace. Finding apps is a total drag. Keyword searches often come up empty (though there MUST be an app for what I’m looking for) but more often a bunch of crap icon packs appear rather than what I’m looking for. And why isn’t there a great website for searching for apps?
• I can’t easily take a screenshot. srsly? I was really hoping they’d fix this one in 2.1.
• The touch screen seems to lose its mind sometimes and either stops responding entirely or I have to do the gesture a few times.
• The software keyboard is sluggish. I can easily get ahead of it and it drops keys. It seems like it could be better at not only catching every keystroke, but guessing which key I meant to press based on the previous one. There must be some intelligence available to look at key-tuplets to predict what key I’m intending to press.
• the bar for app development quality and standards is pretty low. Consistency across apps is not great, so it can be a mystery whether you need to to a long touch on the screen, look in the menu button, find another button, etc.
• The four hard-coded buttons at the bottom of the screen. They’re either too easy to press by accident, or too hard to press on purpose. Why aren’t these actual buttons anyway?

Bottom line

I’ve been really enjoying the N1 this week and I’m going to keep it. (and ditching the Droid), but I’m not giving up the iPhone. Even if I did, from the sounds of it, Apple would have me crawling back this summer. I’m resigned to keeping two phones.

Post from: Jangro.com

My First Week with a Google Nexus One

RSS isn’t quite dead yet. If you’re relying on the browser to provide access to your RSS feed, you’re leaving a bit too much to chance.

Understandably, we’ve all become very used to our browsers auto-detecting a blog’s RSS feeds and providing a link somewhere up in the browser interface.

Like in Firefox we have a convenient RSS button in the address bar:

Problem is, Google Chrome (at least on OS X) doesn’t have this basic browser feature yet (which is just ridiculous).

So when I’m using Chrome, I can’t easily subscribe to Chris Saad’s blog, for example:

Sure, I can enter the blog’s URL into Google reader. Or I could open up Firefox. But don’t make me work for it. An RSS link is basic stuff that should just be there in your blog’s template.

(Sorry to pick on you Chris. I see this all the time. Yours was just the final straw.)

Post from: Jangro.com

Hey, I can’t subscribe to your RSS feed!

We got Rockband 2 for Christmas as the “Family Gift”. read “for Dad”. We’ve been having a great time with it.

I will say, however, that I’m a bit disappointed with the songs that come with it. Maybe I’m just showing my age. Rockband is SO much easier if you actually know the song first. Without having the beat of the song in your head, it’s nearly impossible to move past “easy” mode.

It comes with 80 songs with the promise of another 20 available for download by entering a redemption code in on their website. This promotion was on the box, and the packaging.

After my wife hunted around for way too long for the mysterious redemption code, I jumped online and learned from some 12 year olds that the Wii version didn’t come with this code. Customers would have to wait for the online store to get these free songs.

Well, that was almost a year ago, and the online store is now available. I went in and checked and discovered the free songs.

Lo and behold, there are 20 free songs mixed in with hundreds of not-free songs. I don’t think I know any of them, but your mileage may vary. Particularly if you’re a grunge rocker.

Here they are in order of difficulty

1. Manifesto – “Burn You Down”
2. TheNewNo2 – “Crazy Tuesday”
3. GLaDOS and Jonathan Coulton – “Still Alive”
4. The CAB – “Bounce”
5. Hollywood Undead – “Young”
6. Lesley Roy – “I’m Gone I’m Going”
7. The Len Price 3 – “If I Ain’t Got You”
8. Dealership – “Database Corrupted”
9. Semi Precious Weapons – “Magnetic Baby”
10. Cocktail Slippers – “Give it to me”
11. Ghost Hourds – “Ashes to Fire”
12. Kutless – “The Feeling”
13. The 88 – “Sons and Daughters”
14. The Chevelles – “Get it On”
15. Tickle Me Pink – “The Time is Wrong”
16. X Japan – “I.V.”
17. Endeverafter – “I Wanna be Your Man”
18. Shaimus – “Like a Fool”
19. Underoath – “Desperate Times, Desperate Measures”
20. Authority Zero – “No Regrets”
21. Between the Buried and Me – “Prequel to the Sequel”

I think we’ll be buying some songs. Though we did also get the Beatles Rock Band game. My three year old can do the vocals to Yellow Submarine, the chorus anyway.

Post from: Jangro.com

RockBand 2 Wii: The Missing Redemption Code and Bonus Songs

If you’re plotting and planning your way through Smartphone waters, trying to get your grubby hands on the latest, hottest phone and mobile OS, you’ll need to be very strategic. Either that or willing to drop some dough.

At this point, in order to feed my gadget-habit, I’m carrying two wireless contracts. It’s not cheap, but I see it as a business expense so I can stay on top of and write about new tech.

Thankfully, I’m in a position to do so (I own the company and sign the expense reports).

As an iPhone owner who wanted to be the first on the block to try out the Android 2.0 operating system, I had to bite the bullet and sign up for Verizon.

Now the Google Phone (Nexus One) has hit the scene and it looks like they will be a GSM phone launching on T-mobile. Another network. Another contract. Another termination fee.

The good news is that Google’s also talking about making an unlocked phone available. (This is huge, more on that below.)

In the US, there are two major cell phone network technologies, GSM and CDMA. The phones that operate on them must support those networks, and generally it is either-or.

Verizon and Sprint have CDMA networks
AT&T, Cingular, and T-mobile are on GSM networks.

Beyond that, most phones are “locked” into a single provider. So even if you have a GSM phone, if it is locked, you may only be able to use it on one network. The networks can unlock it for you, but they may only do that after your contract is up, if at all. And what good is an unlocked phone that’s two+ years old?

The Google Nexus One will be a GMS phone. So even if I can get an unlocked phone, I will not be able to use it on the Verizon account.

I may, however, be able to use it on my AT&T account by dropping my iPhone’s SIM into the Google phone. If this is possible, I bet this is the crux of their strategy for releasing an unlocked phone. Contracts are the big reason people don’t switch phones as it is painfully expensive to break contracts and switch providers.

Google doesn’t have much hope of getting millions to pay AT&T $175 for nothing and switch to another 2 year contract at T-mobile. Never mind ending up with expensive iPod Touch.

But I can see millions of people picking up an unlocked Google phone to try out with their existing AT&T service. I know I will. Talk about driving a wedge into the iPhone’s user base.

If all that happens I’ll probably drop the Verizon account and pay through the nose a termination fee for the privilege of owning the Droid phone. The cost of being a hopeless geek.

Got Droid Envy?

If you’re already a Verizon customer, and you love the device itself, go for it.

But if you’re more keen on the Android OS than the device itself, given the Google announcement, I’d say hold your horses. You likely won’t be able to use the new Google phone on Verizon.

Post from: Jangro.com

Droids, Google Phones, Contracts, and Termination Fees: What’s a Geek to Do?

Do you feel like your participation on blogs and social media can be wasted effort?

I love blogging and social media, but much of it feels like I’m dropping content into a well to never be seen again (like delicious), or a fast moving river that sweeps it away (like Twitter and FriendFeed).

We’ve got all these great tools and social networks to post into, but are we really contributing to the world in any lasting way? Do the things we post have a life beyond the page it appears on for merely a few minutes?

I’ve posted a few thousand times on twitter. But where are these tweets now? For all practical purposes, they’re gone.

This bothers me. A lot. And it’s the major reason why I don’t do more on platforms like delicious, reddit, friendfeed, identi.ca, gather, etc., etc. The list goes on and on.

Even so, I do participate in a relatively short list of blogs and social networks such as Twitter,
jangro.com, affbook.com, Flickr, snaps.jangro.com, Facebook, delicious, and Google Reader.

And there are even more that I would participate in if it didn’t feel so scattered and that I’m wasting my time.

If I could pull it all together into a single location, I’d feel like I’m not only contributing to the social media world, but they’re also collecting somewhere. If for no other reason, I’ve got them for posterity’s sake.

I’ve recently come across a few services that have tried to solve this problem in one way or another, have given up, and published their platforms to the Open Source community. These are SweetCron and storytlr. They both provide very similar functions which is to pull all of your online activity, your “Life Stream” into a single location.

storytlr

storytlr is (soon to be “was”) a hosted service that allows you to specify any of many social media outlets from which to pull your life stream. It stores each post as a blog entry of sorts and presents them cleanly on your “full lifestream” page.

Here’s an example that popular, London-based, self-proclaimed Social Media Junkie, Zee M Kane launched on storytlr last year when writing about it on ReadWriteWeb…

Sadly, this will disappear with 2009 when storytlr shuts down its service on Dec 31. I don’t think Zee will mind so much as it seems that he has replicated similar functionality on his zee.me website.

The storytlr service is going away, but thankfully the developers have released their code to the wild:

As promised a while ago, we are open sourcing our platform. A first version is now available at http://storytlr.googlecode.com with a detailed set of instructions on how to install.

With this code, you can host your own storytlr on your own server (or on a shared hosting environment). By default, it is setup as a single user mode, but you can easily change it to a multi user host and therefore reproduce the exact service we are hosting on the current storytlr.com.

I started by trying out the self-hosted version of storytlr, which ended in a failure simply because the installation didn’t work for me. After going through the simple installation process I ended up with a blank screen. With no indication as to what was wrong, and several posts and comments within a quick google search complaining of the same with no good solutions, I moved on to the next.

SweetCron

Similar deal with SweetCron. Long story short, developer Yong Fook lost that lovin’ feeling for the awesome lifestreaming platform that he developed and released it to the open source community. From his shiny new posterous blog:

Lifestreaming seemed very impersonal

If I’m honest, I started lifestreaming for me, not my audience. There’s definitely a strong value proposition for blog owners who are thinking to switch to a stream – it’s maintenance free. No more writing blog posts! That value doesn’t translate into audience value so well, though. I think my audience quickly got bored of seeing blurry food snapshots or out-of-context quips from my Twitter feed. Your mileage may vary.

Ironically, whereas a lifestream was supposed to be an intimate, personal insight into an individual’s life… the lack of real audience interaction meant it ended up as quite an impersonal experience.

That is, of course, his perspective. But I feel like he’s sort of missing the whole point of what he created. I agree that it can be pretty impersonal. If you want interaction and comments, you need a real blog. I’ve got a few of those.

For me, this is entirely different than blogs, twitter, flickr, and the rest. It’s a meta blog. It brings everything I do, all over the place, together in one place. So now I feel that now matter where I post, I’m contributing to my own big picture, on my own terms. And it is done in a way that’s pretty fun to look at.

Most importantly, this will allow me to contribute more, in more places, without feeling like I’m throwing away everything I write. It’s liberating and energizing.

I just can’t expect that there will be a heck of a lot of interaction there. That’s ok. I get that on my blogs.

SweetCron Setup

The SweetCron implementation on my own scottjangro.com domain went very well.

You start out with something really bare-bones. Much like Zee’s storyTlr blog above. Here’s mine:

I can customize that template to make it look however I want. SweetCron has a nice API that can be used to spin a template just about any way you want.

It also comes with a “boxy” theme that you can customize however you like. In fact, you must customize it or it looks awful. Here’s what I’ve done so far:

I absolutely love how everything I do, no matter where, also appears on scottjangro.com.

If it has an RSS feed, I can pull it into my SweetCron blog and customize its appearance with some pretty simple CSS.

Take a look and you’ll see the latest with this blog post appearing somewhere near the top (if you’re reading this in a timely fashion, of course).

If you can’t tell, I’m having a blast with it.

Why Self-host?

If the storytlr story doesn’t answer that question for you, I don’t know what will. Everyone who has created a storytlr blog will have to find somewhere else to dump that content. Or they’ll lose it.

Need another example? One word: Ma.gnolia. Need more?

SweetCron and the self-hosted storytlr allow you to participate on these networks, but also grab the content for yourself. It’s your content. Grab it.

This is all pretty geeky stuff, but if you’re looking to get control of your own content, I think this is a perfect solution.

Post from: Jangro.com

Open Source Life Streaming

Now that I have pared down my twitter list to a small enough number of people I’m following so that I can actually pay attention, I saw this come across the twitter stream this morning.

My friend Todd Crawford wants to break his old iPhone 3G so he can get an iPhone 3GS…

There’s a place in your life for two iPhones, especially as someone who travels as much as you do. You can keep the second phone as a battery backup… with a phone attached to it.

Now I’m sure YOU know how to do this, but I’ve spoken to several people who didn’t even know that the iPhone had a SIMM card. So here’s how quick and easy it is to swap between iPhones.

How to Switch SIMM Cards

Post from: Jangro.com

Use Your Old iPhone as a Backup Phone

I just went through a massive twitter purge. I do this every once in a while, usually after realizing (for the umpteenth time) that auto-follow is a bad idea.

I’ll say it again. Autofollow is a bad idea.

Wait…

There, maybe I’ll remember that for next time.

I used Tweepi to go through my whole list and manually unfollowed anyone who I don’t know or at least know of and find interesting. Particular targets were those who had “success”, “money”, “guru”, or “mlm” in their twitter name, or were clearly a douchebag. I did not to take it personally and act on those who I’m following but don’t follow me back. (Though several are duly noted.) No double standards here.

I will admit that I got a little bleary-eyed and trigger-happy toward the end. A bad combo.

If you survived and I’m following you as of right now, congrats. I like you. Yay you!

If you got unfollowed and you actually noticed, it was surely a mistake on my part. Do let me know.

Post from: Jangro.com

Twitter Purge

I get a lot of questions in blog comments and emails asking the question, “What is a jumper?” Many of the Samsung color wheel repairs require that a small jumper be removed in order to get proper colors after a color wheel replacement.

What is a jumper?

If you’re from England, a jumper is a sweater.

Or, if you’re an olympic athlete, you may be a high jumper, long jumper, or triple jumper. In all cases I think you’d be considered a jumper.

For our purposes, neither of these apply. In electronics, a jumper is a small clip that closes the circuit across two metal pins. This is used as a switch to configure an electronic device.

In some Samsung televisions, removing a jumper is required to resolve a color issue after changing a color wheel.

There are only so many ways I can describe what this tiny part is with words, and I continue to get questions. so here’s a video.

Unfortunately, I don’t have this model television, so a hard disk drive will have to suffice.

Again, not a television, but a jumper is a jumper…

Zoomed in…

And someone did provide me with a picture of the jumper in the Samsung television. Here’s what it may look like somewhere in your TV.

I hope this helps.

Post from: Jangro.com

What is a Jumper?

I got a nice surprise today in my mailbox.

That box on the lower right contained a nice long-sleeve T-shirt that says, “Droid Does” on it.

I’ll wear it with pride, glad that I got my little bit out of Verizon’s $100 Million Droid Ad Campaign.

Yes, those are two iPhones. One of them is green with envy.

Where’s the Droid? Taking the picture.

In an iSpy fashion, there are some other interesting things in this picture. can you identify them? (I’ll label them on the picture in Flickr.)

Update: Here’s a great looking guy (however scruffy) modeling the shirt. No, Verizon, you cannot use this in your ad campaign. I don’t care how many millions you have left.

Post from: Jangro.com

Droid Does T-shirts

I know you’ve been hanging on the edge of your seat about this one.

A week and a half ago, I posted a video on how to fix your loose droid battery cover.

It has actually turned out to be quite a heated issue amongst Droid owners with discussions popping up in several Droid forums and blogs, including Motorola’s own support forum and Dave Winer’s droidie blog. Dave’s post has a funny comment that starts out like this:

I think this article is a special moment in technology journalism.

For 3 years I have been listening to people whine about the iPhone’s lack of removable battery, storage, and mechanical keyboard, while the whole time I’ve been 100% satisfied with my iPhone’s battery, storage, and keyboard.

Now Droid has arrived to show us iPhone users the error of our ways. Except that Droid’s removable battery falls out. And you can’t put apps on its removable storage, so you are limited to 200MB of apps, which means there are thousands of iPhone apps that simply can’t fit on Droid, even if they were ported. And the mechanical keyboard is too flat to type blind.

though you should read the whole thing.

Resolved

After all that angst, Motorola jumped on that thread in their forum just in time before the entire world ended in a cataclysm started by several of us starting simultaneous fires by inserting a highly flammable paper shim to snug up the battery door. (yes, there was a guy in that thread who warned us.)

They made good and shipped new doors to me and several others who requested them.

And what did the Motorola engineers do? They made the shim under the door thicker.

Or maybe they did nothing except hope that a new door will fit better. Mine is better.

So with some incredible photo-journalism, I present to you my old battery door (augmented) alongside the new.

They changed the font on the printer. And the date. I think that’s helping too.

It’s hard to tell with a picture, but I will say that black pad on the door does feel thicker on the new door.

Though my solution worked just as well.

Post from: Jangro.com

Droid Battery Cover Problem Update