Its a pretty cool device and (to my surprise) it allowed me to abandon all the other phones I was carrying with me, pretty much with in a couple of days (I expected it will take me at least a week to transfer all the things I was doing with mobile connected devices to a new device). So now – probably to the surprise of many of my friends – I carry just one phone instead of 3.

I’m using the Cellcom provided Milestone, as it comes with a very cost-effective plan, and less so because it comes with complete Hebrew support in its Android firmware.

After 1 week of usage, I have to say that I’m very happy with what it can do and it has definitely upgraded my communication experience – I get a better email experience (and that was hard to improve on the Ericsson P1i I was using previously), better synchronization for the address book and calendar (now I get both Google calendar and the company’s calendar synced) and I even have IM connected most times (which is to say – if you try to IM me and I’m less then responsive, likely I’m driving or something).

Things that I’m still not happy about:

• I can’t get tethering for dial-up to work. I haven’t tried USB tethering yet, but bluetooth tethering doesn’t work for me (though at this point it looks like more a problem with my computer then with the phone).


• It has crashed a couple of times on me so far (which is to say – much less then my previous phones at about the same amount of time, but still).


• It eats battery like crazy – if I’m not really playing with it all day, let say: 1 GPS drive to work, some emails and a few calls during the day, maybe some IMing and when its time to go home the battery can be dead. If I actually do any battery intensive usage such as playing games, listening to podcasts or stuff like that – it will be dead withing 3 to 4 hours. I’ve put the complimentary car charger, I got with the phone, in my car and I keep it connected while driving. This usually (but not always) allows me to get away without the battery dying on me at inconvenient times.


• The system’s software update does not work – I know there are updated firmwares from Motorola, but when I try to run the software update from the system settings it tells me it can’t connect to the server and to try again later.


• There are some annoying bugs in the system, such as: the music player starting itself when the headset disconnect, the market fails to install applications if Google Talk isn’t connected (sometimes, but not always) and a couple of other minor stuff.


• The bluetooth headset disconnects sporadically, and also sometimes looses the A2DP connection. This is less frequent, less serious and much less annoying then it was with the P1i, but its still a menace. Maybe it is the headset after all.


• The “application drawer” is a useless UI. The default way to launch applications in Android (at least those that you don’t have shortcuts for on the over-crowded home screens) is the application drawer – a huge list of any application and plugin that you installed order by alphabetical name. You can’t re-order them and you can’t put them into sub folders or anything. If you’re like me and installed a bunch of stuff on your phone, then you are forced to scroll through several screens full of icons before you find what you need (at least kinetic scrolling is fun). When you get a new Android device, the first thing you should do is install a launcher replacement that allows you to put folders on your home screens, then treat the folders like subfolders in the Symbian menu system.

• The UI is pure joy. The touch interface is fast and responsive, and easy to work with. And unlike the Nexus One, the “Android Experience” buttons (the static buttons under the screen) work easily and always react properly.


• WiFi works great! It even notifies you if you are roaming about outside your home WiFi network and come across an open hot spot.


• The hardware keyboard is really nice, and even has a dedicated language button to switch between Hebrew and English. I’m still missing a few keys but its no where near the problems I had with the Nokia E90. Specifically I couldn’t figure out how to type a comma when in Hebrew mode, and a few useful characters where relegated to a special “Symbols” menu that in some applications is not accessible.


• Surprisingly enough – I kind of gotten used to the software keyboard as well. Although I hated the iPhone virtual keyboard, I find the Android one quite useful. I wouldn’t presume to say that the Android keyboard it better then the iPhone’s – most likely I simply gotten used to it.

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• Motorola Droid X and Droid 2 will use OMAP CPUs, not Snapdragon processors (intomobile.com)


• Motorola Milestone XT720 Unveiled (phonereport.info)


• Adobe Releases Flash Player 10.1 for Android (wired.com)


• Motorola Droid Tethering Options (brighthub.com)

What is interesting (to me anyway), is that the game is full encoded using HTML and Javascript – each ghost or pacman and also all the dots are graphics assigned using CSS to HTML DIV elements, which are moved on the screen using Javascript (source code is here at the moment – it is minified but its not hard to figure out what is going on).

[Update:]

I Am Not Left Handed are unsigned at the moment, though they are involved in a music promotion project called “Slice The Pie” which has an interesting concept – go to their site and click on the “Invest in our album” kite at the top left to learn more about it.

Here is what I Am Not Lefthanded have to say about themselves on their site (which is BTW looks very well for, for a band anyway):

“We don’t play pop music, we don’t write music for art’s sake, we don’t represent any movements, we’re not hip, we’re not cutting edge, we don’t dress to be cool. We manage ourselves, we write our own songs, we do our own recordings, we shoot our own videos, we design our own covers, we run our own website. We’re not generally negative people. Oh yes, and we’re not lefthanded.”

Their music is Creative Commons licensed, though its the no-commercial, no derivatives license, and you can’t actually download their music – 1 song from each of their two albums  can be downloaded for free, where when they say download they mean – “click the link, subscribe to our emailing list and we’ll send you a ‘free download link’ to your email”. So it begs the question of why use CC at all? Still, they make interesting music for cheap – buying their two albums for download will set you back 6 pound (which is about 33 NIS).

I mean – if you are a simple e-mail user: have one account with which you send a few emails, receive a few e-mails and sometimes forward something to your list of friends – then you have several good options including a few web-mail systems.

If, on the other hand, you are more serious in your communication requirements and you need to:

• Work with multiple e-mail accounts and manage them separately but with the option of moving stuff between accounts.


• Connect with MS-Exchange (still most companies in Israel use MS-Exchange for their groupware backend)


• Work with multiple mailing lists with different policies and different internal filing requirements


• Keep all your past communications for reference


• Inter-operate with multiple shared calendaring systems, and specifically with other people’s calendars in a heterogeneous environment (some people do not believe there are e-mail clients other then MS-Outlook)


• Do all this on multiple computers so that e-mail, address books, calendars and what-not are transparently available on all computers


• Use Linux as your computing platform of choice.

Currently I use Evolution as my main PIM solution, and while on paper it has everything I need, in practice it gives me more frustration then any other computing system I used ever.

For first thing – if you want to work with MS-Exchange as a server (and in my company I’m forced to do so), then its unstable as nothing you’ve ever seen out of beta in the last 10 years. The old OWA method requires a separate process that tends to crash a lot, leaving you without access to your e-mail, address book and calendar until your do the “force-shutdown” rain dance, and even if it doesn’t crash it still manages to give you grief with the “Formatting Message” bug. The new MAPI method, while understandably immature and a pre-release preview is crashy to the point of absurdity – sometimes you can’t even get into the main window before it crashes. The Fedora 13 bug list for Evolution crashes gets longer by the day (I do feel sorry for Matthew Barnes that has to deal with all this) and I do not believe these are very complex issues: its a segmentation fault, for crying out loud. I can’t believe that at this point – the year 2010 – we still have software that segfaults with invalid memory access on a daily basis! Don’t people check their pointers before dereferencing them?

And don’t start with me about shared calendars! The weird thing is that if you want your Evolution client to use a shared calendar system, you have the option of MS-Exchange support, and.. well, that’s it.   Its not like there aren’t other shared calendar systems in the world (for example – Zimbra and Zarafa to name a couple. Interesting how both start with “Z”), is it just that if you aren’t a corporate Exchange user then you aren’t really someone interesting to Evolution developers ?!?.

The sprite collision detection is not brilliant, but you can burninate villagers!

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מעניין שדווקא עכשיו מתפתח בארץ סיפור מוזר – לכאורה מישהי שהדליפה מסמכים צבאיים סודיים לעיתונות על פעולות לא חוקיות של צה”ל, נעצרה (או אולי הושמה במעצר בית) והוטל צו איסור פרסום על הפרשה ואחר כך הוטל צו איסור פרסום על כך שיש פרשה שאסור לפרסם.

יכול להיות שבישראל, מדינה יהודית דמוקרטית שמעלה על נס את החרות ואת החופש, מעלימים אנשים ללא משפט וללא פרסום ואסור לדבר על זה?

אני לא יודע אם לי, בבלוג הישראלי שלי, מותר בכלל להזכיר שקראתי באינטרנט על משהו – אבל זה ממש טפשי אם כל מה שצריך זה חיפוש בגוגל כדי למצוא המון מידע על הנושא.

קישורים שיתכן לנושא, מי יודע?

עדכון: פרטי הפרשה פורסמו ב”הארץ”.

בנושא לא לחלוטין אחר – מאגר התמונות (באיכות ביומטרית) של משרד התחבורה, שספק אם הוא חוקי בכלל, קיבל לאחרונה תמונה חדשה: עירא אבראמוב הולך להצטלם (אנא צפו בסרט הקצר – פחות מ-4 דקות).

אני מתחבט באותה הדילמה של עירא: רשיון הנהיגה שלי פג אבל לאחר שחידשתי אותו כחוק משרד התחבורה לא מוכן לשלוח לי את כרטיס הפלסטיק (הבינלאומי) לפני שאספק להם תמונה דיגיטלית חדשה באיכות גבוהה (“ביומטרית” לפי משרד התחבורה. ראו גם פרוטוקול הדיון בהצעת החוק להכשרת השרץ – שלא עברה והכתבה ב-YNet). מעניין גם שהשר הממונה על משרד התחבורה בעת פיתוח המאגר הביומטרי שלהם הוא מכרנו מאיר שטרית, הידוע גם כממציא חוק המאגר ביומטרי שהפך את מאגר משרד התחבורה ללא חוקי – שיתכן שזה הדבר היחיד הטוב בחוק הזה.

בכל מקרה, הפתרון שלי הוא קצת אחר: לאחר שפג רשיון הנייר הזמני ששלחו לי ממשרד התחבורה עד שאצטלם, ניגשתי למשרד התחבורה והוצאתי רשיון נייר זמני נוסף שתקף עד אוגוסט. אמנם זה קצת טרטור, אבל אם עד אוגוסט לא יפתר הנושא, אני לא רואה מניעה שאגש שוב למשרד התחבורה ואוציא רשיון זמני נוסף עד פברואר 2011, וחוזר חלילה.

זהירות ספויילרים (קראו אחרי הסרט)
חומרה מדהימה – כנראה שהיא עדיין עובדת בגלל שהיא לא דיגיטלית או אפילו אלקטרונית.

אני חושב שהמציג, פריק-מונקי, קצת פישל בכך שהוא לא הריץ PPP על גבי החיבור וניגש עם דפדפן מקומי, אבל זה כנראה היה מאריך את הסרט בעוד 10 דקות ומעבר לגבול שיו-טיוב מרשים

So here’s why I won’t buy this (or the Nexus One, or the Motorola Milestone which I was very much interested in): No Bluetooth Dial-Up Networking.

Apparently, something that I’ve taken for granted with my 3 years old Nokia and Sony-Ericsson phones is sorely missing on Android, even with 2.1. Supposedly you can get it to working by installing some 3rd party applications (that cost extra), but its hardly the experience I expect from a network enabled “superphone” released in the year 2010.

Other things I require in my most important communication device:

• Ability to install 3rd party applications (so no Blackberries. Yes, I know they have 3rd party applications, but there are about 10).


• E-Mail push with standard IMAP servers (so no Blackberries, Maemo, or iPhone. Also most Nokia devices won’t do it).


• Bluetooth object exchange (so no iPhone or Palm Pre – because these US oriented devices won’t let users transfer files to the device so they will have to buy their ringtones from the network provider).


• USB mass storage emulation (again, no iPhone).

Which is all a load of horse shit – Nokia sells more devices then anyone even though its uncool to talk about their very very useful Series 60 based smart phones. If you look at the article linked below – the one about SE hoping to get bigger in the US, and read through to the market share analysis you’ll see what I mean: SE is the 4th largest phone provider in the world 14.6 million units shipped in 2009Q4 – who is ahead of them? Is it Apple or RIM? No – its Nokia, LG and Samsung. And fifth place is Motorola.  All the so called iPhones and Blackberries are niche players.

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• 2009 Smartphone Stats Worldwide, Nokia and Symbian dominate but competition is fierce (allaboutsymbian.com)

והפעם Truth or Consequences N.M – אני לא חושב שהסרט הזה בכלל הופץ בארץ, אבל אולי אפשר לתרגם את שמו כ”אמת או השלכות, ניו-מקסיקו” (כנראה לא בהפצה מסחרית בישראל. בבתי הקולנוע בארץ היו כנראה קוראים לזה “אמת או מוות בניו-מקסיקו” או משהו כזה). הסרט קרוי על שם העיר (האמיתית) שבה מתרחשת לכאורה סצינת הסיום של הסרט – אם כי באופן משעשע הסרט לא צולם בניו-מקסיקו (לא ברור לי למה, ניו-מקסיקו אמורה להיות מקום די מוצלח לצילום סרטים).

זהו הסרט הראשון של קיפר סאתרלנד כבמאי (והוא גם משחק באחד התפקידים הראשיים) וכנראה הסיבה שהוא לא הפך לסרט פולחן היא ההפצה המאוד מוגבלת שלו (מוטיב שכנראה יחזור בפינה הזאת הרבה): http://geek.co.il/wp/2010/01/16/%d7%91%d7%9e%d7%a1%d7%92%d7%a8%d7%aa-%d7%a1%d7%99%d7%9b%d7%95%d7%9e%d7%99-%d7%a9%d7%a0%d7%aa-2009 מכיוון שכולם אוהבים סיכומי שנה, הנה עוד סיכום שנה – פרסי דרווין לשנת 2009 חולקו לאחרונה והמנצחים הם:

שני שודדי בנק, בעיר דינאנט בבלגיה, שניסו “למשוך סכום כסף גדול” מכספומט מתו כשכשלו להעריך נכון את כמות חומר הנפץ שהם זקוקים לפריצה (תרגום גוגל). הפיצוץ הרס את כל הבניין – שהיה ריק באותו זמן מלבד שני הפושעים (תרגום גוגל).
שודד אחר הובהל לבית החולים במצב קשה ומת זמן קצר לאחר מכן בעוד גופתו של השודד השני נמצאה 12 שעות לאחר מכן בתוך ההריסות.