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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• Is This Motorola’s iPhone Killer? (fool.com)


• Motorola Milestone XT720 announced for Germany (intomobile.com)


• 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)

It again boggles the mind, how Apple takes on a well known feature of existing products, tacks a bastardized version of it on a new revision of their product, and everyone hails at how innovative they are…

Here’s the Wired quote:

iPhone 4 includes a front-facing camera and support for videoconferencing with other iPhone 4 users, via a feature called FaceTime.

• Above mentioned phones include a front-facing camera and support video conferencing with any other phone that supports standard 3G video calls, on any 3G network.

That’s what Apple aims to do with the introduction of FaceTime. The awkwardly named protocol could be implemented by all major handset manufacturers so that consumers could perform video calls as easily as we perform voice calls today.

Now here’s a video:

(you can also watch this video on Youtube)

I apologize for the directing instructions in Hebrew (the guy operating the calling phone had trouble locating the “Dial” button on the phone) and for the lousy focus of the camera when closing in on the phone (but you should be able to make out that the calling phone is showing me videoing Sagi – the guy that takes the call).

Thanks to Sagi and Alon for taking a time out of their busy schedule to help me rant about stuff like that.

[Update:]

Steve Jobs: “This is amazing, I grew up here in America with Jetsons, Star Trek and communicators — just dreaming about video calling. And it’s real now.”

Yes, but it was real 8 years ago as well – a long time before even the first iPhone came out!

Related articles by Zemanta

• FaceTime video conferencing coming to the iPhone (tuaw.com)
• Will iPhone 4 usher in era of video calls? (cnn.com)

Yes, this device runs better with all kinds of logo MS-Windows operating systems: you can choose either XP, 7 or Linux

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.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Sony Ericsson turned down the Nexus One (mobilecrunch.com)


• Sony Ericsson hopes to get bigger in the US with new touch-screen phones (taragana.com)


• MWC 2010: The Year of The Android (wired.com)


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

From reading the article, I’m not really clear who have levied this fine – from a naive reading of the article, it sounds like the complaint was filed against the Pub’s wireless internet service provider – The Cloud (a company that provides wireless hotspot services to businesses), and its not clear whether a court was involved or if the fine was levied by some sort of arbitration process handled by the company.

Obviously there is a serious issue here – A business that provides internet access to its clients, whether if its the primary service or a complementary service, whether its free or for charge, is not really a subscriber and should benefit from the same “safe harbor” provisions as any service provider: a communication service provider is not responsible for misuse of its service for illegal purposes. The same way that The Cloud is not responsible for the infringement, the pub itself is just as much exempt under the same clause.

I would have taken them to court about this.

I wonder how this apply to the ACUM (the Israeli equivalent of the RIAA) operating of suing businesses that have a radio open to a music channel during business hours under the assumption that this is unlicensed rebroadcasting of copyrighted music.

The new GNOME shell is, off the bat, pretty awesome – it is a completely new and refreshing approach to the desktop (checkout the screenshots in the link).

The GNOME shell replaces 3 different components of the modern X11 free desktop – the Window Manager, the panel set and the Compositing Manager – with a single setup. By running gnome-shell -replace it takes over all these responsibilities. Unlike KDE’s 4th iteration the new GNOME leaves Nautilus to manager the root window as a file view the so called “desktop icons”.

GNOME shell is using mutter as the window manager – mutter is an experimental metacity replacement that is uses the OpenGL based toolkit clutter for doing the 3D compositing, and the shell itself is written in Javascript, which definitely lowers the boundary for entrance but may also be responsible for the slowness of GNOME shell – it is using the Mozilla Spider Monkey, the Javascript engine used in Firefox.

I’ve been using GNOME shell on and off for about a week now and my first impression is that it is slow – not enough to be a real problem for occasional use, but it would be a problem if they can’t get it much more snazzy by the release date. It may be because of the Javascript nature of the shell or because of mutter. My bet is on mutter as I’ve tried using it in the past and it is slow. GNOME shell also tends to freak out once in a while and eat all my memory, at which point I have to kill it and go back to compiz.

Usability wise,I think GNOME shell is very nice. The “activity orientation” works very well and is a bit similar to the point that KDE 4 went, but GNOME shell takes it further by completely ditching the panel approach. On the face of it it looks like they do they old GNOME thing – taking away all configuration and user options and do their “sensible defaults” thing. They did throw away the concept of applets which was one thing that you could customize GNOME with – with the new shell it looks like the only option you have is to choose which applications you use and how many activities you have.

That was the rant, and we’ll see where it goes from here. On the plus side, though, the new work flow with the shell is indeed very easy and flowing. The animations – though simple – make using the shell a pleasure (when its not thrashing my computer), and the favorite applications concept that have been used successfully elsewhere (in KDE’s kickout menu, Apple’s dock and the Windows XP menu) is used to great effect here.

In the future I would like to see more and better animations and compositing effects – currently GNOME shell is very plain looking compared to even the compiz default settings. Also I’d like to see more theming and customization options – I think applets are a great use case for small applications that do not need constant screen presence – like Tomboy or Hamster that I use  - and I would be sad to see them go, possibly to the point of going back to KDE. Maybe a widget overlay like in KDE and MacOSX would allow that.

Lastly, here are some screenshots:

more->

בצורה דומה- ודיון שגם חוזר שוב ושוב בקהילות הקוד הפתוח – זה הטרוניה נגד כל כך הרבה הפצות לינוקס ופרוייקטים מתחרים אחרים: למה לבזבז כל כך הרבה משאבים על פיתוח KDE מול GNOME או אובנטו מול פדורה – הכי טוב לסגור את כל הפרוייקטים המיותרים האלה ולהתרכז בהפצת לינוקס אחת ושולחן עבודה אחד מול המתחרים. או כך לפחות הטיעון הולך בד”כ.

שני הטיעונים האלה לא מוצלחים בעיני. מה שטוב בקוד הפתוח זו הבחירה: כל אחד יכול לבחור להשתמש במה שהוא רוצה, לקרוא לזה מה שהוא רוצה ולפתח מה שהוא רוצה. כן – זה אומר שיש הרבה מאמצים כפולים ויש הרבה דברים שנעשים לא נכון, אבל מכל הניסויים האלה בסוף יוצאים פתרונות יותר טובים. הסיבה העיקרית שתוכנה חופשית מצליחה להעמיד אלטרנטיבות ראויות לפתרונות מסחריים (ובמקרים מסויימים הרבה יותר טובות) היא החופש הזה. תוכנה חופשית זה קודם כל החופש של כל אדם לבחור במה להשתמש ואיך לעשות את זה.

מעבר לזה, אני לא חושב שאנחנו צריכים להתרכז ב”לינוקס מול חלונות” או “לינוקס מול מקינטוש” או לינוקס מול שום דבר. יש הרבה מערכות הפעלה בשוק ואובנטו היא אחת מהן. חלונות היא מתחרה נוספת וגם פדורה. אובונטו ופדורה הן שתיהן מערכות הפעלה המבוססות על קרנל לינוקס וסביבת משתמש של גנו, אבל בכך (בגדול) מסתיים הדימיון ביניהן. MacOSX לדוגמא היא מערכת הפעלה המבוססת על קרנל NetBSD וממשק משתמש מסחרי של אפל. ויש ערבובים יותר מוזרים, כמו Nexenta שזו מערכת הפעלה המבוססת על קרנל של Solaris וסביבת משתמש מאובונטו (גנו, apt מדביאן וכל מיני ישומים אחרים של אובונטו).

לדעתי, אנחנו צריכים לעודד את המגוון הרב של מערכות הפעלה ולא לנסות לקטלג את הכל תחת שם אחד. אני משתמש בשלוש מערכות הפעלה – אובונטו, חלונות ופדורה, ובנוסף אני מפעיל מדי פעם את Haiku ו-OpenSuSE – סך הכל 5 מערכות הפעלה שלחלקן המפתחים משתפים פעולה, וזה מצוין, אבל אני לא חושב שזה צריך לפגום באינדיבידואליות – וכל אחד שיבחר במה הוא רוצה להשתמש. יש אנשים שיותר יתאים להם להשתמש באובונטו, אחרים יעדיפו OpenSuSE (לדוגמא מי שרוצה ממשק KDE) ולאחרים גם עדיף להשתמש בחלונות.

The latest Java Runtime Edition, in the latest version, has multiple vulnerabilities and no updates available. It acknowledged multiple problems. There is enough disclosed for exploits to be created on the net. Unfortunately, the only workaround is the workaround we all know to well – which is to disable Javascript to prevent the Java Runtime Edition components from being exploited until Sun updates themselves.

[The emphasis is mine]

Well, obviously the guy is a security expert and not a programming expert so its OK that he doesn’t know that Java has nothing to do with Javascript and disabling Javascript will not affect the Java plugin. No, wait, what?

I’ve heard from several others that Security Now sucks (I think also on the Linux Outlaws podcast, which is a great podcast) but I decided to give it a try anyway and it completely failed. I don’t think I’m going to ever manage to hear the rest after that announcement.

Up until that item, they just talked about some “security patches” to MS-Windows applications, which has about as much relation to internet security as telling someone that is worried that people will break into his home to plant some bushes behind his picket fence – i.e. not much except in lay-people’s minds.

בלי להכנס יותר מדי לתוכן, היה משעשע ואני אנסה יותר טוב להגיע גם בשנה הבאה.

בנימה אחרת – הייתי במסיבת החלפת המפתחות בסוף הכנס והיה מאוד משעשע, הבעיה היא שבשבוע שעבר סידרתי את מפתחות ה-PGP שלי לקראת המסיבה ובתהליך החלפתי את הסיסמה של המפתח הראשי שלי למשהו אחר, שבדיעבד אני לא מסוגל לזכור . זה היה ממש ממש ממש מטופש מצידי.

לכל מי שהיה במסיבת החלפת המפתחות, אני ממש מתנצל אבל אני לא אחתום על המפתחות שלכם השנה. חמור מזה, אני אצטרך להחליף את המפתח שלי בכל המקומות שבהם הוא קיים (שאני מקווה שאזכור את כולם) וחבל – דווקא היה לי זיהוי מפתח נחמד.