PI Units
We should totally adopt PI units. Finally a unit of measure that actually makes sense
So, I was talking to a friend today, and it occurred to me that my phone is quite adequate, in terms of power, for the majority of my computing uses. Sure, not for development or hard-core gaming, but it’s almost as fast as my laptop, and has much more GPU power (and so is better for casual gaming), and the new dual-core 1.2 GHz versions of the snapdragon should negate the extra core advantage. With a bit more RAM, my phone could be a full replacement for my (admittedly ultra-portable) laptop. Additionally, the iphone 4 is better in every hardware respect than the ipad, except for it’s CPU being downclocked a bit.
So, here’s my proposal: someone should make a tablet doc for my phone. It should have a touchscreen in the 8-13″ range, a battery, and a hole in the back where I can dock my phone completely flush with it. That way, I can carry that and my phone. When I need ultra-portability, I can take my phone out. When I need a large screen, I can dock it, and the extra battery can even allow the phone to run faster when docked. Maybe turn off one of the cores when undocked, for example. This would give me all the advantages of a tablet and all the advantages of a phone, and none of the dis-advantages of either, right?
But why stop there? Why not have a dock in a laptop form-factor? Or maybe just a keyboard + touchpad + battery with space to dock the tablet dock. Now I have the advantages of a laptop as well. Add in a hard drive/ssd in the laptop base that automounts when you dock the phone, and it’s just about as perfect as it can be.
Of course, all this needs software support, as well. Apps have to be able to detect when the phone is docked, so that they can switch to the high-res mode to take advantage of the new screen real estate; and they have to be able to tell when the tablet is docked, so they can take advantage of the keyboard and touchpad. And I need good remote-desktop software so I can access my dev machine at home, especially in laptop mode (since it won’t be running a full Linux, only Android).
This should give me a good phone, with decent battery life for a phone; a decent tablet, with good battery life for a tablet, and not too heavy (I’m looking at you, ipad!), and a usable laptop, with decent battery life for a laptop. Of course, it will cost a lot, but it had better cost less than a laptop + tablet + phone (by quite a bit). And, all my data and apps can be in one location, and look and feel the same, no matter where I am.
So, Google: you want to own the world? This is what I want. I suspect I’m not alone. Take the wind out of Apple’s sails.
On a lighter note from my recent posts, I’ve added a redirect to the blogs here on gryniewicz.com. If you go to blogs.gryniewicz.com/<name>, it will redirect you to the blog for <name> So, for example, blogs.gryniewicz.com/dang will get you here.
A class action suite has been filed against Sony for removing the Other OS feature. I hope it’s granted, although it won’t help me personally. After all, Sony won’t bring it back, and slapping them on the wrist with a fine that enriches some lawyers is not a proper solution. However, maybe it will give companies pause in the future when the are deciding to remove features.
This whole “Other OS” thing has really hit me hard. The Other OS feature is why I bought the PS3 in the first place, rather than the Xbox360. I dragged it out every time I argued a friend should buy a PS3, too. Now, Sony has removed it from my console. I’ve seriously considered selling my PS3 and getting an Xbox instead. The only problem with that is the money I have invested in games, which would all be wasted. I certainly haven’t used my PS3 since the update was announced; I just don’t feel compelled anymore. Maybe this will change (I hope it does, as there’s lots of games I want to play right now), but for the moment, Sony has completely turned me off the PS3.
There’s a much bigger side effect, though. Now, for every device I buy, I have to ask myself: “Will this killer feature that I’m buying this for still be there in a year? If it’s gone, will the device still be compelling to me? Can I do anything (such as rooting my phone; Google++) to ensure the company can’t change my device without my consent? No longer can I assume that my devices will still be useful down the line for the purposes I want to put them to. This is not new, but it’s never hit home to me before.
One thing’s for sure: I’m not likely to buy any more Sony products.
Over the weekend, we went to Best Buy to look at netbooks. While we were there, we played with the iPad. Janette felt as I did: it’s useless; however, my 6 year old loved it. The reviews were right.
The iPad has made me think a bit about device convergence. Conceptually, I have 8 main devices in my life:
I pretty much use all 8 of these conceptual devices every day. Now, obviously, I don’t really want 8 different devices for this, so I make some compromises to reduce number and cost of these devices. This is not always possible; device 3 (home gaming device) is, in fact, a dedicated device. It’s my PS3. Full-on modern gaming, such as Fallout 3 (my current game) is demanding. It takes a lot of fairly specialized and expensive hardware to get that kind of game to play properly. You can game with a computer; and lots of people do. But the price of a decent gaming computer is 3 times the price of a console, for approximately the same experience. Unfortunately, consoles are pretty bad at most anything except gaming, so I end up with a dedicated gaming device. So, that’s one down. (Well, really more than one, because we have a Wii, a PS2, a PSOne, a dreamcast, a NES, and so on… but I don’t use them hardly at all, so I’m not counting them here.)
I have another dedicated device, my ebook reader. There’s a good reason for that: e-ink. Anyone who has tried to do any significant amount of pure reading on an LCD has discovered that they make horrible reading devices. I stare at a screens all day at work, and they’re about as good as screens get, but I still have to look away all the time to rest my eyes. Not so with e-ink. I can literally read for hours without looking up and be fine, just like paper. It’s awesome. Nothing else currently available comes close. However, for anything except reading books, e-ink is currenlty useless. It’s refresh rate is just fast enough to turn pages, but not fast enough for anything else. So, my ebook reader (a Sony PRS-600) is my other dedicated device.
Now the compromises start. First, my development machine. As much as I love my hoss workstation at work (quad-core, 4G, dual 24″ LCDs), it’s very big, very non-portable, takes up lots of desk space, and is very expensive. I spend most of my down-time at home in the living room sitting in a chair with my feet up. This means that getting access to a hoss dev box (which would presumably be on my desk in the computer room) would be difficult. I would need to either give up my living room time with my family or my dev box time. So, I use a laptop for personal development. This allows me to spend time in the living room with my family.
Once I have a laptop, I can compress a number of other pieces of functionality into it as well. My home diversion box, used primarly in the same downtime as I do my development, is also my laptop. It has all my music on it, so it ends up being my primary music player (I use it at work to listen to music). I even use it for some gaming, although admittedly not much. It’s not very powerful.
For portable gaming, I have a DS, but I don’t ever use it. I basically take it on flights, and that’s it. Why? Because my G1 is a decent mobile gaming device. There’s lots of games that are quite fun, and lots of them are games that don’t seem to end up on dedicated mobile gaming platforms, like sudoku and freecell. In addition, it has always-on internet, so it can use that to enhance the gaming.
This leaves a phone and a mobile diversion device. Now historically, I had two devices for this: A moto flip phone and my 770/n810. However, for the last year and a half, I’ve had a G1. Initially, I carried my n810 as well (since I used it at the time as my ebook reader), but my G1 quickly usurped all the features of my n810, and it became my main portable device, with one exception: reading. It’s a poor ebook reader. Too small, too short battery life, and that everpresent LCD. In addition, I used to carry an actual mp3 player with me for portable music. However, my G1 has usurped that role as well. It doesn’t have enough storage to hold all my music, but it holds a good subset. It also docs in my car, so I can use it in there for music.
Now, there’s one device that I left out of the list: GPS. It’s a common dedicated device, and I do use Google Navigator (and before my G1 I used my n810) for GPS fairly often; however, I don’t use it anywhere near as often as the 8 use cases above, so I kinda left it off the list. In addition, I’ve never had a dedicated GPS device; I’ve always used another device as a GPS. All the entries on that list have, at one point or another in my life, been represented by a dedicated device. So, GPS is important to me, but not enough that I’ve ever actually bought a GPS unit.
On to the iPad, which brought this whole thing up. The iPad, as it stands, cannot fit into my life. It tries to be an ebook reader, but it has an LCD, so it fails. It isn’t a phone, so it can’t replace my phone. It would make a decent mobile diversion device, but it’s not enough better than my G1 (or, say, a Nexus One or an iPhone) that it’s worth carrying in addition to my G1, and I have to have my G1 because the iPad isn’t a phone. It is supposed to be a decent mobile gaming device, but again, not significantly better than N1/iPhone, which I have to carry anyway, so… It could be a decent home deversion device for most of those uses; however, it’s lack of a keyboard and lack of a real OS make it completley useless as a dev box, so I have to have my laptop anyway, which is much better in every home diversion category, so it won’t fill that niche either. It’s not powerful enough to be a home gaming box. It’s not any better as a music player than G1/N1/iPhone (and arguably worse because of it’s size). That leaves nothing. I need a laptop, I need a phone, and that covers everything that the iPad can do, and generally better.
So what would it take to get a tablet like the iPad to slot into my life? Well, first off, it has to be able to replace my phone for 95% of my uses. I’m willing to keep my old phone around on the charger so I can put my SIM in it for going to football games. And, don’t tell me a tablet would be a horrible phone. I know it. But lets face it: making actual phone calls is the least common thing I do with my G1. I actually make less than one call a day on average. So a crappy phone is fine, as long as it can work as a phone. I wear a headset for long calls anyway, so that’s not a problem. But, without being a phone, the tablet just cannot fit into my life; I won’t carry it.
The next thing it needs to be able to do is replace my ebook reader. This means it needs an extremely high DPI screen that is directly sunlight visible, and one that won’t hurt my eyes after hours of use. Currently, this is e-ink, which fails for other uses; but there’s some hybrid screens coming out that operate like e-ink or like an LCD. Hopefully something like that would be good enough for reading.
It would have to have great battery life. Like 12 operational hours, at least. I need to be able to actually use it all day without it going dead in the evening. This is actually my main gripe with my G1: it has horrible battery life. If I actually use it much, it fails in the evening. I actually keep it plugged in all day at work, just in case.
It would have to have an always-on internet connection (like my G1), and a decent app store (like my G1) or run a full OS like Linux (which, of course, has tons of apps).
It would have to be the right size. For me, that’s ~6-7″ diagonal. Much bigger than that and it becomes too big to carry or to use as GPS in the car. Much smaller than that, and it’s too small to be a decent ebook reader.
If I had such a device, then I could remove one of the two dedicated devices from my life: my ebook reader. I could consolidate down to a single device that I carry with me all the time. Would I actually do it? I’m not sure. I can think of situations when I’d rather have my current phone (like the afore metioned football game). But, at least there would be a chance. The iPad, as it currently stands, is completely useless.
W00t! The wordpress app for android works with the new mu! It knows about multiple blogs on the install and everything. Pretty sweet!
Well, I got a new laptop about a week and a half ago, and I already love it. It’s small, light, cool, and has a huge battery life, even in Linux, even with my normal usage. It works extremely well out of the box, as well. Here’s the specs:
First impressions: The screen is bright. Wow, the screen is bright. I generally have to run it a <50% brightness. Makes me wonder if it’s visible in sunlight; since it’s winter, I don’t know yet. It’s quite slow, compared to my previous laptop. Or rather, it takes a long time to compile things, because it doesn’t feel any slower to use. If anything, it feels somewhat faster; presumably, this is due to twice as much RAM that is much faster, and a much better GPU. The keyboard is nice, the touchpad is great (although it’s very slightly in the wrong place, meaning you hit it with your palm while typing; more later), the speakers are way too quiet.
On to the real meat of the question: Linux support. In general, everything works great. Here’s the details.
Video
This works fine with xorg 1.7.3 and xf86-video-intel 2.9.1. Screen brightness works, both via Fn keys and software. KMS also works fine. The backlight doesn’t come back on after resume (and I haven’t set up acpid yet to fix that) but a quick chvt works fine to get it back. HDMI out works (although I wasn’t able to get full 1080p on my quick test with my TV; I’ll try on a monitor later). Dual head via HDMI also works fine via xrandr. I can render 720p video fine, without kicking out of low CPU frequency. I haven’t tried 1080p, since the screen doesn’t go that high.
Network
Both the GigE and WiFi work fine; the GigE uses the atl1c driver, and the WiFi uses the ath9k driver. A word of warning, tho: use 2.6.32 or higher, or the WiFi get poor reception and constantly roams to a non-existent base station, causing your network connection to cycle up and down constantly. With 2.6.32, it works fine.
Touchpad
The touchpad is detected as a mouse, and handled by evdev, even with the Elantech driver built into the kernel. Since two-finger scroll and multi-finger tap work out of the box (even without the Elantech driver), I haven’t investigated why yet. I would guess that hal is mis-diagnosing it, and loading evdev rather than synaptics. I’m planning on looking into this soon.
Edit: The driver in the kernel doesn’t recognize this as a touchpad, so it runs in ImPS/2 compatibility mode. This is usable, annoying, since nothing is configurable. Ubuntu bug.
Audio
Audio works fine with the intelhda driver. Full volume control, headphone, etc. The speakers on this thing are way to quiet. You can’t use them to play video for 2 people to watch. Since I didn’t play much with Windows, I’m not sure if it’s a hardware thing, or if I’m missing some “make it loud” setting. The headphones are plenty loud, so that’s okay. I mostly use headphones anyway.
Webcam
This may or may not work. I added the driver that’s supposed to work (uvc) but when I tried to run cheese, it crashed. I haven’t tried any further at this point, so it may work. The USB ID isn’t the same as the ones listed, so it may not work.
Battery Life
This is the big one. Size/weight and battery life are why I got this laptop in the first place, so it better be good, right? Well, it is. I haven’t done a full battery drain test (well, I’m doing it right now), but I’ve gotten 5 hours with space left, and I watched 2 hours of 720p HD video with ~50% left. When you first unplug, g-p-m claims 10.1 hours left, but that’s a damn lie, of course. I’ll have to do a good powerdrain run.
Okay, I’m no longer cautiously optimistic about the N900. I’ve officially crossed it off my list, and any claims that Nokians make about the N900 being an actual open source platform are patently false.
This reminded me of bug #176 opened in 2005 (yes, 4 years and 4.5 hardware iterations ago): The N900 still does not have native ogg support. This means to me that Nokia deliberately removed that support. They must have; all the underlying software (gstreamer, etc) has it by default.
If the N900 was, in fact, an open source project, ogg support would have been added by the community. Heck, I looked at adding it myself back in the day. But it’s not there, therefore the N900 is not open source. Oh well. There’s always the N910, that’s sure to come out in 6 months. Maybe Nokia will have gotten their act together by then.
There’s been a lot of chatter on the planets about the N900. I have to admit, I’ve been very blah about Maemo for the past 6 months or so, despite having a 770 and a n810. And it’s related to why I’m not exceptionally exited about the n900. I’ll get to that.
You see, I was hugely excited about the 770. It was a great little device, and I bought it as soon as it was available. I skipped the n800, because it wasn’t any improvement for my uses, and because I was pissed that Nokia had EOL’d my 770 after about a year. But, I was seduced by the hardware keyboard, daylight-visible screen, and extreme prettiness of the n810 to ignore my misgiving about Nokia, and get one. Again, early adopter. And the n810 is a fabulous device: well made, very useful, etc.
However, I noticed trend. Bugs for Maemo on the n810 got ignore, or closed “fixed in freemantle”. Features and development for the n810 (and n800) stopped. Everything added was not backwards compatible. Barely a year into my n810 ownership, and Nokia was already quietly EOLing it. Now, it sits in my car and acts as a GPS.
So, on to the n900. The hardware looks awesome. The software, ditto. I’m extremely excited about it as a device. But I can’t bring myself to actually care about it, because twice now, Nokia has screwed me. Come on guys: for a $400 – $500 device, you have to support it longer than a year! 3-4 minimum!
So, I’m not excited about the n900. I can’t afford to be burned again. I’ll stick with my Android phones for now.