Mobile platforms
This is going to be one of those ‘to save me from repeating myself’ sort of blog posts, as I seem to have been frequently engaged in conversation recently about this topic.
Apple
Let’s start with the elephant in the room. Apple redefined the smartphone with the launch of the iPhone, and though I don’t have one myself I’ve had an iPod Touch since the early days so I’m no stranger to the platform. Many seem to be convinced that the iPad is going to work the same magic, but I’ll stick to what I said previously on this – I think the iPad will create a category but won’t necessarily dominate it.
Apple clearly has a head of steam in its app store, and seems for the time being to be the app that developers will do first. I expect this to change though; as other platforms proliferate, and developers tire of the walled garden constantly having its walls moved against them, then the talent and economics will stack up elsewhere.
Long term I expect that Apple as a mobile platform (in both smartphone and tablet form factors) will become much like Apple as a personal computer platform e.g. a design led premium product that leads on the simplicity of its user interface. Apple will do very well from this arrangement financially (as premium products bring with them enhanced margins), but the growth that has propelled them past Microsoft will stop sooner than many buying the stock today might hope.
Android
Android is the clear challenger to Apple’s crown, but there’s a lot more to it than that. I don’t presently own an Android device as I believe the platform is (or at least was until very recently) in a phase of such dramatic change that it was a sure road to buyer’s remorse – any Android handset bought today (on a typical 2 year mobile contract) will seem positively prehistoric before it’s upgrade time (just look at the G1!). Since Google Apps is where I live on my laptop I expect that I will get an Android device when my present handset is due an upgrade, but that’s almost a year away. I desperately hoped that the plan by Google to sell the Nexus 1 SIM free and without a contract would be something I could buy into, but the economics of mobile remain a strange beast (it seems $SIM free handset + $contract > $handset with contract).
I don’t subscribe to some of the present arguments that Android will conquer the world because it has tethering[1] and the iPhone doesn’t etc. This is not a features war, and features can easily be copied between platforms. Android will conquer the world because it will out evolve the competition – it will suck developers and handset manufacturers and everybody else in the ecosystem in, and collectively they will push the platform forward faster than any single organisation could on its own. Google may be in the driving seat, but others will provide the pit crew, and the engine, and stickier tyres etc. Android will win the race because it’s more manoeuvrable.
The rest of the field
Having already declared what I expect to be the winner (at least in terms of long term shipment volumes and application footprint) it’s worth taking a look at what else is out there (and I’m inclined to agree with Tim Bray that ‘Two is not the cosmically correct number of viable mobile platforms.’
RIM
This seems to be the one that people keep overlooking in this debate, and that the techies always have a reason to discount, but that keeps on being there stronger than ever. BlackBerries have this perception as being business only, just for email, but that’s just not the case any more. The BlackBerry has a huge market share, and it’s not all business – ordinary people buy them as consumer devices because they don’t care that the browser sucks so long as they can email friends and use a (barely functional) FaceBook application. I’ve read elsewhere that BlackBerry messenger is a huge hit with US teens, which I’ve seen no first hand evidence of. What I do know from my own experience is that they make great devices for symmetric communication (via email) – where you send stuff rather than just reading. Also the apps are getting towards ‘good enough’ – the recent Twitter App may not be as swish as TweetDeck on my iPod, but it does the job – I can read (and write) tweets on the hoof.
For some reason I can’t quite pin down the BlackBerry has fallen way behind on its browser, which always was clumsy and slow compared to the state of the art. It also seems to be execrable from a development point of view (and their app store is truly awful). This will be what kills RIM (unless it raises its game) – when the choice is between mobile optimised HTML5 and ‘there’s an app for that’ and their device does neither well. I chose my present BlackBerry because I wanted a keyboard (and knew I couldn’t get on with an iPhone style touch interface); when it comes to upgrade time I may be able to get an Android device that has a keyboard, or somebody might just have a touch screen that I can live with (unlike the Storm).
Palm
The Treo was perhaps the device that first defined the smartphone by colliding a PDA into a phone. I remember when I first saw the 600 and I was frankly amazed by how small but functional it was (and I put up with its flakiness for a whole year and a bit until the 650 came out shortly after my upgrade window had opened). Sadly Palm OS was limiting, and the diversion to making Windows Mobile devices didn’t help with development. When the Pre came along last year I could see ‘too little, too late’ writ large on the impending tombstone.
and then HP came along and saved the day, and I’ve been scratching my head ever since trying to figure out why? On one side there’s the cost (and inflexibility) of a WinTel approach to mobile/tablet, but why didn’t they just join the Android party? One thing’s for sure, the $1.2Bn that HP paid for Palm is just table stakes, and they’re going to have to throw down a lot more money if they want to seriously have a go a bringing WebOS into centre frame for developers and consumers.
Windows Mobile
There was a brief period a few years ago when the iPhone wasn’t born and Windows Mobile sucked just a bit less than everything else in the PDA inspired world of smartphones. During that period I bought an Orange M3100 (aka HTC TyTN), which wasn’t bad, but wasn’t great either.
These days the only positive vibe I hear about Windows Mobile comes from Microsoft partners who’ve been sucked into the Redmond spin machine. They’ve been shown shiny Powerpoint, and talked to by evangelists who are passionate and convincing. What I don’t see is a passionate user community. People (including MS employees) always seem to put up with Windows Mobile rather than loving it. I don’t believe that the desk bound .Net developer ecosystem magically translates into a huge pot of Windows Mobile developers (and great apps). MS are kind of caught between a rock and a hard place on this one – how do they monitise Windows Mobile without charging a per unit license, and yet who would want to pay that license fee when they can get Android? How does MS add the value that it’s trying to extract from its licensees?
Nokia
I used to love the way that Nokia phone just worked when others didn’t (in particular Motorola, but Ericsson were guilty too). I still use a 7210 as my travel phone as it’s unlocked and the battery runs for days on end (weeks when it was fresh). Nokia sadly seem to have lost their way. They still make great little phones, but they don’t make great little smartphones. The last Series xx device that I spent time with was just awful.
My bet is that Nokia will eventually join the Android pack, but that it will take a long time for them to get over the (emotional) sunk cost of where they are with Symbian. Open Source will not save them – an open source project without a grass roots community is always a worse place to be than a community without open source.
Others
There’s some other interesting stuff rattling around out there like INQ (and we don’t have to look too far in the rear view mirror for things like the Sidekick), but frankly you’d have to be mad these days to start something from scratch with such great open source platforms available.
What about the operator?
Android is shifting the balance of power in the mobile space, and this seems to be disrupting the operators as much as the incumbent platform plays. Eric Raymond has had a string of meaningful things to say about this in recent weeks (though he does fall into the same trap as others by fixating on specific features). I think he’s probably right – the operators can bitch and moan as much as they like about what’s happening here, but the market will route around them if they become an obstacle. Sean Park covers this superbly in his platforms, markets and bytes presentation at eComm 09. The real problem here is that the operators have been trying too desperately to have some kind of value add (that justifies the enormous cost of those spectrum licenses), but all the consumer wants is reliable service and accurate billing (the stuff that telcos are supposed to be good at). Which brings me to my endnote…
[1] Tethering is going to be a very controversial feature. On the consumer side I can completely understand people not wanting to carry around another device like a dongle or a MiFi, and tethering is the natural answer to that (provided your battery can hold out, or you’re happy to tether by wire). The mobile telcos seem less happy with this route, as it turns out that the ‘killer application’ for those expensive 3G licenses is data – plain dumb pipes, and the only way to monitise that data is to sell a separate contract for it. Selling a separate device along with that separate contract has been an integral part of the smoke and mirrors game of getting the consumer to pay for (mostly) the same thing twice.
Update 2 Jun – AT&T have just relaunched their smartphone tariffs, and tethering is now on the menu (in anticipation of iPhone OS 4). The price is $20/month, which just gets you the right to tether – no extra data! This seems pretty outrageous to me when compared against $10/GB for AT&T’s out of bundle usage, or £15/15GB that I pay to Three for mobile data. So there we have it, AT&T think that the right to tether is worth around 2GB/month – I find this pretty disagreeable, but it will be interesting to see how consumers and other suppliers respond. I suspect that the operator that offers tethering with a bump to the data bundle will be the consumers choice (e.g. charge the extra $20, but give the extra 2GB headroom with that).
Filed under: technology | 5 Comments
Tags: android, apple, blackberry, INQ, iPad, iphone, mobile, Nokia, Palm, RIM, telco, tethering, WebOS, Windows Mobile
BlackBerry OS 5
One of the side effects of getting a new machine was that I used BlackBerry Desktop for the first time in ages. When it started up I was offered an upgrade to the newer 5.x OS, which I went ahead with (luckily I wasn’t in a hurry). Here’s my experience of running the new OS on my 8900…
Icons
After the backup/upgrade/restore process was complete all of my icons were back to where they’d started life rather than where I’d left them, which then led to a little spell of hunt the app. The upgrade also reset my background. Pretty much everything else made it through unscathed, apart from…
SplashID
The main reason for plugging my BlackBerry into my new tablet was to sync stuff that I had saved in SplashID. This didn’t go well for me. When I found the app again and started it I was asked to set a password (rather than asked for a password), and all of my entries were garbled:( Luckily I was able to export what I had on the old netbook and import it onto the new desktop app, which then synced things back to my BlackBerry.
I quite like the new Twitter app on the BlackBerry, but it went missing during the upgrade, meaning that I had to reinstall (at which point my BlackBerry said that the app was there, and that I was ‘upgrading’ to the same version). After reinstalling I had to set things up again, but that wasn’t too time consuming.
I still have one gripe about this app – why can’t it be launched without a network connection? It works fine for reading tweets when you lose the connection. One of the killer things about BlackBerry email is that it works pretty seamlessly between online and offline, and Twitter should be no different.
Battery consumption
In the last few weeks before the upgrade my battery life was becoming a real problem – I was struggling to make it through a busy day. This seemed pretty poor considering that when I got the machine a year ago it could go 2 days with ease and manage 3 a a stretch (and this is the primary advantage of having a 2.5G device rather than 3G). I blamed the Twitter app (as it was the thing that I’d installed most recently), and took care to have a USB charging cable with me.
Anyway, the post upgrade BlackBerry seems to be back to being able to cope with 2 days (even though I’m still running the Twitter app) so it seems that the new OS is doing some really smart things with power management.
Lock/unlock/standby
The good news – the spurious messages about standby mode that used to happen on pressing the mute button when locked seem to have gone away.
The bad news – unlocking seems to be less reliable than before. I sometimes need to press the unlock 2-3 times to get the unlock dialogue box to appear.
Performance
The clock mini icon still appears with annoying regularity, but maybe just a little less than before. Performance is certainly worse than when I ran without encryption, but that’s not really something I consider optional for a device with my contacts and company email on.
Overall
The main benefit of the upgrade is a return to decent battery life, and it was worth the (small amount of) trouble just for that. There are a few cosmetic touches that I could easily live without, and some niggles have come others have gone.
Amazingly it seems that very few BlackBerry users have gone down the upgrade route. I’d certainly recommend it if you’re on an older OS and having battery life issues.
Filed under: technology | Leave a Comment
Tags: 5, 8900, battery, blackberry, curve, os, SplashID, twitter, upgrade
This is my first follow up post after my first impressions, which went up ten days ago now. I’m using the X201 as my main machine on the road, at work and around the house, so it’s getting to the stage now where I know it reasonably well.
Pimping my ride
I’ve done a few upgrades in the last week or so:
- An extra 2GB of RAM, bringing the total up to 4GB. I’d previously noted that 2GB was a bit stingy, and I had an extra 2GB on order when I last wrote. Of course when it arrived it immediately rubbed my face in the fact that 32bit Windows 7 really doesn’t deal well with any more than 3GB. Time for another upgrade then…
- Windows 7 x64 (Ultimate). I’ve been a bit cautious about using x64 fearing issues with with drivers (and particularly driver signing). That said, I’ve been running Server 2008 x64 on my garage box for a while now without any snags, and the recently arrived ThinkPad Edge machines I got for the office also had Windows 7 x64 so it was time for a change. I didn’t want to blow away the supplied system though, and 250GB was a bit of a squeeze, so for a bit of space (and speed)…
- A Seagate Momentus 500GB 7200rpm. This drive is big and fast. I contemplated a large SSD, but felt that 256GB wouldn’t be large enough, and the price of 512GB SSDs is still stratospheric. Seagate claim that the Momentus only uses 0.05% more power than a regular 5400rpm drive, and it doesn’t seem like a power hog (but it does feel quick). It also works with the ‘airbag protection’ mechanism, which was at one time the sole preserve of Hitachi/IBM drives.
I think it needed all three upgrades to unshackle this machine’s capability, but it now really does feel fast and responsive.
Plugged in, not charging
I committed the cardinal sin of not waiting a full 12 hours for the battery to charge when I first got the machine, so I feel that I only have myself to blame for subsequent issues. But it was new, and shiny, and I needed it.
Anyway, battery management seemed to be a complete game of chance for the first week or so. The machine would regularly fail to charge, and battery life indicators would swing quite dramatically.
The update to Windows 7 x64 (or the clean install process) seemed to bring things back onto an even keel, and I had a bit more confidence that I could get 3, maybe even 4 hours out of the 8 cell battery. Then yesterday it basically refused to charge past 43%. I’ve now updated the BIOS, and it seems to be behaving, but this power management bugbear goes back to the early days of Vista, so I’m somewhat shocked that the shipping BIOS for a machine this new would still suffer.
Network management
I continue to be impressed by the GigE, which seems more useful than ever when paired up with a really fast drive.
The Lenovo comms utility seems to have been the only driver that has refused to install properly since the x64 upgrade. To be honest I’m not missing it as the default Windows 7 network management works well enough and doesn’t have me tearing my hair out at seemingly random radio on/off actions.
The bump is on the wrong side
After a bit of investigation I turned up an answer to my issue with ‘Display cannot switch to secondary portrait with this configuration‘. It seems that it’s all to do with the position of the WiFi/3G antennae and the proximity of them to the body when the screen is used in tablet mode. Lenovo, I have a suggestion – put the antenna hump on the left hand side.
Resuming
Since the clean install/upgrade to Windows 7 x64 resume from sleep seems to be more reliable and robust than it was before, and it also doesn’t start playing paused videos, which was a niggle before.
Video
I had a go at playing some HD (720p) video, which to be honest didn’t look that much more impressive that SD, but barely tickled the available resources. There was certainly no need to go into a battery sapping energy management configuration (though it was nice to turn up screen brightness, which seems to suffer more than my old s10e – maybe because of the tablet sensor stuff acting as a filter).
I also tried some video transcoding, which seemed impressively fast, though Divx Plus doesn’t give FPS data like the old Dr Divx. With a fast network and drive it’s almost worth copying stuff to and from this machine for transcoding.
Overall
The upgrades that I did were relatively cheap (about £100) and have transformed the machine. It really does feel pretty top class now, and I’m looking forward to continued use as my main machine for work and travel.
Filed under: technology | 4 Comments
Tags: 3G, lenovo, review, tablet, thinkpad, WWAN, x201, x201t
Not Only SQL
No, or Not Only
One of the most sensible things to emerge for the recent no:sql(eu) event (which sadly I didn’t attend) was a statement that NOSQL should be expanded to Not Only SQL rather than No SQL. This is an interesting development, as there’s been lots of good stuff going on in the NOSQL world, but the debate has been polarised and driven off centre.
I could be wrong about this, but it seems to be that the movement would be better labelled as NORDBMS, as it’s with relational databases that the problem lies, not the language used to query them.
The central point: SQL != RDBMS
Now I don’t have any particular complaint against RDBMS per se, it’s just that the world has moved on from a place where an RDBMS can be used as the default mechanism for persistence. The RDBMS has its place, and that place isn’t everywhere for everything. In fact I’d go so far as to say that the rational architect wouldn’t choose RDBMS from the plethora of available choice for all but a few projects starting from scratch today. That is if it wasn’t for organisational (and ecosystem biases), if it wasn’t for…
The cult of the DBA
DBA’s are the self appointed guardians of the modern firms ‘books and records’. They’re a conservative, safety first, sort of bunch, which is why they don’t really do new technology. And why should they, when the vendors that keep them supplied with T-Shirts, track days and conferences to slack off to assure them that they’re on top of all this new fangled stuff like XML and object caching and data warehousing.
The cult of the DBA is also powerful, with it’s leaders firmly emplaced in senior positions within the firm and across the industry. There are rules around here, and we know who set them.
Leaving practicalities aside, when you ascend to layers 8 & 9 of the OSI model (politics and religion), then the essence of the NOSQL movement is ‘screw you DBAs, I’m going to do this myself, I don’t need you and your time consuming processes’.
The cult is not alone however, as the RDBMS is just a veneer on top of the real persistence and…
The priesthood of storage
These are the guys that add the extra zeroes to the end of your cost per TB. The guys that have to run their own private networks (with their own esoteric protocols) to make up for the fact that storage inherently has no security.
Of course the priesthood make out like they’re saints – these are the guys that work weekends, just in case that slip of a finger takes out the whole trade floor.
Together, the cult and the priesthood have established themselves in such a way that the typical enterprise developer has no choice – if you want your data to be secure (and who doesn’t) then you put it in here (the RDBMS) and we look after it there (an EMC DMX or similar).
The impedance cost
I have written before about impedance mismatches in data, so I’ll try not to repeat myself too much.
The trouble with RDBMS is that relational form (and the set theory it’s based on) and yes, the SQL query language itself aren’t often the optimum way of representing data. This is especially true if you manipulate that data in an object oriented language (where you almost certainly represent it as objects) or exchange that data with others (using perhaps a text based expansion like XML). There are conversion costs in time, compute effort and fidelity when moving between representations. Common sense therefore suggests that if data can be stored in the same form that it’s manipulated then that’s a big win.
This problem isn’t confined to the code, as it extends to the modelling domain too. Entity Relationship (ER) tools are great at helping you organise how you put things into an RDBMS, but I feel that’s where the story ends.
The training cost
A (perhaps specious) argument I’ve heard against new data management techniques and technologies is that ‘my developers know SQL’. Setting aside for a moment my scepticism that SELECTs and JOINs are blunt instruments compared to the other tools in the bag, I do accept that fully exploring and understanding the tool bag is too much for the average developer – so if SQL is what they know then let’s take advantage of that. This is where things get interesting…
Bolt on (or bolt in) a SQL parser
Just because you have an unconventional data storage paradigm (e.g. anything that’s not RDBMS) doesn’t meant that you can’t understand SQL. Mike Stonebraker clearly understood this when he chose StreamSQL as the way to go for complex event processing (CEP) queries with StreamBase. Others are starting to follow the lead. Sean Park recently pointed me at GenieDB, which looks like a very interesting hybrid of memcached and MySQL. My first reaction was that it’s a system that will let you have your cake and eat it (and that provides a reasonable path to eating LOTS of cake really quick when that need arises). I hope to kick the tyres soon (and report back here what I find).
And in the cloud
This post wouldn’t be complete without a comment on the big news of the day – VMWare (Springsource) buying Gemstone, which is clearly a big bet it the NOSQL space. This will get interesting, as VMWare now have all of the pieces to make a complete Platform as a Service (PaaS) that can sit on top of VSphere (and other?) Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Since they can abstract and automate a lot of the traditional admin overhead out of the way then I think this torpedoes the cult of the DBA and the priesthood of storage – there simply isn’t a place for these people in a cloudy world (public, private, hybrid or whatever). And just to be clear, I’m not arguing that systems administration evaporates into the cloud (I’m with the very wise Simon Wardley on this one); but the discipline of system administration changes – progress routes around obstacles, and the cult/priesthood certainly were obstacles. NOSQL has implications for developer productivity, systems administration workload and risk. No of these are trivial, but new and better choices are now on the table, and I sense that there’s more to come.
Filed under: cloud, software, technology | 3 Comments
Tags: cloud, database, dba, iaas, nosql, paas, rdbms, sql, storage
Broadband Britain – really?
I’ve just spent the last few weeks trying to suck the cloud through a very thin and broken straw – my mistake, trying to use the Internet in the City of London.
The proposed telephone tax that came out of the Digital Britain report (and failed to find its way through parliament in the finance bill) was supposed to guarantee ‘fast’ broadband access across the country. What this meant in practice was a 2Mb/s (max) ADSL connection for rural areas that presently don’t get any broadband at all. I think the powers that be have been looking in the wrong place. If we want a strong digital economy then how about decent connectivity at a fair price for business users in our cities?
Right now there seem to be three choices out there:
1. xDSL
Digital Subscriber Line technology comes in two different forms:
ADSL
Asymmetric services usually have far greater download speeds than upload, which kind of presumes a web browsing workload (where requests are small in comparison to responses) rather than something where traffic is equal in both directions like email or voice over IP (VOIP). Using VOIP phones was part of my plan for the recent office move, so I knew that I’d need a decent upload capacity (say 1Mb/s) so an ADSL2 service that offered 20Mb/s down and 2.5Mb/s up looked like it would be barely adequate, and reasonably priced at £20/month. The best bit was that it could be installed quickly.
Sadly the install didn’t go so well, and we had a lot of hassle getting any connection at all. Worse still it turned out that our local exchange (the one that basically covers most of the City) couldn’t actually do ADSL2, so we got regular ADSL – 8Mb/s down and only 500Kb/s up (best case) – nothing like what I needed for the phones. It’s simply staggering that the exchange infrastructure in central London hasn’t been upgraded, but somehow that’s the case. I suspect two things come into play here – 1. very few residential properties in the area (and hence little pressure from Ofcom to meet consumer targets) and 2. a desire to get business users to buy more expensive services (of which more to follow).
In the end it took 3 weeks to get the service working properly, and I’m grateful to my friends at BT for pushing things along and providing the help needed to navigate retail, wholesale and OpenReach. It seems that the culprit was a dodgy (BT supplied) 2Wire router – I guess it’s always the last thing that you change that fixes things.
With the worst of the jitter and drop outs behind us ADSL is probably sufficient for a lot of the Web/SaaS stuff that we consume, but more than a handful of phone calls was going to remain a problem.
SDSL
Since I can’t get the upload speed that I need for VOIP with ADSL (and can’t get ADSL2) I’ve had to order an SDSL service. This is seriously not cheap at nearer £200/month for 2Mb/s (and the engineer I saw whilst troubleshooting the ADSL woes says I’ll be lucky to get more than 1Mb/s out of that since the exchange is so far away). There are cheaper services out there, but they all use SDSL-M, which is essentially the same tech as ADSL2, and thus not available to me in the middle of the City.
I’m told that SDSL is being phased out soon, which brings us to…
2. Ethernet First Mile
The use of Ethernet in the First Mile seems fairly new in the UK, though I understand it’s been commonplace in AsiaPac for the best part of the last decade (my brother in law used to get a 100Mb/s service to his flat in Sapporo for £12/month about 5-6 years ago).
I got some quotes for EFM, which started at £300/month for 2Mb/s! Even worse there was a 3 year minimum contract – a bit tough when your sub lease is only 2.5 years. Costs spiral upwards towards around £500/month for 5Mb/s.
I don’t think this situation will endure for too long, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see 5Mb/s for £99/month on one year contracts in the next year or two, which is one of the reasons I decided to suck up the cost of SDSL for the time being.
For the real speed freak there is of course…
3. Fibre
For as little as £550/month you can get a part share (say 25-50Mb/s) of a 100Mb/s pipe over fibre. Of course the fibre itself can carry a whole lot more than that, and the bandwidth that you can get for your £ goes up quickly. Whilst this seems good value against EFM it’s worth looking further afield. In Hong Kong they can get 1Gb/s for $200HK/month (which is less than £20), and I expect it’s much the same in S. Korea and Japan etc. Why are the economics of fixed line connections so different in that region?
I was very tempted to go for a low end fibre connection, but spending something North of £7k a year on data seemed like a lot for a small company, and there’s another problem – installation takes about 3 months, so even if I’d ordered the moment we’d chosen the new place (and before leases were sorted out etc.) I’d still be waiting another 6 weeks. Clearly the demand is out there – it must be a nice business to be in.
Getting by
Whilst the ADSL wasn’t working we ran the office on my MiFi (and one or two other 3G cards) and mobile phones. This wasn’t great, but it wasn’t awful either. 3G certainly works better than unreliable ADSL.
Getting better
What would have helped a lot here is if the building had some of the infrastructure already in place – say a fibre termination and router. Then new tenants could be flexibly given muxes on the fibre to deliver the bandwidth they need. This could potentially be a sweet deal between the landlord and his chosen telco, and would save a lot of delay and duplicated equipment.
Why isn’t this happening?
My guess would be that there’s still far too much profit in the traditional leased line business (and fixed line voice) and that prices are being kept artificiality high to avoid canibilisation.
Filed under: could_do_better, technology | 2 Comments
Tags: adsl, broadband, efm, fiber, fibre, sdsl, voip, xdsl
The arrival of my shiny new Lenovo X201 Tablet meant that I had to lay my hands on a 3G SIM so that I could try out its WWAN (the 3 SIM in my MiFi was pressed into other duties, but that’s another story for another day).
For a while I’ve been recommending Vodafone’s Top Up and Go (TUG) to friends and family, so I took my own advice and picked up a package from Maplin (knowing already that a SIM only approach was futile, and that I’d have to get an extraneous ‘dongle’). The best bit about TUG was that the credit didn’t expire so long as you used it every 6 months, so I was dismayed to discover that TUG credit now expires after 30 days. The counterbalance is that you now get 3GB for your £15 (rather than the old 1GB), but this isn’t a fair swap in my mind, and it seems that I’m not alone in thinking this. The official line on what’s going on is in Vodafone’s forum.
I typically use around 900MB of 3G data in a month, so the old Vodafone deal would have been perfect for me (as an alternative to my £15/15GB with 3). If I wasn’t tied into a 2yr deal with 3 I might have swapped already. I’d be very surprised however to find myself topping up much (if at all) on the new deal. For me Vodafone has lost a customer and recommender by joining the race to the bottom and losing its key differentiation (though coverage on my daily commute has been great). At the same time it seems that O2 and T-Mobile are becoming more friendly to the occasional user by offering £2/day tariffs and the ability to buy weeks (as well as months). Perhaps the trend here is to sell on time rather than data volume, but if that’s the case then Vodafone isn’t offering the choice that others are.
It’s also worth mentioning that Vodafone have stood up an new APN to support this new PAYG rate, so you need to configure the APN as ppbundle.internet. The username/password remain the same as ever as web/web. It took me a while to dig this out of the web so that I could configure my modem right, as most sites still have the old pp.internet guidance.
Filed under: could_do_better, technology | Leave a Comment
Tags: 3G, APN, payg, sim, tug, vodafone, WWAN
A few weeks ago I was pretty upset with Lenovo after they cancelled my order for an s10-3t netvertible. My last update flagged that Lenovo had been in touch, and I wondered if there might be a happy ending? There was, as Lenovo came back to me promising an s10-3t as soon as they hit UK shores. Sadly that hasn’t happened yet, and their arrival seems to be slipping further back, so in the mean time they’ve given me an X201T to play with.
Spec
It’s got a 2GHz Core i7 (620), which is dual core with hyperthreading. RAM is a somewhat miserly 2GB, which turns out to be barely adequate to run Windows 7 and a bunch of apps. Since I’m already seeing some long pauses for virtual memory management I have another 2GB on order, which should sort things out.
Stepping up to the latest and greatest silicon is a double edged sword. It’s certainly a fast and responsive machine, but then I’ve been living with an Atom netbook for the last year. Battery life seems to have been compromised though. Given that it has a pretty big extended battery on it I’d hope for something that can manage a transatlantic flight (at least when new), but I’m typically seeing the battery meter saying that it will manage somewhere between just over 1 to 4 hours on a full charge (depending on the energy mode selected, which can automatically switch when playing video etc.).
The screen is 1280×800 in a wide format. It’s not quite as gorgeous as the 1440×1024 that I used to have on my old X60T, but it’s still a decent chunk of real estate. The Intel HD card that drives the screen seems adequate. At least Windows 7 on this seems to be able to play (standard definition) video, which was always a struggle with Vista on my X60T (which was ridiculous considering that my old 400MHz P3 T20 could play video just fine).
Integrated WWAN
I’ve been bleating for some time that laptops, netbooks and tablets should have 3G cards built in (or at least have the option), but it seems that too few do. This machine has an integrated Qualcomm Gobi 2000, which should work on just about any network. I’ve tried it out with 3, O2 and Vodafone SIMs, and it’s worked pretty flawlessly with everything I’ve thrown at it. Vodafone seem to have excellent coverage along my commute, so I’ve been running a PAYG SIM for the last few days. It’s given me the best mobile connectivity experience that I’ve witnessed yet. This is probably something to do with the ugly and fragile looking antenna on the top of the screen. I’m worried that it’s going to break, but it certainly seems to help with reception.
Lenovo have done a good job with the tools for managing WWAN, and in most cases you can just throw in a SIM and it figures out what it needs to do when you press connect. What a shame that SIMs are so hard to come by for the sort of globetrotter who’s likely to go for a machine like this.
GPS
The WWAN card also does GPS, and the antenna hump seems to help here too. Reception is quick, and it seems to find more satellites when compared to my old MS USB device. It doesn’t really work indoors though, so it’s more one of those things for the train or car (and it’s certainly fun to watch the map whiz by on MapPoint, particularly when somewhere unfamiliar).
The supplied Lenovo software seems to be little more than a Google Maps mashup, so some proper mapping software is certainly a good plan.
Things I like
Trackpoint – I’ve been a long time user of ThinkPads, and I’ve always considered the TrackPoint to be superior to the TrackPad (especially since the centre button was introduced for scrolling). As soon as I started using the X201 the muscle memory came back. The silly part was that I tried to use the non existent TrackPoint on my s10e when I went back to that. Why don’t Lenovo’s netbooks have TrackPoints – it would be a great addition to the range, and help differentiate them from other netbooks?
USB power when off – this seems to be a common feature these days, but it’s very welcome (and this is the first machine in my hands that has it). The geek travel pack has plenty of things to charge gadgets (USB and otherwise), but I have in the past often found myself having to leave my machine on just so that I can have a fully charged BlackBerry or iPod (both of which seem especially fussy about power) in the morning.
Gigabit ethernet – something else that the old X60T had, and very useful for moving video off my main box.
Stuff that’s missing
Fingerprint reader – this is clearly an option that my particular model doesn’t come with, as there’s a little bit of plastic over where it should be. This really should be standard on a tablet, as putting passwords in when using tablet mode is no fun at all. I guess that Lenovo could use their VeriFace technology and the built in webcam, but that’s not on offer here.
SD card reader – my old X60T had a great one of these where the SD card went in flush, and my s10e at least had the slot even if the card did poke out when in use. This is a surprising and annoying omission in my view, and having a full size ExpressCard 54 socket doesn’t seem like a fair trade to me. Update – somehow I managed to miss this. It’s on the front rather than the side, and it does hold an SD card nice and snug. Next thing is to see if it can boot from it (handy for BackTrack etc.)
HDMI port – the ThinkPad Edge models that I got for the guys in the office have HDMI, but not this higher end model with its grand claims to HD graphics. Again I’d happily trade the port real estate taken by the ExpressCard.
Niggles
WiFi switching off – for some reason that I haven’t yet fathomed it seems that the X201 keeps switching the WiFi off and back on again. It doesn’t seem to interrupt my work in any measurable way, but it is a distraction. In fact the whole network management is a bit too clever clogs, with the machine constantly trying to assert profiles based on locations.
Audio volume – one of the nice things that the s10e does is remember different volume settings for different outputs, so I can have it loud through my earphones when watching a video on the train, and quiet (or muted) in the office so that tweets don’t disturb my coworkers. With the X201 it seems that there’s only one volume setting, so you constantly have to adjust to the environment.
Video playing on resume – when I pause a video before putting my machine to sleep I don’t want to start watching it again the moment it wakes up.
Keyboard – the keyboard is a decent size and has a good feel, but it needs to be hammered. I seem to keep on having missing letters (more often vowels) because I haven’t hit it hard enough.
Cursor control – my X60T had a handy little cursor control circle in the bezel beside the touch screen, which was great for navigating PDFs and eBooks when in tablet mode. If this machine was multitouch (it isn’t) then I’d expect that I could use some gesture to scroll, but without either means it’s pretty clumsy work getting around with the stylus.
The wrong way around – with an extended battery the natural way to hold this thing in tablet mode (for a right hander like me) is with the battery in the left hand and stylus in the right. Unfortunately I get ‘Display cannot switch to secondary portrait with this configuration’ the moment that I hold the machine this way – it lets me put the screen in that orientation, but flips back and gives me the error message as soon as I pick it up. WTF, and what configuration do I need to change to make this stop. Looking at the icons down the side of the screen it seems that the whole thing has been designed for left handed usage.
Overall
I’ve enjoyed using the X201 over the last few days. It’s positive features are certainly more than enough to make up for the niggles. I’d just love for there to be an X202 that gets things even better.
Of course the one overwhelming issue is the size and weight. I’ve become very accustomed to having a machine that slips into my bag with space beside it for a decent paperback, and the extra 700g over my s10e is noticeable when I pick up my bag. The machine I originally ordered, the s10-3t, would almost certainly deal with these issues; and I bet it would be great with built in WWAN.
Update 11 May 2010 – I did a follow up post of week 2.
Filed under: did_do_better, technology | 2 Comments
Tags: 3G, GPS, lenovo, review, tablet, thinkpad, WWAN, x201, x201t
Holiday in Florida 2010
Getting there
It’s often argued amongst business travellers which of London Heathrow (LHR) or New York (JFK) qualifies as the worst airport in the world. In my opinion they’re both bad, but Orlando (MCO) is the winner of that dubious honour – subjecting travellers to another round of security screening after they’ve been through passport control and customs is just the worst sort of insanity, and exactly what you don’t want after flying for 10 hours with (by then) cranky kids. On my last trip to Florida we flew to Miami and eventually drove to the Orlando parks area, this worked out pretty well, but on return I figured out that Tampa might have been an even better choice so I gave it a go this time.
For what might be the last time I chose to fly BA, which operates a Gatwick to Tampa route (I have to go past Gatwick to get to Heathrow, so it’s a natural preference). This choice turned out to be fortuitous as we flew out on the first day of BA’s strike, but Gatwick routes weren’t affected (since BA cut the deal with Gatwick staff some time ago that it’s now trying to make work across the rest of its operations). BA is a troubled company these days, and not just by their staff/union issues. This trip gave me a fresh perspective on their problems, and it seems to me that their leisure customers have totally unrealistic expectations of their economy product – they’ve set themselves up to fail as people expect more than they’ll ever receive. I have a stack of BA points to burn through, not to mention an Amex card companion voucher, so I will do my best to put those to work, but otherwise BA is at the back of my preference list.
Tampa turned out to be a good choice, with one significant gotcha for the inexperienced – just after passport and customs (which was no worse than any other US airport I’ve encountered in the last decade, and better than many) you have to get over to another terminal area via a little shuttle tram. Don’t under any circumstances put your luggage onto the conveyor after the customs check – keep it with you on the tram – otherwise you’ll have a 30-40 minute wait at the other end – quite ridiculous.
On my last trip we used an airport hotel for the first night, and picked the hire car up in the morning. This allows the tired kids (and adults) to hit the hay without further queuing for a car and a drive to whatever the final destination might be (which can stack up to another 2-3 hours). This worked well for me once again, as the TownePlace Suites was convenient, friendly and inexpensive, and it turned out to be right across the road from the Alamo/National hire car depot where there was no wait whatsoever the following morning at 9am.
Car rental
On my last trip I’d got a convertible (a Ford Mustang), and this time around I booked another as it adds to the whole holiday experience. Alamo/National (at least at Tampa airport) operate a system where you pick your own car from the lot from whatever class you paid for. This gave me the choice of two Mustang’s and two Sebring’s. I picked out a Sebring as it had Aux in (for my iPod) and a bit more leg room for the kids.
The state of my Sebring (and its brother that we left in the lot) gave me cause to consider whether the whole car rental model has been forced to change during the financial crisis. I’ve grown used to new(ish) cars that the rental company buys at deep discount from the maker and then sells a few thousand miles later at a profit into the used market. A model where the rental cost is incidental, and pretty much there to cover insurance. That doesn’t seem to be how things are working any more (since the bottom fell out of the used market). My Sebring had almost 35,000 miles on it, and what seemed like a whole lifetime’s worth of wear and tear (e.g. almost all the paint had flaked off the door handles). It felt like a bit of a clunker.
Renting a GPS for a couple of weeks costs much the same as buying one, and I’ve already written about my decision to get TomTom for my iPod so that I could find my way on this trip. I saw PNDs in a local supermarket for $105 so I’m guessing that the most cost effective approach is to buy a GPS (or have one shipped to your arrival hotel) and then eBay it on return home (or keep it for future trips).
Destination
Having found it fitted our needs perfectly we chose to stay once again in Chris Rackstraw’s lovely villa near the parks (and if you like what you see there then please say I sent you so that I get a future discount – just don’t book Easter 2012 ;-). There are just two things I would change about this place – the Internet connection would probably be more convenient for most people if it had WiFi (I used my little travel router) and it would be great if the plasma had a VGA connection so that I could watch material from my netbook (though one day I might have something that could feed one of the unused [but inaccessible] HDMI’s).
Having a pool and hot tub was perfect for chilling out after a long day in the parks, and gave the kids some incentive to head home and splash around.
The attractions
Disneyworld
This was my 4th visit to the Mouse in his house, so I must be a sucker for Disney’s particular flavour of crass commercialism. They just do everything so well.
The kids didn’t seem to remember that much from their previous visit, so for them it was all pretty fresh. For me it was a chance to revisit old favourites like the ‘Circlevision’ show at the China piece of Epcot. We also hit the ‘coasters pretty hard as my youngest is an adrenaline junky and now tall enough to ride everything that Disney can throw at her.
Epcot, Animal Kingdom and the Magic Kingdom worked out pretty much as expected. Hollywood Studios was horrendously busy on our first visit (and a salutary lesson that ‘Spring Break‘ isn’t so easily avoided in the US), and required another trip in order to do the Rockin’ Rollercoaster (twice) in addition to the Tower of Terror. The lesson from this trip is that hopper tickets probably aren’t worth the extra. They’re a good idea if you only have 3-4 days to hit 4 parks, but if you have a couple of weeks to fit in 6-7 visits then you can plan on a park a day and take things easy. Since extra days are inexpensive I’ll probably buy more days in the future in preference to hopper tickets.
My little princess was booked in (weeks in advance) for a makeover at the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique in the Magic Kindom, which formed the kernel of a girls day out. Meanwhile the boys headed for…
Kennedy Space Center
My first trip to KSC was brilliant, but that was back in the days when it was still a slightly amateurish operation. Last time around I found the bus trip to be a nightmare of queues, and just a bit too prepacked and boring. This time I chose to stick to the visitor center itself and fully explore the place, which turned out to be a good call – there was plenty there to fill a day. The only part of the bus tour that I felt I missed out on was the Saturn V exhibit, but it just wasn’t worth the money and time to tack that on.
The hidden gem of KSC that we hit on the way home is the Astronaut Hall of Fame. There’s a lot more to this place than a bunch of plaques commemorating the men and the missions, and it’s included in the visitor center ticket price.
SeaWorld
I’ve driven past this place a lot, but this was the first time visiting the park. Perhaps because it was fresher than the Disney parks I came away thinking that SeaWorld was in fact the best of the bunch.
The kids loved the various shows, whilst I was impressed by the ‘coasters – Kraken was simply the best I’ve ever ridden, and I liked the gimmick on Manta of ‘flying’ face down.
I was impressed that ‘Shamu’s Happy Harbor’ wasn’t jam packed like similar play/amusement areas at Disney, and we used our second ‘free’ day to return there and let the kids play without any queuing or hassle.
Dinosaur World
This was a time killer between leaving the villa and getting the flight home, and turned out to be a lot better than I expected (though I did have pretty low expectations).
My budding palaeontologists enjoyed killing a couple of hours there, but it’s certainly not whole day out.
Eating out
The big disappointment of the trip was that I didn’t get to eat in Disney’s California Grill. It was booked solid, and the lesson was that I should have made a reservation months in advance (like I did for Bibbidi Bobbidi). To make up for things we returned to the Flying Fish Cafe on the Boardwalk, and the seafood there was once again outstanding – that place probably now scores two of the best ten meals I’ve had in my life.
Closer to home the restaurants on US192 felt a bit like cable TV – too much choice, but nothing that you really want to consume. One exception was the Longhorn Steakhouse. I’d read good reviews on the original location in Kissemmee, and the newer branch nearby is clearly living up to expectations. Looking at their site this seems to be quite a large chain, so I may have to try it out elsewhere when I’m in the states as the porterhouse was excellent.
We also went out for some Mexican food, trying out El Patron. I must confess some disappointment with the Mole, which I expected to be more exciting, but the Fajitas were good, and anywhere that can make decent guacamole and margaritas deserves another visit.
Lunch was mostly park food, which wasn’t too bad or too pricey if you pick wisely – just avoid the gallons of HFCS drenched soda if you want to preserve that waistline (as Cory Doctrow puts it ‘industrial waste disguised as food’). I mostly went for salady options, but the chilli cheese hotdog at SeaWorld was a guilty pleasure – deliciously dreadful. I got dragged into the T-Rex Cafe at Downtown Disney against my better judgement, and must say that it was (much) less awful and less of a rip off than I feared.
Shopping
I’ve picked up some real bargains in the past (when the exchange rate was $1.8-2/£). My favourite buy is my Timberland GoreTex boots, which I had resoled the year before last after they fell apart on a Helvellyn hike.
This year with the rate at $1.5/£ there were fewer bargains, but they were still there. I tend to prefer Orlando Premium Outlets over the bunch at the other end of International Drive, but the selection at both seems to have homogonised over the last few years. Go early if you don’t want to spend ages finding a parking space.
I almost missed the nearby Target (having used the Publix over the road for most groceries). It’s a cornucopia sort of place, and seemed to offer better brands than Walmart at similar prices.
Power and telephones
In addition to the usual geek travel kit I took along a couple of Swiss Travel Worldwide Adapters with USB and a US Griffin iPod adapter (which is really just a USB adapter with a USB-iPod cable). It really is so much easier to keep those mobiles, cameras, DS Lites and PSPs going with USB chords than it is to take the full ensemble of dedicated adaptors (which would be a bag of its own).
For mobiles I picked up a couple of AT&T Go SIMs on eBay and bought $25 credit for each, which along with my usual T-Mobile PAYG SIM proved ample for the entire two weeks for keeping in touch with each other and home. I didn’t switch my own mobile onto a US network at all. Back at home I forwarded it to my SkypeIn number, which I in turn forwarded to my US cell (using a worldwide subscription so that it wouldn’t eat into my Skype credit). For calling home I used Skype’s excellent ToGo service (which provides local points of presence so that you can bridge into the Skype network [and call rates] for a local call). All in all this gave us reasonably seamless functionality with very low cost (certainly a whole lot less than running 3 mobiles on international roaming for 2 weeks).
Next time around
We had a great couple of weeks, and I’d certainly fly to Tampa again, use the same hotel airport (maybe even hang around there for a few days and do Busch Gardens etc.), and stay in the same villa. I’ve not been back to Universal Studios since 1997, and I’d also like to try out Discovery Cove and maybe some of the water parks.
Any other suggestions?
Filed under: travel | 2 Comments
Tags: disney, disneyworld, holiday, Orlando, seaworld, travel, vacation
The day democracy died
I greatly fear that tomorrow, Tue 6 Apr 2010, will go down in history as the day democracy died.
I am of course writing once again about the Digital Economy Bill [1] in the UK, and its big brother ACTA. Pieces of legislation penned by the lobbyists for media distribution companies and about to be rammed down the throats of their customers the general public. Pieces of legislation that are intended to protect corporate interests in cyberspace, but that have huge unintended consequences for freedom of speech and nascent innovation. Whoever said ‘never pick a fight with somebody who buys ink by the barrel’ was spot on. How ironic that this is about a world where there is no ink, and the only barrels to be seen are thrown by Donkey Kong.
I must confess here that I was naive and complacent. When the bill was formally announced in the 2009 Queen’s speech I thought that there was no chance it would make it through parliament before the looming general election. I thought that it was part of a vanity parade, where each department had to have a slice of the pie on their big day, but that this government would have more important things to see to in its dying days. I thought that the proposed legislation was too fatally flawed to make its way through parliament, that the abandonment of the consultation process that was supposedly behind the bill would fatally wound it before it got anywhere. I thought that the process would slow it down too much, that it simply wouldn’t get through in time.
I was wrong on every count, and looking back to the summer I wish I had joined the fight sooner.
It is now clear that this is the keeper – the one bill that this government is hell-bent on ramming through. Baron Mandelson (of Modor) has a busy portfolio, but it seems that most of his energy has been expended into seeing this one over the line.
It’s now clear that there is no effective opposition to the bill. The Tories are just as in bed with the media lobby as New Labour, and the Lib Dems changed sides too late to offer much hope of repairing the earlier damage that they wrought. Without an effective opposition it doesn’t matter how defective a piece of legislation is. Sadly it seems that the main UK political parties are too often in violent agreement on what should be contentious issues.
Worst of all this bill has laid bare the damage accumulated over the last thirteen years on Britain’s parliamentary process. New Labour would never have been able to become the new crime a day sausage machine that it is without tearing the obstacles of due process out of their way. Much was made of the changes to who sat in the house of Lords, but I mustn’t have been paying attention to the part where they changed roles to tenderising the sausage before it goes through the machine rather than checking on quality when it comes out. I still thought that the Lords could send back bad legislation to the commons (at least for a few iterations), and that’s just not true any more – the process has been ‘streamlined’ in a way that must be the envy of every tin pot dictator on the planet.
I feel it would be over-egging the pudding to say that there’s been a popular backlash over the last few weeks. Yes, tens of thousands of people have written to their MPs, but I fear that the die is already cast. The digital early settlers that I count myself amongst have fooled ourselves that we have power, that what we say on social networks, in blogs etc. has real impact, that we reach millions at the click of a search button. It’s not true though; the digital natives seem to be just as unaware (or uncaring) of what’s going on as the analogue generation for whom popularity is defined by the talking head on TV (regardless of whether that TV signal is analogue or digital). It leaves me wondering if the media industry are in such a rush over this one because they sense that it’s their last chance?
As I said after my talk at CloudCamp London, I really hope that in a few weeks time I’ll be the idiot who was making a fuss over nothing. At this stage however I really fear that I was just too late, or even that I joined an impossible fight. The dark side to this legislation is that it hands control of the Internet or an Orwelian government machine. When Britain, the supposed home of democracy, becomes like China because the spin doctors and their cronies made it seem like a god idea then we all have something to fear, wherever we live.
[1] I’ve stopped linking to the Wikipedia entry on this, as it seems to me that nobody is keeping in top of the detail, and there’s much better coverage elsewhere. At this stage I can particularly recommend JP’s Blog.
Filed under: politics | 2 Comments
Tags: acta, debill, democracy
Filed under: could_do_better, grumble, technology | 4 Comments
Tags: customer service, lenovo, s10-3t
Chris Swan's Weblog 