Rants of a mobile dev » Reviews

Android G1 Battery Calibration

drubin — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 11:28:00 +0000

I mentioned a few days ago I had a G1 phone in there I mentioned the battery life was shocking . nabil2199 mentioned a battery calibration link it really does work.

That article wasn’t the most clear in the world of what you need to do to calibrate your battery.
1) Let it discharge completely(Even when it says it is dead carry on discharging, mine ran on 0% power for a good few hours)
2) Charge it fully while it is off.
3) Let it discharge completely again.
4) Charge it fully.

It seems silly but it does work, My battery life has improved so much since doing this silly thing.

Nokia’s Music Store Fail

drubin — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 07:05:56 +0000

I heard last night on the Tv that Nokia is going to be releasing their Music store at first I thought maybe this would be great for South Africa since the majority of our population do not have smart phones such as the iphone….

They claim to launch on the 24th but if their current site is any thing to go on I as well as many others will be highly disappointed.

Major issues.
1) Going to the site on a mobile (Nokia 6300) gives a content type of wml (text/vnd.wap.wml) on a phone that clearly supports xhtml mobile profile.
2) Their site isn’t even in wml it is xhtml served with a content type of xml FAIL! on most of the phones
3) They site is missing the correct xml decleration. This is normally an issue with IE6 since it doesn’t understand xml…. but wait I thought this was a mobile site?
4) Mobile profile
should be used instead of
5) Use of javascript on a phone that clearly doesn’t support it, way to go to save data use age.
6) IE specific css Is this a website NO!

Oddly enough the UK version is more mobile compliant then the international one with minor errors like the xml header (point 1 and 2) other wise pretty nice site.

I am pretty sure there are more basic errors and maybe I will bother to check it out again and update this post but for now I have other important stuff to get done.

I have An droid

drubin — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 14:07:25 +0000

I have been using/testing out the G1, based on google’s android coming from a hard core Nokia user it has been an very pleasant experience.

So far I must say I am enjoying it. The Google integration is flawless (What else did you expect). When loading the sim for the first time it asks you for a Google account a few seconds after authentication all your contacts calendar and emails are all synced down to the phone. The contact sync feature to me was the greatest since my old phone had gone to mobile heaven.

Their UI is by far one of the easiest to use and most intuitive. I have only tried out the Apple’s Iphone but so far the fact this phone as a qwerty keyboard makes it easier to use. This does take some getting used to I still feel I type faster on the standard 9 key mobile keypad then this smaller qwerty one.

Hopefully in the next while I will be able to check out their SDK and put together some sort of app. For now I guess I will have to just live with a super cool phone.

Word of note the the synchronization can kinda kill your battery life but all of this is easily turned off or configured to happen at a less frequent interval.

Facebook For Dummies

drubin — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 18:45:39 +0000

I was in shopping around over the weekend and I happened to walk past the book store and happened to see Facebook For Dummies. There is even a Facebook page devoted to this book.

I mean seriously who would buy a how to for a website that continually changes and adds new feature sets as often as Facebook does?

Gmail Mobile V2

drubin — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 12:56:49 +0000

In one of gmails blogs they announced the release of version 2 of their mobile application for gmail. I was very excited to try out the new features this had to offer

Multiple Accounts
Basic Off line usage
New short cut keys

At first I was very pleased with the cleaned up look and feel the added short cut keys making navigation much simpler on a mobile device with limited screen sizes and most phones lacking fully functional keyboards.

Just for the record I am currently using a Nokia 6300 wiki | gsmarena |nokia making use of edge data connection

At the start of this testing proccess the jar/application was +-256.8kb for a phone application this is quite chunky it is still with in the acceptable bounds for the maximum jar size my phone can handle +-1mb. To my surprise running the application for the first time brought up a loading while it attempted to download the other parts of the application such as images etc. (I do not know exactly what was downloaded with out going into further debugging/decompilation at this point in time I am sure that would breach their EULA) after this proccess the application had taken up +-400kb of my phones internal memory and I had to remove 2 of my previous application in order to make space for this “beast” of an application.

As part of the offline browsing of mail, Gmail has to cache the mail on the phone in order for it to available offline. Using some sort of format in the RMS(Record Management System) anyway phones have a limited amount of RMS data that can be stored per application. This is something that worries me currently my Gmail application is sitting at 830kb this is an exceptionally big for a mobile application.

For a mobile developer as my self I like to see things catered for the lowest (reasonable) common denominator. While using this new improved version of gmail I had to remove another application in order to make space for my ever growing Gmail one.

Benchmarks Questions

Is there a limit to how much Gmail will try and store on my phone?
Does the application ever check getSizeAvailable or getSize before trying to write to the RMS
Will there be an option to turn off offline caching?
How much data transfer is really saved by not reading from an http connection and reading from the RMS – Is the amount of kb’s saved worth the read/write access to my phones persistent storage

I would really like to revert to the older version of Gmail as I use this application often when I am not near a PC in order to check for important emails. The only issue with this I had to remove the old one to make space for V2 and they have since removed the option to download the legacy version.

Update:
I have reported this on the Gmail list archives here.

Taken Movie Review

drubin — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 22:39:30 +0000

I decided that other then programming/linux stuff I might as well write about something else I enjoy. It has been a long time since I watched a truly great movie. I mean I have seen a few enjoyable ones that I would rate highly based on sit down factorÂ®(This is how much you want to remain in your seat during the movie) . Sorry to say butÂ Zohan would not be rated as a great movie but very funny and highly rated on the “sit down factor”.

I went to go and see Taken last week. The only thing I knew about the movie wasÂ a quote from the trailer. “I dont know who you are, I dont know what you wantÂ if you are looking for a randson I can tell you have no money but what I do have is a very particular set of skills that I have aquired over a very long career, skills that make me a nightmare for people like you….”Â This movie is listed as Action a Thriller would be more accurate. The movie is action packed with abitous fight scenes Drama, Suspense.Â This was one of the better movies I have seen this year. Very simple plot but very well executed. With out giving away too much of the movie I am just going to say it was well worth watching and definitely had the “sit down factor”Â®

Imdb.com rated it as a 7.9/10 I would give it aÂ 8.2/10