This is a bit of a placeholder, since I linked to this post from another post before I'd actually written this one. There should be a longer review along soon - no more than a few days.

Like most people, I've been through a bunch of mobile phones in the past few years, keeping at least somewhat up with technology - when I was in the UK, it was funded by subsidies from the operator once I signed a contract, but I've been buying phones retail in HK and been quite happy on a no-minimum-term contract, in particular one which gives me a decent amount of included voice minutes and unlimited GPRS. I don't actually talk on the phone that much, since most of my communication is either online or face-to-face nowadays, but having an always-on connection terminating at a smart device in my pocket is quite nice.

It's small, it's sleek, it's got a smaller but brighter screen than my Treo 680. The interface is a little slow, but the individual programs are fine. The world of UIQ3 software seems very small, even compared with the sadly shrinking PalmOS world. The built-in email software is usable, even if it behaves slightly strangely - Chatter Email for PalmOS is nicer, but that's a dead end now anyway since the author was hired by Palm. The signing thing complicates things a bit and probably contributes to the shortage of third-party software, as does the UIQ/S60 split. The built-in media player is quite nice, even if it doesn't do Ogg - or for that matter, AVI. Getting used to handwriting recognition and a phone-type keyboard rather than a qwerty keyboard is taking a bit of time. The battery life is almost certainly longer than the Treo, but I haven't really stress-tested that yet. I wish they'd just use a USB connector. Full Java support is nice, and makes the software situation a little less disastrous. I'm waiting for the first OS update for what is a pretty recently-released phone, which will apparently have some Flash support - I don't care too much for Flash, but it would be nice if it gets delivered with a newer version of the Opera Mobile browser. Alternatively, there is some work going on to put together a webkit-based browser, which should be able to handle most/all iPhone-targeted sites, which would be nice. I might do some hacking at some point to remove the Chinese support, which might make some of the input quicker. I wish it had the hard soft buttons of the G700, rather than the soft soft ones, but I think the wifi and better camera are fair exchange. Wifi on a phone is nice, but I haven't really had a chance to use it on a public network yet, rather than at home. My mobile network are offering access to their affiliated wifi network for almost nothing if you are already paying for a data plan, so I've signed up and will try it out sometime soon. It's a 3G phone, but my (current) phone network is 2G-only, so I can't comment on 3G at all. It cost me $3780, standard Hong Kong retail price, but I've got a year's interest free credit so I'm paying around $315 per month and the shop threw in: (deep breath) spare battery and charger, screen protector, SE gym-sized bag, a voucher to get some crappy stickers for the phone, a 2GB memory card, a couple of pads and fridge magnets in the shape of the phone, two cans of Coke Zero and a large metal retro-style Coke thermometer. They call it dark brown, but it's really just a slightly 'warm' black.

How's about that for a brain dump then?

I live in a medium-sized apartment, in Hong Kong terms. We've got a reasonably large living room, two comfortable-but-not-roomy bedrooms and smallish kitchen and bathroom. During the change of flatmate, I moved from one bedroom into the other, because the new one is slightly larger and has more storage. Our broadband connection comes into the living room, where there's a file server in the corner and an 802.11n wireless router box thingy, but unfortunately, that puts the bathroom between the wireless box thingy and my bedroom. The bathroom which has thick concrete walls which do a pretty good job of blocking 2.4GHz signals, apparently. In the bedroom, there's a weak, slow and unreliable signal from the wifi box which is only really a few meters away. I'm not entirely happy about this - I've got quite used to having wireless in my bedroom for things like watching TV in bed, late-night IM and so forth, particularly with the EeePC and my new wifi-enabled phone thrown into the mix. Incidentally, a little testing shows that my GSM signal strength also drops significantly between the living room and the bathroom.

So how to solve this problem? I tried moving the wifi router box thingy around a bit, which didn't make much difference, so I decided to throw a bit of money at the problem. I went down to Wanchai and bought a couple of no-name cheap Homeplug boxes for $500 the pair (approximately £32 or US$64). There are more expensive brands and more expensive standards - there are three generations of the technology in use, analogous to 802.11b, 802.11g and 802.11n for wifi. There are strict warnings in the short documentation for the homeplug boxes saying that you must only ever plug them directly into the wall, not into power strips, but that simply wasn't going to happen - I'm a techie living in a flat with a real paucity of power sockets and it would be impossible to dedicate two of them to networking. So, I plugged the boxes in and they work - really not that much more to say that that. They are pretty slow, comparable to 802.11b, but that's okay because that's all I paid for. They have some support for on-the-wire encryption, but you need to load up some Windows management tool to do that, so I'm running them unencrypted.

Phase 1 complete - I have a working network connection in my bedroom.

Unfortunately, I'm greedy. I don't just want a working wired connection, I want a working wireless connection. The next thing I tried was to repurpose my old Dell laptop, which has been almost completely replaced by the Eee, as an access point. That was... not a great success. Without a wifi card and driver which supports running in Master mode, you're stuck with an ad-hoc network, which is a lot less reliable than Infrastructure mode, particularly in a dense urban environment where any channel is going to get interference from other wifi devices, not to mention microwaves, TV signal senders and so forth. One notable thing I did find while trying to get this to work was parprouted which does virtual bridging between networks using ARP, rather than actual bridging which doesn't work with wifi interfaces. Parprouted does seem to work, but the network itself let it down.

I finally (?) solved the problem last night. One thing which most techies have is a drawer/box/room/large warehouse filled with spare bits and pieces which were useful in the past and might be useful again in the future, and which are being stored against that possible future use. Deep in one of my storage vats was an old Apple Airport Express, possibly the first 'travel router' designed for use in places like hotels, which might provide a wired connection but not wifi, or would charge extra for it. It can also do streaming audio and run as a printer server, but I've never used those - I have used the wireless bridge before, however. After a lot of faffing around trying to get a copy of Windows XP running under kvm/qemu to see the little AE box on the physical wired network, I configured it up, plugged it all in, and I seem to have a nice reliable wireless network in the corner of my room now. It is even happily acting like a real bridge and routing between the networks, over the virtual cable supplied by the homeplug boxes, rather than doing NAT and running its own DHCP server, which is the usual mode. In the end, I've got two little boxes lying on the floor in the corner of my room, and all is well!

There's also a bright blue network cable running right across the middle of my living room, but there are always sacrifices...

Went to see Prince Caspian lastThursday night, at the new cinema, the Grand at the Elements Mall above Kowloon station. The cinema is nice, if a little expensive for Kowloon, but the toilets are downstairs, and the food stall was too cramped. Comfy seats with - apparently - vibration and/or bass stuff setup so you got a bit of a jolt in your bum when something want bang onscreen. Wouldn't rush back, but wouldn't mind going there if someone else suggested it. As for the film - nothing too special, and I'm not sure it was the best choice for the second in a possible franchise. It's somewhat light on Aslan the crowd-pleasing lion and other cuter talking animals, a little dark for some kids, and has a slightly disturbing overall story of Spaniards ruling over England.

My phone fell off my bed last night - which has happened before. The LCD cracked and the screen died - which hasn't happened before. After a bit of dreaming and reading up on various other 'smartphones', I called Palm who offered to replace it for HK$1400 (about £90) in a few working days, which seems to be the sane thing to do - I assume it'll be a reconditioned model. I'll leave it until later in the year to look at things like Android phones. It's slightly shocking just how attached I am to this thing...

Firefox 3 happened. Anyone who hasn't downloaded it should do so - there's really no reason not to at least try it out. I've been running the release candidates for a while and it's a pretty good piece of work, feels better than 2.0 did.

New flatmate has been here since the start of the week. She seems to be settling in well, although there is a slight separation which wasn't there with the old one - quite understandable, since she's just moved in with a stranger. Still not sure how long she's planning to stay, but hopefully I'll have the option to get in someone else or keep the place to myself by the time she does leave.

Might need to learn some PHP in the near future, unfortunately.

Off to Shenzhen today - remind me to write that place up sometime soon. Plan is the usual, shopping, food (teppanyaki today) and massage. Back for the second major "friends leaving HK for good" do of this summer, so far.

We've gone from serious flooding, constant thunderstorms and people dying in landslips two weeks ago, to a 'Very Hot' weather warning today. Time to break out the shorts, I think, since the forecast high for today is 33°C!

Went to Web Wednesday last night, running a bit late, to hear the end of talks about Relief.Asia and The Library Project, both very good causes, and both doing interesting stuff online and important stuff offline.

My flatmate - who I originally moved in with over a year ago, for 'a few weeks' - left Hong Kong on Tuesday evening. I wish she hadn't gone, and I will miss her, but bloody hell it was a drawn-out process. It took her something like 6 months of indecision, agonising, and stressful planning and packing before she finally went. On the other hand...

The reason I was late for Web Wednesday is that I was meeting with a potential new flatmate, who - unless things change in the meantime - will move in next week. Lucky timing, I guess, but she posted a message on GeoExpat at the weekend looking for somewhere, and it will be rather helpful to my finances to not have an empty room. It's going to take a little time to get settled living with a stranger though, after a year with a friend and two years alone before that.

I live in Sheung Wan, a neighbourhood just to the west of the central financial, retail and commercial district of HK (called, sensibly enough, Central). A number of significant financial institutions have their global or Asian headquarters within 30 minutes walk from here. Sheung Wan is an old neighbourhood by Hong Kong standards, and is particularly well-known for streets dominated by shops selling dried seafoods, herbs and roots and other slightly arcane Chinese medicine-like stuff. I noticed, walking down one of those streets recently, that a lot of the staff in the shops are carrying and using abaci. I was quite surprised to see that, in modern and pragmatic Hong Kong.

Also, Sheung Wan is relatively low-lying, and my place is only a couple of blocks from the waterfront. During the storms this weekend, not only was there quite serious flooding in streets near here, but craters appeared in a few spots along the (brick) pavement afterwards. It looked like places where work had been done, and the holes had been packed with sand which simply washed away in the rains. A weird thing to see.

A random tip: using a modern version of pilot-link, assuming your Treo is already paired with your computer, you don't need to do anything special to sync over Bluetooth, since the pilot-link libraries have native support. Just specify the port as bt: and it will do the right thing, so something like pilot-xfer -p bt: -s ~/treo/syncdir is all you need.

3G iPhone? Meh. Nice devices, nice software, too locked-down for me. If/when my finances loosen up, I might be tempted to hunt down a 1st gen iPhone, assuming the price will drop through the floor.

My Slashdot account ID is 1327. I rarely read it, past the headlines, and even more rarely post comments, but I wonder how many of the 1326 people with lower ID numbers still use the site at all. To be honest, Slashdot jumped the shark (or 'nuked the fridge') years ago.

Am I rambling? Time to finish up.

I wandered along to 7-11 at lunchtime today to get a carton or two of tea, and I noticed some digest-sized magazines sitting in a little rack by the cash register. There were two magazines about Windows Mobile version 6, and three about the Apple iPhone. I did a little shopping yesterday, including some video game-related stuff, and while I was waiting for something, I had a bit of a chat with the guy running the booth/stall/shop about the current prices of Nintendo Wiis in Hong Kong. Both unremarkable things, except for the fact that 'officially' there are no iPhones or Wiis in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong has one of the busiest ports in the world - and there's no doubt that the if you combine the tonnage shipped through Hong Kong with Shenzhen, you will find the heaviest traffic in the world, by a long way. A very large proportion of manufactured goods from China ship through Hong Kong or Shenzhen, and a large proportion of all the manufactured goods in the world come from China - including the Wii and iPhone. The iPhone, in fact, is only available in a rather limited number of markets - approximately 6 at that point - due to Apple's policy of close and exclusive partnering with a single phone network in each country. The Wii is generally available globally, but there is neither an official Hong Kong model nor a price. The Wii and the iPhone are, of course, both widely and easily available in Hong Kong, but due to a lack of official release, support and pricing from the manufacturer, the market is free to act as it will.

Hong Kong regularly ranks as 'the free-est economy in the world', but even leaving aside the interesting point of Hong Kong now being a semi-autonomous part of a communist country, that's not really true. While the government doesn't generally interfere in the economy too much directly, there are some strong distortions of certain markets which have a measurable effect on things at a macro level - but at a micro level, things are very free. That is, of course, a good thing and a bad one - Europeans tend to get upset at the lack of consumer, tenant and employee protection in Hong Kong, but it also means that really, nobody official is interested in the vast grey market. As an example, Apple doesn't have official resellers in Hong Kong, but there really isn't much they can do to stop unofficial ones springing up, selling products Apple does not wish to have available, or in ways they disagree with. Due to the lack of an official Apple-supported route to get an iPhone in Hong Kong, every single iPhone in Hong Kong is unlocked - and I would assume that a large majority are also 'jailbroken', modified to run non-Apple-blessed software. Once you are operating outside the official limits of the device, breaking the warranty for sure, and probably the software license as well, just to get the device to work, why not open it up as far as you are able - rather than as far as the manufacturer wants?

The Wii, of course, is differently interesting. There has been no release of the Wii in Hong Kong, and while there are mod-chips and other methods available to play games from foreign regions, nobody has managed to hack it enough to change the language. While there is only a single model of Wii, unlike the Xbox360 and PS3, there are effectively 2 models available in HK, the Japanese one and the US one. They are identical hardware, but the US one has menus in English and allows access to the US Wii shop, and comes with a copy of Wii sports. The prices are purely set by the market, there is a certain demand for each 'model', there is a certain supply - more of the Japanese machines are available than US ones - and prices change, both up and down, over time.

The really interesting thing is that while neither of these pieces of in-demand consumer electronics hardware are officially available in Hong Kong, both are in fact easily and widely available. In fact, there are enough of them in Hong Kong that there is a flourishing support market - Wii games and both Wii and iPhone accessories are very openly sold by major retailers, even if the actual device is still sold slightly underground. That is what makes Hong Kong an open, free market, where what might be considered at least grey market, if not black, elsewhere, is just considered 'doing business' here. And one final point: while in many ways Hong Kong is a small town, with small town mentality, this is one way in which locals are very open and progressive - it seems unnatural to them that a manufacturer would - or would be allowed to - limit their markets or the uses of their devices, and it is second nature for Hong Kong to just route around these limitations.