Wandering Jew
Here, there and everywhere

a nice little monster

I have in my home, as of now, 2 PCs (a desktop, and a server/media-centre), 3 Android phones, an ebook reader, a crappy-but-cheap Chinese Android tablet - and 3 'netbooks'. The newest addition to the menagerie is an Asus Eee PC 1215N, which rather wipes the floor with the its two predecessors...

Device	Processor	Screen	Storage	Keyboard	Output
EeePC 701	Celeron @ 900MHz	7 inch 800x480	4G(?) SSD	Small and crap	VGA
Nexus One	Snapdragon @ 1GHz	3.7 inch 800x480	512MB flash	None	None
EeePC 901	Atom @ 1.6GHz (x2 threads)	8.9 inch 1024x600	16GB flash	Small and less crap	VGA
EeePC 1215N	Dual-core Atom @ 1.8GHz (x2 threads)	12.1 inch 1366x768	320GB HDD	Full-sized, chiclet	VGA & HDMI

Threw the N1 in there for comparison, just to make the point that a 2010-era smartphone can even outspec an EeePC 701, in the right light - same resolution screen, though obviously smaller with a much higher DPI, faster CPU in terms of raw clock speed, longer battery life and although the 701 has more storage than an N1, my N1 typically has a 16GB microSD card in it. Anyway, back to the 1215N.

I picked it up at the Hong Kong Computer & Communications Festival on 20th August - notable because there is, as far as I know, no firm release date for this machine in the US, and Amazon UK were listing it with a pre-order fulfilment date of August 23rd, but have just updated it to September 7th! I've had my eye on this model for a while, and knew it was due out late August or early September, but hadn't heard anything at all about Hong Kong release dates, so I did something a bit naive - I simply called Asus last week and asked them. After being passed around a couple of times, I was quite shocked to get a straight answer ("at the computer festival this Friday") to a straight question, since I was fully expecting to be told that they hadn't announced a date, and certainly weren't going to randomly disclose it to an anonymous individual caller - kudos to Asus.

Going back to that Amazon.co.uk listing, while the date has changed, the price has stayed the same, at £429 (US$666, €524, HK$5180). The machine is actually available in a few other places, and looking at a Swedish site they are listing it at 5290 Kronor (£459, US$712, €560, HK$5540). There is no price available for the US, but rumours are placing it around US$500 (£321, €393, HK$3888) - which to be fair would exclude any sales taxes, unlike the European prices. Me, I paid HK$3780 (US$486, £313, €382) in cash and took it home - there are no sales taxes in Hong Kong, and there was no delivery charge or delay - so I think I did pretty well there!

Inside the somewhat-sparse brown cardboard box was the laptop, the battery (see below), a charger with a UK (and therefore HK) figure-8 cable to plug into it, a warranty card, and a relatively simple manual in English and both Traditional and Simplified Chinese. The guys who sold it to me were nice enough to throw in a case - ugly-but-functional - an extra year of official Asus warranty, and an antivirus package - entirely useless to me. Not exactly an extensive package, but that's probably a good thing in these green days...

There appears to only be one 1215N model number across the world, but there are a few variable specs which will change depending on where you get the machine. In particular, mine has a 320GB hard drive (but some may have 250GB), a 6-cell battery (4-cell being the alternative), 3 USB 2.0 ports (some models advertised with 2 USB 3.0 and 1 USB 2.0) and 2 GB RAM in the form of 2 1GB sticks (as opposed to 4GB or even 1GB options). While I'd quite like the USB 3.0 ports, just for future-proofing, I'm reasonably happy with the HK spec, and while 4GB RAM would be nice, it would be pretty easy, and not particularly expensive, to upgrade it myself since the two SODIMM sockets are in fact the only easily-accessible and user-upgradable innards.

Now, I Don't Do Windows^TM. The 1215N came with Windows 7 Premium something-or-other, but I Don't Do Windows^TM so I got rid of it pretty sharp-ish - shoved Ubuntu on it, because that was what I had lying around, and what I've been running on my older EeePCs, but I'm not sure what it'll end up with. I did see Windows 7 running on demo units at the 'festival', and it seemed to run alright, for Windows. Did I mention that I Don't Do Windows^TM? The salesman did run up the Windows Experience doodad, and while I can't remember the exact scores, they were 5.something for the memory and disk tests, and 3.something for the CPU, graphics and gaming - not too bad in the scheme of things for a device like this, I think. Anyway, I Don't Do Windows^TM so let's move on.

On paper, at least, it's somewhat comparable to the MacBook Air - the 1215N has a slightly smaller screen with a slightly higher resolution, a slower CPU but not massively so, the same amount of RAM, much bigger hard drive, theoretically-similar Nvidia graphics but with a lower-power, lower-performance Intel chip as well, and slightly more heft, 1.45kg (with 6cell battery) vs. 1.36kg for the MacBook Air. The Air is much much thinner, 19.4mm at its thickest compared with 37mm for the 1215n - but then the 1215n has a smaller 'face'. The kicker, of course, is that the Air costs over 3 times as much as the 1215n - I'm not trying to suggest that they are in the same class as machine, just point out that there isn't as much difference as you might think...

The hardware

For a netbook, it's pretty big and heavy. The photo shows a clear comparison with the Eees 901 and 701, but other photos clearly show why - the 12 inch screen is huge compared with the 9incher, and makes the 7 inch screen on the original Eee PC look like what it is, a toy. On the other hand, I've always called them 'little laptops' instead of netbooks, and that name fits well. The hardware is actually somewhat of a hybrid - it's a netbookish screen, but it has a full-sized keyboard and a CPU designed for a nettop (i.e. a 'little desktop'), with the upside being higher performance and the downside being less power management than chips designed for true 'netbooks'. As I mentioned above, it's also got hybrid graphics, with a low-power, low-performance Intel chip and a higher-performance, higher-power Nvidia chip, although the switching isn't working with Linux at the moment - I'm not much of a gamer, and multi-threaded decoding largely makes up for the lower graphics performance when viewing video files.

At this point, I'm pretty happy with the new toy. The Linux support is slightly lacking - small things like the sound driver needing a tweak to support the headphone socket, and bigger things like the Nvidia Optimus stuff being largely implement in the Windows drivers only. I'm sure things will improve - it's a pretty new machine, and Linux drivers have a nice habit of quietly getting better support for new hardware.

A short lecture

A friend of mine - technically interested, but not particularly knowledgeable - asked me about Chrome OS stuff. I wrote her a short lecture in return, and thought I'd dump it here as well :)

We'll start with 'cloud computing', which is actually an appropriately nebulous term... It's been traditional for a long long time, particularly when teaching computer networking, to use a cloud in a diagram to represent "all the stuff which happens on the network between computer A and computer B" - http://www.yourdictionary.com/computer/cloud - we don't care how the communication happens between A and D, we just assume they can talk to each other. This usage has been changed a bit, in the past 5 years or so, to add the idea of *services* which live in 'the cloud' - we don't care where they are, as long as we can communicate with them over the Internet, using standard tools from anywhere. A simple example would be using gmail/hotmail/yahoo for your email, rather than an email system supplied by your employer, school or ISP. Another simple example would be Facebook - you don't know anything about how it works, you don't have any relation with them other than being a user of the service, you can access it from anywhere...

So 'cloud computing' is the idea of taking things which previously ran either on your computer, or at least on your local network, and shoving them out into the cloud. It relies on a combination of 2 or 3 technologies, which are just about available now, but weren't 5 years ago - ubiquitous broadband, standard network protocols, and, to a slightly lesser extent, cheap/ubiquitous computing.

Chrome OS is what falls out of all that, if you're Google. It's an OS designed to run on cheap portable computers (i.e. netbooks) which are always on-line (wifi or 3G) and running a standard platform called a 'web browser'. It assumes that you use Gmail in your web browser, rather than Outlook connected to an Exchange server. It assumes that you use Google Docs rather than Microsoft Office. It assumes that you stream music and even video (TV, etc.) from the web, rather than storing and playing it locally. It assumes that you're using Google talk through your browser, rather than running a local chat program. It assumes that you're doing all of this on a 'secondary' computer.

They're not claiming that you can or should run your life like this yet. What they are saying - correctly, in my opinion - is that if you are willing to trust the 'cloud services', you can move a lot of what you do online without losing very much, and gaining ubiquitous access in return. You've got a big heavy laptop... I've got a little handheld phone... they both access the same online data, to a great extent, and my phone has a longer battery life, built-in 3G, and lacks the potential for spraining my back by carrying it.

As for running Chrome OS to take a look at it, there are a couple of options. You can't run it directly on your Mac, because it only runs on netbooks, and a small specific list at that. What you can do is run it under virtualisation - same same way I, for those rare occasions when I need it - run 'Windows in a window'. VirtualBox is a virtualisation tool, which will let you run Chrome OS in a window on top of your Mac OS. Alternatively, and much more simply, just load up the Chrome browser - technically, the chromium open-source browser, which is the core of Chrome, since Chrome is still Windows-only. Chrome OS is, in essence, a modified form of the Chrome browser running on streamlined Linux OS, so if you want to know what Chrome OS looks like today, running Chrome (or chromium) will get you a lot of the way there...

Chromium is pretty usable as a browser - I've been using it as my main browser for a few weeks now, with little trouble. Chrome OS, however, is not usable yet. It's expected to be released to hardware manufacturers sometime around the spring, and be on the market latish next year.

Or Android 1.5, as it's properly known

About 20 minutes ago, jbq (aka Jean-Baptiste Queru, Android engineer and community friend par excellence) announced on the #android IRC channel that Android 1.5 - the release formerly known as Cupcake - was done, tagged and released. And that being done, he was going on vacation...

There's a somewhat full feature list here, but the things I'm really interested in are:

• A2DP, or stereo Bluetooth support, coupled with AVCRP for remote control. To be honest, I'm not hugely bothered about it being stereo as such, since I mainly listen to podcasts and other spoken content, but without A2DP, only calls can go over Bluetooth, regardless of the number of channels in your audio. I had A2DP on my Treo years ago, thanks to Softick Audio Gateway, a third-party shareware A2DP driver, and it's good to know that Android has caught up a bit.
• On-screen keyboard. The G1 is the first phone I've ever owned which slides, flips, rotates or otherwise isn't a single block with a keyboard on the front, and while the slide keyboard is pretty decent for a phone, it's pretty annoying to have to flip the phone open to enter a URL, a search term, or some other short text - and it's almost unusable one-handed, say when holding onto something in order not to fall over on a moving vehicle. I've had a fiddle with the soft keyboard in the 1.5 preview SDK, and it seems pretty usable, at least for short things. Not sure I'd want to type an email, blog post, IM, etc. on it, but we'll see
• Widgets. One of the most-requested features for the home screen - apart from not taking a few seconds to rebuild itself after being kicked out of RAM to make use for something else - widget support appeared as somewhat of a surprise a couple of months back, and not quite in the expected way. Rather than being HTML/CSS/Javascript widgets, they are implemented as an application interface, so they are richer (and probably faster), but a little harder to write. There are already lots of ideas floating around, and at least one community widget competition which should hopefully produce some interesting things. I wonder how long until the 3-screen home screen becomes limiting?
• Browser performance. Not that the existing browser is particularly slow, but it'll be nice to see it faster.
• General polish and performance. There's been a bunch of screenshots floating around recently, and thing are looking a little more form-over-function. Not that it really really matters, of course, but prettier phones sell more units, and I want Android to sell as many units as possible - both because I think it's a good platform and good for the mobile market, and because, selfishly, I hope to release some Android software soon, and more users (customers?) would be better

The interesting question, of course, is when it'll get shipped or pushed to users. The HTC Magic should be the first device shipping with 1.5 out-of-the-box, and it's expected to be released on May 5th, which really isn't far away. For the G1, T-Mobile Germany have already announced that they expect to push a 1.5 update to users in May, so it's not unfair to expect T-Mobile in other countries to do something similar - I have a US G1, so I should get the push whenever T-Mobile US gets round to it. I suspect Dream (same device, but not T-Mobile branded/released) users might have to wait slightly longer, but hopefully not too long.

Roll on donut!

Just a little thing

I got a T-Mobile G1 (aka HTC Dream) back in November, the first Android device to hit the market. There's a partially-done full writeup somewhere in my draft folder, but for now, I wanted to get down a little tip I discovered today:

I've been trying to sign up with the new PCCW Wifi 'Single Device Plan', which is a very cheap ($28, around US$3.50 per month) unlimited wifi plan which uses the MAC address of the device for authentication. You have to manually login once, entering the activation code you got by SMS, and from then on it'll recognise your device and log you straight in. Their regular wifi service is virtually unusable on a regular basis with Android, since you have to connect to the service, then login before you can get to the internet, but as soon as you connect the device tries to reconnect to gmail, IM, etc. over wifi and fails. Very annoying... One limitation of the single device plan is that the $28 rate is only applicable to mobile phones, not laptops, and they use server-side user-agent sniffing to make sure you're activating a supported device. Android is, of course, no supported.

No problem, says I, since the webkit rendering engine in Android has support for choosing an Android user-agent, a 'desktop' user-agent, or an iPhone user-agent. I knocked together a simple web browser which pretends to be an iPhone, and went to register. Problem, says I - there's something a little funky about the SSL setup used on the activation form, and I can't get it to work with my toy browser. The built-in browser uses undocumented APIs to handle SSL errors, and while I probably could hack something up to work, I really can't be bothered.

I originally discovered that webkit had optional user-agent strings from the famous Mr. Romain Guy - author of the Android Home application - who mentioned something about a debug mode in the browser. Unfortunately, this debug mode is, while not exactly secret, also not well-known, and I went off on a wild goose chase to make my own browser. Today, while randomly browsing the bug list for the best-known Cupcake-on-G1 build, I see a mention of the debug mode, complete with instructions on how to enable it. In short, what you need to do is load the URL "about:debug" - this won't load a page, but will enable debug mode, which adds a bunch of options to the bottom of the 'Settings' panel, including a User-Agent picker.

As soon as I found it, and tested it on this site, I popped down to the PCCW shop in my building, loaded up the activation page, and bang! working fine. I haven't tested it, but according to original instructions, the setting doesn't persist (across a restart of the Browser, or a reboot, I don't know), but it's very useful to know if you just need to access a page behind a stupid iPhone-only user-agent check.

For the record, the other toggleable options which show up are:

• Single column rendering
• Use wide viewport
• Normal rendering
• Enable tracing
• Enable light touch
• Enable nav cache dump

Don't really know what any of them do, but I'm sure there are one or two people out there who might want to play around with it...

I've abandoned PalmOS for the second time

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?