In that piece I explained that Bell and Telus had separate CDMA networks which they would be abandoning in favour of a new HSPA+ network, which has happened very smoothly.  At the time Rogers had covered about 84% of the Canadian population with HPSA (3.6 and 7.2mbps) and had just opened their first city with some HSPA+ support (Ottawa, if I recall correctly) and over the next six months upgraded many other cities that had existing 3G service to HSPA+ (in May 2010).  Rogers has also since expanded their 3G coverage to include the province of Manitoba (through a partnership with TBayTel) and some other areas on Ontario, thus leaving the Maritimes with unchanged 3G service areas (though they promise this will change “soon”).  Neither Bell, Telus, or their subsidiary brands have offered Rogers customers a means out of their existing contracts.  Rogers has also launched LTE 4G in 4 cities in 2011: Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.  Rogers data packages are typically 500MB or 1GB for the two most common smartphone packages; LTE starts at $52.93/10 GB.

Bell and Telus have also had a busy few years; let’s start with Bell.  For years Bell had a 50% share in Virgin Mobile Canada, a MVNO that used Bell towers and cellular equipment on the “no-frills” wireless service plans offered by Virgin.  In 2009 BCE Inc. bought out the remaining shares of Virgin Mobile Canada to make it a full subsidiary company and began to offer HSPA/HSPA+ phones in late 2009.  Today, Virgin has very competitive phones and plans, and is a serious wireless provider that offers “tab” service rather than traditional termed contracts (whereby 10% of your bill each month pays off the balance remaining on the purchase cost of your phone).  Bell still maintains Solo Mobile in central/western Canada, though they’ve fallen by the wayside in light of the Virgin brand.  Bell continues to activate, sell, and service CDMA phones and has no current plans to discontinue service for these phones in the near future, though they do no longer service analog phones.  The average package with Bell and Virgin is 1GB with the typical smartphone package ($60 and $65/mo respectively).

Telus has also been busy: Koodo, a “no-frills” affordable service provider they created in 2008 to attract younger, cost-conscious consumers has taken off; as of today they offer a vast selection of smartphones with data plans starting at $5 (a flexi-plan that increases with usage) as well as a 2GB/$30 plan which far-and-beyond beats typical dataplans with Bell, Telus, Rogers, and Virgin.  Telus now offers a nearly HSPA-only line of phones, with a selection of HSPA+ handsets.  I had imagined that there would be more of these phones by now, however they’ve only really come out in great numbers in the past year after AT&T announced their use of HSPA+.  Typical data packages remain greatly unchanged for Telus, with approximately 1GB being the average allotment for most consumers (as is bundled with their $65/mo smartphone package).

The strange development in Canada in the past two years has been new entrants with HSPA+ on the AWS (T-Mobile) bands, notably Wind Mobile and Public Mobile.  Wind greatly focuses on unlimited services, such as unlimited data, messaginng, and calling within Wind-zones (where Wind has towers; the phones will still function outside of these, though will be roaming with increased airtime rates).  Rogers has launches a competing brand, Chatr, aimed at this “unlimited  in zones” mentality which is a scam: Wind has to do “zones” because they only have towers in those areas yet still wish to offer nationwide service.  Rogers has nationwide service (to some degree) and arbitrarily enforces “zones” on Chatr customers.  Wind has now accumulated more than 317,000 subscribers (here) and is still going strong.

In the near-to-mid-term future we have the Maritimes’ largest cable provider, Eastlink, launching some sort of cellular network.  Currently Eastlink offers a Motorola Canopy network for rural broadband across Nova Scotia and is partnered with Rogers Wireless to offer discounts for bundle customers.  Eastlink has cable/internet/home phone service in nine provinces, though is most predominant in Atlantic Canada (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, PEI, and Newfoundland).  Given that Bell or Telus are the only real options for cellular service in the Maritimes, there are high hopes for Eastlinks forthcoming service.  Notably, in 2005 Eastlink began offering home phone service and made the 902 area code (for Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island) the most competitive in North America.  Hopefully the 902 area code will once again be the most competitive in 2012 with cellular service.

Weeks went by.  I got a few offers: “$100 if you deliver it to Cape Breton” (an eight hour drive) Nope… “$100 in Halifax” …. Nope!  So I reduced the price to $175 and finally got a reasonable offer: “$175 in Halifax if it can run on Koodo.”  Koodo is a cellular brand owned by Telus Mobility which operates on the shared Bell/Telus HSPA+ and CDMA network.  By virtue of the shared network it uses the same frequencies as Bell and Telus, who chose to use the North American standard AT&T bands for HSPA+.  We’re in luck! Rogers also uses the exact same frequencies so the Pre can work in theory.  After intent Google’ing I discovered people have had success unlocking their Palm Pre 2s and running them on Bell.  Awesome!  I replied saying that it was possible and that it would need to be unlocked, a process I’m unfamiliar with.  He said he could do that himself.

When I met the guy to sell the phone I discovered he was a Palm Pre (original) user.  After some talking I’d had all my fears quashed that the buyer on the other end may have mistakenly thought the Palm Pre was an Android phone, a reasonable fear given the vast fragmentation in the Android handset marketplace.  He said how he’d been an avid Pre user (on Bell, CDMA) since 2009 and loved the look and feel of webOS except that it was slow on the original 2009 Pre.

I got a sinking feeling.  The Palm Pre 2 does have much more hardware resources than the original Pre but it is still incredibly slow compared with the Nexus One, iPhone 3GS, and even my Blackberry Bold.  It’s by far the slowest phone I’ve used since my early days on a feature phone (the LG Keybo for what it’s worth).

I booted the phone up and he marvelled that it boot up so quickly.  And applications open so fast.  And typing is much more responsive.  And card view is much more fluid.  And you can open Google Maps, Music, a browser, email, and messaging cards and the phone doesn’t pop-up to say that it’s out of memory.  Wow.

It then dawned on me that to a fish the world is wet.  From the perspective of an original Pre owner the Pre 2 is a logical successor and is so much faster.  If you’d entered the smartphone world through webOS and never left then you’d only see the Pre 2 as fast and shiny.

In 2007 Jon Rubenstein, a former Apple executive responsible for trimming the Mac line-up in the late ’90s and later developing the iPod, joined Palm.  Using the invaluable experience from developing and shipping mobile devices at Apple, he was crucial to the development of Palm’s saviour movement to compete in the modern smartphone market against the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.  webOS premiered at CES 2009 and, should it have shipped the following quarter, would have given the iPhone a run for its money.  From day one the Pre (the first device to run webOS) offered multitasking; background process management; cut, copy, and paste; and the entire feature set of contemporary iPhone (3.2MP camera with video, multitouch, 3.2mm headphone port, GPS, WiFi b/g, accelerometer, notifications, a WebKit browser, App Store, and 3G–albeit Sprint’s CDMA/EVDO).  But it didn’t.

Eighteen months later (October 2010) came the reluctant rollout of the third-generation of webOS devices, the Pre 2 at the helm.  The Pre 2 boasts a 1GHz processor, 3.1″ multitouch screen with Guerrilla glass by Corning, a sliding QWERTY keyboard, a gesture area, 512MB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, webOS 2, 3GSM (HSPA/AT&T/Rogers) compatibility, and a $449 price tag (from Palm online store available in GSM or Verizon CDMA flavours).  Compared to the 3GS (which shipped before the original Pre) this would be a reasonably comparable device with a faster processor, twice the memory, a $150 savings, Flash 10 capability, and an awesome notification and multitasking metaphor that iOS is still trying to figure out.  The biggest sale was to developers: a Javascript API that devs already know!

The most compelling feature of any smartphone is app availability.  I’m not a believer that the number of apps available for a platform is any kind of indicator of the success or usefulness of a platform; just that you need a core set of applications that are essential to you, like Facebook, a good Twitter client, a music player, etc.  The hope with webOS was that developers would port their existing web apps (that Apple has iPhone devs craft in 2007 with their web SDK) to native webOS apps with ease.  Compared to the contemporary platforms, webOS used the highest level language in place of Java (Android, Blackberry) or C (iPhone as Objective-C is a superset of C) and supported dynamic typing, automatic memory management, and other modern language features.  That was the hope, at least.

• iOS has had this from the early days of native apps (2008) as Facebook launched a “web application” in 2007 and a native version a year later; Tweetie (now Twitter for iPhone) by Loren Brichter launched in November of 2008 (just five months following the release of the native SDK at WWDC).
• Android has had Facebook native since summer 2009 and numerous Twitter clients, including twidroid (now twidroyd due to legal issues) since fall 2008.
• Blackberry had Ubertwitter (now Ubersocial due to legal issues) since 2009 and an official Twitter for Blackberry client since summer spring 2010 as well as Facebook since fall 2008.
• webOS has no official Twitter client as of now, nor does it have any particularly useful ones either (I picked the so-called crème de la crème one, phnx for $2.99 and it is pretty immature so far).  Facebook for webOS premiered in spring 2010.

webOS is slow (as research for this entry I stumbled upon this podcast, Hypercritical, which offers some explanation and discussion).  I don’t entirely understand the reasons why it’s so slow, although the most suspect reason is that the entire native SDK is built on top of WebKit.  WebKit itself is an incredibly fast layout engine complete with Javascript support that is utilized by Safari (Mac, Windows, iOS), Dashboard (Mac OS X widget host), Chrome, Android browser, webOS browser, and Blackberry OS 6 browser.

It seems to reason the use of WebKit is not the problem, but more likely in implementation.  The kind of speed issues I’m facing remind me of the transition in browsers from (traditional) Javascript interpreters to Javascript compilers.  The primary difference is that Javascript is first compiled to native code before being run: there is an initial performance hit as it must compile before anything can happen, but it is particularly efficient at repetitive tasks (as are found throughout modern web apps).  The best case study would be the evolution from Firefox 3 to 3.5 which upgraded to a JIT compiler.  The difference in speed was somewhere between 20 and 40x.  Perhaps webOS isn’t capitalizing on modern innovations in WebKit such as JIT compilation.

But where would you see this?  The best example of the sluggishness of webOS is in switching between chats in the built-in messaging (SMS/MMS) app (which doesn’t do any kind of character counter!).  When in one chat you perform a left-slide gesture on the gesture area to return to the list of chat threads then you tap on another chat to respond.  There is a noticeable time, perhaps three quarters of a second load time to show these messages and an additional half second before typed characters are registered by the text box (typically the first couple characters you type are ignored so you get partial words that you have to correct).  Even the Blackberry, which may freeze for minutes at a time when performing any menu action, does this right: everything responds nearly instantly and characters may not appear immediately but are buffered and eventually appear in the right order.  In other words, the Blackberry understands your intentions.

All of the problems with webOS stem from immaturity.  The speed issues are reminiscent of a 1.0 software release, not a 2.0 update that should be polished.  My overall judgement is that webOS has no place in the market as developers clearly aren’t adopting the “modern” API architecture and the user experience doesn’t feel competitive with iOS, Android, or Blackberry.  It’s as if webOS developers are unaware of the goings-on of other platforms and have evolved in a vacuum without the influence of the industry.  For example, all of the Twitter clients I tested don’t do “pull to refresh,” rather use a button or “shake to refresh.”  Also, none of the clients offered to complete usernames @ mentions when composing a tweet, not even offering a selection panel like Twitter for Android; the best client did, however, allow you to reply (but not “reply to all”) and filled in the user name.  The UI for phnx has two themes: one navy blue with white text, the other black with white text, reminiscent of the early days of iOS apps, where modern apps have become lighter.  These are conventions that have been offered on most clients for the better part of a year by now but haven’t ventured to webOS.  The best way I can describe the end-to-end experience is like walking into a time machine to 2009 where the Pre was released in lieu of the iPhone.  The problem is that most people have experienced the responsiveness and feature sets of modern platforms by now and that cannot be ignored no matter how hard you try.

The Pre 2 hardware is perhaps the most quirky.  In addition to being the thickest mobile phone I’ved used since 2000, the Pre 2 is also the best fingerprint magnet I’ve ever owned.  The Guerrilla glass lacks a coating that we’ve become accustomed to since the 3GS that prevents oils from adhering to the screen.  The glass itself feels grippy and almost resists your finger gliding to perform gestures.  This leads to an almost “gross” experience as the screen looks, feels, and always is dirty.  The soft-touch plastic Palm uses is commendable and feels like it would resist scratches, cracks, and dirt.  The sliding motion of the QWERTY keyboard is excellent, except that I haven’t yet figured how to hold the phone with one hand to hit the sleep/wake button without inducing the sliding motion.  The keys themselves are tricky: Palm has recessed the keys behind a bezelled lip around the keypad that makes them unusual when coming from a touchscreen or Blackberry Bold keyboard. (There is no option to use a touch screen keyboard).

Possibly the quirkiest feature is the use of autocorrect with the physical keyboard.  Out-of-the-box the dictionary is very limited and doesn’t know common text slang such as “lol” or even common contractions (such as getting “don’t” from typing “dont”) and opts to replace these with seemingly random words (ex, by default it replaces “dont” with “weird”).  The dictionary claims that it does learn but I have yet to witness it learning, but keeping the preference pane (“Text Assist”) to edit the dictionary quickly is easy with the card view multitasking.  By far the most useful feature for typing is to set up short cuts which can be any “word” or character (but not space) that is replaced with another word, for example, by default “r” will be replaced with “are” when “r” is not connected to anything and you hit the space key.  I’ve used this short cut feature to set up common contractions, “youre” → “you’re”; “arent” → “aren’t”; “ill” → “I’ll” and more.

My verdict: webOS feels like a $199 feature phone with great font rendering.  The gesture area is not really intuitive and doesn’t provide any added function beyond Android’s physical “back” button or iOS’ software buttons.  It simply is not possible to recommend this phone to anyone given that you can get a Blackberry Curve with a much better keyboard, a much more responsive experience, and a complete social package for $50 less (retail Curve 9300 is $399 from Rogers).  That said, if HP is able to find a good dev for a Twitter client (to include/offer for free) and is able to speed up the phone to contemporary levels then this would be a different story.

This has been a wonderful year for Apps; the Android Market exploded to 200,000 apps as of December 28; the Blackberry App World (of “super apps”) has grown 1,500 apps as of November 30; and the iPhone app store has exploded, passing 325,000 total apps on December 26; in just two months the Windows Phone 7 app ecosystem has bloomed to over 4,000 apps. However there is one common app that I’ve loved on all three platforms:

Opera Mini

Yes, I know, Opera Mini, the staple app from years gone by when “apps” were “applications” and would only run on high-end Nokia phones. Opera Mini does have a long lineage, however it’s essence is what defines it, just like Blackberry is defined by its history as a pager. I should elaborate: Opera Software (company) is based out of Norway that has developed a great internet suite since the ’90s. I have personally enjoyed Opera, and was at its peak on the ’90s when you paid for a browser as you would any software (this is in the days of AOL disks, nearly a decade before Firefox). Today, Opera is mostly known to the masses as the Nintendo DS and Wii browser, and for the surprising approval onto the iOS App Store in April of this year.

I remember in April questioning what the big deal was, having reminisced back to 2005 seeing a Motorola Razr running a “stunning for a mobile phone” web browser; I remember waiting for it to load the Google homepage over 1x for what seemed like forever, only to see that the Google logo had been dramatically compressed, the text box didn’t seem to fit just right, and the fonts had been replaced with 1980s bitmap fonts. Furthermore the idea that the browser was navigated by pressing the directional pad buttons (making the usual for the era slight beeping sound on every key press). Nonetheless I had to see what Apple was fussing about; if the iPhone version resembled this pre-historic attempt at a “browser” then Mobile Safari was in a league of its own.

After many hours of reading about the architecture of Opera Mini I figured it was definitely worth a shot; it seemed that Opera hosted a server farm that would proxy mobile phone traffic by downloading the actual pages, compressing the contents as an image, then transmit the minuscule result to the phone which would run simple rendering software that was aware of text boxes, hyperlinked regions of the page, and other simple HTML controls. Opera had even managed to allow Javascript on-load events to function (under time constraints that delayed page-load), and Javascript on-click events. Impressive; this was definitely worth a look, after my app-free month was up.

The iPhone app downloaded quickly over EDGE, only 980KB, under a megabyte. Within a few seconds of launching Opera Mini initialized and prompted me with the typical Opera homepage with bookmark tiles (aka Speed Dial). I tried loading a simple site that I was familiar with, I loaded the Twitter mobile page for myself. Within three seconds the page had entirely loaded. On EDGE. Wow. The rendering was a little off, and I couldn’t get my login credentials to take (I figured my intricate password of special characters must have disagreed with the proxy form submission page, or perhaps a cut-and-paste error). It seemed every page loaded quickly, like EDGE-on-ecstasy quickly. In the next month I used a fraction of the cellular data I was used to while browsing the internet much more. In my long bus rides to school in the morning I was able to read the usual sites, although some of the sites were butchered (ex Mashable) I still got more out of Opera than I did Safari.

But then tragedy struck and I jumped ship to Android, finding that Opera was exactly the same experience on Android. The idea of this kind of cross-platform browsing intriguing; Webkit may be cross platform, but this was to the next extreme; I imagined Opera licensing their rendering technology to companies that could produce dump clients that browsed entirely through the cloud. The Android client even allows the user to browse with the trackball, in a Blackberry-like fashion, which although against everything I believed at the time as an iPhone user, it was great to read with, navigating a long article without continually stroking the screen.

I then migrated to the Blackberry (OS 4.5) in November; the simple and terrible Blackberry browser reminded me too much of my old LG Keybo’s WAP browser to be comfortable, and Opera Mini was too tantalizing. Yet again, Opera Mini was a great, speedy experience that was able to browse with much better rendering and speed than the stock browser. However I did note a feeling of non-native-ness I suspect it was merely due to the low resources of a 2007-era Blackberry.

It is without hesitation I can recommend Opera Mini to the masses (even the feature-phone wielding amongst them) especially with the $0 price tag. Even on 3G and WiFi Opera seems to always load faster than Safari. Now, if only they made an iPad-optimized version of Opera Mini, eh?

Rationale.

I’m often at websites reading about a topic and think, “Hey, it would be great to be able to have Wikipedia right here without leaving this page!”  And so, as a Chrome extension, it works as advertised.

Use.

Once installed (Mac, Windows, and Linux versions of Chrome; this is written in Javascript and is portable) you just click the ‘W’ icon, between the omni-box and the wrench icon, and Wikipedia pops-up.  When you type a phrase it will check to see that an article exists and offer suggestions, then loads the article you select.  All internal Wikilinks (to other articles) will load inside itself.

Features.

• This extension offers 1-click access to Wikipedia
• Instant-ized access to Wikipedia and OpenSearch suggestions
• Uses the mobile version of Wikipedia as it’s already formatted for a small window.
• Is cross-platform, written in Javascript and CSS.
• Preserves Wiki-formatting, layout, and section links (#ash links)

Future.

As of now, version 0.5, Wikipedia Instant:

• …doesn’t open external links.  These links when clicked don’t do anything.
• …doesn’t have a 404 for not finding articles or suggestions from Wikipedia.  This isn’t a huge issue if you’re close to a spelling or topic, but could cause some problems.
• …doesn’t remember your history, state (currently open page), or offer any options.
• …is semi-slow.  The algorithm I’m using to convert Wikilinks isn’t very efficient (it’s a giant nested loop = gross).  Additionally there is a lot of loaded code every time you open it (click the ‘W’ icon) — the whole jQuery library, and for the suggestions where the box is auto-filled on mouse-over is a nasty ‘onMouseOver’ event which could perform poorly on slow systems.
• …doesn’t show progress for loading articles.
• …doesn’t sanitize input.
• …uses not-so-elegant links (anchored Javascript); this shouldn’t be a problem as Chrome is the only target for this (duh) but it could work better.
• …doesn’t preserve the collapsable sub-headings found on the Wikipedia mobile site.  This makes for a lot of scrolling.
• …has a bug where some pages will scroll on the x-axis (although only an issue if this is enabled on your computer)

As logic follows, these shortcomings will be morphed into features. Additionally, functionality will be added to chose to use Wikipedia Simple and other languages.

Installation.

I thought you’d never ask.  You can click this link and it will download (49KB) and prompt you to install.  If you wish to disable or uninstall this, you go under the wrench menu > Tools > Extensions and click uninstall on this extension.

Download here (49KB)

The house has been underway for the past 4.5 months and the contractors and crew have been awesome to work with and haven’t made any major mistakes, and they’re eager to correct the mistakes that have been made.  It has been an interesting experience — having to decide where a door should be, what height a window should be, where light switches should be, all without living in the home.  This is an awesome lesson in good user interface design (you think it sucks when an app’s UI sucks, imagine the UI you live in everyday sucking.) There were some goals that I’ve set aside, as I manage the connectivity in the house (that would be five computers, a handful — two at the moment — laptops, media playback devices — XBox, etc — with higher-bandwidth requirements, and an array of routers and switches to provide some segmentation).  My 5 goals for this project were:

1. Wire everything that isn’t mostly mobile.
2. Gigabit is a plus.
3. Central location for all network equipment that isn’t in a living space.
4. DIY — the electricians made it very clear they have nothing to do with data networking. Also DIY is more cost effective.
5. Unobtrusive & durable.  Outlets are better looking and more reliable long-term than simply run wire.

I think those goals were met.  On July 20 I ran tests and labeled each of the outlets in the utility closet with the room they run to, and confirmed each run (Cat5e, as that’s all electricians would allow me to use, because of building code) is working.

1. There are 7 runs (outside of the closet): one in each bedroom; one in the media room, den, great room, and kitchen.  Works great for all of the wired components of the network.
2. Gigabit is possible with Cat5e and the outlets I used.  The to-be-implemented network equipment will dictate this.  Currently I’m using my legacy dual Linksys WRT54G routers; one running Tomato router, the other running stock firmware to provide most compatible wireless – Tomato has given me trouble with wireless before; the second router is connect to the first using a standard ethernet cable from a LAN port to a LAN port.
3. All of the networking equipment will sit on a shelf in the utility closet.
4. The electricians ran the wire from the closet to each room in a specified location.  I terminated the ethernet myself.  I spent ~<$400 @ Home Depot for the tools and materials (1 impact punch down tool for $69, 1 termination coaster @ $2, 14 Cat5e modules @ $5.33 each, 3 single module face plates @ $3 each, 4 dual-module face plates @ $3.50 each, 1 three-module face plate @ $3.50, 4 dual keystone port wall mounts @ $4.95, 100ft of bulk Cat5e cable @ $25, Cat5e crimping tool & terminatoins @ $32.95, 50 Cat5e terminations @ $12.95).  This is a fraction of the cost this would have cost in 1995!  **fwiw — when wiring the ethernet terminations, I used the ‘B’ wiring guides.  In my research I concluded this is a more modern wiring standard, however both should work with modern hardware.
5. The faceplates look nice and clean.  Unlike phone jacks, ethernet has to be wired (at least in residential settings) using a module and faceplate.  The modules snap into holes in the faceplates to allow a myriad of combinations of connections including phone, coax, ethernet, RCA audio, HDMI, and more.  The module size is standardized.

Tests

As I’ve never terminated Ethernet before (without a professional near-by), it was certainly a gamble that any of this would work.  At the risk of shorting a Dell laptop and a WRT54G router, I used these for testing.  Unlike a $110+ professional test kit, this would provide real-world results in that not only are the pairs tested for electrical connectivity, but also the two terminations as a whole working (interference).  Every termination works, as do all of the ethernet cables I’ve crimped/made so far.  I’ve performed gigabit tests by linking two computers directly (by using a crossover cable between their ports in the utility closet) and it works (I didn’t see any reason why it wouldn’t, but testing is better than not testing.)

Right now I’m writing/finalizing these blog posts using my wired ethernet to access the internet.  There is some pride knowing that I made this, and it works.  As we’re all moved in I have a lot more to write about, including my new office space, the time of day electrical power meter (coming soon, not yet installed), and the global connectivity issue.

My iPhone, although the screen was smashed, continued to work (power on, make calls, etc…) and would be a good backup phone to have for the future.  So I should replace the screen; there were two options — do it myself (iFixit kit for $65) or have Apple do it.  Given that I was in Maine, just minutes from an Apple Store, tt seems logical that should the screen be replaced by an Apple Genius.  I went online and booked a 4:10PM appointment with a Genius.

At the store I checked in with an Apple employee and my name appeared on the Genius bar screen as #3 in line. At exactly 4:10 an employee led me to the bar and I explained my problem to the genius and he asked to look at the phone — he said he wanted to look at my SIM card, and I (embarrassed) said that I had, since the iPhone broke, bought a Nexus One and the SIM wasn’t in the iPhone.  He popped the iPhone SIM card tray open and did a serial model lookup and said my phone warranty expired “yesterday” so… happy 1 year, iPhone … and although the warranty wouldn’t have mattered, it would be $199 to replace the screen and would take 5 minutes.  That’s a bit steep.

He further examined the phone and found a crack in the case that I had lived with and ignored for the better part of the year I owned the phone, and said that the device could be replaced for free under an Apple recall issued for the 3G and 3GS with a cracked back panel.  He explained that Apple has recognized they were using a defective plastic for the backing of the phone and would replace any phone that developed any cracking.  Stellar.  I got a replacement phone, fresh, new, sweet.  I punched in my old password and deleted the contents of the phone, and it was placed in a box under the counter and out came a fresh iPhone.  He took my Rogers SIM card and popped it in the iPhone to which it wouldn’t activate.  Fail.  I figured this would be an issues as iPhones are locked to their home carrier (AT&T in the US, Rogers, Telus, or Bell in Canada, etc…) He suggested it would activate when I got to a Canadian IP address.

Good news: I got back to the hotel, and even under the bad (filtered) WiFi at a Hilton, was able to activate (plug phone in, iTunes opens, phone says “iPhone Activated”) and successfully connected to the AT&T network (did not connect to a data network as data roaming was disabled) — even as far as showing “AT&T” next to the bars, instead of the “ROGERS” I’m used to seeing.  I hoped this phone works when I get home (fwiw — in the Settings > About page, “Rogers 5.0″ is displayed as the carrier, and my phone number is displayed as “My number”).  This is a great experience.  I powered the phone on at the boarder and it automatically connected to AT&T, however I was able to select “ROGERS” from the carriers list in the Settings.app.  The phone now works perfectly, although I’m faced with the tough decision to chose between the Nexus One and the iPhone.

bradarsenault

(Brad Arsenault)

Something terrible happened at 3:22 PM on May 25. Something that I had feared more than anything for ten months. My iPhone broke. I was walking in the hall way and got bumped and my phone flew out of my hand, hit the ground face down, and the screen was shattered (see pic below, may disturb some people). My heart was shattered. Thus I began the journey of selecting the next best suitor as I knew the next iPhone was coming (everyone knows there’s an iPhone hardware refresh in June).

I immediately called Rogers and told them my phone was broken and I needed to replace it. I had read before that Rogers, in an attempt to bolster ahead of the other two providers, had launched a device replacement program, called “Rogers handset protection guarantee” which would replace your handset for a subsidized price (using a refurbished unit) so long as you have a minimum of 12 months remaining on your contract (if you have less than 12 months the contract is extended to 12 months). Awesome; had I been with any other carrier I’d be in for a whole lot more money!

So I enquired about getting a replacement and the surprisingly helpful CSR told me that there were three handsets available to me — the iPhone 3G (not 3GS) would be $549 ($50 off retail), a Blackberry Curve 8900 would be $299, a Blackberry Bold 9000 would be $329, and the LG Eve (an Android device) would be $0. Honestly none of those options sounded reasonable;

• the LG Eve is an Android handset but is a previous generation device, running stock 1.5 (with no knowledge of updates to or past 1.6), using a resistive touch screen, has a poor QWERTY keyboard, and is plagued by bugs (according to reviews).
• the Blackberry Curve 8900 seemed at first like a compromise Blackberry, but actually out specs the Bold in a few places, notably the camera and physical size/weight, but would mean bye-bye GMail push, well-made apps, touch keyboard, and dignity (I’ve knocked the Blackberry in a lot of places). Regardless, this was choice number 1.
• The Blackberry Bold 9000 was my first choice but I gave myself a minimum of three days to think it over. The first problem was that it’s a previous generation device with poor battery (according to reviews). I’d also heard that Blackberry OS 6 wasn’t going to the Bold 9000 (only the Bold 2/9700). Also the camera was mediocre, etc…

So with my initial decision made, I decided to call Rogers to order a Blackberry. I was just saying “yes” to completing to order when I brought up that I would need to switch my data plan over to a Blackberry data plan. If I had been any other consumer this wouldn’t be a problem — Rogers charges the same rate for Blackberry data and smartphone data ($25 for 500MB, $30 for 1GB, …) but I got my iPhone in July during a promotion to get a 6GB data plan for $30 which was a battle to get back then. At the same time, Rogers had a promotion for Blackberrys where if you inquired, you could get 6GB of Blackberry data for $30. The switch wouldn’t change any pricing. But Rogers didn’t know of that or wouldn’t allow me to do that.

My next venture was to perform a trick I’d heard of, called APN3CON, where the CSR has to type APN3CON into the SOC section and it makes your data plan function on a regular smartphone/internet stick and on Blackberrys. Awesome. I talked to Rogers and the CSR downright said I was crazy and making up lies. He thought it was a prank and verbally attacked me for it, constantly saying “who told you this?” Further more I emailed Rogers to confirm that APN3CON works. They said it does and gave me strict instructions as to how to get it on my account, but by this time I was fed up and my mind changed — Blackberry may have awesome relevance in business, but the way the interface works, and the age of the platform, and the build quality all told me that this was not the phone for me. I’d moved on to bigger and better things.

Now, almost seven hundred words later I get to my decision, the Nexus One. The Nexus One has been supported by Rogers in Canada — of course it would work with 2G unsupported using the T-Mobile version, but however I don’t have 3G where I live or within 100KM of where I live (screw you Rogers), it would be nice to have it eventually.

I ordered my Nexus One with an inscription on June 2nd at 5PM, costing $556.16 US dollars ($581 Canadian, currency converted through Mastercard at price of purchase). The phone was delivered on June 7, and on delivery from DHL, a fee of $78 local sales tax including a $7 brokerage fee was paid. All said and done, the phone cost ~$660. Not so bad, considering that the iPhone 3GS retails for $699 before taxes.

I’ve now had the Nexus for a full school week, and there have been a lot of good reactions to the phone, a lot asking whether I prefer this to my iPhone. That’s an interesting question, because the 3GS is a different generation of phone — back in the ~500MHz, medium-density screen generation, not the high-resolution, 1GHz, 500MB memory generation of the Nexus One, Evo, and iPhone 4. I’m happy with my decision; I’ve found that my generally poor Rogers reception has been immensely improved with the Nexus, even though both have antennas in the lower quarter of the phone (where one’s hand would more often than not cover it) and the Nexus has a metal case.

Switching to Android wasn’t at all difficult — at first I noticed all of the facets of the OS that Apple had gotten right that had yet to be polished, most notable the camera interface doesn’t rotate with the phone (the iPhone will rotate for 3 sides of the phone), the Android browser is far slower than Safari, the home screen icons do nothing to move as you drag other icons, and the phone does require more than one physical button to operate! It took a lot of time to pickup how the other buttons (the resistive buttons for back, context-menu, home, and search) would become useful. Also the trackball. That is a lot of ugly in the world of Apple, but has proven useful sometimes, and I now usually use it as a clicker for long-presses to paste text single-handed. That’s another difference; the iPhone may have been late to copy/paste but has done text selection (placing the cursor in a text field even) really well, with the floating magnifying glass. On the other hand, the N1 requires that you tap-and-guess, and use the trackball for greater accuracy. The Android (as of 2.1) doesn’t allow you to select any non-editable text.

As per apps, there may be a lot fewer Android apps, but they all seems snappy and very competitive with iPhone apps, albeit there are fewer drop dead gorgeous apps. For example Tweetie… or “Twitter for iPhone” is a beautiful app that I loved from day one on my iPhone. Twitter for Android is a powerful, versatile app, which looks good, behaves well, and feels Android-native, but it doesn’t have to fluidity of Tweetie.

I mentioned the Android browser is slower… and I meant it. The iPhone browser isn’t so hot on EDGE compared to Opera Mini (for obvious reasons) and certainly can’t compete with WiFi, but the Android browser is even slower. Even after the page has loaded, the browser keeps loading for many minutes, and the load priority isn’t straightforward — the iPhone always loaded text, layout, then images whereas Android seems to load and render in a top-down fashion. Opera Mini for Android seems promising though, and like on the iPhone, I’ll more than likely use that most of the time.

I was a pretty cocky iPhone user — I always mocked Blackberry for it’s antiquity, Windows Mobile for it’s downright outmoded-ness, and Android for it’s battery life, memory usage, and crashing. In the days I’ve had the N1, I’ve yet to have a system crash, application crash, or even an application go unresponsive. Holding the home button provides a 6-way application switcher for the last used applications, most of which snap back to life just how they were left, whether they stayed running or not. In fact, the Rogers My Account app, which yes, on EDGE takes seemingly forever to load, will even continue to load in the background. There are tons of pleasant surprises like that in this OS, that I never really thought about on the iPhone.

There are some areas where I hope to see some future polish thought, for example, when Twitter times out (I am on a shoddy EDGE connection) I get a message like “Tweet cannot be posted at this time.” followed by a Java-style error message including something along the lines of something.socketConnection.timeOut(). Most users would have no idea what that means, and would probably question someone like me as to whether something was wrong with their phone. A simple “Posting tweet timed out” would be adequate.

Over the coming weeks I’ll have some posts on good Android apps and life with this new fangled thing. For once it will be nice seeing the iPhone from the other side of the court. Here’s to new beginnings to all those who are encouraging Apple to innovate; choose Android.

If you aren’t sure how a bookmark differs from a bookmarklet, take a look at Wikipedia, or read my simple explaination: a bookmarklet is a saved line of Javascript code which provides some functionality and has all of the capabilities of Javascript on the currently displayed page, including navigating to a new page and modifying the page itself. A bookmarklet is activated when you open the bookmark (click it). On the iPhone there’s only one native way to get bookmarklets onto the phone — by bookmarking them on Safari on your computer then syncing them to Safari on the iPhone (done through iPhone). There are some bookmarklet providers which provide helper install pages to get around this limitation.

The iPhone bookmarklet installer bookmarklet: Found at joemaller.com/___
When activated this bookmarklet will add text to the beginning of each link found on the page so that you can bookmark it (see the site for more information).

The 1Password bookmarklets:
If you have an iPhone and the 1Password you can use the “lookup in 1Password” bookmarklet which automatically open 1Password with the current page address and allows you to copy your password. Immediately after copying some text you’re returned to Safari where you can input it. 1Passsword can be synced in app over WiFi to the Mac OS X version of 1Password.
OR
If you don’t have the 1Password iPhone app and have the desktop version you can make a self-contained bookmarklet which does the same thing in browser. New passwords are synced to this by the 1Password app on OS X. (learn more about option # 2 at the 1Password site)

Delicious – (see this page for instructions)
This just navigates you to an iPhone friendly way to bookmark using Delicious, pretty simple, very useful.

Find in Page – (Javascript to bookmark)
This open a Javascript prompt where you enter a phrase (case-independent) to find in the page; matches are counted and highlighted in yellow and bold.

Open Links in new Window – (Javascript to bookmark)
When activated this changes all links on the current page to spawn a new tab to view them.

Dictionary – (Javascript to bookmark)
This open a prompt to enter a word and redirects you to a definition of the word.

Wikipedia – (Javascript to bookmark)
This opens a prompt where you enter a Wikipedia query.

Mobilize This! – (Javascript to bookmark)
This bookmarklet open the currently open (or loading) page to be opened using the Google mobilizer service (shows only plain text, much quicker to load).

Read It Later – log in to your Read It Later account to find these bookmarklets
This adds the current page (or current loading page) to your Read It Late queue.

For immediate substitutions I’ll be using Hahlo for Twitter, the Facebook web app, and I’ve set textPlus to SMS.