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Wandering through a shopping mall on Friday I spotted the new Google Android powered G1 phone at a T-Mobile store. So I decided to take a look as it could be a viable alternative to the iPhone if you don’t want the O2 network or can’t justify the £35pm entry point for the iPhone.
Initial impressions weren’t good, it had the same awful plasticky build quality of the old T-Mobile Vario (HTC Touch) with a screen that slides out of the way to reveal a proper keyboard. This slide out mechanism is not what I would call robust…
But the important aspect of this phone is the operating system and software which are supplied by Google, someone else may make better hardware in future if the platform takes off.
The Google Android system has all the features you’d expect of a modern smart phone, a full web browser, good email support, maps, an apps store etc. The features list is not the problem, but the implementation is. The iPhone was revolutionary not for any particular feature like the touch screen or maps, it was revolutionary due to the way it worked. The simplicity. It’s very obvious how to do almost anything. The Android platform takes advantage of keys to do some things and the touchscreen to do others. It’s never obvious which you need to use to do something. You find yourself scanning the keyboard for the appropriate key if you cant find what you want on screen, and then if you can’t find a button that does what you need you end up looking around the screen again for some sort of clue as to what to do next. It’s awful. It’s not much more user friendly than the original T-Mobile Vario which ran Windows Mobile 5(?) and that was an absolute nightmare, although the G1 isn’t as sluggish. If it worked well I could forgive the unfinished and very dated “look” that the interface has but as it stands I can’t find anything positive to say about this phone, apart from the price. Even the keyboard, which I thought might be a benefit over the iPhone really isn’t as it’s small size does not make for fast text entry, to be honest I doubt it’s any faster than the on-screen keyboard on the iPhone.
Hopefully Android will get better, that’s the beauty of software, but for now, unless you honestly can’t afford it, the iPhone remains very much the king of the hill.

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Apologies to those waiting for the next installment of this project, I have been busy with various client sites…

As I mentioned in part 1, I decided to make some real world measurements of the performance of the solar panel and also the power requirements of the iPhone 3G.

I hooked up a DC power monitor to a 12 volt battery and for a period of exactly 1 week I charged the iPhone exclusively from the 12V battery via a Kensington car charger. In 1 week of my normal use, (ie with WiFi and bluetooth switched on 24/7, email checks every 15 mins, some light browsing and probably 3 or 4 hours of calls) the phone used 43.5 WH (watt hours).

(more…)

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I’ve been researching solar panels for some time now and really fancy having a go at putting together a system to run my computer setup off of solar power only. But I’ve decided to try walking before running (or maybe I should consider it crawling before even walking?) and just see how easy it is to power my iPhone purely from solar energy.

To power something like an iPhone from solar energy you need at least 2 things: (more…)

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There have been a lot of questions raised about the accuracy of the iPhone GPS receiver, the size of the antenna, the update frequency and so on have all been called into question.

So I decided to try a simple test as I am currently learning how to develop iPhone applications that make use of the GPS. Using a 3rd party application to log the GPS co-ordinates from the iPhone, I cycled a 3.5 mile route through a suburb of London and exported the co-ordinates as a KML file and loaded the path into Google Earth. I then manually drew an accurate path in Google Earth of the same route.

As I was cycling, bear in mind that I made use of the pevement in places, as well as the road.

(more…)

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Next month will mark the 8th birthday of the Apple iPod, the mp3 player which revolutionised the music industry. In less than 8 years Apple sold over 160 MILLION of them, 60 million of which was in the last 18 months alone…
They began with just one model, available only in white and with a 5GB capacity it required a Macintosh computer in order to use it. Retailing at $399 it was considerably more expensive than mp3 players from the more established competition such as Samsung, Creative Audio and so on. But unlike the mp3 players which came before it, it was far easier to use. Transferring music from your computer to the iPod was practically automated, just plug it in. And navigating through 1,000 tracks required an easy to use interface that broke away from the CD player like controls found on most players.
The 3rd generation player of 2003 saw the introduction of Windows compatibility and with the trademark white earbuds becoming a (accidental) fashion statement sales really took off. TV and billboard ads capitalised on this, using silhouetted dancers sporting bright white earbuds.
As the years and generations have passed, battery life has increased massively and so has the memory capacity. However the physical size of the device continues to shrink and become more refined and elegant. The feature list continues to grow, first came music, then photos, then video, then games and now we have 3rd party applications, full web access and email.

The chart below highlights the different generations along with the price (at launch), storage capacity, battery life (max battery life is for audio use only, minimum battery life is for video playback where available), colour selection (all colours available during that generations lifespan)

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NOTE: The figures in this blog post are updated live. Anyone linking to this article should probably avoid quoting the actual numbers in their own article.

A few weeks ago I posted a link to a web based application that we wrote to test the download speeds on the 3G iPhone. So far 643 tests have been performed by users from all over the world.

The average 3G connection speed (ie filtering out the results from 2G or Wi-Fi tests) for each country, in order of fastest to slowest, is as follows:

(more…)

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We’re trying to do some research into the typical browsing speeds on our beloved iPhones so we’ve knocked up a simple web app for the iPhone that runs a speed test.  The results are logged by connection type (eg 2G, 3G etc).   We feel this information will be valuable to developers such as ourselves as iPhone connection speeds to web apps are something of an unknown quantity.
Please point your iPhone to: 

http://speedtest.lightsourcemedia.co.uk 

(more…)

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Apple are quick to mention the internal sensors fitted to the iPhone, the info is right there on the website:

Sensors

• Accelerometer
• Proximity sensor
• Ambient light sensor

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The native iPhone Wordpress application has finally appeared in the App Store.

It’s a free download and allows you to manage your Wordpress based blog quickly and easily.

So,  first impressions?

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According to the Q3 financial results conference call, Apple’s next fiscal quarter (Q04) will experience a secret “product transition” that will drop the company’s overall margins from just under 35% to just over 30%. It would seem that Apple is concerned that their high margins make it easy for competitors to release similar but cheaper products…

According to Apple’s CFO, Peter Oppenheimer “these state-of-the-art products will have technologies and features that others can’t match”, but he refused to reveal anything beyond that.

(more…)

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