Android 2.2.2 with MotoBlur.

Score: 1/5 – Buy an iPhone instead.

This review is not going to be flattering to either Motorola or Android, as I find it difficult to know where the root cause of a problem lies (Android, or the specific implementation as delivered by Motorola) I’m going to lump them together, if I perceive the issue with the OS, I’ll say it as I see it.

This phone is my introduction to Android, chosen because of the proclamations of being “life proof”. I naturally assumed that it would be able to be robust and integrate well into my day to day life. What a mistake to make.

The defy does have some good points, the best feature of this phone is the screen. The pixels are nice and dense rendering crisp, clear, clean text and images. It’s useless in sunlight, especially the unlock screens (grey on grey) but indoors it’s pleasing to be able to read such crisp text in SMS’s and the like. Swype that comes default with the defy is also an awesome piece of software and would have to be the one “feature” of the Defy (actually any Android device) that I would love to take across to the iPhone when I eventually return.

The rubber seals making it life proof are nice when new, but now 2 months into ownership I can see where the one protecting the charge port is going to wear out in about 6 months due to the need to continually feed this phone with power! I use it with runkeeper to track my runs, it’s nice and light and being sealed (at the moment) is comforting when you’re doing a sweaty workout.

The battery life on this phone was awful, I found one of my many googling of my issues that if you tick the USB Debugging option (Settings -> Applications -> Development) that I could improve the battery life from ~18 hours to not quite 2 days. The biggest hog was init/home that seemed to be using vast quantities of CPU resources, the phone would on occasion get quite warm and chew through 20% of the battery for no apparent reason. It appears that ticking this option, causes the issue not to occur and is likely related to a Froyo bug that many other manufacturers have fixed, but Motorola in their wisdom are not fixing for the Defy.

Compatibility with SD Cards (supposedly ones that should work) is sorely lacking. I attempted to update to a Class10 32GB Lexar microSDHC card. This caused all sorts of issues on the defy, which googling indicated have been issues for other manufacturers and the Froyo release of Android, many of those manufacturers have released updates to their OS releases, Motorola have chosen at this stage not to.

I would like to point out that while I would love for Motorola to release a Gingerbread 2.3 (or even a ICS) update to the Defy, I would be equally happy with a fixed version of Froyo that resolves a lot of the issues I am and many other defy users are experiencing.

Other issues I have experienced is applications randomly crashing, aweful pauses for not determinable reason, swype becoming unusable to to what ever the root cause of the init high CPU usage is (this seems to be resolved with the ticking of USB Debugging – which of course now leaves me open to more security risks). I would not at this moment in time recommend an Android based phone.

I could potentially see myself being happy with a Google Nexus One, S or Prime, given that Google support their older phones with software updates and refreshes. They don’t install vast quantities of bloat on it. I would not recommend any other Android based phone, and will purchase outright an iPhone 4S to replace this device of hatred and pain.

If you’re tempted by a Motorola phone – I would recommend that you flee, they may be pleasantly designed, have some cool features, but their after sales support is non existent.

Telstra : You also have a lot to answer for – I’d like some support and back up here please getting my issue resolved. I would like you to also enable people to get rid of all the links and other apps that you put on the phone’s image. I like a nice clean neat view of my system. I had a look at the apps you put on there. Most don’t interest me, give me a way to clean them up please, it’s my phone after all.

The phone gets a 1/5 because it’s got decent reception and clear voice calls. The just plain awfulness to use and odd behaviour prevent it getting any more than that. I actually dread making an outbound call, or creating an SMS, it’s just painful to do. Receiving a call and responding to an SMS is easy to do and once you’re into the right app it does work.

Word experienced an error trying to open the file.
Try these suggestions.
*Check the file permissions for the document or drive
*Make sure there is sufficient free memory and disk space.
*Open the file with the Text Recovery converter.

Instead of telling you why the document could not be opened (trust settings) it pops up saying an error occurred, it could be memory, disk space or file permissions. Of course none of the suggestions work. In the end I gave up and just disabled trusted documents (Which has to be done in each office product) as well as right clicked on the file selected properties (for a file I created in Google Docs, and then downloaded) and selected the “Unblock” button just to make it work.

How about telling the users that it could be because Word has been set not to open untrusted documents, or providing some accurate description that it’s related to this (or that the file has been marked as blocked because you downloaded it from the internet).

This would have to be one of the worst examples of user unfriendliness I have come across. The QA person who signed this off should be sent to some punishing place never again to work on software until they’ve learned their lesson.

Method one – sector by sector copy – this method would attempt of course to copy the bad sectors, however after a while, this seemed to hang, left for 12 hours to have it progress no further, owch, what to do, what to do….

Method 2 – XXCopy – rendered the system unbootable, attempted to work out how to make a Win7 install bootable after the fact, not much luck… this led me too RoboCopy

Ended up using robocopy (Robust Copy) utility which is available on the Windows 7 boot disk, steps performed:
1) Partition new disk
2) Set active partition
3) Format NTFS
4) Run robocopy with the command string
robocopy d:\*.* c:\ /TEE /S /E /COPY:DATSO /PURGE /MIR /ZB /NP /XJ /R:3 /W:2

The source was D drive (D for Dodgy!) destination being the newly formatted Hard Disk
/TEE – Output to console – this way you can see that it’s changing files
/S – Copy Subdirectories excluding empty ones
/E – Copy Subdirectories including empty ones
/COPY:DATSO – What to copy for the files – (D)ata, (A)ttributes, (T)ime, (S)ecurity, (O)wner
/PURGE – Deletes anything on the destination that does not exist on the source (added this due to having some files from other playing about)
/MIR – Mirrors the directory tree
/ZB – Use restartable mode
/XJ – Exclude Junctions on NTFS filesystems
/R:3 – Retry 3 times
/W:2 – Wait 2 seconds before retrying

This got me a bootable Win7 installation, and a dodgy disk has now been sent for RMA. It failed to copy 17 directories and 5MB of Data, no idea what’s missing, but I’ve experienced no problems thus far (touch wood).

The first thing I did after all this, was a backup, then a full chkdsk – everything has been great so far.

I’m glad I was doing my backups – if I wasn’t I might not have noticed until it was too late.

Some of the key features of the Kindle 3 that may interest you is the higher contrast screen for that even more paper like visuals, even lighter and smaller than before, a new colour (graphite) which I personally find significantly more appealing. The best feature of the WiFi only kindle is it’s price at $139USD even with currency conversion and shipping to Australia it’s price competitive with the Kobo which was the cheapest e-ink based eBook reader available down here.

Kindle WiFi direct link for Australians

Intel Turbo Boost Technology Monitor - Fail

Solution:

(Version 1.0.400.5)

This is what I did to get this tool installed:
I ran the setup and again the box popped up saying “This installation requires a newer version of windows”. I did not click “OK”.

I typed %TEMP% in the windows search box and hit enter, explorer opened up a window displaying the contents of the TEMP directory. I then looked inside the two most recently created folders with a name (GUID iirc). Inside one of these folders was a directory of {671EC9B2-A0F0-4035-AA48-729EDC3C59EF} inside this directory are two setup files TurboBoostSetup64.exe and TurboBoostSetup32.exe as I am running Win7 – 64 bit I ran TurboBoostSetup64.exe which installed correctly and I now have Turbo boost tech monitor working.

M

CRTL-ALT-DEL : Desktop

CTRL-ALT-END : Remote Desktop (1)

CTRl-ALT-SHIFT-END : Remote Desktop (2)

If you’re connecting to a further remote desktop not sure what key-sequence that you’d need.

Ensure that you include the  the following line in your

/etc/apache2/httpd.conf 

add the following line

Include /etc/nagios2/apache2.conf

restart apache and things will begin to work for you.

Things like the eeePC from ASUS seem almost ideal but there are a few issues with it – slightly too small and horrific battery life. If the keyboard and screen resolution were a little better and the interface had a tad more polish (to suit the limited screen real estate) it would be damn near an instant purchase; but its biggest holdback is the battery – 2-3H battery life, one would assume quite a lot less when driving something the huwei E220 USB 3G/HSDPA modem.

Now both Intel and VIA have released their next generation mini-mobile CPU’s (Atom and Nano respectively) performance and battery life should be improved in these devices the Atom being the most interesting of the two CPU’s – hyper threading and SIMD instructions included but out of order execution has been dropped – it will be most interesting to see how such things are supported by software. Nvidia’s Tegra is very interesting an ARM based solution complete with OpenGL-ES support and a tiny power consumption footprint. One could conceive a decent portable device could be constructed based on this platform (the current non-3G iPhone is based on something with a similar architecture).

However my needs are pretty simple – I want a portable device with a reasonable screen (1200×800 pixels), reasonable keyboard for the fat fingered amongst us and fantastic battery life when used with a USB modem. I think drivers will be Tegra’s limitation and price will limit the adoption and acceptance of the Atom and Nano platforms, only time will tell – I think manufacturers have overlooked the reason that people have flocked to the eeePC, yes it is partially form factor but overall it is price I think there is a whole market segment between eeePC and subnotebooks (Vaio, Lenovo X300, MacBook Air) where people want some of the functionality of these subnotebooks, but not the prices attached to them.

** Addtion – whinge and you shall receive – seems the eeePC1000 may suit my needs – depends on final cost I suppose which looks like it might be going up.

Some awesome little clips advertising world of warcraft – the Mr T clip is da bomb foo!

If you’ve experienced the pain of a screwed up page (formatting) after embedding a youtube video – try the page here, very, very helpful! The above saved my site – it took forever to work out why the formatting went all fubar. The code supplied by youtube out of the box does not work well with WordPress and Firefox, most of this is related to changes introduced by the wordpress graphical editor. However, a few simple changes, removing of the “embed” tags and life is once again happy and videos, embeddable and viewable by the important browsers.