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Thu, 10 Jul 2008
Top Ten 'Im Not Buying an iPhone' Excuses That Will Save You Money
So the new iPhone comes out tomorrow. Your friends (if you have any) might be asking you if you are going to totally buy the new iphone or not. Well, here are some excuses you can use to avoid having to buy another piece of electronics tomorrow and fighting the crowds.
10. I can't justify spending
9. I am going to wait until the
8.
7. 6. The (insert obviously inferior iPhone knock off handset name here) is way better than the iPhone, I am going to buy that instead 5. I am going to wait until the one with the mini-DLP projector comes out 4. I don't want to sign another 2 year contract 3. The back is plastic now ... i liked the old iPhone's metal back. too bad I can't buy the old one now 2. The plans are $10 more expensive now 1. Steve Jobs is the devil
Sun, 08 Jul 2007
1 in 300 Americans, EDGE grows up?
I am breaking one of my rules blogging about something as overblogged and amateur reviewed as the iPhone, but it is a noteworthy topic in some aspects. With over 1 million units sold, 1 in 300 americans is prancing around with a glass and stainless steal battery-sucker-o-matic. In what was nearly an impulse buy, and after listening to some of my wife's friends convince her the night before that only celebrities could obtain these "rare" phones, I figured I could not lose buying his and hers iPhone's. In fact, its reception was better than bringing home jewelry...aside from being comical and worthy of its own blog...and for those who have read my "black box" OSX Xterm window rant involving the IRC client "BitchX", and my suspicious wife, you can only guess. I opt for the 8 gig unit, as the improvement was almost at cost, and the fact it has no expansion. Yes, thats right, CDMA and EVDO fanboy is on a GSM network. What is the most interesting about this Cingular/AT&T Wireless, now AT&T, EDGE network is this carrier had an ace up their sleeve. Apparently, for unknown motives, Cingular launched EDGE crippled. It was under-engineered in more ways than one. Not only were there less EDGE carriers, but the backend was not fast enough to even support the most basic of speeds on the network. This means that the reason why you only got 40Kbps on EDGE was probably not just the air interface, but the back-end connectivity to the tower. The short story is that AT&T dumped 50 million dollars into a project called "Operation Fine Edge". This project involved installing more EDGE line-cards into cell sites (boosting air interface capacity), but actually making sure the back end connectivity in the poorest performing towers was there too. This effort bumped EDGE to about 200Kbps on average, depending on location, time of day, and signal strength. I have seen 200Kbps in residential areas in the evenings, and about 90-110Kbps in the business cores during peak times. Not bad. Infact, EDGE is about as fast as their UMTS offering. Sad, but true. Its too bad the iPhone does not have EVDO, but taking in account that nobody knows how to optimize a TCP stack on a handset to begin with, the EDGE network on the iPhone has the visual apperance of an EVDO network. Pages load fast. Thu, 28 Sep 2006
One of several projects i am working on...I'm not really permitted tell you what it does though. If you have a project in mind, even if its something a little out of the box, let me know. Development cycles can be very short. Mon, 27 Feb 2006While there is certainly better applications about to hit handsets across the globe, America's Best Mobile Pix is still a quick fix for your social ranking needs on the go. This software is a mobile HotOrNot / RateMyFace style application, which allows you to rank (between 1-5 stars) girls, guys, cats, hairstyles, and other random topics that change month to month. The winner of each social contest recieves a $100 visa gift card or something of the sort. Not too shabby. America's Best Mobile Pix claims to be "family friendly", but I really doubt it. Some of the photo submissions are very edgy, which makes you wonder if they do any filtering or approval at all. I tested this application today while on the bus, and I was supposed to be ranking "interesting pictures". These images ranged from sunsets, artistic images, trees...and up pops up something that exceeds my "PG" rating I try to keep my blog entries at. Very embarrasing. Nethertheless, most of the content is pretty tame, especially in the "baby" and "cat" section. You can simply flip through images and rank for hours and never get bored. Its a real time killer and my wife gets a kick out of all the dorks in the guy section. If you have seen the intro to "MySpace The Movie", you probably could relate. Sometimes the application is slow and hangs while it is waiting for a response from the server. While the application is very chatty with data services, Vision really isn't this slow, so I suspect it has something to do with their "pix" servers. Oh, yeah, and you can tell a bunch of clueless bastards without any pop internet culture in their blood wrote this software. Apparently, they think that "pix" is singular form for one picture...sorry guys...its "pic", pural is "pix". It also sports this really nutty softare description on the website, which is down right confusing. I wonder if they know what the purpose of a "?" is...or maybe people really talk like this on IM and i'm just too old for this.
"New! See & vote for America's Hottest Girls, Hunkiest Guys, Cutest Babies, Funniest Kids and More!? Submit your own pix and WIN prizes!? Easy & fun to use.? As featured in USA Today - you can also rate all pix and be the contest judge!? Download now! This wonderful piece of software is $2.99/mo (free, thanks to my monthly vision credits -- suckers). P.S. The last post from me (Voip Bounce Back) was written from my MM-7400, MidpSSH, and Pico -- on a 1.5" x 2" screen. Oh and there is no keyboard on the phone either. Mobile blogging at its absolute worst. Fri, 18 Nov 2005This project is really picking up a lot of steam. About one week ago, Surj Patel started asking a few peculiar questions about the GM862-PCS....the kind of questions one asks with intent to build their own homebrew cell phone from commodity parts.. The plans were similar -- gumstix, cheap surplus LCD, and GM862. These three components are the key ingredients to the "brains" inside such a device. If you have read any of my previous articles, the GM862 provides voice/data capabilities and is controlled via serial port. Word of such a crazy project has started to hit the mainstream already. CNet wrote an article earlier this week titled Build it yourself cell phones. With this article came more interested people out of hiding, and more help means this project is going to take off like crazy. A few things have changed since i first purchased the product. Telit announced availability of a Phython version of this product. This can make intial prototyping quite easy, along with providing the "glue" to either avoid the gumstix in the first place (less interesting; yet has applications) as well as provide a better abstraction layer for easier control of the GM862's interworkings. Such an "API" or abstraction layer would also be useful when supporting more than just the GM862 (yes, there are more modules out there than this...and they'll be even more soon). This might be a smart idea to avoid redundant efforts. Why build a cell phone? Good question. I have a hard time answering this question, myself. I think the biggest reason why I am so interested is that all cellular hardware platforms are very closed. Since the inception of the camera phone on the 1xRTT networks, I immedately invisioned how nice it would be to be able to write native code for my handset. Lets see...100Kbps symetrical throughput, camera on front of flip, along with 80x60 screen, full audio capabilities. Gee.. i could do video conferencing with this handset...oh wait..no i cant...platform is closed, and java cant talk to the camera or the outside screen. Well, then, I have a button on the side of this Sprint phone....i could deploy push to talk and just use a low bitrate vocoder (like the onboard QCELP encoder/decoder). But no, i cant. I'd have to write native code to run such a SIP app in the background. I had to wait 2 more years for Sprint to finally release such a beast. Since Java VM's are limited and slow, most phones cannot even run these apps in the background, it serverely limits a mobile developer. If we only had a hackable platform with direct access to the hardware, our mobile dreams would become our reality, and we would stop lusting over those Japanese and Korean handsets once and for all. Or maybe the fundimental answer is, I do it because I can. Thu, 10 Nov 2005*DAMN* After downloading Google Maps Mobile for my SprintPCS Sanyo MM7400, I immedately run this app. My screen goes completely blank, and suddenly, I have a full screen satellite view of north america. I can zoom in and out, go to vector map mode, with the same look, feel, and smoothness as google maps. The 1xRTT network makes it load as fast as it does on the desktop. After zooming in over my office building, I decide to start messing around with its local search functionality. I type in "Coffee", and 3 Google Map-isk dialog boxes pop up showing me where I can get coffee in Bellevue. It also tells me to hit 1-9. As I hit these numbers, the app quickly pans and centers over the item of interest -- even if they are on the screen or down 5 blocks. The dialog boxes even dynamically point and shape as they swish on and off the screen. Need directions? No problem. Click "Directions" and you get a nice green dot you can position on any city street. You then position the end dot. If you do not want to visually describe your start and stop locations, it also accepts addresses. After you place your start/stop points, it routes and gives you real-time directions. The only downside is that, since it is a third party application without a signed GPS API certificate, it cannot pull location data from Sprint. I am sure that once that is functional, this will be one killer LBS app.
Fri, 26 Aug 2005
Whats small, chalk full of sound effects and music, offers turn-based fighting, full motion mpeg video cut-scenes, and can be played by a very large number of players at once? Yes, its Casey's new cell phone MMORPG: "Maokhian Prophecies" I started work on this game a couple weeks ago, and its really coming along so far. It takes advantage of some cutting edge features with newer sprint phones, but it should be completely functional on lesser handsets. One of the most challenging pieces of this project is the map generation. I have to create all the map data by hand.
You may also notice that the tile graphics are a little crude. The game is completely skinable, so once I obtain a better
tile set (very likely from freeciv), i will be performing a little cleanup work on the graphics.
Mon, 11 Jul 2005In recent news, CNN mentions a new suffix has been approved by ICANN today. This suffix was surprisingly backed by several large telephone and software companies, including the GSM Association. Thanks guys, for a TLD that takes about 9 key presses on my cell phone. Wouldn't it be easier to type .com instead? You might as well have lobbied for ".aworldwidewebsiteforcellulartelephones" I am going to stack this one up with other useless TLD's, such as .coop, .biz, .pro, .name, and .museum. Sun, 06 Jun 2004
Fun With Modems
Why would I want to mess with AMPS or a modem? Well, I sometimes go into roaming areas, and my 1xRTT data will not work. I need another solution, and AMPS is the only solution which will transport my data. Circuit switched data on roaming providers is not possible, and modems do not work over vocoders on the likes of digital networks (ie, CDMA, GSM). Since I have unlimited off-peak and unlimited roaming, data should be quite inexpensive. Since the modem is 2 wire, and the handsfree is 4 wire, I would need a hybrid transformer. This splits/combines transmit and receive pairs. I would also need to make sure it was matched, as well as provide voltage on the modem side so it can be happy. But screw all that, I figured out something a little simpler. I can always find a phone jack. But then long distance becomes an issue...or does it? Nearly all roaming providers let me 3-way call. So, in CDMA, I 3-wayed the modem land line and a free dialup provider (nocharge.com), which was long distance. I typed in ATD on the modem, hit mute on the cell, and waited for a connect. The handshake went crazy, and failed. It was almost as if both modem sessions were going through a vocoder---but i thought three way calls were at toll rate (64k) on the network? I guess Sprint is doing some tricky stuff. So I threw the phone into AMPS, made a 3 way call, used my ATD trick, and put the phone into mute. This time i worked. Apparently, putting the phone into mute wasn't the only thing i needed to do while in AMPS. The phone needed to be in a good coverage spot in the house (no static noises) because apparently mute is a phone/handset feature, not a network feature.
Wed, 26 May 2004
Now this is Wireless Fidelity
The Link: Casey's Mobile Broadcast Station. Im sure a few special events are in order -- I just need to find myself a camera man. On a personal note, I am traveling to a function in eastern washington this weekend (Tri Cities). I'm bringing my gear with me and I should have the entire cell site to myself. For past blog entries, check out the archive on the side or click here. |
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