Month: August 2009

Internet on the Boat

Kathy and I spent the weekend on the boat on the moorings. We couldn’t go any where because the canal is closed due to a breach on one of the embankments and so they’ve closed all the locks to stop boats moving and hopefully to keep the water levels up until they can get some pumps in to pump water round the section they have had to drain.

My G1 is still away for repair and so I’ve been using Kathy’s old LG Viewty which has some very odd quirks to it and I’m glad its not my normal phone.

There is one good thing with the Viewty in that Linux just recognises it when I plug it in and I can use its 3G modem without installing any software (unlike Windows where you have to install the unbelievably crap LG communications suite.)

When I tried it at home it had crawled because we live in a 3G dead spot, but out on the boat moorings it really flew.

3G speedtest on the boat.
3G speedtest on the boat.

Yes, that really is a 665Kbps download speed. I think if I try it at home I get something like 86Kbits.

So I configured my laptop to share its internet connection and we actually were both surfing the net at the same time. The only down side is that the 3G stack seems to choke if you ask it to do more than a couple of things at once.

The case of the stranded contacts

I quite like my G1, and now I’ve got TasKiller it’s battery life is almost reasonable.

One of the big features of the G1 is that when you set it up you have to tie it to a Google Account. This gives you access to email and also synchronises your contacts and your calendar on the phone with your Google Account.

This gives you a lot of extra functionality. Rather than maintaining your contacts on your phone on its internal screen you can sit at your computer and login to your Google account and do all the work there and then synchronise it, and you can also do work on your email (like delete messages in bulk and move them round) from your computer which is a lot easier.

This breaks the traditional link between phone and SIM and contacts/numbers. In the past you saved numbers in the phone or on your SIM. Move phone or move provider and you’ve got fun and games getting all your contacts synced up in one place. With the G1 they are in your Google account. So change your phone to another Android phone, or change provider (which at the moment you can’t)  and everything simply moves with you. Brilliant – and the G1 even allows you to import contacts from your SIM.

But what happens when your phone goes wrong? Well I found out.

The keyboard on my G1 has gone faulty with the P key and the backspace key going a bit odd and not working about 70% of the times you press them, and anyone who knows my typing will know that I use the backspace key a lot.  So I phoned T-Mobile and they said “Take it to your local T-Mobile store and they’ll send it away for repair”, and so I did and yes they did.

T-Mobile gave me a loan phone, a phone that looks like it crawled out from the primordial soup, no internet, no 3G, no nothing, but most importantly : NO CONTACTS.

Where are my contacts? That’s right, they’re sitting on a Google server somewhere and the phone cannot get to them.

Now I fully understand that T-Mobile can’t keep a pile of G1s in stock as loan phones, but now with things like the G1 blurring the line between phone and internet, especially when it comes to contacts etc. I think that maybe they need to look at their loan phone policy.

As for getting my G1 back? It could be 10-15 working days. So I’m stuck in the technological backwater until I get it back, unless I can work out how to use the Viewty. The only good thing you can say about the Viewty is that Linux just works with the on-board 3G modem.

TasKiller

I’ve had an Adroid G1 on T-Mobile for quite a bit now and I quite like it, its got a lot of good features but one huge problem with it is the damned battery life. Like its terrible.

I found I can make it last longer by turning off 3G unless I know I’m in a good 3G signal area. My part of Cheltenham is lousy and sitting on the table at home it will often lose data connectivity completely.

But the other day I stumbled upon TasKiller which is a totally free app in the Google Market Place.

So what does it it do?

Well it kills apps, pure and simple. When you “quit” an application on the G1 you’re not really quitting, its just swapping things round. Now some of these apps don’t really cause problems but others, like the built in email app, seem to hog resources.

After installation you simply start it up and it shows “idle” apps in white and active apps in yellow. Short clicking on an app kills it, if you long click on it then you can either switch to it, or you can add it to an ignore list.

The ignore list is very clever because one of the features of TasKiller is you can kill all running apps except those that are on your ignore list.

So that’s a quick overview of what it does. It doesn’t sound like a lot but it really makes that battery life last longer.

If you’ve got a G1 then get this app, seriously.