Porting to Cell-C

I have been a Vodacom direct customer since 1995 (except for a brief stint of stupidity with Nashua Mobile, who make Vodacom SP look like angels). I have always had a Talk 500 contract or superior. Like a religious nut, I'd upgraded every two years, allowing a new handset to buy my loyalty and put up with ever increasing bad signal quality, network outages, rubbish data throughputs and perpetual price increases and value deflation for 12 years. This, combined with dropped calls at three distinct points on Cowie Road in Bryanston that hasn't been fixed in the 10 years I've complained about it has resulted in no loyalty from me.

 

I used to pay R899 for this privilege a month, without a handset, with no data and 100 SMS'. I have now ported to Cell-C, which was a painless / smooth experience. I am now paying effectively R500 for the same voice bundle, and receive 300 extra SMS' and 400MB of data included. In my books, thats about half the price. I plan to take the savings and use it to build a contract that suits me, whereby I'll get a new phone every year now. So, for the same money, I'm getting a phone every year as opposed to two, 400MB of data and 300 additional SMS'.

 

I've used the network now for 10 days continuously, as my primary voice and data provider. The service has been, from a voice perspective, superior to Vodacom. The data service has been great in almost all locations except underground parking locations. And because of VitalityMobile, my wife has cancelled her contract with Vodacom as well, and we'll be phoning each other for a fixed fee per month.

 

Goodbye Vodacom; hello Cell-C!

Asus Nexus 7

I've always been a fan of Google's Nexus line; hardware purpose built to highlight features in the latest version of Android, usually in a skunkworks configuration with hardware and software teams working relatively close together (same building at any rate).

 

I've had the Nexus One, Xoom, the Galaxy Nexus (I skipped the Nexus S because I thought it wasn't frankly that interesting) and most recently the Nexus 7. I picked it up in Dubai for R3000, in Duty Free. First impression is that its a solid device, with a nice rubber feel at the back. Jellybean on this device is extremely responsive, and renders graphics at lightning speed.

 

The 7" form factor is interesting; I personally like it, but Android still suffers from a severe lack of tablet-optimised applications, which makes me think that while this device is blazing fast and a pleasure to use for what I need it to do (Chrome and Google Reader), the iPad Mini is going to dominate this sector. At the time I bought, there was no 3G version; that has been rectified and I think with a 3G radio, this is definitely a very interesting device, especially if its price holds at roughly half that of its competitors. For the money, its unbeatable.

 

PS It does have the capability to make media available via USB, which is a big winner for me.

Unotelly (or how to watch Netflix and Hulu Plus in South Africa)

So cool devices like the Apple TV and many other embedded / TV devices support services like Netflix, Hulu Plus and BBC's iPlayer, but getting them to work without lots of hackery with VPN clients (services like Hidemyass) is near impossible.

Until now.

I signed up for a trial with Unotelly, a DNS-resolver / cache-based solution. They claim its VPN free, but the only way I can see it working is that they redirect the supported list of channels through to their own application proxies, which then mask you from the content provider.

Who cares; it works well, its relatively cheap, easy to install and I had it up and running on my home network in minutes. And best of all, works equally well on laptop, tablet, smartphone, etc. Neat!

Facetime HD camera's and Skype

Just a quick post, noticed that my video using Skype was stretched on a laptop with a Facetime HD camera.

This blog post was quite useful in getting it sorted out.

Android 4.1 - Jelly Bean

I had written before about the Galaxy Nexus; I've upgraded it to Android Jelly Bean, and so far loving the new notification framework, and the overall smoothness and perceived speed jump in usage.

 

The ability to mass dismiss notifications is also quite cool. Not cool is the auto-resizing / scaling of widgets. Sometimes, you want widgets to stay just where they are dammit, and this sometimes gets in the way. Pity there is no way to "lock" a widget / home screen.

 

Time to go play and discover more :-)

Samsung Galaxy SIII vs HTC One X

So, the big decision; do you buy the Samsung Galaxy S III or the HTC One X ? I'm not a fan of change, and I'd really appreciated the HTC Sense interface; I felt it enhanced, rather than detracted from, stock Android.

 

I ordered both, and played with both (the Samsung for about 10 minutes, and the HTC is now my primary device). Samsung's TouchWiz just seems to get in the way, and over simplifies the phone approach. I can see how this works well if their goal is to convert people from the iPhone to Android. It frankly pisses me off, and I spent most of yesterday helping a friend clean it off and install Cyanogenmod 9. He spent most of yesterday evening telling me how great it was over the stock interface, and based on my extremely limited time with it, I'd agree with him. He's going to love Jelly Bean when it arrives.

 

The One X seems on the surface not dramatically different from previous phones and iterations of their overlay. It just feels polished, smooth and natural. You can see that they've tried very hard to abstract the interface issues away from Android and provide a more consistent interface.

 

It feels good in the hand, and although the non-removable battery and lack of micro-SD (almost standard these days in any phone other than from Apple) is a concern, frankly it feels better and more well constructed than its equally large competitor. No doubt the Samsung will get more sales, but is it a better device than the HTC ? Not convinced. Battery life is sucky on both.

 

Both are still too damn big to be used with one hand, so it will be interesting to see what the iPhone 5 looks like size-wise. Its going to be a touch act to follow though, as the 4S appears positively dated compared to these new giants. Lets see.

Hetzner DE rocks

So I used to host a box in the US with a company called Limestone Networks, for $130 pm for a Intel box with a 500gb drive and 3tb of bandwidth.

I switched over to Hetzner in Germany, who charge E60 for an 8 core box, 2x3tb drive and no bandwidth limit! Not quite true, because I get rate limited to 100mbit after 5tb. I think I'll manage ;-)

The management interface is brilliant, the support is world class and I've not had to phone anyone.

Go Hetzner :)