The last HTC phone that anyone will care about

HTC was a credible, solid device manufacturer that not only made great hardware, but paired it with its customisations of Android that in past years made Android a credible option for business users rather than a geeks wet dream. But it feels like someone sucked out all the energy and dynamism out of HTC, and threw it into Samsung. Now don't get me wrong; Samsung, while they make great hardware, make some god awful UI's and add (in my mind) almost no tangible value to the Android ecosystem rather than numbers.

 

But you have to face reality; HTC is haemorrhaging its senior executive team, and despite announcing it before the Samsung S4, has delivered the HTC One it to market in most markets later (sometimes by days, but often by weeks) than its feared rival. So is this the last great phone HTC makes ? I hope not, but fear it is.

 

Onto the merits of the phone!

 

• Its gorgeous to hold in your hand, and feels so well built and less plastic than its rival
• Those stereo speakers are truly amazing - no more tinny noise, thanks to those Beats-inspired additions
• HTC Sense 5 is truly a breath of fresh air, providing a great skin on top of Android

But I'm afraid its not all roses :-(

 

• The battery life is miserable - try running out of juice (properly) by 4PM in a business day
• The lack of a large Calendar widget is a dreadful omission, given that its been there in almost every prior device
• The design gives the hint that its not life-proof compared to its rivals

 

I like it; enough to make it my primary ? Lets run the battery a bit longer and see. But if it continues to be miserable, no.

Nokia Lumia 920 (aka the peak of irrelevance)

I tried a Nokia Lumia 920 this week. Its well built, solid (I could use it as a traditional weapon its so damn heavy), and the unit I played with was a deep red (and came with a luminous yellow inductive charging pad). Quite eye catching.

 

LIke the Blackberry Z10 I played with a while ago, the Windows Phone has some great features. Its super responsive, the graphics are gorgeous, and its quite quick to get going. But, it doesn't take long for the Microsoft-ism's to come shining through. All the built-in apps only integrate with Skydrive; sorry Google Drive and Dropbox users, you're stuck. And Google users, there's no social networking, search, browser, Earth or maps. There's nothing. Unlike the Blackberry, this platform has been around long enough that if those applications were ever going to make it over, they'd have been there by now. The fact that they're not, indicates that they probably won't ever be.

 

And thats sad, because this could have been a great contender.

 

Emphasis on could have been. Adios, Nokia & Microsoft. It was, respectively, a great (Nokia) and fucking goddamn awful (Microsoft) 20 years in the mobile industry; by hitching the two horses together, they'll just drown faster.

Samsung ATIV SmartPC Pro 700T

Microsoft Windows 8 has had mixed reviews; from the positive to the negative and everything in between. There is no question that Microsoft has taken a large bet on the mobile form factor, and Windows 8 is the company's response to the IOS-led mobile computing revolution underway. Most reviews have been lukewarm, and customer adoption has not been as rapid as hoped.

 

Is this because the software / hardware doesn't work, or is the idea flawed ? Having several Apple devices, I can confidently say that while they're amazing personal and consumer tools, they vary between amusing to downright useless as corporate devices. Three simple things that you can't universally do on an iOS device are;

1. Correctly view, edit and contribute to a multi-user / versioned document with tracked changes
2. Consistently view, present and edit a presentation
3. Export, import or share onto a memory stick any content

 

While these are simple (and you would think trivial) matters, in a business context they're effectively show stoppers. I bought and played with a Microsoft Surface RT (RT stands for ReTarded), which was silly. The hardware is great, the folding thin keyboard is truly innovative but the lack of an Intel processor makes the app and program ecosystem pretty thin. Enter the mouthful; the Samsung ATIV SmartPC Pro 700T (phew). A i5-based processor, 64GB SSD and built-in 3G modem makes this (large and heavy) tablet and associated keyboard cover quite an interesting beast. I've been using it for about a week now, and some initial thoughts;

• Windows 8 isn't sure if it wants to be a tablet, or general purpose computing platform (Metro, desktop, and the confusion and lack of cohesion between the two)
• Windows has a large and solid platform of software that allows you to do almost anything you need
• USB ports are damn handy, as is an open and standardised set of file systems
• 64GB is simply not enough storage; even with an additional 16GB MicroSD, disk space is so tight that you just barely make it
• Windows 8 tablets and devices play nicely with corporate workflow, systems and architecture principles

 

Windows 8 (and this hardware) are not the prettiest, slickest, fastest or most appealing combo; a MacBook Air or an iPad 4 from a design, weight and general aesthetic perspective kick these offerings into the stratosphere. But as a business tool ? I haven't powered my iPad on since I got this. 

 

For me, even though I'm going to get ridiculed for it, the Windows 8 tablet is a compelling story.

Bose QC3 headphones

Its very rare that you buy something that does exactly what its supposed to do, and does it so well that it blows all your expectations away. One such device is the Amazon Kindle; does what its supposed to do, and consistently. I'd like to add another to that (very short) list; the Bose QC3 headphones.

 

Yes, they are very expensive at $350. Yes, they only work when they're powered (i.e. the proprietary battery is charged). But oh yes, they are gorgeous and comfortable to wear (even for hours at a stretch). And oh yes, they sound amazingly neutral (which is rare these days). And oh yes, that battery lasts for ever (more than 16-18 hours). 

 

It comes in a beautiful hard case (which frankly doesn't look like it'll last very long if you don't care for it), an airline adapter (for those stupid airlines that don't have a standard headphone jack), a charger and a set of "world" adapters that will make the charger work just about anywhere. The only fiddly bit is the cable, which comes either as a standard wired cable, or as an Apple-compatible control set of buttons. On the plus side, its detachable, and on the minus side, they really should consider making these things wireless. Cables, while great for quality, really suck in real world use.

 

It really is surreal how the minute you put these on and switch the button (there is mercifully only one button on the whole thing), it sounds like all the air has been sucked out of the room and its eerily quiet. On the audio quality front, I can only reference these to the Klipsch Image X10i's in terms of quality and trueness to the recording; if anything, these are slightly bass heavier, but not distractingly so. Mid's and trebles are fairly treated, and overall quality is sublime. They don't get terrifically loud, but because of the design seem to focus the sound into your ears as opposed to bleeding out. And they're open backed, which means a much more neutral sound that doesn't eliminate external noises if they're loud enough.

 

Are they worth the price tag ? Audio quality and comfort are so subjective, its hard to comment without real-world comparisons. These are so good that comparisons are only for academic purposes, not necessity. it would be interesting to compare these with a pair of AKG 490NC's, which are roughly a third less. The Harmon equivalents that I have tried were so bass heavy (as were the Monster and Beats equivalents), whereas the AKG's are more supposed to be more neutral.

 

But these Bose; awesome! 

Open-Mesh

I've played with a load of WiFi access points; from my very first Zyxel 802.11b access point, with its dorky associated PCMCIA card, to the latest/greatest Apple base station, most AP's haven't really differentiated themselves. Off hand, I can think of Proxim, Cisco, Orinoco, Xirrus, Colubris, Ruckus, Linksys, Netgear, Billion, D-Link, TP-Link & Belkin to name a few brands I've had the (dis)pleasure of directly configuring.

 Only four stand out, for different reasons.

• Proxim, for having the most awesome WiFi meshing, going back more than 8 years. Although you had to connect to each one to configure them, wired or wireless was irrelevant; they would discover each other and backhaul over 5GHz and serve clients over 2GHz, with a single unified SSID. They were almost perfect, except for the price, which was about R5k at the time
• Linksys, for having the most long-range device, the WAG54G. Solid, dependable, boring as sin but rock solid and worked well in almost any environment
• Billion, for unarguably having the most rubbish radios and range, and being so unreliable that they're as good as useless
• Apple, for having the most expensive and least functional devices on the planet. Other than that you can configure them from an iOS device, there is absolutely nothing redeeming about these AP's. Repeat, there is nothing redeeming about Apple AP's as WiFi devices

So, being a schmuck, I ended up with two Apple Airport Extreme devices, both cabled/wired, with two radios; one broadcasting at 5GHz and the other at 2.4GHz. Nope, they didn't speak to each other if they were cabled. Nope, they didn't form/create one SSID. Yes, iOS devices are particularly stupid and want to associate with the BSSID they last connected, not necessarily the one closest.

 

So, we had what I call the last shining light problem; the last AP the client device connected to, was the one it insisted on connecting to again. Even if there was a closer, faster AP in the same room. With the same SSID. This illustrated to me that you can't leave AP decisions to the client; work on the principle that clients are stupid (gosh, that would be a first!), and leave the intelligence in the network.

 

One evening, this happened once too many times and I got super annoyed. Quick Google search revealed that what I want to do is surprisingly difficult in the consumer space, and pretty rare even in the enterprise space. What I wanted is referred to as wired open or loose mesh; a mixture of wired and wireless AP's, that communicate with each other, and where an associated AP will kick a client off when a "closer" AP sees the client.

 

A quick call to Ruckus indicated they can absolutely do what I want; but at a price point I wasn't willing to pay for home. Meraki (now a Cisco division) seem to be able to do what I want, but again, at a price point that seems to be straying quite far from their original roots. I was about to give up, and then discovered Open-Mesh. 

Seemed ideal; cheap AP's ($60 and $80), cloud-based controller, two SSID's out the box, perfect! Also cheap enough to experiment, so I ordered four. Two were to be wired, two wireless. I expected four would be enough. The first awesome thing was that they told me the MAC addresses of the devices, before they shipped! Excellent, means I could add it to my DHCP-issuing infrastructure, as well as configuring it online, on the Cloudtrax portal. You create a master login, and from there, you can create multiple "child" networks each with their own independent settings.

 

And before you think you're locked into their AP's, essentially any AP running batman can join and be part of the network.

 

So how do you configure ? There are three high level decisions;

 

1. Do you want to allow guests (i.e. an open network), and if so, what do you want to limit their traffic to ?
2. Do you want to allow guests to have a premium service ? If so, what are your Paypal details and what rate limit would you like them to have ?
3. Do you want to run a 2nd "private" SSID and bridge it to your LAN ?

 

There are a bunch of other decisions, like AP isolation (i.e WiFi clients cannot connect to each other), the ability to report outages via e-mail, but functionally, you have to determine the above 3. I configured the devices, by basically adding them to my network on a Google-backed map with their MAC's (which I had because they gave them to me), and waited.

 

They arrived, I plugged them in, and 15 minutes later, I had a meshed WiFi network that had two wired AP's, and two additional AP's hanging off them. As promised, network coverage was excellent and more importantly, I could roam from one AP to another with no dropped packets, a slight increase in latency and the ability to review my network from Android or iOS. I've ordered some additional AP's to ensure 150Mbps in every corner of the house, but basically, you could get away with 4 on a two story house for Internet access.

 

There is no longer a last connected light problem, there is now a shining light network; the closest AP is associated to, network access is full strength and the network is fault-tolerant.

 

I can highly recommend this service!

Edit: you don't need to tell the devices or network which one is cabled or not, which port is LAN/WAN; it figures it out dynamically.

Edit: it creates a virtual BSSID, and then dynamically remaps the closest AP to a client with that BSSID. It also creates its own DHCP range and NAT's on the guest network, and prevents clients on the guest network access to the LAN.

Edit: I've added three more nodes to the network, and it is highly extensible; here is a view of my home network.

Blackberry Z10

Blackberry had lost its way over the last few years. It had frankly average hardware paired to cloud-centric intelligence in the form of BIS or BES. With both, polling of your e-mail, calendar data and the like was done centrally, and then results pushed to the end-device. You couldn't ad hoc add a POP3 account, for example; it had to be added at the centre.

 

So in my opinion, Blackberry has never really had smartphones; they've had smart terminals, but as smartphones, they were pretty poor. I've played previously with a Bold 9000, and a Curve 8520; nice enough build, average performance and downright rubbish app selection.

 

That was the past. When Blackberry announced the Blackberry 10 OS, based on QNX (of single-floppy bootable GUI fame), there was the promise of getting to par with Blackberry's unarguable competition, Android and iOS, at least in features. And while I've only had a Z10 for two days, I thought it good to share some opinions.

 

Gone is the requirement for BIS or BES to do anything useful! The device is actually a smartphone; it has ActiveSync support out of the box, IMAP support and the like. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are integrated into the central messaging environment (called Hub), as are your texts, BBM's and other messaging systems. In addition, your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn contact data sync with your phonebook, so you can look at your contacts holistically rather than across multiple applications.

 

The device itself is very well made; it feels of premium quality, with a relatively minimalistic design. Easy and comfortable to hold, feels like a solid device and packs a 1800maH removable battery and removable microSD card. Yay, removable storage. Hardware is definitely a pass.

 

 

Software, on the other hand, is different. Not good or bad different, just … different. You can see that its got a UNIX or UNIX-like backend, and it feels like a polished skin on Android frankly. You swipe down from the top to access menus or additional features, you swipe up to access the task bar, and then its a swipe to the left to access the central message Hub, or a swipe to the right to access the fairly ubiquitous and Apple-like application menu.

 

So far, so good. In terms of the applications available, its a little miserable at the moment. The core ones (Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) are there, but nice to have applications like Skype and Whatsapp, and core applications to me like Google Drive, Google+ and in fact anything Google-related are simply not available. While I can live with these omissions for a short time, no matter how slick the experience is, I will ultimately be forced away from the platform due to a lack of "killer app".

 

And then the event (™) occurred. The device was charging, and several notifications for application updates, including one for Blackberry World, appeared. As you would, I chose the install all option, and went to sleep. I woke up and noticed the Blackberry World application's icon had changed, and it was now simply a square with a triangle, a circle and a crescent. And trying to run it would simply bring up the task manager. Hmmmm, this wasn't a good sign. And guess what ? There is no way to delete it, no way to repair, and no way to download another copy.

 

 

Ok, although its painful, lets reset the device. The only on-device option is called a security wipe, which other than taking very long, does what it says. All your user data is gone; and this is important, ONLY user data is removed. The phone rebooted and lo and behold, now I didn't have a broken Blackberry World application; I didn't have ANY Blackberry World application. Shit.

 

So, lets try and reinstall the OS. Oops, you can't. At least, not as a user. You have to give it to Blackberry. Given that this is a test device from Blackberry SA, I'd assume they were quite keen to resolve this problem quickly. Well, now been 24 hours since the problem was reported, and no action. Sigh.

Would I recommend this device ? Right now, no. In 3 months time ? Maybe.

iShieldz

Best. Screen. Protector. Ever.

 

No bubbles, good protection, easy to apply. And the dry auto application (yes, this is tech and no, its not porn) is amazing! Get from Emia Distribution.