Tag Archives: Epic

Mr. Deity and the Bang! – Season 4 Finale

  By TurboFool | November 22, 2011 - 8:47 pm | Acting, Atheism, Entertainment, Humor, Religion, Science, Television, Video Leave a comment

And here it is, guys, the episode you’ve all been waiting for. Probably. Just humor me.

Glorious, isn’t it? I think it’s a pretty epic sendoff to season 4. Keep in mind, this was the prequel season. So that’s essentially meant to lead into season 1, and season 5 will pick back up where season 3′s cliffhanger left off. Confused? You should be.

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I’m Officially Done with Smartphone Hardware Keyboards

  By TurboFool | March 4, 2011 - 8:45 pm | Electronics, Phones, Software Leave a comment

My first smartphone was the HTC Mogul for Sprint. Before that I had a long line of dumbphones (AKA “feature phones”) of various sorts. I had begun to really get into text messaging as a primary form of communication, and although I was pretty damn quick with T9 (like riding a bicycle I can easily pick it back up now), I longed for a REAL keyboard to pick up speed with. So when I went to a smartphone it was a no-brainer to get one with a keyboard, partially because I wanted one so badly, and partially because there really weren’t any smartphones at the time without them (the HTC Touch came a few months later).

I picked it up quickly, and immediately found the benefits. As a touch-typist I learned the layout and began writing at a pretty darn high speed, autocorrecting my errors like I do with my computer’s keyboard, and quickly reaching the point where I no longer needed to look at the screen. My suspicions were confirmed, and it became a must-have feature.

Soon after the iPhone was unveiled, and I was floored by it, at least for most of its unveiling. The lack of expandable storage, replaceable battery, availability on anyone but Cingular, and hardware keyboard sunk it for me. I knew I could never type as quickly, accurately, or without looking on an on-screen keyboard and its lack of tactile feedback, and I moved on and stuck with keyboard models ever since.

But prior to my current device I had seen the pattern phones were taking. The coolest, slickest, best-specced phones didn’t have keyboards, and I knew I was going to have to make a change and get used to it. I played with the Moment’s on-screen options and determined that even if they slowed me down a bit, I could get used to it. Plus Swype was actually pretty cool for one-handed writing. I had also determined that I was going to get an EVO 4G if Sprint didn’t get a variant of the Samsung Galaxy S. And then all my desires were answered in the form of the Epic 4G which was both a Galaxy S AND had a keyboard.

It didn’t take long for me to run into a serious problem with the Epic, though: the keyboard sucks. Physically, it’s fine. The keys feel good, and they’ve got a nice give to them, and the spacing’s good. I was able to get my speed up to usual pretty quickly and I would have been fine with it, except it randomly SKIPS inputs. You can type a whole paragraph and go back and notice that a third of your words are randomly missing letters that you DEFINITELY typed. I know myself, I know my autocorrection, and I typed those letters. But they’re simply not there. So not cool.

I put up with this for a while, and finally I decided to see if I could do better. So I installed the freshly-ripped Gingerbread keyboard on my phone and told myself to spend a couple of days without the hardware keyboard. And in the last few months my keyboard’s been used for nothing but checking whether my phone’s frozen.

Turns out onscreen typing’s not only not as bad as I thought, but faster. For one thing the built-in autocorrection works better than I expected and is certainly an improvement over the random missed letters. Common little errors are corrected as you go, and while sometimes its recommendations are laughable, most of the time it’s pretty helpful. I also quickly found that, to a degree, I still didn’t need to look at the screen. Even with the lack of the physical feel of the keys, I knew their positions well enough to make do pretty darn well. All in all, I adjusted much faster than I expected and with the exception of entering odd strings of text or URLs I didn’t mind it the way I expected. Punctuation’s a bitch in many cases, but I struggle through it.

But things came to a head today when I upgraded to the latest Bonsai4All ROM for my phone, which includes a FIX for the damn keyboard problem. Finally. So I figured it was time to try it out and see if I can go back to my beloved hardware keyboard and switch the onscreen back to Swype for easy one-handed use. Boy was I surprised to find that, despite the hardware keyboard being noticeably more accurate (although still not perfect), my typing speed was DRASTICALLY slower than I had gotten used to. It had nothing to do with lost familiarity (my fingers were finding the keys just fine) and everything to do with the spread-out spacing and the physical effort in pressing the keys. Silly things I never considered an issue before, but the subtle loss of time in traveling distance and depressing buttons adds up quickly when you’re hitting a large number of keys in a short period of time with only two thumbs available.

And that’s that for me. The allegiance I held to hardware keyboards on phones has ended with that final realization. Unless Sprint’s next awesome phone has a keyboard and no comparable alternative without, I will now have officially switched to onscreen keyboards from now on, gaining me access to much slimmer phone (even if I wish they’d stop making the damn things slimmer and start putting in bigger batteries).

But good luck prying my hardware QWERTY desktop keyboard out of my cold, dead hands… ;)

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Why I hate Android

  By TurboFool | February 24, 2011 - 10:21 am | Electronics, Gadgets, Phones, Software 2 Comments

Okay, first things first: that headline was pure sensationalism at its core. I love Android, and there are currently no alternatives to it that I would consider as reasonable replacements for everything Android does so damn well. But it’s very often the little things that can really frustrate you when dealing with a device or platform.

Case in point, Android’s handling of its multimedia duties. See, when Apple decided to get into the smartphone biz, they completely changed the paradigm of what we expected. Instead of a phone built around business needs that could also browse the web and play audio files, they started with an iPod and built around that. In fact that’s what led to many of the early jokes about the iPhone really just being an iPod that made phone calls. It was initially best at its roots and poor at everything else. It’s since improved drastically, although the joke that it’s terrible at making phone calls remains.

Meanwhile Android came from a more base concept of trying to do everything, and launched after the iPhone set the standard for these concepts. It, IMO, got the overall OS concept down much better, appreciating that we need to run more than one app at a time, that when something wants our attention it shouldn’t completely overtake the activity we’re participating in, and allowing applications to tie their needs together in all kinds of clever and involved ways. But what it lacked was the long history of multimedia experience to inform that functionality, and that’s where it still fails.

To be clear, Android’s built-in media abilities are fine. They do the job well, their interface is decent, and I have little need to complain about it. Some phones, such as the Galaxy S line, include support for a lot more codecs making it actually EASIER to play videos on my phone than on an iPhone (my Epic 4G has so far played every single video format I’ve thrown on its card, without conversion) or Zune, and include improved media players. As well the Android Market is packed with alternatives for better podcasting software than Google’s passable Listen app, better video players such as mVideoPlayer, better music apps such as DoubleTwist or WinAmp or a dozen others, streaming options like Slacker, etc. Point is, its flexibility allows it as a media device to functionally match or surpass the iPhone and Windows Phone 7 quite comfortably, even if not as fluidly or naturally. So it’s not in its technical abilities that Android fails me. It’s merely in one simple overlooked place: audio mixing.

Android seems, under most circumstances, unable to mix two disparate sources of audio into its output at the same time. When playing music, a video, streaming audio, playing a podcast, etc., any other audio playback that occurs (such as the variety of notifications your dozens of apps can use to get your attention, carefully customized to exactly your needs, or directions from your navigation software), the OS will simply kill whatever audio track was already playing for as long as it takes to play back the other audio (including any dead silence that was included in the clip before or after), and then continue playing the original line of audio. It doesn’t pause the audio, it merely mutes it. When playing back music this is unbelievably annoying and distracting, and when playing back an audio book or podcast it’s simply unforgiveable. The number of times I have to hit the skip back button in BeyondPod to see what I missed because an email came in while I was enjoying the latest Drabblecast is ridiculous, not to mention mildly unsafe. And even in music it leads me to avoid using Slacker or my other amazing music sources when I have guests in my car because it’s simply embarrassing to have the audio constantly shut down while we’re trying to enjoy ourselves. I find myself apologizing for it or simply shutting it off and switching to FM.

So far Google seems unconcerned with the issue despite the large number of complaints in their support sites about it. The problem’s existed throughout every version, and it doesn’t seem to be acknowledged. But it’s enough to make me consider digging out my Zune again just for audio, except it still fails to provide me the streaming options I’ve grown to expect since switching to Android.

Another smaller failing in this area is Android’s handling of Bluetooth when there’s an audio cable plugged into the device. It seems to assume that if I have anything plugged into the headphone jack that I must prefer to use that as my hands-free solution instead of the paired and connected Bluetooth headset. This might make sense if I were using the included headphones with microphone built in, but it’s a failed assumption when I’m in the car and have an audio cable plugged into my sound system. It’s even more of a failure since it doesn’t notice that my audio cable doesn’t have a line for microphone, can’t deliver audio to it, and doesn’t leave the phone’s built-in mic open. So when I’m driving and listening to music through my phone and I get a call, despite having my Bluetooth headset on and in my ear, I have to reach over and unplug the audio cable from my phone and then answer the call, otherwise I hear my caller through my car’s speakers and they hear nothing in response. The iPhone, as far as I’ve witnessed, actually asks you which device you want to answer through when a phone call comes in, routing to your Bluetooth or other options accordingly. Presumably if you were to hit the answer button ON your Bluetooth it would be smart enough to route there. Android still doesn’t do this.

These issues aren’t enough to override everything that I love about Android, but they are enough to cause some audible profanities in my car for reasons I don’t think are necessary. These SHOULD be easy to fix, as even Windows Mobile, for all its failings, worked fine in these circumstances. And yet, at least for now, they remain untouched. Google’s lack of concern on these types of matters seems to border almost on Apple’s methods of telling their users their desired features don’t matter, except Google instead simply ignores the problem entirely. It’s unfortunate, and I really hope it improves. While I’m sure there are other issues with Android that bug me, if these two problems were resolved I’d feel as close to 100% happy with it as I could in a technology world with a constantly moving target of expectations. Let’s shore this up and move on.

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