Jack Scott's Blog

I’ve been in need of a new mobile (cell) phone for a while. My old phone, an HTC Touch GSM (the original) was becoming a bit broken. I was loving it to bits.

The USB connector was broken, WiFi only worked half the time, I was starting to get jealous of the iPhone; a number of reasons contributed to the need for a new phone.

I did however love HTC. The phones seemed rock-solid and well designed, especially compared to some of the other manufacturers on the market. Other HTC owners I have met over the years agree; I am yet to hear an HTC owner complain about anything but the price.

I considered a few phones. The Apple iPhone was high on the list, as were a number of Nokia phones, most notably the N79. I will admit at this point to being a brand junkie; there was no way was buying a cheap iPhone clone.

What drew me in to buying the HTC Touch Pro2 was the full QWERTY keyboard and large 3.6″ WVGA screen. I know from owning a decent desktop computer that the most important parts from a productivity point of view are the monitor and the keyboard. They are the parts your body has to interact with, and they should be comfortable.

I bought my phone new in the retail box for $887 AUD from a shop in town. I have seen them as low as $650 on eBay, though I didn’t go this route because I wanted a solid warranty. It is a mobile phone with a hinge, after all.

Now onto the device itself.

It’s far and away the largest and heaviest mobile phone I’ve ever had, or ever seen, or even heard of (apart from the old analogue brick phones). It’s 17mm thick, 116mm long, and 59mm wide. Looking at it another way though, it’s the smallest laptop computer I’ve ever seen. It has a 480×800 pixel screen, as well as a 5-row QWERTY keyboard. Although it is on the small side (naturally) the keyboard is very nice to type with, using both thumbs with the hands wrapped around the back of the device. The screen is also nice, not suffering from glare problems as much as other phones I’ve used (older Nokia phones were particularly bad). If you look closely you can see the individual pixels, but you have to look very closely. It is a very high quality screen.

The screen is a touchscreen, and this is one area where they might have done better. The level of touch required to activate a ‘click’ is in my opinion excessive. It’s far more than on my old phone, or the Apple iPhone. It’s still usable however.

Battery life, as expected for a smart phone with all the bells and whistles, is miserable. I have to charge mine every day, otherwise the battery does run flat. However, being human, I have to sleep sometime, and it’s convenient to charge it every night.

In the box comes a screen protector (very useful, it’s a large otherwise unprotected screen waiting to be scratched), a spare stylus, a USB cable, a wall adapter for charging without a computer, a pair of earphones, and a very nice leather case. The headphones that come with the device serve a dual purpose. The first is as a headset for using the phone, and for listening to music. The second is an antenna for the device’s FM radio. I have to say here that the shape of the headphones is abysmal. They do not fit in my ear at all, and the cable is far too short. If it wasn’t for the fact that they are required for FM radio, I would have just chucked them away.

Inside the device is a Qualcomm MSM7200A chipset running at 528MHz. It’s fast. There’s 512MB of storage onboard, of which around half is available to the user to store settings, documents, and optional applications. Program memory (RAM) is 288MB. More would have been nice, but I’m yet to run out of it.

HTC has gone to great lengths to ensure every piece of software you could desire is on the device, and they’ve managed well, with a few exceptions.

The operating system is Windows Mobile 6.1, upgradeable to Windows Mobile 6.5 some time in the future depending on which carrier you are with. It’s nice, though I notice no huge usability or performance increases compared to Windows Mobile 6.0.

HTC also put their custom TouchFlo 3D software on the device as an alternative user interface. If you’re not used to the Windows Mobile interface, you’ll probably find it nice. I just turned it off and used Windows Mobile as Microsoft designed it. The alternative interface does have a few cool features, mostly related to quickly turning communications on and off as well as turning emails into phone calls near instantly. I get the feeling it’s designed for the jetset business executive. As you may have noticed, I’m not one of them.

The device is also jammed with other software. A YouTube player is there, as is a choice of two browsers (Internet Explorer and Opera Mobile), Google Maps (with support for the GPS built into the device), and Microsoft Office Mobile. As well as a lot more. I loved the fact that Google Maps and YouTube were installed by default, saving me some download time. One application that is missing is Facebook, although given two browsers and a huge screen, it’s not so much of a problem. Opera Mobile even supports tabs, though having more than 2 or 3 tabs open at one time does slow down the device quite a lot, especially when multitasking with other applications as well. I would have liked a few more games installed by default, although I guess I can’t complain – this is a business phone.

Overall, I love this phone, and I’m very glad I bought it. Assuming you have the the money to spare, I would definitely recommend it.

Good:

• Huge 3.6″ screen.
• QWERTY keyboard.
• WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, HSPA, it’s all there.

Bad:

• Opera slows down when multitasking.
• Battery life is short.
• Included headphones are awful, and using your own requires an adaptor.

Overall: 4.5 stars.

Recently I’ve been looking into my mobile phone account, since I’m sure I’m not getting the best deal. Currently I’m with Telstra on a prepaid plan. There’s nothing wrong with it, except that it’s generally expensive.

I’m only a light caller (we’re talking a couple of sub-minute calls a week, tops), and only a couple of SMS’ a day. On the other hand, I use a significant amount of data. Every month I use at least 100MiB, and sometimes I go up to a gigabyte. For various personal reasons, I’m expecting to use even more than this over the Australian summer.

So I went through the options, with the goal of paying less (a good thing) or getting more for my money (also a good thing). I currently pay somewhere between $30 and $50 AUD a month.

Telstra - I like Telstra a lot. Signal can be found pretty much everywhere in Australia, and a 3G signal can be found in all the major towns and cities. Call quality is very good also. However, they are very expensive. The Telstra plans I looked at (in particular the Mobile Member Plan) confirmed this, being even worse value for me than my prepaid plan. Data usage (most important for me) is charged at $59 for 1GB, then 25c/MB after that (more info). This is HUGELY expensive. Even with a low-cost $20 plan though, I do get a new phone (but no data).

It’s worth mentioning that I’ve also had a Telstra Prepaid Wireless Broadband dongle in the past. I liked it a lot and found it very functional, but the prices were very high. This is still the case, and the prices are about the same as they were 6 months to a year ago. I’d prefer not to have to have a seperate plan for data, but it is an option.

TPG – TPG have one of the cheapest post-paid plans on the market. It’s $9.99, includes $150 of cap value, with call charges being very reasonable rates. However, at this cheap price, data suffers. Data usage is $5/MB, which is much more expensive than Optus, Virgin, or even Telstra!

TPG’s more expensive plans ($49.99 and $79.99) do include data (500MB and 2GB respectively) as well as free calls to other TPG users in off-peak hours. However, at this price, other providers are cheaper anyway. In addition, none of TPG’s plans include a new phone (although for that price, you can’t blame them).

3 - After a friend’s experience with their accounts department, I’ll never go to them in my life. I haven’t even looked what the prices are, let alone care.

Virgin - Virgin Movile was one of the providers I looked at very closely. For $25 on their Rollover Caps Plus plan, I get more calls and texts than I’ll ever use in a month, as well as 300MB data, which is more than I use in an average month. Also included is a new phone, free voicemail, and free calls and texts to other Virgin Mobile customers (though this is nobody I know, making it a dud offer). It goes straight on the shortlist. If I do use over the 300MB in a month, I can buy a data pack which gives me 1GB (up to a total of 1300MB) for an extra $15 a month. There’s also the Velocity points I earn, but they amount to two parts of nothing.

Also worth consideration is the Beancounter prepaid plan. This has the benefit of really cheap calls and texts to everybody (10c SMS’ to anybody in Australia is very tempting), but falls down in the data department; I have to buy a seperate data pack ($10 for 300MB) seperately.

Optus – The ‘yes’ Cap plans have similar value to Virgin’s post-paid offerings, but without the possible bonus of free calls to other customers of the same telco. With regards to data, Optus is slightly more expensive than Virgin at $19.95 for 1GB. Virgin uses the Optus network (in fact, Virgin is owned fully by Optus, not by the Virgin Group as you would expect) so reception and signal quality should be very similar, at about 96% of the continent’s population at the present date.

Vodafone - Last but not least is Vodafone. They have two series of plans. The first is the SIM Only Contract Caps, starting at $20. This has quite reasonable value at $150, but my research indicates it comes with no data. A data pack can be added, $9.95 for 200MB. This would cover my needs most months, but leave me high and dry in a few.

Their other line of plans is the Contract Caps, starting at $29. These include a new mobile, and for the more expensive plans, some data as well (quite a lot of it, in fact). However, for the cheaper plans it’s the same $9.95 for 200MB as the SIM Only plans.

Another thing to be mentioned about Vodafone is that their network in Tasmania, from experience, sucks. It’s getting better all the time, and in other states is probably quite fine, but is still lagging behind the other networks in Tasmania.

Conclusion

So which one to choose? It’s a hard choice to make. Most of my friends are with Telstra, and would either kill me or not message me anymore if I moved away to another provider. On the other hand, being with Telstra is definitely the most expensive option for me (except for possibly TPG). I won’t go Optus, since I may as well go Virgin. I also won’t go Vodafone, since I like my phone to work around the places I live. 3 is ruled out for being incompetent. That leaves staying with Telstra or moving to TPG or Virgin.

I have no idea what I’ll do yet. I’ll let you know when I decide.

About a month or so ago I investigated replacing my extensive collection of virtual private servers, free web hosting accounts, SSH shell accounts, and so on with a single managed server account. The reason for this is that the time taken up with managing these various accounts and servers was starting to chew up more time than the money I was saving.

A couple of friends had free accounts with Nullshells, and had positive things to say, so I thought I’d give them a go. I chose the “Value” ($7 USD / month) web hosting plan based on the number of domains I planned on hosting. All my websites are fairly low bandwidth and low disk usage, so this was the only one of the listed specifications I really cared about.

I have to report that the signup process was fairly simple, and the setup process was completed quickly. The only thing I found slightly confusing was that (for some odd reason I can’t quite fathom), there seems to be a separate user account for the billing system and the system logons. While this doesn’t really matter (I set them both to the same password and just ignore the fact), it does puzzle me.

The web hosting plan I chose gave me access to one of Nullshell’s servers on the East Coast of the USA. I have had no problems so far with the speed of the server, nor with the speed of the connection. I live in Australia (basically the other side of the world), and was getting ping replies in 250msec. Not quick, but that’s not the fault of Nullshells. Transfer, however, was no problem. It fully saturated an ADSL2+ connection I tried a transfer speed test on. I have no doubt it’s a lot faster than that too.

As with all modern hosting plans, a user control panel is included. The one Nullshells uses is called ISPManager, and everything about it is very nice. It’s a lot easier to work with than CPanel, and makes a lot more sense.

As for the actual plan’s features, well, they’re pretty nice too.  $7 a month buys me 1GiB of disk space, 5GiB of data transfers, 10 MySQL databases, and 100 email accounts. As well as that there is the previously-mentioned 5 domain limit. Available for use are PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails and Server-Side Includes. Compared to the larger ISP hosts, this is brilliant value. Even for some of the comparable smaller hosts, it’s still rather outstanding. But there’s one surprise up Nullshells’ sleeve that I haven’t talked about yet.

The service is amazing. I’m yet to have a problem resolved in an unsatisfactory way. The staff are always ready to help. In addition to this (and this is the first time a commercial company has impressed me in this way), I’m asked occasionally if things are working fine and given notice of recent improvements the company has made (I’m interested in such things, which is why they tell me).

Overall, I’m really pleased with Nullshells. For the cost of 3 bottles of Coke a month, I have a web hosting service that’s much more reliable than anything I could do myself, with great service and more features than I’ll ever use. 5 stars.

For the last few years I’ve been following with interest a tiny little program called Notepad2. Essentially it’s just a text editor (very similar to Notepad included with Windows), but it does have a few tricks up its sleeve.

For starters, it has syntax highlighting. And I argue, very very nice syntax highlighting. I much prefer it to other editors I have installed on my computers (Dev-C++, Visual Studio, Emacs) as well as others I’ve used in the past (GEdit, Kate). Arguably though it’s not as complex as any of these editors. In addition, it does line wrap, line numbering, and more. Pretty much every part of the editor is configurable. It also automatically detects between Windows, UNIX and MacOS 9 line endings (very useful when you swap source code between Windows and GNU/Linux).

Notepad2 editing a Patch file

There’s a lot of things it doesn’t do though. It’s not a fully-fledged IDE, by any means. It has no idea about projects, function parameter hinting, Makefiles, or anything like that. If you want an IDE, look elsewhere. Which is why I have Visual Studio installed. It does everything, and then some more (in a few gigabytes of disk space).

Above all else though, there is one very handy reason why I have Notepad2 installed. It’s because it can completely replace Notepad. Because Notepad2 is only a single file, like Notepad, with no other dependencies except Windows itself, it just slots in. After removing all the security on the Notepad.exe file in the Windows folder, you can just copy and paste Notepad2 in. And then all the links and file extensions pointing to Notepad just open Notepad2 instead. If this sounds pretty cool, you can learn how to do it here (XP) or here (Vista). I wish there was an installer for Notepad2 that did all this automatically; at the moment Notepad2 is just distributed as a bare executable file. But I certainly won’t be complaining too loudly.

If you’re looking for a simple editor for when a full IDE isn’t necessary, or you’re still using the default Notepad for everything (shock horror), then I’d definitely give Notepad2 a go. Even if you don’t fully replace the original Notepad, it’s still a pretty cool upgrade from Notepad.

[ad#post-footer]

Recently I found a quite awesome piece of software, and I thought I’d share it with you.

ExpanDrive is basically an SFTP file system driver for Windows. What it does in plain English is turn an SFTP share on a remote computer (say, for instance, my virtual server on the other side of the world) and turn it into a drive letter on my laptop. Like so:

My Computer using ExpandDrive

This is the first piece of software I’ve found that does this, and does it well enough that I can just click on the drive, click on any file inside the drive, and it automatically copies and opens in the appropriate application. Saving inside the application also works. For instance, I had a word document lying around on my server, so I thought I’d test it out. I opened it up just like a normal file, edited it, saved it, and so on, and it just all worked normally.

The only difference from a local drive or a Samba share is the speed at which things happen. There is a noticeable difference (to be expected, it going over several ADSL connections). Opening a text file took about half to one second, saving it about the same.

The people who make this software say that it’s “rediculously simple”. They are very right, it is. Anybody who has used WinSCP would be familiar with that software’s connection screen. ExpanDrive’s is very similar:

ExpanDrive Main Window

One bug I have noticed is that the drive usage is wrong. I know for a fact my vserver doesn’t have 12TB of storage space available (as shown in picture above). I’m actually using about 30% of 12GB, so I’m guessing they just checked total disk space wrong.

The only downside is to this software is cost. It’s $39.95USD for a single license (a license can be used for multiple SFTP shares). While it’s not a huge amount, it’s more than I’d like to pay for something like this (in my mind, this sort of thing is worth about $20USD). I haven’t bought it yet, I’m still using the trial (which lasts for 30 days). But I think I will.

[ad#post-footer]