Wednesday 8 September 2010

Living online

I have a blog, that at least is self evident.  I'm on twitter (rarely), I have an account on identi.ca (used most of the time), I spend time on Facebook, I have Google Reader account pulling in about 40 news feeds.  My phone is hooked up to most of these accounts so I can access information on the go (it even pulls up the weather and some stock prices when my alarm goes off so I can see what the day holds).  I write documents online using Google Docs, my email is provided by Google as is my calendar.  I have a paid for Ubuntu One account where most of my photos and all of my important documents are stored, and I'm thinking of paying for more space with Picasa so I can put more photos up there as well.  Oh, and my bookmarks are automatically synced between all my devices via my browser.

Writing it all out like that it suddenly becomes very clear how much I rely on the internet and good internet access.  I could have a cheaper home ADSL account but I pay a little more for cable so I can get the speed; but that's important to me as having "up to" 4Mb is useless, I don't want to leave my laptop on all weekend so I can upload the photos that I've taken during the week to my on-line storage account.  Likewise I want the download speed so that my other devices can pull down new files quicker.

Put simply, my entire life is in the hands of corporations with my data stored on their anonymous servers distributed across the world.  I'm not really going anywhere with this train of thought, I'm not one who thinks that all these services should be open - realistically no individual is going to have the resources to match something like Amazons Cloud Services - and I'm not scaremongering you into thinking that these faceless corporations are out to own us all, all though I'm sure one-or-two of them are.  Rather I'm looking at this situation in astonishment.

When I first got on-line the biggest problem I had was how to carry around 20 floppy discs safely in my bag without bending or breaking them.  The future then was how we would have devices so we could carry our digital lives around in our pockets.  Back when I was 16 if you had told me that instead of having storage in my pocket I would have a device to access my on-line virtual storage I probably would have given you a sympathetic look and asked if you wanted to sit down for a while.

My 6-month old son is now living in a world where he's had an on-line presence since he was 40 minutes old, since he was born mobile devices have gotten faster, new video codecs have arrived looking to replace flash movies and self-healing solar cells have been demonstrated.  It makes me wonder if, when he's old enough to start using a computer, telling him about storing data on your computer (or indeed 20 floppy discs in your school bag) might illicit the same response I would have given when I was 16 and on-line storage meant having your own website.

Friday 3 September 2010

New Phone

After spending a year with my HTC Magic I finally decided it was time for an upgrade (or rather that I was finally able to), so I upgraded to the Samsung Galaxy S.  Initially I was hoping to go for the Google Nexus One but contract prices weren't quite in the right ball-park for me, but after seeing the Samsung in use with someone who I work with I figured I'd take a shot.

Initially I was concerned that I would find the phone to big for practical use but in reality it's a good size and feels nice to hold.  I've been using my phone as a e-book reader since I first got my HTC Magic and the larger screen on the Samsung makes reading them much easier.

One thing I was eager to try was the camera.  I've always been disappointed by camera phones, although the quality of the images are sometime fairly good the shutter response speed has always been a huge disappointment.  So I headed off to Markeaton park with the family and with a little trepidation fired up the camera app and started snapping.  The camera app doesn't review the pictures after each shot so I took a few before checking and I was pleasantly surprised.



The quality of the photos on the Super AMOLED screen were more than impressive and then shutter response was really quick, still not quite as good as a real camera but close enough that I wouldn't be worried about using my phone as a camera when I'm out and about.  One very small gripe here though is that even though the phone supports multi-touch the camera app uses the phones volume buttons to manage the zoom functionality.  Where the camera does redeem itself though is the touch-focus function, so after framing the shot you can just tap the part of the scene you want to focus on and the phone does the rest.

So next I moved on to the video, this was also very impressive for a phone and the quality during recording and playback was as good as the photo's I think.



In terms of general use I'm very impressed with the phone, the battery may not lost to long but I've come to expect that from modern smart-phones and I've gotten into the habit of charging while I'm at work.  One trick I did find was that turning of automatic syncing overnight means that the battery is barely touched overnight so I don't have to worry about the alarm not going off (besides I have my 6 month old alarm to wake me up anyway).  It would be nice to be able to remove some of the pre-installed apps but with 2Gb of internal storage I'm not to concerned.

So this far and so good, I'm impressed with the phone and as always I'm more than impressed with the Android operating system, I'm not sure when Froyo is coming to the device but I'm looking forward to seeing what it brings.