• Apple’s new low: censoring a dictionary #
• Followup on the Apple dictionary story. #

Also, the webcomic Cat and Girl was Sent from my iPhone (via @brionv) #

I figured, hey, this one’s free, why not check it out?

Finding and Downloading

The first problem I had was finding it. But that’s mostly the fault of the Android Market, which can only be browsed by hierarchy and sorted by date or popularity. Fortunately, there’s a search function, so I just searched for “Hexed” and it turned up immediately.

It took a while to download even over 3G, so I let it sit and came back to it when I had time to take a break.

Reading the Comic

They’ve taken the comic and broken it up more-or-less panel by panel, turning it into a slideshow presentation that you scroll through by swiping your fingers along the touch screen.

It actually works surprisingly well, especially with the default transition effect of “slide,” which matches your finger’s movement. (They also have “fade” and “deck” transitions — deck has the appearance of sliding a card off of the top of a deck to reveal the next card beneath it.)

To jump around, there’s a navigation slider that you can bring up from the menu. You can scroll along the slider, or pop out the keyboard and type in a specific panel number. Unfortunately, there’s no preview of the panel you’ve selected until you hit OK.

Drawbacks

Screen size is going to be a problem, as least with translating comics from print. As long as we’re making devices you can stick in your pocket or on a belt holster, there’s only so big you can make the screen. That works fine when you have, say, 6 panels on a page, because they’ll break up easily and word balloons are still going to be readable. But splash pages? They’ll lose their impact, plus they may have to be reformatted to keep dialogue and narration legible.

There was one spot in Hexed #1 where the formatting did end up being a problem: it was a double-wide panel broken up into two in which the character on the right spoke first, so I had to shift back and forth a couple of times for follow the conversation properly.

This won’t be an issue for comics designed for the mobile audience, though, and iVerse is seeking submissions for new comics.

What’s Next?

I mentioned the problems with finding Hexed #1 in the Android Market. I’m kind of hoping that Google will at some point either add some new ways to browse on an Android device, or set up a website that you can use from a desktop the way you can browse iPhone apps through iTunes.

Following up on that, what about subsequent issues? Android will notify you when updates to your installed apps become available. But Hexed #2 isn’t really an update to Hexed #1, is it? Suppose you have ten series that you’re following through your phone? How do you find out when the next issue is available? Or will they treat each series as a single application, with updates adding the content from each new issue?

It seems like each issue is being treated as a separate app, which brings up another potential pitfall: clutter. At present, all of your app launchers display as icons in a single alphabetically-sorted grid. Imagine having to scroll past a block of 10 or more issues of a series every time you want to launch something that doesn’t have a shortcut on your desktop!

This may not be the case, as if I go into Settings/Manage Applications, it displays as “Comic Viewer” rather than “Hexed #1,” but that may simply mean that when more comics are available, they’ll show up as additional copies of Comic Viewer.

• Beginning to think walking to lunch today wasn’t such a hot idea. #
• Dedication: drinking Jamba Juice in the rain. Real dedication: without an umbrella. [Edit: alas, it wasn't me.] #
• Sticker found on a light pole (photo at right) #
• SciFiWire, why build an iPhone app instead of a high-functionality mobile site that would work with iPhone AND Android? #

The web browser works great. Most sites work fine even with the small size, though sometimes I run into problems submitting forms. I think it’s an intermittent issue with sites that submit forms via JavaScript instead of a regular button. Unfortunately that includes WPTouch, the WordPress skin for iPhone and Android devices that I’m using on the site, but that could be a conflict with another plugin.

Now that I’ve got a phone that will actually load most of the web, it’s really interesting to compare the different levels of mobile support out there. For example, Flickr has an incredible mobile site optimized for iPhone/Android (and if you do web development, it’s worth taking a look at their lessons learned post about it). Amazon has a surprisingly featureful mobile site as well, though it has fewer bells and whistles. There are more sites with bare-bones mobile versions, and of course many more that don’t even bother.

I do use Opera Mini occasionally, mostly when I’m in an area without 3G coverage or when a particular page gives me problems.

I keep running into one critical roadblock: Flash-only sites. Neither the Android browser, nor the iPhone browser, nor Opera Mini has support for Flash at this time. Mostly this seems to be restaurants trying to prevent me from reading their menus, looking up hours, or looking up allergy information, in the name of looking trendy. Brilliant move, there.

The touch screen is quite responsive now that I’ve replaced the packing screen protector with a normal one. I’m not sure why it should make a difference, but it does seem to. I do occasionally run into problems where my finger is too big for the target area, but it usually manages to figure out what I’m “clicking” on.

Email is extremely basic, but works well enough as long as you don’t have a zillion messages when you check. As far as I can see, there’s no way to delete multiple messages at once, but at least I have the option of installing a third-party email client, which is something I’ll have to try out sometime.

The camera’s okay, but not spectacular. It manages well enough when there’s plenty of light, but doesn’t pick up colors very well, especially reds. Pictures taken on overcast days, or at dusk, tend to come out blue. On the plus side, I can easily post straight to Flickr using the email gateway, or straight to Twitter using Twidroid.

Applications I use the most, in no particular order:

• Dialer & Contacts, of course.
• Browser.
• Power Manager (which makes it much easier to turn on and off power-consuming features like wifi, Bluetooth, and GPS).
• Twidroid.
• Weather Channel.
• Camera.
• Calendar.
• Email.
• Tag ToDo. There are a couple of other to-do lists, but this is the one I used to build my Christmas gift-buying list, so that’s what I’ve been using for now.
• ShopSavvy

Hands-free controls are limited. With my last phone, I would hear a tone through my Bluetooth earpiece when it connected. This one’s silent. It doesn’t offer control over things like auto-pickup. And I’m not sure the button on the headset actually does anything with the G1. (On the RAZR, it would initiate voice dialing, or would end a call.)

Voice dialing is pathetic. Somehow, as I’ve switched to newer phones over the last few years, each phone has had worse voice dialing. I used to have a phone that let you record several names in your contact list, then when you used voice dialing it would try to match the sound of your voice against the recording of your voice. You could only have a few names, but it worked.

Then the RAZR V3T actually tried to interpret sounds and match them against the address book, but half the time I had to repeat the phrase “Name Dial” so many times that I started just hitting the dial button twice to redial. Plus half the time it couldn’t tell the difference between “Katie,” “Stacy” and “Jason.” I kid you not.

Even that’s better than the G1’s voice dial, which I once managed to trigger accidentally, only to have it decide that “Oh, I guess I wanted that lane after all” meant “Call Mom at mobile.”

The other problem I keep running into with the phone features is that every once in a while a call will connect, but not actually transmit any sound. I’m not sure whether this is an issue with my phone, with the G1 in general, or with T-Mobile’s 3G network.

So I went down to the nearest T-Mobile store, asked about a couple of issues that hadn’t turned up in my previous research, and got the last one in stock. There was a couple there before me looking at them, but they said they weren’t ready to buy, just researching.

It took me about an hour to activate the phone, mainly because I didn’t have a data plan beforehand and it can take that long for a new plan to take effect. Once I did, I started playing around experimenting with it. (Unfortunately this meant a lot of the things I was going to do this afternoon…didn’t get done. Oh, well.)

Good Stuff:

• I really like the keyboard. Even though I’m using my thumbs, just knowing where the keys are (and not having to do any kind of combos for letters & numbers) means that I can type much faster than I could on the RAZR. I’m already starting to get used to some of the secondary characters, like dashes and such.
• Real web access! The web rendering is very nice. But then it’s WebKit, so it’s basically the same as Chrome or Safari, so that’s not a huge surprise.
• Twitdroid (a Twitter app) and Quickpedia (an optimized front-end for Wikipedia) have impressed me so far.
• There’s a tip calculator app called BistroMath. I had to pick it up or the name alone. (Sadly, it doesn’t seem to work as an FTL drive.)
• I absolutely love being able to look things up online instantly!
• Wi-Fi was easy to set up, including WPA2 security, so I can use our wireless network at home.
• Wallpaper selection is very nice, with a built-in crop & resize function.
• Plain old USB charging, which means I can still use the car charger I got for my last phone.
• The WPhone alternate interface for the WordPress admin area, originally developed for the iPhone, is fantastic on the G1! (Too bad they aren’t developing it much anymore.)
• The built-in calculator app includes limited scientific capabilities (trig, logs, roots, etc.)
• My bank has an app that will look up the nearest ATMs or branches to where I am.
• Scrolling by dragging the actual content instead of the scroll bar is surprisingly easy to get used to. Actually a lot of stuff about the UI is like that: awkward at first, but in just a few hours it becomes second nature.

Minor Issues:

• Our apartment is right on the edge of a cell coverage area, so I haven’t had a chance to try it out on the 3G network yet. But that’s not the phone’s fault.
• It took me a while to figure out how to sync transfer data via the USB cable, since they’ve changed the way it’s handled since the manual was printed. The manual lists it as a system setting, but it’s now an option that pops up in the notification area when you connect it to a computer.

Not So Good

• The touch screen isn’t always responsive, but that may be because I haven’t removed the screen protector that ships with it. I wanted to pick one up that’s actually designed to be used before I pulled this one off.
• The covers on the USB port and memory card feel really flimsy.
• Battery life doesn’t seem to be terribly great. In fact, the clerk at the store suggested I charge it nightly.
• I’ve only played with the camera a little but seems slow and isn’t great with artificial lighting.
• Playing around with WordPress and Wikipedia shows how valuable it is to have a layout optimized for the small screen. The Android browser seems to rely entirely on zoom to handle large-screen layouts, and it would be nice to have something like Opera’s fit-to-width option. Update: It seems to ignore handheld stylesheets, which IIRC is true of the iPhone as well. When website providers try to help you with the small screen, maybe you should let them? *sigh* Need to see if it handles media queries, at least for screen size. Update 2: It does have a fit-to-width option, but I’m not entirely sure what it does, given that I keep running into layouts that end up scrolling horizontally.

Stuff I Have Not Tried But Intend To

• Anything involving GPS. I’m inside right now and it can’t get a signal.
• I don’t know how fast the download speed is over 3G. (Wifi is quite nice!) Update: 3G speed seems pretty decent, actually!
• Map directions. But it’s Google Maps, and those are generally quite good.
• I haven’t hooked up my Bluetooth earpiece yet. Update: Pretty simple. I just needed to remember how to put the headset in pairing mode.
• I haven’t tried connecting to an open WiFi network/hotspot.
• I need to do some more testing with the camera, see how it handles daylight, check out image quality, etc.
• I haven’t really messed with voice dialing.
• Email. It automatically links to your Gmail account, and has the ability to access POP and IMAP accounts, but I haven’t tried out any of the above yet.

• Real web access.
• Reduce number of gadgets if possible (combine with camera and/or music player)

Limitations:

• Still have a year left with T-Mobile.
• Not thrilled about AT&T, but resistance is softening.
• No phone in existence has the camera capability I want.

Options:

• Back in early summer I was looking at the Shadow or Wing from T-Mobile. Windows Mobile, so I could put Opera Mobile on it. Not 3G, don’t think they have WiFi, so they’d be slow. G1 sort of makes them obsolete (see below).
• iPhone. Safari and 3rd-party apps. High speed: both 3G-capable and WiFi-capable. Requires switching to AT&T. Not quite big enough to replace my iPod yet (I’ll look again when they hit 32 GB). $200 + $130/month for the cheapest 2-phone plan, plus my wife would need a new phone whether she wanted it or not.
• iPod Touch. Basically an iPhone without the phone. Big enough to replace my current iPod, plus give me Safari, but only at WiFi hotspots. (Would be perfect for Comic-Con!) But I’d need the 32 GB model, which is $500.
• G1 from T-Mobile. Comparable to what I’d actually use on the iPhone, won’t require switching providers. Again, 3G and WiFi — and it looks like 3G coverage where we live is better than the standard coverage. AM is expandable via MicroSD card. Music player is MP3 only. $180 + $75/month (assuming I can just add a $25 data plan to our current 2-line plan.

That G1 is looking pretty good. I’m not prepared to be an early adopter, but it might be worth taking a serious look at it in a few months.

From what I hear it was fairly chaotic, at least in the morning. Apple’s new policy of making you activate the phone in the store was causing delays, especially factoring in the fact that iTunes’ servers got swamped. That would explain why the line was still so long several hours after opening.

Usability note: One of said co-workers got tripped up trying to sync music to his new phone, because the default is to not synchronize music, and the “Sync only checked songs” box looked close enough to being the right option that he didn’t dig deeper.

You can see some lawn chairs and umbrellas. The campers are sort of hidden in the shade, which is why I upped the brightness on the second picture. Of course, I’m sure everyone waiting in line appreciated the shade. Those shadows will only get longer over the course of the afternoon, and while there’s a nice breeze once you get out into more open areas, the corridors of the mall are better at channeling people than wind.

When I walked by the first time, I only noticed the line running to that corner you can see at the end, maybe 3 storefronts down. About 10 minutes later, after stopping at Kelly’s Coffee, I saw that they were wrapped around that corner, almost the entire length of Forever 21, and stopped at the edge of the patio for the restaurant next door.

Not a huge line—I’ve waited in much longer lines for movies—but bigger than I expected for a phone.