First base
This post is a day late, mostly as I was nursing quite a large hangover which meant the creative juices weren’t exactly flowing.
So how has it gone?
So far so good, I managed to get the phone set up play with the gesture tutorial and then I started with Synergy. Big mistake on my part as I had forgotten to sync my contacts to my sim card prior to resetting my iPhone which meant that the ones the Pre now had were at least a year out of date.
Joy.
For those unfamilar with ‘Synergy’ its Palm ethos that you should be able to sync all of your contacts from a range of different sources(Facebook, Gmail, Sim card etc) which is great in theroy but can lead to frustrations. Namely the fact I have ALL of my Facebook friends on my contacts list, which is fine for me as I’m a big proponent of ‘Friend Culls’ meaning that most of my friends in Facebook are actually people I physically know. The big drawback is that once you’ve added your facebook contacts, you can’t delete them from your contact list without deleting them from facebook first. This is further compounded by the fact that not everyone has their mobile numbers in Facebook (I certainly don’t) which creates a fair number of useless entries that just seek to take up space in your phonebook and you can’r remove.
So the first half hour of the my life with the Pre was spent sorting out the large mess of contacts into one list (lots of clicking, copying pasting and deleting), not the best way to be introduced to the phone.
Annoying.
Afterwards I setup my App Catalog account and put a card onto it, which almost didn’t work because the App Catalog only appears to accept Visa and Mastercard, luckily it seem to accept my Visa Debit card and all was well, I’m getting a feeling that this lack of clarity on certain sections is going to be an every present theme during my time with the Pre. So now I was all set up and good to go, it was time to get some Apps, now I know the App Catalog is threadbare in comparison to the iPhone and I had indentified that I only really use three core apps (Facebook, Twitter and Web browsing), all of which are easily available via the Pre (I’ve selected Bad Kitty as my twitter client of choice). I haven’t really spent much time looking at other apps although I may later on today.
I should take a minute to talk about the keyboard, its not great but I’m certainly getting used to it although I’m not nearly as fast as with an iPhone and the lack of autocorrect is a major oversight by Palm. On a side note its a lot harder to type on when you’re in bed as the slider makes the phone top heavy leading to potential a TKO as you inevitably drop the phone on your forehead.
But this all sounds a bit negative right? There are many things that I love about this phone. I love the feel of the phone in my hand, many reviews have made mention of the polished stone feel of the Pre and I heartily agree, its very satisfying to hold. Another is its beautiful approach to multitasking and the coup de grace, its notification system. Now I can understand if you don’t quite have a passion for smart notifications that I do, but that’s because you may not have been an iPhone user. Let me explain, Palm and Apple have two distinctly different approaches to how they think you should be informed of something happening on your phone. Palm method can be equated to being gently tapped on the shoulder and discretely informed that you have a new text message by popping up a small notification at the bottom of the phone. Apple prefer to use a modal pop up that is akin to being grabbed by the shoulders and told HEY YOU HAVE A MESSAGE, READ THE MESSAGE, COME ON READ IT NOW!!!!!!! It will also not release control of the screen until you’ve either read it (closing your existing app and opening the message one) or dismissing it and returning to whatever it was that you were doing. Nothing makes me angrier than crashing during a race just because someone text me and that’s the reason I switched from the iPhone.
So at the end of the first day I’m up and running but apart from the notifications system, I’m not bowled over but that’s not to say I don’t like the phone, far from it. It currently satisfies most of my smartphone requirements, the question is can I find something to keep me here as the iPhone 4 is looming large in my mind.
That’s the mission kids, we’re about a week and a bit away from the iPhone launch and I’m still tempted but I think I will give the Pre a month to prove itself.
After all the iPhone will always be there.
Action stations
Finally got back from Belfast at 11pm, I treated myself to 2 double cheese burgers, small fries and a small coke at the airport (about a million calories, but I’m going running tonight so it should balance out), 19 hour days on 2 hours sleep are awesome!
Anyhow, moving on.
With yesterdays post about app stores being the ties that bind us to a particular platform I decided to put my money where my mouth is.
As you may know I sold my iPhone 3G a couple of days ago and am now phoneless (save for a work blackberry), my plan was to get this:
With stunning features such as a screen and keypad
As it would do for now and the plan was going really well until I got the o2 shop and they said they wouldn’t sell it without £10 credit, which means the phone becomes £20 and much less tempting. I then played with a couple of phones, including the new Pre Plus and left the store, resolute in my new plan, to not have a phone.
But during yesterdays trip to belfast, it would have been nice not to have to bring out my laptop just to check my email (I know a stunning observation) and a BlackBerry Curve isn’t the greatest phone to use. So I then thought of a third plan: I could get a new smartphone on contract, use it for two weeks and then return it during the cooling off period and get an iPhone, genius eh? Except that the week of the iPhone launch I’m in Blackburn doing training meaning I wouldn’t be able to send the phone back.
Plan four!
I’d just got into bed last night and was at that point where I was so tired that I couldn’t sleep, so out came the hackintosh for some idle surfing.
And lo I surfed high and low, forums, blogs, wiki’s and then inevitably to eBay. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Pre of late, no phone has really captured my ADD attention like it, but they are all too expensive £160-170 (far too much to play around with) and I wasn’t sure if I would be able to sell it on for the same price. So I do what anyone would do, I started messaging people on ebay asking them for BIN or if they would reduce their asking price.
I wasn’t expecting any takers at my offer of £120 + pnp but you gotta chance your luck sometimes.
And then, something unexpected happened, I got a bite. I knew it was worth a shot being that the Pre is deffinatly a phone unloved by the masses (but with a solid if tiny hardcore developer community) and with the new iPhone coming people are probably looking to shift handsets quickly but still.
So I’ve got a 2 month old Pre £120, its coming tomorrow and no doubt you think I’m crazy but lets look at the TCO:
LG dumbphone £20 (£10 phone with £10 useless credit as I’m on contract)
Palm Pre £120
Now, on looking at it the Pre is far more expensive but I did get it cheap and I know I can sell it for at least £100 in three weeks time. Making the total cost of ownership (less shipping and app purchases), £20.
And I don’t know about you but I think that’s pretty decent price to pay.
Hack Different?
I’ve been messing around with my netbook (an Advent 4211 – Think an uglier MSI Wind). Some of you may know my usual success when it comes to fiddling with things, but this time round I had a reason.
My netbook used to run Windows XP, that was until the harddrive died in spectacular fashion (second time its happened this year, both times the hard drives ended up as coasters). This happened the day I bought a shiny new 6 Cell battery, as my previous 3 cell was only giving me 20 minutes worth of power.
So I had a netbook that could only BSOD, but at least it could BSOD for four hours!
Typical.
However, way back last year I installed OSX on external hard drive when the hackintosh thing first bursted on to the netbook scene. I hadn’t made the full jump as running an OS over USB is cludgy, bulky and I didn’t use the netbook due to the aforementioned battery issue. So I went back to XP and left the hard drive to one side.
Until two days ago, when the XP drive died and I was left without means to re install XP (I’d left my external Dvd drive at a friends), so I installed the OSX drive and was back up and running fairly quickly.
And it was good and for a time things were fine. I made baby steps into OS X, found out what Expose was its shortcuts and how easy it was to install applications, the usual Mac transition joy.
I should have stopped there….. I didn’t
I had the good sense to check out software update and on seeing on their being an update to 10.5.8, had the really smart idea of click the break button (in this case named install updates).
The update installed and I restarted, the result was someone similar to this:
well truth be told I had a kernel panic (that’s right my Mac had taken a turn for the Emo), as I was greeted by this lovely image when I restarted:
And I hadn't got a dvd drive to sort it out
Let’s review:
- I had a shiny new battery and a working netbook
- I then had a shiny new battery and a broken netbook
- I then had a shiny new battery and a shiny new operating system
- I then had a shiny new battery and an apparent out of date operating system
- I then had a shiny new battery and a updated shiny new operating system, that hadn’t been restarted
- I then had a shiny new battery and a coaster
Now doesn’t that sound like progress!
So I admitted defeat and went to bed, cursing my fiddling until it breaks nature.
The next day I popped round my friends house and regained my external dvd drive and set to sorting out my hackintosh. I was decided that I would try out OS X even though I could now reinstall Windows XP, as during the 30 minutes I had a working copy of OS X I saw enough to convince me that it was worth the time.
So I was all set to reinstall and then I saw that this:
It's a Snow Leopard
So why go with a proven hackintosh capable OS, when you can try something that could be buggy and untested?!
So I did, luckily I found a ISO that was set up for the Wind and apart from the com.Apple.Boot.plist pointing the boot loader to the wrong partition and breaking, necessitating alot of this:
Want to hack da mac, get used to using this....
But plists aside it was a pretty seamless process and most things work (trackpad, wifi, camera, sound etc), the only thing that is currently broken is the built microphone, but that’s a small price to pay imo. Even updating to 10.6.3 didn’t prove to be too onerous.
So after three days I’ve got a working netbook with Snow Leopard 10.6.3, and a shiny new battery:
The Finish (non broken) Article
None of this would have been possible without the tireless work of those intrepid members of http://insanelywind.com/forum, truly have I stood on the shoulders of geeks.
Windows phone series seven
Bad name, hell even the acronym sucks (wpss), but still yesterdays unveiling of the all new windows mobile operating system has sent shockwaves through the internet.
Like Palm, Microsoft has started from scratch, said goodbye to legacy apps and designed a mobile operating system for the future.
The cynic in me just sees that they’ve taken the Zune HD interface and whacked a phone onto it, but even if that’s the case its still one sexy looking device:
Credit Engadget
Compare that to the iPhone and Cupertino’s wonder phone looks, well….old.
Time will tell if that minimalism will help or hinder but it demonstrates the break that Microsoft has made with the past.
Ultimate tools for Lecturers
I’ve showed this to my colleagues:
Just imagine giving every Lecturer one of these
It’s a briefcase containing the following:
- MacBook Pro
- Video Camera
- iPhone
- Digital camera
- iPhone Dock
It also has:
Integrated charger!
A one socket charging solution that means with one cable you can charge all of the devices inside! Very impressive kit!
So we got to thinking what would we change? This is what we came up with:
- Laptop
- Pico Projector & projection screen
- Video Camera
- Digital camera
- Digital recorder
What would you put in your E-Learning Briefcase?
Too many layers
Continuing on from my previous post about the iPad (and its shortfalls), I’ve been thinking about it from another perspective i.e. an educational one (suprising eh?).
The latest buzz in education for the last couple of years has been netbooks moreso than mobile phones , which in the majority of cases are still too clunky and lack sufficient screen estate to make them useful for lessons. However if we look to institutions like ACU (who’s connected program was the first to give students iPhones and iPod touches for educational benefit both in and out of class), we can see that that a device such as an iPhone lends itself well to aiding teaching and learning.
Why does the iPhone succeed where other mobile learning projects have failed? Because its intuitive This is so often overlooked when it comes to e-learning tools, first impressions count, if users (and I’m containing teachers and students within this term) can’t make something work, they’ll drop it and move on.
I’ve tested this myself, give the iPhone to someone who hasn’t used it before and they will know how to use it, as the majority of the controls make sense.
So why has education been so interested in netbooks? They’re certainly attractive:
- Small form factor
- cheap
- sufficient performance for web and document writing tasks
I am a netbook owner ( for just under two years now), its far better than the Toshiba Satellite A50 it replaced. That is not to say its not without flaws. It’s battery doesn’t last long enough and the screen resolution is annoying, seriously who thought 1024 x 600 would be a good idea? I wouldn’t even classify myself as a power user, all I do on mine is surf the net and download stuff and yet it’s grunt is rarely sufficient for even that, if you are surfing a website/forum with many images or embedded videos you soon start to experience slow down.
But you can see the benefits, a £200 netbook that can act as an resource locator for lessons is far better than investing £400 in a laptop to do the same thing.
So if we agree that netbooks are great in concept, but flawed in execution why are we giving them to our students? Surely we want to give our students the devices that will enable them to excel?
Because there wasn’t anything better at the time
But I don’t think that this is the case, I now spend probably equal amounts of time at home surfing the net on my iPhone as I do my netbook (that in itself is a major milestone that a mobile device can even compete) and for pure passive information gathering, something like an iPhone is hard to beat.
The main reason I feel the netbooks suffer is that the os (be it Linux or Windows) offers too much functionality. For a device sold and marketed on the principle of giving you quick and easy access to the internet on the go, netbooks don’t really achieve that with any great level of success. A Windows XP install will probably take 1-2gb at a minimum and I would happily say that you could probably do without a lot of it. All that functionality bogs the machine down and makes it harder to achieve its core goal surfing the internet. So it stands to reason that the iPad will probably overtake my netbook as my surfing device of choice because it will do exactly what I need of it, with no bloat, no fuss and no mess.
That’s not to say its perfect (far from it), for students the lack of flash (and thus removing access to the range of e-learning tools & services based on it) and the ability to easily create and store documents (unless file structures etc.. are revealed later on) are thorny issues but I can see that young students will be able to interface better with an interface with a touch screen than a mouse (point and click vs touch).
Regardless of your thoughts on the iPad I think it’s perfect for education as its cheap (relatively), secure, quick to boot and has a decent battery life. It’s ease of use (going on the iPhone interface) means that teachers will spend less time training students on how to use the device and more time using it to support and enhance learning and that’s got to be a good thing right?
OTA 2009
- Rick Fant, head of Internet Discovery at Vodaphone,
- Caroline Lewko, mobile entrepreneur
- And someone from the BBC, whose name escapes me at the moment.
Holidays – Getting away (from//with) it all?
Beach
My recent trip back from London on Saturday got me thinking wistfully about Holidays (side note since buying my flat I haven’t had any time off that hasn’t been filled with DIY).
Join me as I travel back to my youth, to a time of orange squash and honey sandwiches.
Its summertime, schools out and its time for a holiday!
So in we all cram into my folks car:
- My brother and I in the back seats,
- Parents up front,
- Mum with the map,
- Dad with a steely determination to get to the destination as quickly as possible (and screw the traffic laws)
- Air conditioning was the realm of premium saloons like the S Class etc, so windows open and pray that we don’t get stuck in traffic!
But what entertainment to keep a six and an 8 year old quiet on the journey?
We had few options, stare out the window, read a book, be sick after reading a book or kicking the back seats.
Later on we had access to a Nintendo Gameboy and an Atari Lynx but the battery of either wasn’t impressive (or in the case of the Lynx horrific, 8 AA batteries drained in under half an hour!!)
Compare that to today’s car journey of today:
- Individual climate control for front and back passengers
- In built Sat nav that detects speed cameras
- And such entertainment (Dvd players, full blown games consoles)
But more importantly we literally have the world on a stick with wireless Internet, with 3g we can update our friends of our progress, play games and keep up to date of everything.
We progress in this swirling mass of 2.4ghz signals constantly pervading our social space, keeping us awake and aware of everything at all times.
I love technology and having the world available to me is very useful but:
If we’re constantly connected, with a permanent on-line presence can we ever say we really got away from it all?
Is our family’s holiday on the beach lessened as people can tag our photos with their own experiences, thus rendering our holiday a collective experience rather than personal.
Of course other people have climbed that hill, swam that lake, found that cove but that experience is ours and ours alone but until it his the Internet those memories are ours and no one Elses
How much access is too much? Is there a limit to collaboration? Will there be a time when it is no longer possible to get away from it all?
I like the fact that we have the ability to switch off, but in the not too distant future I don’t think we’ll be able to escape the maelstrom that is pervasive technology and with that a small part of ourselves may be lost with it.
Truly//Mobile
I, Tom Curtis have finally (and I mean finally), joined the mobile internet revolution.
I’ve purchased (after alot of g1 vs iphone deliberation) an iPhone.
The irony is not lost on me, (for those that didn’t read cart before the horse where I discussed the cost of smartphone and how it may hinder development of mlearning solutions) I singled out the iPhone as the worst of these due to its high purchase and running costs.
So why did I not go with the cheaper google phone?
Three reasons:
1. The G1 doesn’t natively support Microsoft Exchange, it is possible via an external app but even then its not perfect. Prior to my purchase I used a 1g iPod Touch and have grown used to how simply and easily it integrates with the Colleges email.
2. Android looks promising, but I think there will be issues regarding compatibility; especially as newer handsets come out
3. Chess with friends
Ok Ok, its not a work or critical need, but I love this app and theres no version of it for Android (yet) and it’s a lot of fun 😛
SO lets move onto the thorny issue of cost:
Everyone + dog is buying a shiny new 3GS, which means alot of 1 year old 3g’s on the market for (releative) buttons. I managed to snag a 3G iPhone on a forum for the princly sum of £210 inc next day shipping (and it came with all the 3gs bits: small charger etc).
I’m currently on a £15 a month plan with o2, (it should be £15 but being the silver tongued lothario that I am, I got it reduced), I’ve whacked a 7.50 unlimited web bolt on that brings my total monthly phone expenditure to £22.50
Bargain!
Running to Stand still
I visited Hastings College last Friday to meet with Apple Distinguished Educator Steven Molyneux to view his latest e-learning project.
Hastings is in the middle of a sea change, a paradim shift if you will, a transition between two implacciable foes.
I’m talking of course about Apple and Microsoft.
With Steves guidence, Hastings are replacing all teaching and learning PC’s with Mac Mini’s, whilst keeping the administrative staff running on Windows.
So far so average, but this is where it gets interesting:
They are removing their VLE.
A FE/HE institution with no virtual learning enviroment, how will people work?! Perhaps its not as insane as it seems, a poorly implemented VLE is nothing more than a content repository, almost a digital library of sorts that people dip into when they need to find something.
They’re replacing it with OS X Server which comes bundled with: Podcast creator, wiki server and combined with the ilife suite makes quite a compelling learning solution….
After a reasonably speedy journey driving in the beast with my collegue Jim accompanied by playing Mettalicas Death Magnetic at ear bleeding volume, we arrived at Hastings College.
I should preface this next comment with the statement that Hastings is in the process of building a new Campus with upto date facilities and on looking at the current one, I can safely say that the new build can’t be finished quickly enough (old school doesn’t even come close, think of the worst ‘building of the future’ 60’/70’s constuction and you would be getting close).
We met Steve and headed straight to a hair & beauty class that had been using iPod Touch’s as a learning aid to support activities both in and out of contact ours. Students would access course content by viewing the wiki and streaming video/audio/text where appropriate.
Except some students couldn’t get the videos to work, others didn’t bother to use the devices except in class and others either didn’t have internet at home, or if they did failed to have WiFi.
And even if they did overcome the access issue, it still left a bad taste in my mouth as we’re just replicating the same solutions over and over again.
The iPod being utilised as nothing more than a passive viewing medium, almost as if it were a laptop rather than a mobile device, the iPod is a device born of web 2.0 it is an amazing collaboration and communication tool like no other before (in terms of accessibility, speed and ease of set up).
Why do we in education always seek to reinvent the wheel? Got a homework diary? Have a digital diary! Got a portfolio? How about an ePortfolio! In class poll? Have an online poll!!
The list goes on, but its always the same things, when will we stop replicating and start to really innovate.
If not now, then when? 