Singers' view on the world

I’m sure you have all heard about the new kid on the block, he sure seems a little different than all the other kids around him. His parents seems to control the whole internet in some way or another, and he’s very open to other people and things.

Alright lets cut to the chase:

It’s been over two years since Open Handset Alliance unveiled the Android an operating system designed by Google. Android is a mobile device platform built on the Linux Kernel. The first cellphone to be released with Android was the HTC Dream/T-Mobile G1. The Android system quickly gained popularity after the launch of the G1 and more people and manufacturers became interested in this free and open-sourced mobile device platform. In the end of 2009 there was 18 phones running Android, HTC is the manufacturer with the most Android phones out at the moment. So that was some history on Android now lets get back to the newly released Google Nexus One.

The Google Nexus One was announced by Google on January 5th just before CES. A lot of people had been looking forward to this “superphone” to rule them all like so many times before it got the name “iPhone killer”. The hype was big at the Google press conference where press and bloggers were given free phones to review and keep.* Quickly after the dust had settled, people started to discover problems and bugs with the Nexus One. As more and more people turned to the Google customer support, the forums and auto response FAQ answers failed to satisfy most users. Some users tried to contact T-Mobile and HTC for support but they kept referring the customers towards each other or Google. Google just wasn’t prepared for all this need for support, they can usually deal with by just referring to their FAQ. More than 518 comments in a thread about T-Mobile Upgrade Eligibility.**

So could Google have handled the launch differently? Well it seems like Google wasn’t really prepared for launching and selling hardware at the moment. They hadn’t done their homework as far as support goes and they were clearly caught off guard. When Apple launched the iPhone back in 2007 they received some bad press for how they handled support but it now shows that Apple benefitted from the way they handled and took care of problems. Apple insisted that AT&T would send customers to Apple(Store) and then they would deal with their problems.

The Google Nexus One got all the hardware and software to support multi-touch and yet they thought it would be a good idea to exclude this in the US version of the Nexus One. The same happened to the Motorola Droid which doesn’t have multitouch but its European counterpart, the Motorola Milestone, does indeed have multitouch. People are claiming it because of a patent made by Apple, apparently they have patented the whole multi-touch technology. In Europe you can’t patent software though so that should be the reason for Nexus One and other Android phones lacking multitouch in the US. I don’t really think this is the issue since so many companies are including multitouch in their products even in the US, and the fact that multitouch is in fact included in Android – but just disabled on US phones, seems weird. Well okay I guess you can live without multitouch gestures such as pinching and etc. right?

This video pretty much proves my point that the Nexus One is still missing a lot of testing and bugfixing. I still don’t really understand the need for the trackball and the four buttons on the bottom, excuse me but the phone have a touchscreen – that was a touchscreen, that means you don’t need all those buttons and trackballs. Just look at how Apple managed to only place one button on the front of the iPhone with volume up/down, silence/ring and standby/power off on the sides. It just seems like you wouldn’t have a need for those buttons but maybe that’s just me. Anyway as you just saw in the video the four touchscreen capable buttons at the bottoms doesn’t seem to be working properly, since the reviewer seems to have a lot of problems pressing them.

As this test shows, the Google Nexus One is falling a bit behind on the touchscreen but it is doing fairly well compared to the Droid. Read more about the test at: labs.MOTO.com

The expectations to the Google Nexus One was big when the first photos and descriptions of it showed up on the internet. Google had given the phone out to employees as an early Christmas gift and of course these employees were telling the whole world about the new fantastic phone. After all the photos and information had been released there was really nothing new other than a sad little phone that is being sold online by Google only. It really is just the next HTC Android smartphone, nothing is really revolutionary or new about the phone except the Google branding. It hasn’t being sprinkled with magic unicorn dust or anything else. If Google hadn’t given the phone to it’s employees, then they would have surprised the whole world at the press conference, the press would have been writing about it for days whereas now who is really talking about the Nexus One? The only stories I’m seeing about it is describing the poor support or lack thereof. We had all expected Google to revolutionize the way smartphones are sold and subsidize in the US, but it’s still just a HTC phone being sold on a two year contract. I’m sorry but I don’t need yet another Android phone on contract, where is the Google that usually “breaks new grounds” and does what they want and not what the big companies want them to do. I want Google to put pressure on T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon and make some changes to the way cellphones are being sold. Where is the GSM/CDMA chip so it could function across multiple networks. I was expecting a lot more from Google with this “Google Phone” and what I’ve seen so far doesn’t make me want to trash my iPhone at all.

You should remember that I’ve been using an iPhone for over 2 years now so I’m used to the way an iPhone handles different things. I’m sure you could get used to the way the Google Nexus One does things it just takes some time, just like when I first started using the iPhone. I do realize that Google Nexus One is kicking the iPhone’s butt in a lot of cases, but I personally had just hoped for more from Google. I really like the way Android handles the integration with cloud applications and documents, the Gmail app is just one of the places that Android phones beat the crap out of the iPhone.

* According to new FTC endorsement guidelines, bloggers are now required to disclose free gifts from companies whose products they review. http://bit.ly/8jfaL9
** Google Support forum, http://bit.ly/7tOdUc

Update:
Nexus One Multitouch Available Now; Floodgates Open for Hackers [Gizmodo]

I’ve had my Nikon D60 for 6 months now so I thought it would be a perfect time to look back at what I’ve learned and how I like my first DSLR camera. I’ll make it a little series of posts where this is part 1.

Six months ago I decided it was time for me to go out and buy my first DSLR camera, I’d read reviews and guide for years and now I just had to have one. I quickly decided on Nikon because I liked the way their interface is built. After choosing a brand that I liked I went looking for the model that would be right for me. I narrowed the models down to only consumer and prosumer models because of my level of knowledge and the price. First the Nikon D40 seemed like the perfect for a beginner photographer, but I thought it had some limits. After the Nikon D40 I found the Nikon D5000 which had just come out, the Nikon D5000 have a lot of great features that the D40 and D60 doesn’t have. I thought for a long time about buying the Nikon D5000 because of the swivel screen, HD video, better sensor and some more features, but I ended up buying the D60 because of the price. I saved some money buying the D60 instead of the Nikon D5000, so I got a lot of great stuff beside the camera itself.

So how do I like my Nikon D60, well it’s a great consumer/prosumer Nikon DSLR camera and I like it a lot because of the weight and the easy-to-use interface. The weight is a huge deal for me because I want to be able to take it with me when I’m traveling, there is nothing worse than a huge camera(bag) that you have to lug around all day while sightseeing a completely new city.

Accesories:

With the camera I bought this Lowepro Rezo 160 AW Camera Bag, it’s a really great bag for the Nikon D60 and you almost can’t feel you are wearing it. There is a big compartment where you can split the space up with 2 dividers and with these I think you could fit 2 lenses + the Nikon D60 in there. Besides the big compartment there is also a lot of small pockets and rooms for batteries, memory cards and stuff like that. The bag also have a rain cover inside it, so in heavy rain or snow you can take it out and cover the bag – works very well.

I also bought this SanDisk 4 GB Extreme III SDHC memory card and I really can’t praise this memory card enough. It is so fast and reliable and it’s one of the best SD cards I’ve ever owned, I actually bought another one as a backup. It’s very important that your memory card isn’t the bottleneck of your brand new camera because you’ll get annoyed with that very quickly.

I’d read several places that it was a good idea to buy a spare/backup battery for a DSLR camera. So I thought well “I better get one then..” so I bought a spare Nikon EN-EL9a Battery, you have noticed that this is an EN-EL9a and not the standard EN-EL9 that the D60 ships with and the reason for this is that the EN-EL9a have more mAh(capacity).

After the first 2 months with this camera I was ready to try some new forms of photography and I wanted a tri-pod, but not some heavy tri-pod that is hard to lug around and position. After reading through all sorts of photography blogs I finally found the Joby Gorillapod SLR and it looked amazing. After I got this I’ve been taking all sorts of crazy angled and positioned photographies, you can position the flexible legs anywhere you’d want to – on a branch, bench, fence, road, couch, chair, light pole, etc. This is such a great invention and I think every photographer should have one of these. Now I’m just looking for a good brand of tri-pods because I really want a “real” tri-pod too. I wouldn’t recommend the GorillaPod for too many slow shutter photos because it might move a little bit if not secured properly.

This Christmas I’d put so many photography related things on my wish-list and I got one thing that is so great I just have to tell you guys about it. It’s the Nikon 35mm f/1.8G AF-S DX Lens and WOW! This lens is built for Nikon’s DSLR cameras with a DX sensor. Even though f/1.8G isn’t really that impressive, I was still surprised by the creamy bokeh and great night photos this lens takes. Here is a shot i took with the lens a few days ago:

Edit:

I forgot to mention some of the accesories that I’m thinking of buying, so I just wanted to add those here in the bottom.

I really want to buy a remote/cable-release for those long shutter photos, and just to eliminate shakiness. I’ve been looking at the simple but very cheap Nikon ML-L3 Wireless Remote – only thing is that it seems to be missing a couple of features that I really would like to use. So if any of you have a suggestion for a great remote/cable-release for a Nikon D60, please write a comment below.

Another thing that people keep telling me I need to buy is different filters, so I’ve read up on a lot of them. Most people use a UV Filter 52mm but mostly just for protecting the lens glass from scratches and dust, I don’t really think I need one of these even though they are fairly cheap. There is a couple of filters that I would like to try out, B + W 52mm Circular Polarizer MC and a Hoya 52mm 8X (0.9) ND MC Filter. These filters seems to be able to give me some great effects and make some photos better looking. One of the more experimental filters I would like to buy is a Close-Up Macro Filter 52mm just because it would be fun to play around with. If you have any recommendations on brands or types of filters, please let me know in the comment section below.

This is it for part 1 of my little series of posts about the Nikon D60.

I just read a tweet talking about how awesome some app called CitySourced was, so of course I had to take a look at what this great app was. I went to the app’s website and started reading and I quickly realized that this app had some great potential.

CitySourced is basically an app for the normal citizen in every american city* who wants to help the local government/city council with problems around the city. This sounds really great and the way CitySourced executes this idea of citizen reporting is just brilliant. The easiest way to understand this app is to see it or understand how it works for the person wanting to report something.

So let’s say you are driving down a road in San Jose, CA and suddenly you see a pothole in the middle of the road so you park your car at the side of the road goes out and with CitySourced snaps a photo of the pothole. Then the apps reads your GPS coordinates and sends it to the city council of the city you are in. At the city council they have a program running on a computer that sees all of these reporting tick in and they can then review them and fix them. The developers are planning on implement some features requested by Kevin Rose at TechCrunch50, some of these features are:

• Be able to subscribe to your own neighborhood.
• See events close to you, that you can take action on right now.
• Implement a Digg like system where you can vote up reports to give them higher priorities.

Besides these new features they are also planning to implement the app with other data sources and for the city council to gather all this real time data at a central point.

Take a look at this video fra TechCrunch50 with the company presenting the application:

I think this is a really great application for the iPhone and they are developing an app for the Palm Pre with Android support coming soon. This really should be in every city around the world, just think about all the problems we meet every single day these would be easier to fix.

Website: CitySourced.com

Twitter: @CitySourced

*I hope this expands to the rest of the world soon.

Review recap:

We’ve all heard the rumors of the Apple Tablet/iSlate, and yes there is a lot of those around. First some background for all these rumors. Rumors about a Apple Tablet have been around since the Newton was released and it’s probably one of the biggest vaporware products today. Never have a product, that is not confirmed nor suggested by the manufacturer, been given this much hype. There has been least 5-10 rumors every single day for the last 2-3 months about this product. So you might ask: “what’s all this hype about?” I’ll try to answer that and other question in this post. I’ll try to shortly describe some of the major rumors about it and then you can make your own decision on wether or not you believe all of them.

One of the biggest things going on right now is the story of Apple “secretly” registering domains and trademarks back in 2007 as a way of securing the brand for a future product launch. In 2007 the domain iSlate.com was transferred to the registrar MarkMonitor.com which we know is responsible for Apple domain and trademark registrations. Of course the name of the real registrar was hidden behind MarkMonitor.com. This looks suspicious but it could just be a coincidence.

But the rumor site MacRumors.com investigated the domain further and they found out that sometime in 2007 the real owner of the domain was exposed for a short time. Guess who was the owner of the domain, yes you guessed it, Apple. So the name definitely seems to be a plausible name for the Apple Tablet or should I call it the Apple iSlate.

Besides the domain name pointing towards iSlate as the name the trademark is registered in Europe by a lawfirm Apple is known for using to register trademarks. In the United States the trademark is registered to a unknown company in Delaware, Slate Computing LLC. Back before the iPhone  was launched a little unknown company also in Delaware registered that trademark too. Now this could of course all be a coincidence but someone dug deeper and found out that a Regina Porter had signed for the trademark. Regina Porter is also an employee at Apple Inc, with the title Senior Trademark Specialist. So we just found out that Apple is making up small “fake ” companies so they can register trademarks and domains without anybody knowing, no big deal everybody is doing that.

So Apple registered the domain iSlate.com back in 2007 and registered a trademark in both Europe and The US. Apple has also told iPhone developers to start preparing their applications for a bigger screen. Rumors are saying that the iPhone SDK 4 and OS4 has tools for a bigger resolution.

Apple has also rented Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco the 27th of January so it’s expected to be launched there and shipping within 2-6 months.

A reader at CultOfMac just got a tip from a friend who is working at Apple, saying that the tablet will have a very “steep learning curve”. I’m not buying because of multiple things:

• Apple is not known for releasing things that doesn’t work out of the box and intuitive.
• When Steve Jobs showed the iPhone for the first time he spent almost 2 hours explaining how revolutionizing this new device was. After this Apple made videos where people could learn to use their new gadget.
• A “steep learning curve” could be two things, either it means there will be a lot of learning or a learning that is easy and goes fast.
• I think Apple will try to just add more gestures to their already functioning multitouch technologies.
• More VoiceOver controls like we know from the iPhone and OS X.

Then some rumors about a 3D graphic User Interface used for navigation and such. It should be a 3D quality UI but on a two dimensional screen. I’m not so sure about this rumor tho.

More cloud based operating system. It does indeed seem like we are moving more and more into the cloud but I think we still need some things before a 100% cloud-based operating system can be used on this tablet.