Final Report: G1 versus iPhone

This will likely be my final blog about the G1; I'm enjoying the thing and it does the job, but it's not exactly an exciting device in itself.

eReader has released a client for their ebook service; it's actually my favorite and now I'm happily reading "The Golden Compass" on the G1.

It is pretty noisy; the noise floor when listening to music is barely tolerable, although the music itself seems to sound pretty good. They must have used a really cheap D/A converter in this thing. I bought a pair of Skullcandy earbuds to use with it, and they work and feel fine.

Rooting the G1 was initially pretty scary, but now that it's done it's a cakewalk. I'm using the images from http://cyanogenmod.com ; I can now tether with the phone and can use my SD card for application storage by just putting a Linux-compatible (ext2, 3 or 4) partition on the card after the FAT32 partition. I can do a quick backup of my currently running system to the SD card at any time using Nandroid (which comes with the image) so trying new versions isn't a problem; I can always revert the phone.

Salling Media Sync does quite a good job of syncing my phone with iTunes. I'd rather give iTunes a pass altogether, but for now I need it. Hoping Banshee will work on the Mac soon.

In conclusion, the G1 is doing the job for me. I'm happy with the switch.

Why I stopped using the iPhone

I recently switched from an iPhone 3G on AT&T to a T-Mobile G1 running Google's Android. There were several reasons for this:

1. I'm not very impressed with AT&T's 3G service. I've had a lot of problems with it; I've had to call AT&T 3 times in the last year to report bad 3G performance at my work place. In every case it was a problem on their end, but I had to fight my way through probably 45 minutes to 2 hours of reboots and network settings resets before I could convince them of this. Also, AT&T's service is quite a bit more expensive than T-Mobile's or Sprint's. But this is the least important of my concerns.

2. The iPhone hardware is very closed. You can't replace the battery yourself, you can't use your own memory card. It seems like planned obsolescence to me. However, given the beauty of the iPhone hardware, this isn't the major concern either.

3. Apple's hamfisted control of their software was really pissing me off. If I want a better mp3 player than iTunes I should damn well be able to pay for it and get it, not be stopped by app store policies against apps that "duplicate" functionality.

4. The iPhone OS is very unsophisticated. Looks kinda pretty, right? But the paradigm is pretty much Windows 3.1; colored icons in neat rows which you have very little control over.

Worse, no multitasking. Frankly, I think this is unforgivable. The machine is a computer running UNIX, for God's sake. And why can't I use a USB or wireless keyboard with the iPhone? And why can't I mount the phone's storage on a computer and store some documents to carry around with me? And why can't I play OGG or FLAC files? Or videos other than a very narrow range of MPEG 4 types?

5. The OS issues in item 4 could be easily solved by third party developers, and in fact, they mostly have been. But ... Apple doesn't want you to be able to make changes to the low-level OS, however much you want them, and however much you have paid for the damn phone. Some long-suffering developers have figured out various clumsy solutions to get around this, but it's difficult to do, and every time they work out a way to do it, Apple comes up with a "fix" that breaks it. It got to be really painful to "jailbreak" the phone over and over again.

Screw that.

Android has it's own problems, and is not as slick as the iPhone OS yet (I hesitate to call the iPhone OS "MacOSX" when it can't even multitask!). But Google and the Open Handset Alliance are not nearly as closed to third-party development at the OS level as Apple is, and modified OS installs are easily available. And updates to the OS are not going to cause me to have to wipe my phone and start over every time.

Also, switching to T-Mobile is an investment in both money (cheaper) and freedom, since T-Mobile's 3G implementation is more compatible with European standards than AT&Ts. I'll have more options in phones, in other words. Kinda lusting after the Nokia N900, to tell the truth, which will run 100% on T-Mobile.

Debt

Debt is not an evil, it is a tool.

With a chainsaw, you might cut your own hand off. You also can cut some firewood.

The Dan!

Just saw Steely Dan in San Francisco, with my long time friend and music fanatic Jim Pire. They performed the entire "Royal Scam" album plus some favorites at the end. The show was great! Fagin and Becker were both lively and fun; Fagin seemed to be very excited and rolled around on his piano bench, looking something like an old grey Stevie Wonder.

At one point, during a between-song lull, someone called out "Freebird" and Fagin called him an asshole, which certainly seemed like a reasonable thing to say in context.

The backup band was wonderful. The lead guitar player knew all the famous licks perfectly, and his own improvs were tasty and very much too the point. The drummer was strong, always on the beat and understated except where, such as during the solo in "Aja", he needed to be showy. And the trombone player, of all people, really got people going whenever he had a solo. The three female backup singers sang strongly and got their own solo vocals, taking the normally male leads in "Dirty Work".

Very cool the hear the entire album; it was played strongly and with great fidelity to the original. All except for "Everything You Did", which was always the weakest song on the album. Evidently "The Dan" felt so too, and gave the song sort of an island beat, which certainly made it a bit more pleasant to listen to.

40th Anniversary Edition of Red by King Crimson

I am deeply enjoying the experience of listening to the 40th anniversary edition of Red, by King Crimson, one of my top 10 albums of all time.

Much as i loved it, I had two complaints:

1. The title track was flat sounding, like they recorded it in a fairly flat sounding room and did nothing to liven it up.

Well, this problem is fixed handily in the 5.1 mix; separation increases the fidelity of each instrument and the performance comes to life in a way that needs to be heard.

2. Providence, the first song on side two, was long and unlistenable. It was certainly unlistenable to me; I wanted more pounding, screeching prog rock and providence was several (too many) minutes of unnecessary noodling to my ears.

But in the 5.1 mix the clarity of each instrument is increased, and somehow the creepiness of the improvised, "concrete" performance is emphasized to the point where it becomes a new treasure, to me, and that means a big piece of this already wonderful album is now accessible to me for the first time. Bravo, gentlemen.

It also contains a CD version, versions in 96Khz 24-bit stereo, several unreleased tracks of varying interest, and some VERY well recorded videos from French television of what evidently seems to the be "Starless and Bible Black" era band performing songs like Lament and LTIA pt II, and very well.

I give it a good *****, it's wonderful, and certainly not more expensive than it needs to be.

http://www.king-crimson.com/album/red

More G1 Impressions

I bought a white phone; why are the headphone and adapter cables black? Ick.

I thought it would be nice having a hardware camera button, but pressing it moves the phone, making photos more blurry. In broad daylight it'll probably be more useful.

The included headphones are comfortable enough, but pretty much unusable on my bicycle as they seem to amplify the noise of air rushing by my ears.

The trackball is not all that accurate, but with that and the keyboard I don't accumulate fingerprints on the screen nearly as quickly as on the iPhone.

Ah, multi-tasking. How is it the iPhone runs MacOSX but can only run one app at a time? Works great on the G1.

The software keyboard is comparable to the iPhones, if not quite as accurate. But, I have a G1, I don't need to use the software keyboard if I don't want to. I have a choice. Yay.

The software in the Android Market is definitely more crude than the iPhone stuff, on average. However, except for commercial stuff such as ebook and audible apps, I've been able to find apps to do everything I used to do in the iPhone and do it well. For similar money or for free. I'm impressed.

An Open Letter to Apple

Dear Steve:

Re Apple Lossless versus FLAC: screw you guys. Really.

Love, Hugh