Now, I was never going to get an iPhone – I don’t run Windows or Mac OS, so I wouldn’t have been able to use it anyway. The Palm Pre, whilst much advertised before launch by O2 (and at the time my only non-iPhone upgrade option) was a bit of a non-starter for a few reasons – most notably that they were already being removed from stores in the US (and soon after Palm were bought by HP). So I was left with the choice of either Nokia’s N900, where the OS has now merged with Intel’s offereing, or an Android based phone.

Having played with both the N900 and a HTC Desire, as far as I was concerned it was an easy decision to go with the Desire. It won out due to three main factors: the device is a more sensible size when already carrying a blackberry for work, Android offers more applications and a proper multi-touch interface, and the contracts available were much better for me.

Decision made, I sorted out all the stuff related to migrating my number and got the phone. Since thebn, there’s been no looking back. The phone is as good as I hoped and probably more: I find myself recommending it to anyone who’s interested – and from other people with them I haven’t heard any stories of dissatisfaction.

The one thing that I will note is that the battery life isn’t fantastic. I’ve found that if I use it heavily (especially with lots of network traffic) it will need a full charge within the day. Turning off data and not playing around with it all the time, however, sorts a lot of this out and it will last a lot longer.

In terms of apps, I could probably go on for a while about those, so I’ll leave that for another post, as this one has gone on a bit already. However now I have a device I can blog from (most of this post was written on it), hopefully I’ll update a bit more often.

The install process was nice and smooth, with everything just working out of the box, which was certainly a nice feature. The one thing that needed a bit of manual intervention was the installation of some non-free components, such as the nVidia graphics drivers so as to get 3D acceleration, but this wasn’t too much trouble (although editing the XOrg.conf file is probably beyond a real beginner).

Given that almost two years has passed, I was hopeful that there’d been progress, and I wasn’t disappointed. The niggles that I had previously noticed with KDE 4 were gone, and I can now have a sensibly sized panel, displaying only the current desktop’s activities in the task bar, along with a couple of useful widget on the desktop. The settings are all there, and applications that were missing last time, like Kontact, are now back and ready to go.

One of the other applications that has been updated since I last used KDE is Amarok. Now on version 2.2, a whole load of changes have occurred – including some rather drastic ones to the UI. Unfortunately, it seems to me that performance has dropped considerably – with it taking minutes and 100% CPU in order to do basic tasks such as adding a track to the play list. I’m currently wondering if this performance (or lack thereof) is down to the database, as previously I’d migrated to using MySQL rather than the default SQLite. I’m tempted to look into this again, as the performance is a bit of a joke at the moment. One other thing I’ve noticed, is that the on screen display doesn’t always work – instead only appearing intermittently and with no real consistent cause for it (not) appearing.

All in all the experience is a lot better than where it was, and it’s great to see that it’s come on in such leaps and bounds since the original release almost two years ago – and I’m certainly not looking at other desktop environments to move to!

With this in mind I took the easy option to solve this problem and went on the hunt for a new MP3 player so I could listen to my own music on the train to/from work (rather than the tinny crap from other passenger’s headphones). After some pondering Sadiq linked me to the Sandisk Sansa Fuze, which is just over £50 from Amazon, and with a free trial of Prime I had it rather quickly.

The device itself is flash based, and the version I got has 4GB of on-board memory, with a microSD card for additional storage. It’s simple USB mass storage for putting files on, so no more messing around with additional applications like I had to do with my old Creative Zen, and this also means that it works nicely without any drivers on any OS I care to throw it at. The battery life is fantastic, and manages to keep going for over 20 hours on a single charge before it finally gives in and demands more juice. The other nice thing about the Sansa is that the jog wheel used for controlling the device actually moves. I’ve never liked the lack of tactile feedback found on iPods, and this is a big plus for me in terms of providing tactile feedback.

So far I’ve not had many problems with it, although I’m not sure how well it supports SDHC, as the 8GB card I got doesn’t seem to work too well as the refresh of the internal library hangs when I use that. Admittedly the refresh is slow as it is with a 2GB SD card, but as it hadn’t finished after 30 minutes of waiting, I’m going to presume that it didn’t like the card. This is something I still need to investigate further, but for the time being I’m happy with 6GB of music.

The only other downside that I can think of is that it charges via USB, so either needs plugging into a computer, or the additional purchase of a 13A to USB adapter. Then again, this is common with the iPods these days I believe, so it’s hardly a big issue.

All in all I’m very happy with the Sansa, and would recommend it to anyone else after a small, cheap MP3 player.

Turns out that the newer version of the madwifi drivers that Ubuntu Eee ships with don’t get on too well with the wifi chipset in the Eee 701, but an older version doesn’t have that issue. So I’ve just downloaded, compiled and installed these and it’s all good.

Fortunately this is now documented on the Ubuntu Eee wiki (which it wasn’t when I first started looking into this problem) and hopefully will be fixed fully in a future Ubuntu Eee release.

With this in mind I headed down to my local phone retailer and eventually settled on the Sony Ericsson C902. The main reasons for this choice being that it’s not a smartphone that tries too hard to do everything and fails miserably, and that it’s around the same size and weight of the Nokia with minimal moving parts. It also has a 5-megapixel camera (and the C905 an eight… I wonder if there’s any reason for the off-by-three model numbering…) with flash, which I might find myself using for those moments that I wouldn’t normally have had my camera with me but there’s something that I would have wanted to take a photo of.

Of course, in changing phones there’s a whole host of problems that arise. There’s a mostly common interface, with the numbers being laid out the same and the T9 letters being on the same numbers; but the space is a different matter. On Nokia phones it’s on 0, but Sony Ericsson have it on #, which lead to lots of hitting 0, realising I’d added a + instead of a space, and then having to remove the character. This lead to another issue, as my Nokia had the clear button on the same button as back, so it was the top right soft-key. The Sony Ericsson on the other hand has a separate clear key, so for a period I’ve ended up hitting back when I mean clear, and then having to recover from that. Still, with time my muscle memory will adapt; and I’m already getting better with things like the space issue.

There was another issue with changing phones; especially to one with Sony involved in its manufacture: Naturally Sony use memory stick based technologies (M2 in this case) and Nokia used MicroSD. Memory cards are rather cheap anyway these days, and I picked up a 2GB one for £15, along with USB adapter so I could ensure I was able to use it as the Sony Ericsson “mass storage” mode doesn’t seem to work too well under Linux, although seemingly “phone” mode works fine under Ubuntu on my Eee.

Still, it’s not all bad about having switched to a new phone. Sony Ericsson have clearly put in some effort with what they’ve done during manufacture. For example the charger, which connects to the same port as the USB cable and hands-free kit, can act as a passthrough connector for either of these other devices so you can connect it to the mains and your laptop and not worry about obliterating the battery life on the laptop through charging the phone through the USB (something else that the Nokia didn’t do).

They’ve also been rather clever with the handsfree kit, making it effectively a mic on a cable attached to their proprietary connector, with a 3.5mm connector for headphones on the end. This means that I don’t have to put up with using whatever crappy headphones are provided, and can instead use my own ones for when I want to listen to music.

My favourite feature still has to be the camera though. When using it there are of course certain modes that you might want, and they’ve handily placed these on 4 “buttons” on two touch sensitive bits either side of the screen. Normally I don’t like touch screens, there’s a complete lack of feedback from the touch so you don’t know how hard you need to press to get something registered. This phone, however, makes use of haptic feedback to provide some reaction to your press; triggering a vibration from the phone when you provide input via these touch sensors. This is great as far as I’m concerned, and was a great surprise when I tried the phone out prior to selecting it.

It also contains an accelerometer so it can detect which orientation it’s in for media uses (it saves photos in the correct orientation so you don’t need to rotate them manually) and games, with one of the games on the phone being a Need For Speed mobile version that allows you to turn the phone to steer.

In summary I like my new phone, usage is pretty straight forward and the little things like the handsfree and haptic feedback have made it quite nifty. I just need to re-train my muscles to the new key layout for spaces and delete and I’ll be very happy.

Install was easy, running off my USB stick that I had set up following instructions on the Ubuntu Eee website – with the traditional live-USB style beforehand so I could test that things work.

So far things are good, and in installing it over the recovery partition too I’ve managed to gain some more space for things I want to install, which is certainly nice. The one issue I have encountered is that the wifi seems to be stuck in some sort of powersaving mode as it works in bursts, which is a touch annoying, but I haven’t looked at this properly yet.

The interface is intuitive and good, very similar to the default Xandros one in terms of the large icons on the home app that sits above the desktop and all in all I like the way it works.

By default both of these are the 2003 versions, and there’s always been a number of things that have annoyed me. So when a co-worker recently pointed me in the direction of the internal pilots for newer versions of both of these, I set about installing them.

The first, and most noticeable difference, is obviously the appearance. Office 2007 has famously done away with conventional menus and toolbars in favour of the ribbons, although seemingly not across all applications in all circumstances as Outlook only uses them when editing individual items (be they emails, calendar entries or tasks). Office Communicator 2007 also has a UI change, heading towards the Microsoft Live Messenger style, which is probably better than ribbons as there’s not really much scope for them in an IM application. Aside from the obvious niggle that neither of these applications now fit with the rest of the look and feel of my operating systems, the interfaces are actually usable and the ribbon makes a lot of sense.

Moving on from the initial visual impressions and onto the new features, a number of the things that annoyed me appear to have been fixed (such as only being able to search for contacts in communicator in ‘Surname, Firstname’ form – although it doesn’t yet go as far as working by mailid) and there are a number of new features that I like (such as being able to view other people’s calendars in overlay mode with your own).

Communicator 2007 also now stores the conversation logs in a folder in Outlook, making it much easier to find the conversation you had with someone last week compared to the previous implementation we had involving a (often broken) web interface, and also offers an easy way to view previous logs when a conversation has been resumed.

The addition of document previews and image resizing in emails within Outlook is good too, allowing for a quicker look at the contents of attachments without having to load other applications – although it appears we are yet to acquire previewers for PDF files.

I’ve yet to use the other applications properly – having only viewed a couple of Word documents briefly, but if my experience with the editor in Outlook is anything to go by they’re certainly quite usable. The popup formatting element when you select text, for example, is very useful for quickly editing documents.

So far the only downside I’ve discovered, is that they might use slightly more RAM, which can be somewhat of an issue given my machine needs more memory at the best of times when running the variety of other applications that I need to do my job at times.

All in all, Office 2007 and Office Communicator 2007 are a good improvement over their predecessors and I’m happy with them so far.

Of course, the technology is the first one, with the process-per-tab model being there to stop it from crashing horribly when one tab is dealing with a website that decides to go off on one. A nice idea indeed, as is the idea of jailing off plugins in a similar way (I’ve got pissed off with Flash taking down Firefox at work now, so am currently running with Flashblock enabled to stop this). In a strange turn of events, Microsoft actually got there first with the process-per-tab idea with IE8, so I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before Firefox and other browsers look into it.

The main thing, however, that caught my attention was the idea that they’d get much of the market share. As much as we hate it, Internet Explorer has the majority of this, and in the corporate environment things aren’t too likely to change any time soon (especially not with webapps still being deployed that make use of activex controls and broken rendering). This leaves us with Firefox in a comfortable second, albeit miles behind, then Opera, Safari and some other browsers (I’ve not researched this, I’m just going on what makes sense). So where would Chrome fit in?

To my mind, there are two groups of users when it comes to browsers – those who are stuck in their ways using IE, and those who are happy to switch. Obviously the first group is a lost cause, so lets look at the second. This savvy group has already abandoned IE for some other platform, be it Opera or Firefox. To my mind (and at least in my own experience), they’ve likely got whichever browser they picked configured how they wanted; with the extensions and plugins they want installed and set up. Everything just works.

So, how do Google then get these users to move to Chrome? It’s an interesting puzzle. So far (having not used it myself due to the lack of Linux build) people seem impressed with the speed, but miss their extensions (especially an adblock one – which I’m sure google would love to implement) and have found that it is possible to crash the whole thing. Convicing these users to move over is clearly going to take more than a bit of a speed improvement over Firefox. People will want their extensions, and this provides an interesting technological problem for Chrome if it wants to stick with the jailing that they seem to have happily advertised everywhere in their documentation.

Of course, it’s still very early days, and I’ve yet to use it – so will reserve judgement on how well it works until I have – but it’ll be interesting to see how it does in the marketplace.

Previous updates haven’t gone so well, and last time the update manager crashed out during the upgrade; leaving in place some stuff that caused my machine not to boot until I managed to track down the cause and uninstall it from a maintenance prompt. This time, however, things seemed better and the upgrade went without a hitch… until I rebooted.

It was at this time that I discovered that no longer were my drives appearing as /dev/hd<foo><bar>, but as /dev/sd<baz><gaz>. This wouldn’t have been a problem, had I been using my drives by uuid in /etc/fstab. I wasn’t, and this is probably my fault as they were updated during the edgy upgrade but I changed the file and got rid of them somewhere between edgy and feisty.

So, after some jiggery pokery I got that problem solved and my machine was back up and booting, although I can’t seem to find my DVD drive anywhere in /dev, and a post on the ubuntu forums suggests that some drives might not be compatible with things (who wants to bet that mine is one of them).

This aside I’ve not had any problems so far. I’m still running KDE3, so can’t comment on the KDE4 variant, and haven’t played around with the desktop effects stuff. One thing that I did notice, however, was the decision to ship with Firefox 3 beta 5 by default, which most of the plugins I use don’t support. This was soon fixed by reinstalling Firefox 2 and manually updating the symlink in /usr/bin (as for some reason it doesn’t use /etc/alternatives unlike a lot of other applications).

All in all this has gone pretty smoothly… although it could have been better, and I would like my DVD drive to work at some point (although I only really used it for watching films, which I can do on the xbox instead now)

Sure, it’s tiny and doesn”t have much in the way of power (although at 900MHz/512MB of RAM it’s more powerful than my X21) but the keyboard is still more than big enough to allow me to touchtype on it with minimal mistakes and the screen is big enough for most uses. As noted in Skumby’s blog post on it it doesn’t really work too well with websites such as Google Maps.

By default the Eee comes with Xandros Linux installed, although the manual does have instructions on how to install Windows XP and which elements can be removed in order to make it fit on the 4GB drive, most of which is actually taken up by the restore image. For me this is fine, as it means I have access to the utilities that I’m used to on my other machines. At the moment there seems to be a limited number of additional packages available in the official repository, but from what I’ve read this is increasing.

All in all it’s a very nifty little device that will certainly do me fine for my portable computing requirements.