December 2009 Archives

On a typical York County New Year's Eve, merrymakers drop a cigar, a pickle and a white rose.

A 125-pound, papier-maché shoe will be lowered from a bucket truck onto the parapet of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Hallam, Pa.

The original big shoe, the Haines Shoe House

Was built in 1948, was by far "Colonel" Mahlon N. Haines' most outlandish advertising gimmick. It is a wood frame structure covered with wire lath and coated with a cement stucco. It measures 48 ft. in length, 17 ft. in width at the widest part and 25 ft. in height. The interior consists of five different levels and contains three bedrooms, two baths, a kitchen and living room.

York Mayor John Brenner reflects on ten years with the city.

A decade of economic challenges, the opening and healing of racial wounds, and the dawn of one of the largest projects in the city's history.

After listening to rumor and speculation about Google's Nexus One smartphone, I wanted to add some more from a York County perspective.

The hardware is impressive. Android 2.1 operating system, 3.7-inch WVGA AMOLED display (very bright), 5 megapixel camera with mechanical AF and LED flash, a 1GHz processor, 512 MB RAM, 512 MB ROM.

However, a phone is only as good as it's network.

This phone will solely depend on a data plan for voice and applications.

The rumor mill associates T-Mobile as providing the data network, with a dying thread about using AT&T's slower EDGE network.

Looking at a map of T-Mobile's data coverage over York County, Pa., 3G isn't available.

This leads me to believe that this phone will only run on the slower EDGE network unless connected to WiFi. The map shows many rural areas in Pennsylvania aren't covered by any T-Mobile network.

My only experience with T-Mobile was eight years ago. I would hang my phone on a tree branch and used Bluetooth to talk inside my house just two miles north of center city York.

Anyone have a comment about their current data experience with T-Mobile coverage in York County?

If the rumor mill is correct, the cost of using the Google Nexus One will be a flat $30 a month data fee for everything - voice, data, texting with no contract.

Looking at my current Verizon plan for the Droid, I pay $30 for data, $40 for voice, $10 for texting = $80.

Even if I kept the Verizon Droid phone and paid the minimum, $40 for just voice, I would still be ahead with using the Droid and Google Nexus One in tandem. The option of seeing how the phone works with little risk until a contract expiration.

At first, the phone appears to be by invitation only so my speculation may play out with real world experience before I ever have a chance to try one.

Other considerations with the application of Google's Nexus One

Google Voice is a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone system. Your handset doesn't mesh with the phone carrier at all for voice other than using it's data connection.

Google becomes the phone company for the Nexus One. My experience using this on the Motorola Droid over Verizon's 3G network is that it's seamless and no different than any carrier.

The up side to this system is that phone calling is unlimited and free to the U.S. and Canada with penny per minute costs to many foreign countries. The voice mail system associated with Google Voice is robust with free speech to text.

Update: The lawyers for the plaintiffs are expected to receive $2.95 million. nytimes.com This is why I truly didn't like this lawsuit.

There is no justice in gross profit from damages. That is $3 million that could go into R & D or anything that might be of value to the general population this supposedly damaged.

I'm even more glad now that I didn't "cash in" for driving a Civic Hybrid.

Update: Reader comments that problem is real for her

I received an HCH Class Action Settlement for my 2005 Honda Civic Hybrid (True vs. American Honda Motor Co., Inc. ) last night.

Fortunately for Honda, the settlement includes rebates for new vehicles. I get $100 cash back and a video to train me how to best use my gas and brake pedal.

PoliceStream is an app that broadcasts fire/ems scanner activity in real-time (few second delay) from 2700+ different locations in the United States and Canada via your wireless connection.

I have used the Android app PoliceStream for the past month (greenmesh11/9/09). The developer has been making updates to the content and functionality regularly.

For York County, Pennsylvania, the scans are broken up into police, fire and public safety.

Tips: Float over the frequency in the app for an option to bring it to the top of the list for easier access from the list when opening app. The sidebar helps you quickly scroll though 2700 channels alphabetically.

The service won't scan all the channels available on a $700 trunked digital scanner nor will it be as reliable, but for $1 you can't beat it for a quick portable scanner of the basics to enhance news gathering.

This fall York County switched over to a digital system making the former inexpensive analog scanners obsolete.

The audio level from PoliceStream wasn't as loud as other multimedia I push out the Droid's external speaker, which is pretty good otherwise.

I solved the volume issue with a MOTOROKR EQ7. The unit with four metallic JBL speakers on top will also fill a room nicely for music and podcasting.

The bluetooth unit paired out of the box without any quirks and just automatically reconnects to the phone whenever it's plugged in.

The unit also doubles as a speaker phone. I don't really use a phone to talk, so I haven't tested this function other than to see that it works.

The EQ7 also has functions for shuttling music from the speaker box, but I am a music streamer and have never purchased music in file form.

For podcasting and streaming services like Pandora, Slacker Radio, Last.fm or iMusic the unit is an excellent addition.

The Bluetooth connection remains solid if i move my phone anywhere in my 2 story house. My house is small at 450 sq/ft per floor.

The MOTOROKR EQ7 unit is powered by a 12 volt power supply, which means it can be easily converted to mobile vehicle power. It will also run on four AA batteries.

The Droid camera software/hardware combination offers:

• A mechanical trigger button on the top, long side of the phone.


• Automatic and manual override settings for flash


• Automatic and manual lock for infinity and macro for auto-focus


• Nine preset conditions with steady photo


• Several tinting options


• Auto and manual white balance overrides


• A choice between 2-5 megapixels

The video interface offers controls for white balance, color effects and video file size (HD/MMS)

The basics of the phone camera's functionality are part of the default Android camera software on the Motorola Droid.

As of yet, I haven't found any third party interface that replaces this functionality entirely well, but several interfaces add new functions.

Replacing the camera functionality is as easy as searching and installing an app. When replacing the functionality of the phone, the user is offered an option of using one or the other with a sign off for one as a default.

As an alternative, you can choose between which interface you want to use each time the camera is activated.

Uninstalling the app, reverts the phone back to it's original functionality.

CameraMagic, a free App from the Android Market pictured here, changes the core functionality of the camera.

This app has a burst timer that you can set interval and duration. This can be used to take multiple photos one after another at a user defined rate.

There are an apps available to take stealth (spy) shots that don't show an interface and never use flash and various other apps that alter the raw function of the camera interface.

I like to keep these apps available as a mental note by scanning the Android Market using "camera" search words. The apps can be downloaded on the fly and installed in seconds to add a function to the camera.

It's easy to install and uninstall new camera functionality on demand.

An operating system update is like a visit from Santa for a budding Android geek.

My first observation with the Motorola Droid is that the image processing seems quicker and the interval between shots shortened.

The password page also has a slightly different look.

The list of updates include:

Better Bluetooth, background echo eliminated, improved phone book transfer of contacts to in-vehicle systems.

Incoming call quality is improved.

GPS icon will disappear after a GPS app is closed.

androidcentral.com

The upgrade is also supposed to enhance battery life and increase stability.

The ability to select between Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, Megenta, and Red external LED alerts aren't utilized by many app builders, but they come in handy to differentiate between different silent alerts.

The external LED alerts appear at the top right corner of the phone as two tiny ports of light..

Using them in conjunction with sound and vibration is useful when walking away from the phone and you don't want to log in to see if you missed a notification. They also can be used as a silent only notification.

An app like HI Yahoo, a Yahoo instant messenger app, gives you an option to choose any of the colors as an alert.

They say it isn't how you fall, but how gracefully you can get up. That is my month long observation using the Android 2.0 operating system on the Motorola Droid.

The phone has an hour meter (pictured) telling you how long the phone has been running. I am trying to see how long I can run the phone before it becomes buggy.

UPDATE: Test ended at 205 hours when the phone rebooted itself while running turn-by-turn navigation and receiving a SMS notification. Still 8+ days for a multi-tasking phone smart phone used heavily each day is pretty good

Over the past month, I have booted the Droid because I was too lazy to shut down apps or just because it feels like you should boot a computer after a few days.

You can think of the Android operating system as a shell running many smaller functions at the same time. An app may become buggy and need to be shut down, but the shell remains unaffected.

You can use a free app management utility like taskiller to quickly close down apps that are running in the background; if too many are running or as a maintenance step before resorting to a restart of the entire operating system.

Pictured is a window that appeared when an app running Yahoo Messenger crashed.

There is an option to Force Quit or to Wait when an app crashes.

Oddly enough, a forced quit in the case of many apps (ncluding built in ones like SMS/MMS) brings you right back to where you were with no data loss. It's almost an instantaneous recovery.

It's a good system to use when dealing with an open app market designed for many handsets on many wireless carriers, where there is more likely a chance of running a buggy app.

It's a less than ideal system to have if you want to implement something like global font customization (like BlackBerry, Windows...), although copy & paste and linking of services threads though Android and between the apps pretty seamlessly.

For a system that touts open source development, the blend of many ideas by many authors held together by one operating system, Android 2.0 is amazingly stable.

Here is a photographer who has taken his work and wrapped it in a dynamic calendar app that brings up a different wallpaper photo each month.

I wonder how many people internationally will give someone $3 for a year long stream of nude photos.

It's an interesting way to serve up content that sells (that's tasteful from what I can see), but might be held up in an approval process.

The content could also be served up as a free promotion app downloaded directly from the author's website entirely skipping the Android Market.

The app has a dynamic function that lives all year as a desktop picture of the month wallpaper.

Other apps tie an artists images or sounds to ring tones and alerts.

And for those of us who have gotten used to giving content away on the web to people who don't like to pay for websites...

It's paid firewall baby !

According to RBC Capital Markets, 800,000 Motorola Droids have been sold since the Nov 6 launch. It is expected that one million of these handsets will be in the market by the end of the fourth quarter.

Add to this the two dozen other Android based phones on T-Mobile and Sprint and you have the developing nation of Android.

The Droid will be released as the Milestone in Europe.

The Android 2.1 operating system update may appear in December (electronista.com)

It also follows a makeover of the Android.com website that usually precedes wider availability of a new Android release.

If accurate, customers would see a redesigned Android Market with the option billing directly through their carrier... Handset owners could also shop from the web on a computer instead of having to download apps from third-party sites or a smartphone's native store portal.

The OS update will be pushed to the handset and will appear in the notifications to proceed.

While the freedom to develop and publish an app outside the Android Market will result in porn apps like "MiKandi", it's also an avenue for a website to publish their own app download links for local users.

Instead of saying, get phone A and go to store B to download the app, the thinking is similar to the desktop market where you can download anything compatible with your operating system.

This opens the ability (for say a news website) to offer a link for an app to access their local content right from the website for readers who are using a variety of handsets, devices and wireless carriers that are running the Android operating system.

The Android Market, in this case becomes secondary, but a platform where an app and it's content can be marketed globally.