Technology for Mortals

Update – Google ETF is actually $550 on top of the $180 you already paid!  So if you pull out early, you’ll have to pay $730 total!

I know Justin was impressed with the business model Google’s new Nexus One phone, but I really don’t see how it’s any different.  You can buy the phone from Google for $529 without a carrier subsidy, or you can pay $179 with a T-Mobile subsidy.  You buy the phone directly from Google, but how’s that any different than buying an iPhone directly from Apple?

Furthermore, it seems that Google isn’t very honest about the Early Termination Fee.  It’s actually $350 if you break the contract early but Google advertises a $200 ETF.  Verizon honestly advertises a $350 ETF and they’re being persecuted by some members of the FCC and by the so-called consumer advocacy groups who haven’t made a peep about Google’s misleading advertising or the $350 ETF.  Why such an obvious double standard?

The Nexus One is made by HTC and it seems to be fairly impressive with an 800×480 OLED display and a 1 GHz ARM processor.  But according to Michael Arrington, it only gets 1.5 hours of battery life when he games with the display at full brightness.  That’s pretty pathetic considering the fact that a full size laptop gets more than that.

Updated 11/22/2009

Anyone who has ever tried to get wireless BlueTooth A2DP working in the last three versions of Windows will come to the following conclusion.  Getting A2DP stereo BlueTooth needs to be WAY easier in Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7.  Getting basic BlueTooth connectivity working for wireless mice or keyboards is fairly painless and easy because everything just works out of the box after you plug in a BlueTooth adapter into your computer, and you’re tricked into believing that everything is already working and installed.  Trying to get low quality monophonic headset audio working is hard enough and trying to get A2DP high quality stereo working is a royal pain.  This is something that’s amazingly simple on any modern cellular phone but it almost seems like rocket science in Windows.

The first thing you’ll notice in any recent version of Windows when attempting to connect a BlueTooth headset is that it will ask you for a bunch of drivers.  Scanning the Internet or local hard drive won’t yield any results, and you’re left scratching your head wondering what happened and why the headset doesn’t come with any drivers.  But as it turns out, you need additional drivers for your BlueTooth adapter to make any of this stuff work.

On my Lenovo X200, I downloaded the latest BlueTooth drivers compatible with Vista or Windows 7 here only to find out that only low quality 8-bit monophonic audio is supported.  I had to search the Internet to figure out that I needed the WIDCOMM BlueTooth drivers from Broadcom, and Broadcom BlueTooth chipsets are very common though there are others on the market and you’ll need to get drivers from the chipset manufacturer.  The driver install was fairly automated, but it took a LONG time to install and it required a reboot.  I also had to connect and disconnect the A2DP headset and reconnect to get it working, but it worked beautifully when it did and sound quality was amazing.

Now my problem is that I need to find functional A2DP drivers for these super mini USB 2.0 BlueTooth dongles I got from DealExtreme.com for $2.36.  Bluesoleil for Windows version 6 worked fine with this cheap adapter, but Bluesoleil costs $30!  There’s just no way I’m paying $30 for a set of drivers to run a $2 dongle.  You’re much better with a jWIN JB-TH101 which comes with A2DP drivers and it’s smaller.  It’s only $10 if you can pick it up at a Fry’s store and avoid shipping charges.  Getting it online might double the price due to shipping.  I have a nice little IOGear GBU421 which comes with drivers but I used the Broadcom WIDCOMM drivers but it might cost you $20 with shipping.

And here’s a parting tip.  I bought this amazing BlueTooth to 3.5 mm stereo jack adapter (includes a microphone as well) for $13.  The cheap plastic earphones are lousy but you don’t have to use them and it’s worth it even without any earphones.  More importantly, having the ability to connect your own high quality earphones is even more important.

Barns & Nobles are apparently launching a new eBook reader, and someone is apparently decided to call it the “Nook”.  Now maybe I’m dating myself but did some young Product Marketing person not know the slang meaning of “nook”?  Almost sounds like they’re marketing some adult toy.

Funny names aside, the dual-screen (one color touchscreen and one ePaper), AT&T 3G connection, and the reasonable price of $259 sounds very impressive.  Forrester isn’t too impressed because the device has a low or non-existent profit margin, but that may be a bit short sighted if this device turns out to be wildly popular and it turns into the “razor” that sells the “blades”.  Besides, the competition for eBook readers is heating up and the days of selling bulky ugly eBook readers for $300+ are long gone.  If the device is as good as its specification suggests and Barns & Nobles is able to execute properly, the device should do extremely well.

Now if this cool new gadget can actually get its owner some nook, that would actually be the most impressive feature set of all.

This has to be one of the coolest things I’ve seen it a while, but word is emerging about a new secret Skunk Works project called “Courier” which is a new innovative “booklet” design. This thing apparently has 2 7″ LCDs on a rigid hinge and it looks like something that might be direction tablet computers are heading towards.

One thing I’m not sure about is whether this design allows you to operate it like a notebook computer with a virtual keyboard if you need to type an email. Had this device been invented 10 years ago when a lot of people didn’t know how to type, it would have been an instant mega hit. These days, almost everyone knows how to type so they’re probably going to want a keyboard. It’s also not clear if you can flip the booklet back to back so that you have something you can hold in one hand though I doubt it since it’s probably too big for that. While it’s definitely a very cool device, I’m not sure if it’s as useful to me as a laptop. The user interface looks good but who knows if it actually works as responsive as it appears in the video. Ultimately, this may be a very nice niche product but I think it needs to be smaller, thinner, lighter for easy standing operation.

Read more about it here.

An organic farmer Lenny Levine in Nova Scotia just blocked his rural community from having broadband access by convincing the Kings County Council to block the construction of a microwave tower several hundred meters from his farm. Levine cites his unfounded fear that the microwave radiation would mutate the DNA in his organic crops.

Read rest at Digital Society »

The “Environmental Working Group” ewg.org just put out their report on the dangerous of cell phone Radio Frequency (RF) fields.  The problem is that their report either relies on very small studies that show a possible correlation with increased cancer rates but they completely omit the largest studies that found no dangers with cell phone RF fields.

The EWG makes several claims in their executive summary but they seem to contradict the larger body of evidence.  Read the rest at Digital Society.

Update 11/9/2009 – Nokia is recalling the chargers sold with this phone made between June and August of this year for fear of electrocution!  You have to go to this site to exchange the charger.

I just picked up a new Nokia 1661 to replace my lost cell phone.  Unfortunately, I lost my Samsung Blast which was a nice slim phone and I had a 2GB memory card in it.  I’m 17 months into my contract, and I have to pay way too much money to get another phone from T-Mobile.  So I got a free SIM card instead and one of these pay-as-you-go phones.

The Nokia 1661 looks great, but the instructions are absolutely horrible on how to insert the SIM card. The way they make the slot look makes it very confusing, and even this online guide doesn’t show you how to plug the SIM in correctly.  The way it’s slotted makes it look like the SIM card needs to be slid down towards the middle of the phone, and that just doesn’t work.  Turns out you just push the SIM card towards the very top of slot towards the top of the phone rather than try to line up the SIM to where the groves makes it seem like it’s supposed to reside.

It seems like other people are trying to find the answer too so I’m posting this to help them out when they do a search.  Here’s a picture of how it should look after it’s fully inserted.

How to install a SIM into a Nokia 1661 cell phone

A product that has caught my eye since last year is the Peek Simply email device from Peek that gives you wireless email and SMS capability.  It’s an inexpensive device that costs $20 for the Classic model and $60 for the “Pronto” model more suitable to business users.  The Classic model gives you access to 2 email accounts and image viewing capability while the Pronto gives you access to 5 email accounts with image, DOC, and PDF viewing capability.

The Pronto also has Exchange compatibility and the email service is supposedly instant “push” email, but I called Peek to confirm that it’s a 90 second delay which probably means that Peek’s servers poll the POP3 or Exchange server every 90 seconds.  As for the Exchange “compatibility”, that’s for the inbox only and it grabs your mail by logging in to your company’s Outlook Web Access (OWA) server.  The sent email goes through Peek’s SMTP server which unfortunately means that mail sent from the Peek Pronto is not synchronized in the Exchange server.  Now if Peek can download email using your OWA account, there’s no reason they can’t send email using your OWA account so this might be something they might fix eventually.  Being able to sync on the inbox and sent folder is an absolute minimum requirement for me.  You can probably forget about any kind of calendaring compatibility and I doubt they download every message in your corporate inbox on your Exchange server.  You’re most likely not going to be able to search through your sent mails either so it effectively treats your Exchange server as a POP3 mail server.

While the screen is fairly large and detailed, you can’t surf the web because there is no web browser.  Besides, you’re only paying $15 to $20 a month (12 month or 1 month term) for the email- and SMS-only wireless service when full service wireless Internet usually costs $60 per month.

$15 per month is pretty cheap so it is an attractive service for people who want mobile email without buying an expensive smart phone and contract.  However, don’t even expect it to offer the same level of functionality as an iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, or Android phone.  It’s definitely good enough for SMS and consumer class email especially if you prefer carrying a plain old dumb phone that doesn’t crash and lasts days instead of hours.

I’ve debunked the myth that wireless mesh networks are practical before, but the same nonsense came up at the FCC wireless technology workshop and the testimony from the New America Foundation’s Sascha Meinrath went unchallenged.  I’ve taken the time to thoroughly debunk this myth once again along with a detailed explanation of why mesh doesn’t work.

If you’re going to be installing BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) 5.0 on a Windows Server 2008 machine, you better be ready to call technical support or read this blog post at a minimum.  I spend 5 hours on the phone with BlackBerry customer support over the course of two days to work out all the installation problems that should have been automated by the installer and documented in the pre-installation guide.  I will give Research In Motion support credit for helping me through these problems.

The main different between BES 5.0 and BES 4.1.x is that the administration interface is Java and ActiveX web based only, which irritates me to no end.  BES 4.1 gives you a real interface that works without a browser and isn’t dependent on some complicated JBoss+Apache web server setup.  This web based aspect of BES 5.0 was the source of some major installation and configuration headaches.  With BES 4.1.x, you don’t have to put up with any of this nonsense.  The reasoning behind 5.0 using a web administration interface is that now the users can manage their own BlackBerry Enterprise accounts though I really didn’t need this feature.

Just getting the basic preparation work done for a BES 5.0 install is daunting enough because you have to go through this pre-installation guide.  That involves setting up a BES service account, the local server permissions, the active directory permissions, the exchange server permissions, and other software that needs to be pre-installed.  It gets a bit confusing and I definitely recommend just using the SQL Server 2005 express they include in their BES 5.0 installer and then you don’t have to worry about additional JDBC drivers for remote SQL databases.  Don’t bother installing SQL express yourself as it will only make things more complicated.  You will need to install the Microsoft Exchange MAPI client before you install BES.

One pre-installation step that is missing is that you need to make sure that IPv6 on Windows Server 2008 is disabled.  Un-checking IPv6 in the network interface is not sufficient, and you’ll need to follow the instructions in this Microsoft KB article and edit the registry.  Once you’ve done this along with all the other pre-installation procedures above, you can proceed to install BES.  Note that during installation, be sure to select BlackBerry Server authentication for the web administration interface and not Active Directory (AD) integrated authentication.  BlackBerry technical support couldn’t figure out how to get this working and they told me to reinstall from scratch on a clean machine and don’t use AD authentication for web administration.

There’s more pain after you’ve completed the whole installation.  The web administration interface also needs access to the SQL database which doesn’t work out of the box and can frustrate you to no end.  Because the BES installer didn’t bother to nail down the SQL ports from dynamic to fixed TCP 1433, the web admin page refuses to come up.  You need to go into the SQL Server Configuration Manager and manually set the TCP ports to 1433 as shown below.

Internet Explorer 8.0 in Windows Server 2008 also requires you to enable “compatibility mode” for the administration page and you must also put the administration URL in the trusted site list.  The other problem you’ll find is that because the BES 5.0 installer generated its own SSL certificate rather than using the one that is either already on the server or easily obtained in a Windows network environment with a Certificate Authority in place, the browser throws up error messages that it doesn’t trust the SSL certificate.  You can fix this by right clicking on Internet Explorer and choose “Run as administrator”.  Then you can view the certificate and install it.  However, it’s installed in the wrong place in the personal user certificate store and you’ll have to export the certificate and import it into the computer certificate.  A better option is to import the certificate into Active Directory trusted certificates using this procedure I wrote up in 2006 and that solves your problem for every computer within the active directory that needs to use the BES web administration page.

Anyhow, it’s all working for me right now and I hope this document helps you avoid the headaches I went through.