I’ve been using Android for close to 4 years now, I started with a Samsung Galaxy S, upgraded to a Samsung Galaxy S3 and this December I switched camps and bought a Sony Z3.  I was a fan of Samsung mostly because how easy it was to get one since nearly every carrier here in Canada stocks and sells them.  On paper the Galaxy series seem like good phones, they have great specs, nice screens, and for the most part are supported well from Samsung (barring the OG SGS of course).  The problem I found with Galaxy phones is that they feel really cheap.  The price of the phone doesn’t say cheap (probably because the specs are high at the device launch) but the overall finish of the devices are cheap.  Plastic cases, cheap battery covers, terrible implementation of their launches (Touchwiz).

After using my SGS3 for nearly 3 years I wanted to get a new phone but sadly due to the plan I have with my provider it was not cost effective.  I have a pretty generous data plan with my provider and in order for me to get a ‘free’ phone and upgrade I would have to give up my plan and switch to a more expensive plan.  This was not something I wanted to do.  Luckily a friend on one of my tech forums that a used, unlocked Sony Z3 for sale.

Now originally I wanted to buy a Google Nexus device.  After having a Nexus 7 since 2012 I was really happy on how open and well supported the device was.  Yes the Nexus is a generally forgettable device on fit and feel, similar to the SGS series, but the software support and overall performance of the device was really attractive.  It just worked, and if I wanted to try a new ROM it was extremely easy to pick one and flash it to the device without having to jump through 400 hoops (I’m looking at you Samsung Odin).  Sadly the Nexus phone that was released this year, the Nexus 6 was too big for my liking.  Not to mention the size but overall the device received a mixed reception, mostly due to it’s high price.

I like Sony products, I had read good things about the Z3 line (both full Z3 and their compact edition).  I’d seen enough feedback on the XDA forums about Sony’s dev group participating well in releasing their sources to developers so that suggested to me that they were more open than Samsung in regards to people modifying their phones.  That plus their version of launcher (I don’t even know what they call their launcher) seemed well organized and had enough useful improvements over stock Android that the Z3 would be a nice change.

Overall the Z3 has been exceptional.  I get around 2 1/2 days worth of battery life from the phone, it’s responsive and pretty much everything I’ve thrown at it runs flawlessly, from games to apps, to videos, etc.  I haven’t been overly thrilled with the availability of cases but I found a few that work fine.  I also like the magnetic charger which works well but I can’t help but think it’s a bit finicky.  My biggest concerns are the battery life.  Yes, right now, the battery life is amazing, but both of my SGS devices were really good when I first got them.  But, as time went on, the battery life on my SGS went in the toilet.  It would take a long time to charge and the battery would drain really quickly.  I’m not sure if it is just because the removable batteries Samsung supplies are crap or just the daily cycle of charge, use, charge, use caused the battery to become less efficient in keeping a charge.  With the Z3 not having a removable battery this could be a real issue.  I’ve been more diligent in plugging in my Z3 only when I need to (less than 20% battery left) but it’s not clear if that will make any difference or not.

For more than two years my girlfriend and I suffered with having a stalkers.  Not the kind that follow you around (though with stalkers can you ever really be sure), we would regularly get a lot of phone calls, calls to our work numbers, calls to our cell phones.  The stalker wouldn’t actually say anything, because, like all people with mental issues they were too scared to have any sort of confrontation, their entire purpose was to be an irritant and be disruptive.

The cell phone companies can do nothing, as usual they expect you to pay your bill and not to call them, when asked they said there is nothing that can be done track these blocked calls.  Calling the police gave similar results.  Their solution (which was identical to the cell companies) was to “change your number”.  Why should I have to change my phone number to get someone to leave me alone?  The stalker is the one breaking the law, not me.  At any rate we suffered with this annoyance until my girlfriend found a really cool service called Reveal5 here in Canada.  Their system allows you to see ALL blocked/unlisted numbers and then reverse the number to find out the address, telephone provider, name of the scumbag person who is calling you.

The service really works, we sent all the information provided by Reveal5 to the local authorities who then proceeded to have a discussion with the stalker and since then the calls have stopped.  While I would have preferred to press charges because clearly people who irritate  you (sometimes called 15-20 times a day and do nothing on the line) have mental issues it was easier to just have the police have a chat.

We’ve subscribed to this service.  I cannot express how happy we were that the calls stopped.  The Reveal5 support team have been nothing but fantastic, friendly and understanding as well as willing to work with local police to provide them with the information they needed.

I highly recommend subscribing to Reveal5 if you are suffering from blocked calls calling your lines.

I’ve been out for a while, I haven’t done any real software development outside of work for a while.. just taking a break.

I bought Mafia 2 on Steam the other week which was on sale, I hadn’t finished or played a game for a while so it was nice to take a break.

The other day a friend from work had me look at his cheap Android tablet.  It was a cheap iPad ripoff from China but being a geek I like gadgets so I took the device home to play with it.  My friend wanted to get Honeycomb on the thing but 1) Honeycomb isn’t officially released 2) there is NO XDA support for the device 3) the device is pretty slow.  It has a decent clocked CPU (1ghz) but only has 256 MB of memory and that 1ghz processor is the old Arm11 which from what I understand is slow and inefficient.  Nonetheless it was a fun experimentation and gave me a new appreciation for tablet computers.  Now if they would finally come down in price.

It seems to me that all tablet computers are overpriced.  For the amount the cheapest high end device that is being sold you could get a pretty great netbook (or if you shopped around a fully usable Laptop.  Sure you could argue that a tablet is a lot more portable but I can guarantee that the laptop is also a lot better at doing computer type things.  It’s likely the ‘it’ factor that tablets have that is driving their perceived value up.

With the release of Honeycomb there will be a lot of competition though so with luck we’ll able to pay a lot less for even more powerful device before the end of 2011.  Then it will become a matter of “is there enough tablet specific software to make the purchase a lot more attractive”.

Well after much complaining, petitions, calls I finally got a replacement phone.  Bell called me and offered to replace the phone with a brand new one.

Sadly I had to wait until now to get it.  The Christmas holidays and slow mail service during the holidays had me wait a couple of weeks but at least I have a new phone.  I have to send back the old repaired phone when they finally get around to fixing it so I have some time to see how this new phone fares.  To be honest I’m not sure I expect it will last any longer.  The new phone they sent has nearly the exact same manufacturing date and considering my luck with XBOXes the manufacturing dates usually mean that I’ll get another dud,  but at least I’m up and running again.  When I do get my old repaired phone I’ll have two choices from which to choose and will hopefully have enough information to make an informed choice which is better (ie: does the old phone have new hardware in it or did they just flash the SD card for the least reliable fix out there).

For Christmas I bought a Canon T2i DSLR camera, it’s good but the learning curve is nearly vertical, especially for someone like me who came from a point and shoot.  It takes great pictures though and learning something new is always fun.  Youtube has a lot of great tutorial videos as well.

I bought a cheap Samsung plasma TV and Sherwood audio receiver for my other place hooked up the TV to my WDTV to watch a UFC fight (to make sure the TV was working without any dead pixels before I move it) and read the manual for the receiver which should do what I’m expecting for a simple multi-room stereo.

I’m still working on my first Android app.  I’m having some real trouble finding someone to draw icons for me.  I’m terrible at icon type art so if I can’t find anyone to draw for me then I’ll be stuck using some of the free icons, which is pretty disappointing.

Well, my phone is dead.

I ran into the dreaded internal SD Card failure.  No real warning, it just died.  I had the phone sitting on my desk, went to go get it and the screen wouldn’t turn on, buttons lit up but no response.  Rebooted the phone and it’s stuck at the boot logo.

No different ROM flashes would fix the device, all the logs said the SD card could not be mounted.

I went to the place where the phone was bought in hopes they would replace the device.  No dice, they told me to talk to Bell.  Went to the first Bell store:

“Oh I can fix that”  .. “hmmm” .. “yeah I can’t fix this, you need to send it into Bell”

went to another Bell store, one that actually sends phones into Bell for repair.

“Oh I can fix that” … “hmmm” ..  “yeah I can’t fix this, you need to send it in”

I’m amazed that some of these people actually work at the store.  I had the guy suggest to me that he was fixing the device when get got the phone into Download mode.

All this does is put the phone into recovery mode where you can update it via the PC.  The guy was suggesting that the phone was “updating itself” and all we had to do was wait.  I didn’t say anything trying not to smirk/laugh.  Needless to say he gave up too.

The worst part is that this is definitely a design flaw on the I9000M model offered exclusively through Bell and neither Bell nor Samsung want to admit there is an issue and do right by it’s customers.  Bell blames Samsung and Samsung blames Bell.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do.  I sent the phone in but I don’t expect to get it back fixed anytime soon.  I’m pretty disappointed.  I love the device but it’s pretty obvious online that there are a lot of people having problems.

I haven’t decided if I want to sell the device when it comes back or stick with it.  To be honest I’d feel bad about selling the device and it craters on someone else.  It is pretty depressing that I’m finally off work for the holidays, I have time to do some learning, coding and at best now I have the emulator which is pretty limited/slow for what I want to do.