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.

I started writing code a long time ago, so I went through the days where you had to worry about how much memory you had available to you and how you could get your data into your application without causing out of memory issues.  With all the windowing environments and new object oriented languages it’s easy to forget “the good ole days”.

I was reminded this week when I was working on an app I’m writing for Android.  The software I want to write deals with images saved from the device’s camera (or hopefully other images on the device that the user may have imported,etc).  Android has a lot of great functionality around reading and importing bitmaps but I underestimated how well those bitmaps are kept in memory.  I was running out of memory when I wanted to save my manipulated bitmap based off it’s full original size.  I wasn’t sure how I was going to solve the problem until I found this post on the Google forums:

Yes, the images from the camera are 2048px by 1536px.  If you convert

to a bitmap, thats 2048 x 1536 x 2 = 6291456, or 6MB.  This is right

at the allotted space an Activity gets.  If you can live with smaller

images, I would suggest using a sampleSize of > 1 when decoding the

image.  This will result in a smaller image size, thus less memory

used.  I have used the following code in the past to keep my images

under a set byte count.  Alternatively, you could forget about

calculating the sample size and just set it to 2.  This would use

1.5MB instead of 6MB on a standard image.

6MB, that’s not that much, but for a mobile device, yeah I suppose I can see how that is overkill.  I was unaware that the ‘allotted space an Activity gets’ was around 6MB so that is why my app is running out of memory (basically I was trying to allocated 2 uncompressed images in memory.

The posting on Google gives a solution which I’ve tried.  I haven’t spent any time playing with the calculation but I plan on it as the default sizing loses a lot of the image detail.  I have some wiggle room in there because at any one time I’ll only be using 2 images so I can probably bump up the quality/sizing a bit.

I use Jetbrains IntelliJ Idea at work.  I have for quite a while now.  In the early days they didn’t really exist but since starting college and TurboC I’ve used an IDE.  Since I’m spending my free time learning Android development and I know that Jetbrains have an Android plugin for Idea I figured it would be natural to use IntelliJ.  Unfortunately the plugin for Android is pretty simplistic.  It’s not bad (the recent community beta for Idea is pretty flakey) but it leaves a lot to be desired as filling out the XML files for configuration can be a pain without examples.

I know Google recommends Eclipse so I downloaded it instead and while it’s integration with Android is awesome I find the IDE too cluttered, it does TOO many things.  I never though that I’d say it, but sometimes you can have too much functionality and the user can get confused.  Regularly at work I’ve got into arguments with product managers with my statement  “If the user doesn’t want to use the functionality they’ll just ignore it” but in the case of Eclipse you’re so surrounded by all these features that you can’t really escape it.

I don’t really like how projects are laid out either in Eclipse.  It seems like they try to hide the directory structure/layout of your build process with their “projects” mentality but likely it’s because I’m so used to having my code laid out a different way that it’s just foreign to me.

Either way, learning new stuff is fun but can be frustrating when you just learning to walk and you want to run.