Ray Hilton’s Blog

All I can say is thank god some sense has finally entered the market. Its pretty obvious that all the manufacturers who are part of the Open Handset Alliance are frustrated with the quality of the operating systems available. Even Nokia, who partly own Symbian, are rumoured to be jumping ship. I hope they do; I have always used Nokia phones, but opted this time for a HTC device since I could no longer stand Symbian (its soooo sloooowwwww). While WM6 is a profoundly stupid operating system, with a UI designed by software engineers, not designers, it scores over Symbian devices by being faster and much better supported. When I click call, I want it to call, not hang around for a few seconds working out what it should do.

The other choice is, of course, the iPhone. However, the iPhone is just fluff at the moment; being locked into specific networks and developers being locked out means it is just a toy, not a proper platform. Of course it has been hacked, and there is supposedly a 3rd party SDK being released in January, but who knows what degree of access this will provide. Until then it cannot be considered a serious contender as a smart phone.

So, Android manages to fix a lot of these issues by providing an open, easy to use and java based platform. Downside of course being there is no device that can actually run it yet However, at this rate, the iPhone will come out in Australia about the same time that Android phones start appearing. Given my very high opinion of HTC (very well built, compact and free OS upgrades, yay!), I would much rather carry a device with which I can do what I want on whatever network I want, rather than a locked down, but good looking, piece of pocket fluff.

I’m very impressed by the API of Android, it appears to be designed by sympathetic programmers who just want to make your life that bit easier so you can get on with building Cool Shit. The whole thing revolves around a few basic concepts; Activities, Services and Intents. Activities are interactions with the user via the UI and Services are background processes such as playing music. Intents are things like “call number”; they can be provided by or requested by any application. I think a lot of developers, especially existing Java ones, will be quite excited about finally having a proper mobile platform to build for.
http://code.google.com/android/

My friend Paul got his iPhone in the UK, jailbreaked, activated and unlocked in less than 24hrs thanks to this tutorial.

Now, if they would just see their way to releasing a HSDPA version so I can use it with 3 (Which is by far and away the cheapest and fastest way of accessing mobile data in Australia).

Modec produce electric vans with a 100 mile radius and 2 tonne cargo limit. Tesco are going to be using them to deliver groceries to internet ordering customers. Nice to see that Tesco isn’t all evil.

MAKE Magazine have a nice primer on open source hardware.  The idea is that scematics, designs, parts list, firmware source, APIs and whatever else makes a final product can be open and free, not just the higher level application code.

Ok, lets start again.

I have moved all technical and development related posts to my company webiste; wirestorm.net. From now on, this will be my personal site.