techsupportrich
…well there you go
My Adventures In Rooting My Android Phone: Part 3
Jul 26th
To Sense or not to Sense, that is something you’ve really got to think about. I’ll go over things briefly so new people can catch up. Android has a user interface, obviously. The problem with it is (or can be) that it’s a bit like an interface designed by Google. Very functional and not much else, although in all honesty Android is the nicest UI on any Google product. However some phone makers like to put their own stamp on their devices and alter the stock Android UI. Motorola have one called Motoblur and HTC have one called Sense. Sony have one too but I don’t know what it’s called.
The first time I heard that phone makers could do this I expected to see a whole range of absolutely useless UIs, however it didn’t work out like that. Motoblur is actually quite good from what I hear, and Sony’s offering isn’t too bad either. But it is HTC Sense UI that seems to be by far the most popular.
Of all the ROMs I have tried so far, none of them had Sense, instead opting for the stock Android fare. Like I say, it isn’t too bad, just functional. That’s all well and good but there’s a whole world of ROMs that are based around the Sense UI that offer features that you just don’t get anywhere else.
Don’t get me wrong, Sense isn’t perfect. There are a few problems. First of all if you don’t like bloatware (that’s pre-installed software that you wouldn’t ever consider installing yourself) then you’re going to be upset, Sense is absolutely loaded with it. To be fair HTC seem to have done this with the most honorable intentions. The HTC interface is there to help people who might not be as tech savvy as the rest of us. For somebody with relatively little technical knowledge, everything is there already. Twitter, Facebook and Flickr integration is damn near perfect in the current 2.1 version. A new user doesn’t have to worry about finding a Twitter app or suffer the hell that is the Android Facebook app, it’s all there when your phone starts up for the first time. Unfortunately HTC assumes we do other things besides social networking and insists on giving us apps to handle it. They assume, like Apple does, that we all have a stock portfolio that we need to constantly monitor. At least with the iPhone you can put the Stocks app in a folder and forget about it. The HTC Stocks app runs constantly whether you use it or not, and you can’t get rid of it.
The as yet unreleased 2.2 version adds to the bloatware with Plurk integration. That’s right, Plurk! I know you were sat there wishing for just such an app and now you have it. Luckily these custom ROMs tend to do away with this sort of thing. Put it this way, if the one you’ve got doesn’t dump the bloat then find one that does. There are plenty of good ones.
At the moment I’m trying Pays-ROM which you can download here. So far it looks like it has all the best features of the new Sense UI with none of the Stocks or Plurk apps. There’s the 720p video recording, the stock Android Contacts app which I prefer to the Sense equivalent. It has HTCs Flashlight app that uses the camera flash, and the HTC Wi-Fi hotspot app that turns your phone into a Mi-Fi like device.
With the addition of Launcher Pro this seems to be a brilliant set up. I hope I can stay with it for at least a few weeks. I’ll let you know how it goes.
An End To Podcasting As We Know It At Simply Syndicated?
Jul 20th
I would like to start this post with an apology. I did that thing where you write a question as a head line just to make people panic a bit and then click on a link. I know that you saw “An End To Podcasting As We Know It At Simply Syndicated?” and then came to this story under the impression that we might be stopping podcasting or something. We aren’t, at least not that I know of. That said I’m here to talk to you about an end to podcasting as we know it at Simply Syndicated so I don’t feel too bad about the head line.
Just short of five years ago we started making Movies You Should See. It was a very different set up in those days I can tell you. There were certainly fewer podcasts around. It seems like there are just so many these days. When we started we didn’t really know what was going to happen or what the future would hold. We just knew that we were making this show every week and people were listening to it. It wasn’t long before other shows started. Make It So was next I think, then The Bollocks Show, it’s all a bit of a blur after that. As all of this was going on we still didn’t know what was going to happen in the future so we kept on making all these shows week after week, for what was beginning to feel like forever.
Of all the shows that Simply Syndicated have ever produced only two have had an official last episode. Some have faded away to nothing for various reasons, but very few of them come to an end. We just make them week in week out, FOR EVER. Are you beginning to see a problem here? It’s time to get realistic and start thinking about the future. Are we really going to make Movies You Should See or The Definitive Word for ever? Of course not, that’s a ridiculous thing to suggest. We took a break from doing Make It So for a while, but we came back a bit more ready to do the show. Obviously we could be tighter but hey, if it was a problem you wouldn’t be listening. The point is that the break did us good (as is this break we seem to be in at the moment due to various logistical problems).
It’s not just us that could do with a break sometimes, it’s listeners too. From a listeners point of view I can see two problems: More >
My Adventures In Rooting My Android Phone: Part 2
Jul 20th
I’m now a couple of days in to this phone hacking stuff, and I have to point out that I still have no regrets about doing it. My original aim was to end up using the leaked version of the HTC Sense software but things haven’t worked out like that.
It was just before Craig’s album launch party on Sunday night. I was getting ready to have a go at streaming the gig via my phone. In early testing I just couldn’t get it to work. Any video I managed to stream over the internet was very choppy and came without audio. A quick run of the SpeedTest app showed me that I was getting 1.8MB down and 0.01MB up. Clearly that isn’t right as I was on my home Wi-Fi, and I know just how wrong it was because previous speed tests had produced 6.6MB down and 1.2MB up.
After a bit of searching online I discovered that there was a problem with the way I had partitioned my memory card. You need to partition your memory card so that the phone can install apps to a section of the card. That isn’t a feature of Froyo, it’s a feature of ROMs, one which saves you a lot of trouble as with Android you have only been able to install apps to the phone’s internal memory. Unfortunately for me, it is also possible to partition some of your memory card to act as RAM for the phone. In older phones it speeds things up and lets you run apps that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to. In the Desire however, it just causes problems. That meant re-partitioning the card and that means losing everything that’s on it. More >
My Adventures In Rooting My Android Phone: Part 1
Jul 17th
I was trying to come up with some sort of vast, dramatic story about what I’ve done and why. But I get the feeling that all you’d really like to know is the answer to two questions. What is rooting your phone? and What do you get out of it? Well, I’ll try to tell you.
When we’re in the world of computers, having “root access” is all about having access to everything. You’re more likely than not the Administrator of your home computer, and that lets you do anything you like. Installing and uninstalling apps, formatting discs, changing system setting and stuff like that. By contrast, you probably aren’t the Administrator of your computer at work. You’ll just be a simple user that can only use the apps that the IT department see fit to give you. It’s all a matter of security.
Because of the great opportunity to really mess things up, you don’t have Administrator or Root access to your phone. Besides, it simply isn’t nessesary for most people to do what they want to with their phone. Root access is generally what you need when you want to do something with your phone that either your service provider or handset maker don’t want you to do. I suppose the most talked about case of this is people hacking their iPhone so they could install apps in the days before the app store, or unlocking the phone to work on any network.
Android phones don’t have quite the same restrictions, but the principle is the same. I had to gain root access to my phone so that I could do things with it that O2 and HTC don’t really want me doing.
So what are these things? Good question. After all I can already install any app I like and I moved to O2 to get this phone so I certainly don’t need to unlock the network. Not even iPhone users are suffering the same restriction that once caused the great unlocking community. Well, I want to install different ROMs on my phone.
What’s a ROM? Think of it basically as the operating system of your phone. That’s not entirely what it is, but that’s all the explanation you really need. Rather than hacking the current operating system, I’m hacking the phone and replacing the operating system with something completely different.
There are a couple of reasons for doing that. First of all the Android development goes very quickly and you can find yourself stuck with a handset running old software. Sometimes phones get updated by the handset maker, but more often than not they get updated by your network, and they tend to take an age over it. In my case my HTC Desire is running Android 2.1, the latest version of the OS is 2.2. HTC say they’ll be releasing an update sometime before the end of September, probably. Even after they do I’ll have to wait for O2 to load it up with their wallpapers and other crap before I can update my phone. You might be suffering even more if you’ve got a slightly older phone that’s running 1.6. With a rooted phone you can load any OS you want, including versions of the very latest.
Not only can you get the latest versions of the OS, you can choose which ROM you go for. For example HTC have their own UI that they put on top of Android with their own apps and widgets. It’s actually not bad, but it might not be for everyone. If you don’t like it you can download a ROM that doesn’t use the Sense UI. Maybe you’d like an OS that’s stripped of everything except the most basic software, you can do that too. The possibilities are endless.
The majority of ROMs are free (which is to say I haven’t found one asking for money yet) and gaining root access to the phone is as easy as could be. I used an app called Unrovoke 3. All I had to do was download the version for my phone, set it running on my Mac (there are also PC and Linux versions) and connect my phone to the computer. Thirty seconds later my phone was rooted and ready to accept new ROMs. A quick search on the Market found ROM Manager, another free app, which lets you download new ROMs and switch between them when you feel like it.
After playing around with a few different ROMs I have eventually settled on what seems to be a leaked version of the HTC Sense ROM that will be out officially for my phone some time in the future. Something which has given me the ability to have seemingly endless storage for apps, HD Video recording, Wi-Fi Hotspot functionality and a much snappier experience when generally using my phone.
All in all it seems to have been worth it so far, but this is day 1 and I’m still reinstalling apps. There’s plenty of time for something to go wrong. One very important piece of information you need to know before you try this is that you will absolutely 100% invalidate the warranty of your phone. Make no mistake about it, if you brick your phone it’s your problem. Do this and you lose the ability to ever complain to your network about a handset problem. That said, I haven’t broken mine…yet.
What would be the best bitrate?
Jul 15th
If you read my last post you’ll have realised that I’m on the lookout for new things to go in our store. Whilst thinking about it I realised that there are loads of great episodes of shows that aren’t available on our rss feeds any more. They would go great in the store and people would get the chance to hear some quality content that is otherwise unavailable.
As always, Your with the conent we sell, I like to make it at a higher quality than it was when we offered it for free. Traditionally that means raising the bit rate of the mp3 file that you download. The first two years of Movies You Should See was sold at a bitrate of 328kbps, which was far too high. Then year there came out at a bit rate of 256kbps, which I think is still too high, but it’s the same as a music track that you’d get from iTunes.
It’s important to remember that all our content is spoken word rather than music so it doesn’t need to be as high a bit rate. Because of this we’ve been selling SHaFT at 128kbps. In the six months we’ve been selling it has never been a single complaint about the quality of the audio.
When I put lots of new content in the store over the next few days I intend to have it at the same rate of compression as SHaFT, as I think it provides a compromise between sounds quality and file size that offers good value for money.
I’d love to know what you all think about this issue. Is the compression rate of SHaFT acceptable? Do you even care? It might just be me that gets obsessed about this sort of thing.
What are we missing?
Jul 12th
There are lots of online stores like MusicalMouseMat.com that I use. Every so often I find myself saying “If they did X, Y and Z or sold A, B or C then I’d buy it right away”.
The trouble is that we assume that the people selling these things know that they should be selling it, they just don’t sell it for whatever reason. That may be the case for movies and tv shows, but that’s pretty much it. The rest of us just go around selling what ever we can when ever we can. That means that we miss things. I’m very sure that there are some of you out there chomping at the bit to get your hands on some stuff that we could have in our store, but dont’.
I’d love to know what those things are. What are they? Let me know and I’ll see if I can make things available.
No Mr Bond I Expect You To Die
Jul 7th
They finally managed to kill James Bond. MGM Studios, the rights holders of the James Bond Franchize are 4 billion dollars in debt and looking for a buyer. They have just confirmed that the next Bond film has been cancelled, meaning that it will be a long time before we finally get to see if Bond catches that guy who gets away at the end of the last film.
I’m personally a huge fan of the films and was hoping that Daniel Craig had a few more left in him. With things the way they are I don’t expect to see him in another Bond film again. We can always hope, after all they did make more Red Dwarf, and that was rubbish.
What’s with all the phones?
Jul 7th
Every so often I see something I feel like writing about so I go write about it. It just feels like the only things that inspire me to write about them are phones. I’ve always had quite an obsession with the little things but it has gotten out of hand recently.
But, like I say the only interesting things are phones. I’d love to be writing about computers, but nothing interesting has happened there for ages. The PC market has definately reached maturity, bringing no big speed bumps in processing and no big anythings in any area. Totally dull. I think the last remotely interesting software even was OS X Snow Leopard, and before that it was Windows 7.
Even the legendary Mac vs Windows debate seems to have died down. With the release of Windows 7 it looks like Microsoft have finally created something that pretty much just works. I’ve been using it on a netbook since early January and have yet to get a virus or see a single app crash.
PS3 and XBox? Who cares. Nothing interesting there for ages either. At a push we could start to get excited about all this motion control stuff that’ll be out before Christmas but as it is I’m not to optimistic about it.
Today it seems, for now, phones are the thing. Maybe it’ll die down a bit once everyone who wants one has got their hands on their iPhone.
Nokia Smartphones
Jul 5th
Anyone got one? Anyone? Is there a single reader out there who could legitimately email me with an message that starts ”I’ve got a Nokia N97, it’s the best phone on the market, and here’s why”.
I didn’t think so, I certainly don’t expect to get that email. Remember when everyone had a Nokia phone? I don’t really know how well they did in the US but in the UK there was a time when you just wouldn’t consider getting a phone that wasn’t a Nokia. Now you’d be crazy to get one. I keep seeing lots of sales charts that say Nokia is still the world’s number one smart phone producer. What? Really? Who’s buying them? While office after office are crying out for iPhones and Android phones, I doubt there is a single company on the planet who are making all their staff move over to the Nokia E72 or some other Nokia excuse for a phone.
Let me be clear, Nokia do sell an absolute boat load of phones. It’s just that they’re what we class as feature phones, which is a bit of a bad name because we’re referring to phones that don’t really do much. You know, the ones for people who say they just want to make calls. Surely this market can’t be long for this world. I noticed today that you can get the HTC Wildfire for free, on a £15 per month contract. Why would anyone in their right mind buy anything by Nokia.
I’d like to suggest that all Nokia need to do is release some decent hardware or a better operating system, but the problem is well out of their control now. We only need to look at the computer market to see what’s going to happen.
At one point in the 80′s there were over 600 computer companies in the UK alone. That’s 600 types of computer, most with their own operating system, and most of them doing pretty much the same things. As time went on Microsoft released their BASIC operating system and the number of computer companies began to plumet. They just started making computers that ran the OS that everybody wanted to use. Now we have two. A main one that most people use, Windows, we have one for people that don’t like Windows, OS X, and we’ve got one for people that don’t really like using their computer, Linux (but that doesn’t really count). I’m only messing you Linux people.
In any case I hope you can see my point. What we really need as consumers is a couple of competitors. Somebody to make something good, and somebody to make something sightly better so that the other guys up their game a bit. And, it looks like those two are going to be Android and iOS. Most people will carry some sort of Android phone. Sorry iPhone supporters but that’s the way it’s going to be. Android phones are available for free and on cheaper contracts than the iPhone. As good as the iPhone is, it’s not £300 better than Android. However, I think the next largest group of users will be iPhone people. RIM and their Blackberry will probably represent the Linux which is mainly used on company servers around the world, with their penetration into the corporate market. It’s fair to say that as Android and iOS get better at the corporate stuff RIM might find themselves in trouble.
Where does all that leave Nokia and their Symbian OS? Nowhere. Looking at everything Nokia have released in the last three years it’s clear that they don’t let their engineers go on the internet, into shops, or anywhere they might see what other people are doing with phones. If you do a quick search for the upcoming Nokia N8, their new flagship phone, you can’t help but feel that they haven’t got a clue what’s going on in the world. It’s a shame that they haven’t come close to keeping up with the times, but I can see there being a time in the next ten years when you can say “Remember Nokia?”
Posting Systems
Jun 30th
These days there are lots of strange, wonderful and wacky ways of sharing a whole range of information about your life. From the mundane “I had Frosties for breakfast” to “I’m in New York and there’s a huge monster going crazy!” there’s a way to do all of it.
It seems at the moment the most popular ways of doing this are Facebook and Twitter. Those two websites have the biggest groups of users, and that’s what makes it all possible. There’s no point posting stuff online if there’s nobody there to see it. The echo noises in Google Buzz are testament to that.
The magic of Twitter and Facebook is that you don’t need to post something on there yourself. There are more methods of posting stuff than there are systems to post to. So you can tell YouTube to announce on Twitter when you’ve uploaded a video. You can get FormSpring to post your answers to question right on your Facebook account. The clever part of these systems is that they follow you around the internet keeping tabs on everything you do and telling the world about it. More >
