Jay's Technical Talk » Commentary

Using refrigerator door bins and vegetable crisper drawers for garage organization

Jay — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 01:53:38 +0000

Cardboard boxes are fine, but refrigerator door bins and vegetable crisper drawers are nicer for storing things. The good ones I used here are made from clear plastic so you can see inside them easily and they don’t block light.

Of course, they are terribly expensive to purchase for this use, but with the (lack of) quality of Kenmore /Amana refrigerators manufactured after 2004 you can find free donor components relatively frequently. I also believe that with the addition of standard closet shelving support brackets the glass shelves from these fridges can be re-purposed into standard wall shelves.

Book Review: The Wreck of the River of Stars by Michael Flynn

Jay — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 00:09:50 +0000

The Wreck of the River of Stars by Michael Flynn is a character driven space tragedy. The characters are excellent and the writing is superb. If you like happy endings, you shouldn’t be reading a tragedy, but if you like excellent writing you should read this book now.

Emily Smithson broken link recommendation spam

Jay — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 11:24:53 +0000

I received two emails from “Emily Smithson” alerting me to broken links on a webpage I maintain. She recommended a website which has “mirrored” the original content as a place to link to.

How helpful, I thought, reading the first email. But then I saw that the 2nd email had the exact same format, almost as if it was sent out automatically by a spam bot.

A quick google search shows that E.S. has been finding other broken links and recommending people fix them with links to “http://www.aprendelo.com”.

Perhaps she is just a helpful individual who sends out emails with the exact same format to multiple people, and happens to find a mirror of the content that they had previously linked to all on the same “http://www.aprendelo.com” website. Or perhaps the website deliberately mirrors other people’s content and then tries to get people to link to it for profit.

In any case, I appreciated the notice that the link was not working, but I updated the link to point at the new official source of the content, not the website her email recommended.

Ubuntu 10.04 AMD Radeon M6 chipset and Extron Electronics video multiplexer

Jay — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 00:37:29 +0000

After working perfectly for 4.5 weeks with the same podium setup, my Thinkpad X31 laptop refused to output VGA video to the Extron Electronics video multiplexer box at school.
It appears that the Extron Electronics box is not sending out proper Extended Display Identification Data (edid) which tells the laptop what resolutions it supports. My xrandr command finds the data for my laptop video display screen, but not for the VGA-0 port:

VGA-0 connected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
LVDS connected 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 0mm x 0mm
   1024x768       60.0*+   60.0
   800x600        60.3     59.9
   640x480        59.9     59.4

I have no idea why this started today. I don’t remember applying any patches to X-org in the last two days, and the technicians in charge of the podium swear that they didn’t change out anything.

I figured out a fix to make it (mostly) work. Tell xrandr to go ahead and force the VGA-0 port to a specific resolution with the following command:

 xrandr --addmode VGA-0 1024x768

This mostly works, but the sync signal is slightly off, leaving a black bar of 20-30 pixels on the left side of the screen. It is also annoying to have to run that command every time I want to display to the podium.

Adding range to a Dakota Alert WMT-3000 wireless driveway alarm

Jay — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 02:12:50 +0000

This is a photo of the radio transmitter inside of a Dakota Alert WMT-3000 wireless driveway alarm system. The wire coming through the hole drilled in the bottom of the case and soldered to the base of the antenna extends out to a 27″ wire whip antenna. Note the jumper circled in yellow. This jumper has a “high” and “low” setting. It is set to the “low” setting by the factory, and the “high” pin has been cut off. I found that the range was extended by soldering the “high” (cut off) pin to the center pin.

Jameco potentiometer grab bag

Jay — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 00:37:41 +0000

So, if you purchase a few Jameco grab bags of potentiometers, what exactly do you get?

100 – 10 Ohms a good number, plus a few 20 ohms
500 – 50 ohms, a good number
101 – 100 ohms, a slightly smaller amount
201 – 200 ohms, a good number
501 – 500 ohms, a metric boatload (filled up 2 squares in my organizer)
102 – 1K ohm, a large number
202 – 2K ohm, a large number
502 – 5K ohm, two
103 – 10K ohm, three
203 – 20K ohm, eight
503 – 50K ohm, two
104 – 100K ohm, two
204 – 200K ohm, one
304 – 300K ohm, five screw pots, plus six larger slider pots
504 – 500K ohm, a large number
105 – 1 M Ohm, five
205 – 2 M Ohm, seven

Of course, if you wait a few months, Jameco’s overstock may be completely different and their grab bags may have completely different distribution of potentiometers.

Flashy Guy at Dragon*Con

Jay — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 01:42:52 +0000

Update: His name is Marc DeVidts and more info about his costume can be found at his site.
The coolest technical “costume” I saw at Dragon*Con was a guy with a hundred or so individually addressable RGB LEDs under a white outfit. He had them under wifi control from his cell phone. He could select colors, speed, intensity and many different patterns of flashing. The video shows a “random” effect, but I also saw things such as a “line” moving up and down that made it obvious that each cluster was individually addressable. Unless he was supposed to be the guy from Quantum Leap, I think it was just a cool technical effect and not a specific costume. Download Video

HTC Aria on AT&T Review

Jay — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 02:20:15 +0000

I have used a Motorola Backflip for a month, and am now trying out an HTC Aria. The Aria is a much smaller phone that lacks a keyboard, but has a newer version of the Android OS (2.1) and has a faster processor. For the rest of my comparisons, keep reading.

Cost
This phone costs more than a Backflip, although you can buy one for a penny on Amazon with a two year contract with AT&T. Or $339 without a plan.

Physical Size
The Aria is a pocket phone. Because it doesn’t have a keyboard, the Aria is considerably thinner than the Backflip, and fits in your pocket well. This is a phone you can carry around in your front jeans pocket (guys anyways). This phone feels like my earlier Motorola Razr v3xx phone when in the pocket, and is quite portable.

Display Screen
The screen is basically the same size and resolution as a Motorola Backflip (320×480 at 3.2in diagonal). Although the resolution is smaller than some larger phones, I’ve found it to be just fine for everything I’ve wanted it to do. At it’s brightest display setting it’s just slightly brighter than a Motorola Backflip, but you would probably never take advantage of this in real situations. Fifty to seventy-five percent brightness is plenty for either phone in normal situations. Android 2.1′s “Auto Brightness” setting works well, and the screen has plenty of dynamic range to support it.

Calling Voice Quality and Speaker-phone
The voice quality from the headset and Bluetooth is perfectly acceptable. I have not yet tested it in a truly noisy environments, but I do not believe it has background noise reduction (I haven’t found a 2nd microphone hole anyways…) The microphone is at the bottom edge of the phone instead of the bottom front, but it’s a small enough phone that this probably doesn’t matter. The “next to your head” sensor is very quick and responsive, and the screen “comes back” as soon as you lift the headset away from your head.
The speaker-phone / speaker works for waiting out hold music, but it is relatively anemic and I wouldn’t want to use it for a conference call. All of my Motorola phones have much better speaker-phone performance.

Cellular Bands / Carrier Lock
It is a “quad band” GSM (or World) phone, so you will be able to get voice and GPRS/EDGE service anywhere in the world. However, for 3G/UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA, it only supports 1800 and 850Mhz, which means that it will work for AT&T in the US, and a few carriers in Latin America. Because I had purchased the phone used, and not from AT&T, I paid a guy on the internet $9.50 for an unlock code so that I could use the phone with any provider. (The Motorola Backflip unlock code cost $3.)

Speed/Processor
This phone is noticeably faster than the Motorola Backflip. It boots in about half the time, and all the widgets on the home screens appear within only a few tens of seconds after boot-up. When switching between applications or portrait/landscape orientation the switch is much faster than with the Backflip. I do not think you will have any complaints about this phone’s UI speed.

Battery Life
The Aria is running Android 2.1, which has had several battery life improvements built in, and it appears to last longer between charges than my Backflip. However, this is still a smartphone, and you will need to charge it daily. (Once the backflip is updated to Android 2.1 it will probably have a similar battery life.)

Android 2.1 / HTC Sense
Android 2.1 adds some battery life enhancements, and the feature that I really use, WPA encryption support for wifi networks! A few features I like about the HTC Sense UI:

The dialer automatically searches for contacts as you dial a number. For example, if you dial “546″ it will show everybody who has “JIM” in their contact name, or “546″ in their numbers. This feature blows Motorola’s MotoBlur dialer out of the water.
Click home button twice to get an “expose” like preview of all homescreens.

On the other hand, the facebook/twitter account integration wasn’t terribly good. I ended up using the default Android Facebook app, and I just stopped checking twitter altogether. If Facebook/Twitter are your thing, you’ll probably want to use a MotoBlur interface (and get a physical keyboard). The MotoBlur “Happenings” widget is the best I’ve seen for keeping up and interacting with Facebook and twitter.

One annoyance I have is that you can not delay the pattern lock. If you want to use a pattern to lock your phone, it will ALWAYS request the pattern, even if the phone just locked itself after being put down for a few seconds. You can change the screen timeout to 10 minutes, but then you have to push the power button to turn the screen off, which locks the phone! I really want the Motorla Blur / 1.5 feature of being able to have a simple swipe to unlock as standard, and a pattern lock after 20+ minutes of inactivity.

On-Screen keyboard
After using a Backflip for a month, I found the lack of a physical keyboard to be annoying. It definitely reduces the number of Facebook updates/comments and emails that I send using the phone. I have not yet decided if having a keyboard is worth the extra size of the Backflip. Because the Aria runs Android 2.1, it’s on-screen keyboard has a Google speech to text button which works really well for simple messages. I have found it much easier to hit the button, say a sentence (slowly, with pauses between each word) and then send my message back. As long as you are not using weird nouns not in standard dictionaries, and are in a quiet environment, the speech recognition works quite well. I have composed emails a sentence at a time using the speech recognition. The only problem is that it requires network connectivity to Google’s cloud to work. (And every so often when I’m on wifi with perfect 3g signal it claims that the network connection isn’t working!)

The soft-keyboard is acceptable, and has a predictive/corrective text entry system that works well, and is needed due to the mistypes you’ll make. It is fine for typing out a quick message, but people who SMS/email a lot will probably want to buy a phone with a hardware keyboard. Be sure to turn the phone sideways to get the bigger keyboard if you are going to be typing anything longer than a one or two word search term. The biggest thing I miss from the hardware keyboard are the arrow keys to navigate the text selection carrot! It is very, very difficult, even in landscape mode, to click the carrot exactly where you want it to correct a predictive text error.

Button layout and optical joystick
One annoyance with the hardware is the capacitive button layout. The aria has 4 capacitive buttons along the bottom of the screen: Home, Menu, Back, and Search.
Unfortunately, the home button is so close to the left side of the screen that if you hold the phone in your right hand and have slightly longer than average fingers, your little finger will touch this button at the worst time.
The location is also DIRECTLY under the “hide keyboard” soft button on the keyboard, so 20% of the time when you are done typing, you will accidentally go back home instead of returning to the application you were typing in.
In my opinion, putting 4 buttons here made the home and search button get too close to the edges. (I’d be interested in knowing if lefties constantly find themselves triggering the search button.)

From an ordering standpoint, I think having the menu button on the far left would result in less aggravation. (Within an application, pulling up the menu is more easily reversible than going to the “Home” screen.)

On the plus side, the volume rocker (located on the left side of the phone) is easy to use for right handed individuals.

The optical joystick works. I can use it to scroll up/down/left/right within applications that support it. The Frozen Bubble game is the only thing I use it on, because that game doesn’t support using the touchscreen to move the bubble aimer. You “push” the joystick in to select, which is how you take a picture with the camera or start recording with the video camera.
I use the optical trackpad even less than I use the Motorola Backflip’s “BackTrack” control pad. It’s not terribly bad, just not really needed for 99% of the applications. And if an application DID want to make use of it, the constant “clutching” needed of lifting your thumb and moving it before swiping in the direction you wanted to go would get annoying quickly.

The power button is on the top right, which makes us right handed users have to bend our pointer finger to access it. It’s not difficult to push, but I prefer the top left of the phone, where my pointer finger naturally rests.

Music/Audio
Although HTC’s specifications website does not list Ogg Vorbis support, the phone (Android) does support playback of Ogg Vorbis music! I’m not an audiophile, but I found the audio quality to be as good as with any portable music player. The HTC Aria is a small phone, and they have a unique 3.5mm audio jack. Because the back of the phone is slanted, and the 3.5mm audio jack goes into this slanted part of the phone, your headphones don’t quite plug in all the way on the back. (It still works fine.) A picture will illustrate:

Easy to Root!
After waiting and waiting for an easy method of rooting the Motorola Backflip, this phone was a dream to get root access on! The Unrevoked application just handled everything, and everything just worked. Directions can be found here.

That being said, I can only think of one reason to bother rooting the phone, and that would be to make it into a wifi hotspot using the android-wifi-tether software. To make that software work, you do have to download a slightly different wifi driver firmware to your phone’s SD card. Lots of directions can be found here. Everything else I wanted to do with this phone I could do by simply downloading a standard application from the android market.

Battery Compartment / SIM / MicroSD
I bought my phone used, without a manual, and it took me 5 minutes to get up enough confidence to actually yank hard enough to remove the back of the phone. Now that I know what I’m doing, it’s OK, but not super easy. I much prefer the Motorola Backflip’s “push the button and the back panel unlatches”, but I am confident that the back panel of the phone won’t accidentally come lose. You MUST remove the battery to replace the sim card. The micro SD card slot has a nice “push to click, push to release” action, which I find nicer than the “push it in and latch with a plastic tab” on the Motorla Backflip. Oh yes, and the inside back of the phone is surprisingly yellow!

I could not find any external antenna jacks, but most people won’t miss them.

Camera
The camera does not have an LED flash. I can’t hear it actively adjusting the focal length as I do on my Motorla Backflip, but anything farther away than 4 inches is in focus, so this doesn’t appear to be a major issue.
I’ve been able to capture barcodes and other “close up” features without a problem, but it may not work as well for super small barcodes.

It can shoot video up to 640×480 resolution and photos up to 5MP. It offers an option to shoot “wide-screen” format, but the actual CCD sensor is a 4:3 sensors, and you get (2592×1952) in 4:3 format, but only (2592×1728) in 3:2 wide-screen mode. I’m not sure why you would want to shoot in 3:2 wide-screen mode other than to match the screen aspect ratio. It’s not true 16:9, and you are losing resolution. So if you want to use the photos outside of the phone’s display, you may as well leave it at standard 4:3 mode.

The image quality appears to be just as good as the Motorola Backflip when outdoors in good lighting conditions. The lack of an LED hurts in low light conditions. Oh yes, and you actually take a picture by pressing in on the optical joystick. (I had to download a quickstart guide to figure that out…)
Here is a photo taken with the phone’s camera:

Conclusion
Overall, I am happy with the HTC Aria phone. It is smaller and more responsive than the Motorola Backflip, and has slightly better battery life. (It was also easy to gain root access, which allows wifi-tethering.) However, I suspect that the Backflip will make battery life improvements when it upgrades to Android 2.1. Although the Backflip is slower than the Aria, I really only notice it at initial phone boot-up and very occasionally when applications are starting up for the first time. All in all, the Backflip is still quite usable, and the addition of a hardware keyboard really helps with composing emails, text messages, comments and status updates. I will use the Aria for a full month, then switch back to the Backflip to compare again.

Wifi Tether on the HTC Aria

Jay — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 01:25:50 +0000

One of the best ways to allow other devices to use your phone’s data plan to get on the internet (a process called tethering) is to have your phone become a little wifi hotspot. Then, any wifi device can get internet access via your phone. To do this with the HTC Aria, follow these steps:

Root the phone using Unrevoked
Install the latest version of android-wifi-tether (I tested 2.0.5-pre4) found here: http://code.google.com/p/android-wifi-tether/downloads/list. You may have to use the Android SDK or Sideload-Wonder-Machine to install the software.
Find the proper firmware (fw_bcm4329_ap.bin located in the /system/etc/firmware directory of a HTC Evo 4g system-dump) and rename it to fw_bcm4329.bin. Place this file in your android.tether directory on your SD card. The directions I followed were here:http://code.google.com/p/android-wifi-tether/wiki/Setup_HTC_Desire_Incredible
A few links I found were:
http://www.htcevoforum.net/f2/htc-evo-system-dump-18/
http://rs922.rapidshare.com/files/389762848/system.rar

If things don’t work out, check the android-wifi-tether log to make sure it has found and is loading the firmware file.
I have confirmed that this procedure works for unencrypted wifi tethering on my HTC Aria to a Ubuntu laptop. You can control access via MAC address filtering, but keep in mind that anybody with a wifi card can see all of your network traffic (and MAC address spoofing is trivial.)

I am currently attempting to get WEP-128 bit encryption working perfectly with Ubuntu Linux. (Wifi-Tethering does not currently support WPA encryption.) I have been able to get the phone to export a WEP encrypted wifi signal, but the Ubuntu Network manager has a problem connecting to it. I am able to connect to the WEP encrypted wifi form the phone if I configure the laptop’s wireless interface manually with a script such as the following:
sudo service network-manager stop sleep 1 sudo ifconfig eth1 down sudo iwconfig eth1 mode ad-hoc sudo iwconfig eth1 essid AndroidTether sudo iwconfig eth1 key s:SUPERSECRETKEY sudo ifconfig eth1 up sleep 2 sudo dhclient eth1

Motorola Backflip (MB300) Review

Jay — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 02:25:23 +0000

I have been using a Motorola BACKFLIP as my primary phone on AT&T for the last month. It is my first experience with the Android OS and smart-phones in general (my previous phone was a Motorola Razor V3xx “feature” phone), as well as my first full QWERTY keyboard on a phone. Overall it has been a positive experience. For the rest of my review, keep reading…

Hardware:
The screen quality is good, and the 3.1 inch 320×480 resolution display is perfectly fine for all of the applications and web browsing I have used it for. I’ve been happy with the display quality and brightness (although I intentionally dimmed the display after using PowerTutor to determine that it used more power than the CPU when lit). The capacitive touch screen has worked as I’d expect.

The hinge mechanism that folds the keyboard around from the back to the front has been solid. The keyboard, although flat, offers at least as good tactile feedback as my Razor’s, and having one available has made sending emails or commenting on Facebook posts much easier. I was unsure if I would need a QWERTY keyboard, but now that I have it, I’m wondering if I could do as well with an on-screen keyboard. (I almost never try and use the on-screen keyboard, instead flipping the phone open to use the hardware QWERTY, even though this requires a vertical to horizontal flip of the GUI.)

When you open the phone “halfway” it will sit on the keyboard (back) side and have a vertical “clock mode” display that is nice for nightstand or tables, and can be used as a mini digital picture frame.

The back of the screen has a “BackTrack” touch-pad which can be used when the phone is folded open. At first I though that this feature would allow me to select anything on the screen with one touch, kind of like a touch-screen on the back of my regular screen. It does not act like that. Instead, it responds to relative commands to highlight focusable items (links, buttons, etc) and then select them. So, for example, if you want to click the third link down in a web page, you have to slide your finger in a downward motion. The UI will highlight each link moving down as you do so. When you get to the link you want, you stop sliding, and double-click. This does allow you to select things without “obscuring” the display with your finger, but takes longer than just tapping on links. The only time I really use the backtrack sensor is for scrolling, moving between large buttons, or double-clicking to select the already selected default option. It doesn’t get in my way, and I don’t mind having the extra interactions options available, but I just don’t use it nearly as much as tapping what I want on the front of the screen. (You can disable it in the settings if you don’t like it or if your fat fingers keep accidentally brushing against it.)

One nice thing about having the battery compartment door “inside” the phone (when it’s folded closed) is that when you drop the phone the battery and door don’t automatically go flying (like with my V3xx and V551 phones…). I have a close fitting plastic “snap-on” case around my Backflip to offer it some protection from drops, and in the one drop-test where I learned that the battery and door doesn’t go flying a corner of my case got chipped off. (Superglue to the rescue.) If my other Motorola phones are any indication, this guy can also stand being dropped without having any major issues.)

Size:
The Backflip is larger than my previous daily use Phone (Motorola v3xx razor), but can still fit in a front pocket. It is a bit thicker (mostly due to the keyboard) and makes a larger bulge in a front pocket. I typically carry it around in a cell phone pocket on my backpack. For daily usage, I’d recommend cargo pockets or a belt case. (On those occasions you are leaving the home/office without a backpack or cargo pants, it can be a bit bulky to carry around.)

Speed/Power:
Before purchasing the Backflip I read a lot of reviews that said it was under-powered, had a small screen, etc. From a specification standpoint, many Android phones have faster CPU’s and bigger screens. Every so often I have noticed pauses (mostly when some applications are first starting, when you first turn on the phone, or when switching from vertical to horizontal layout). These pauses are longer than on faster Android phones, but if you are upgrading from an older Feature Phone you probably will be happy enough with the speed. However, if you use a Nexus One, Droid, HTC Aria or other 1Ghz phone running Android 2.1, when you come back to the Backflip it will feel slow and poky. I found the phone to be at least as responsive as my Razor v3xx.

The one place that I really noticed a speed hit was on initial phone boot-up. The Backflip takes almost a minute to boot up when you first turn it on! This is much slower than any previous (non-smart) phone I have owned. It can be annoying when you are on a flight that has landed, and everybody else is telling their family and friends that they have landed, and your phone is just finishing it’s boot-up process. Even after the phone itself is booted it, it usually takes my widgets (I have about 10) another 30 seconds to a minute to draw themselves. Once things get loaded into memory the phone runs fine, but the initial startup is slow. However, as I don’t shut my phone off too frequently, I haven’t really noticed this delay too often.

Radios/Reception:
I have found that the cellular reception is comparable to my Razor (good). I have been very happy with the voice quality. The Backflip has a second microphone to cancel out ambient noise. So far I haven’t really tested it, but nobody has complained about my audio and I haven’t had any dropped calls.

The Backflip is quad band GSM (voice + GPRS/EDGE data) which allows it to work anywhere in the world. However, it’s 3G radio only supports 3 bands (WCDMA 850/1900/2100), which means it mostly does not work on T-Mobile at 3G speeds, and may not support 3G when traveling (especially in Europe). But at least it includes the WCDMA/UMTS-2100 band, which makes it a step above some other AT&T exclusive phones that only have 2 band support [850/1900]. [The iPhone 4 supports all four 3G bands, meaning that it will work with T-Mobile and in all foreign countries at 3G speeds.]

The WiFi signal reception is close to comparable to my laptop (also good). I was especially impressed with the GPS, which acquires a lock faster than my (two year old) Tom-Tom dedicated GPS unit. (I guess the A part of AGPS really helps.) I found that using Wifi Location (allowing Google to collect anonymous usage info…) combined with GPS location gives very good results. Even when the GPS hasn’t locked on, you get 1000′ accuracy from the wifi if you are in any type of town that has already been surveyed, and when the GPS kicks in you get accuracy down to tens of feet.

Speakerphone / Music:
I have continued to be impressed with Motorola’s speakerphones. As with my previous Motorola phones, the speakerphone works very well. It can also be used to play (mono) music, but is a bit tinny (as you’d expect). This speakerphone is better than that on the HTC Aria by a wide margin.

The Backflip has a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, and while I’m not an audiophile, the music sounds just as good from my phone as any other mp3 player I’ve used. I am especially happy with Android’s support for my OGG Vorbis music collection out of the box! I’ve been using the Museek music playing application to handle my multi-gigibyte collection (stored on the micro-SD card).

Camera / Flash / Barcode Reader / Flashlight:
The 5 MP auto-focus camera (with LED flash) is good enough to replace a standard point & shoot camera from 3 years ago. I plan on using it as my main traveling camera (leaving the 2.1MP Cannon with a real lens at home, dedicated to documenting workbench projects…). The flash isn’t quite as powerful as a dedicated camera, but it’s good enough for your standard nightclub shots. The auto-focus camera does a good job at macro shots (such as barcodes or close up shots of flowers).

The Barcode Scanner combined with Google Shopper is one of my favorite applications. (Yes, I’m that person who likes a book at the Bookstore, scans the barcode, and orders it used from Half.com while still in the store…) I have also downloaded the Motorola developed “Backflip Light” application, which allows you to turn on the camera flash to use as a (quite serviceable) flashlight. Here is a sample picture:

Micro-USB cable:
The phone uses a MICRO usb cable, NOT a Mini-USB cable like my previous phone and all my previous phone accessories. I was annoyed at Motorola for switching, as I had to buy a 2nd charger and 2nd data cable with the new “micro” USB end. Plus, my Bluetooth headsets, headphones, and e-book reader are now using a different charger than my phone. On the plus side, even though it’s not the same plug, it is still an industry standard plug, so you can buy chargers and cables from anybody. (And Micro to Mini USB adapters do exist, so with some advance planning I can charge all my devices with a Mini-USB charger and a Mini-to-Micro adapter.)

Web browser:
The standard Android Web browser is very usable. You are aware that you’re looking at at a web page on a phone, but the entire page renders as you’d expect. I haven’t found a standard (non-flash) web page where I haven’t been able to log into and get things done if I needed to (albeit slowly, with lots of scrolling around.) Ebay, Amazon, Sakai, WordPress, they all just work.

Android/MotoBlur:
The Backflip is running Android 1.5 (Update: You can upgrade to 2.1, here). Not having used any other version of android, I felt that 1.5 had all the features I really needed. (The only feature I have heard of but can’t use is WPA Enterprise Encrypted Wifi, animated homescreen backgrounds and the B&N Nook Reader for Android.) I’ll be happy to upgrade when the OTA updates start going out, but I don’t know of any other 1.6, 2.1 or 2.2 feature that I’m really missing by running “only” 1.5. The ability to move applications to the flash card really hasn’t been needed. I have a large list of applications installed, and so far I’m only using up 223MB (of my 336MB total application storage area).

The MotoBlur software that Motorola adds to the stock phone appears to be limited to a “MotoBlur” account setup/login screen when you first start up the phone, social network integration with the contacts/dialer applications, and a few custom widgets on the home screen. The MotoBlur website allows you to track your phone via GPS if it’s lost/stolen, backs up your contacts, and allows you to restore your contacts to a new MotoBlur phone later. I removed the news RSS applications, but kept the “Happenings” application that pulls in my Facebook and twitter feeds. As I haven’t used a “stock” Android phone, I may not be noticing some other MotoBlur features by just assuming that all Android phones “do that”, but I have noticed that the contacts application pulls photos from my Facebook account and lists people’s status messages, which I believe is part of the MotoBlur experience. Overall I have not ran into anything about MotoBlur that made me hate it. Several control panel settings allow you to disable background data downloads, Facebook feed updates, etc. should you not want to use these features. After using the HTC “Sense” UI, I have decided that the MotoBlur “happenings” widget is the best I’ve seen so far for Facebook/Twitter updates.

I did receive one software upgrade (13.37, in two parts) while using the phone, which I downloaded over WiFi. This was a stability and bug-fix patch to Android 1.5. The install/upgrade process took a few minutes, and went flawlessly. It added a new “AT&T Deathstar” logo to the boot-up process (and made the boot-up process appear to take even longer than before). Other than this, I didn’t notice any material improvements from the upgrade, but I was happy with how the phone had worked before the patch.

Unlocking/Rooting the phone:
I was able to buy an unlock code on the Internet for $3 which successfully removed the carrier lock on the phone (so I can use it with T-Mobile, or an international roaming SIM card if I need to), which was easier than trying to get AT&T to give me the code as I had purchased the phone 2nd-hand.

The only real complaint I have about it is that Motorola has done a better than average job of locking it down, so nobody has posted easy to follow “rooting” directions on the web yet. So far there are only two reasons I want root access, which is to make the phone into a wifi hot-spot (useful for traveling), and to replace the stock boot-up animation (not really needed).

Other than wifi-tethering and reading B&N Nook content, everything else I’ve wanted to be able to do with the phone has been easily achievable via applications available (for free) in the Google App Store. Motorola has also made it difficult to “sideload” applications from sources other than the Google App Store. It can be done, you just have to install the Android SDK or Sideload Wonder Machine (which uses the SDK tool) on a computer to do so. (So far I haven’t found any applications that I needed that were not in the Google App Store, so it hasn’t been an issue for me.)

Battery Life:
The Backflip wants to be fed at least once a day, and prefers to have a top-up at lunch. This is NOT a phone you can leave in your purse all week and be ready to make a call on Friday.

Unplugging my phone from the charger at work, taking it home but not plugging it in at home, and bringing it back to work the next day resulted in a battery charge of 65%. That’s 35% used over 16 hours being almost entirely idle. (I had used the phone for no more than 20 minutes.) The battery drains noticeably faster when you are traveling (and the radio has to constantly switch cell phone towers) than when you are static.

Although the standby time isn’t great, the “talk-time” (or rather, surfing the Internet, checking email, and updating Facebook time) of the phone is relatively good. You can use it continuously (for talking, or surfing) for around six hours. If you plug it in every night, you shouldn’t have any problems under normal usage scenarios. If you are the type of person who spends your two hour commutes playing mobile video, (or if you sometimes forget to plug the phone in at night) you may want to invest in a charger
at the office. If you plug it in at night and also charge it at the office, the battery will never go below 75% charged, and have plenty of reserve power for heavy usage.

Overall:
Overall I’ve been very impressed with the new capabilities of the Android phone. I’ve had Motorola phones for the last five years (V551, V3xx) and I’m also happy with the Backflip. For a low cost Android phone, it really shines.

I am going to be trying out an HTC Aria next. The Aria has a smaller form factor, no keyboard, faster processor, and runs Android 2.1 out of the box, but otherwise it has almost exactly the same specifications.
The smaller form factor and easy availability of rooting instructions and tools online may win me over to the Aria, but it costs about twice what the Backflip did, and I have a hunch that I’ll really miss the QWERTY keyboard.