G1 Episode I - The Android Attack Begins

Well I did it, I finally cemented my status as a Google fanboy by dropping $179 to pre-order a brand spanking new Android powered "G1" phone. It took a while to fight through the T-Mobile website issues - it seems they either completely screwed up launching the pre-ordering web pages or were suffering from horrendous website overload. Either way by 12:30p, several hours after the press-release event in New York was over I was finally able to go all the way through the ordering process and make the commitment. But that was after a couple of hours of trying - it took so long that I almost changed my mind at the last minute having learned there is a decent list of "obnoxious flaws" in the product.

I have to say that the lack of stereo bluetooth audio (A2DP) strikes me as seriously obnoxious. I have taken to using my existing 3 year old Windows Mobile phone (also by HTC) in my car with my Motorola bluetooth handsfree speaker phone, it plays tunes nicely and satisfies the California handsfree requirement. But now without stereo audio my G1 will be a pretty poor mono-audio player. I'd have to get a second FM transmitter or radio with an audio in jack (not possible in one of my cars that has a Bose factory radio I can't really replace). But I've tried to rationalize that A2DP must be in the hardware and a future software upgrade must surely support it especially given that Amazon is now the music store of choice for the G1 - anything that hampers the phone being a great music player has to be fixed.

Other obnoxious flaws bother me less lie lack of a video player other than YouTube at the moment (I'm going to assume you can play embedded video on a web page though) because I seldom do anything with video on my phone now and expect that there will be decent 3rd party apps later.

The lack of a standard headphone jack requiring a USB adapter which is not even supplied is a pain but I hardly, if ever use plugin headphones with my phone now - but given the lack of stereo bluetooth audio this becomes more important - I'll need that output to connect to an FM transmitter in my car. Then again my current WinMo phone has a non-standard 2.5mm jack that requires an adapter for most headphones so its not really a step backward - but they really could have done better. My guess is headphone jacks eat up a lot of internal space and cause issues with dirt and RF intrusion.

Lack of multi-touch is surprising but I've lived without multi-touch all my life and I'm sure I can continue to do so. Lack of an on-screen keyboard seems surprising - I don't much like them and have big fingers that usually require me to use a stylus with my WinMo device but sometimes its handy to have as a fall back. I don't much care for the iPhone on-screen keyboard BTW - the letters are still too small for me so perhaps there wasn't much chance I would have been happy with one anyway. Since this device has a real keyboard which I very much desire in a smartphone I think I'll be pretty much happy with input methods.

Locking to T-Mobile I wont care too much about until I need to go to Europe which I do at least once a year - I haven't seen any information about whether the phone supports the world GSM frequencies, given who makes it I'd be very surprised if it didn't although I know its probably not going to be compatible with most other 3G service frequencies. My experience is that T-Mobile is very good about unlocking phones for its current customers and since they are imposing a $200 contract break fee (how long can that last legally?) I would really hope that the G1 will be no exception. If not I'll be unhappy and have to bust out my WinMo phone - kind of defeats the point though... I wonder what AT&T iPhone customers do anyway - do they just suck it up and pay those usuary international roaming fees?

Being able to tether the G1 to my laptop would be nice - I can do it with my WinMo phone right now but again on reflection almost never actually do it. Part of the idea with a phone like the G1 is that its web and online experience is so good that you don't actually need to use a laptop 99% of the time unless it is for work. In which case your employer should be busting out a WWAN card for you to use. In the last year I've found this to be true and do much of my email reading and sending from my current phone - that should be much, much easier from the G1 especially as I've become far more Google-centric with use of calendaring and such in the last year.

I also realize that the lack of tethering has enabled T-Mobile to offer that $25 "unlimited" (I've read elsewhere its not actually unlimited - after 1GB of transfer in a month they reserve the right to dial down your bandwidth) data plan which is only $5 more than I pay right now. And that data is much faster than my current Edge service so it will be far more useful to me. Given that the $25 a month plan includes 400 text messages it will actually save me money since my current plan doesn't include any and costs me $.20 a pop - so 400 would cost a fortune. I couldn't really see me getting through more than 400 messages given the G1's enhanced email and chat facilities. The whole point is email more text less...

Lack of multiple Google account support as I do have a number of Google hosted domains each with its own Google account. But 95% of what I do now goes to a single Google account and I have webmail available for the others - there is after all the Google online web access too. Basically Google doesn't have a very compelling story for accessing multiple accounts anywhere, let alone on the phone - you still have to log out and in again and often times it doesn't get that right. I'm expecting when they do find a decent solution it will come to the G1.

If T-Mobile drags its heals over getting software updates to the G1 I'll be very upset, it took them a long time to release the widely available firmware updates for my WinMo phone. Eventually they declined to release the WinMo 6.0 upgrade for it, presumably to encourage people to upgrade to the virtually identical replacement phone they had for it. However I can't believe that Google would let them get away with that - lets hope the upgrades are relatively painless!

One final thing I really, really want to see is caching of maps with the mapping/GPS application. I travel out of cell reception pretty frequently and T-Mobiles network is pretty sparse anyway. So if all that GPS and mapping goodness is useless without a network connection it will be a serious drag. I experience this with Google Maps on my WinMo phone and it is the one thing that starts me thinking about buying a dedicated GPS - something I shouldn't need to do. With the amount of storage you can add to a G1 via a memory card you should be able to pre-load or pre-cache huge amounts of map data and then travel all over. I know that's not how Google Maps is designed to work but it is a must have for making the G1 an extremely useful utility that actually saves you money by not buying other devices. With Google's traffic and search facilities it will always be far and away more powerful than simple GPS - while you have the network connection that is!

Overall pretty much everything can be fixed in software so I really hope it happens. If I was to make my top 3 must have software upgrades for the first firmware rev it would be:

1. A2DP stereo bluetooth
2. Map and POI caching for Google Maps
3. Multi-account support

Mostly for me the "G1" is not about being a fanboy - its more of a technical investigation and I'll also use it as a development platform for apps. If it turns out to suck I will either wait for the next device which I guess will be the "G2" or end up selling it or moving onto some other platform such as a Symbian Linux tablet or the next big WinMo device (the latest HTC sliders are real sweet but way to expensive if purchased unlocked - and T-Mobile just doesn't get the cream of the crop, they always go to AT&T). Lets hope Google and T-Mobile got it right though, and they will continue to improve the device after the launch just as Apple and other have always done.

UPDATE: Apparently after howls of protest across the inter-webs T-Mobile has relented on their 1GB per month cap and promised to come out with a revised usage policy based on fuzzy "don't harm the network or other people's use of it" criteria.

Web 3.0 /= Web 2.0++

A couple of years ago when Web 2.0 was really getting going I told some people that I thought Web 2.0 was pretty much the end of the line for web applications. Web 3.0, I said, would actually be a trend back to desktop applications using the Internet for data delivery. Think more like virtual machine based apps like good old Java applets that never really went anywhere back in the early days of Java.

Lets just say I got some incredulous stares back then, like I might have been from a different planet and next thing I would be predicting $5 a gallon gas or something crazy like that.

My rationale was that JavaScript in an of itself was the major vehicle for web applications these days, at least portable ones that is. But it seemed clear to me that JavaScript is just not a good language for delivery for major application functionality. While its a powerful dynamic language it has many issues and is distinctly married to the web browser. As applications get bigger and bigger large volumes of JavaScript get harder and harder to manage. While there were some promising movements towards standardized JavaScript libraries for app development they were too big and too slow for efficient delivery of an application in a standard web page.

Hence I saw that there would ultimately arise a class of standalone applications, probably still delivered via a web browser initially, that would get their data via standard Internet HTTP protocols, perhaps incorporating JavaScript, perhaps not and they would run either connected or disconnected. Stuff like AJAX would be utilized to deliver application and data updates on the fly. All in all we'd see application logic migrate more and more to the client side and due to the bifurcation of client platforms into Windows, Mac, mobile devices (Windows, Symbian and other) and also eventually Linux that would necessitate some cross platform operating environment on those clients - something like a virtual machine or cross platform sandbox seemed an obvious requirement.

So I guess I feel somewhat vindicated now that we have a burgeoning set of development platforms like Adobe AIR, Google Gears, and now even an "application centric" new browser from Google called Chrome. Not to mention other efforts by Microsoft (Silverlight) and Sun (JavaFX) that have yet to see significan't uptake for client side application development.

So if Web 3.0 really is a revolutionary take on the web and certainly more than an incremental twist on web 2.0 then what might web 4.0 be? I'm afraid I don't have any early insights on that, but trust me I'm trying to get my head around it even as I type.

Blu-ray for G33 chipset motherboards under XP

I've just finished getting Blu-ray playback working on my Intel G33 chipset based motherboard running under Windows XP (SP3). I initially thought this would be a slam dunk - add blu-ray drive, install PowerDVD, slam in a Blu-ray disk and off we go. I knew I wasn't going to be getting digital high def audio (24 bit/192khz) from my system - this much I uncovered while investigating HTPC for a friend. That prompted him to go off an buy a blu-ray player instead of the HTPC route - even though he didn't even have HDMI audio on his high end Cambridge Audio amp.

Anyway during investigation I found that for about $150 I could get a Pioneer BDC-202 blu-ray drive offering 4X read-ony blu-ray plus standard DVD/CD read/write. That was below my previous $200 threshold where upgrading to blu-ray seemed to be "no-brainer". So off I went and ordered one from Newegg along with a copy of Blade Runner "The Final Cut" a five disk blu-ray extravaganza. I also stuck the first disk of "Planet Earth" on our NetFlix queue. Well that was the easy bit...

So when the drive arrives I install it with not much ado, and happily remove the last clunky IDE cable from my motherboard (the new drive is SATA 2.0) and disabling IDE support in the BIOS as I go. Then I go to download the Cyberlink PowerDVD trial but as I'm reading on the download page I notice it says under a section called "Not supported" G33 video playback. But my Gigabyte GA-G33M-S2H motherboard is based on the Intel G33 chipset which is supposed to support HDCP HDMI output, MPEG2 acceleration and even has a Realtek ALC-889A D/A chip with a protected audio path (PAP) that Cyberlink were about to add support for (to give analog conversion of the high-def audio streams). I download their handy app that tells you if your system is blu-ray ready and sure enough it is flagging my graphics drivers as not blu-ray ready.

Further investigation on AVS Forum leads me to conclude that I'm pretty much screwed unless I upgrade to Windows Vista or get a discret video card. For some reason the HDCP support in my video drivers is noew good enough for NetFlix video HDCP playback but Intel pretty much refuses to bring out G33 drivers that support blu-ray under Windows XP. Grrr.

So I start looking at Vista which I've staunchly avoided for a couple of years now because I just didn't need it and all my other systems are XP and they didn't need it. Eventually I really don't want to install Vista just to get blu-ray.

So then I look at video cards which doesn't make me happy because when I bought my system I deliberate picked one with integrated graphics so I wouldn't need discreet video. I don't do gaming on it and I don't need the extra 30W or so of power consumption even when the system is idle - let alone all the heat and noise when its not. But the good news is there are some fanless sub-$50 video cards, something like an nVidia 8400 or 8600 based card which will give full high-def video acceleration and come with nvidia drivers that support HDCP/blu-ray. At that price I figure I can get it, wait out Intel for G33 drivers or whatever happens next (maybe I upgrade to G45 or the next round of Nehalem or post Nehalem motherboards after that).

As I explore the AVS Forum a bit more I start to see people say that PowerDVD just doesn't do blu-ray under XP period. Then I see people saying it does, or that if you use ArcSoft Total Media Theater (TMT) you can have blu-ray under XP - its not an XP limitation. So just for giggles and kicks I download TMT and try it out but bizarrely it doesn't even read the Planet Earth disk, its as if it isn't there. I start to wonder if the drive is fried but find that it works fine with DVD or CD. So I start to wonder if its a firmware issue and upgrade the Pioneer drive to the latest 1.07 firmware - still no change. Then I experiment with all kinds of BIOS settings, moving the drive to a different SATA port, turning on IDE emulation mode etc. etc. Still no joy - put blu-ray disk in and it just doesn't show up. Some people on AVS Forum suggest that maybe the disk is dead - it does look a little strange so I resolve to wait for my Blade Runner disks to show up.

Blade Runner shows up and I stick one of the disks in and low and behold TMT fires up and starts playing the disk. Yay I think and promptly declare the system working without stopping to think how practically impossible it is that the system really is playing a blu-ray disk. Nonetheless I plonk in the Planet Earth disk in the drive and it doesn't play, just like before, so I happily declare it a bad disk, put it back into its NetFlix envelope and send it on its way.

Well it didn't take me long to try another disk from the Blade Runner pack and hmmm, seems to be a problem - it isn't playing. I switch to the other disk - fine. Then it dawns on me - the disk that plays is actually a DVD - two of the disks in the five pack are actually DVDs, not blu-ray. Doh! So realizing I've probably just put a perfectly good disk back in the mail to NetFlix I get back on the case of the unplayable disk.

Some more posts on AVS Forum lead me to the conclusion that even if the graphics drivers are bad, even if the player software doesn't like my system the files on the blu-ray disk should show up on the filesystem but that is not what I'm seeing, I'm seeing nothing, I mean nuttin! I boot up my system under Linux and see the same problem - DVD good, Blu-ray bad. But under Linux I'm able to peruse the system log and get some error information that the file system on the blu-ray disk is not supported. After reading more Linx posts (Linux posts - for a Windows problem???) I discover that blu-ray uses UDF 2.5 file system and this is only supported under Windows Vista, not Windows XP - strike #2 against XP I guess. Funny how nothing that came with my shing new Pioneer drive mentioned this...

I wonder if there are drivers for UDF 2.5 that work with XP and eventually find out from the Digital Digest website that there are drivers out there on the grey market of downloads from obscure places. They were ripped from the Xbox 360 software that supported HD-DVD which also required UDF 2.5 support. Somewhat sceptically I download the files, unpack them and install - after rebooting my system (essential) I stick a drive in and go explore the drive. Lo and behold it worked, I can now see files on the drive even with blu-ray.

I fire up TMT again and it starts doing something - I hear audio but get a black screen where the video should be. I then install WinDVD but that doesn't work at all (in fact it doesn't even install barfing at the point it needs to load some C runtime libraries). I go back to trying PowerDVD (this is the third reinstall of that software) but on trying to play the disk it just tells me my hardware is incompatible and stops. Back to square one, well maybe square one and a half - at least I now know my drive is just fine and almost certainly the Planet Earth disk was not faulty at all.

So I post again on AVS Forum (about my tenth post on the subject by this time) and quite by chance someone says it sounds like all I need now are "Japanese beta video drivers" for TMT. Huh? No more information than that but its enough to get going so after many forum searches and Google searches I finally find a thread that mentions yes there is some beta version of TMT from 2007 that apparently worked with the G33 chipset and its GMA 3100 graphics processor. More searching leads me another AVS Forum post that has a link to a download that contains two magical driver files which I duely copy into the appropriate TMT program directory. One more reboot, fire up TMT, fingers crossed and boom - Houston we have blu-ray! Glorious high def Blade Runner playing right there on my XP machine with the supposedly unsupported chipset.

So yes, it can be done but it took me virtually a whole day of trial and error - install, uninstall, reboot, search, re-search, tearing out of hair. swearing, pounding of keyboard, and frustration. So now I have this whacky Frankenstein blu-ray system with unsupported drivers from an xbox-360 and Japanese beta graphics drivers - but it works with no Vista and no extra video card.

I have a feeling that anyone with a G35 based system with XP can probably use the same combination of hacks, just follow the links above. Hopefully G45 users will find things a lot easier since Intel is supposed to be supporting HDCP blu-ray even for XP, and maybe eventually they will go back and fix their G33 and G35 drivers - now other have shown them it is possible (apparently). My two remaining questions are:

1) Why the heck don't all blu-ray drive manufacturers provide drivers for UDF 2.5 under XP just like USB devices come with drivers for pre-XP versions of Windows. And why the heck hasn't Microsoft produced official drivers for download?

2) If I buy the official TMT product will it work without driver hacks? Or will it perhaps break a some point with the drivers I have already? By all accounts a bunch of people are also using these Japanese drivers so ArcSoft should really be sorting this problem out. I guess I'll find out when I purchase TMT since there are no other alternatives for G33/XP/blu-ray at the moment.