TheSmiling-Blog

Archive for Mai, 2010

Last Thursday the Samsung Technology UserGroup Frankfurt (STUGFRA) had the first meet and greet with people who are interested in bada in this area.

All together we count 11 people having nice talks at the Australian Bar YOURS in Frankfurt, a nice location with the opportunity to order drinks and food to make a good night even better.

Although we had to skip the "Getting started with C++"-presentation we still had good topics about Samsung bada, a small overview about what bada is and what you can do with it from a developer point of view. As we also mentioned before this wasn't a "developers-only" meeting and I'm glad that we also had some non developer people there to get other points of view like from a marketing perspective and also from a regular user perspective.

Concerning the Wave device everyone was really impressed about the super AMOLED display and also about the performance of the device. All attending GSDAs also had only good news concerning the battery lifetime which seems to last for about a week in standby mode. Still, we have to say that we have the impression that the currently flashed OS on our devices seems not to run any periodically background services which usually eats up some battery.

We also want to come up with a special thanks to the BadaDev-Team which joined our event and also announced it on there not rarely visited website.

We all had a great time and a lot of people already asked for the next event before they left. The next STUGFRA event has not yet been scheduled but we're looking forward to new and inspiring talks around the wave device and the bada system. Please keep an eye on this XING-Group here for more events.

Your STUGFRA-Team

(Michaela, Marc and Norbert)

PS: We have some video material that has not yet been reviewed or prepared. Please be patient about it.

Posted in Developer Advocates, bada, mob!lers

Till now I flashed my Samsung Wave two times which is actually working pretty good.

You should start the Platformdownloader before you connect your phone via USB to your computer. The downloader recognizes the phone after a few seconds and tells you which ports are ready. You must have installed the USB-Drivers on your PC before. You don't have to disable the MTP-Screen, but you can. The MTP-Screen "locks" the screen and displays that your phone is connected, in this case you cannot work with your phone while it is connected to the computer. To disable the MTP-Sceen, you have to dial *#6870# on your phone.

When you're connected with the downloader, your phone should display a mobile phone icon and an arrow pointing on the icon from the top. Now you're ready to go. Click the "Download" Button and pray ... sometimes the Downloader displays a security warning and you can't go on. If so, you have to reconnect your phone. Sometimes this takes more then one try. If you don't get the warning, the downloader starts with flashing your phone. This takes around 3-5 Minutes. The phone will reboot automatically and you're done.

To see the new version number, simply type *#1234# on you phone.

I'm currently running version S8500XXJE4, the CSC-Version is S8500OXAJE4.

The game 'asphalt5' is preinstalled with this version as it was 2 versions before. I now get a little bit more far when trying to connect to my Exchange Server, but I can't sync. I always get a "Connection error" message which is unfortunately not telling me the exact problem. Could be wrong password, could be wrong server URL, I don't know. I double checked all options and couldn't find any typos or wrong settings. Does anybody know if this is just not implemented yet?

Also, I'm still not able to connect to my full Google account. Only Google mail is working, but the full account with contact and calendar sync is not available. Twitter and Facebook work as expected.

As I had some more time yesterday to play around with the Wave I started downloading some HQTEST-Apps from the market. Some are really funny like the "Word World e-book" telling a story about a bug that can't sleep and a frog helping the bug finding a good place to sleep. Looks like some developers are a little bit bored . However, with a 3G connection, the phone is really fun. Twitter, Facebook, App-Download, it's really working great. I also like the downloading animation on the phone, showing the app icon with less brightness and then "filling" the icon with "water" until it has it's full contrast.

I also have to mention the speakers of the phone. The quality of the speakers is really great. I use it all the time when I drive in my car. The sound/voice is clear and loud enough and nothing seems to vibrate or jam the sound.

Now, the feature I like most Video phone call: The current version now does fully work. The versions before had the problem, that the called person had no chance to do anything on the phone when he/she received the phone call except for hanging up. Now, if I'm the one who receives the call, I can enable my video camera and the display is working while I'm on the phone .. great, I really love this feature.

To sum it up: A lot of essential things like synchronizing multiple accounts with mail, contacts and calendar are still not working. The video call bug was fixed, and the phone is still fun.

Posted in Developer Advocates, bada, mob!lers

This is my first and small review about the wave (S8500) bada phone from Samsung including statements from other people I gave the phone to.

The first thing to mention is always the screen. Bright and detailled super AMOLED Display, everyone is just amazed and hold his/her phone beside to check the difference.
Every developer I gave the phone to thought it would have an android operating system but was wondering why this OS works so fluent. I explained that this is bada and works with C++ which left no open questions concerning the fluent screen flow on the phone. This also affects the accelerator.

Next people say that they like the size of the phone and that it looks and feels like hight quality material was used. I do agree with that.
The 3 button system is not so intuitive but easy to learn, that’s just a small issue which should be gone in minutes after owning this phone.

I haven’t tested the camera that much but I did some video phone calls and those are working pretty good. You can switch between the front and the back camera while having the phone call which makes it easy to show the other party around where you are. This is very fun and will probably use this feature more often as soon as the bug on the receivers side is fixed)

The battery lifetime seems to be pretty good but I don’t have much data traffic at the moment so I guess I have to test this a little bit more.

When people click through the phone they usually end up at the game asphalt5. The first thing they say is something like “wow”. The 3D graphics are just great and the game works fluent as expected on a C++ machine.

One big issue is the empty market. As we found out with the mobilers project, apps are the heart of each smartphone to personalize it. Without a good stack of apps, it’s just half the fun. The Twitter and Facebook clients for example are so basic that I could easily use the website of those tools instead. (I know we’re in beta status right now, but I want to mention it as a big point that has to be “fixed” when the first phone will be released)

From a developer point of view the IDE is good to work with and the debugging on the simulator and the target device works really good. It still has some small issues here and there but from what I’ve been trying so far the biggest obstacle is the programming language that I have to get used to as I’m a developer from the Java world. (I’ll fix that problem in the near future )
I see I’m drifting off the the main topic here so I might write another post about the developer point of view later.

To sum it up: I believe that the wave will find a lot of enthusiasts and as I’m already convinced by this phone I already try to “sell” it to potential customers.