TheSmiling-Blog

Archive for the ‘IT & Development’ Category

What most of you are probably interested in: Yes, Samsung did it ... this is finally a Galaxy phone that you can work with. Compared to the Galaxy and the Galaxy Spica this one is way more enhanced, lighter, better screen, better hardware and, the most important thing: better battery lifetime! Since I would say for myself that I'm a heavy user, I know the value of a good battery lifetime. If you followed some other posts you know that this was the most important point to complain about the other two Galaxy phones. With heavy user I mean, that I use the following apps on a regular base:

Google Mail
K-9 Mail (2 Accounts - push mail)
Exchange for Android (calendar, tasks, emails, contacts - refreshing every hour)
Seesmic as Twitter client (refresh every 30min)
Facebook App
Google Talk (recently started using it instead of sending SMS which is a good deal when you have a data-flatrate)
Google latitude (yep, started stalking a little bit)
Google Navigation
Wordpress (mainly managing comments on my posts)
Telephone (that one was unexpected, wasn't it )

Battery still lasts a regular day, as expected with smartphones. Consider taking a charger with you when you start using Google Navigation a lot, this is really consuming. I don't want to talk about the hardware specs here because you can find them on the web so let's just move on with the other stuff.

I read and heard a lot what people say about the hardware. Some say it looks cheap and feels like plastic, others say it looks classy and love it that it is so light weight. The latter one fits for me too. It just looks and feels awesome and the screen with the super AMOLED 4'' display is just amazing.

The most sentence I hear is: "It looks like an iPhone, that's stupid" ... well, I'm not an apple hater nor a fanboy so I don't really care. But you know, compared to other things like MS Windows, no one ever complained about Linux also going the way of using "windows" for their UI, so yes, there's always someone who does it first ... get over it!

Back to the main topic:

The phone is really fast and has a lot of memory which means that you can probably have every app you use in memory and the android system does not have to close any apps. At this point we get to an issue that can really annoy you: The phone sometimes lags, especially when you start a new app. I heard some rumors about that the internal storage is too slow so every time you start a new app it takes a while to load it. I tried to reproduce this idea by using a task killer that closes unused apps after a while and it looks like this is really the case: I had more problems with lagging when I was using the task killer. I believe this phone has enough memory that you don't need a task killer at all.

What I really like is that this phone has an integrated radio which you can use when you put the headphones in (those are used as the antenna). Also a nice feature that is not implemented in android 2.1 but I heard (haven't checked that yet) that it would be in 2.2 is tethering. The phone supports tethering of 3 other devices via WiFi as well as for one device if connected to USB ... for business cases a great feature that I really appreciate.

Sometimes you find things that are tiny little features but you are still totally impressed that someone thought about it: my girlfriend was calling me on her birthday and on the display it showed a small cake icon. Great if you consider having over 400 contacts in your phone book ... not that I remember all of them but imagine how impressed they will be if you have their birthday "in mind".

Samsungs version of android also has the "missed calls and missed messages"-puzzle view that the new Wave device has when you missed those and turn on the screen. You have to get used to the "pantheon"-launcher that has the menu-button on the bottom right screen when you want to get to the apps-list. I actually installed LauncherPro a few days ago and I have the feeling that this launcher has more performance than the default one ... you better check this for yourself.

The Galaxy S has no hardware keyboard which I don't miss because I never owned an android device that had one. The swype-Keyboard that is shipped with this device by default is really working great and learns your words after the first time you typed them in.

In my eyes, this is the best android device on the market right now, although the lagging when starting apps can be annoying. I still hope on any firmware update or maybe Froyo to fix this problem, but if this is really a hardware issue we have to wait for the next device. My advice as already said: Don't use a task killer, you don't need it with 512 MB RAM, believe me.

If you have any more ideas, corrections or just anything to say about the device or this post, please leave me a comment.

Posted in Android, Developer Advocates, bada, mob!lers

Ok, this is my 3rd review on the Samsung Wave that finally hit the market a few days ago.

Cool things I found out but will probably be more easy to find when you have the manual for this phone:

on an incoming phone call, just lay the device on the display and the ringtone will be muted. It does not send your caller to the mailbox, just mutes the tone
to sync your Google Account with the phone, don't use "Google" as Account-Type, use "Exchange" and do the following:
- Enter username and password (the user name here must be the full email address like "yourname@googlemail.com"
- domain can be left blank
- put "m.google.com" as URL and I recommend using SSL
- You can select the data that should be synced (contacts, calendar, emails etc.) but unfortunately you can only sync your main Google calendar

I also just downloaded Samsung Kies (v1.5.0) to test it with my Wave. Make sure you have the set the USB-Connection to "Samsung Kies" on the device. To do so, press the center button to get into your apps, select "setting" and go to "connections". At the very bottom of the list it says USB where you can select several types to use with the phone. Select "Samsung Kies" here. Open Kies and connect your device, it should be recognized immediately ... it took around 5 seconds. (I assume you have installed all necessary device drivers on your computer before)

Now, Kies main functionality is to copy phone data to your computer. It comes with some additional tools like a video-editor, but does not combine the download function for it. So the way to go to edit a video you took with your Wave would be:

download all videos from phone to PC
open video-editor
select video that was stored on PC

The usability could be better here I think.

What I really like because I haven't seen it before is the Samsung App Store in Kies.You can download apps from the Store via Kies and install them from there to your device. That is really a very nice feature. Currently I only found less then 200 apps in the store but I predict that there will be a lot more coming soon. (I won't get my MetricCalc-App ready before my vacation, but I think it should be in the market in 5 to 6 weeks)

Another thing is the phone book and calendar sync. You can store (or backup) all your data to you computer and also sync with Outlook via Kies. That is nice, but: I have synced my Google Contacts via the previously explained method using the Exchange-Account-Connector and my phone book really has a bunch of contacts now ... Kies doesn't see them. Kies only knows about contacts directly stored on the phone .. why is that? It would have been more then awesome to have full access, unfortunately that is not the case.

There are also some additional applications in Kies like a music player and photo-editor so it kind of looks like a very light version of a mac with some applications. I have no opinion whether this is good or bad. With Kies you can also use your device as internet connection which I think is a great feature too. We all know that the Wave already comes with an integrated AccessPoint which can be used for tethering with WiFi, but hey, there are still laptops out there that don't have a WiFi connection, so USB does the job.

I hope this post answers some questions I had in comments lately.

Posted in Developer Advocates, bada, mob!lers

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.

Posted in Developer Advocates, bada

It looks like MS came up with different colors for different problems .. and I now found out that there is also a black-screen available :)

Unfortunately the system disc space of one of my Windows Small Business Servers 2003 was packed … not that I didn’t plan to have enough space .. I just underestimated MS-Updates over years, it’s just crazy.
However, after the disc was full, the login (and logoff) screen of the Server was black .. only the logo had its colors. I couldn’t see what or even where I was exactly typing and you don’t have to be a designer to know, that black text on a black background is everything else but visible.

Thx to computing.net I know now, that this is a common problem if there is no disc space left. The solution, assumed that you managed to log into your system, is to go into the registry and set the colors back to default.

To do so, go to [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Colors] and put in the following colors:
"ActiveBorder"="212 208 200" "ActiveTitle"="10 36 106" "AppWorkSpace"="128 128 128" "Background"="102 111 116" "ButtonAlternateFace"="181 181 181" "ButtonDkShadow"="64 64 64" "ButtonFace"="212 208 200" "ButtonHilight"="255 255 255" "ButtonLight"="212 208 200" "ButtonShadow"="128 128 128" "ButtonText"="0 0 0" "GradientActiveTitle"="166 202 240" "GradientInactiveTitle"="192 192 192" "GrayText"="128 128 128" "Hilight"="10 36 106" "HilightText"="255 255 255" "HotTrackingColor"="0 0 128" "InactiveBorder"="212 208 200" "InactiveTitle"="128 128 128" "InactiveTitleText"="212 208 200" "InfoText"="0 0 0" "InfoWindow"="255 255 225" "Menu"="212 208 200" "MenuText"="0 0 0" "Scrollbar"="212 208 200" "TitleText"="255 255 255" "Window"="255 255 255" "WindowFrame"="0 0 0" "WindowText"="0 0 0"

At least MS has an article about it which you can get here.

Posted in IT & Development, Microsoft

[...] Once a mobiler, always a mobiler [...]

with these words, Sunny Lee, president of Samsung germany, handed over the certicicates of ‘distiguished alumni’ of the samsung mobilers program to the 18 members on January 19th 2010. He told us that he is amazed about what the group achieved in 4 month and was thankful about all ideas and the creativity of the mobilers.

As you already know, I’m one of the 8 mobilers who won the trip to Korea getting the chance to work with the developers over there to get mobile phones to the next level :)

Unfortunately I still have no news concerning mobilers 2.0 – but it was mentioned more than once that this group is not done yet and “that is is not over yet”!

Here’s a picture of my cool samsung mobilers program certificate. It’s been a great time and it will be an aweseome time in the future .. I feel it ;)

For another review you can also check Querweb-Blog from my mobilers (and also group blue) colleague Sabine [in german].

Posted in Android, mob!lers

Awesome, I’m one of the 8 mobilers from samsung who won the trip to korea with visits of the samsung developer center, how cool is that?

This actually brings my “mobile world” to a whole new level and I’m really exited to work together with the developers there on new mobile phones.

Today is the second day of the final workshop at samsung headquater germany in Schwalbach. The mobilers now have 4 great month of diving into the mobile scene behind them and the pilot phase of the mobilers concept here in europe has payed off. There will be mobiler 2.0 campains starting this year in other european countries too. The campaign will also continue in germany but I don’t have an exact picture of what this will look like at the moment. I’ll keep you up to date.

The 18 mobilers who were divided into 3 groups, each of 6 people were not only there for samsung promotion. The 3 groups also came up with new concepts of smartphone applications which they promoted and for which the group members also came up with business models.

Here’s the list of the apps which were designed and the corresponding mobilers group:

Group blue: http://www.theconferenceapp.com
Group orange: http://www.audioriver.de
Group green: http://urbangolf.ignaz.at

I’ll keep you updated on my korea trip. … Oh and by the way: I’m on group blue :)

Posted in Android, IT & Development, mob!lers

I just uploaded my first Chrome Extension, a currency converter.

The extension uses the latest conversion rate coming from the free public webservice webserviceX.NET.

If you want to install that little (hopefully cool) thing, I’d appreciate if you download it from the official Chrome Extension page here (instead of installing the source). This is just for better stats :)

For those interessted in the source code, you can download the zip file here. For more information about how to get your chrome ready for extensions (they’re beta at the moment), you should have a look here.

If you want to dive into deep development, the website you need is this one.

Posted in Google, IT & Development

Ok, here is the promised test on the Samsung Spica (i5700) phone … and some more.
The PDF comparison is in german but I’ll give you my personal result in english here:

If I had the choice between the Samsung Galaxy, the HTC Magic and the Samsung Spica, I’d choose the Spica. A few (unfortunately not all) mistakes Samsung did with the Galaxy are now resolved with the Spica; in particular I’m talking about the battery lifetime. Also the Spica in my eyes can score with it’s style. I can’t exactly tell what is, but compared to the Galaxy it does not feel so heavy and “fat” and it looks more “up-to-date” than the HTC Magic does. (well, actually, it is younger than the Magic ;) )

The OLED Display adds the cherry on the cake; the colors are just awesome and when you hold the Magic beside the Samsung you try to set your display settings for the Magic to brighter and better contrast … but that doesn’t fix the problem!

Unfortunately the Spica is still running on Android 1.5. It is supposed to be able to get updates up to Android 2.0 with the specific Samsung software which is only running on Windows. I haven’t tested any updates yet and I’m actually skeptical about that, but I’ll let you know as soon as I try do do it.

Here’s my detailed PDF-Comparison for download, enjoy!

Posted in Android, IT & Development, mob!lers