amelie.nu

Skip navigation

All posts tagged with "Geekiness"

HTC Wildfire - a review

HTC Wildfire

So, I have been looking for a new phone and was thinking about getting the iPhone 4 or the HTC Desire. I was quite fond of my previous HTC, the T-Mobile branded G1 (aka HTC Dream), but it was crashing a lot. I ended up with an HTC Wildfire (that's it over there on the left. Pic of box taken with phone. Wheee).

Now, the Wildfire was not a choice as such - I went into the shop to see what deals I could get on plans, I wanted to go for the cheapest plan I could and see what phones came with it, if any. In the end I stayed with my current network (T-Mobile) as they had the best deal on cheap contracts, it seems. They offered me a variety of basic phones, but there were only two Android ones - the T-Mobile Pulse, which looked very nice but had a rather old version of Android on it (older than the version I had on the G1) and while I thought it looked great, I did want something a bit more futureproof. The other Android was the Wildfire, a new addition that had just come out, running Android 2.1 via HTC Sense. I went for it.

I was immediately disappointed by the phone. I expected it to be more or less the same as what I'd been used to; as it was a free phone I hadn't had a chance to try it in-store and kind of regretted that - it wasn't at all the same. For a start, I noticed the lower resolution. The G1 had a 320×480px widescreen (16:9) resolution (the same as the original iPhone's) on a 3.2" screen running at 180dpi. The Wildfire has the same 3.2" screen, but it's a 4:3 resolution of 240×320 (dunno how many dpi, but it's less than the G1), which is about 2/3 what I had before. The colours were not the same either - the Wildfire boasts the same 16-bit colours as the G1 but does not deliver them. I get patchy, dithered colours reminiscent of the old 256 colour system.

No matter, I told myself; I can get used to a smaller screen. It's only then, of course, that I realised that the Android Market wasn't showing me a lot of the apps I used to have installed. I searched for them - nothing. I learned why - a lot of Android apps require the default screen resolution of 320×480, which most of the phones have. The Market won't show items that won't fit on your screen, and even those that do say they'll fit on your screen end up looking very squashed, for the most part.

Then there's HTC Sense, which is HTC's UI on top of Android. Now I'd never been hot on the vanilla Android design, but it was ok and I got used to it. I thought HTC Sense would be a great addition to Android, finally some shininess! ... er, well, not really. The awkward colours mean that it doesn't really work for one, and secondly I'm not sure who designed the HTC Sense UI but it's like HTC took every app on Android and uglified it. Not a fan at all, and I immediately reverted to vanilla Android Home instead of the Sense display. It's a shame, because they have done some rather nice tweaks to some of the apps (the rest, I really wish they'd left alone) but with the ugly interface, I'm really not inclined to use them. That and a lot of the apps are useless anyway - one is "download Navigon" and is nothing more than an advert for a navigation app. Even if you do download Navigon, it doesn't go away. You can't delete it or hide it. Grrr.

One thing I LOVE LOVE LOVE is the fact that I can add my Facebook, Twitter and Flickr contacts, and link them to my phone contacts so that if the person has an updated email/phone number on one of those accounts, it'll update it on my phone. But the problem with that is, once you add those items, Mr Wildfire thinks you will want to be automatically updated of people's statuses/etc when they call you or you call them. Er, no thanks. I'll check my Facebook et al when I feel like it. Oh and note to Mr Wildfire: I set a contact's default number for a reason. I want that number to show up first when I type their name into the recipient field; I don't expect you to list all their numbers in numerical order. That inevitably means I will send things to the wrong numbers, since all landline numbers here start with 01 or 02 and mobiles start 07. That means if I have my friend Bob Jones with a number of 01234 567890 and his mobile number of 07123 567890, when I start typing "Bob" into my recipients, it'll autofill the first number in numerical order - the landline number beginning 01, even though the mobile number is set as his default number. Do not want. Also, I would have thought it would prioritise 'Mobile' numbers over 'Home'/'Work' when texting, as it is more likely I will want to text another mobile than a landline... Eh. Oh, and that's another thing - when you're making a call, it seems the proximity sensor isn't working properly, as my ear pressed a load of stuff on the screen - cut off the call, muted me, etc etc. Hmmm.

And you know the one thing I really wanted on Android - the indication light that flashes different colours depending on what I've received? Ah yes, the Wildfire might as well not have one. It only flashes green (or orange when charging), it doesn't have a multi-colour LED like the G1 and the more expensive phones. Wah :( It also turns itself off after 5 minutes, so if you happen to be in a meeting or some other place where you can't look at your phone every 5 minutes, you'll miss a notification.

But it's not all bad! Honest! I have had the phone a week now and I've actually grown to love HTC Sense's home screen. Still not so hot on the apps (ugly) but the home screen actually fits in much better on the phone than the vanilla Android one. My complaint now is that it eats a lot more battery power :P I got 3 days' battery on vanilla Home, I get a day and a half on Sense, which has more funky widgets and has 7 screens to put them on instead of just 3. The on-screen keyboard took a bit of getting used to, but the predictive text - while largely a rip off of the iPhone's - makes it much easier to use than the version on the G1 (which I hardly used in favour of the slide-out one). I also love the look of this phone - even though I would have preferred it in white (and there IS a white version! It just wasn't available at the store I went to :( ), the grey/black combo looks sleek and professional. It fits snugly in my pocket, unlike the G1 which was a bit too big.

All in all, I have actually grown very fond of this phone and despite the screen resolution/colours and ugly apps (apart from the weather app. That has gorgeous graphics), I'm really glad I got it. I got a cheap contract, and got a cheap (ish. It's not cheap on its own, but compared to the other smart phones) phone with it. For the price I'm paying, I could have expected something that wasn't a smartphone at all, or something that is but was nowhere near the quality of the G1. But I didn't get that, I got something which - yes, it's not as good as the G1, but I'd say it's about 90% the smartphone the G1 was. It may have less of a screen resolution and less colours, but it has almost 4 times the memory and storage space I had on the last phone, as well as an LED flash and brightness sensor. Ok, so the former I don't really use (other than as a torch/flashlight :P ) but I actually really like the latter. The G1 never really did go bright enough... You'd get a bit of sun and that was it - screen was invisible. I've not had any sun yet to try the Wildfire on, but it certainly seems to be able to go much brighter than the G1.

But yes, I'm actually very happy with it now :)

Why I'm not switching to Chrome

I seem to find myself in somewhat of a minority these days; whether that is true or just how it feels I don't know, but it looks like a lot of the 'crowd' are switching to Google's browser, Chrome, while I'm lagging behind with Firefox.

I feel a bit like I did back in 2004 when Firefox first came out (and was called Firebird). I swore I'd never leave IE6 - I was happy with it, it did everything I wanted and I didn't want to change my ways just because someone said somewhere that IE might be rubbish. Of course, I was convinced eventually - the main deciding factor was the tabbed browsing and the fact that I could open all my daily bookmarks just by middle-clicking a folder or selecting "open all in tabs". After switching I discovered just what a headache IE was and how stupid I had been to be so in love with it :P

So am I just in denial again this time and standing by Firefox because I am too stubborn to switch to the new cool kid in town? I don't think so, this time. Don't get me wrong, Chrome is a great browser - I have it and use it every now and then.

Things I like about Chrome:

  1. Speed
    You can't deny that Chrome is very fast, and Firefox's increasing bloat is really noticeable next to it. Chrome starts immediately on my PC whereas Firefox takes about 30-40 seconds. It takes a bit longer on the Mac but it's still faster than Firefox which again takes around 30 seconds to start. Both computers are of a similar spec and age, just in case you were wondering.

    The other speed factor is the more up-to-date JavaScript engine included in WebKit (the rendering engine Chrome is based on) - AJAX queries are much faster in Chrome than they are in Firefox which is useful for JS-heavy websites.

  2. Resource usage
    Firefox is pretty heavy on the resource front. Right now I have 4 tabs open and Firefox is using a whopping 169MB of memory to run them. Opening the same 4 tabs in Chrome only takes up 91MB. Of course, the reasoning behind this may be simple - I've got far more extensions running in Firefox than I have in Chrome (I do have some in Chrome though, so it's not an out-of-the-box copy). However, I'm inclined to believe this isn't just to do with the extensions since I've heard of lots of people with no extensions having issues with stupid memory usage courtesy of Firefox.

    When I shut down Firefox, it takes aaaaages. I know it does things like backing up my bookmarks and saving my open tabs and sessions and whatever else, but so does Chrome and Chrome shuts down immediately. On the Mac I've also had odd issues with Firefox continually reopening itself whenever I shut it down as well... Never had that with Chrome.

  3. Themes
    Firefox has a great many themes available for it, and I've never really been a fan of the default so have always used one or another. They're ok, but they are a bit flakey in places - the theme I'm using at the moment doesn't theme dialogue boxes correctly so they look all squashed. It's not the first time I've experienced that either - perhaps just lazy theme makers.

    Firefox has recently introduced the concept of Personas - simple themes that plonk themselves on top of the default to give your browser a bit of a facelift. Easy to install and no restart needed (except for the installation of the original extension). Except... to use them, you need to be using the default theme, which as I said before, I'm not a fan of. Therefore, any persona looks horrible to me because it's on top of the icky default theme. I don't mind so much on the Mac which has a different default theme - in fact, I'm using Personas on my Mac copy of FF - but on Windows and Linux I don't think they really work with the default theme. Sorry Firefox. Chrome's themes are more like the Personas - they don't change much except add a background here and there and maybe change some colours, but some of them are really well made and I found a theme I fell in love with immediately. It really makes me want to use Chrome more since I really do like it. Not seeing anything similar for Firefox and even if I did, I don't think it would work too well since it seems centred on the way Chrome is actually laid out.

  4. Little things
    There are little things that annoy me about Firefox. The most annoying is when it randomly decides it won't load a page, even if I was just on it a moment ago. I have to go and empty the cache before it'll load again. Sometimes I just give up and open Chrome to view the page rather than fiddling about with caches :P I even tried reinstalling Firefox and removing my profile data to see if that helped - it didn't.

    Restarting to install extensions and themes really annoys me too. I know why I have to (it's the way FF works) but Chrome manages its extensions just fine without a restart and I can install a bunch of them and see how they work without having to wait ages (see point 1 above) for my browser to restart.

    There are other little niggles about Firefox that annoy me too - sometimes your bookmarks will all disappear; it'll crash and won't let you reopen it, claiming it's still running; it does weird stuff with saved usernames/passwords, capitalising parts it shouldn't... There's more, but if I can't think of them right now then they can't be that important.

Having said that though, there is one BIG reason why I will not be switching to Chrome, despite all the above - extensions. I use around 30 extensions at the moment and I find every one of them useful. Some of them are silly things like showing me the weather forecast or generating Lipsum, but others I could not live without (well, slight exaggeration. Maybe). Adblock Plus, NoScript, Gmail Notifier and HTML Validator are just 4 of the extensions I use on a daily basis and which Chrome hasn't managed yet. Yes, it does have an Adblock extension and some sort of port of the others, but they just aren't as good. The fact that Chrome has no status bar means most of the extensions that have icons are bunched up into the toolbar, making my address bar smaller. I installed a few Chrome extensions and they all went into my toolbar - all 6 of them - and it makes it look cluttered and busy. In Firefox, most of the extensions sit nicely in the corner of the status bar which makes them non-intrusive and I can look at them quickly if I want to see their status or change an option.

There is a lot of community support for Chrome, but it isn't at all what Firefox has. Perhaps because Firefox has been around for about 6 years longer than Chrome - in 6 years we might have the same, if not more, community support for Chrome than Firefox, but it isn't the case now. You can Google anything to do with Firefox and find a way to do it - if you can't tweak about:config or find an extension for it, I'd be very surprised.

While I would love to use Chrome if it had the extensions I love from Firefox, I doubt they will implement a similar engine. Chrome is not Firefox and by making these extensions work with Chrome, will they not just be producing a clone (or 'lite' version) of Firefox? I would have thought that Google would want Chrome to be its own browser and not just a faster version of something already out there. Also, Google is unlikely to change its support for an Adblock or NoScript plugin since its own ads would be blocked by such things... Not a good idea for them.

There is also some rumour that Google collect everything you do on Chrome and use it to target ads at you or something (not read up on the details, I must admit). Not keen on that but it wouldn't deter me from switching if the extensions were better.

In short, I like Chrome... but I won't be switching. I'm happy to stay with my slow and bloated Firefox that has the extensions I know and love. Maybe I'll change my mind at some point, but not yet.

I built a computer!

Last week, I built my very first computer as a present for the boyfriend. He needed an upgrade for his gaming machine and we found that his 2006 model just couldn't be upgraded any further and the latest games wouldn't run... So, we would refit it. New motherboard, new processor, new graphics card.

He wanted a top-of-the-range machine so that it wouldn't need upgrading for a while yet, so we selected the almost-best-but-not-quite (not made of money here :P ) parts.

We went with the following:

When it arrived, we found that ah - previous computer case was a Micro ATX form and the motherboard we purchased was ATX. The graphics card required at least 400W of power and the current PSU would only supply 115W. Hmmm. Oh well, blame my n00biness. :P Out we went again, and picked out the following extra parts:

So! Now we build (pictures described by text underneath them)...

Toys!
Parts!

Working area
The working area - ooh, shiny

In goes the motherboard
In goes the motherboard

It's in!
Processor

Almost there
Almost there... Most of the bits in now!

Aaaand... Then I forgot to take more pictures, so here's the finished product:

The finished product

The front bit opens up to reveal the optical drive etc. Yes, it lights up (not my idea...), but it worked first time, the drivers and everything installed without a problem, and everything is great :D We took the 200GB hard drive and 8-in-1 card reader out of the old computer as they were still pretty good, then reformatted the lot and put Windows 7 RC 64-bit edition on there (it previously had XP Media Center which would only see 2GB of RAM :\ ) and lo and behold... Latest games run fine, not found a single problem with it yet. We'll definitely be getting the full version of Windows 7 when it comes out as the boyfriend hates Vista and needs DirectX 10 for his games (which is only available in Vista and 7)... So, there we have it. He can pay for that though :P

I was surprised to find that it worked, to be honest... I'd never built a computer from scratch and while I did have some guidance at first, I was apparently doing so well I didn't need it XD

More pics can be seen on my Flickr account :)

← Older Entries