IPv4 has but months till exhaustion. After that, no internet access for you!
ISPs have some potential to aggregate RFC1918 reserved addresses behind carrier-grade NAT but beyond that, perhaps this is the real Y2K coming at yer.
What we’re not seeing is lots of residential grade networking equipment being released as IPv6 ready.
So much to do, so little time. Discovered Spree “Open Source E-Commerce for Ruby on Rails” http://spreecommerce.com/
Super-smart phones based on Google’s Android operating system have been relatively slow to take off since the first one appeared a year ago. Despite Google’s iconic brand, they have yet to develop the strong bond with U.S. consumers achieved by the Research in Motion BlackBerry or the Apple iPhone. And, after a year, Android has less than 10% of the 85,000 apps the iPhone now offers.
Sprint
Sprint’s HTC Hero
Mossberg’s Mailbox
But Android is beginning to blossom in the market for this class of device, which is really a hand-held computer that performs many laptop-like functions.
In August, T-Mobile began offering a new $200 myTouch Android phone. Motorola will shortly launch a new $200 Android model called the CLIQ. And, on Oct. 11, Sprint will start selling perhaps the most unusual Android phone so far, the $180 HTC Hero. I’ve been testing the Hero, a touch-screen phone without a physical keyboard that has some important distinctions from earlier Android models. In general, I like the Hero and can recommend it to Sprint customers, or others looking for something powerful, but different.
HTC, a veteran Taiwan-based maker of phones, has altered Android more than anyone else so far. It has been gradually developing its own signature software layer that sits atop phone operating systems. With the Hero, it has applied this software for the first time to an Android phone, and that’s what sets the Hero apart from its Android brethren. The latest, beefed-up, version of this HTC software is called “Sense.”
Sense includes handsome, large widgets with extra features that go beyond the vanilla Android experience supplied to everyone by Google. So the Hero looks and behaves somewhat differently. For instance, a contact page in the address book application consolidates that contact’s Facebook and Flickr accounts. The music player and photo album look better, and the Hero with Sense can use Microsoft’s Exchange service to synchronize mail, calendars and contacts.
Sense also offers something called Scenes—entire collections of sets of screens and apps, either canned or customized, that can change the phone software’s look and feel. With just a couple of clicks, you could switch between a work-oriented “scene,” that prominently features apps such as a stock tracker and your work email, and an entertainment-oriented scene filled with the music player, photo album and other apps.
As with Sprint’s Palm Pre, the Hero’s price is a bit deceptive. To get the phone for $180, you must remember to mail in a rebate form worth $100. At purchase, you have to put up $280. On the other hand, Sprint’s monthly fees can be much cheaper than those for other carriers. You’ll have to pay at least $70 a month to use the Hero, the same minimum fee that AT&T charges iPhone owners. But Sprint’s fee, unlike AT&T’s, includes unlimited text messaging and unlimited free calls to any mobile number on any network.
Sprint’s HTC Hero, A Worthy Smart Phone Competitor
7:07
WSJ’s Walt Mossberg reviews Sprint’s HTC Hero, the latest super smart phone based on Google’s Android mobile operating system. He says the HTC Hero is a good product and a good alternative to rivals — the BlackBerry, iPhone and Palm.
The Hero’s hardware isn’t especially beautiful. It’s a dull grey, noticeably thicker than the iPhone, with a smaller screen and six buttons plus a trackball, which adds another navigation option to the touch screen. It’s the same length as an iPhone, but is a bit narrower and lighter. It comes with just two gigabytes of memory, compared with eight gigabytes on the $99 iPhone and 16 gigabytes on Apple’s $199 model, though the Hero’s memory, unlike the iPhone’s, is expandable via a hard-to-reach slot under its removable back cover.
One big drawback is battery life. Sprint is only claiming up to four hours of talk time for the Hero, versus five hours for the Pre and iPhone. But, unlike the iPhone’s, the Hero’s battery is removable. Another drawback: I sometimes found the touch screen unresponsive, requiring multiple pokes at an icon.
On the plus side, the Hero has a much higher resolution camera than the iPhone’s or Pre’s—five megapixels versus three megapixels.
It also functions as a video camera, and in my tests, both still photos and videos I took looked very good. Phone calls, even on speaker phone, were clear and strong, and the phone has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in addition to Sprint’s high-speed network, which in my view is better than its reputation. Web browsing was adequate.
HTC’s Sense gives the Hero seven screens on which to place apps, versus Android’s standard three screens.
And, in addition to the standard Android apps and the 8,000 downloadable apps from Android’s Market app store, there are a variety of large, beautiful HTC “widgets” you can use. The downside of these is that they can occupy an entire screen.
The most impressive widget is called People. It’s an address book in which each contact’s page features a scrolling bar at the bottom with icons that allow you to see that person’s most recent Facebook status, photos from Facebook and Flickr, plus emails and text messages she’s sent to you and recent calls between you. This is somewhat similar to Palm’s Synergy feature, which is also based around people.
Overall, I found the HTC Hero to be the best Android phone I’ve tested, and a worthy competitor to the iPhone, the BlackBerry and the Pre.
—Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.
C’mon Android!
Concept seems like something that could be used in an app to add smarts to twitter.
Woah! “If the CRTC’s decision is not overturned, approximately 30 ISPs will likely be forced out of business. Competition in the ADSL market will be totally eliminated, and Canadians will have only two choices for wired Internet access: the local Cableco or the local Telco.”
Slashdot Your Rights Online Story | Canadian ISP’s Fight Back, Again: “”
Sun tried to open-source and commercialize Star Office as Open Office in it’s battle to compete with Microsoft. That seems naive a decade later and their open-sourcing of Java came too late.
RedHat’s model of value-adding open-source to the enterprise market has been a success that led many other to follow but it’s one of many with many valid models hopefully yet to be explored.
imo IBM has preceeded the efforts of Google in open-sourcing the code that drives the infrastructure. This engenders my goodwill with IBM in the wake of Sun being gobbled up by goodwill-challenged Oracle.
Ditto then Google /dry and I especially look forward to participating in the use and distribution of rebuilds of Android and Chrome sans privacy-related code /dry.
India wants to ban VoIP because Caller Line Identification (CLI) data may not be available. The idea that CLI addresses the need to identify the caller is nonsense because CLI can easily be spoofed.
And for VoIP, it can just be tunneled. The terrorists will want to talk peer-to-peer and not terminate or originate calls via a PSTS-gated VoIP provider and they have ample options for how to do this.
Given the ease with which peers can conduct a private conversation on an IP network, the Indian authorities would probably do better to focus on leveraging what they can with the law as it applies to the existing PSTN.
There’s lively debate going on about RSSCloud versus PubSubHubbub
URL shorteners are the rage and I believe there are hundreds. Great then to tap into an open-source solution and quickly roll-your-own, allaying privacy concerns at the same time.
Further to the previous entry. It works!
Richard Fisher has written an Adobe Air app that demonstrates Dave Winer’s RSS cloud.
Being on WordPress, this blog entry should thus appear in Helios in the next couple of minutes – inline with my Twitter stream.
test test test
I guess this is important. I’m a big fan of pay-as-you-go which I’d call ‘pre-pay’. It’s good for the consumer, good for startups and bad for Fat Telcos. What more could you want.
Very interesting to see Huawei in this space.
T-Mobile introduces first pay-as-you-go Android smartphone, dubbed Pulse: “”
(Via TechChump.)
This is why you use your friendly local VoIP provider and/or long-distance SIP-terminating VoIP provider. Otherwise, you’re a pawn.
Skype Doubles Connection Fees For Some International Calls
(Via Wired.)
Om Malik observes that WiFi remains omniscient (pun?) but he is in San Francisco, home of Meraki and their freenet.
I’m in Bangkok and writing this on a finally-stable access platform based around ‘Spider Wifi’ which isn’t great, is hard to procure and needs a bit of constant attention but nevertheless at AUS100 for the year with only a 3 hourly disconnect to content with – is pretty convenient.
It only works the way it does thanks to a Linksys WRT54GL with OpenWRT installed. My Meraki’s are lying around awaiting a similar hack.
‘Hack’ also brings to mind another issue with Wifi which is the inability to control competition for the spectrum and this suggests to me that WiFi will always equal ‘hack’ and ‘control’, being the defining attribure of a telco, suggests that the telcos aren’t going to make any significant switch to Wifi at any time.
With recent comments bemoaning the lack of momentum with things Android, Om’s comments about Apple’s rising dominance as a WiFi consumer device suggests to me the use of an Android device as a smartphone/mesh-repeater which would be ideal in the developing world with it’s phone-centric internet access model.
(Via Om’s Writings.)
Facebook is my least favourite social site. I find it messy, annoying and Microsoftish. I don’t discount the possibility of it being a CIA ploy. It’s a walled-garden and antithetical to the very concept of a ‘world wide web’. I never accept requests from Facebook applications and no, that’s not my real birthday.
But I love Friendfeed, I guess because it does one really obvious thing really well and that is provide a location where all my content from across the wide web of niche socialnetworking sites can be aggregated.
Now this little piece of niceness has been consumed by the Facebook juggernaut and the social web just got smaller by one.
Facebook’s Purchase Is Bid to Own Social Media – The Washington Post
I find the guys from Twitter to be more enlightened. Twitter is also unique, simple in concept and paradigm-shifting.
See also: John Naughton: Battle lines are drawn for the war of web search dominance | Media | The Observer
P2P Not to Blame for Content Industry Failures Says EU: “only around 20% of online users would pay for online content if all the other free options suddenly disappeared”
Macquarie Telecom CEO declares Telcos will need to embrace customer service to be competitive on the NBN.
(Via Australian IT.)
There’s something enlightening about a wind-powered datacenter. The forces of nature meet with human-powered knowledge in the New Utility. Hmmm.
Meet Google, Your Phone CompanyThe Google Voice app essentially reduces the cell phone carrier to a dumb pipe.
(Via Om’s Writings.)
The funny thing about this (not that there’s anything funny for the site moderator) is that I went to view the site from my connection on True Internet in Thailand and got
Site blocked. http://www.zgeek.com is not allowed on this network.
This site was categorized as:
Lingerie/bikini
(blocking service provided by openDNS – I’m actually starting to get really sick of openDNS)
Don’t laugh too soon – it’s coming to you next. Defend the right to freedom of speech or.. forever hold your peace.
Another defamation suit: ZGeek owner sued for alleged defamatory forum comments
The plaintiffs are apparently seeking $42 Million in consequential damages, claiming that they lost a film deal as a result of criticism of the conspiracy theory in the discussion fora.
(Via EFA.)
