Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from January, 2010

One Password to rule them all

I am notoriously bad at memorizing. If not, I might have gone to medical school and chosen a more lucrative career than Engineering... But as the number of online services I uses increases, so does the number of account username and password combinations. I try to standardize as much as I can on the same usernames(s) but some sites make this really hard by requiring strange and unusual conventions (name must be at least 8 characters long and include at least special character and number??? Whose name looks like that?) or by dictating that the username be whatever 10 digit number their database uses as the unique key for the account record. Same drama for the passwords, except that using a standard password everywhere has the added disadvantage that once the password is compromised, the attacker would have access to all my various online service accounts - if sHe could guess those bloody convoluted usernames... ;-) Things got particularly bad for accounts, which I use very rarely and w

G1 to Nexus One: a review

By any measure, the new Nexus One is a very nice phone: large brilliant display, high-performance CPU core, high-res digital camera, solid low-profile body. With this kind of hardware spec, the Nexus One establishes itself as the current flagship among Android phones. To my liking, it does not have a physical keyboard, which makes for a much more slim and solid feeling body than the G1 for example. In that sense the Nexus One is what I had hoped for in my original review of the early G1 . In the about 1.5 years since the G1 came out, Android has come a long way. 3 major releases of the platform have added important missing features like an on-screen soft-keyboard and helped harden the platform based on experience in the field. At the same time, developers have contributed a wide range of expected and unexpected applications, and learned how to write them so that they don't drain the battery within minutes. There are now half a dozen or so Android phones on the market and many more

Nexus One: the good, the bad and the ugly

So it doesn't cure cancer, solve world hunger or even global climate change - but it's still a pretty nice phone! At first glance, the large, crisp high-res display get's all the Uhs and Ahs, including how snappy the UI responds thanks to the 1Ghz Snapdragon chipset. With its speed and responsiveness, the phone is a pleasure to use! The form-factor is thin, sleek with ergonomically rounded corners and lies well in the palm of ones hand. The teflon coated plastic case gives it a nice high-end feeling texture. The biggest improvement in software features for my use case is the ability to sync multiple accounts for the contacts and the gmail app - now I can get notifications for email arriving on any of my gmail accounts. My only serious gripe so far is with the placement of the on/off button, which I need to press each time before and after using the phone. Its location at the top edge, is very un-ergonomic for single handed use - i.e. fishing the phone out of the pocket with