While trying to record the ESPN WSOP Europe on my Time Warner Motorola cable box, I got the list below.

Software bug in TW cable box

As you can see, the entire page is the same show at 7pm repeated. What you can’t see is there are multiple pages of the same entry, over and over again. There is no way to delete it or change it. It’s just stuck in there and preventing anything else from being recorded during that time.

Hey. Time for a firmware upgrade guys.

Long time readers of this blog knows I canceled my Vonage to switch over to Ooma for free VOIP, saving me tons of money. But at the end, Vonage managed to give me a swift kick in my crotch with their $40 cancellation fee. End of story, right?

Maybe not. Apparently, some money hungry lawyers sued Vonage in a class action lawsuit and won a bunch of money for us ex-Vonage folk. I signed up for it to get my money back from them but I’m not really sure why they’re not allowed to have a cancellation free when just about every wireless phone company lives off of this fee.

Vonage class action lawsuit

Who knows. Maybe this is just a scam to get my name and address. I’ll believe it when I get my check in the mail and it clears.

Well it happened. I dropped my poor Palm Pre and it became intermittent. As you may know, I’m not happy with the on-screen keyboard on my iPhone, so I decided to go ahead and try an Android phone from Sprint and got the Samsung Epic 4G.

Cost:
The Epic from Sprint, with an upgrade or 2 year contract, will run you $500, minus $200 instant rebate, minus another $100 mail in rebate, which equals $200. That’s the same price as the iPhone 4 upgrade or 2 year contract from AT&T.

Sprint requires you to upgrade your account with a cost of $10 per month which is required regardless of if you want 4G or not. If you want to use the hot spot feature, which allows you to use your phone to connect your laptop to the 4G network, that will cost another $30 on top. The hot spot feature is not required so the minimum upgrade cost to your account is $10 per month.

Screen size comparison - Epic (left), iPhone 4 (right)

Hardware:
As you can see above, the Epic 4G is about the same size as the iPhone 4 but the screen on the Epic is larger. The Super AMOLED display is large, bright and stands out as soon as you see this unit and is one of it’s big features. Unfortunately, this bright screen eats up a lot of battery power. More on that later.

Below, you can see that the Epic is thicker because of the slide out keyboard. It’s not so thick that you can’t put it in your coat pocket but you probably won’t want to put it in your back pants pocket.

The Epic feels lighter even though the iPhone is 4.8 ounces and the Epic is 5.4 ounces. Maybe the plastic fools you into thinking it’s lighter. I like the curves on the Epic in my hand, which feels more like the old iPhone 3G. Unlike the iPhone 4, which is hard to pick up from a flat surface, the Epic is easy to pick up.

Thickness comparison - Epic (left), iPhone 4 (right)

The Epic has both a front and back facing camera with the primary being a 5MP (same as the iPhone 4) with a very bright white LED flash below the lens (see below). You can take pictures using the touch screen or by using the dedicated shutter button on the side. By pressing this button, the “camera” app automatically starts up. I think this is a great feature and makes the unit feel like a camera. You can also record HD video at 720p @ 30fps. More on the camera in the next installment of the review.

Epic Back - 5MP camera with LED flash

While we’re looking at the back of this unit, the back has some type of soft touch backing to keep it from sliding around when you put it on a slick surface. I like this feature because when I put my iPhone 4 on my laptop, it slides off and falls to the floor, whereas this backing keeps the Epic in place.

Unlike the iPhone, the USB jack is at the top and the power button is on the right. I like the power being on top on the iPhone better because when I push the volume on the left, sometimes I will accidentally press the power on the right. I thought I would eventually get used to it but after using the Epic for a few months, I’m still not happy with the power button location.

The Epic also has a tiny red LED in the upper right front, next to the Sprint logo. This LED will flash when you’ve missed a call or text message. This is a feature on the Palm Pre that I missed a lot on the iPhone. The LED is a little small to notice from far away, but it’s better than having to turn on your iPhone every time you need to check to see if you missed a message.

The USB jack at the top seemed very odd at first but I eventually got used to it. If you have your Epic connected to your computer located further than your phone, the cable goes straight back without having to go from the bottom, then up to the computer. If you get the docking station for the Epic, all that becomes mute. There will be a separate review on the docking station.

Epic power button on upper right

The speaker is on the back (at an angle) at the bottom and sometimes can become muffled if you have your phone on a soft surface like your couch. The iPhone’s speaker is located on the bottom (not the back) so it points towards the user, and avoids this situation.

Below the screen, there is a Android function area with 4 touch buttons: Menu, Home, Back and Search. Apparently, Google allows each manufacturer to order these buttons anyway they want so it’s different on many Android devices. Maybe good for the manufacturer if you want to be different, but no so much for the user switching from one to another.

Since you cannot self configure the location of these function buttons, I would have preferred them to be real buttons. However, I did eventually get used to the touch buttons and you can configure it to stay lit in the setup so that it doesn’t go dark too fast.

Slide out keyboard

Of course, the big feature for me with the Epic is the slide-out keyboard. Because it’s a landscape keyboard, it’s luxuriously large, and even includes the top 5th row with numbers. A lot of other keyboards do not include that top row and it’s really nice not to have to press any function keys to get the numbers. There are also dedicated buttons for the 4 main functions (menu, back, home and search). However, the click distance feels a little shallow and sometimes I cannot tell if I’ve pressed the key or not.

Also, although the slide-out keyboard feels okay when it’s open, when it’s closed, feels a little loosey goosey and cheap. I like my gadgets to feel tight and precise, but I’m being picky here.

The actual hardware specs for the Epic is an impressive 1GHz Cortex A8 Hummingbird, so it is very snappy and never feels sluggish like my old Palm Pre. Like the iPhone and Palm Pre, there is no HDMI output, but it does come with a 16G SD card standard out of the box.  So unlike the iPhone, if 16G is not enough, you can always buy more space.

Disconnected from network

For some strange reason, something weird happened to my Epic after about a week and I was not able to connect to the Sprint network. After a quick call to customer support, they were able to quickly remedy the situation. So far, this has not happened again.

As for battery life, out of the box without tweaking the software, I got less than a full day (8 hours) with moderate use. With very light use (no calls, some texting, browsing), I can get through an 8 hour shift. The battery that comes with the unit is 1500 mAh but you can get one that is 1600 mAh from Seidio for $50. They also have one that’s 3300 mAh but it comes with a fatter back cover and makes your phone bigger.

In the Android 2.1 version which came with the Epic, there’s some problems when the battery level becomes extremely low. Sometimes it will become confused and also will not let you launch the camera app. It took me a while to figure out what was going on and at first, I thought it was a hardware problem. I’ve read that this will be fixed in the 2.2 Froyo version which should be coming out this week.

Just by lowering the brightness of your display, you can get a lot more juice from you battery. You can also turn off 4G and bluetooth to save a little power also. This is easy to do on the Epic.You can swipe the very top of the screen downward and you will get a selection of all the network related buttons to turn off or on.  There are other tricks you can do in software which will be in a future article.

I didn’t do a scientific comparison but the battery on the iPhone 4 seems to last longer with the same amount of use. But you can swap out the dead battery on the Epic if you have spare batteries like I do. This can save your life in emergencies.

Seidio battery

Sprint 4G:
Although I didn’t get this phone for the 4G, that’s one of it’s big features so I checked it out in detail.

During my testing, I found the 4G coverage to be very spotty at best. Check with Sprint because 4G is not available everywhere yet. Sometimes, I could not even get 4G in many parts of Los Angeles. What’ strange is, when the 4G is slow, it still uses it even if the speed is slower than the 3G. So if you turn off 4G, it will switch down to 3G and you will get faster service. Not very smart.

In my testing, I found using 4G on the Epic itself to be anywhere from 3.27 Mbps to 6.13 Mbps (downtown Los Angeles) depending on location. However, sometimes it can be as slow as 0.07 Mbps when there’s something wrong with the connection.

Using the hotspot app, I measured the 4G speed on my laptop connected via my Epic with the following results.

Regular DSL Wifi: 2.59 Mbps
4G hotspot: 2.60 Mbps

So basically, the 4G is just slightly faster than the AT&T DSL in downtown Los Angeles. I also did the same test while I was in Honolulu with the following results.

DSL Wifi: 2.07 Mbps
3G hotspot: 0.86 Mbps
4G hotspot: 0.48 Mbps

As you can see, the 4G was actually slower than the 3G hotspot, and both were slower than the WiFi in the room.

According to Sprint, the new Android 2.2 Froyo should fix some problems with the hotspot app, which I’m guessing will automatically switch over to 3G if the 4G connection is bad. This new version should be out shortly.

So I was not very impressed with the 4G service I’m getting on Sprint in Los Angeles. I’m not doing anything that requires a lot of speed but for people that want to use the hotspot with multiple laptops, you’d better find a really good spot with perfect 4G connection or you won’t even be able to browse any websites.

Conclusion:
Compared to the Palm Pre, it’s big but not compared to the iPhone 4. There are some minor problems with button locations on the Epic but nothing that’s a deal killer. The battery life seems to be shorter than my iPhone 4 but I’ve figured out ways to get around it. The Epic is as snappy as the iPhone 4 and makes running apps fun.

The screen in gorgeous and the slide-out keyboard eliminates my complaints about the on-screen keyboard. Actually, I’ve been using the Swype on-screen keyboard more than the physical keyboard. More on this in my next installment.

The 4G is a bust but the iPhone 4 doesn’t even have it.

All in all, I’m happy with my Epic and am using it instead of my Palm Pre and iPhone 4.

Next Time:
Epic camera vs. iPhone camera.

Androidify.com

If you ever wanted to look like the Android logo, but dressed up like you, try this Android app from Androidify.com.

In case you haven’t heard yet, you can now take credit cards for payments via your iPhone or Android phone. All you have to do is open a free account at Square Up and they will send you a credit card reader like the one shown below. It plugs into the headphone jack on top of the iPhone or Andriod device.

Card reader goes into headset jack

When the app is launched, it will ask for the dollar amount that you enter using the screen keyboard provided. Next, you swipe the card through the reader. After that, you will see a screen like the one below where the purchaser will be able to sign his/her name using their finger.

Customer signs on screen

Once that is done, you will be presented with a screen that asks the purchaser if they want a receipt via email as shown below.

Get a receipt via email

That’s it. Very simple. Now anybody with an iPhone or Android phone can accept credit cards. The money under $1,000 goes right into your checking account. If you have more than $1,000 it takes longer or you can contact Square Up to arrange something with them.

As for cost, that’s the beauty of this service because there’s no monthly fee. If you only use this once every other month, there’s no cost when you aren’t using it. The fine print is that for each transaction, they charge 2.75% + 15 cents if you swipe the card and 3.5% plus 15 cents if you key enter the information (without swiping the card).

For people that don’t want to open a corporate account with their bank and pay a monthly fee, this is a perfect solution. Next time your friend can’t pay you his half of lunch because he has no cash, just whip out your iPhone, plug in the credit card reader and get paid.

After getting a new black couch, I realized that every little piece of lint, hair, dandruff, and Cheetos dust shows up like DNA under black light. During Black Friday, I decided to look around and found a good deal on Best Buy online for a Dyson DC31 Animal hair “hand-held” (quotes intended) vacuum cleaner.

Dyson DC31

This version is normally $270 but during Black Friday, it was about $220 with tax. I have the regular full sized Dyson vacuum cleaner and I really like it’s performance so I decided to get this blind, without looking at it at the store first.

When I took it out of the box, I was a little surprised at the size. I was expecting something a little closer to the old hand-held vacuum I used to have from Black & Decker, or even the free one from Oreck with a cord. To get an idea of how big this is, the picture above shows the device and the height is over a foot and weighs 3.3 pounds. So if you’re weak, this vacuum is not for you. It’s like a big gun with a red trigger.

The two features that I wanted for a handheld vacuum were bagless and cordless (with rechargeable battery), which this unit has.

You can see the brush that rotates in the head in a close-up view below.

Close-up of brush

This unit is made for people with pets so it’s really strong and will pick up anything and everything. There’s no doubt about the strength of this unit and because of the bagless design, it’s easy to clean with nothing to replace. The lever for dumping the dirt is shown below in close-up. This level causes the bottom of the collector area to open like a door and allows you to dump the dirt and dust. Sometimes the crap inside gets stuck and it can be a little bit of work to get it all out.

Release lever for the dirt

The only consideration for this unit is the size and weight. I would strongly recommend that you go to the brick and mortar store and pick it up yourself to determine if it’s too big for you or not. It might be too heavy for older people so probably don’t buy this for your grandmother. For younger folk, it’s a good workout for your arm and I recommend it over anything else I’ve seen so far.

After trying out Redbox, I decided to try Netflix on the PS3, which streams movies directly to your HDTV for only $7.99 (streaming only with no DVDs by mail). Using the PS3 to sign up turned out to be a little harder than I expected. First, I got the error below:

Not a good start

Restarting didn’t fix anything so I deleted Netflix, and re-installed it with the same results. The only way I was able to fix it was to go to the Netflix website from my computer and sign-up, then delete and re-install the app on the PS3 and try again. I did finally manage to get things working but if a techno geek like me had some problems, I hate to see what would happen when the typical grandma tries this. I guess she wouldn’t have a PS3 anyway.

Once I got everything setup, I noticed that a lot of the movies available on DVD (via snail mail) are not available for streaming. But right now, they have a one month free trial period so it’s a good time to try it out.

My main concern was the quality of the stream. To my surprise, the video starts to stream in a few seconds and although not full HD quality, it is very good. The quality is about as good as what I got on my Tivo via Amazon Unbox, except that version had to download the entire movie first before viewing. My HDTV says it’s in 1080p mode but I think that’s the PS3 upgrading the video to that resolution.

When the video first starts, there’s a slight resolution deterioration, but after a few seconds, the resolution will improve to an acceptable level. Once in a while, there’s some color artifacts, especially when the scene is very dark, but for the most part, movies look fine. If you are in love with your Blu-ray high resolution movies on your 70″ screen, you might have a problem. Otherwise, you’re good.

The biggest problem is the lack of brand new movies. But they do have a long list of older movies, including a lot of classics that you may have missed. There’s plenty of content to check out, especially if you’re trying to do it in the one month free trial period.

Also, don’t forget you can still stream movies to your computer at home or at work, as well as to your iPhone.

When the Kinect was shown at E3 last year, I thought it was a stupid ripoff of the Wii. Now, I take back everything bad I said about it. If you’re a perv, looking to grope without getting arrested, this hack is for you.

As you may have read, I cannot get used to the on-screen keyboard on the iPhone 4. In a last ditch effort to use the iPhone, I decided to try an external physical keyboard called iPazzPort from a website China for $40.

As you can see below, this is a credit card sized bluetooth keyboard that recharges via the USB port. The keyboard is about the same thickness as the iPhone 4, but does not lay flat like the new iPhone which makes it hard to type when placed on a flat surface.

iPazzPort charging via USB

Pairing with the iPhone was a snap as shown below. I just followed the instructions and the keyboard was connected to the iPhone. This keyboard will also work with other devices like the PS3 and laptops, but I did not test that out.

Keyboard pairing with iPhone

This keyboard also has backlighting so you can use it in dark environments as shown below. One of my biggest gripes with this keyboard is the placement of the backspace key which is located in the lower right corner instead of the normal upper right. The backspace is also small, and is a regular sized key, instead of the normal double sized key.

iPazzPort with iPhone 4

The feel of the keyboard is a little mushy and not crisp and hard to determine if you have actually typed a character. Another gripe I have is the keyboard does not seem to have any debouncing of any kind and I kept getting repeating characters very often. In fact, sometimes I would get more than one repeating character when typing just one letter.

It’s bad enough that I have to carry this extra piece of hardware with my iPhone, but the keyboard doesn’t feel good, has debouncing problems, and a strange layout, makes this keyboard a big pass. What a big waste of time and money.

Update:
One other problem is that you cannot use it while walking or standing because you have to hold your iPhone in one hand and it’s very hard to use this keyboard with  one hand.

Last time, I compared the iPhone 4 and Palm Pre’s hardware and the iPhone 4 came out on top. However, the Palm Pre is older. So perhaps, the comparison isn’t completely fair.

This time, we’ll compare Palm’s WebOS vs. iPhone’s iOS mobile operating systems. The iPhone’s operating system came out several years before WebOS, but it has been updated recently so it will be an interesting match.

The biggest difference is multi-tasking. WebOS came out of the box with true multi-tasking. You can open multiple apps simultaneously, just like on your computer. On WebOS, each app is represented with “cards” like a deck of cards. Below, you can see multiple apps open and can be scrolled sideways, and touched to maximize. Pushing the “home” button will minimize the app.

Palm Pre - Real multitasking

Below, you see the new version of Apple’s iOS, which pretends to have multi-tasking, but it’s more like the ability to “freeze” an app, and return to it later. The app does not run in the background,  like on a true multi-tasking operating systems, with the exception of the iPod and phone apps. By double clicking the “home” button, you get the last 4 apps that were running shown at the bottom of the screen (see below). You can scroll to see even older apps that were running but there seems to be a limit on how far back you can go without the app resetting to it’s initial start-up condition.

iPhone iOS - Fake multitasking

There are several problems with this fake multi-taksing method on the iOS. For one, any application that has not been re-written to work with the new version of iOS will not go into this “freeze” mode and will simply restart when you try to return to the app.

Another more serious problem is that the “freeze” method doesn’t always work even with apps that have been modified. A typical problem I had was when I was running an app that required me to fill a form to register to use. To do so, I had to run another app to recall a phone number or account number, but when I would return back to the “frozen” app, it was no longer at the form and would revert back to the previous page. I assume this is because switching apps caused the first app to think that I did not want to register.

Going back and forth between apps is a very common thing to do and this “fake” multi-tasking on iOS barely works for simple apps like the browser or other apps that have static pages when switching apps.

Another big difference between the 2 operating systems is how events are handled. On WebOS, when an event occurs, an alert appears at the bottom of the screen. Below is an example of how a text message is shown as an alert.

Palm Pre - Text message alert

Notice that the app image (the browser) shrinks slightly vertically, so that the alert can be seen at the same time as the app. This is because the app continues operating and the alert will shrink to a smaller size if ignored. But the user can continue working with the app.

However, on the iOS, alerts are basically pop-up dialog boxes. Below is an example of a text message that causes the pop-up to appear.

iPhone 4 - Text message pop-up

It’s bad enough that the pop-up appears, like one of those SPAM pop-ups on your computer, but it requires the user to close the dialog box, or switch to the app that is causing the pop-up to appear. This action is very disruptive and not intuitive at all. One of the worst situations for this is during an interactive game. Right in the middle of the game, you’ll get a pop-up, stopping the game, then after returning from the alert and back to the game, it often does not continue properly. For a gadget freak that’s used to using multi-tasking on computers, this solution is simply unacceptable.

Next, the on-screen keyboard of the iPhone vs. the physical keyboard on the Palm Pre will be evaluated.

Palm Pre (left), iPhone 4 (right)

As you can see from the picture above, the area of the screen available for text message on the Palm Pre (left, shown in yellow) is much larger than on the iPhone (shown in red), because there is no on-screen keyboard. If you turn the iPhone to landscape mode to get a larger keyboard, you basically can see one line of text. It’s almost unusable in that mode.

Regarding the on-screen keyboard, everyone that has an iPhone told me that I would eventually get used to using it, but I was never able to get to the same speed as using the physical keyboard on the Palm Pre. To top it off, the auto-correction feature often causes the words to be changed and if you don’t notice it, it can lead to some very embarrassing messages. Be careful.

The undisputed fact is the iPhone app store has about 250,000, whereas the Palm app store has about 4,000. Of course, there are a lot of fart apps, and the like, that are usually not anything that anybody would pay for. The only app that is FREE on the Palm but costs $1.99 on the iPhone is the LA Times app. There are no essential apps on the Palm that is not available on the iPhone as far as I can tell.

LA Times iPhone app for $1.99

Conversely, there are tons of free apps that are very useful on the iPhone, like Paypal, Qik, Chase Bank, Square Up, Google Earth, redbox, and Photoshop Express, that are not available on the Palm platform, for free or even for pay. This is where Apple kicks Palm’s ass badly. How can Palm pretend to be a real competing platform when they can’t even get Paypal or redbox to write apps for them?

The WebOS multi-tasking is clearly the winner. I personally like the physical keyboard over the screen keyboard that takes up 3/4 of the screen. But if you must have access to a specific app, but it’s not available on the Palm, everything else becomes completely irrelevant. So this comes down to which apps you need. If the apps you need are available on the Palm, then for you, Palm wins. If not, Apple wins.

Lastly, the iPhone is currently only available on the AT&T network. The Palm Pre is available on Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon. I have used all 3 of those networks and Verizon has the best coverage in Los Angeles. Spring has 4G in some areas but not in Los Angeles. AT&T’s network is the worst of the 3. While in Vegas, I used both phones and AT&T was always worse than Sprint and at the MGM, I got absolutely no reception on AT&T while I got perfect reception on Sprint.

Moreover, Sprint gives away the turn-by-turn Navigation at no charge. On AT&T, the exact same app will cost you $10 per month. Not a big deal for most people but I hate throwing away $120 per year for no reason.

This entire exercise has turned into a nightmare for me. There are certain apps on the iPhone that I really like, but I hate the on-screen keyboard, and the AT&T reception. Currently, I carry both phones which is really not a good solution. If the iPhone was available on another network, at least I would feel safer just carrying the iPhone. But the reception on AT&T is so bad that I just don’t trust it.

So who wins this contest?  I’m not sure. All I know is that I lost because I have to carry 2 phones and pay for 2 service providers. Not cool.

Perhaps the solution is to go to the Google Andriod, which does have many of the important apps, but is available on all service providers and with many hardware options, including some with physical keyboards.

More phones in my pocket. Just what I needed.