Regular readers of this blog may have noticed a reduction of posts here. The reason for this has been that I’ve been working on Palm WebOS games and a corresponding website mobigamedepot.com.

This new website will be the portal for the games that I will be developing and I will post some behind the scenes details about the development work here on Cochinoman for your reading pleasure.

For starters, why did I choose the Palm WebOS platform? When the iPhone first came out, I wanted to do development work for it but since I’m not a Mac user, there was that learning curve and the SDK was not available at first. Then before I realized, everybody and his brother was on the iPhone platform and it was too late to get in the game.

Fast forward 2 years and when the Palm WebOS was announced at CES last year, my interest was again peaked. I followed the SDK development closely and managed to get on the software developer program as an early developer.

The WebOS SDK has a lot of limitations, especially for real-time games, but it also makes it less likely that the big boys will be getting on this path. As it turns out, there is a new PDK that was announced at this year’s CES that allows for low level C/C++ coding and the big boys (e.g. EA) has come out with their 3D games for the WebOS.

This last move still doesn’t deter me from working on my games because the big budget EA games will have to sell for $7-$10 and I will target the below $2 market for my games. There’s no way that EA could sell their games for 99 cents and still make money because of their overhead in developing these heavy games.

My first released game is “Lunar Attack,” which is basically an upgraded “Missile Command” with more features. In the future, I will post about the decisions that were made regarding this first game.  The second game I am working on is a scrolling sprite based game that takes place in a Pyramid.

If you are thinking about developing games on any mobile platform, you may find the articles interesting.  Even if you are thinking about non-game development on a mobile device, you might find something interesting in there.

While setting up my Google Voice account, I found a link to a website called Voki that has a text to speech app. This app can be used to create your voicemail greeting for Google Voice.

They have a bunch of different male and female voices but I found that Kate has pronunciations that I liked. You don’t have to create an account to just make your greeting. You can also create widgets for your blogs. See sample below:

I had a dream. In this dream, there was a service that allowed me to have just one phone number which would ring any or all my phones (cell, home, work) and even allow me to make long distance calls. If I change my number, I can forward my calls to my new number seamlessly. I can even forward specific numbers to specific phones only. And all this was completely free.

Incredibly, Google has created such a service for free called Google Voice.  Currently, it’s still in Beta and available only by invitation but all you have to do is sign up and wait.

Once I got it, I discovered it has even more features that I knew about.  Here are a few that pleasantly surprised me:

Call Screening – You can set your settings so that Google Voice will ask the caller for their name if they are not in your contact list. It’s like having your own secretary.

Listen In – Just like the old answering machines of the 80′s, you can listen to the messages being left by the caller, then decide if you want to pick up the call. Amazing. Why don’t they have this feature on voicemail for cell phones? This is perfect for people avoiding calls from stalkers.

Voicemail Transcripts – As you would expect, when you get a voicemail, you can get an email or SMS message to alert you. That’s no surprise. However, the message contains the transcript of the voicemail. Yes, that’s no bull. It’s not perfect but it seems to work fairly well.  In any case, you also get the full MP3 of the actual voicemail so you can always listen to the real caller.

Ring Multiple Phones – This is the main feature of the service. But there’s more to it than all your phones ringing. You can also direct certain “groups” (e.g. friends) to specific phones, or even automatically send specific numbers to voicemail (or even your SPAM folder) without ringing at all. There’s so much you can do with this, it’s mind boggling.

Call Record – Are you serious?!  Yes, you can finally record your calls simply by pressing “4″ on your phone. When you’re done, press “4″ again. The MP3 file is available in your account online. Not only that, you get a transcript AND code to embed a player directly into your blog.  You know I’m going to use this feature to record those customer service calls for this blog. Check this out:

Call Switch – As if those aren’t enough features, how about being able to switch phones without hanging up. You heard me. Simply press the star button on your phone during your call, then your other phone will ring. Now, just pick that the second phone, and hang up the first phone. So easy, even a caveman could do it.  How many times have I said, “Let me call you back from my cell phone because…” No more.

Free – WTF!? That’s the most amazing feature. It would be great to have all these features (and much more) for a small fee. But when it comes for FREE, you’re just speechless. They even start you off with 10 cents for out-of-the-country calls.

The free long distance (US and Canada) is a game changer for sure. Why would anybody pay for long distance with their land line carrier anymore? All you have to do is sign up for Google Voice and get free long distance calls.

Although the original company was partly owned by McDonald’s, Coinstar bought them out and created redbox. It’s only very recently that they have put their new DVD rental machines (made by Flextronics - also manufactures Zune, Xbox 360) at Southern California area 7-11 stores.

As you can see below, the main part of the unit is about the size of an ATM machine but they display is much larger, to attract more attention from potential customers coming to 7-11.  The machine is located on the outside of the 7-11 so I assume it’s water resistant.

There is a touch screen located on the front of the vending machine, much like the newer ATM machines. From there, you make your movie selection, and pick from the inventory inside the machine. Next, swipe your credit card, and out pops a DVD from the side.  You can also reserve your DVD from their website (redbox.com) and go to the nearest vending machine that has your movie. The machines are connected to the Internet so it will not give out your movie to somebody else.  I wish Blockbuster had that feature online.

The cool thing about the rental is that it’s only $1 per day (return by 9pm) and there are no late fees. They just keep charging you $1 per day until 25 days, then you own the DVD.  Also, you can return your DVD to ANY redbox vending machine.  So you could rent one near work, then return it near your home.

The only thing stopping me from using this service right now is they don’t have any Blu-ray movies yet.  When they do, I’m going to be on it.

When I switched over to Sprint to get the Palm Pre from Verizon Wireless, the switch was painless and quick. In fact, I was surprised that Verizon didn’t try to get me to stay with some offer, like the way AOL used to do. When I moved my old Verizon number over to Sprint, they said it might take 8-12 hours, but in actuality, it took less than one hour.  I didn’t keep checking it but it may even have been under 30 minutes. As a comparison, when I moved my number from Vonage to Ooma, it literally took weeks.

So, with such a smooth transition, it was a little funny when I got one last email from Verizon asking me to take a survey to find out why I left their service.  I started answering some questions about why I left, and after about the 3rd screen, I got this error below:

This error can be caused by many things but the most common is too many requests.  So I guess a lot of people are being asked to take a survey about why they are leaving Verizon Wireless.  Nice parting shot Verizon.

Other than the hype over X-Box Natal and Sony’s motion detection device at E3, one other device came out a little more quietly. Dell’s Alienware has released their new laptop touted as “the most powerful 17″ gaming laptop in the Universe.” I guess they figure the other life forms on other planets use screens larger than 17″ so they don’t have to worry about false advertising.

Of course, this has to come out right after I buy my Dell laptop.  Oh well. It’s a little too big for me anyway.  I’ll keep saying that to myself while I cry myself to sleep.

Jared asked me for more information on the battery on my new Dell Studio 17.  Being the OCD Rain-man that I am, I decided to conduct some testing and document the result here for your reading pleasure.

So to begin, I found out from Dell that the Studio 17 from Best Buy has the 9 cell battery (instead of the 6) which means it’s the most you can have on this model.  Next, I selected the “Dell Recommended” power setting as shown below:

This is basically a middle of the road setting to give you average battery life and average performance.  This seems to be a good compromise between battery life and performance.

Next, I enabled the “Dell Extended Battery Life” in the Battery Meter.  I’m not 100% sure of everything that this does but it only applies when you are running on battery and it changes the color scheme to “Windows Vista Basic,” which may not work with all your programs.  It also turns off the Windows Sidebar (which I guess uses up battery power).

Instead of conducting this test with a fully powered battery, I decided to try to simulate what I would normally do in real life. After max-charging it on Friday night, I let it sit over the weekend without using it. On Monday, when I turned it on with battery power, it was down to 91% battery charge level. I figure this is probably the longest you would go without turning on your laptop after a charge.

During the testing period, I backed up approximately 300 files over WiFi to my Buffalo NAS, copied files to my desktop via WiFi and did other light processing, including using the browser.  What I specifically did NOT do was use the DVD drive at all.  So if you plan on watching a DVD movie, this power test probably will not apply to you.  If you are going to be using it to create and edit Word files, email, and browse the Internet, this power test should be almost exactly what you will get.

The table below shows the battery level (from the Battery Meter) as time progressed (shown in hours and minutes).

As you can see from the table, near the end, the battery level goes down fairly quickly.  From 15% to 7%, it only took 11 minutes, then down to 5% in just 2 more minutes.  At this point, the system turned off automatically.

Once again, keep in mind that this test started from 91%, which was where the level was after not using the computer for 2 days.  If it was charged right before use to 100%, and you set the power setting to “Power saver,” I’m sure you would get a lot more time from the battery.  But I don’t think those results are useful when you are using the computer in real-life situations.  I like longer battery life, but I hate slow computers.

My results show that with moderate use and with the screen on for the entire time of testing, and connected via WiFi, you can get about 3 hours of battery life, even if you start with a slightly less than full chage.  In my book, that’s a pretty good length of time.

For the first time since switching over to Vista, I got a BSOD (Blue screen of death) on my brand new Dell Studio 17 after updating Vista via Microsoft.  Very nice.  After my great experience with the Dell customer support, I decided not to even bother calling them.  After looking around the Interwebs, I came across a post on the Best Buy forum:

http://forums.bestbuy.com/bb/board/message?board.id=Computers_New&thread.id=3137

This post basically explains that the BSOD is caused by the built-in webcam driver which causes a “IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL” fatal error.  To fix this problem, they tell you to download and install a new version of the webcam driver from the Dell website at:

http://ftp.us.dell.com/input/CREATIVE-LABS_INTEGRATED-WEB_A05_R207341.EXE

The self extracting program will automatically uninstall the old driver and install the new driver and reboot your computer.  You must close the webcam driver in order for the installer to finish.  You would think the installer could close the driver for you but I guess that’s asking for too much.

Seeing that ordering a keyboard cover from Dell took 2.5 hours, I figure this BSOD problem probably would have taken about 5 hours to solve over the phone with Dell customer service.  Instead, a few clicks in google, download and I’m done in under 10 minutes.

Boy, these posts are looking more and more like those Apple TV ads.

As you know, I’ve had my love/hate relationship with HP and their horrible customer service.  Well, that honor has moved over to Dell.

Oh, where do I start. After I bought my Dell Studio 17 at Best Buy, I called Dell as soon as I got home to order a keyboard protector and spare AC adapter.  This is what I always do with laptops. Why? Because dust gets into the keyboard and I like a spare AC adapter pre-plugged into the wall at home so I don’t have to get it out of my laptop carry bag.  But I digress.

Toshiba has keyboard covers for all their laptops, while HP doesn’t have any last time I checked.  How about Dell?

Well, I tried looking on the Dell website with no success.  So, I called Dell’s customer service toll free number to find out.  As it happens, I talked to “J.Z.” at Dell who told me that he had the keyboard protector and AC adapter for my laptop and would send it out right away. According to my Ooma account, that call took 32 minutes. That seems a little long but at least it appeared that things were going fine.  My order on Dell’s website appears below:

So I made the order on Friday and I got the UPS shipment 3 days later on Monday.  Wow. So far so good.  I was getting ready to write up a nice glowing report for Dell.  I open the package and I can tell right away that the keyboard protector is too small. It’s for a 13″ laptop, while my Dell is 17″.  Damn it. Also, the power adapter is not Dell but from a company called “Targus.” Strange that Dell wouldn’t sell their own power adapters.  In any case, I bring it home to try it out.

As soon as I plug the AC adapter to my laptop, I get the following dialog box:

WTF?! Oh no! J.Z. totally screwed me over. So, to summarize, after a 32 minute call to J.Z. at Dell, he sent me the wrong keyboard protector and wrong power adapter.  Wow. This beats all records on incompetence.

Now comes the “Hell” part of this story.  First, let me show you my Ooma call log to Dell:

As you can see, I started my calls at 4:36pm and finished a little before 7pm. I’ll spare you the details of call after call without any success.  I talked to Christian, Raoul, Rod, J.D. and some others I forgot to get their names or I got disconnected before I even got their names.  On one call, they transferred me, and the automated machine told me that I got transferred to a non-existing extension and hung-up on me. Very nice Dell.

Another thing that made these calls “Hell,” was the slowness of their order computers. It was so slow that most of them would put me on hold for 2, to 3 times per call for 3 to 5 minutes at a time.  Or maybe they were just playing Solitaire while I was on hold. Luckily, I have a speaker phone so I can just wait for them to return.

Actually, the ones that didn’t put me on hold was worse.  They would all try to sell me more crap. Mostly, they tried to sell me more RAM for my laptop. I kept telling them it was already maxed out at 4Gigs, but they would still look it up on their slow computer, then tell me that it was maxed out. Yes, I just told you that. Then, they would try to sell me a LCD HDTV. Buddy. How about trying to look for that keyboard cover instead?

Are you getting the “Hell” part of this picture yet? I was really getting frustrated.  It’s funny but they would give me a number and extension to call if I got disconnected, but when I would call that number and extension, it was apparently busy and the automated phone machine thingie would just get confused and hang-up and I would have to start all over again from scratch. It actually started to get funny after a while because it was so ridiculous.

Call after call, I got transferred until finally, Christian told me that Dell doesn’t have a keyboard protector for 17″ laptops. Just groovy. This after another guy asked me if I wanted the plastic or rubber version of the protector.  One guy was finally able to give me the return authorization number so that I could return the crap they already sent me, but I wasn’t able to order anything from that guy and I got disconnected. Dell really needs to get their act together.

At the end, J.D. finally came right out and told me the other guy sent me the wrong AC adapter and that he would send out the right one.  At this point, I didn’t care that my credit card wasn’t going to get a refund for weeks for the wrong stuff I got. I just wanted to get the “F” off the phone. I told J.D. to go ahead charge me for another one and send me the correct adapter. By the way, the correct one was about $30 cheaper than the wrong one. Go figure.

So now I still needed a keyboard protector, so as per my usual procedure, I looked on eBay and found one from Hong Kong for $10 (the wrong one from Dell was $16), with free shipping.

Well, this story of hell does have a happy ending.

Fast forward 6 days and I got both the Dell AC adaptor and the keyboard protector from Hong Kong on the same day.  Interesting that the shipment from Hong Kong takes the same amount of time as the UPS shipment from Dell in Lockbourne, Ohio.  The keyboard protector for $10 cost them $5 for shipping (free shipping to me).  So $10 minus $5 shipping equals $5. How do these people make any money?

This time, the Dell AC power adapter was the right one.  However, the adapter that they sent was not exactly the same as the one that came with the laptop and did not have the cool blue light on the end.  Oh well.  At least it works.

So what’s the moral of this story? Good customer service is hard to find in the tech world. But when I do, I’ll write about it. I hope I live that long.

My Toshiba Qosmio started to turn off by itself, apparently from overheating. Since I can’t have my computer turning off unexpectedly, I immediately went online to compare laptops. I didn’t want to spend $2k+ for a crazy fast game laptop, but I can’t buy one of those super cheap and slow laptops either. I also decided I wanted to try a different company to see how they are compared to Sony, HP, and Toshiba (which are the ones I’ve already tried.)  At this point, I’ve gotten used to Vista so that’s no problem anymore.

One thing I noticed is a lot of the computers come with 4Gigs of RAM and so are installed with Vista 64-bit instead of 32-bit.  I’ve had a few minor incompatibility problems with my Vista 64-bit but I’ve managed to get around most of them so I was willing to go that route.

Last time when I got the Toshiba, I actually wanted to get a Dell but I needed a new one that day so I couldn’t order one from Dell. This time, Best Buy had some Dell laptops in stock so I went over there to take a look and decided to buy the Studio 17 for $729.99.

The Dell Studio 17 162B laptop has these specs:

• Intel® Core™2 Duo mobile processor T6400
  Features 2 processing cores, 800MHz system bus and 2.0GHz processor speed per core
• 4GB SoDIMM DDR2 memory
• Slot-loading DVD±RW/CD-RW drive
• 17″ WXGA widescreen LCD CCFL display
• 320GB SATA hard drive (5400 rpm)
• Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD
• Intel® High Definition audio; HDMI connector
• Built-in 2.0-megapixel webcam with microphone
• 8-in-1 media reader
  Supports Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, Secure Digital, Secure Digital Input/Output, Secure Digital High Density, Secure Digital High Capacity, MultiMediaCard and xD-Picture card formats.
• 1 IEEE 1394 FireWire port
• 4 high-speed USB 2.0 ports
• Dell 1510N wireless networking mini-card (802.11b/g/n)
• Long battery life (Up to 6 hours and 33 minutes)
• Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium Edition 64-bit operating system with Service Pack 1 (SP1) pre-installed

Basically, the Studio 17 is a retail only version of this model, and is meant to be a cheap 17″ laptop for casual users and web browsers.

The first thing I liked was the big 17″ screen which is nice and bright but the resolution is only 1440 x 900, which is on the low side for this sized screen.  If you order this unit from Dell, you have the option to get higher resolution but it will cost more. So if you’re going to use this for editing high resolution photos, this might not be the right one for you.

The AC power adapter is very small compared to my Toshiba and has a 3 prong AC side with ground. The plug that goes into the laptop has a blue light which looks very cool in the dark. You can see that the AC adapter outputs power even after being unplugged by this blue light.

The power switch is on the right side of the LCD hinge and unlike the Toshiba, lights up as soon as you press it. Other indicator lights also start blinking to let you know that your computer is on. So far so good.

But when I start typing on the keyboard, I notice that the number “4″ is not working. I take the key off and use a cleaning duster can to blow out any particles and re-assemble the key and I got it to work properly. Not a great start but at least I got it to work. The keyboard layout is fine but the keys feel a little “plasticky” or “clanky” compared to what I’m used to.  However, I did test the keyboard at the store before I bought it and I was able to type very fast on it.

Compared to the Toshiba Qosmio, the CPU is clearly slower, even though this laptop has 4Gigs (Qosmio had 2Gigs). Some of my heavy duty DJ applications stutter a little. On my old Qosmio, I was able to open many tabs in Firefox with websites as quickly as I could move my mouse. On my new Dell, there’s definitely some delay and stuttering when doing this same task. I guess that’s the difference between $730 and $1300.

The next thing I noticed was the speakers were back to the very cheap type that is used on most laptops. Yes, I can hear things but it’s just not the same as the super high quality speakers on my old Qosmio. This is not a fair comparison because the Qosmio is a “game” laptop so the speakers are top notch.  The headphone jacks are on the right side, which for me works better than laptops where the jacks are in front.

The DVD slot is on the right, and unlike all laptops I’ve had in the past, this one is slot loading. This means you just push the DVD into the slot like the one in your car. When you want the DVD out, you press a touchpad “button” on the top row above the keyboard. I hated the touchpad area on the Qosmio and don’t like this one on the Dell for the same reasons. It’s very cool to look at with the lights, but call me old fashioned, but I like physical keys that I know I’ve pressed.  However, I think a lot of people will like this touchpad area which also controls the DVD/CD play as well as launching media applications.

My old Qosmio had 2 USBs, 1 eSata and HDMI output, whereas this Dell has 4 USBs, 1 eSata, 1 Firewire, and HDMI output.  The Dell is designed with no outputs on the back or front.  I like this design decision because it’s always a pain to have to turn the laptop around to see the back so you can plug things in and out. Putting everything on the sides makes it a lot easier.

The battery is contained in the back “lift” that acts as a horizontal leg to lift the entire laptop higher in the back. Although, this makes the laptop thicker when traveling, I still like the extra battery time, plus the angle of the laptop itself.

All in all, this is a good middle of the ground laptop with a relatively long battery life.  It’s not fast enough to be a gaming machine, but with the larger screen and keyboard, it wants to be a desktop replacement. It’s probably too big for most travelers but I don’t mind commuting with it.  Even though the resolution could be higher, with my failing eye sight, I like the big 17″ screen with bigger fonts.  So, this is for the non-gaming user, who wants a large screen but don’t want to pay for it.  That’s would be me.