review

I use the Debian operating system on several computers. My "main" computer (Imladris) runs Debian unstable (Sid) while the others mostly run on testing. I've been anticipating the Gnome 3 upgrade for some time, mainly because of the switch to Gnome Shell which is a completely new way of using the desktop. I had played with Gnome Shell a while ago, and was kind of impressed and worried by it in equal measure, I decided it wasn't ready for prime time so stopped using it. Naturally I assumed it would be much more impressive upon release; especially since Debian is not (by far) the first GNU/Linux distribution to include Shell.

A while ago a big upgrade came through on imladris, and it was clear it was the Gnome 3 upgrade. I share this computer with three other users, two of which are children for whom I have implemented password less login (locally only). I can only say I think Gnome have significantly mishandled the upgrade. Here are some reasons why.

Login is seriously slow

The display manager can take up to a whole minute to display the list of users (and often doesn't display the icons). There are some bug reports about a possible race condition that causes this, but seriously on a reasonable spec computer this is unacceptably slow. The same problems occurs when switching user.

I couldn't login

My, admittedly old user account simply wouldn't launch a working desktop. I had to (at a command prompt) delete configuration directories to get my account working again.

Absolutely zero support for the user in transition

So the average user does the upgrade and suddenly their entire desktop has changed. But when they first login there will be some guidance about where everything is gone... right? No. Having already used Shell, I knew, but I had to try and show everyone else how to use the machine again. It's not that spectacularly intuitive.

Actually, a lot of functions have just gone

There's a huge removal of existing functionality. All your carefully tweaked panels: gone. All your applets: gone. And bizarrely often with no working alternative.

Not friendly for children

It was possible to set up a Gnome 2 account to make it easy for kids. Low res graphics, and big panels with big select icons. The new paradigm completely ignores all that in favour of a sleek minimalist environment which is probably not that easy for young children to understand.

Dictatorial design choices

It's been decided that we don't need minimise buttons or maximise buttons. It's been decided not to honour old desktop backgrounds. It's been decided not to honour existing resolution settings. It's been decided not to show anything on the Desktop (much to the confusion of many users). It's been decided we can't right click on the desktop.

Some of this kind of nonsense is exactly why I don't like some other operating systems who believe they know what's best for you with Messianic Zeal (I'm looking at you Apple).

All in all I find this transition very disappointing. There are lots of basic things no-one seems to have thought of, and years of desktop customisation have been swept away with an extraordinary arrogance. Don't get me wrong, I support the idea of trying a new Desktop paradigm: but, for instance, if people used to have applets on their desktop for the weather, or for system monitoring, it's because they needed it. Rolling out a new desktop that simply ignores these things in favour of how some people thing everyone should use their desktop is exasperating.

I'm seriously hoping that Gnome Shell improves significantly and fast. I won't hold my breath.

Posted by Colin Turner

I have both these phones. The HTC Desire is my personal phone, and runs Android (in this case Froyo, Android 2.2). I've been using Android for some time now, and regular readers will know I haven't been shy about commenting on its problems in the early releases. I also have, and have had for about the last month, an Apple iPhone 4, running iOS 4, for work. I've been promising some people a comparison.

Disclosure: I'm not really an Apple fan. From the moment I started to play with some in QUB, I disliked the single button, the cotton wool interface that kept you from "harming yourself", or doing anything deep. But I know that has changed somewhat, the latest Apple computers, while still having that fluffy exterior now have a decent operating system underneath. So I'm going to try to be as fair as I can be.

First a comment about the build quality. Both phones feel very similar both in the hand and in the pocket, the iPhone feels like it has a better build quality, but then you do expect solid hardware from Apple. Both phones have a button on the top to "wake" the device. Both have volume controls on the side. The iPhone has a nice feature of a slider button that mutes the device at one go; the Desire requires you to put the volume slider to zero (there are other ways, I know). The iPhone has one big button at the bottom, reminiscent of the one button mouse, and this is an area where the Desire wins hands down, with more physical buttons including the search, back button, the menu button, the home button and the optical trackball.

A note on the intuitiveness of the interface. Apple claims that their interface is so intuitive you don't need any instructions. I must say I find the Android (Desire) interface more intuitive, and when you start that phone for the first time, it walks you through the basics. Very helpful for beginners.

Anyway, time is short and some people are waiting on this review, so here's a potted comparison.

Feature	iPhone	Desire
Basic Interface	Uncluttered, but uninformative, no widgets, no live wall paper, no active folders. Dull, one size fits all. Switching between tasks and back again is inelegant. Notification of outstanding items is cleaner than standard Android.	Very rich, combinations of apps on the desktop, widgets and all the things mentioned by their absence for the iPhone. Much more personalised. Task switching, particularly the back button, is much more elegant. HTC Sense is nicer.
Phone	Disastrous. Frequently won't connect calls when my Desire will. There seems to be something else at play here and I've reported it. Both phones are on the same network BTW. It's more awkward to change numbers on the fly and many other things. But it's very pretty.	Much improved in Android over the last few versions, the ease of dialling, changing numbers is much better. Finding contacts to dial is much easier and faster. Oh, did I mention it works?
Voicemail	Fancy. Asks me to set it up every single time I turn on the phone. Recently while travelling, I couldn't pick up a voicemail because of this for about an hour, by which time I was sitting with the caller.	Not Fancy. Works all the time.
Workplace	The stock mail client is very pretty, and for example, links to appointments easily (but makes it hard to see if you are free). It has limited threading support which is really nice.	The Android exchange support is, in my opinion, superior. It lacks threading, but does have follow up support, which I take to be vastly more important.
Apps	Legendary, but there are relatively few free quality apps. For example, I struggled (still haven't) found a decent calculator (not the built in one) that is free. I find the market app rather clunky. Can't find any decent external exchange apps that work.	Many problems with the Market were fixed in Froyo, the apps available seem to be broader in nature, and many more are free (my perception). Choice of several exchange apps, more fully featured than iOS.
Software Keyboard	Simple, elegant, but frustratingly difficult to type complex content, having to change layouts all the time.	More cluttered, but actually as easy to use, better word prediction, less switching between layouts.
Battery Life	Initially winning hands down, but now hogging battery like no tomorrow, can't make it through an average day. I don't know what's causing the problem and so I'm just deleting apps all over the show.	Vastly improved over other phones, still an issue, but actually appreciating it more after the iPhone
Music	Very pretty. iTunes integration. This is also the problem. A cheap player I bought for my Daughter allows me to just dump music on it and it works. What I had to go through to get Music onto the iPhone because of my unusual setup, well, it wasn't easy. Oh, and by the way. iTunes sucks. I mean really... disastrous, but with no alternative.	Bulk device, you can just copy the music on and it works. Plays music just as well as the iPhone, in fact better because the former occaisionally and inexplicably stops. Wide variety of music players.
Video		Flash.
Web	Browser is probably prettier than Android's and allows more Tabs, seems to be slower though.	Native Flash is an advantage here too.
Notifications	Really dreadful, and a well known problem in the Apple community. Poorly handled, and when they pop up, and you go to use the phone the notification is just gone.	Elegant system that allows multiple notifications each of which take you straight to the issue. Persist, unobtrusively, until dismissed.
Calendaring / Time	Automatically setting the time to the wrong time since the clocks changed. Manually fixing this makes calender entries wrong. Setting it back to automatic makes the time wrong again.	Google Calendar back end more open than Exchange. Exchange functionality built in too. Minor quibble, cannot change the colour of the Exchange calendar. Date / Time works. Minor quibble, on a non rooted device you can't use ntp for ultra correct times. Can't on the iPhone either as far as I know.
Oddities	My laptop supplies power out of USB while it's off. I use this to charge my Desire if need be. The iPhone requires the whole machine to be on for it to charge the phone.	The power connector on my Desire seems to be a bit stretched, so if I'm not careful, it's not being charged. The Desire asks, when plugged in, whether it should charge, act as a disk, do internet tethering etc..

I'm honestly struggling to find an area where the iPhone wins hands down against its competitor. I can't think of one. I imagine if the iPhone is the only smart phone you are used to, it seems miraculous. It probably seemed that way against Android 1.1. But Android has grown up now, and it makes the iPhone look just stupid by comparison. I couldn't recommend an iPhone to anyone. Sorry.

By the way, I fully accept that perhaps when I get used to the iPhone I might come to love it more, but I'll be surprised.

Posted by Colin Turner

For many years now, I've been aware of the Cthulhu Mythos, since it infuses lots of popular culture. Indeed, Dread Cthulhu was recently blamed for the horizon oil spill, a theory that I rather enjoyed.

Despite this, I hadn't actually read any of H.P. Lovecraft's books directly. Last week and this, I decided to try out an ebook reader on my phone, specifically the rather excellent Aldiko for android. It's a nice application. I downloaded two of Lovecraft's books; "The Call of Cthulhu" and the "At the Mountains of Madness".

Lovecraft has been, mostly after his death, immensely influential, with references to his work appearing in many modern authors' work (e.g. Stephen King, Neil Gaiman). He is famous for the idea of "Cosmic Horror". The idea that the world is not truly rational, and understandable, but nightmarish, chaotic and hostile or at best indifferent to human nature.

I found "The Call of Cthulhu" rather unpleasant to read in parts, not because of the supposed horror, but because of the unpleasant racism implicit and explicit within the book. It does need to be remembered that everyone is a product of their times however, and I find the implicit racism difficult to accept in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien too. But the book was interesting.

The second book, "At the Mountains of Madness" was more mature and less objectionable.

But I couldn't entirely share the horror of the protagonists. Some of their discoveries were genuinely horrifying (usually acts committed by human beings) but much of the rest would be wondrous. They are horrified by the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry in architecture. Non Euclidean geometry does not frighten me, and indeed Lovecraft understood it wasn't the true nature of the universe. But seeing clearly non Euclidean architecture in a "normal" setting is wondrous, terrifying perhaps briefly, but not horrific. Much of the horror just comes from the primitive frame of reference, either scientific, or religious or both, of the protagonists.

And this is the bit I really can't understand, since Lovecraft was a failed astronomer, so he would have known that the universe is, to the best of our knowledge, indifferent to our existence, and that the laws of physics themselves could see our annihilation in so many ways. Indeed, apart from a (probably literal) Deus Ex Machina solution, every scientist knows that the ultimate future of humanity is doomed... Is that "Cosmic Horror"?

By the way, since the world is Sherlock Holmes mad at the moment, I recommend A Study In Emerald (PDF), a Hugo Award winning short story that is an interesting cross over of the Sherlock Holmes and Cthulhu mythos written by Neil Gaiman.

Posted by Colin Turner

I've had my Google development phone, the g1, for some time now. I haven't had the luxury of time to write anything for it, but I mainly wanted it to try out Android anyway. I've reviewed the phone before, and again after some canonical firmware upgrades.

I use the truly excellent K9 application for mail, it has good support for self signed certificates, now has IMAP push support and is generally excellent. However, it stores all the mail on the shockingly limited internal memory on the device. That, and upgrades to things like Google Maps, adding truly excellent new functionality, left me constantly looking for applications to remove.

This is why in the end I decided to try Cyanogen's ROMs. Since I have a development phone, I didn't need to root it, and just followed the relevant instructions (in truth, I couldn't be bothered to downgrade the OS to root it first).

Here are some observations about the new ROM:

• Apps2sd is amazing.
  I have the whole pleasure of trying different apps all over again, without sweating about every byte. I don't have to worry about how much data is in my contacts (whether I assign them icons), my emails, and so on. I have plenty of room. I was delighted to be able to install DocumentsToGo. Which makes the phone much more useful for work emails. Loads of great apps I had to remove have been reinstated, and I can play with others, like the awesome Google Googles.
• Extra workspaces
  There are five workspaces, making for more widget playroom. I now have a calendar app taking up a whole workspace with the events to come. Excellent.
• It fixes several problems I had with MMS functionality.
  
  • It fakes a variety of user agents, meaning that a test video message I sent myself on o2 finally worked, for the first time ever.
  • The stock ROM allows you to prevent data access when roaming, which is good. But it also doesn't fetch MMS when roaming, which is (for me) a nuisance, and these are usually on a different tariff system. So when you receive an MMS on roaming, you end up enabling all data access to quickly receive the MMS, and then turn it off again. The Cyanogen ROM has an option to retrieve MMS on roaming.
• UI feels snappier
• USB tethering
  can be enabled, which JustWorks (TM) with Debian. Excellent.

On the downside, I have had some reset problems, but admittedly I have sometimes been pushing the phone very hard indeed to test it. And the battery life on the g1 is still awful. I know Noodles has solved the problem by not actually using his phone :-), but I want to use mine.

Another minor problem I encountered some weeks ago was the accelerometer suddenly starting serious misreporting on one axis. This problem seems to be becoming less severe, but even reinstalling the stock and then cyanogen ROM did not fix it. However, note I did not wipe the user data.

Cyanogen has made my phone fun to have again. And I will still replace it when a new Android handset comes out that I really like, but a lot of the urgency has gone. I'll certainly buy him a beer for Christmas.

Posted by Colin Turner

I installed donut earlier this week. This is on my G1 devphone, so I don't recommend you use the htc page otherwise. This time I didn't bother going through all the nonsense with the tools, I just mounted the phone on USB and slapped the image across one by one into the SD card as update.zip.

This is not as significant an upgrade as cupcake was but nevertheless, it's improved the phone in a number of key ways.

• the search widget now searches phone content as well internet content, this works very smoothly;
• the camera / camcorder apps are now easy to switch between, and much faster;
• the gallery is quicker, but only after it takes a complete age to index/whatever;
• the market application is hugely improved, and as a bonus, lots of content that was previously unavailable on the devphone is now listed;
• the speech synthesis stuff is installed, but I don't really see it does much just yet;
• the battery monitor app is very useful, especially since the g1 battery life sucks so badly.

My battery life is, by the way, 29% taken up by wifi (forgot to switch it off today), 18% by display, 14% cell standby, and so on. 8% was taken up by voice calls.

Be warned, the new upgrade seems to suck up more space, and takes a long time to start-up after first reboot.

You can see a full list of the changes here, and though it's modest, I think it's a nice upgrade in lots of ways. At this time, it's hard to know how much limitations in the G1 experience are from the hardware or the OS, I'm looking forward to seeing how android behaves on new hardware.

Posted by Colin Turner

I recently bought a Roberts WM201 Internet Radio. I've used it for a while now and thought I'd post my thoughts.

First of all, I was looking for a radio meeting certain criteria, it needed wifi, I wanted it to pack a reasonable punch since it would essentially be my main music source, it needed to support upnp media servers. I also wanted it to have an integrated transformer so that it would not have a bulky mains lead since I wanted it for my rather small kitchen. Finally I wanted it to be semi portable, so I could move it from room to room without too much fuss.

The WM201 meets all these criteria, and is based on the Reciva technology that has been well received by a few of my friends, notably Paddy and Noodles. The radio is a pretty good size, not too large and not too small, and feels really solid. It has a wired network port as well as wireless capability which is great. For complex reasons, when it first arrived I had no internet connection (no gasps, I was making do with 3G hookups). That being the case I knew I wouldn't be able to get the internet radio functionality itself working. But I figured I'd set up a local lan and get the mediatomb server on my development machine working. I was able to hook up to the LAN and enter the WPA password, but it just would not play with any functionality whatsoever if it doesn't see the servers it expects to. Now Noodles has suggested my geek privileges should be revoked for not working out how much of the internet I had to fake to get it to work. He may well have a point! In my defense I had plenty of other issues to deal with instead.

About a week later I got my net connection, albeit temporarily since some work was needed on the cable. So while the network was up I was finally able to get into all the functionality, and I was really impressed, the small display and control is really intuitive and the shipped remote control is excellent. When it came time for the external network connection to be severed again, I quickly switched the device over to streaming media from a playlist on mediatomb, but interestingly it still gave that up midway when the external connection went down. Dumb, but forgivable.

So again, what's good? It offers brilliant sound, and more volume than I could wish for. It's easy to browse through the huge array of stations, and for things like the BBC stations, it has a good interface to the "listen again" service. It works seamlessly with mediatomb on my PC. All excellent. A minor grumble is that it's not easy to switch briefly from a radio station to the playlist on mediatomb and back again, you have to go through all the menus every time. The number of stations is so huge, finding them can be a little slow, but you can as you would expect, save them to a preferred list. I hit a problem with that; my saved BBC stations have spontaneously stopped working, just showing endless retrying messages. When I go back through the menus it's all fine. Odd.

The radio becomes better yet when you use the Reciva portal to set up your "stuff", a list of your preferred stations and podcasts. Obviously it's much easier to do this on a web page, and then you simply register your radio. Now (it seemed to require a hard power cycle for me) the radio has an extra "My Stuff" menu which gives really easy access to your favourite stations and allows you to quickly select podcasts, far faster than navigating on the radio. An odd note, if you for example navigate through "listen again" in the normal way, you can fast forward, pause and rewind the playing media. But if the same stream is selected from the podcast menu in "My Stuff", you can't. A slight annoyance.

I'd really recommend the device overall, it's great. Incidentally the cheapest prices I could find were on Amazon by some distance, but time and time again, I would select a seller and only at the final hurdle be told they wouldn't ship to Northern Ireland. I've complained about this before, it would be useful to know rather sooner that I'm wasting my time. Anyway, I found a simple way to work out which sellers ship to Northern Ireland and find the cheapest of those. I selected one from each and every seller on Amazon. Then when I went to checkout I removed all those that caused complaints. It was then easy to find the cheapest remaining seller. Much faster than trying them one at a time.

Posted by Colin Turner

I recently wrote about my experiences with the Google G1 dev phone running the 1.1 Android firmware, and discussed a number of problems.

Last night I obtained the just released 1.5 (cupcake) firmware and performed the upgrade. That all went smoothly, it helped to have done it before and working out the idiosyncrasies of the process. So how does the new firmware measure up?

Initial thoughts and feelings are very good. Picture handling in MMS is hugely improved, although I still had a problem with an old video clip, but I'll see if it was the oldness that was the problem. The optional on-screen keyboard is very useful and surprisingly easy to use, with predictive words hovering just above it. I enabled the options to automatically rotate the screen upon device reorientation, that is a big improvement in general usability, and means you no longer have to flip out the keyboard just to provoke rotation.

Other improvements include the camera - much better, and video capability, although the microphone doesn't pick up sound very well on video. The web browser is also much improved and hugely more usable and readable, the auto rotation helps that too.

One very quirky problem, the one screen I've found that doesn't auto rotate on the device orientation is the home page. That rather surprised me. Overall, this is a very significant set of improvements, and I'd suggest any G1 user upgrades as soon as possible.

All of this goes a long way to making the G1 a good day to day phone for me, although I'm still having to limp from one charging source to another, I don't think I can get through a day of my normal use without charging in the car and at my desk - and yes, I'm frequently trimming back all the features to extend battery life, when I remember.

Update

Here are a few more comments after a little while of using cupcake. Of little problems and whether or not I've resolved them.

• Bluetooth pairing
  After Cupcake, the phone no longer automatically paired with my in car gadgetry. In the end I found that going through the settings and clicking connect explicitly for each device connected it that time, and next time it did so automatically.
• MMS issues
  There are still some of these, I get some images from some people that are much smaller than I remember getting from the same people with the same phone when I had the N95. It's not clear if this is because the G1 is just not allowing the same level of zoom, or what else may be to blame, but still rather small. Also, video clips are simply not playing. When I receive one I still get another text from my provider (O2) telling me I can't receive them. But now there is an icon suggesting they can be played. When you try, you simply get a number of seconds of a blank screen and silence. Suggesting possibly a codec problem, but I can find no mention in the oracle of google as to how to fix it if so, or whether I should expect it to work.
• Fast switcher apps
  The API that allowed apps to turn off and on some features has been deliberately disabled. Not a huge issue, but it means many apps that helped you turn on and off wifi, for example, no longer work. Unhelpful in a phone that still has profound battery life issues.

Posted by Colin Turner

I obtained an HTC Android G1 dev phone to play with. I've been working with it for almost a week now, and so can post my initial thoughts. And they are quite seriously mixed. There are things about this phone that are just unbelievably good, but with some shockingly unbelievable flaws too, enough to possibly render the phone unusable for me to be honest. You'll probably see as you go on that shocking, and unbelievable are two buzzwords I use a lot in this review. It's more polite than rearranging this acronym FTW into its more usual order and expanding.

First, some caveats. The phone I received was a dev phone, it had the 1.0 firmware revision, and that might have been the cause of my initial problems. It's now on 1.1 (and update was irritatingly problematic too). The dev phone comes with the phone, headphones, a US charger, a USB cable, and about two post cards worth of docs. Mostly these discussed set up of APNs. That wasn't trivial, and O2, my provider were frankly as helpful as a chocolate teapot. It didn't help that their systems showed, at least with the 1.0 firmware, that the phone was missing key capabilities.

Thanks to Noodles, I got some working access, and initially getting things synced with Google, and wifi was easy. I actually had some problems with bluetooth pairing, but it could have been the other end. I spent a lot of time trying to find the most elegant way or exporting my evolution contacts to Google, and eventually found the magic command line to produce the CSV on Debian Sid your paths may vary.

First of all lets summarise the stunning features of this phone.

• Big clear screen
  Mostly the interface is crisp and clean and the touch interface is very intuitive and easy to use.
• QWERTY goodness
  The G1 screen slides out to reveal a full qwerty keyboard that is really easy to type on.
• Shell goodness
  You can download applications that allow a local shell, and for me much more usefully an SSH client. Coupled with the keyboard and connectivity this is excellent.
• Calendaring
  This is just superb, intuitive, easy to navigate, cosmetically pleasing, automatic sync.
• Email
  Almost belongs in grumbles since the built in client does not, under any circumstances, accept self signed certs. But the K9 market app does it all, it seems to be a fork, or more likely set of patches maintained on the original email client.
• Messaging
  This is really in both lists. The nice way in which the G1 threads correspondence is very helpful, but there are problems. See below.

And now, the reprehensible clangers.

• Battery
  The battery life on the N95 is shockingly bad, but actually the G1 is on a par with that, you seem to need to constantly trim all the features that consume power to get through a day reasonably (all be it, the battery life is stretching now I think, and less day-to-day fiddling helps).
• Video Capabilities 1/2
  This is the first 3G device I've ever had that didn't have a forward facing camera for video calls. I know some other smart phones are similar, but the N95 I have does have this capability. A non issue for many, but something to note for some.
• Video Capabilities 2/2
  Even now, quite a while after release, the G1 is incapable of using its camera for video clips. I find this extraordinary, I think it's the only phone I've ever owned with a camera that can't do this.
• Media Messaging
  This is quite frankly, shockingly bad. It's a complete pain in the ass to configure MMS, and even then it often simply doesn't work. There are long delays and repeated failures in sending and receiving MMS, and yet other times it does it. I can't yet work out the pattern. The way in which the phone shows attached images is really appalling, and difficult to manipulate.
  Rather than showing the image when clicked on till you click again, it annoyingly shows it for a number of seconds of its choosing and then goes back. You can't zoom, rotate, download, or otherwise manipulate the image that doesn't even fill the screen size available.
  Even more extraordinary is that while the phone can't take video clips (see above) it also fails to be able to receive them. That's an unbelievable flaw in a phone this high end. Instead my provider sends me an SMS telling me I'm a third class citizen and invites me to download the file using a browser. When you try to do this you will find you can't actually save the damn attachment anywhere to bring the market apps (no inbuilt video viewer) to bear on this thing. I just can't get over this stupidity. I have to wait to get home to a real PC to view these.
• The contacts section in Google seems to allow no space for birthdays. Since for me that's a pretty critical aspect of calendaring and I'd like the data hooked to the calendar, that's annoying.
• Headphones
  The headphones plug into a mini USB socket on the bottom, but as such they are custom. The N95 has a much better system of having an adapter that provides functionality to tweak music playing with a plain ordinary headphone jack in case you have better headphones.
• Memory Management
  Another shockingly bad aspect of the phone. It's onboard memory is quite limited, but so what? I put an 8 Gig micro SD in it. Well, almost nothing can actually be stored on the extra card apart from music and some other files. All applications, text messages, and so on take up the main memory as far as I know.
• No automatic rotation
  The device certainly appears to have the accelerometers to allow automatic rotation of the screen, but simply, it doesn't. You have to pop out the keyboard to do so whether you want to or not. Stupid.

Every new phone you acquire seems to have new features you don't know how you did with out, and problems that irritate you from previous good experiences, but seriously, the MMS problems this phone has, has caused me to have both phones on my person and swapping SIM cards this last week. That's just ridiculous. It's quite likely the G1 will end up in a drawer until someone gets their act together and deals with that astonishing flaw. That or I'll sell it on. It's a shame, so much else in the phone is excellent, but the problems are often simply inexcusable in a smartphone well into the 21st century.

Update

I was pleased to read that a firmware update is to be released Real Soon Now, that will resolve most of the serious issues on my list, or at least I hope the MMS handling will be improved given what is on the list, otherwise this would be even more braindead.

Oh, and by the way, I know the iPhone shares some of these problems. There's a reason I don't have one.

Posted by Colin Turner