Ivo's blog

I purchased the Samsung Galaxy i7500 about 6 months ago. I blogged before on how disappointed I was with it, and that hasn’t changed. Recently I took my losses and replaced it with an HTC Desire, which turns out to be the perfect Android phone - I totally love it.

Summarized, here are some of the issues I’ve had with the i7500:

• The screen locks/blocks when dialing, and can’t be unlocked. This means you can’t use the touch screen to navigate through phone menu’s. I’ve met a fellow i7500 who suffered from the same problem, and his workaround was to use the trackpad to navigate through the numerical on-screen keyboard. But sometimes even this doesn’t work.
• Photo’s are sometimes corrupted. You end up with missing pictures and strange files with numerical id’s. Sometimes they also seem to come back again, so perhaps they are still correctly stored on the filesystem, though when accessing the storage remotely you will see the strange files as well.
• WIFI is flakey/buggy. It will sometimes not recognize previously accessed/stored networks and it weel keep asking for a key. Turning wifi off/on again sometimes solves this issue.
• Battery life is really poort, and actually simply not acceptable for a device with features such as the galaxy. Why put in 3G, Wifi, GPS and an oled screen if the device doesn’t have enough power to last a working day?

All of these issues persist after a full factory reset

Samsung has completely ignored its “early android adopters” and chose to focus on supporting “cheaper” Galaxy Spica in stead. This is the support you get for a device that has cost € 450,- half a year ago (and now costs less than half of that).

I don’t even care for an Android 1.6 or 2.x update, I just want a usable Phone.

I recently checked to see if there were any updates available. The only software that’s available on the Samsung Mobile site is “Samsung NEW PC Studio”, which I previously ranted about. I’ve tried downloading the update, but the installer is actually failing to install due to a “configuration file error”. I’ve tried contacting Samsung Mobile about this and all they came back with was to contact Samsung Netherlands. It’s unclear why they can’t forward support requests internally themselves.

Eventually Samsung Customer service (after I forwarded the mail myself) replied that there are no updates and there is no reason to use New PC Studio, which makes me wonder why they offered the download in the first place.

This whole experience has made me reconsider my appreciation for Samsung in general. I used to be a fan of their products - I have had Samsung flatscreen TV’s, printers, mp3 players (one of the few ones with ogg support back then) and I have always been really happy. Until now that is

If you want a buggy, overly expensive Android phone and terrible customer service / support, pick Samsung. I can’t imagine anything will improve with the new models so you should be save. However, if you want your money’s worth from a company that truly believes and supports Android, pick an HTC device like de THC Desire or HTC Legend

It seems iRiver has put up a webpage containing the source to the iRiver story firmware, or at least (some?) GPL copylefted parts of it.

It’s a rather strange page however. Text is embedded in images (in stead of plain text / html) and an imagemap with javascript to download the actual files. It’s almost as if they don’t want the page to be indexed. They even manage to misspell their product name.

On the other hand, iRiver *is* linking (again through javascript, so it can’t be followed by crawlers) to the open source page from its frontpage.

So just to be sure I’ll be making copies of the provided source, and to help google a bit I’ll provide some indexable direct links:

• iRiver Story kernel source
• iRiver Story boot loader source
• iRiver Story busybox source
• iRiver Story mtools source
• iRiver Story cairo source
• iRiver Story newlib source
• iRiver Story freetype source
• iRiver Story libjpeg source
• iRiver Story libpng source
• iRiver Story iconv source
• iRiver Story expat source
• iRiver Story zlib source

I will also provide a mirror of the iRiver story GPL source files, though I haven’t checked them thorougly yet.

It’s unclear if my previous posts and/or if Mikhail Gusarov’s gpl-violations.org work has been of any influence, but it’s good to see some source being released. Hopefully this will enable the openinkpot.org developers to hack the iRiver story a bit more :)

When using Twitter I sometimes wonder how I’m “related” to other users. Usually I will know if I follow them directly or if they follow me, but do we share any followers / people we follow?

Twitter is considered a social networking application, but I find it really hard to find this information directly. Impossible actually. That’s why I’ve created a small twitter application, “Litter Social”. Given two twitter screen names (doesn’t have to be your own), it will find shared connections, one level deep. The application was written using Pylons and Mike Verdone’s twitter api. The latter has some shortcomings which I’ve reported back, most importantly lack of out-of-the-box support foor the v1 Twitter Api, but that’s quite easy to work around.

So go ahead, give Litter Social a try. Let me know what you think. It’s actually a bit addictive :)

About (litter).scritch.org

Litter isn’t a very flattering name for a site but it rhymes with Twitter and it points out that you shouldn’t take it too seriously. They’re just small twitter experiments (more to follow). Scritch.org is the site I run all my experiments (they “scratch” my “itch”) on, which also includes Fetch, an HTTP header analyzer and Guess, a tool to detect the software (cms, framework) a site is using.