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Friday, 29 May 2009
My First Two Weeks with Android
Two weeks ago I received my new HTC Magic smartphone - it's powered by Google's open-source operating system, Android. This means the source code for the system the phone runs on is freely available to download, which means any developer can write their own applications and tweaks for Android phones.
With switching from mobile provider 3 to Vodafone, I managed to negotiate a good deal on the contract - it's £40/month instore and I managed to get it for £20/month - that includes 600 minutes, unlimited texts and internet, as well as the free phone (worth £500). Also I have the option of starting a new contract after 15 months, obviously only if I stay with Vodafone (but my plan is to do so, as they're probably the best provider and loyalty is rewarded in this economic crisis - or at least if you tell them you're leaving it is!).
This is only the second Android phone on the market so far (with plans for about another 18 by the end of the year), following the G1 (aka HTC Dream) which was exclusive to T-Mobile. I was going to go for the G1 until I heard about its successor - a better phone on a better nework!
Within minutes of having the Magic perform simple tasks at the touch of my finger, I was enraptured by its user interface and functionality. The first thing I was asked to do was sign into my Google Account - this, I discovered a couple of minutes later, had automatically loaded my Gmail contact list into the phonebook - not particularly handy as I had no phone numbers in there, only email addresses - until I realised that once I transferred my numbers from my old SIM card - it automatically synchronised my contacts! Say I had Joe Bloggs stored as a phone number in my old nokia phone, and Joe Bloggs stored as an email address in my Gmail contacts - once I put them together I had one entry for Joe Bloggs with a phone number and an email address! And best of all - this contact list is constantly synchronised with my Gmail account so not only does it update both if I update one or the other, but it also means that I can never lose my contacts as they're always backed up automatically! It's the same for Google Calendar. Magic!
Apps
Once I'd got my head round how amazing the usability of the phone was, it was time to dip into the Android Market and see what apps were out there - I'd heard of a few good ones and wanted to see what else was available. It came loaded with Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Calendar, Google Talk and a bar code scanner (I'll come to that later) and these are the ones I've downloaded in the last two weeks (all for free):
- Shazam
- Hear a song and want to know the name/artist/album - this recognises songs and shows you the info
- Bubble
- Spirit Level - hold the phone horizontally, vertically or flat on a surface and the on-screen bubble "floats" to the centre of gravity
- handyCalc
- Scientific calculator (damn right!)
- Compass
- A dynamic navigational compass
- Metal Detector
- Yes, you heard right. This app actually analyses what you place the phone near and buzzes more the closer it gets to metal. It's not practical at all, as you pretty much have to know where to position the phone in relation to the metallic object to get it to buzz, but it is novelty
- Google Sky Map
- Point the phone at a part of the sky and it shows you the stars, planets and constellations - you can also search for them and it tells you which way to point the phone to find it
- The Schwartz Saber
- A light saber that makes the noise when you move the phone
- 0870
- Uses the database of SayNoTo0870.com to find geographical numbers to dial when you ring premium rate numbers
- My personal favourite - Where's My Android?
- You know when you misplace your phone, have to ring it to find it, then realise it's on silent? Well those days are over for Android users - with this app you set a particular word, and then when you can't find your phone you text it that word, and when it receives the text it turns silent off and starts ringing! Genius or what?
There are many more I have installed, little things like stopwatch, voice recorder, notepad, which come with phones as standard - but this way you get to pick and choose which one you use (like I did when I found out the standard calculator had only basic operations). There's also a good Facebook mobile app, as there is for Twitter, and a good multi-account IM client - ebuddy.
I've also got a few games I downloaded from the app market - sudoku, solitaire, ping pong, air hockey - the usual stuff - and also some brain training ones: MathPractice; Maths Workout; Iconic Memory; Slide Puzzle.
There are also widget apps you can download for the home screen - time & date, calendar, battery percentage, music player, etc.
The camera
How many mega pixels?? If I got a quid for every time I was asked that - as if the resolution of the picture is the only feature you can judge a camera on. It's like when people compare a high-res phone camera to a not-quite-so-high-res digital camera as if the phone will take a better quality picture, which it won't because it's not got the quality lens and focus of a digital camera. Anyway, rant aside, the camera's a 3.2mpx but it has a fantastic lens and focus! Nothing compared to a decent digital camera but very good quality for a phone.
The camera's focus quality comes into play for the aforementioned bar code scanner app - you can use the camera to scan the bar code of a product in a shop, research the product and compare prices online! You literally see and hear the lens focus in on the bar code in order to read it - it does the same when you're taking a normal photo - it adjusts focus automatically. If you scan a book, CD, game or something like that, you can read reviews, research information about it, as well as compare prices.
The video's ok. Nothing special but good enough (phone cameras are never going to replace digital cameras - their only purpose is for taking a picture or video when you don't have your camera on you).
Touchscreen
I love it. You can literally 'throw' icons, menus and page content to where you want it to go. Say with a web browser on a computer, to scroll down the page you would scroll down with the scroll bar or the mouse scroller, but on the web browser on the Android, to go further down the page, you touch the page and drag, or even flick, it upwards and out of view, bringing the below into view, as the same for up, left and right.
There's a menu bar along the top of the screen all the time (except in apps that use the full screen), this shows if you have any notifications (missed calls, texts, emails, downloads, etc.) on one side, and the time, your battery level, phone signal, 3G signal, and wifi signal and sync status when appropriate. If, say, you see you have a new text message, you touch the bar at the top and drag or flick it downwards to open it up and reveal the details. As for the tab at the bottom of the home screen, which you tap or drag/flick upwards to open, which shows all your installed apps.
When I talk about dragging or flicking things about, that's literally what it fells like when you touch something and move it - it feels like you're actually physically moving it with your fingertips, and when you drag the menu up or the notification bar down, it feels like you're actually holding it, pulling it up or down. On the home screen you have a selection of app shortcuts and widgets to start with, but this is 100% customisable - you can place icons wherever you want (none are locked), remove them, add new ones and add widgets. You have three screens: one central one, and one either side to the left and right. To get to each side you simply drag the screen to one side like you would with web content, move it out of the way to access another area. Each of the three screens has 4x4 grid for you to use as your canvas - icons take up a single 1x1 space and apps take up varying rectangular areas.
There's an interesting innovative unlock feature - you set a 'pattern' by dragging your finger over a sequence of nine pins on the screen, and you have to use that pattern/combination in order to unlock and gain access to the phone - this is in place of a PIN or password.
Google Maps
Other bits
Starred Contacts - in my opinion this is a much better, easier and more flexible function compared to standard Speed Dial, which requires you to assign up to 8 contacts to a number 2-9 (1 is voicemail) and memorise them. This is just a feature which allows you to 'star' a contact - like starring an email in Gmail, the empty star silhouette is there for you to tap to make them a starred contact - and then you open your list of starred contacts and pick from the list. I have a shortcut to my starred contacts on my home screen.
Buttons - this particular phone has 6 buttons on the front below the screen (green phone, red phone, home, menu, back & search), a tracker ball for precision (e.g. go back two spaces in a block of text while composing a text message), which is also a button (you can also use it to navigate but that's no fun!), and there's a volume up/down long button along one side.
Typing/Texting - this phone's predecessor, the G1, had a slide-out QWERTY keyboard but this one just has on-screen touch typing, which only took me a few days to get used to typing quickly on. I'm not perfect yet, I sometimes hit the full stop key which is next to the space bar. Occasionally I'll hit the wrong letter, where it'll usually pick up on the typo and automatically correct it. You can either type with it up-right (compromising keyboard width for extra viewing space) or rotate the screen to hold it horizontally in two hands like a PSP, using your thumbs to type).
It's good for suggesting/predicting words when you start typing them which is really useful for longer words, just saves you typing them in full - and it gives as many suggestions as it can fit along the screen (with an arrow to view the next ones). I was stumped for a few days on how to add new words to the user dictionary while typing them so that it could predict them in future, but I posted the question to the Android Community forum and the answer came within minutes - you just long press the word and it saves it.
One of the best things about this phone as a phone (as apposed to a palmtop gadget) is its conversation-view for text messages, similar to that of Gmail, whereby you see each part of a conversation rather than one message at a time, so if there's a text conversation between me and Joe Bloggs, it shows my message, then Joe's reply, then my reply, and back and forth following the conversation.
Menu Button & Long Press - long press (pressing and holding) is a really useful way of adding extra functionality without the use of buttons (on-screen or physical) - like if you're viewing a text message conversation you can long press a text message and it shows you a menu of options specific to the text message you pressed - call the sender, save the number, forward the text message, copy the content of the message, view the time & date of the message, etc.
The menu button (a physical button) is there so you can view the menu or settings of whatever you're viewing at the time (to save taking away space on the screen from what you're doing/viewing)
Music Player - the phone comes with a 1GB micro-SD card (which you can obviously replace with a bigger one) which is the ideal medium for data storage for pictures and videos (taken with the camera or transferred from your computer) and music. The music player is great as it organises your music into artists, albums, etc. and you can easily search for an artist or song or whatever. It's generally much more sophisticated than the previous generation of phone media players which usually only let you play, pause and skip - whereas this phone lets you drag across the timer to manually skip further on or back through the current song.
It comes with a nice smart little white leather case you can slip the phone in to to keep it protected in your pocket. This is great except for one tiny flaw - if I want to simply check the time (we all do it - who wears a watch these days?) I have to remove the phone from my pocket, slide it all the way out of the leather case to touch the menu button to turn the screen on to see the time.
For people like me, who use all the Google services anyway, and make full use of them - I can't see us ever going back from Android. Now I've lived like this I can't imagine going back! Not having my contacts synchronised with Gmail? Or my calendar? Or not being able to locate my phone with a single text message when it's on silent? Or not being able to pull a light saber out of my pocket at any time?
I've been following (in the Twitter sense as well as the normal sense) the development of Android and what to expect next from the project. Loads of phone companies are realising its potential and announcing launches of new Android-powered phones throughout 2009. Even some laptop manufacturers are playing around with it is an operating system for mini-notebooks - and before long I imagine we'll be seeing it on more powerful laptop machines. With any luck it could develop to much greater things and, I may be getting way ahead of myself here, it could be the dawn of the overtake of Microsoft Windows as the standard computer operating system, which would rid the world of dependency on hidden-source bug-ridden corporate systems and programs and give us the option to use (and develop) open source programs.
I've written about dozens of features of the phone but that's only a tiny proportion of what it can do. I honestly could have written twice that much again and still not touch the limits of the phone!
...Oh and I almost forgot - it makes and receives phone calls too!
Labels: Android, Featured, Google, Internet, Java, Programming
Posted by Ben Nuttall at 22:21 
Friday, 24 April 2009
MATLAB and Java Assignments
I've had a hectic week this week trying to get all my assignments in. I had a MATLAB assignment due in on Thursday and a Java one due in today.
The MATLAB one involved two questions: the first was a banking system which calculated interest and mortgage payments; the second was an animation of a sporting event. The first question involved a switch statement to begin, so the user was prompted to choose one of four options, each one taking them to a certain part of the code and allowing them to perform their chosen banking task. Within each of those I had to use nested for loops and if statements, taking input values and getting the loops to work out how to calculate the answer based on their inputs (for instance if the user entered 10 years, the loop would have to run 10 times), which was kind of fiddly but fairly easy. If you don't know what a for loop is, it's quite common in many programming languages, and here's a brief explaination:
for i = 1:10
a = 2*i
endThis means that the loop runs 10 times (for i=1, for i=2, ..., for i=10) and does the code inbetween each time. So the first time it runs, the variable i=1, so when i is multiplied by 2, a = 2 (in MATLAB this would return the answer each time). The second time, i=2 so a=4, then each time i increments by 2 until i=10 and a=20. This is a very basic example but there are many applications this can be used for.
For the animation, I had to draw the figures using x- and y-coordinates of polygons, filling them in with a chosen colour, and then use a for loop to change their coordinates (i.e. move all the x-coordinates one space to the left every time the loop runs). It started off as a simple yacht animation, but I got carried away when I added the second yacht and made it into a pirate chase with a bullet being fired.
It actually sailed smoother before I added the movement up-and-down, but the code to make it do this was rather complex and imaginative so I left it in to get more marks. I nested an if statement within the for loop:
for j = 0:120...
if rem(j,2)==0yboat = yboat + 1
elseyboat = yboat - 1
end
...
end
So every time the loop ran (the ellipsis doesn't show the bits of code that get the x-coordinates to move the the left), the if statement checks to see whether j is divisible by 2: if it is, the y-coordinates increment by 1; if not, they decrement. This makes the boat (and all its related shapes, again not shown) move up and down alternately. The assignment handout included a video of an animation worth 90% and it was much simpler than mine so I should have scored fairly well.
Once I had this finished and submitted I had to get on with my Java assignment: to make a simple sketching program in Java, as an applet for HTML. About 24 hours before the deadline I hadn't done much, only the very basics, and then spent most of the afternoon helping 3 other people to get that far, went to have a beak for about an hour and a half and went to train, then did a little more before going out to see the Inbetweeners at a club in Manchester, then woke at 10:00 the next morning to carry on with it, just 2 hours before the de this was only enough to get 40%. I worked on it every second for the next two hours, trying bits of code to get it to do more advanced fuctions, I added colours, a reset button, a change background colour function, different shapes, a text field, another text field, a change size field, and so on, until I had completed the list of functions to include, which were given with percentages of how much you would get if you did them, upto 70% (a First Class), and it said extra marks would be awarded for extra features and for the general 'look and feel' of the applet, so I should have done pretty well. I submitted at 11:59. Just in time. Here it is:
Java and MATLAB's m-code is very similar in what you can do and the code you use to do it, but MATLAB seems to be much simpler, for instance a simple if statement requiries the following: line 1 - a condition (e.g. if x>2); line 2 - a statement (i.e. do something); line 3 - else (or else if for another condition); line 4 - a statement (i.e. do something else); and more else if statements and conditions as required. Java requires brackets round the conditions and silly curly bracksets round the statements. Also, in MATLAB, when you type something it indents if accordingly, so when you write if, it turns blue and indents it, then on the next line it will indent further, then as soon as you type 'end' it turns blue and reduces the indentation creates a collapsing option for the if statement.
Next year's Java will be much more complex, with a much stronger emphasis on objects. As for MATLAB, I specifically chose the units which included MATLAB programming, one of which was about computer graphics and virtual environments, and most people who aren't interested in programming will have gone elsewhere so it should get much more hardcore.
Labels: Computers, Featured, Java, MATLAB, Programming, University
Posted by Ben Nuttall at 17:42
