This week was very interesting in the mobile world. Both David and Goliath were too busy dealing with their own bad press to worry about smacking each other in the face.

On Friday, Internet erupted with pretty serious accusations against Motorola and how they allegedly booby-trapped their Droid X, their flagship Android-powered superstar, so that no ROM hacking could be done whatsoever.. otherwise the device would pretty much self-destruct.

On the same day, Mark Milian from the LA Times wrote a piece on the inclusion of useless applications by carriers and the reasons behind it.

Absolutely Android put up an article titled “Why Motorola should be asked to  leave the Open Handset Alliance“, which maybe was a bit of an overreaction that we all shared at that point, but ended up somewhat appeased when Motorola “clarified” the situation. Yes, it’s arguable.

Around the same time, Apple was in damage control mode with the iPhone 4 antenna fiasco leading up to the press conference on Friday, where Steve Jobs openly admitted he actually is considering refunds and is giving shit away to avoid a mutiny among his unholy horde. Apple. Giving back money and free shit. Because they fucked up.

It was definitely a very interesting week in the mobile world. more…

My last post about Sony Ericsson’s Xperia X10  was a bit of a rant, as a friend pointed out. He’s not wrong… but I think it’s justified considering the obvious quality (or lack of) of their applications – both mobile and desktop. Anyway, I felt it was fair game to give my readers a more objective perspective on it because I’ve been asked after people have read my last few posts if I hated the Xperia – and I truly don’t, so something must have been unclear or my sentiments weren’t properly displayed. I never said I was a qualified blogger, I just thought I’d put the info out there because there’s so few of it as of this moment on the Internet. Keep in mind that I’ve switched to the Xperia last week after using an iPhone 3G for two years. There will be some heavy comparing done here. So here comes a more professional, if you will, review of the X10a.
more…

Oh god, Sony Ericsson’s apps are fucking horrible.

Mediascape or how not to design a media player

Oh yeah, you read that right. Mediascape is one of the worst piece of shit that I’ve ever got to see on/for a mobile device, and I’ve been using a cell ever since you could install Java-powered games on them, so I’ve seen a lot of shitty things. Mediascape and Timescape are just excuses for Sony  Ericsson to claim a branding over the Xperia and the Android platform. They’re utterly useless, badly designed, proprietary and do not take into consideration user preferences or ability to customize whatsoever. And that’s only the apps that run on the phone itself.  I won’t go into details because these apps aren’t even worth taking the time to talk about them more than I already am. Suffice to say that I don’t know anyone who would use them. As you can guess, I’m extremely dissatisfied with Mediascape… and the best part? You can’t fucking uninstall it. It’s shoved on the platform, it’s permanently running in the background and, as if that wasn’t enough, it’s the default viewer for the photos you take with your camera, the videos you have on your device and eeeevery song you want to listen to. Really Sony, if you wanted to force shit on your users, at least do it in a way that users won’t feel like they’re missing out on a bunch of features, do it like Apple.

Well then, let’s hope Timescape is better?

You would think so, yeah. But no. Timescape is a nifty little concept that theoretically aggregates all your social stuff in on

e application. Twitter, Facebook, SMS messages, Emails, every social interaction you have. It fails brilliantly at all of them. First, I consider myself a social power user. I love Twitter and I tweet a lot. Timescape does not allow me to do anything with Twitter except read my friends’ timeline. I can’t filter replies or direct messages (or even see them clearly). Facebook, meh, I’m not really a Facebook user so it didn’t really matter to me. But all the status updates from Facebook are tossed in WITH the Twitter updates in one cute little stack-thing. Can you see how it’s hard to find/notice anything in that yet? Alright, there’s more. Add to that your emails and your SMS, in chronological order. Nothing tells you this stack is an email or an SMS. You can’t compose or reply. Again, this useless piece of shit your default application for emails, Twitter and Facebook when you first use the phone. Thank god for the Android Market.

Wow, that’s two for two in the shitty department. How about PC/Sync apps?

Yeah, they’re not getting better here. The apps that Sony Ericsson wants you to use on your (Windows, obviously) PC are even worse. Media Go and PC Companion are just one notch above vaporware. Media Go is Sony Ericsson’s alternative to iTunes for iPhone. Considering that iTunes is already one of the worst applications available for Windows, it shouldn’t be too hard to do better. Well, they somehow managed. For one, I couldn’t install Media Go from the installer that’s forcibly located on my miniSD card. I could however install PC Companion… with which I tried installing Media Go to no avail. I had to go to their site, manually download the application and run it. All that so that I can create playlists for Mediascape… because Mediascape doesn’t offer the feature. Yeah, that’s right. A media player that doesn’t allow you to create playlists. Sony Ericsson just thinks you should toss all your mp3 on your phone, unorganized, and shuffle through it. Thanks Sony, but I have my own way of  listening to music, and as a distributor, you’re supposed to facilitate it, not force your listening habits onto your consumers. I have resorted to transferring my files using the USB cable and my file browser (which also means it works under Linux, by the way), manually creating a M3U playlist with a shell script (oh yeah) and using Astro to validate/re-create that playlist on the Android. All that because Sony Ericsson’s media player does NOT allow you to create playlist. Or delete them for that matter. How fucking annoying is that?

It says a lot about Sony Ericsson that Timescape and Mediascape are their first selling point for the Android…

In other news, I still haven’t figured out how to take a god-damned screenshot.

Alright so it’s been a week since I’ve switched from my beloved iPhone to Sony Ericsson’s Xperia X10a and Android. So far, I have to say I’m impressed with it. It’s a really good, fast and responsive device that covers most of the features the iPhone has and even improves some. Keep in mind though that my iPhone was jailbroken about a month after I bought it, so some features, such as StatusNotifier, are somewhat taken as “default” for me. That being said, here’s what I have to say about the Xperia X10 after a week of usage:

Even if Android is an open platform, distributors (Sony Ericsson) and carriers (Rogers) will do everything they can to lock you in and make your device feel as proprietary as possible. In my mind, an open platform like Android means I can happily hack away ANYTHING I want. One of the first question I asked the Rogers’ representative who was selling me the Xperia X10 was “So, be honest here and tell me how Sony Ericsson and Rogers have crippled this phone?” and obviously he couldn’t answer. Well, you heard it here first, this phone is crippled. For one, the Xperia ships with Android 1.6. As a little progress indication Android 1.6 was released in September 2009. 2.1, which is the current version, was released a month later, on October 26th 2009 – although we’ll give Sony a bone here and say that the 2.1 SDK was only released on January 12th 2010. Sony’s explanation for using 1.6? None. Supposedly, their Timescape and Mediascape softwares are incompatible with the latest Android version. In other words, the two shittiest proprietary force-bundled apps on your device make that same device unable to be up to date. Fun isn’t it? They’ve announced a 2.1 upgrade available in Q4 of 2010… which means half a year at a minimum. By that time, my guess is I’ll already be running 2.1.

I’ve found some cool applications that I’ll blog about soon, customized some things but nothing as intense as jailbreaking an iPhone. I’m still relatively in the ‘acceptable usage’ realm for now, and the interesting thing is that I don’t feel I need more. The Android Market really has all you need – although some applications are not in it (like Helix for example). The hard part is really just to figure out which app is worth it and which isn’t. The Android Market is open, which means everything is on there… which, I’ve come to realize, is not always a good thing.

All in all though, the Xperia is a great device. Its hardware is pretty impressive and the device itself is built very well. My grudge against Sony Ericsson lies with the sub-par applications they’re forcing their users to use. However, like any mobile device, the X10a requires a bit of tinkering before it does and looks the way you want it to. For example, the default keyboards are… well, ordinary. The HTC keyboard on the other hand works amazingly well for me, I can type as fast as I used to with my iPhone without having to learn a new keyboard/finger-positioning layout.

Another thing I have against Sony Ericsson is the completely useless support documentation they provide. This device is recent, there aren’t that much HOWTOs and tutorials available to do this and that on the ‘net so far… so figuring out simple stuff like how to add your own custom ringtones/notification sounds is extremely annoying (yeah, I’ll make a post about that). I haven’t found a need to debrand the X10a so far… but I’m not done playing with it.

Overall, I’m happy with my switch.

While we’re here… here are two very useful resources for your X10a:

XDA Developers forum

Xperia X10 Blog

Sony Ericsson’s support site (remember how I said two very useful resources? Yeah. This is number 3. Draw your own conclusions)

Wow, what an adventure this has been. Getting out of a  contract and into a new one with a parent company? Not as easy as you’d think. I’ll spare you the story, and instead, direct you to the Twitter rant that ensued the saga. Textual version: I went to a Rogers store during my lunch break to get the Xperia X10 from Sony Ericsson. First off, let me explain what carriers that are available to mobile users in the province of Quebec: Theoretically we have several carriers to choose from: Bell, Solo, Telus, Koodo, Videotron, Virgin, Rogers, Fido and Public Mobile, but technically, those are really only two carriers: Bell and Rogers because Solo, Telus, Koodo, Videotron and Virgin borrow Bell’s network and Fido borrows Rogers‘. As for Public Mobile, it was granted by the CRTC rights to operate in Canada as an independent carrier. As for the rest of Canada, Shaw, SaskTel and Manitoba Telecomm Services (MTS) are also available.

That being said, I’ve had a contract with Fido for about four years. I broke/renewed that contract two years ago when Apple’s iPhone came out in order to benefit from their “get the iPhone 3G for 149$ with a three year contract” offer. I don’t have a thing to say about Fido, they’ve been great. However, my iPhone is getting old. A new one is coming out in June (presumably). Thing is, I lost my iPhone 3G in a cab recently. I didn’t expect to see it again. I was iPhone-less for a week. That week made me think that maybe it was time to look at new devices. Seeing as I’m an open-source enthusiast and a Linux advocate, I looked into Android devices first. A friend of mine then told me he had seen Sony Ericsson’s Xperia X10 in action through another friend and that, as an avid iPhone user, had been impressed. I figured if he was impressed, being a jailbroken iPhone user, it was worth looking at. I looked up the device, read reviews, specs and videos and decided it was a good choice for my switch to Android. So, after having looked at that alternative… the taxi driver I lost my iPhone in calls me to tell me he’s found my phone. I get my beloved iPhone back, but the damage is done. With Apple/Steve Jobs’ latest antics against open source and platform accessibility, I had a score to settle. I had already been getting in my head the thought of having a new smart phone, and if you’re an iPhone power user like I am, you know it’s no small task to find something even remotely as useful as the iPhone. But in my opinion, I had with the Xperia X10. more…

This blog somehow became very popular among iPhone hackers and users in the last year, mostly due to my Cydia articles and iPhone HOWTOs. Well, I hope you enjoyed that cause that’s not gonna happen anymore; this Friday, I’m getting an Android. Why? Well I’m glad you asked.

1. Number one reason to justify this switch can be said very simply: Apple. Their product was revolutionary – the iPhone is to the cell phone market what the iPod was to the MP3 Players market and don’t get me wrong, it’s an amazing product. There is, however, a divergence of ideas in my relationship with Apple. They like their users locked in, powerless, doomed to abide by Apple’s terms of services. What’s worse than that is that Apple has absolute power over what it created. It’s not wrong per se – hardware-wise (hello, Gizmodo!), but for everything else, it’s a dictatorship. Everything is closed-sourced. Apple has the right (and abuses it) to refuse third party applications for whatever reason they choose, even if it’s merely because it implements a feature better than the way Apple implemented it, but they’re not afraid to steal features from said third-party developers when comes the time to release a new OS (WinterBoard, BossPaper, Backgrounder, etc). Look up what they’ve done in the last few years, from their multiple app refusals to their unsaid definition of the future of Mobile… I will not support that.
2. Another reason would be that, well, I’ve been there and I’ve done that. I know the iPhone inside and out and there’s not much left that I can experiment save from taking the thing apart (which I will invariably end up doing with my 3G once I get an Android).
3. Sony Ericsson just came out with the Xperia X10, and she’s a beauty. It’s available on Rogers with for a relatively expected cost. I’m still debating the device a bit, but it’ll be an Android. It’s not an iPhone, but it’s pretty damn close. Close enough to be familiar and different enough that it might be a whole other thing.
4. Android. It’s backed by Google. It’s open-source. I like the philosophy, anyone who knows me know that I’m a fierce open-source advocate, it makes sense to support an open-source community and leave a tyrannical one, even if the alternative wouldn’t be as good. Fortunately, it appears to be.
5. I will not need to hack it up to get it to do what I want. Well okay, Rogers (my carrier) has locked the Xperia X10 to Android 1.6, and I will have to investigate as to why they’ve done that. I might need to hack around a bit to stick it to the man and get Android 2.1 on it, but that’s expected. Carriers are abusive, restrictive assholes and will always be – I’m willing to deal with that for lack of viable alternatives.

All that to say that from this point on, this blog (whatever it is) will turn its focus from the iPhone to the Android, more specifically and in all likelihood, the Xperia X10… with Rogers. I will document my evolution with this new and unknown world that is Android and hope that it will help you solve your problems or maybe even convince you that Apple is the new Microsoft, and you should switch before you side with a corporate giant who wants to control and restrict everything there is going to be about the emerging market that is mobile.