We are currently in the organizational stage of the project and there are lots of things left to figure out. We need volunteers - that's one thing we know for sure. Should you have interest, do not hesitate to contact us with what you think you can bring to the organization. Keep checking the site and MobileCamp Montreal's official Twitter account for updates!

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.

Bill Shackett, a few minutes ago, wrote a comment in reply to one of my Xperia review and reminded me about all of this, and mostly about the junkware stories. I vented about that very thing quite passionately in two articles I wrote last month, and I thought it would be a good idea to write a post, instead of a reply to his comment, to answer his question: how the hell do you solve that problem? It's annoying, and if you're reading this chances are you agree with me. I don't mind bundled applications, I understand the motives behind their inclusion and have no problem with a little promotion where you can... when it's well done. Carriers and manufacturers should not make bundled applications uninstallable or worse, like Sony Ericsson for the X10a, completely hinder the operating system. The Xperia X10 is stuck on the 1.6 version of the Android OS when the current stable version is 2.2, because their attempted symbiotic integration into their obsolete version didn't pan out as they planned. They did promise an update to 2.2 in Q4 of this year... but by then, the OS will be even more advanced. Yes, they did good with the patch they released last week, but it really feels like an Apple-flavored cookie to basically say "hey, we're doing something. It's not what you want, but it's something, right?"

So I thought I'd explain to Bill and everyone of you how to get rid, as best as you can, of bundled applications on an Android platform. It's not foolproof, but it's working great for me.

Step 1: Get Startup Auditor

Startup Auditor is a program by VesperaNovus that allows you to control what applications are launched automatically when your phone starts up. Bill had an issue where Maps would always be running, and I agree, it's really annoying. Foursquare, Facebook, Weather Applications, most Twitter clients, and pretty much everything that could involve notifications and data update is running in the background on the Android. I like to control these things, I don't need the ones that I install myself, so I sure as hell don't need the bundled applications which I never run and are hidden from every menu to suck up battery juice while they sit and do nothing. Some applications conveniently have that option in their settings, but most don't, sadly. You can get it on the Android Market for 0.99$ - trust me, it's worth it just for one feature: aside from doing what it advertises, it also allows you specify if the application you prevent from running at startup should also be automatically killed when launched. So carriers can't play a timed auto-run trick on you. How's that for sticking it to the man?

Step 2: Get dxTop

I know it'll sound a bit restrictive for you maybe, but this is what I found to be the best solution. dxTop is an alternative Home application that has a lot of cool improvements over whatever standard (or carrier-bundled) versions of your default Home screen. One of them is a native task killer that you can access just by sliding a drawer, showing you which applications are running, recently used and which services are initiated. From there, you can long press any running apps' icon to kill it selectively, kill all apps, kill all services or just nuke everything. Now, I know the opinions on having task killers on Android are  mitigated. Some people need to have control and go against the intended  design and some claim having a task killer sucks as much resources as  you'd save by killing unwanted applications. My take? I agree with both.  I like to have control, and I can charge up whenever I need so battery  isn't that much of a concern to me. That's why I went with a task killer  - but not just any. I figured if I was going to spend resources on  something purely obsessive, I might as well make it worth it, so I went with a full home replacement with a native task killer. The one and only inconvenience with that is simply that you cannot have an ignore list of applications you might want to keep running, like your Twitter client and Google Talk for example. I'll have a more thorough article on dxTop once I finish evaluating a few applications for a top 10 list I am planning to write soon, dxTop is definitely on it though, of that I can assure you.

Step 3: Get Memory Monitor

Another advantage of running dxTop is this pretty cool widget called Memory Monitor. It'll sit one of your Home screens and show you a pretty (customizable) graph of your memory usage. Tapping it allows you to kill all apps or services to regain control of your resources.

Using these three things will allow you to tune your control over what runs at startup, what's allowed to be automatically open, and what you want to be running when you care enough to look at your resources usage. Plus with dxTop, you do it with mad style. I realize however that dxTop might not be your thing, there are lots of different tastes, habits and Home applications out there, but seeing as this one is my favorite, I hope I still managed to provide a viable solution, or at the very least inspiration, to Bill's problem. Lastly, I'd like to point you to Bill's website , or at least the one he wrote in the 'website' field of the comment form, an active little community of Xperia X10 owners/enthusiasts, which can sometimes come in as handy as the xda-developers forums themselves. I'm always amazed when a home link from a comment is not spam, I was almost knocked unconscious when it turned out to be a great find, so thanks for brightening my day!

Note: All the applications mentioned in this article are available on the Android Market. Sorry for the lack of QR codes. I realize some of the applications are not free and offer only a toned-down version to test out and they are available through other canals that enable you to obtain them for free. While I encourage the method for longer testing periods and more through evaluation of the features that are not available or modified in the free version, I also encourage the developers of this market. If you like the applications, please consider buying them or making a donation to their developer. Thanks!

Physical design

Image: Sony Insider

The first thing you'll ]notice about the Xperia X10 is that it's not as small as the iPhone. The Xperia's size is 119 x 63 x 13 mm while Apple's iPhone is 115.5 x 62.1 x 12.3mm. It's available in two colours at the moment: black and white. I got the white version because I figured it would be a nice change after two years with a black iPhone. When first looking at the X10, the first thing you'll notice is its huge 4" TFT screen with scratch-resistant coating. It's capable of displaying 65,636 colours (that's an Android 1.6 limitation, not hardware) in a 480x854 pixel resolution (as opposed to iPhone's 480x320px) which consequently is also the size you'll want to use when creating wallpapers. As a reference point and a joyful stab at Apple, the Xperia screen is bigger than the iPhone by 0.5". That's not all the Xperia is better at either, it's significantly lighter than a regular 16G iPhone too, although they both supposedly weight 135 grams. The Sony Ericsson branding on the front (silver text near the speaker and below the screen respectively saying "Sony Ericsson" and "Xperia") and the back (same text as the front with a green/blue embossed (!) Sony Ericsson logo) is really not that bad once you stop paying attention to it. Nobody came up to me and said "Oh that's the Xperia!" yet, so I consider that a good thing. As you would expect, it's mostly made out of plastic. The back cover (that you need to take off to get to the battery, miniSD card and SIM card) feels really cheap once it's off the rest of phone - I'll have to see how long that lasts. There's a 8.1MP camera on the back and I believe there's also an objective on the front, though I have yet to figure out how to use it (which means it may not be a camera at all). Near what I think is or might be a camera lens on the front is a little barely noticeable LED that, as far as I know, can flash three colors: red, green and blue - more on that later. Comparing the buttons and layout with the iPhone (because it's the most popular one at this time and also my previous model), it's not as intelligent and user-friendly as Apple, but it's not that far. There's three lean rectangle buttons below the screen: Menu, Home and Back with nice little white LEDs on each side of the middle (Home) button and that's it. Apple's one-button design is nothing short of genius, but the folks at Sony Ericsson have provided users with a more customizable feel to it - more on the buttons and their effect later. The top of the phone sports an 3.5mm standard audio outlet, a covered firewire plug and another small button used, as the iPhone, to power on/off or lock the device in various scenarios. The cool innovation here is the camera button that's on the right side of the phone near the bottom. Once you turn your X10a in a landscape position, that button is exactly where you'd expect it to be to perform the actions it does such as  camera shutter.

Hardware

It rocks a huge 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor that makes the phone pretty responsive and capable of running CPU-intense applications, as opposed to the 600MHz you'll find in a 3GS. There's 256MB of memory plus an extra 128MB reserved for graphics (the iPhone doesn't have that last part). It also does Bluetooth obviously. Hardware wise, that's really all I care about. It came bundled with a 16G miniSD card (I believe that's Rogers' doing and not Sony Ericsson since it's reportedly bundled with a 8G miniSD normally), a cheap pair of Sony Ericsson-branded headphones and a standard charger. The cool thing about the charger though is that it's just like Apple's: it's a miniUSB cable that you can use to plug in your PC or use it to plug in a power outlet using the adapter they provide. Convenient, I like it. There is however some things that are less appreciated due in part to the hardware. For one, the sound volume doesn't go very high. It could be a limitation of Mediascape since the alarm, notifications and ringers all seem to be louder than what songs played in Mediascape appear to be. Second, well there are no accessories for it yet - no screen protectors and no cases. I realize that's not really Sony Ericsson's fault, but the design of the phone is rather unconventional, very rectangle-ish so nothing that's out right now can be used with it efficiently.

Interface

Now that we have all that covered, let's use this thing. First thing you'll notice is the lockscreen. It really, really resembles Apple's (clock and wallpaper are displayed when locked) except that the swiping gesture you need to perform to unlock it is actually an arc starting from the bottom of the screen to the middle right part of it. Nice little clin d'oeil there. Once you get used to it it's really not a problem as you can imagine. The interface also reminds me of iPhones, but it's better in almost every way. I really hate that I haven't figured out how to take screenshots with it because it would make explaining this to you so much simpler... anyway. We all know what an iPhone screen looks like, right? Well keep that in mind, I'll use that to illustrate what's where and what does what. First, the app icons. Very similar, same concept. The Xperia however only has three pages of apps - you cannot have more with this crippled version. There are third-party applications such as Helix that will allow you to hack around that and basically create a new "homescreen application", but that's probably too advanced for most casual users so I won't cover it today. The homescreen manipulations are very similar to Apple's - tap to run an app, long tap to reorder it. Three major differences though; first you can add widgets to any of your pages. Widgets can be anything application-provided like Seesmic's Twitter ticker to the default widgets like the analog or digital clocks. One caveat regarding that though - there's lots of cool widgets and you can only usually add one per page since you run out of space and Android won't let you add any more. Icons plus widgets take a lot of room, it's a shame that there can't be more pages. Second, the statusbar is simply amazing. There's a big gap on the left side in which notifications appear. Notifications can be your new emails, new tweets, the song that's playing in Mediascape (for quick access to the player) or really anything that you would think of using the iPhone's push notifications for but implemented in a much usable way than Apple's. See, if you tap the statusbar than drag down, you'll pull a new window that contains all your notification - IN TEXT! - without having to open the application. How amazing and convenient is that?? And that's not the coolest part. On every notification, there's a LED on the front of the phone, kind of like the BlackBerry's annoying orange/red indicator but much smoother, that can flash in red (low battery), blue and green, as defined by the application sending the notification. A-ma-zing. My emails flash green and my new Twitter mentions flash blue. I can know why my phone beeps without so much as touching it. Beat that, Apple. The same concept applies for the bottom. There is no static dock on the Xperia, but you can access your menu (where all your applications reside since you can't possible have enough of 3 pages to put all your icons and restricting the number of applications you can have would be a suicide for the Android platform) the same way, by tapping the bottom and dragging up, pulling the application menu along the way. Very cool. For more information and a video of the interface in action, check out Gizmodo - but make sure you don't forget anything there.

The one thing that annoys me about all that interface though are the applications themselves. I'm coming from an iPhone background, I'm not used to have shit running all the time and I get paranoid about my battery usage (which with the Xperia easily lasts me for a whole day - no matter what I do or don't do). It's obvious that for their notification system applications need to run in the background and there are a lot of "task managers" available on the Android Market... but it's still kind of annoying. Unneeded things like Mediascape and Timescape can be running at any given time for no apparent reason, same for camera and other apps that really don't belong in the background process list.

All in all, do I think the Xperia X10 is better than an iPhone? It's hard to answer. When compared side to side, there are pros and cons to each device and the manufacturer behind it. Apple had two years to perfect its design, strengthen its userbase and plant a standard usage inside everyone's head. It will definitely be interesting to see where those new Android devices lead us. So do I think the Xperia is better than an iPhone? It's too early to tell, but what I really love about it is that it's an equally viable alternative to something that was beginning to reek of  oppression and restriction. For that, we should all be thankful.

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 one 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.

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)

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.

One thing you should know at this point is that Rogers actually owns Fido - so Rogers is Fido's parent company. Concretely, for Fido customers, that means that at any given point within your Fido contract, you can break your agreement and switch to Rogers. Of course, Fido will fine you a hefty fee for doing so... but Rogers, after 30 days, will reimburse the fee, effectively switching you from Fido to its parent company while getting you a new device (and a 3 year contract) cheaply in the process. That's exactly what I did. However, I ran into some trouble that I will not speak of here as it's been resolved. Suffice it to say that Rogers independent stores are really adamant about their policies.

So after some clerk troubles, I had my Xperia X10 all set up. The switch from Fido to Rogers only took three minutes to take effect - I had both phones activated, the Xperia with Rogers using a temporary number and my iPhone with Fido using my regular number. After a few minutes, I received a text message on the Xperia saying my number had been successfully transferred to my new account. Seeing as I had to be somewhere around the same time I got my phone, I didn't take the time to sit down and play with it immediately. I put the SIM card and the battery in, booted it up and walked to where I was headed.

Well, I was pleasantly surprised by what followed. As I was walking (fast!) on the street, my Xperia was prompting me to perform the initial set-up: online services (Twitter, Facebook, etc), localization (time zone), location services (GPS) and the like. All in all, very, very convenient. The first thing I set up was my Google account. I had read that Android had seamless integration with Google Apps, and it was time to test it so I entered my Google Apps credentials instead of my actual Google (GMail) account ones. Without missing a beat, I had my contacts on my phone, just like that. I then set up my Twitter and Facebook accounts - but all that did was add them to Sony Ericsson's Timescape. Still, pretty cool. So at that point, my Xperia X10 was ready to use, although only half-charged out of the box. The most important thing after my initial set-up, to me, was to have access to my contacts and Twitter account. It did that flawlessly - and that's when I started being impressed and very happy with my new acquisition. Then came the playing around...

Sitting at a bar in Montreal, watching the Canadiens get beat by the Penguins in game one of the NHL semifinals, I started tinkering with the phone, getting a feel of what was where and  what did what. First reactions from a 2 years iPhone user? The on-screen keyboard seems slower than the iPhone's. Also, the autocomplete cannot, at this point, rival the iPhone's dictionary completion. Still, it's negligible and there's always the possibility that I'll get used to it as time goes by. The interface is very nice and polished. The screen, bigger than the iPhone's, is much more responsive than what I'm used to. So, this is when I start checking out the default applications. I figure it's better to make a different post for each review, so check out the Android tag archive for it!

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.