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…

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)

About that whole Pirates-going-to-jail thing…

You can show your support for the Pirate Bay by flying the Music Pirate Flag at half mast on your blog/website/forehead. Right-click and take it away!

Props to Atom X for creating it for me and you.
Music Pirate Half Mast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.makeitfall.com.

The original SVG version is here.

“Revolution is not an apple that falls from the tree when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.”

-Che Guevara

A friend shared this video with me saying I had to hear it. The video is at the bottom of this post or over at Multiply. I’ve never heard of Louis C.K. before, but that guy raised an interesting debate while on the set of Conan O’Brien‘s late night show. He’s saying that “we live in an amazing, amazing world and it’s wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots“. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a truer phrase. After discussing it with like-minded people, I came to question it on some degree. Let me explain a bit. basically, CK is explaining that most of the civilized world’s dwellers are taking everything for granted. They cry in outrage when trivial things go wrong – when their Internet goes out or isn’t fast enough, when their cell phone can’t get a signal and things like that. So, at this point, he’s absolutely right.

Now think of it this way. Every single generation thinks the one succeeding it is lazy, spoiled and ignorant. We can even go back to prehistoric times when the wheel was invented and fire was found! Picture Mr. Cro-Magnon saying the following: “Oh, look at those guys using their ‘wheels’ and ‘fire’! Ooooh, look at me, I’m too good to walk and eat raw mammoth meat!” Does it strike you as out of place? It shouldn’t, because it probably happened (in grunts and other creative guttural sounds, but still). This must’ve been said by someone at some point in every generation.

So this raises the question: do we actually take our lifestyle for granted, or is it just a natural evolution of needs and habits? Are we slaves to our technologies, or do they simply improve our way of life? Could you imagine a life without Internet and cell phones? I don’t think I personally could. I was born in the very early days of Internet and cell phones were inexistent still, but within the first 10 years of my life, computers started to be a common thing, and people started to rely on it. How many jobs (and lives) currently depend solely on the computer? I know mine does!

more…

The Montreal tech scene is thriving, especially in 2008 – or maybe I just became more involved and hence notice and participate in more things. Either way, last night was Montreal’s first CelebrateCamp which was held at the newly renovated Radio Lounge on the Main. “Camp” events, for those of you who are not familiar with the term are basically a kind of “open source” unconference. Wikipedia describes it as such:

An unconference is a facilitated, participant-driven conference centered around a theme or purpose. The term “unconference” has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid one or more aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees and sponsored presentations.

So there, it was basically a big meeting of select people who have a marked interest for that specific event. It was organized by Austin Hill and the profits generated from ticket sales were given to Montreal Children’s hospital. We raised around 4000$ so it can’t be considered a bad thing. It was pretty nice actually, we had plenty of room to talk and meet people. I’m guessing that the fact that it was held on a Thursday night kind of slowed things down a bit, but then again people weren’t going clubbing, they were socializing. With that in mind, I have a few deceptions. First of all, most of the attendees were Twitterers. I walked in there with the feeling that I knew everyone, but that I couldn’t identify anyone. Name tags with Twitter usernames would have been great to identify people. I didn’t meet everyone I wanted to meet, mostly because I had no idea who they were. However the whole thing was organized in what, 2 weeks? So I’m considering it a success anyway. Also, people didn’t really hang around. By midnight there were about 50 of the 150 people that were there at 10 that were still there, and when the bar closed I can safely say that we were two left. Are geeks early sleepers? Or was it because it was Thursday? Or because everyone was keeping their party stamina for the Station C party the next day? Well, whatever it was, I met three people, which is disappointing.

But I had fun, and we raised 4k$ for kids. Can’t be bad.

See the Twitter tag and the Flickr tag. For an accurate tweet-recap of the party in two nice animations, head over to Michelle’s blog and have a chuckle on me.