Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Windows 7 Mobile Operating Thingy for Whatsits - does anyone care?

I was at Google IO last week.  Talk about iPhones was everywhere - people thinking about how the Android vs iPhone battle was going to play out.

Windows 7 Mobile Operating Thingy for Whatsits (or whatever they're calling it these days) wasn't talked about.  Not at all.  Zero. Nada.

The Kin?  Again, nothing.  Crickets.

I hear there was trivial shakeup at Microsoft today.  Whatever.

Do the people at Microsoft understand how bad things are?  Sure doesn't seem like it.

Monday, May 24, 2010

Android carriers and phones - Sprint, TMobile, Verizon, ATT, Droid, Evo, iPhone, Nexus One

We're just finishing up a trip to San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego. Between me and my fiancee we're carrying around four cell phones (thanks to giveaways at Google IO):

  • Droid/Verizon
  • HTC Evo/Sprint
  • iPhone 3G/ATT
  • Nexus One/TMobile (my fiancee's phone)
Our reactions to the carriers and phones so far:

Droid/Verizon: works great, works everywhere, but you need a forklift to carry this thing around. The Droid is clearly an engineering prototype that someone from marketing stole from the lab. It's just not a shipping product, no way, no how.

However, since I'm a geek, carrying around the engineering prototype hasn't been that bad.  When I was carrying around the Droid and the iPhone 3G, I'd almost always pull out the Droid.  I'd really only pull out the iPhone for UrbanSpoon.

HTC Evo/Sprint: The new hotness.  The screen is bigger than my laptop.  It's fast.   It's got some lame software on it called "Sense" - sometime soon I'll need to figure out how to disable it, but it's only mildly annoying so far.

Sprint has been surprisingly good - no coverage problems in urban areas so far, and very good coverage on the train between LA and San Diego (with some dropouts where geography was pretty obviously terrible - Camp Pendleton for one).

iPhone 3G/ATT: I'd like to tell you about ATT's coverage, but I almost never pull the iPhone out of my pocket.  It feels archaic at this point.

Nexus One/TMobile: Very nice phone, but as far as we can tell TMobile isn't actually in the business of providing wireless connections to cell phones with any sort of reasonable coverage.  Just pathetic.  TMobile isn't worth considering as a provider.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Android - loading a javascript file from a web page needs internet permission

If you're trying to include javascript in an android.webkit.WebView view with a standard script tag like this:
<script language="javascript" src="demo.js" />
You need to add internet permissions to your manifest:
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" />
Doesn't seem to matter that the file is local.