The nice part of it is you don’t touch the s/w so it doesn’t void your warranty and doesn’t anger CuperGods.

he bad part of it is each time you reboot the phone, you have to do a 20 second song and dance to make it work. (See the instructional video). It is a minor irritant, but the upside is great.

My wife is using it on Airtel 3G in India and it works just fine.

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After my switch to Android, almost all of my personal data is now stored in the cloud.  My emails, calendar, contacts and the works.  I have long preferred online tools such as 37Signals over native clients for most of the stuff I do.  In addition to this, being a web developer, I have a handful of personal software that is hosted by my servers that I use to do things like expense tracking.

Having said that, my demand for fast desktop computing is huge as well.  I am a heavy Lightroom and Photoshop user and being a programmer, I need all the programming tools needed for that – a *nix based OS that can handle both Adobe products as well as *nix based development tools, for which OSX fits the bill perfectly today.  My primary machine is an i5 MacBookPro, but I don’t use any of the built in OS software any more (AddressBook, Mail etc).

The most used software for me are Google Chrome, Adium, Terminal, Lightroom, RubyMine, Textmate and Photoshop.  About once a month, I use iMovie to transfer movies from my camcorder and do basic edits on that.

I know I didn’t mention MS Office.  I use MS Office about once every two weeks to open a work document that is a PPT or a Word doc.  But for my personal use, I have migrated to Google docs.  Most personal documents are generally collaborations with the spouse or others and Google docs work just well.  [And Google, you shouldn't have killed Wave.  I was using it.]

I was intrigued when ChromeOS was announced many months ago and was immediately skeptical about its limitations.  But as more and more of my data and managing it has moved online and accessed through my Android phone, I saw the use for it.  But I had to try it nonetheless.

I signed up for the Chrome OS Pilot Program the minute it was announced.  I was a bit bummed that I did not receive the netbook when many others started to receive it and was quite surprised that it showed up yesterday.  Turns out my pal at Google Sanjeev had nominated me for the Netbook .  This review and experience wouldn’t be possible without him, so my thanks to him.  I owe him for this one (amongst other things .

Chrome and its AppStore

I switched to Chrome as my primary browser almost instantly after it was launched for Mac OSX.  I was mainly attracted by its speed, but stayed because of its built in developer tools.  For someone who is Javascript and CSS challenged as I am, the developer debugging tools and code inspection is brilliantly done.  Yes, I know these are available in Firefox and Safari as well, but I find that these are extremely fast in Chrome and I like the overall experience.  I mean how often do you open a PDF and not realize that you are reading one?  I have opened PDFs and see  that this doesn’t look like HTML only to realize I am reading a PDF inline in the browser, PDF that opened instantly and behaves like a HTML document!

I also let Chrome manage my bookmarks and sync them to the cloud and I also let it manage and sync my extensions and themes as well.  That makes me a near perfect candidate for the ChromeOS.

As a person who naturally gravitates towards webapps, the new age HTML5 based webapps have been an eye opener.  I installed the Chrome WebStore as soon as it was installed and played around with Grooveshark, NyTimes, USA Today, NPR and the Amazon window shop apps – if you haven’t tried these yet, you should and see the difference for yourself.

My Chrome WebStore

As Mashable noted, the iPadification of WebApps seems like generally a good thing.  I see why iPad owners love their iPads.  Could this also mean that the underlying technology for these apps is HTML5, CSS and JS wrapped around by a thin Cocoa layer?  If that is the case, then we are in for a fun few years ahead when more and more webapps start using these technologies and change the way we interact.

At this point, I should add, I am sold for webapps as the future.  As I mention above, I would still have big beefy computers to run my Photoshop and code, but I expect almost everything else will be done online.

CR48

Engadget and AnandTech have great reviews of the CR-48 and hardware.  That covers almost all you need to know about the hardware and packaging.

The CR48 shipped with almost a fully charged battery.  I was up and running in less than 30 seconds.  I am still shocked by this experience.  Since I use Chrome and I enabled sync there, I got all my bookmarks, extensions and all my apps after login.  It is as if I never left my MacBookPro.  I didn’t expect anyone to top the user experience of setting up an Android phone and watch it sync all your data from the cloud, but the ChromeOS setup did it .

I am pleasantly surprised how elegant the hardware is.  It reminds me of the 13″ Black MacBook in many ways.  The chicklet keys, the fit and finish, the way the lid latches on.  They keyboard has been very well through through.  The “function” keys are acutally useful.  Having a dedicated key for back, forward, reload, full screen and switch tabs is brilliant.  Makes a lot of sense when the only app you are going to use is the browser.

It is instant

Between the SSD and the lightweight OS, CR 48 is FAST.  Cold boot is less than 20 seconds or so.  Wake from sleep is about a second or less.  Waking from sleep works flawlessly (I can’t believe I am saying about a linux based OS) and it takes less than a second.  BRILLIANT.

The browser

The webapps I tried on this so far have all worked very well.   Javascript execution seems pretty fast.  I can’t tell the difference between using an app like Grooveshark or picnik between my MBP and the CR-48.  SD videos play well.  HD video SUCKS since flash doesn’t do hardware acceleration.  Adobe says they are working on hardware acceleration on linux and it is a top priority.  I hope they do it soon since right now that is the big stumbling block.

That is quite an anti climax from a review point of view.  This is the full Chrome browser and it executes Javascript blazingly fast and renders HTML instantly.  It is as simple as that .

You can open multiple instances of the browser if you are not a tab guy by using Ctrl N.  You have to use Alt-Tab to switch between windows.  You can use Ctrl – tab or the switch tabs button to cycle through tabs.  The wrench at the top right pops you with a settings menu, where among other things, YOU CAN CHANGE THE SEARCH BUTTON TO CAPS LOCK, which I had to do since I was hitting the CAPS LOCK quite often and annoyed that it was launching a new tab all the time.

I mean that really is it.  Every webapp I tried works as well it works on Chrome on the MBP.  What else is there to say!  Google promised a browser as the OS, and it works .

Battery life seems to be GREAT.  I used the CR48 for about 6 hours yesterday and the battery was down to 35%.  This is totally usable without a recharge for a full day or more.

The OS

There is some basic stuff available in the OS.  Shift – Escape opens a task manager with a “stats for nerds” link .

Task Manager

Ctrl Switch Tabs takes a screen shot and Ctrl O opens the downloads folder that has the screenshots.  Incidentally, you can download files to your download folder and open it by using Ctrl O.

Downloads

But when I tried to upload an image from my WordPress web console editing this blog (this is written on the CR-48 of course), I get a full file manager instead of the downloads directory.  I am absolutely sure that non-geeks would be totally lost here.  I could navigate to ~chronos and find my way through, but this is something that should be addressed.

File manager!

Shell

One of the things I want to see is if I can use the CR 48 on the road for emergency coding.  Ctrl Alt T opens a basic shell with basic commands.

Thankfully crosh supports SSH and you can SSH into any other box.

Crosh

The other way to get to remote boxes is by using WebVNC.  If you can run a VNC server on the remote server, you can connect to it from the browser by using WebVNC app on the Chrome web store.

The OS itself does not allow you to compile or run stuff on it, you need to get out of the shell to another server to do your stuff.

Usable in a pinch.  I am headed on a roadtrip shortly and I plan to leave my MBP behind and take the CR 48 alone.  I expect the shell and SSH to come in handy for emergency fixes.

BTW, I could use some help with the font size of crosh.  If you are Chrome OS developer and you know how to push the font size of crosh up, please let me know.

And yes, you can open multiple crosh shells and you can switch to them by using alt-tab .

You can also enable developer mode by flipping the jailbreak switch and you get access to a better shell.  I tried that, but once you do that, the OS warns you every time you login that the image can’t be verified and you have to do a CTRL D to make it go away.  Not very non-geek friendly.  I have turned it off for the moment.  If I do need the full shell, I would do that for a short period.

A much discussed thread about using the CR 48 for development can be found here.

And yes, someone has already installed Windows on the CR 48 using the developer mode.

What else do I need?

This would also make a great movie player for the kids.  I need to figure out how to attach a USB thumb drive to the USB port and make it work, find out if there is a media player app to play videos off the thumb drive.  If that works, it would make an awesome addition for an already cool device.

Conclusion

As you can tell, I like it.  A lot.  But I buy into cloud based computing and I am ok with my data living in the cloud.  If you do that, you will like the ChromeOS.  If you are uncomfortable with that idea, then it will take a while for you to like ChromeOS .  But you’ve been warned – this, my friends, is the future.

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Update 1:

If you agree with the critique of Boxee’s GUI elements in this review, please chime in here at Boxee’s feature request page.

Update 2:

I am amazed that @Boxee's product manager wrote to me an hour after I wrote a boxee review. Thanks! I hope you guys succeed in a big way.

November 12, 2010 3:57 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

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anand

Update 3:

@boxee Any chance of getting pre 1.0 GUI elements for local media back? Too many clicks to get there and lack of genre filtering sucks.

November 12, 2010 7:41 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

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anand

@boxee in twitter (Avner?) told me that they are addressing some of the GUI issues.

@obelix74 we are going to fix both

November 12, 2010 8:07 pm via Twitter for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite

@boxee

boxee

Prelude

As you might know, I am quite a fan of Boxee.  I have been using Boxee software on a Mac hooked to the TV whenever I have it available and it solved almost all my problems from my past HTPC attempts.

The Boxee Box has been the device I was waiting for almost an year now, from the day it was announced.  I have used it extensively for the past three days, here are my initial thoughts.

Hardware

I actually like the shape of the boxee box.  It has an attitude of its own.  You either like it or you hate it, which is what the designers intended.

I hooked the Boxee to my TV using HDMI and my Yamaha sound bar using Optical cable.  Works perfectly.  My Yamaha sound bar supports both DTS 5.1 and Dolby surround sound and from what I have heard so far, it is awesome. I am not an audiophile (hence the Yamaha sound bar), so take that with a pinch of salt.

Most of my personal video content is in M4V or MP4 files (thanks to AppleTV and Mac based video editing).  All my music is in MP3 and all photos in JPG.

All my files are hosted in a NetGear ReadyNAS which is hooked to a Gig-E enabled Apple Airport Extreme.  The boxee is hooked to the Airport Extreme using ethernet as well.

It has played all my local content well so far.  I read some nasty reviews in Amazon regarding how badly it plays .AVI files – I don’t have any first hand experience of this or Blu Ray .iso files.  I do plan to test DVD .iso files and will update the blog based on that.

A friend noticed a bug with .m4v files which I also saw after a bit more testing.  For most m4v files, the video shows up correctly.  For a few files, when the movie starts, you only hear audio, if you forward it by 10 seconds or so, it starts to play the content correctly.

There has been no lag whatsoever in the media streaming or music streaming.  Photo slideshows, however, were slow when I threw my 12 MP files, each about 10 MB at it, so I had to resize the images to 1600 x 1200 resolution and use those for the gallery.

The only time I have seen Boxee choke so far is when I added a single directory that had about 8000 resized photos in it.  It did slow down quite a bit and become unresponsive.  I had to force reboot the machine.  Other than that, this has been running very well.

My wife thinks that the Boxee box is snappier than the Boxee on MacBookPro we had earlier.  I think the file scrolling speeds are much faster in the boxee box and in general the GUI is snappier on the box, but I can’t tell for sure.

Startup is under a minute and I am amused people find that as a negative.

I don’t have much 1080p content.  So much so that I only have a 720p TV (I know).  To test how well it works, I hooked my boxee box to my primary photo editing monitor and played Revision3 videos as well as some YouTube videos through it.  It played them pretty well as well.  I have seen good reviews about Blu-Ray .iso performance in twitter.

Flash takes a while to get initialized in Boxee, but once it initializes, based on the server, the performance varies from “It is fantastic” to “Reasonably bad”.  Playing Jon Stewart from the dailyshow.com website through the Boxee browser, for instance, was awesome.  Once I maximized the player, the resolution dramatically improved and it was near perfect.  I have also watched a few TED show apps, seems to work well.  YouTube works fairly well as well.

Flash does seem to stress Boxee a bit during startup.  The video player takes a few seconds to initialize and to start playing the video, but once it does, it runs pretty well.

Oh the keyboard on the remote.  The keyboard is fantastic.  Qwerty on one side and minimal buttons on the other – PERFECT.  It is the best thing ever that happened to a HTPC.  Gone or the days arrowing up and down the soft keyboard on screen.  I think the Boxee Box remote will be the golden standard that others have to match.  Great job, Boxee and D-Link.

The only nit so far has been I accidentally hit the buttons on the other side when typing on the keyboard, so

I have trained myself to hold the remote by the edges and not on my palm.  Something I am willing to live with for the benefits of the keyboard.

All said and done, I am not the right person to review hardware.  Anandtech has promised to run it through their media test suite.

Initial setup

Initial setup was extremely easy, nearly as easy as setting up the AppleTV, which is saying a lot.  The only time I had a glitch was when the audio didn’t work and I had to reboot the machine.

Boxee recognized most of my movies.  Getting it to recognize TV shows was a bit of a chore.  Thankfully, Boxee’s help in twitter @boxee_help is awesome.  They redirected me to the naming guide.  I renamed the files based on what was suggested here and asked Boxee to rescan these images.  It picked up changes for some and it did not pick up the right show for many others.  I used FileBot, a Java (JNLP) application and it does a pretty good job in renaming these files.

I then manually did a “Identify video” for those shows that were not picked up.  Boxee failed for most of those with a “Unable to download movie details” error.  However, when I dropped the network source and added it again, it picked up almost all the shows accurately without any problems.  That certainly is a bug.  I have been working with @boxee_help on this.  I will update the review when I find out what is going on.

I had done all this work through iTunes for my AppleTV.  I am bummed that there is no industry standard sidecar files that can be reused across these media players.

Software

Almost all my gripes with Boxee are now with the software, which is ironic since I loved their beta software on the Mac.  It is best explained through my use cases of how I use this device and where it gets in my way.  This part of the review is primarily for Boxee’s consumption .  I hope you guys are reading this and using the feedback.

I received the boxee box a day before it was intended to be released, so I got to use the boxee box with the beta software on it and saw what happened to the GUI after 1.0 was released.

Here are my primary use cases in order of usage.  I wouldn’t prioritize these, but this is just an ordering of how often I use a certain feature.

1)  Music player with photo slideshows

The AppleTV (first generation) was my single most widely used gadget.  The primary use for it was as a music player.  When I started to play music on this, after the screensaver timeout kicks in, it would show the photos in my photo library in a beautiful rolling screen saver.  I can’t overstate how cool this is.

Often my family gets to see photos that we hadn’t seen in many years.  My kids go nuts when they see photos of themselves when they were toddlers.  Add a favorite music track they like in the background and that is THE killer app for this device.

AppleTV nailed this part.  It works beautifully and well, “magically”.

Boxee software on the Mac did this pretty well as well.  I used to set the screen saver to a slideshow directory and play music in the background.  The photo screensaver was not as cool as AppleTV’s, but with the normal Ken Burns effect slideshow, which was pretty nifty too.  Even better, I wasn’t limited to my local music content and run Pandora in the background.  Worked pretty well.

In the Boxee box, for whatever reason, I can’t choose my photo slideshows as a screensaver.  Yes, WTH.  Turns out it is omitted in the boxee box.  I have raised a feature request to handle this.

There is a workaround, however.  I start pandora, then navigate to my photo folder and start a slide show.  I had to rearrange my photos in multiple folders and I pick random folders to start playing.

This is not as convenient, but a workaround till the original issue is fixed.

Given that music and photos are one of my primary use cases, it irritates me endlessly that these two are not top level objects any more in the new GUI.  What.the.hell.  Now, I need to go to “Files” and browse to Music or Photos.  Why?  I understand the GUI was redesigned for first time users and is video centric, but this feels like bait and switch to me (and other beta users).  Very few companies get away with this, heck even Apple took a lot of flake with their iMovie fiasco.

Sorry Boxee, you dropped the ball on this one.  First user experience is great to focus on, but when you have loyal users of your software who have used your software for an year plus, you don’t do this to them.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love opinionated software.  I use 37Signals products and I think AppleTV’s GUI is the best thing out there for the limited set of things it does.  But you can’t make massive changes to your GUI like this.  I can get used to your re-arrangement of items to various screens, but mucking with top level constructs and primary access patterns is bad.

2)  Local content

I have quite a bit of local content (movies and TV shows in addition to music and photos).  Boxee nails this (wait for the GUI gotchas).  as I say in the hardware section, I haven’t found anything to fault in how the content is played once setup correctly.  Better still since the boxee box works stand alone without the need for a server and can talk directly to my NAS without having to plug a HDD, it is near perfect.

Why “near” perfect?  Again, thanks to the 1.0 GUI.  Earlier, when I clicked on TV Shows on Videos, I saw MY videos and MY TV Shows.  If I wanted videos on the internet, I went either to the Apps or to the Boxee browser.

With the 1.0 GUI, when I click on Videos or TV shows, it shows all the TV shows and Videos that Boxee discovered in the internet.  WTF.  I don’t care about random “B” grade movies and TV shows on the internet.  I primarily want to play my content.

So from a one click on videos and TV shows in the beta software, now I have to select Videos and see the noise, then use the down arrow to go the sub-menu and right arrow 4 more times to get to my content under “Files”.

W.T.F.

How can you take a one click operation and make it a 4-5 click operation?  And I have to do this EVERY time?  Can’t the software remember that the last time I visited Videos, I was in the “Files” section and take me there?

Boxee – either move the files as the first sub-tab and select it by default or remember where I was last.  This is nasty stuff.  I definitely expected better from you guys.

Also, under TV Shows -> Files, I saw a bunch of shows.  When I selected them, it launched a browser and took me to Nickelodeon’s website.  Why?  I consciously selected “Files” to see MY content.  I don’t want you guys to take me to a website when I don’t intend to.

I see what Boxee is trying to do here.  They want us users to not think about content as “local” or “internet” and make choices.  I see that.  I don’t know if this is in reaction to GoogleTV, but most random content on the internet is either boring or bad.  I would much prefer to look for internet content through an App instead of being in my face all the time.

And lastly, Boxee – if I want GoogleTV, I will get the Logitech Revue.  Seriously.

3) Netflix

Of course my other source of online media content is Netflix.  With my AppleTV, Netflix was delivered by Wii.  Once I moved to Boxee on Mac, it was fun to have Netflix on one device.

Currently Netflix is not supported.  Boxee says it will be fixed shortly.   I hope they do a good job of that.

4)  Apps

I didn’t watch much TV through Hulu using Boxee in the past.  If having Hulu is a must-have feature, at this moment, you have no choice other than running a full computer next to your TV.  Boxee will get Hulu Plus ($10 per month) by the end of this year.  That isn’t a deal breaker for me.

I tried a few other apps, YouTube works well, TED talks works well, The Big Picture app works well, Pandora works pretty neatly as well.  I was able to add a third party repository and tried xkcd app on it , works nice.

The Boxee browser is “adequate”.  I don’t know whats the deal with Bing being the home page for the browser.  Navigating the browser using the remote is a pain, but you can use it in a pinch.  However, I did see in twitter that you can use a USB wireless mouse hooked to the box if you need it .

I guess I will explore more with the Apps as the days go by.

In short, is this the killer HTPC box I was waiting for?  I am not too sure right now.  I used to think that was the case in the past.  I have no complaints about the hardware so far.  It is the software that needs tweaking and I hope that they fix it soon.  I think I am going to keep the Boxee box, but I guess I will know for sure in 27 days .

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Short answer:

BIG WIN.  Near perfect. Lack of Netflix app is the huge gaping hole, but I hear that it will be patched soon.  I hope it is fixed soon since this box is the perfect thing I have been waiting for.

http://yfrog.com/2rbspaj boxee box box box

November 10, 2010 1:33 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

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anand

http://yfrog.com/mkzenztj boxee box box

November 10, 2010 1:34 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

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anand

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November 10, 2010 1:36 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

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anand

http://yfrog.com/fkng0yj boxee box remote. Cries

November 10, 2010 1:39 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

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anand

Success. Figured out which side is front of the boxee box

November 10, 2010 1:37 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

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anand

http://yfrog.com/fkng0yj boxee box remote. Cries

November 10, 2010 1:39 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

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anand

http://yfrog.com/n8567bj up and running boxee box

November 10, 2010 1:43 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

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anand

http://yfrog.com/elibkij boxee box firmware update

November 10, 2010 1:44 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

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anand

Boxee box keyboard joy to use. No netflix yet :(

November 10, 2010 1:49 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

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anand

http://yfrog.com/1sr32tj boxee box apps

November 10, 2010 1:50 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

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anand

Boxee box is FAST

November 10, 2010 1:50 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

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anand

Boxee box network file setup. Piece of cake. Reminded of fugly popbox fight.

November 10, 2010 1:58 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

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anand

http://yfrog.com/g0wv7aj boxee box lovely photo viewer

November 10, 2010 2:00 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

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anand

First time experience of boxee box for a current boxee user. 9/10 (reboot fixed an audio glitch)

November 10, 2010 2:21 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

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anand

Boxee box streaming of 720p video over gig e from ReadyNAS - flawless

November 10, 2010 2:24 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

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anand

Ok. First 30 mins with boxee box. BIG win. Now get netflix on this please so I don't have to change my mind.

November 10, 2010 2:27 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

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anand

Few hours of normal use. Boxee box runs quiet and smoothly, doesn't appear to be choking.

November 10, 2010 6:22 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

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anand

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Update

Good timing.  I read that Amazon is going to add lending as well.  That helps.  Expect Kindle based reading clubs everywhere.

I have been waiting for an affordable e-reader for a while.  When Nook and Kindle dropped their prices, I knew the time had come.

Most of my reading are non-fiction, photography related or technical books.  Almost all my technical books are now published by Pragmatic Programmer and given the rate at which Ruby, Rails et al change, the only sensible thing to do is to buy their e-books.  The cool thing about their e-books is they iterate quickly and continuously update their books, so you buy ONE e-book for Rails 2 and another for Rails 3 and get the free upgrades.

I dislike reading for a long time on the backlit LCD screens and I try to read at least an hour a day.  Given this, I was printing quite a bit of my technical books and carrying the printed paperwork with me when I went outside.

Given that background, e-ink sounded like the best bet.

I have used the Kindle 3 for about a month now, read five different books on it so far.  Here is a subjective take on the Kindle.

Yes, it does disappear

It weighs next to nothing.  It is small enough to be lugged around everywhere.  The keyboard looks odd at first, but once you start reading, it disappears as well.  All that remains is the beautiful reading experience the e-ink produces.  After a month of reading e-ink, I find it a bit odd to read printed ink .

At first, the blacking out during page refreshes was jarring, but now my mind has learned to tune it out.  Kindle3 is pretty fast as well.  The page rendering is almost instant and it is pretty contrasty with the default settings as well.  I haven’t found a reason to push up the contrast.  I had to push up the fonts a tad size bigger to make it easy to read (Damn, I am getting old).

I have used the Kindle in all kinds of lighting, incandescent, fluorescent, direct sunlight and even candle light (!).  It seems to work just right pretty much everywhere.  When I am next to a huge light source, I do see a bit of glare at a specific angle which is fixed instantly with a slight adjustment of angle.

The longest I have read in one sitting so far is about 2.5 hours during which time I was pacing as I read, lying down reading it with one hand raised and of course, sitting.  After about a month, I can say that the Kindle provides the best reading experience I have had.

I think the Kindle is lighter than even most paperbacks so that does help.  Try reading the 800 page Pick Axe ruby guide in your bed with single hand .

And lastly, my eyes don’t feel tired at the end of a long reading session that I look for artificial tears which I use after 14 hour days staring at backlit monitors.

Going back and forth

I wasn’t sure how going back and forth on the Kindle would be – particularly for technical books that are used for reference.  Between a combination of bookmarking, table of contents and index, I can make it work, but it isn’t as efficient as opening a printed book and thumbing through the index.

I typically bookmark the index first and then start there.  Often I jump a few pages past using the “Go To …” feature in the index.  Surprisingly, search works very well and the results are navigable quite easily.

I haven’t found it frustrating yet to use this for reference material, but it is definitely not optimal.  Thankfully, a lot of my reference reading is done during coding, so PDF search offers me a solution in such cases.

Hooked onto reading

Before I knew, I was buying books.  It started with Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, then picked up Daniel Suarez’s Daemon, which was quickly followed by Freedom.  I am amused that I am reading fiction again, but I guess I could say that the Kindle makes me read more :~), which is a sentiment I hear from other Kindle owners.

I have expanded my Kindle use past books.  Quite a few blogs I read such as Mish aren’t really for quick grasping. Some of these blogs are really involved that make you read and re-read.  They are essentially what Kindle calls as singles (I guess), so I started pushing those to the Kindle as well.

I use Calibre, an excellent e-book management software to manage the RSS feeds I need pushed to Kindle.  It runs a cron job and pushes the updated feeds to my Kindle through the free emailing route.  Works fantastically.

I also use Calibre to convert PDFs to the .mobi format and add them to the Kindle.  Amazon also does a free PDF to mobi conversion through email which works very well.

Tamil PDFs work just fine in the Kindle.  I have Sujatha’s short stories as well as Ponniyin Selvan in PDF.  The PDF to mobi conversion doesn’t work since the tamil fonts are not supported in the Kindle.  The downside of PDF is the font size changes don’t work for PDFs.  I work around this by changing the orientation of the Kindle and leave it at auto font size which seems about right for Tamil PDFs.

I have also saved random web pages that I like to read to the Kindle.  I use a convoluted way to do this.  I save the pages using Instapaper, and when I want, hit Instapaper and convert the pages to mobi format and then use Calibre to transfer them to kindle.  I have read a few huge articles this way.  I can totally see me coding a simple web app very soon that does this on the fly.  A bookmarklet that on click, converts the given page to mobi and emails it to my kindle.  Should be easily doable.

The negatives

I consider the lack of ePub support a huge negative for the Kindle.  My local library has a few good DRM protected ePubs that they rent out.  Adding DRM protected ePub support as the Nook or Sony eReader does would be the last missing link.  I was very tempted by the Nook for a very brief while given that it runs Android.  I found the Nook to be heavier, bigger, slower and less contrasty.  I reluctantly gave up on ePub support for the lighter, faster Kindle.

I don’t get the browser included in the Kindle.  It is useless.  Modern web pages are no fun to navigate through buttons and if you can’t do touch, you might as well leave out the browser.  The social networking connections seem like something a marketing executive had to check off on their lists.

Color e-ink would be nice, now that color nooks are being rumored, I hope by the time I am ready to upgrade my Kindle, there would be a sub $100 color Kindle that supports DRM protected ePub format .

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As a HTPC user, you fall into one of these three categories.

1.  DVR, complete control over internet and local content

You want complete control of what content you want to watch on the internet and access to all the local content you want without any restrictions.  You also want to use your HTPC as your DVR box. What you really need is a computer hooked to your TV.  Mac Mini with Elgato EyeTV fits the bill perfectly if you are a Mac lover.  You can build a quiet HTPC using Windows media center as well.

If you dislike connecting a computer to your TV, but want the power, Windows media extenders are the way to go.  You have a Windows media center PC feeding your data and your media extender renders it in your TV with a 8 foot friendly user interface.  If I had this requirement, I would get a Windows media center and a XBox 360 as the extender.

2.  Complete control over internet and local content

You don’t care about DVR and don’t want to run your Cable through your HTPC, but you want to have access to all the content the internet has to access and free access to all your local content, irrespective of what format they are in.

Boxee box and GoogleTV fit into this category.  Between the two, Boxee currently has an open API that has hundreds of apps  while GoogleTV will get there next year.  Both have their advantages and disadvantages.  When GoogleTV eventually gets into the Sony and Samsung TVs and BluRay players, that would be a game changer.  Currently the stand alone Logitech Revue box is one way to get access to GoogleTV, but the box is more expensive compared to Boxee Box ($300 vs $200).

3.  Limited access to internet content and limited access to local content

AppleTV fits this perfectly.  You get to see content what Apple permits you to. Same with Roku.  Between these two, I would rather prefer Roku over AppleTV for reasons explained here.  If AppleTV gets an AppStore and an open API, it will push AppleTV to the second bucket of devices (complete control), but even then if AppleTV is dependent on an iTunes server to play your local content, it severely limits your options (MP4 only).  That is a choice you need to make.

There are other alternatives here like the PopCornHour and Western Digital Media player.  They all differ in how open their API is and what kind of apps that are available on their market place.

I would include the current batch of various Samsung internet TVs in this bucket.  They offer an open API to play internet enabled apps but are crippled when it comes to playing local content – they are just not as convenient as Boxee or GoogleTV.  When Samsung eventually gets GoogleTV on its televisions, that would be a cost effective way to get your smart TV.

BTW, you may not know this, but your BluRay player can probably play content on its HDD along with Netflix (which you know already).  Same with the gaming consoles like Wii and Playstation.  So long as you are ok with unplugging the HDD, transferring content to it and hooking it back to the player, you can get away with this setup.

Here is the word of caution for people in the third bucket:

“You don’t miss what you don’t know exists”

Once you are hooked to listening last.fm or pandora when browsing photos across the internet and you can watch TED Talks on your TV, there is no going back (not for me at least).  So pick wisely.

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This however doesn’t incur any roaming charges. 

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I was one of the earliest adopters of the first AppleTV.  I owned it for more than three years, only to be frustrated by what it can do and what it never was allowed to do.  It continues to infuriate me that AppleTV is still considered a hobby.  The new AppleTV is marginally better in some instances and outright backwards in many aspects.  You would do much better off buying a Boxee box, Google TV in some format or just buy one of the internet enabled super TVs from Samsung.  I pre-ordered the Boxee Box, since I like Boxee – I currently use Boxee through a laptop.

Update

I got beat up by many that this is very anti-apple.  You should read “What kind of a HTPC user are you?” for background of why I feel this way.

AnandTech has a great review of Boxee Box, check it out here.

Limited internet content

You want to watch TED Talks on your TV?  Tough luck.  You like to hear your last.fm or pandora music channel when you browse your photos in Smugmug?  Fat chance.  There are limited apps on the AppleTV – the apps that exist are limited to Netflix, Flickr and Youtube other than mobile me and free internet radio stations. You get to see content that is blessed by Apple.  Not the content YOU want to see or hear.

With an open platform like Boxee box, you get a massive array of apps.  If there is content worth watching or listening on the internet, there is a Boxee app for that.  If you are a hacker, writing a boxee app for your needs is ridiculously simple.

The AppleTV is great in one thing.  Renting and playing content from iTunes.  You like to rent movies from Amazon?  Tough luck.  Apple is in the content selling business.  AppleTV is one way for them to sell content.  Someone like Boxee is in the “media center hardware / software business”.  Boxee will do everything they can to make that experience the best in the world.

This has been dealt with elaborately by an Apple fanboy way better than I can say.

But airplay will get me there

Yes, I know about airplay that lets you stream content from your iPad and iPhone over iAir to the AppleTV.  Magical, isn’t it?  You know what sucks there?  Airplay works on SD.  SD as in Standard Definition.  As in the pre historic days of the television.  As in days before 720 p “HD”.  As in it will look like crap on your 60″ LED backlit 1080p brand new hot TV.  I am sure you will like SD on that.  Give it a pass.  Airplay is one more way to up sell iTunes content that you can buy.  Pass it.

Crippled hardware

720p.  Low powered processor.  Lack of flash support. The hardware is powered just enough to play 720p MP4 H.264 content from iTunes.  Nothing more, nothing less.  Again, your 1080p TV and your backed up 1080p Blu Ray content is useless on this hardware.  You really want to compromise on the one device that can become the center of your digital media life?  Look ahead, if you like apple, get a Mac Mini for this.  If not, just get a Boxee Box.

iTunes

If you have a lot of local content that you need to play, AppleTV can do that.  But ONLY through streaming from iTunes.  You need iTunes to be running all the time to stream the content for you.  Since iTunes accepts only MP4 H264 content, you will have to convert all your DVDs, your Blu Ray content, your Divx files and the zillion other video formats to the format iTunes understands.  Boxee box doesn’t have that problem.

iTunes has its own quirks.  Have you tried to get iTunes work off content from a NAS?  If your content is in a NAS, have you thought how it will be streamed to your TV through AppleTV?  Content will go from your NAS to your iTunes and back to your TV.

Why fight?  What can’t you just make your media center talk directly to your NAS?  If you don’t have a NAS, why can’t you make your media center box talk to local content connected using an external HDD on the USB port?  Why do you have to depend on iTunes?

With the Boxee box, you can simply hook an external HDD and be done.  No other server is needed for it to show your local content.  Better still, if you have a NAS, Boxee box will talk directly to the NAS and stream content from it.

Maintain your sanity.  Let go of iTunes.  If you do not have a desktop at your home, AppleTV would be a burden to maintain, if you want to see local content.  If you do like Apple products, again, go the Mac Mini way.

Conclusion

AppleTV is nothing more than a crippled iPod attached to your TV.  By crippled I mean it depends on iTunes running on another server to feed local content.  AppleTV is great in doing one thing – which is to let you buy and rent content that Apple allows you to.  Pass it.  Get a better product.  There are plenty of options out there.

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http://www.screenwerk.com/2010/09/23/swiftkey-for-android-is-a-must-download/

http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/09/22/swiftkey-comes-out-of-publicbeta-to-rocks-your-android-keyboard/

This is brilliant stuff.  It works as well as being demoed in this video.

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I am an unapologetic former iFanBoy.  Few months ago, I owned almost all the new iProducts that were launched by Apple in the past few years.  The ones that I could afford at least :~).  Heck, I was even one of the three fools who pre-ordered the AppleTV.

By the end of this year, I will have an Android phone, an Amazon Kindle and a Boxee box (provided they ship) instead of an iPhone4, an iPad (yeah I know the difference between the iPad and Kindle) and iTV.  I have a few less iProducts at home as well.  An iMac, MacBookPro, AppleTV and iPhone 3g were shown the door and other ancillary iProducts will be replaced by non iProducts as they die.  I have removed my dependency on iTunes as my media server and worked around it.  It has been an epic geeky “battle”, but so far I am winning it :~).

I now belong to the small noisy set of people who like iProducts for their design elegance, but hate Apple’s attitude towards developers, partners and to some extent, consumers.  I think Apple’s attitude towards the iOS and the surrounding issues to it (3.3.1, Adobe fiasco, iAd restrictions, App Store approval idiocy) and the overall walled garden approach is bad to consumers in the long run.  Some people, like DHH openly call Apple as being fascist, yet still use iPhone4 and iPad because of their design elegance.  I choose not to do that.

I am dependent on OSX for work since that solves my work related issues elegantly (*nix support, Ruby & Rails support and run Office suite) and would be foolish to waste my work hours tweaking a PC laptop running linux and windows.  Other than that, I see little need for Apple products.

Why this rant when discussing an Android phone?  As Dan Ariely explains in Predictably Irrational, we anchor our current experiences based on prior experiences.  Any of us who saw Mr. Jobs present the original iPhone 4 years ago and did the touch and scroll of contacts knew what was the new benchmark.  He scrolled slower and the contacts scrolled slower.  He scrolled faster and so did the contacts.  He scrolled much faster and the contacts hit the bottom and did the little bounce thingie.

It made all the phones that appeared till that point archaic, tasteless and well, less magical.  You knew you had see the future of phones that day and that becomes the anchor experience.

I have owned an iPhone 3G since then and my wife now upgraded to an iPhone 4.  For good or for bad, my experiences with Android are now anchored against the iPhone 3G I owned in the past and the iPhone 4 my wife owns.  I will often compare the Samsung galaxy S phone to the iPhone, just to illustrate how much better the Samsung phone can be in certain areas, if only they paid attention to detail.  So, here it goes.

Hardware

The first thing that strikes you when you see the Samsung Captivate (that is the AT&T version of Samsung Galaxy S, called the AT&T Captivate ) is how light it is, for the gorgeous 4″ screen.

The phone doesn’t feel like a behemoth to hold given its enormous screen, is ridiculously thin and weighs next to nothing, even with the battery snapped on.  The only things that really ruin the phone are the big at&t and samsung logos in the front :~).  There is ample space in the back for logos, isn’t it?  I mean, I *KNOW* I am using an Samsung phone on AT&T, so do you have to tell *ME* about it? .

Between the size of the phone and the grip of the battery, this phone will stay in your hands.  I really don’t see a need for a case for this phone, unless I want to hide at least part of the hideous logos in front .

Quick iPhone 4 note: The iPhone 4 is smaller, much heavier and has glass on both sides with a super slippery grip.  Beware of dropping it on hard surfaces.

Update: A day after I wrote this, my wife dropped the iPhone4 and broke the screen .

The phone has the volume control buttons on the left, the micro USB port and headphone jack on the top and the power button to the right.

As with all android phones, there is the Menu, Home, Back and Search buttons at the bottom.  The beauty of the Samsung is these are not real buttons, but they feel like real buttons.  The buttons light up when you power on the phone and the tactile feedback you get when you touch the buttons is almost equivalent to touching a real button.

In short, the phone is gorgeous.  It is comfortable to hold, slips into the front pocket of my jeans comfortably and doesn’t feel like it is going slip through my hands.

Buttons too many?

Coming from the iOS world, 4 buttons seems 3 buttons too much.  It took me a while to get used to the Android 4 button approach.  I have been using a friend’s G1 Android phone for a while that eased my transition to Android.  It has grown in me.

iOS takes the approach of “no menus” anywhere in its phones.  That implies that for all operations, the GUI designer in the app has to allocate space for actions and create buttons accordingly.  They do and redesign screens accordingly, but every now and then you run into a screen which is all buttons and less functionality.  Yes, there are smart ways of doing this by popping up the buttons if you select something, but what I observe is that the appearance of actionable buttons is now all over the place.  ie, in different apps, you perform actions ever so slightly and it seems a bit jarring.

The menu button in Android kinda addresses that fact.  The entire screen is available for you to render your content and to perform any action, you hit the menu.  It seems pretty consistent.  The one thing to watch for is some times, the “save” button is hidden in the menu and if you didn’t save it, you might lose what you just performed.

It is a trade off and I can live with either approach.

Now, the back button is just great.  How often have I done something on the iPhone, drilled down many pages only to realize that there is no way to go back!  Take the Yelp app for example.  You start with with a search, read reviews, click on map and you are now in the map application.  You want to go back and look for a related listing.  What do you do?  You hit the home button and you start over.  Unless the app itself provides soft back buttons that lead you back to where you came from, you are in tough luck.

Android solves this problem elegantly.  The back button in the base takes you one screen backwards and it seems to work flawlessly almost always.  I dig this feature.

The search button is a definite nice to have for quick searches.

In short, the 4 button approach takes a while to get used to, but when you get used to it, you wonder how you lived without them.  Different strokes, each works very well.

You can call me on this phone

For the past two years, my wife and me both had iPhone 3G phones.  To top it, my wife has a 45 minute commute each way on the train with varying levels of network availability.  Our telephone discussions often went along this line:

© Herge and Tintin Comics

At least once, I had to tell some one – “No I didn’t mean f*ck us, I meant ruckus”.

The iPhone 3G was magical alright, but the magic was distorted when it came to talking on the phone.  Yes, you discount the fact that my wife was traveling on the train, but the phone still wouldn’t work when she is at work in a high-rise in San Francisco downtown.  My phone would drop calls as I moved from one part of the home to the other.

Yes, I know AT&T gets thrown under the bus for iPhone voice problems, but consider this.  I have been a somewhat happy AT&T customer for nearly 10 years now.  iPhone is the only phone that gives me the most grief when it comes to calling and talking people over the phone.  I have had instances where I traveled to Eastern Sierra and my phone never latched to any kind of a decent signal to make a phone call.  Ironically, I would be able to do Foursquare checkins on Edge or GPRS, but never be able to make a call without dropping.  However, when I borrowed my relative’s flip nokia and make a call, the call would go through, the voice would be clear and loud and you can actually hear the other person talking.  The rub – my relative is also on AT&T.

IMO, iPhone is a marginal phone to talk on.  I read that the iPhone4 is better, but I reserve judgment on that.

The Samsung Captivate changes all that.  It has the clearest, loudest sound quality I have heard in a phone, in a long time.  It is as good as the Blackberries I have used and I will stop looking at my really old  Nokia 6010 lovingly to make phone calls.  I know this is controversial, but if you are an iPhone user with call quality issues, please do yourself a favor and use your SIM card on a different phone.  Hear the difference.

First time user experience

The first time user experience with the Samsung captivate is hideous.  So much so that I had to write a separate blog on how to survive the initial experience of the phone.  You really have to let the phone grow in you and understand the quirks.  Unfortunately, a lot of the issues I faced were specific to either Samsung or AT&T.  I would love to use the stock Android experience as in the Nexus One phone.  This is where the iPhone wins, hands down.  You never feel at loss trying to figure out how to do the basic things you want to do.  In general, I see quite a bit of design by committee at work with Android.  The iPhone often feels as if it was designed by ONE person. If design elegance is important to you, as it is to someone like DHH, I suspect you would love the iPhone better.  But remember, design elegance comes at a cost.  Apple sacrifies features for design.  Features which will change the way you use your phone.

Screen

The AMOLED screen is gorgeous.  After using the 4″ screen, I am surprised how I survived without it.  Surprisingly, I now wonder if the 6″ screen on the Kindle is that big of a jump as compared to running the Kindle app on the phone itself .   The screen size comes in handy when using the Android keyboard.  You get extra space for the spell check suggestions to pop up and it doesn’t hinder your typing.

The resolution is not as good as the iPhone 4 resolution, but it doesn’t matter for most normal uses.  Yes, the iPhone 4 resolution is better, but I will take the larger screen if I have to choose between the two.

Since the AMOLED screens eat more battery on white background, a lot of the default screens come with black background, it was odd at first, but I have gotten used to it.

Here is a bazooka, now go shoot yourself

There is nothing that is configurable in the iPhone.  Different themes, nope (unless you jailbreak).  Different layouts, nope.  Hybrid widgets, no way.  It is either iWay or the highway.  Android has some killer features that will change the way you use your phone.  Remember that I have had this phone for less than a week, but I have found things that bring a smile to my face already.  I expect as I explore this more and find out more apps and tweaks, I am going to thoroughly enjoy the phone.

Android lets you change just about everything in your phone.  The phone layout, what widgets, apps and shortcuts you want on each screen.  What icons you want in the dock, how many docks you want, default behavior of buttons and so on.  It lets you swap out core apps with your own, lets you change core services to what you like (for instance, you can change the app launcher service with your own so you can configure just about everything you see on the phone) and even change your phone calling service with something like Google Voice.

You don’t like the standard keyboard, you can download any custom keyboard from the Android Market.  I haven’t grown out of the Android Keyboard yet, but every now and then I switch over to the fantastic swype keyboard which can be made default system wide.

You got yourself a bazooka and I guarantee you that your Android will never be like another Android phone you will run into.  Here are a few that I have figured out in the first few days of use.

Quick turn off

Do you want to quickly turn off your Wi-Fi and Bluetooth?  Easy, drag the quick drop drawer on top of the screen and you can turn off what you want.  No more fiddling with settings to do things you do often.  The notification area is pretty handy.  All your notifications are stored in this one common area.

Even better, there are apps to let you create profiles and configure them based on what you to turn on and off.

Short cuts for everything

Remember the glorious old days when you could actually make a phone call while driving?  You did a * followed by dial button twice to call the last called person.  I don’t know about you, but 95% of the time, I call one of the last 5 people I called.  90% of the time it is the last person I called or received a call from.  Life used to be simple.

Imagine doing that with the iPhone while driving in Hwy 880.  You take your phone, swipe it, enter the password if you set it, hit the phone button, realize that it is in contacts where you left it last, then go to either recents or favorites, hit the number and hope it dials.  By now you are either close to hitting someone else or like this:

Android helps.  Not the whole way you are used to with your Nokia 6010, but definitely closer in that direction.  You can create short cuts for just about everything.  I have added direct dial short cuts for the phone numbers I call often and put them in a screen.  So calling from phone is now unlock, password (you could configure your swipe in a pattern and use that as password if you like it), quick dial screen and hit button.

Widgets everywhere

Plenty of widgets everywhere.  You will go crazy playing with those.  The possibilities are endless.  A couple of widgets in these two screens should give you an example.

Expose

Too many widgets and too many screens, android has an Mac OSX expose like screen management system.  You can drag and drop icons from one screen to another, add and delete screens. You can knock yourself out totally.

Native Google voice integration

Popular voices like Michael Arrington famously quit iPhone and switched to Android for the Google voice integration.  The google voice integration is brilliant.  You can let google voice take over your phone and free yourself of your phone.  You can make it the unified voice mail box with web and SMS alerts for voice mail.  You can publish that one unified phone number and control which phones you want to receive calls on a daily or hourly basis.  You can filter phone numbers and calls in a central place.

Voice is not my primary requirement of this phone, but if I job involved talking to people all the time, I would switch to Google Voice in a jiffy and use an Android phone just for that.

Multi tasking and battery life

The Samsung Captivate currently runs Eclair or Android 2.1. Multi tasking support, in the nicest way I can put it, is crap.  I mean the apps run well in the background.  I can finally use google chat in the background while using other apps (yes, I know about Beejive).  The CPU scheduler isn’t perfect, IMO.  Every now and then, the phone freezes for a second or two and then frees up.  This happened to me about 3-4 times in the past week so far.

This would be a deal breaker to me but for two things.  First, Froyo aka Android 2.2 is supposed to have much better multi tasking support.  I am waiting for Samsung to upgrade this phone to Froyo, which they are supposed to do in September.  Next, now I know why Advanced Task Killer is such a popular app on Android.  I run it in the background and it periodically kills the idle apps.  Apparently, Froyo killed this API that is used to kill apps.  My hope is with 2.2, the CPU scheduler does the right thing.

From whatever little I have used iPhone4, the multi tasking works very well.  It stays away from the user’s sight and I hope Froyo gets me that.

Battery life is actually pretty darn good.  I get at least as good a battery life on the Samsung Captivate as I got with my iPhone 3G.  I can last a full day without having to recharge.  Turns out the AMOLED screen consumes battery pretty bad and the Samsung is one of the worst phones in terms of battery usage.  IMO, it is adequate for a day’s normal use.  YMMV.  I haven’t done any of the advanced battery tweaking techniques yet, but I am pretty happy with what I have right now.

Apps

The apps I use on the iPhone have all been ported to the Android platform.  They work as good as they did on the iPhone platform.  Till now I haven’t missed any app on the Android Appstore, there seems to be a direct port or a competing app.  I am not a big gamer on the iPhone, so I can’t comment on the quality of games on Android.  Having said that, the casual games my kids play are all available in Android.

I disliked the stock email app on the Android.  As with everything else, I was able to swap it to K-9 mail, which IMO, is far superior to the stock application.

Google app integration

The Android phone lives totally without the need for a desktop computer or something like iTunes.  You have to see it to believe it.  You enter your google username and password and your contacts, email and calendar are pulled in “magically” .  I have switched to Google Calendar as my primary calendar and sync it to iCal through CalDAV.  Works fantastic.  My feed reader is tied to Google Reader, I use Google listen to listen to podcasts and use Gallery to view media RSS.  The only time I had to tether the phone to the USB was to transfer ~10GB of music over to the phone.

If you use Google web services, there is no reason not to use the Android phones.  For those times you need Microsoft office, there is an App for that as well.

What is there to hate?

Every now and then you will run into something that is so far out of what you expect you can’t stop saying WTF.  For instance, for the screenshots I had to take for this blog.  You either have to have root access to the phone to use this app OR you have to install the developer SDK and tether the phone on USB.  Yes, WTF.

Those moments, thankfully are few and far between.  There are minor irritants and initial hiccups in getting used to the GUI and it doesn’t feel as polished and smooth as it can be, but IMO that is a small price to pay for the flexibility Android offers.

Unexplored territory

I haven’t started to use the voice recognition features of Android.  Fred Wilson once dictated a full blog on his Android phone.  I would love to see what it does with my Indian accent.  Since google feeds the voice recognition from the Google 411 project, I hope it works very well.

Update:

I absolutely love the voice recognition feature.  I love the fact that it is built into the keyboard so every app on the phone gets it.  I even made my first voice blog using that .

Conclusion

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I am a happy switcher.  To me, Android opens a whole world of extensibility on the phone and freedom.  There is little I miss from the iPhone other than the slick look and feel and smoothness.  I am willing to compromise on design aesthetics and in return I get a much more extensible phone with a lot less hideous App Store to download apps from.  I just wish I had switched earlier .

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