Are There Too many Android Devices?

With android becoming more and more popular it is hard to deny that with this increased popularity has come not only an increase in great devices, but also that more and more companies are trying to jump on to the success of the mobile operating system to earn themselves a bit of money.

While in some cases this is a good thing and has led to some very good and very popular devices it has also lead to a pleatherer of crappy devices, such as the extremely cheap and honestly horrible devices from companies like ZTE and Huawei. They are usually sub par devices that have poor build quality and little use in the current market and never receive updates. This has led to people shying away from android as a whole because of their poor experiences with these cheap and often slow devices. On the other hand some cheaper devices have been successful in their own right with devices like the LG Optimus One which due to its high availability sold over 1 million devices in its first month which was considered a huge success.

While most high-end manufactures often are good about devices and release cycles one company has started to release a new device every month. HTC has become one of those companies which hasn’t stopped releasing devices with their latest device being the HTC Sensation and device that haven’t been out very long such as the Desire HD being swept underneath the carpet and not getting the new version of their UI. HTC Sense. And as such increasing the android fragmentation and the amount of devices consumers have to choose from which often become obsolete before they buy them.

So what’s my point? Well it isn’t completely negative because some device have often done well but android isn’t a whore, that can just be put onto as many devices that a company can think of. I mean if a company wants to have consistent support they need to focus on one line of their products. not unnecessarily release the phone again just with an S to its name. I’m looking at you HTC. On top of that the devices that are often released at that price point feature out dated hardware and software. If android is going to dominate the market legitimacy companies need to get it around their thick skulls that they can’t trick a consumer into buying the same device again that is the reason I feel that the Desire S and Wildfire S will have poor sales.

Tell me what you think do you think that there are too many android phones on the market or do you like the increased choice?

Increased Traffic?

Well this is nice i have just got back on here after 2 weeks of revising and what do i see but an increase in traffic from summer last year i’m not sure why and i know it’s not that much in comparison to other sites i’m still glad to see people looking at my posts. If you have any requests for articles or youtube videos post a comment below.

Thanks and until next time

Thomas

YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Windowsvista7Helper?feature=mhum

My Thoughts on Unity

As you may know Ubuntu 11.04 will be shipping with the unity interface, which is a continuation of the unity netbook interface found on ubuntu 10.10 netbook remix. In Ubuntu 11.04 unity will be powered by the compiz engine and as such has seen a huge amount of graphical tweaks and performance upgrades. if you used the unity that was present in 10.10 netbook remix you would have realised that it was poorly designed and painfully slow even tho it was designed for a netbook.

In Ubuntu 11.04 unity will become the default desktop session even tho the classic desktop will be available for all users. unity will include many features designed to make the overall experience more fluid. One of these features is the universal menu which will remove the menu bar, and place them on the top bar where the indicators are. This is very similar to the implementation found in Mac OSX, but from what I have seen is very dependant on the application that is open e:g the menu does not yet work in Firefox or chromium. instead of the standard application,places and system menus that ubuntu users have become accustomed to, they decided to implement a universal applications menu which can be accessed from the ubuntu logo in the top left of the screen. like in windows 7 if the user has more than one windows open of a certain application that will be visible on the dock through little white arrows.

I think that these features are great and really help the experience that conical is going for but ia still torn on whether or not I will use unity when 11.04 is released. I said earlier I wasn’t a big fan of unity when it was released with 10.10, but after seeing the improvements made in 11.04 Natty Narwhal I think that given a bit more time unity will become a very polished and easy to use desktop environment.

Elementary OS Preview

The popular theme designed for gnome has now become a full fledged OS which is to be released in the coming weeks. It’s first released will be called jupiter and I assume the naming will follow this pattern of planets. It will feature most of the features associated with a Linux desktop based of Debian but with some changes to the core applications it will include a new browser called midori, which is a light weight alternative to Firefox with many of the same features.

The OS seems to be geared as an OSX competitor as it has a very polished feel but without all the restrictions associated with OSX which is a great bonus. It also allows users who want a new operating system with a dock and a professional theme install it and not have to worry about making their own modifications. This could turn-off some users however who prefer to customize and set up the system their selves.

The OS stays clear of some other bits of software namely Firefox which has become a standard among Linux distributions and the open source community and as i mentioned above it includes the midori browser which is a lightweight alternative. The OS also includes a contact manager called Dexter which will also add the names of friends to the dictionary so the names will not appear incorrect in writing applications such as Open Office. The OS will also include an e-mail client called Postler which promises to be simple to use and setup.

From what I have gathered from reading their blog they wish to produce an OS that is easy and clean but also allows flexibility for more advanced users.

Check out their site here:

http://elementaryos.org/

Code OS Released

Hi guys if you have been looking at my blog you will of noticed me mentioning DevSuSE unfortunately i had some issues with it so i started again. So Code OS was born the version i’m releasing now is 0.6 (beta) it features tools for programming and graphic design and includes the two most popular desktop environments KDE and Gnome.

please comment with new features.

Download:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5242015/Code_OS.i686-0.6.0.iso

Android Review

Today I will be talking about Android 2.2 froyo I will only talk about the OS itself and not hardware this is to see it as an OS like all my other OS reviews. The main bonus of Android compared to other OS’s is that its open source not to mention versatile and to prove it I’m typing this on Android using quicoffice. In many ways Android is great but it has a lot of short comings and one of them is that it has a very lack luster market place which is litter with clones of other apps e.g. there are up to 10 gba emulators which is annoying. This also means google’s app count might be off its actual count. A nice feature of the market is that It’s open and are such Google allow apps designed for rooted phones in which means no need for a Cydia type apps. You can also natively install .apk files to the phone from websites if need be. In addition you can customize it to your heart’s content right from simply changing the background right to changing the keyboard which means no device has to look the same. Android has always been powerful right from the beginning including multitasking which is a lot more than we can say for some other OS’s *cough* IOS *cough*. android has one main weakens and this is its fragmentation by this I mean that by the time you buy a device new more capable devices are available or a new android version has been released this is frustrating as manufactures take time to release new updates such as the new 2.2 update. that brings me to one of android strongest points which is android’s community which updates almost all phones to The latest firmware such as the G1 which was recently updated to froyo by the Cyanogen team and also many applications like setCPU which is requires root access which is now easy done with tools like unrevoked.

My final thoughts on Android are that while it has a lot of problems like a lack luster market place it has shown signs of progress in recent months such as companies like gameloft and firemint developing for the platform. but the reason I recommend using it us that it shows no sign of stopping due to the hard work of manufactures and developers working hard for these platform and from what I can tell won’t go the way of palm’s WebOS which is a good thing.

New CPU AMD phenom x4 9550+

I recently went in to Tottenham court road in London to buy a new processor as mine is starting to get a bit slow and doesn’t handle games that well anymore e:g bad company 2 which requires a quad core CPU to run well on top of which with my screen casts and use of virtual machines my PC requires a lot of power to do these things. Apon getting home I installed it properly then I powered on my PC and my motherboard doesn’t support quad cores great I thought.

So I proceed to find a new mother board and case as I had the stock dell case which is too small.after getting the case and motherboard (gigabyte AM3) i installed it and it and then started my PC the drivers installed. so i played some bad company 2 which gave some interesting results which were due to the computer only using 2 of the CPUs i had to change one of the settings in the boot time options to get it to use 4 but after that bad company went from and average of 25fps to around an average of 40fps on all high settings which was great!

To anyone looking for a new CPU i really recommend AMD’s phenom series unfortunately my CPU was discontinued so go for a newer one like the 955 which is excellent however if you do find a 9550 anywhere i recommend getting it as it runs extremely cool and has some great overclocking potential, but i won’t be doing that until i get a better heat sink.

Upcoming: linux Mint 9 review

in the upcoming weeks i will be doing a review of linux mint 9 (virtual machine)

Fedora 13 Review

Fedora 13 has been released recently and adds several new features to make it more stable. I have been testing fedora on a virtual machine so this review will not take speed into consideration.

Install

installation of fedora 13 was simple however on my virtual machine i had an issue when selecting the partition and had to re-internalize a component which made me a bit annoyed. However i am unsure if this would happen on a real machine and only occurred on the virtual machine due to incomparability non the less i see this as an issue as i was running the virtual machine in fedora mode so i believe that it should of worked.

First Impressions

on first boot it went through a first setup similar to other OSes so as per usual i set up an account and after a couple of screens which in ubuntu are presented in the install menu rather than after install. I managed to get to the login screen which is the default gnome login and as such was very familiar which i liked. It had all the standard options like desktop environments.

so i logged in and went strait to Firefox to see if flash came with it. it didn’t so i proceeded to install it using Firefox’s plug-in installer that failed so i manually installed it from adobe’s website to be absolutely fair Firefox normally fails when it comes to flash install so i wasn’t too suppriesed after installing the plugin i went to check a youtube video which worked fine just as expected.

I then thought about seeing what software was installed scrolling thought the applications menu i was shocked to find that fedora 13 came without openoffice.org which i see as a must for any operating system, even windows comes with a type of word processor in the form of works. which isn’t good but at least they have one. ok I thought ill just install it with the package manager (easier said than done) the package manager was at best cluttered so i searched for open office and i couldn’t find the right package i also tried to get it from there website which didn’t help either as there was no singal .deb file.

after that i thought what can this OS give me that ubuntu or other OSs can’t and to be fair the main thing was the huge library of admin tools, which for the power user and admins will be good and help them to control a Intranet for a business or school.

Conclusion

Fedora 13 is a very stable OS however it has a couple of flaws and the main one is making it for admins and not the public and this cause the issue of certain software not being installed and also installing software becoming an issue i also have a problem with the fact that this OS seems to be behind and is being very typical of an older Linux distro in it thinks about companies even tho its open source and lacks the tools for an end user like you or me to use it effectively and without problems

Install 3/5 (due to error)

Appearance 4/5

Ease of use 3.5/5

Overall 3.5

Windows 7 SP1

By the end of July, a public beta of the first Service Pack for Windows 7 will be released. Selected candidates for the pre-beta testers will receive the update even sooner — should be any time within the next few weeks.

Many companies wait until a first Service Pack is released before adopting a new OS, so they can avoid as many pitfalls as possible when going through the difficult task of changing their primary operating systems. So, when SP1 does come, it should lead to another boost in sales for Microsoft.

This service pack wont feature much and will mainly have old updates and be re-branded as SP1 to add a sense of security to business as they normally wait until a service pack has been released to upgrade.

For you readers out there with Windows XP, Vista, or some other older operating systems, who have been waiting (or procrastinating) switching to Windows 7, you might as well now wait for SP1 to be released, as it make your installation a much smoother process. If you don’t that’s a lot of updates and restarts