Yes readers I’m still here just been very very busy. With the oldest graduating from High School and heading to the Marines soon, work, and of course trying to keep up with the lil one I’ve had my hands full.
Bah who am I kidding most of my spare time has been spent on the Star Wars Old Republic MMO….lol
After 2 years of being out of our short sale we thought it was time for us to become home owners again. Before we did anything we sat down with a loan officer and he went over the figures and said everything look good. Now he was aware of our previous situation that led to our short sale. We were in the middle of a relocation thanks to my old job closing up shop and shipping my position down to Atlanta. Granted I could of packed up the family and moved down there but we still would of face the difficult task of selling a home in the middle of a housing market meltdown.
So after being reassured by our loan officer everything was alright, multiple times. We went ahead and started looking for homes since our lease was coming due soon on our current home. In less than a week we found a home and before I put in a bid, I once again asked the loan officer if we were looking good. He said yes. Well Ladies and Gentlemen less than 24 hours after that discussion our dreams have been put on the back burner, seems the underwriters and the fha have decided that we are not worthy yet to own another home at least until we have been 3 years out of our previous short sale. A short sale mind you that would not have happened if 1) we didnt relocate for a job, 2) housing market took a dump and 3) a massive recession. It took us a year and a half to sell our previous home, a home that honestly we didnt want to get rid of but had to because of my employment situation.
That is the reason myself and our real estate agent repeatedly asked our loan officer if we were ok and we were reassured that we were only to have our dreams crushed. Yes a year isnt that long of a wait but the home we had found was perfect for our family it was only a few miles from where we live and it had enough room for all the kids.
Now I sit here typing this up, in all honesty I dont know why, maybe just to get this off my chest. Perhaps all this was for the better but from where I’m sitting right now its more of the same crap we have had to deal with in the last 3 years.
2011 arrived over a month ago and the mobile phone manufacturers have not stopped pushing out new android based phones. HTC Evo shift a smaller brother to the EVO was released with a builtin sliding QWERTY to the Sprint network. This month will see the HTC Thunderbolt, hopefully. Q2 will see the Motorola Bionic. I’m most interested in the Thunderbolt which is on Verizon’s new LTE network and similar in specs to the EVO. Some of you know that I currently have a droid, so you may be asking why not just stay with Motorola’s line of products. One reason is their stance against developer community which has helped to improve features that some felt were either missing or just not needed. Blur, which is in its current iteration a hot mess. Now dont get me wrong if not for Motorola and Verizon’s Droid 1, and the strong push I dont think manufacturers and carriers would be pushing android as much as they do now, but android still has a ways to go.
Speaking of ways to go anyone else a little upset by the rumored price of the Motorola Xoom, the supposed answer to the ipad. Xoom will be a 10.1″ tablet running Google’s Honeycomb, aka Android 3.0 which was designed for tablets. It looks gorgeous but at $799 and requiring a 3g plan, Verizon and Motorola are pricing themselves out of the average consumers price range for a device that basically would be in between a laptop and a desktop. Granted that is the same price as the 3g Apple ipad with similar specs but the issue is that there is no wifi only version which would bring down the costs for the consumer. Options are good things, ask Samsung, the galaxy tab while a mild success would probably have sold better if it had a wifi only option like the ipad.
2011 is shaping up to be an interesting time for the mobile community, here’s hoping that competition breeds an even brighter future for consumers.
Well thanks to the Android tablet market being slow to startup, I finally broke down and got an ipad through my company. I was one of the first to say I would have no use for a tablet but it has come in handy for little chores I do around the office.
Say I need to go to the computer room and work on some cabling I dont need to worry about carrying around a 15 inch laptop and a laptop bag. Just grab the ipad and go. I do miss flash and thats one of the major issues I have with the device because a lot of websites dont have nonflash backup sites.
I think it was very short sighted of Apple to not even think that companies would be so ready to dump flash just because they said its ancient history. I was hoping to get a Cisco Cius instead of an ipad but it just took too long and the yearly budget was almost gone.
I am hoping to replace my old blackberry with a Droid pro in the coming weeks but only if the exchange integration and vpn issues that my droid has have been fixed.
Since the iPad has been such a huge hit for consumers, other companies have started pushing their tablet products. I believe tablets have a place in the world in between a laptop and a desktop but thats my opinion, being in IT I have a use for a tablet when I don’t want to turn off my laptop and pack it up for short jaunts to the computer room or if I’m on a company outing with a tablet and the right apps I wouldn’t need to lug around my laptop and backpack.
Notice I said right apps, ipad while having the apple app store has a brevy of applications but not all of them translate well to the lovely ipad screen, and the prices for some of the simplest apps are not the best. You wouldn’t expect to pay $5+ for a simple ssh/terminal or rdp tool. The android app store while having more free apps isn’t available on all of the android tablets currently, with the forthcoming Samsung Galaxy tab being the exception. Not only that but Google themselves have stated that Android in its present form isn’t really designed for the tablet format but hopefully that will change with Android 3.0 which is due out this winter.
Now to add into the mix Blackberry announced their “Playbook” Tablet with a nice array of features including at dual-core 1Ghz processor, which could really but a damper on battery life if not properly managed. The one area that RIMM succeeds is in the business world, but Apple and Android are fast on their heels. Blackberry doesn’t have the greatest of history with apps and touchscreen formats, ahem Storm anyone. Most developers are also moving away from Blackberry so it will be interesting to see what the new Blackberry OS built off of QNX will over to developers and if it will help bring some of them back.
So many choices what is a young technologist to do, wait and see is my motto. Galaxy Tab and Blackberry Playbook while announced isn’t available for sell yet nor has pricing been confirmed and the rumored talks of the data plans from AT&T don’t appeal to anyone and will probably have you looking at the iPad 3g before a Galaxy Tab. Both the Galaxy Tab and Playbook will have a wifi only option, with the Playbook being exclusively wifi only and tethered to other Blackberries as an option for 3g.
References:
Blackberry Playbook Announced
Samsung Galaxy Tab
I’ve owned a Droid since it was first released back in November 2009. Usually I’m not a first time adopter and like for others to work out the kinks before I invest in a product, but the Motorola Droid appeared to be an awesome phone and at the time was running the newest version of Android, 2.0. Since I’ve owned my Droid, I’ve rooted it, installed other roms and even beta releases of Android 2.1 and 2.2.
I’ve also noticed over the last 8 months the outcry from some people especially the techies and tech news sites the complaints about the fragmentation of android. By fragmentation I am referring to android phones running different versions of the android os. Now as a power user I understand the frustration when the Google Branded Nexus One gets Android 2.2 before everyone else but I also realize that is to be expected as it was the first phone marketed and sold exclusively by Google. It was basically the Google Reference phone, so of course its going to get Froyo before the rest of us that being said the debacle with the 2.1 upgrade from verizon for the droid has left a bad taste in some people’s mouth. But honestly ask yourself does the average consumer even care that 2.2 hasn’t been released on their droid or evo 4g. I dont think they give a rats ass, as long as they can make their calls, receive texts and do whatever else they do on their phone they could care less about an os upgrade that adds a few more features that they might never use.
As a power user I push my phone to the limit so yes I’m slighted by the fact that Nexus One gets Android 2.2 before the rest of us, but motorola has already announced that the Droid and Droid-X will both be getting Android 2.2 before the summer is over. Let us hope that Verizon doesnt muck up the release again, not that it matters to me since I’m already on 2.2 thanks to the awesome rom community that surrounds the Android community.
I guess the question is, is the Fragmentation in Android phones really that big of a problem? In my opinion its not because the average consumer doesnt care and honestly us geeks are just the very vocal minority. We have to remember that the carriers like stability over the hot newness. Plus Google has already stated that with 3.0 Android will be moving toward a more modular makeup basically making updates as easy as going to the app store.
Ahh I forgot the joy of living in a rural area and by joy, I mean ignorance of some people. So driving home from work yesterday down my usual route, Mr. Sheriff gets behind me. I’m going the speed limit if not a few mph slower. Make my right turn and of course he is turning with me, mind you he has been behind me for about 3 miles now, on comes the lights. I’m thinking to myself WTF, so I pull over out he gets and he goes sir did you just purchase this car because the plates arent matching. Mind you all we’ve had this car for two months now and just received in the mail from the STATE of Illinois our new sticker and registration for the van. So I’m thinking to myself how in the hell is it not in your system.
Anyway pass him my license, registration, and insurance which are all current. He apologizes but at the same time compares the registration to the vin number for the van like I’m still full of sh!t. Mind you the car we had before this one was a Ford Freestyle so no way could the registration for a Quest be the same thing. So he gives me, my insurance and registration back and then goes well let me run your license and then you can go. WTH so you couldnt catch me up on insurance and registration now you have to make sure I’m super duper clean. Tell the truth thats what you really wanted to do in the first place dont sit there and lie straight to my face. So yesterday I had another case of DWB – and for all my non urban speaking friends that stands for Driving While Black 
. We now return you to my usual happy self.
…damn east coasters… in reply to in10seitty #Powered by Twitter Tools.
I’ve been itching to use Froyo since it was announced at Google I/O back in May. Lucky for me and all the other early adopters there was leak of the Froyo build that was converted over to run on the Droid.
I’ve been using it for about a week now and I can say it makes my droid a little snappier. Now Froyo added a few things to the table:
I havent used all the features yet that Froyo promises so I sill speak on the ones I have tried out. Flash 10.1 is currently in beta for Froyo and I’ve done a little testing of course little bit after froyo hit the web for all us droid users, hulu found a way to cut off the access to their widget. Currently Flash 10.1 is at beta 2 and I’ve gone a a few sites it has a few slowness issues but overall it works pretty well.
As for APPS2SD the main issue with that is the developers need to activate that function in their program now granted this was already active in certain roms but Froyo brings it to all of the android community.
I can say that overall the performance has been greatly improved on froyo. System is very responsive and the native install gives you 5 screens instead of the current 3 in stock 2.1 release for Droid. Whether or not this will be the case on the final approved release remains to be seen but one can only hope. Still no release date on when Froyo will be available for Droid, a few lucky testers on the nexus one were able to get a hold of it for their handset but Google quickly pulled it down.
Sources:
Manifest Tech
Froyo on the Droid