Nexus 4

So long, webOS.

Palm's (and then HP's) little phone OS that couldn't quite has served me pretty well these last few years, but with the hardware slowly getting on my nerves and no app ecosystem to keep me with it, I have given in and moved to a more active operating system.

I got my Nexus 4 delivered today (I'm typing this on it now), but have been using Android on my tablet for the last few days so the growing pains have, so far, been minimal.

The biggest change is the keyboard; the last three phones I've used have had physical input so moving to a touch keyboard is a bit weird. The Nexus comes with a fancy swipe keyboard installed as default though, so it's an even bigger change.

I'm still not as fast with the swipe as I was on the Pre, but I do think I'm getting faster. It takes some of the imprecise pecking out of the equation too, which was worrying me a bit about a touchscreen-only phone.

Oculus Rift part 2

Mike, the guy at work with the Oculus Rift (also my immediate boss), let me borrow it for the weekend, so I spent what feels like a lot of this evening setting it up. I say setting it up, what I mean is, trying to set it up.

Everything plugged in and powered on, I wasn't getting anything. I didn't know if it was the cables, the drivers, the graphics card, Windows being a jerk, or if I'd somehow damaged the Rift while gingerly taking it out of the box and setting it on the desk.

It turns out, as near as I can tell anyway, that the graphics card is the problem; its second monitor port appears to be non-functional. I've updated the drivers and restarted the machine more times than I can remember tonight, but it won't pick up anything I plug into that second slot - even the monitor, which works fine on the first port.

The Rift, of course, also works on that first slot, but it proved very difficult to set up, test, configure, tweak and use a head-mounted VR display with only its video output, so in the end I gave up.

I can see the appeal of the Rift, and if it had worked I'd be dashing around City 17 feeling violently ill right now instead of typing this. But in the circumstances, I've got to take some comfort from the fact that I didn't spend $300 on this headset that I can't actually use without spending upwards of £100 on a new graphics card to go along with it.

Oculus Rift

One of the guys at YoYo got his Oculus Rift today, and as we thankfully work in an industry that's not entirely serious he spent most of the morning setting it up and letting people try out the Tuscany demo.

I tried it twice, and both times it gave me severe motion sickness.

I'm not entirely certain what the problem was, but I'm pretty sure it's one of a few prime suspects:

1. the 3d effect;
2. the rapid speed of movement in the environment;
3. the sensitivity of the head tracking was too low;
4. the lack of a frame of reference for your "body"; or
5. the relatively low resolution or lack of focus in the lenses

The first one I tried to mitigate by playing with one eye closed, but that didn't seem to help much. I was already feeling pretty poor at that point though, so it might have been too little too late. The player's movement in the environment is severely disorienting because you're sitting still - only your head movement is being translated into the game. You're also skating around like Gordon Freeman in the original Half Life, slightly too fast compared to a natural walking speed. This also causes some tearing in the display, which doesn't help.

My head movements weren't all being translated accurately either; looking up and down (or tilting my head from side to side) seemed to be 1:1, but turning was slightly slower than my actual movement. This also ties into the lack of a frame of reference - while turning your head a little bit wouldn't change the direction of movement (much like you can walk in a line but look to the side in real life), turning too much would rotate your entire character. So you'd be travelling in one direction, then glance to the side and suddenly be travelling what felt diagonally.

The movement trouble was almost entirely eliminated in Team Fortress 2, which not only had entirely separate body and head rotation but also let you aim separately from where you're looking and allows you to see your character's body when you look down, providing a point of reference for where you're travelling if it's not the same direction as you're looking. The character's weapon also helps ground your point of view more than the Tuscany demo's disembodied viewpoint.

But while the seasickness wasn't as obvious while playing, the queasiness did kick in a few minutes after I stopped, and hasn't really gone away even now - hours after taking the headset off. All of which only makes me gladder that nobody had Mirror's Edge installed at the time.

The final problem is the low-resolution panel, which leaves your field of vision slightly blurred - not helped by the fixed-focus lenses, so you can't adjust it on the fly. Both of these might be solved in the final production model, but I'm not sure they're going to help with my nausea.

It's a promising piece of kit, although I'm not sure it's worth the current $300 price tag, and there were some truly fascinating moments while using it; I was standing up at one point while using the Tuscany demo, and turned around to talk to someone (in the real world) who was having a conversation just over my shoulder. Discovering that they weren't there was weird.

Aroint thee, phone!

I'm due a phone upgrade on June 28th, and it cannot come soon enough.

For the last three years, four months and thirteen days, I've been using webOS phones. Starting with the Palm Pre when it came out, I've gone through the Pre² and now use the Pre³. I love webOS, and nothing else I've used has convinced me that it's anything other than the best-designed and easiest-to-use mobile phone operating system that's out there. Sadly, nobody else seems to have agreed with me (least of all HP, who until three days owned webOS, until they sold it to LG), and since neither Palm nor HP had the money to really push the boat out on proper hardware it's actually pretty easy to see why.

webOS has always been a bit sluggish, its usability hampered by slow responses to user input. Occasionally the phone's multitasking will cause the entire device to freeze for a few seconds, leaving me incapable of even closing the offending app. My phone occasionally won't switch on the mic when I make or answer a phone call, leaving me muted. The browser runs out of memory with more than one card open, which effectively cripples the whole point of a multitasking OS, and will randomly reload an entire page or fail to render more than one screen's height.

I find it really difficult to use anything else, though. The best thing about the Pre series of hardware, which I desperately wish other companies would steal, is the the gesture bar - a touch-sensitive panel that runs off the bottom of the screen. I'm so used to the Pre gestures that I do them automatically on any other phone I pick up.

Come June, I'm probably going to pick up a Windows Phone 8 device¹. It's probably the operating system that I've used least of the three big names currently on the market, but I really like that it's trying to distinguish itself from Android and iOS' boring icon grids. I'll probably take a few weeks to stop trying the back gesture, though.

¹ What can I say? I'm committed to the underdog.

Ubuntu mobile

Canonical, the group that maintains the Ubuntu distribution of Linux, have announced a touch-centred phone UI for Ubuntu. The plan, apparently, is that the phone will be able to connect to a keyboard, mouse and external monitor - which should, in theory, convert it into a full desktop PC.

There are a couple of hurdles in the way, though. Firstly, the early videos and previews I've seen have been less than glowing. They all realise it's a pre-alpha, first-release version of the OS, but the lag and reliance on gestures have caused concern. The gestures in particular don't seem quite right to me; they might be more useful once the lag's worked out, but I get the impression that the swipe-down gestures in particular were thought up for use by a mouse - the target icons are minute, which has the potential to make finger navigation a right pain.

The second, in my opinion much more dangerous, problem they face is the timeline. Ubuntu Phone devices aren't going to be available until early 2014 - over a year away. That's assuming, of course, that there aren't any unexpected delays or manufacturing problems - which would be unheard of outside Apple's processes.

A long lead in, giving developers time to get used to and create software for the OS, isn't necessarily a death knell for Ubuntu on phones, but they've basically given everyone else in the smartphone market a list of features that they can start copying now to undermine all of Ubuntu Phone's USPs by the time it launches.

Palm, and later HP, made similar premature announcements about webOS that meant once the devices hit the market their features were either old news or had been effectively incorporated into Android, iOS or both.

Obviously the phone-as-full-PC feature is going to be difficult for Apple or Google to rip off, without a big-screen version of iOS or Android currently on the cards, but I'd expect the majority of smartphone users aren't looking for that as a primary use for their next device. The gesture stuff, which is in a stronger position to change how people use their phone day to day, is much easier for someone else to nab in the next twelve months.

About bloody time

The announcement was made this morning that O2 are going to get the Palm Pre in the UK, Ireland and Germany, with fellow Telefonica subsidiary Movistar getting it in Spain.

But while this confirmation is nice to have, the carrier information was already more or less a given - very few people doubted, especially in the last few weeks or months, that O2 would be the one to take the Pre to market here. The arguably more important information about pricing and the release date - which was also rumoured to be getting a reveal this week - hasn't materialised yet.

I'm still hoping to get a Pre on release - and in fact the later it lands, then the easier it should be to get out of my current Vodafone contract - but it's frustrating to have so little firm information. They'll apparently be bringing the phone to market before the end of the year (in time for Christmas, allegedly), which is certainly pointing towards the end of November or start of December, if the verbiage used to describe the US release is anything to go by. Palm spent the first five months of 2009 telling people that the Pre would be out "in the first half of the year", and released it in early June - so it's a fair bet that a "second half of 2009" release won't materialize until early December.

(I realise this is turning into a bit of a one-track posting habit, but hopefully I'll stop talking about the bloody thing once I finally get it.)

Pre, post-launch

So, the Palm Pre is out now in the US. Anybody got one (or tried one out) yet? I've read a whole bunch of reviews and forum posts, but the opinions of people I know online are always much better than random blogs and forum idiots.

I'm dying to get my hands on a device to try it out for myself; even just so I can try out the keyboard, which seems to be the main area of complaints, and the only part of the phone I have any significant concerns about. There have been a few reports of overheating, bricking and screens being warped, but this is a first-gen device and I don't think anybody was expecting a perfect machine straight out of the gate. Sprint and Palm seem to be doing a good job of replacing faulty devices, but that can't be doing wonders for their already-low stock levels.

I've got it on good authority that the UK release for the Pre will be in October (pending supply; December if things fall through), on O2. Presumably we won't hear any official announcements until the stock situation calms down enough that they can forecast availability for the UK launch, but it's frustrating to have to rely on third-hand information and rumours for so long.

In any case, I'm hoping that the hardware and software issues that have been encountered during the American launch will be largely ironed out by the time we see the Pre arrive on this side of the pond.

Palm Pre: Can Has?

Since it was announced at CES in January, I've been following the new Palm Prē very closely. I don't think I've ever been this excited about a piece of gadgetry.

(In case you've not seen it yet, here's a pretty decent 26-minute demo.)

At CES, it was mentioned (probably in passing) that information about the UK launch of the device would be announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which has been running since Monday. I'm checking the "gadgets" folder in my Google Reader feeds every 20 minutes to see if anything new has been announced, but so far there's been nothing substantial; a few new features, some clarification on what it can and can't do (so far), and the first chapter of the textbook on developing new applications for its webOS operating system.

Rumours abound about the carrier that it'll eventually land on in the UK. The American version of the phone will be on Sprint, while a lot people seem to think that Vodafone will get the UK contract. The strongest evidence is that the phones at the MWC were running on Vodafone's network, but I thought that they would be too concerned about the impact on Blackberry Storm sales (and now, the HTC Magic) from the Palm Prē - which seems to have a buzz about it bigger than any I can remember other than the iPhone.

The MWC ends today, so there's only a few hours for them to announce the UK carrier - if it doesn't come out of the congress, chances are it'll be long after the (still un-dated) American launch before I get any idea of when I'll be able to pick one up.

3D Projector

Forget the iPhone

I want one of these.

iWant

I've been skeptical about the iPhone pretty much since it was announced; the iPod's synonymity with "mp3 player" pissed me off, especially since it's tied into iTunes so completely. I was expecting a lot of the same PR flash and no actual bang from the iPhone, but to be honest I'm getting more and more convinced.

I'm still far from a sure sale for Apple, though. For one thing, I have a problem the lack of a 3G or GPRS data connection. If they really want me to use it as a portable internet/email device, it's got to be at least as quick as my current phone. There's plenty of software concerns too; there are strange limitations on what you can do. For instance, there's no way to delete multiple emails at once - you've just got to wipe them one at a time. I get 50 or 60 spam emails a day, thanks to my email appearing on my website; having to go through each of them one by one would just get frustrating.

So, on that front I'm going to have to wait for the next model, which will hopefully address some of the missing hardware and software functions. Which doesn't bother me, really; I'm not sure I could justify anything like £300 on a mobile phone.

But if it was available as a free upgrade, colour me very interested indeed. Shame that's not going to happen though; while it was rumoured for a while that my cell provider, Vodafone, was going to get the exclusive iPhone contract, it's now looking likely that O2 (my old provider, as it turns out) is getting it instead. TMobile got the contract in Germany.

Which is a pity. I might still see if I can get into an O2 store and demo the thing when it launches (or a couple of weeks after, once the hysteria dies down), but this first generation is a no-go for me, at least until the exclusivity deal passes and I can get one for much less than retail.

I really, really want one, though.