Tony Blews

I recently bought a Samsung Galaxy Europa from 3, to replace my old Sony Ericsson W595 which had become increasingly unreliable following a freak rollercoaster accident back in September.

The Europa, AKA the  GT-I 5500 is an alleged smartphone, running Android 2.2. It cost me 50 quid, plus 15 quid pre-loaded  on a SIM card. Not too bad, unless you want to keep your old number, in which case you end up with a spare SIM with 15 quid on it, which expires within one month.

One of the reasons, besides the obvious need of a phone replacement,  that I bought the thing was my desire to replace my current “smartphone” combination of an old 3rd generation iPod and MiFi dongle thing. Carrying the pair of them around was a pain, considering the battery life of each, so I was looking for something about the same size that wouldn’t entail a pocket full of cables and mains adapters.

As you can see, the Europa is smaller than the iPod, with a considerably smaller screen, so consequently the on-screen keyboard is far too small and fiddly for a normal sized human to use, let alone a giant ham-fisted oaf like me.

The Europa has a 2 mega-pixel camera, which is crap. Any more information about it would be superfluous.

The processor is woefully underpowered, and apps keep crashing. A particular problem is the WiFi system failing to work and the settings page just reporting “Error!”. Useful.

If by some arcane magic the Wifi system does work and the Europa is used as a mobile hotspot, the data rate is deplorable:

Note that I was is Stafford at the time, which is considerably more than 50 miles from Morecambe. Hence I could not see the Chinese Synchonized Swimming Team practicing.

Also, using the phone as a hotspot causes you to fall foul of Three’s piss-awful censorship. Most URL shorteners seem to be blocked.

So it looks like I’ll be keeping the MiFi for a while yet. And, considering how ropey the phone is, (despite my hatred of Apple) the iPod too.

Back in January I bought a Datawind Ubisurfer,  a small netbook running Linux. You can read my first impressions of it here.

It wasn’t too bad for the price, and I used it a lot at work and whenever I was stuck on a train.

Back in May, I attempted to upgrade the software on it and it went all wrong. The internal GPRS modem refused to be recognised, the MP3 player packed it, and it stopped recognising USB memory sticks.

After a few email exchanges and a bit of confusion (two tech support people with the same name!), I finally got around to sending it back to them at the end of July.

It’s back, and this time it’s WinCE!

Firstly, some hardware specs (again):

• Display: 7 inch TFT – Wide screen display, 800 x 480 pixels (WVGA)
• Memory: 128MB Ram; 1GB Flash
• Networking: Embedded Cellular Modem,Wireless LAN WiFi IEEE 802.11 b/g, 10BaseT Ethernet Interface
• Control: Touch Mouse Pad – Dual Button,  Standard 80 Key Keyboard
• Battery & Power: Lithium Polymer (Approximate Working Time: 3 hours), or External DC Adapter
• Size/Weight: 222 x 165 x 29.5 m, 700 grams
• Ports: Push-Push SD card socket, USB Port, Earphone & Ethernet jacks.

As for software, the thing is now running Windows Embedded CE 6.0 Core, which means that it goes from Off to Usable in about 7 seconds.

Softmaker Office 2008 comes pre-installed, which includes the usual suspects of a spreadsheet, wordprocessor, presentation maker and Outlook-a-like mail client.

Browsing is done with either the UbiSurfer browser, which works through the embedded cellular modem, and a somewhat restricted version of Internet Explorer 6.

The UbiSurfer browser uses a proprietory protocol to have your pages rendered on one of Datawind’s servers and then sent ina compressed form to your machine. While this was painfully bad on the Linux version, it actuall seems to work fairly well this time. Once you’ve got the think connected, which takes about 30 seconds, and loaded the home page (above), it is reasonable speedy for a cell-phone connection. While taking longer than the 7 seconds quoted in the bumph, mine loads the BBC News page in a about 10 seconds. Sometimes it can be annoying and take a while to tab between fields, but generally it works.

Using a WiFi connection and Internet Explorer gives you pretty much what you expect, but ActiveX and Flash cause problems, making Facebook and Google Mail annoying. And it constantly asks  if you really want to visit pages with outdated certificates. Pretty much par for the course with IE6.

With WiFi you can apparently also use the Chat program which I really can’t be bothered to test, and a YouTube viewer which I haven’t managed to get working yet.

There’s also a PDF viewer, general media player and ebook reader on there. They work fairly well, but the PDF reader is very slow.

Games wise you get Allure Xonix, one of those draw boxes and capture an area while avoiding bouncy things games, Tile Fall, one of those click on blocks to destroy them in the right order games, and Paint, one of those not real a game but lumped in with them games. A better menu title might have been Entertainment, but probably not.

Finally, there is a thing called Terminal, which seems to be neither use nor ornament. It seems to be written to access the on-board modem, but doesn’t seem to work. Neither does it support Telnet, which is a bit of a pain in the arse.

All in all, and it pains me to say this, the Windows CE version is miles better that the older Linux version. It’s actually usable for a start. Apart from the lack of a telnet client, obviously.

UPDATE:

The telnet problem is now solved, by installing PocketPuTTY.

Download “PocketPuTTY 2007-02-28 dev build for PPC2002 (release)” from the PocketPuTTY Downloads page, and copy the putty.exe file from the archive to your device. Either dump it on the desktop or put it somewhere else and create a shortcut to it.

Another month brings another Gadget purchase. This time its the Huawei E5830 Mifi thingummy, a combined 3g mobile broadband modem and portable wifi hotspot. Once again it is on the 3 network.

A rough indication of size

The reasons for buy it are twofold. Firstly the internal GPRS modem in my Ubisurfer has gone down, rendering it useless without another means of connectivity (at least until Datawind’s tech support sort me out a replacement or fix); and secondly, my trust Huawei E220 USB broadband modem is being pressed into service as a permanet net connection for my Linux box running a game server (until Virgin can final get around to installing proper broadband for me).

That’s enough of me justifying the purchase, let’s have a look at the thing.

There it is, all lit up like Blackpool

Ooh, shiny. So, pop in the sim card and battery, plug it in to the charger and wait for twelve hours. Thumb the power button for two seconds and on come the five lights.

Ah, you’re thinking, there are four lights! Well, the fifth light (in the middle, not shown) only comes on when you first power up the device or if you feel an irresistable pull to a a foreign land (roaming).

If you’re really insteresting in what the four status lights mean, I’m sure you can find out elsewhere.

Thumb the wifi button for two seconds, then the Saturn button (only my name for it, as it has a little picture of a ringed planet on it) for two seconds and if all is well you’ll be able to connect to the internet through the thing.

Assuming all it well, that is. Sometimes it isn’t. Even though i’m a bit of a 3 fanboy (nine phones and two modems over the years), I still have issues with them. Firstly 3 is a crap name for a company, Whampoa would have sounded cooler; and secondly the coverage where I currently live is ropey at times.

Coverage map of ST17 XXX

The darker shade represents indoor/outdoor coverage, whilst the lighter shade shows outdoor coverage only. The pointer shows where I live. Not shown is a 3g modem gaffa taped to my window in order to get a good signal.

Besides the device itself, the box contains a short USB lead and a charger. The charger is, obviously, for charging the thing, and the USB cable is for three things.

1. using it as a storage device if a microSD card (not supplied) is inserted into it
2. using it as a USB modem
3. using the configuration program.

The configuation program (which installs straight from the device itself – nice) allows you to do all the usual wifi router based things: DHCP config, port forwarding, changing the SSID to something rude, changing the password to something you’ll actually remember.

Connecting to the thing is easy with any most wifi devices. So far I’ve managed to get two laptops (WinXP and Linux), the Ubisurfer and a borrowed iPod Touch running concurrently. I know the iPhone works ok (slightly faster that the phone’s built in 3g modem), and I’m sure the iPad will work. (Does anyone want to lend me one to test?)

Sadly, I could not get a laptop running Hexxeh’s Flow build of Chromium OS. But I put this down to Flow failing to recognised the Dell’s WiFi hardware.

Its a great little device. Go and buy one now. £49 from Three on their PAYG plan.

So, all that remains for me to do now are the customary speed test, using www.speedtest.net, as ever.

Firstly using the old E220 USB Modem:

E220 USB Results

And now using the E5830 Mifi:

E3850 Mifi Results

I clearly have a winner here, but your mileage may vary.

Finally, here are the frankly deplorable results taken recently from my sister’s Orange Home Broadband link recently:

Orange are shite

I’m trying to get to grips with my impulse purchase of the week. For reasons best left unexplored I’ve parted with about 120 quid for a Datawind UbiSurfer from Maplin. Its a ex-display model, hence the slight price reduction over the RRP of £149.99.

So, what is the UbiSurfer? In short, its a cheap netbook running an implementation of Linux. Oh, with a years free internet access thrown in.

More about that later, but first the specs:

• 7 inch 800×400 TFT screen
• 128MB RAM, 1GB Solid State disk
• Full QWERTY keyboard and Touchpad mouse
• Push-Push SD card socket and 2 USB ports (the box says 3, but I have 2 and a connector I’ve never seen before)
• Measures 222x165x29.5mm, weighs 700g
• Battery life provides 4 hours active use and 4 hours

Note the lack of a spec concerning the processor. Apparently it is some form of ARM 500Mhz job.

Applications wise you get the usual word processing and spreadsheet offerings, and a collections of email clients, PDF readers and the like, all GPLed programs.

For web browsing you have Mozilla IceWeasel (Firefox), which only works when connected via a Wifi hotspot, and the UbiSurfer browser itself.
And now we get to the main (only) reason that I bought this thing: free internet access. Included in the price of the device is 30 hours access per month (for a year) to Vodaphone’s GPRS network, via an onboard modem. As we all know, GPRS isn’t exactly lightening fast, but Datawind claim that any web page can be loaded in 7 seconds.

This is supposed to be achieved by Datawind pre-rendering the web pages on their servers (in Canada) and sending them on in a compressed form to the UbiSurfer browser, which then decodes and displays them.
Ok, that sounds fine in theory, but in practice its not so good.
Datawind’s own site (www.datawind.com) takes about fifteen seconds to load, and more complex site such a Google Mail can take up to a minute to fully render.
This pre-rendering process also throws up problems when entering data onto a web page. Tabbing between fields can take up to ten seconds.
Obviously these problems don’t occur when using IceWeasel and connecting via a Wifi hotspot.

But, oddly, my biggest complaint about the UbiSurfer browser is about the hideous splash screen which also comes up when you disconnect, thus preventing you from viewing pages offline. Here it is in all its glory.

Just look at the smug pissweasel. Those grass stains are going to raise questions in the office after lunch. Luckily you can overwrite the this image with something less irritating.

I shall continue to persevere with this thing, in the hope that I can find a use for it.

Just found a GPS track of my trip last month from The Shrewsbury Arms in Stafford to The Stanley Arms in Chester. If you zoom in, you’ll see that it is quite accurate, even showing the bit where I missed an exit and went round a round-a-bout. If i’d set the logging to use small time intervals then the “road holding” would have been better.

Here is the map:

View Larger Map

Download the file