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.

An old mate of mine has released his first iPhone app, a sort of modern take on the Rizla Game, a popular game for potheads.

You know the game, I’m sure. Someone writes the name of some famous celebrity/character/serial killer on a Rizla and sticks it to your forehead. You then have to work out who “you” are by asking questions that have yes/no answers. Sort of like Akinator, but for people who have friends.

Pete’s version has the name come up on the iPhone screen, along with a timer. As iPhones and iPods generally don’t come pre-gummed, unlike Rizlas, you’ll need to affix it to your face somehow. Blu-Tack works fine for at least the minute and a half that you need, unless you have super slimy skin in which case you’ll probably need Gaffer Tape.

Either way, you’ll look a bit of a knob…

So, if you want to look like a dickhead, here is the link to the App: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/hoozat/id492001248?mt=8

Recently I made some comments about the VX1 Mini-Mobile phone.

Since then I’ve played about with the phone. And then I broke it.

The phone got knocked off the end of my workbench, after which it failed to work.

The phone now fails to recognise SIM cards, and rattles when shaken. This makes me think that the SIM contact mountings have broken.

This is shit. I’ve thrown a Nokia 3310 at a wall and it still read the SIM, even though half the keypad was snapped off.

Tesco have withdrawn the phone from sale, and are not offering replacements.  I was offered what is tantamount to a credit note against  other goods though.

The saying goes: “he who breaks something to understand it has left the path of wisdom”.

If it already broken, it is fair game.

So I’ll be taking one apart soon.

Another day, another drunken tat-gadget purchase. This time it’s the VX1 Mini Mobile Phone, a phone designed to be cheap, cheerless, and as basic as something very basic. If it was a car, it would be a 1991 Škoda Favorit.

The phone, which offers less features than a Nokia 3110, is available from Tesco for the whopping price of £9.48. This is what it looks like, with the usual cigarette lighter for size comparison:

At 80x50x10.3mm, its small enough to bung in a pocket/bag/glovebox and forget about until you need it. The battery allegedly last for 90 hours, and you can chatter away for 100 minutes, or so they say.

You can make and recieve calls on it, and do the text message stuff, but that is about it. No games, no putting your own ringtones on it, no web browsing and certainly no fancy-pants apps that will annoy the hell out of your mates (if you have any left after installing that Vuvuzela thing).

This less-than-a-tenner phone isn’t locked to any network and does the GSM 900/1800 or 850/1900 thing, allowing you to pop your existing sim card into it. I’ve tried it on all the usual UK suspects and it works, with the exception of 3. 3 sims carry a warning not to insert them into 2g phone or they will become blocked, and I only have one 3 sim at the moment, which I don’t want to lose.

Talking of losing things, this is probably the main market for the phone. If you are the sort of numpty who can’t go out for a night on the lash without losing your phone in a taxi, this is the idea one for you. True, you’ll lose your number, and won’t be able to annoy your mates (those you have left) with the latest iDrone apps, but losing a ten quid phone is a lot less hassle that losing one worth £400*.

*Of course, the only reason why I don’t have four hundred and odd quids worth of phone is because I keep buying tat like this instead!

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.