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.

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

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.

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.

The PaperJamz Guitar is essentially a paper thin toy guitar, or at least thats what the marketing bumph says. In reality it is only paper thin if the paper in question is The Mail On Sunday (including all supplements).

The reason for this is simple. Whilst the actual capacitive sensors and sound transducer are paper thin, batteries are not. Plus, it it were paper this, it would flop about like a rabbit’s ears. So its actually about an inch thick at its fattest point.

This particular “guitar” is number 4 in a series of 6. Each one has a different look and is programmed with three songs to strum along to. On this model they are:

1. You Really Got Me (The Kinks)
2. Blitzkrieg Bop (The Ramones)
3. Godzilla (Blue Oyster Cult) – I had never heard of this one!

For each song, you can either play in “Perfect Play Mode”, where you just bash away at the strumming area to hear the song play, and “Rhythm Mode”, where you have to get the strumming at least vaguely correct. Neither of these are really that interesting.

What is interesting about the thing is the “Freestyle Mode”, which allows you to play your own songs by using the fretboard as a, well, fretboard. While you can’t actually make real chords on it, you can play pre-recorded chord samples by touching parts of the fretboard to select the base chord and modifiers, and strumming the strum area. They even include a handy chord chart to help you:

To sum this up briefly, to get the major chord, starting at E (don’t touch the fretboard), the frets count up FGABCDEFGA. To get a sharpened major, select the appropriate chord and also touch the next fret towards the body of the guitar. To get minor chords, select the base chord and also the fret two places towards the body. Sort of. Note that the frets don’t count up in the usual F F# G G# A etc. manner, and that they are all the same distance apart (a minor niggle – and a pisspoor joke on my part there, if you spotted it).

But, can you actually use this thing to bash out a real tune? Well lets have a look (and play Name That Tune at the same time)…

So there you have it. Its a sort of guitar, but not a really good one. If your could form real chords on it, then it would be a winner. Currently its just an amusing toy. I’m sure a future version will allow proper playing, and when it does I’ll buy one. Cos i’m sad like that.

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

And quite a lovely little thing it is too. Theres nary a blemish on it’s finish, and it has been holding it’s tuning. This is mainly due to having proper guitar heads with worm-screws, not just the usual tat you seem to find on ukuleles.

I recommend you go and buy one. Now!

Now this post is entitled “Adventures in Ukulele Tuning”, not “Buy this Ukulele and earn me a few pennies”, so what is this tuning business about?

Well, usually a ukulele is tuned GCEA (C tuning) or ADF#B (D tuning), and I already have one for each. This new little purple bugger was bought solely for the purpose of stringing it DGBE (G tuning), in a manner similar to the high four strings of a guitar (you know, the 4 closest to the ground, yet highest in pitch).

It would seem from the outset that new strings are in order, however this is my botch-job workaround:

Take the middle two strings of the current (GCEA) tuning, and re-use them as the top two strings of the new tuning (DGBE).  i.e. the C and E strings are now doing service as the B and E strings. The B is sounding a little dull, but it’ll do for now.

Get the old broken nylon-strung acoustic out of the wardrobe. The old G string from that will be pressed into service as the new G string. Sure it sounds a little dull, but it’ll do for now (again).

Finally, take the B string from the old acoustic and use that as the D string.

This will all do as a stop-gap measure until I can be bothered to get off my arse and down to the music shop to buy the proper strings. More to follow, at a later date…

The two DVD sets (Birmingham Canal Navigations and Caldon Canal) each contain two DVDs, a map, an explanatory booklet and a catalogue leaflet, as shown in the awful quality photograph here.

So what is on the DVDs? Well, one from each set contains an overview of the canal system in question, with highlights of the journeys. The other DVD contains a speeded up journey of the entire system, filmed from the box of the boat. Each is narrated by Paul himself (I assume).

Both are fascinating, and well worth the price (especially my free ones), and should Paul ever produce editions for the Lancaster Canal or Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal I’ll happily fork out the money for them.

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.