Let me break this down by generation. The first generation, 1g, was analog cellphones. You know, those old gigantic things that had a battery that lasted 5 minutes. There were many different standards for analog cellphones, but they all worked on the same basic principle. They encoded your voice into an analog wave, and transmitted it using a very high powered radio to the cell tower that would receive it and connect you to the phone network. The reason the battery lasted for such a short time was because the radio used so much power. The analog network was really only capable of transmitting voice, just like the regular telephone network, but you could theoretically use dial-up technology to transmit data over it very slowly and unreliably.

The main difference between 1g and 2g was that it moved from being analog to digital. The radios used a lot less power, audio quality increased, and you could send data as well as voice over the network. 2g is just better than 1g in every way.

The thing about 2g is that there are many different digital standards that work differently and are not compatible. Some phone carriers chose to use one set of digital technologies, and others chose a different set. Most of the world chose to use GSM, GPRS, and EDGE as 2g standards. Companies like Verizon, Sprint, and a few others chose to use CDMA, and 1x. That is why AT&T phones work in Europe, but Verizon phones do not.

Another thing is that the 2g phones that use GSM, GPRS, and EDGE have SIM cards, while the CDMA and 1x phones typically do not. A SIM card is a little plastic card that holds all your account information. In Europe, where most phones are unlocked, you can take your SIM card and put it in any phone. That phone is now your phone. If someone calls your number that phone will ring. This gives you the ability to change phones at any time. You can also do cool stuff like let your friend borrow your phone to make a call on his own dime when his battery ran out.

In the US, many people use Verizon and Sprint, who do not have SIM cards in their phones. Even people who use AT&T or T-Mobile, who do use SIM cards, have phones that are locked. If a phone is locked, it will only work with one particular SIM card. So even though you can take your card out and put it in an unlocked phone to make a call, you can’t have someone else put their card in your phone. This is why people fight so strongly to get their phones unlocked. The one downside of having phones unlocked is that it suddenly becomes a really good idea to steal expensive phones. I think that is a small price to pay for the convenience, freedom, and power for the consumer.

So 3g is all the rage these days. 3g simply refers to the third generation of wireless technologies. That includes things like HSDPA and EV-DO. These are still digital wireless technologies, like 2g, but they are capable of very fast data transfers. They aren’t as fast as a wifi, but they are so fast you can watch youtube over them if the signal is strong. There are many things you can buy that allow laptops to connect to 3g networks, so they can get really fast data service if no wifi is available.

Verizon and Sprint use EV-DO, while AT&T and T-Mobile use HSDPA. When people talk about the iPhone using 3g, they are talking about HSDPA. Apple just says 3g, because it is a better term for marketing purposes than a complicated thing like HSDPA.

The one last thing to talk about is 4g. 4g is the future. 4g basically kicks all ass, on paper. Theoretically we will be able to get super fast data everywhere. People are talking about speeds of 100Mbits minimum. We will see in the future what the reality is, but there is one thing very interesting about 4g. It seems as if Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile have all chosen LTE as their 4g technology of choice. When the 4g comes, we may finally see all the major carriers in the US using the same technology and delivering compatible phones. With Verizon promising any phone, any app, 4g finally might fix our troubles.

For any of you people out there who are getting ready to comment, yes I know that technically UTMS( HSDPA) is 3.5g, and that EDGE is 2.75g, but the purpose of this was to help people attain a colloquial understanding of the terminology, not to be super precise and confuse them further.

I hope I succeeded in helping people understand the weird cellphone acronyms. I just see so much confusion online, I had to do something.

There is another side effect of this that isn’t immediately obvious. Existing open source applications that are licensed under the GPL, and other similar licenses, can not be legally ported to the iPhone. If you make modifications to a program under the GPL, you must open source your derivative code. The Apple agreement prevents you from doing this. Therefore, you can’t port emacs to the iPhone without violating either the GPL or the agreement with Apple.

In the wake of the recent court ruling upholding the Artistic License, we are more sure than ever that open source licenses are enforceable. Thus, the only chance we have of seeing many open source apps ported to the iPhone is if Apple makes a change, because the GPL isn’t going anywhere.

Luckily many open source projects are licensed under the BSD, MIT, or other similar licenses. Projects under these licenses can be ported to the iPhone because the derivative code does not need to be open sourced. This is why we are seeing iPhone applications that contain code from PuTTY, OpenSSH, OpenSSL, etc.

The thing is that Google Calendar provides iCal files and such. It is a very open system that just begs the rest of the calendar world to sync with it. There is no technological reason that the iPhone can’t synchronize with my Google Calendar directly on its own. The fact that it does not is an example of the kind of thing that only happens on closed platforms. This kind of feature would never be missing from an open platform. I can almost guarantee Android phones will do this. The iPhone needs to do it as well. I can understand it not working well with Google Apps, but not working with it at all is unacceptable.

For now, I need to find a practical solution to this problem. The first thing you might suggest to me is that I should visit my Google Calendar in the mobile Safari browser. This does indeed work, but not well. The user interface of the native iPhone calendar application is far superior to the mobile web interface of Google Calendar. Also, the web interface lacks a lot of functionality, namely the ability to set the phone to alert me about events. If the user interface isn’t good, it’s effectively no different than if the functionality did not exist in the first place.

Your next suggestion might be to get a Mobile Me account. Hah! Listen, I’m a Google Apps user. I’m already fully invested in it. I’m not about to pay for Mobile Me, which seems to not be doing so well. Even if Mobile Me worked, Google Apps is free and better. I think it’s pretty unreasonable to expect me to pay that kind of money just to synchronize my calendar. In fact, I think it is pretty unreasonable to expect me to pay any amount of money for this one feature. Any non-free solution is right out the door. Well, maybe I’ll pay a one-time fee of $5, but that’s it.

The restriction on spending money includes purchasing Microsoft Office or Outlook. If I had a copy of Outlook, I could syncrhonize it with my Google Calendar using any of a myriad of apps like this official one. Then iTunes would act as a go-between Outlook and the iPhone. It’s a chain with five pieces (Google, Calendar Sync, Outlook, iTunes, iPhone) for a process that really only requires two pieces (Google, iPhone), but it will work. The problem is that I don’t own Outlook or Office. Sure, I could pirate them or whatever, but that’s not going to happen. I need a legitimate and reliable solution, not some hack.

In the same vein as the Outlook solution, there are also programs out there like Spanning Sync. Spanning Sync takes Google Calendar and synchronizes it with iCal. iCal then works with iTunes, and then to the phone. It’s a little bit smoother operation than some others because Spanning Sync actually appears to be a really polished application. The problem is that it is Mac only. It would be cheaper to buy Outlook than for me to buy a Mac.

Jailbreaking the iPhone would probably solve the problem, but that’s not going to happen either. I pay a lot of money for this phone, and other than this one issue, I’m almost entirely satisified with it. I’m not going to risk screwing it all up. You can jailbreak at your own risk. I’m staying on the straight and narrow.

This morning I finally came across something that might be a possible solution. It’s called NuevaSync. What NuevaSync does is pretty clever. They have what I must believe to be a Microsoft Exchange server. They allow you to get a account on the server. They will then automatically synchronize your Google Calendar with their Exchange Server. You then connect to their Exchange server directly from the iPhone, and now you will have push synchronization with your calendar. This is even better than solutions like spanning sync, as updates will be pushed, rather than manually synchronized through iTunes. So why not use NuevaSync?

The first reason not to use NuevaSync is that it doesn’t appear to support Google Apps, only regular Google accounts. Too many people who try to integrate with Google, including Google themselves, forget about Google Apps users. Google Apps users are the hardcore Googlers. They should more features and functionality, and they should get it before non-apps Google users. It’s really a shame that so often everything is the other way around.

The second reason is that an iPhone can only connect to one Exchange account at a time. I’m already using my one account to synchronize with the Exchange server at work. Why not also use the work calendar you say? Because I don’t want my personal calendar on my employer’s server, that’s why. I think that’s a reasonable expectation, don’t you? Actually my company was recently acquired. My boss who used to be a partner is now an employee. He was using the work server for his personal calendar, but now he’s trying to get everything off of there. He has a Mac, though, so maybe Spanning Sync will work for him.

In the meantime, here I am with a Google Calendar and an iPhone 3g, and never the twain shall meet. This is a serious situation that needs to be rectified.

When you want to understand why I’m buying the iPhone, you have to understand my past phone experience. I’ve got the LG VX8600 from Verizon right now. My parents pay for it on a family plan. It’s the third phone I’ve owned, and the two phones I had before it were only really capable of making calls. This phone can actually do quite a bit, especially when it comes to playing music. However, it does all those things poorly. When I first got the phone, I played with all of the features extensively. After a few days, I went back to just using it to make calls, and not much else. I even had a Blackberry at my last job. I installed a bunch of fancy apps on it, but the only thing I ever really used was the company e-mail. Even an old Treo is better than any device I have ever had.

Since I’m a software engineer by profession, it’s really pretty sad that I have been completely out of the loop when it comes to mobile computing. The reason is that every device I have had has a crappy user interface. You could have a phone with all the features in the universe, completely open source, but if the UI sucks, it is useless. This is why mobile Safari has so much market share compared to the market share of the iPhone. Even though plenty of phones have browsers, people actually use the one on the iPhone. Many people have phones with music players built in, but they use a separate iPod. The bad user interface makes the feature worthless. I would argue that the iPhone actually has more features than any other phone based on the fact that other devices with more features have bad interfaces that make those features effectively nonexistent.

The biggest reason to get the iPhone is because it will reduce the number of devices I carry every day. Right now I carry a separate phone and iPod. I also don’t have a GPS. Now I can have all three of those, and more, in a single package. This is such an unbelievably huge benefit to the iPhone that is not emphasized nearly enough. Sure, there are other devices that encompass all these features, but like I said, if the UI is bad, the feature effectively doesn’t exist. The iPhone is a usable phone, usable portable media player, and usable GPS in one single device. Only having to carry one thing, instead of three, that alone is worth a lot more money than Apple is charging.

There is some competition for the iPhone that has good arguments going for it, but none of them win. The Nokia N95 is great, but it really can’t compete with the iPhone when it comes to media playing. I would still need an iPod if I got an N95. The Nokia N810 would be almost perfect, but it isn’t a phone. Put a 3G radio in it, and I’m sold. Android is looking like it might be the best for me, as I am a heavy user of Google Apps. However, that also doesn’t look like it will have adequate media playing capabilities. The Android phones have perfect Google integration, but nothing else. The iPhone wins on all other fronts, except it has relatively poor, but satisfactory, interaction with Google’s apps.

There is an issue with the providers. I really would much rather have Verizon than AT&T. But does it really matter that much? We’re complaining that we don’t have our choice of which of the evil carriers to go with. If there were a good carrier, I could see complaining, but there is not. Every carrier sucks. No matter what you do, you have to suffer with one of them. If it’s AT&T instead of Verizon getting your money, does it really mean anything? I live in NY, so I have decent coverage at my house and job. That’s really all that matters.

Lastly, the iPhone is the most popular platform. The most popular platform gets all the goodies. The app store will be loaded with everything we want that Apple allows. There will be a lot more software for iPhone than for any other mobile platform, I guarantee it. There will also be more accessories made for the iPhone, more web sites specifically designed to look good on iPhone, and the list goes on. The world will bend itself to accomodate iPhone users. Being an iPhone user will be a lot easier and lot more convenient than using anything else.

The iPhone isn’t perfect by any means, but what device is? Sure, we would all love it if it had a bigger removable battery, physical keyboard, wifi podcatcher, turn by turn GPS, etc. They are all valid criticisms, but on the same token, many people have unrealistically high expectations. If you only ever bought electronic devices when they were absolutely perfect in every way, people would mistake you for a Luddite.

The reason I’m buying the iPhone is that it has enough features that it crosses the line. Those features have a decent enough interface that I will actually use them, instead of just paying extra money for a device I only use to make calls. The popularity of the iPhone will gaurantee that there is a large amount of support for the device. It’s a huge step up from where I am now. It may not be perfect, but it’s the best I can get right now, and it will definitely be able to hold me over for two years. At that point in time, there will definitely be a far superior device to switch to. For now, the iPhone is the winner.

Anyway, one of my major disappointments with the iPhone is the lack of podcatching software. If it had a podcatcher, I probably would have bought one right off the bat. Android has presented me with the opportunity to write my own mobile podcatching software. I’ve decided that I’m going to go for it. Being an Ubuntu user, I had to setup the SDK to get working. However, I ran into a few problems along the way. Since I suspect many other Ubuntu users out there also might want to get into the Android developing business, here I will post how I got the development environment setup in Ubuntu.

The first thing you need is a computer with Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon installed. The computer should be connected to the Internet. Ubuntu by default tries to use open source versions of Java, and while these are pretty good, they will not work for android development. The fact that Ubuntu will not default to using Sun Java, even after you install it explicitly, is the primary reason this how to is necessary. Anyway, the first step is to update your packages and install Eclipse and Sun Java.

sudo aptitude update

sudo aptitude install eclipse sun-java6-jdk

If you want to use Sun Java as the default JVM in your web browsers, run this command as well.

sudo aptitude install sun-java6-plugin

Now you need to make Sun Java the default jvm in Ubuntu. You can do that with this command.

sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun

We also need to edit the file /etc/jvm. Edit that file as root with your favorite text editor.

sudo gedit /etc/jvm

The contents of the file will look something like this.

/usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj
/usr/lib/jvm/ia32-java-1.5.0-sun
/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun
/usr

Change it to look like this, then save and quit your text editor.

/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun
/usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj
/usr/lib/jvm/ia32-java-1.5.0-sun
/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun
/usr

When certain programs on your system want to run java, they will look at this file to figure out which JVM to use. They will try every JVM in the list starting with the one on top until one of them works. Eclipse, however, does not use this file. It has its own file that works in the same way. First edit the eclipse java_home file as root.

sudo vim /etc/eclipse/java_home

There should already be a line in that file for Sun Java 6. Move this line to the top of the file. Add it to the top if it isn’t there.

/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

Now your Ubuntu system is ready to run the Android development kit. Go to the Android documentation site and follow the directions there. Have fun making mobile apps in Java!

At the present time I have two mobile devices. One of them is a completely generic Samsung mobile phone from Verizon. I use it primarily to make personal phone calls, but occasionally take a few pictures with it. The other device is a Blackberry 7230. It has an unlimited data plan from T-Mobile and no phone service. It is owned and paid for by my employer, and I use it to get my work e-mail when I’m on the go. My personal phone is on a Verizon contract with my family from 3 years ago when I was still in college. The contract is over at the end of 2006, and my family wants to get a new contract to get new phones. I want to take my phone number and get my own deal separate from them. I also want to get a single device that will replace both my personal phone and the Blackberry.

Here is the catch. Where I live and work Verizon is the only carrier who provides decent coverage and speed. They are also the provider with the worst selection of available phones. They especially have the worst selection of smart phones, which is what I will need to replace the functionality of the Blackberry. Verizon also is the worst offender of locking down phones. You might buy a phone that is perfectly capable of running freely available Java applications or tethering to your laptop via Bluetooth, but Verizon removes those features from the phone and then sells them back to you at inflated prices. Thus, there is the conundrum. I can get a decent phone from some other provider, but it won’t get service where I live, or I can get a locked-down crap phone from Verizon that works really well.

In the interest of making money they turn their phones into walled gardens, so they can make money from selling software, games, ring tones, etc. I can understand a company trying to make more money, that’s what capitalism is about. But under no circumstance am I ever going to pay for a ring tone or game on a phone. And for a business user, that stuff shouldn’t even be a consideration. Businesses are willing and able to pay extra to get what should be the default level of service, but no matter how much money you want to give to these people, they won’t give you a proper phone. That’s supposedly in the interest of making more money? I’m sitting here willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a phone, and I’m willing to pay a relatively large flat monthly fee, to get the kind of service usually offered in other continents. Despite that, I’m left out in the cold. That doesn’t sound like smart business to me.

Maybe I’m missing something? Maybe there is a phone out there which does the trick, and I don’t know about it. Lots of people out there have phones and seem to be satisfied with them. Lots of those people use their phones a lot more heavily than I ever will. How is it that they are satisfied and I can’t be? Let me list my needs, and perhaps someone more knowledgeable can point me in the right direction. I will break my needs into two parts. The first is a list of things I absolutely need. The second are the things I would like in an ideal world.

What do I need in a phone? I need it to have decent coverage in all the places I often travel. That includes work, home, parent’s house, neighboring cities, etc. I need to have decent data speed. I need to be able to check my company e-mail either via Blackberry or Exchange. I need to be able to install free Google mobile applications like like mobile GMail, GMaps, GTalk, etc. I need a phone that doesn’t crash, and doesn’t drive me crazy. I need a phone that takes pictures, quality doesn’t matter much. I need to be able to get the pictures off of the phone without paying for each individual picture. I need a phone with Bluetooth, so I can get a headset and legally talk while I drive.

What would I like? I would like a phone that can handle standard file formats like mp3, pdf, etc. I would like a phone that can fully and freely communicate, via USB or Bluetooth, with any computer running Windows, Mac or Linux. I would like a phone that is easy to develop software for, so that I can add new functionality on my own. i would like a small, thin, sexy phone. I am trying to carry less around with me, not more. I would like a phone with a full web browser and, if possible, flash so that I can visit YouTube and such from anywhere. I do not want any sort of limit on what I do with the phone. I would like a phone with a GPS I can use. Basically, I want a phone that has no feature limited in any way. If the phone is physically capable of doing something, I want absolutely unlimited access to that functionality. I am willing to pay a large, flat, monthly fee to get this, but nobody that I know offers it. Is this really too much to ask?

Mobile service providers in this country are inflicting upon the public something very similar to what DRM offers. It is an artificial limiting of technology in order to charge for something which has no real cost. It’s as if you bought a car, but need to pay GM $5 for every time you turn the air conditioning on. This would be much less bothersome if you could somehow pay your way out of it. I do suspect that not even Bill Gates and friends get everything they want or need from their phones. This is a truly frustrating situation, and I am at a loss to make a decision. Think of it, a total geek with no answer to a technological problem. That’s how absurd this has become.

Look at both of my grandmothers and their friends. They are all masters of using the plain telephone, but none of them can use the cellular phone properly. Some of them can make calls and do nothing else, but even then most of them have trouble. And every time they want to do something like change the ring tone they ask some children or grandchildren to do it for them.

There are other problems too. While the smaller phones are more portable the older people often cannot hit the smaller buttons, and definitely not in any efficient manner. They also have problems reading the text on the small screens even if they knew how to navigate the menus. The point is that most senior citizens only want a cellular phone to make calls. Primarily they save that for emergencies. These people have lived most of their lives not being able to contact anyone easily, so they don’t really have a large need to contact someone from their car or the grocery store unless it is extra important.

The reason this hasn’t been implemented is multi-fold. First off not many senior citizens buy phones as it is. So making a phone especially for them would cost a lot and probably not sell very well. However, I think this is a catch-22 and that the reason they don’t buy phones is because of these problems. And if a phone was made and marketed to the older people in our population it would sell like hotcakes. I imagine that even reluctant seniors would receive them as gifts from family and friends. The second reason is that phone companies make most of their money on things like e-mailing pictures for 25 cents and text messaging. That’s why they give away boatloads of minutes for almost nothing is so they can lure you into the other services with higher profit margins. Seniors will only use their phones to make calls and will only do it very rarely. To solve this problem the phone has to come with a pay as you go plan where they only pay for the minutes they use at a reasonable rate like 3-5 cents per minute anywhere in the country. If it is cheaper than the long distance cost of the POTS(plain old telephone service) then they will use it and it will be profitable. Sales of the phone itself could also be profitable as you will see.

So what kind of phone will it be? First off, it will be large. It should be about the size of most cordless handsets. There should only be 13 buttons on the phone. The same 12 buttons that are on normal telephones plus a power button. What about send and end buttons you say? How about voice activation. Saying hello and goodbye will pick up and hang up the phone. There are problems with that as well, but it is infinitely more intuitive to those of old age than more buttons. All buttons should have incredibly large print on them and also be large enough to easily hit with a clumsy finger. There should be no screen, they don’t need caller id or care. They will receive calls so infrequently that all they need is a very loud ring accompanied by a very vigorous vibration to let them know about an incoming call. Lastly their needs to be two LED lights. One of the lights should indicate strength of service and the other should indicate whether the phone is on or off. When they purchase the phones the in-store representatives should be responsible in instructing the elderly people as to how exactly the phone works and what the LEDs mean. They should not let them leave without knowing for sure that the people know how to use them. If they try to make a call while the phone is off and don’t know what’s wrong then customers will be lost due to their own incompetence. Lastly, the phones need very large docking stations for charging. I know that the only thing you need to charge a phone is a wire, but even something simple like that can confuse the old people. Put a large plastic stand on the end of the wire to dock the phone in. Oh, that reminds me, it probably needs a battery indicator also, doh. Anyway, as I mentioned before the phone itself will be cheap. Without a screen or camera or any advanced features the phone will be cheap as dirt. The only problem I can foresee is that the phones will only be a viable product for a short time. When this generation of seniors passes away the next generation will already be fully trained in the use of the cellular phone and will dislike the phone designed for today’s seniors. But I think the good that can come of producing this phone is not something we should overlook. Heck, we could probably make them by recycling old discarded phones into new chassis. Let’s get prototyping so grandma can call her grandchildren again.