Screaming Penguin

I have to admit, I am really disappointed in the iPad. The short summary: I want a small Mac, not a big iPod.

The form factor is great. I have always thought the MID market was wrong on the size factor. 7-8" screens are too small. 9.7 is just about right. The battery life -- Apple says 10 hours, so I am figuring 6 or 7 in the real world -- seems OK, but not great. Everyone on the interwebs is talking about how fast it is, that is good.

There are, however, MUTLIPLE deal breakers for me on the iPad:

Because I often have to revisit this stuff myself, I thought I would write a quick reference tutorial on creating and using a database with an Android application. This isn't terribly well covered in the Android docs, and though many ContentProvider tutorials exist (such as the Unlocking Android code for chapter 5, and the NotePad tutorial included with the SDK), and these help a lot with general database concepts, they are really more complicated than what a basic application needs - a database to store and retrieve stuff.

I will walk through the code and tools for an oversimplified example here, with the ultimate goal of inserting and retrieving some data from an database in an Android app, and then examining the database using a shell and the sqlite3 command line tool. The entire code for this example is available here: http://totsp.com/svn/repo/AndroidExamples/trunk/.

NOTE This code was updated for part 2, and part 3 of this series, so it no longer exactly matches this example -- it's still a working sample app, it just now does a bit more than the original.

First, to get this rolling, we need to create an Android application that HAS a database. We could use any built in application that has a database just to explore it, such as com.android.alarmclock), but we are going to create one here for completeness. After it's setup, the interface for our application will look like the screen shot shown below:

Never thought I would be posting about Google in the "Politics" topic, but hey.

In response to a wide ranging attack on Google's infrastructure, that is never explicitly blamed on the Chinese government, they are threatening to take their ball and go the fuck home:

So I have had the N1 for two days now, and I think I am ready to post my thoughts.

First, this is a great phone. It can't be overstated what a difference the 1gHz Snapdragon makes coming from the 528mHz ARM on the MyTouch3G. It feels wonderful to use, and even with all the animations all the way up, apps just fly by without even a little bit of thought. Android 2.1 isn't much different than the 2.0 the Droid has. Of course, there is the animated wallpaper. And in keeping with Android trends, the first batch is pretty tasteless. The smoke one is nice once you pick a non-assy Lime green that is the default. Seriously. Google needs a few more people with some taste working on this stuff.

Physically, the phone itself is the first phone I have seen that I would say squarely bests the iPhone in the "how does it feel in your hand" test. It has a good weight to it (slightly lighter than an iPhone), and the big flat battery inside gives it a good balance. The OLED screen is, literally, mindblowing. The contrast ratio is great. Full brightness and blacks are midnight-in-a-cave-for-Ray-Charles black. The white is not-quite paper white, but doesn't have that yellow lean a lot of the mobiles seem to have. The part that looks like it is metal on the case isn't. It is plastic, but feels pretty good. The back is covered with that grippy polymer felt stuff, so it has the feel of a mid-90s ThinkPad. I love that.

The buttons on the bottom are capacitive, and that was a frakking idiotic call. I hate capacitive buttons because it is much, MUCH to easy to accidentally press one. The also seem to not buffer presses when the phone is busy like a hardware button, which means sometimes you might "miss" a press. That sucks.

Battery life isn't nearly what is advertised, but seems comparable to the iPhone 3G and MT3G I have had in the past. It does seem to take a long time (3hours or so?) to get a full charge from empty.

The audio on the headphone jack doesn't get loud enough for my taste. At max volume it still won't drown out street noise. It does use 3 core mini jack headphones, which is good. It comes with a pair that have a mic and FF, Play/Pause/RW buttons on it that are pretty good.

I know that seems like a lot of complaints, but really, I am thrilled. Using the phone, it just feels like a million dollars, and Android just FLIES on it. Apps come and go and you wait for nothing but network IO. There have been some small improvements to the browser, and with the new CPU, it feels much faster than any other phone I have ever seen.

I also wonder why, this phone marketed by Google, didn't just come with all the Google apps preinstalled. I still had to go DL Sky Map, Goggles, Translate, Listen, Scoreboard, Finance, yadda, yadda, yadda from the store. Why not just dump the entire Google experience. Also, the "mutliple Gmail accounts" works, but the multiple account support doesn't carry over into Calendar or the other apps.

5.0 out of 5.2.