My Suunto Observer‘s battery died about a week ago. I have replaced its battery three times before: 2003, 2006 (when I damaged the battery cover), and 2009 (when I got a Suunto battery replacement kit complete with new battery cover and opening tool). But this time, it won’t start up at all. Looks like it’s time to say goodbye. It’s been a good ride. I had taken it up mountains, underground into caves, and underwater. I even used it at the office. It wasn’t without problems, I had replaced the bracelet in 2005. And the pressure sensor gave up a few years ago. The sensor couldn’t be fixed short of replacing all the electronic internals. But it kept on “ticking” sans the barometer and altimeter. But all things must come to an end. What will remain are the good memories.
Messages is the instant messaging application of the upcoming OS X Mountain Lion. It is essentially iMessage for the Mac. It also integrates with FaceTime and includes AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, and Jabber clients. But the significant thing about it is it expands iMessage from iPhone, iPod Touches, and iPads to the Mac. That’s a potentially huge bump in the number of users on Apple’s messaging framework and more reason to use Apple products.
I’ve been noticing that the iPhone strangely heat ups while just sitting on the table or in my pocket. That can’t be good for the battery and indeed it’s not. Even when fully-charged in the morning before going to work, it doesn’t last more than 3PM. Yesterday it even died right after lunch.
I’ve tried so many things: Turning off location-based services (negligible), turning off 3G (extra 2 hours), reset network settings (no effect), reset all settings (no effect), etc all to no avail. But I finally, I stumbled upon a solution that made a huge difference.
I read in a MacWorld article that it could be a sync issue. So I downloaded the recommended System Activity Monitor and tried troubleshooting as described in the article. Indeed even at standby, the processors were registering 10% or so usage. It led me to think that maybe my Google Exchange calendar, mail, and contacts are the culprit. Is Google that evil? :P
So I deleted my Google Exchange account. I immediately noticed the processors registering less than 5%. I recreated the Google Exchange account and observed. Processor usage remained at less than 5% on standby. I continued observing the whole day today and, with defaults (3G and location services) on, it hit 10% battery at 14 hours standby and 6 hours usage. And it no longer heats up unless used heavily. Huge improvement!
UPDATE: Problem returned. I’ll try removing the Google Exchange account again.
UPDATE: Removing the Google Exchange account didn’t work either. So I setup as new phone and then recreated the account. Seems to be working fine now. But I noticed low 3G signal really drains the battery. I guess nothing more can be done short of changing providers.
Engadget reported that there were 37 million iPhones sold last quarter. 37 million!!! How crazy is that? As Joset posted on Google+: “Babies born each day – 371,000. Apple phones sold each day – 377,900.” That crazy. Granted, last quarter includes Christmas, the season for giving, lots of iPhones under the Christmas tree, so that’s a peak number. But still, that’s just astounding.
I needed an Android phone to test the Android version of PSMonitor. I wanted a low-end phone, a least common denominator, so I checked out the Samsung Galaxy Ace. While it has better than usual low-end specs (800MHz processor, 3.5″ 320×480 display), it didn’t have a front camera and is not expected to have Ice Cream Sandwich. So scrap that.
This led me to search some more and eventually to the LG Optimus Black which is a bit higher-end (1GHz processor, 4″ 480×800 display). Expectedly, it was quite expensive. But that changed when LG lowered the price and, even better, announced that Ice Cream Sandwich will be available for it. After a few more days of considering, I finally went ahead and got it.
My first impression is that it’s a well-designed, minimalist, and low-key phone. Almost everything is black. Even the LG logos are in subdued shades of gray. Once you hold it, you see it’s also very slim and very light. Probably the one thing that really screams “Look at me!” is the Nova display. It is just BRIGHT! Unfortunately, it has a yellowish tint when viewed from the front which is a bummer.
The user-experience is typical Android, a whole lot of power and flexibility. Frankly, it’s way more than what you actually need to get real work done. It’s not drastically more complicated or worse than iOS, we know they each got their particular quirks. It’s just different.
However, it does feel like it needs a bit more polish (but that’s supposed to change with Ice Cream Sandwich). Also, it’s a little bit laggy due to the low-end specs as well as all those virtual machinery and hardware abstraction layers. The price of multi-hardware support. But it’s nothing that you can’t get used to.
Performance with the built-in Frozen Yogurt is good although I expect it would improve once the promised updates comes out. Gingerbread after all is an enhancement, optimization, and bug-fix version. Performance with Ice Cream Sandwich would probably suffer. I’m hoping it would still be passable though. At least still enough for its primary purpose as my Android test phone.