I’ve been waiting to get a new phone for quite a while and while originally waiting for the iPhone 3GS release, I decided to wait a little longer when I learned that the Prē was on its way. Last Friday finally was the day, and it has been over week now that I own this shiny new toy. That’s plenty of time to explore every little detail of it and the reason I’d like to share a few of my thoughts, point out what I like about it and what not so much. There are a lot of things in which  i don’t agree with other reviews out there, but of course there are a few things that you may have read before, so here we go:

Pros

• Multi tasking is just so much more natural and handy than the way the iPhone works
• WebOS is fun to use and actually looks awesome
• Standard apps like browser, email and messaging are rock solid
• The app store is getting new additions every few days now
• German Prē is sim and net lock free (see O2 FAQs here)
• The Prē isn’t as Google focused as Android and not as manufacturer bound as the iPhone
• App store less restrictive than Apple’s version
• Gesture area is an awesome idea (I’m hardly using the middle button on the device)
• While not possible yet, the instructions for tethering are already present on the device and tethering is planned to be supported with future firmware versions (see O2 FAQs here)
• Touchstone charger: Works great and is well thought through (automatically takes the call when you take it of the charger while it’s ringing, automatically switches to speaker mode once you put it on the charger during a call, etc) BUT seems there are quite a few faulty touchstone chargers on the market (see below for details). Once you got a good one though, it’s just awesome.
• UPDATE: Form factor: With the slider closed it’s just tiny and cute, with the slider open it’s the most comfortable phone to hold while talking that I’ve ever seen. BUT the form factor also has its drawbacks. See below.

Popular Cons I do NOT agree with

• Sharp edge at the bottom of the device: People have claimed it’s sharp enough to slice bread, but I really don’t see the problem here. Sure, it’s a sharp edge, but I don’t even feel in during my daily use of the device. I’ve never had the slightest complaint about this edge!
• Small, tiny keys on the keyboard and bottom of the screen to close to the keyboard: I’ve got small hands, small fingers, for me the keyboard is quite comfortable and not too hard to type on. I wouldn’t give up the hardware keyboard for the world! As for the bottom of the screen being to close to the keyboard: No problem here either. Though I must admit, I can picture people with larger hands having way more problems here. The keyboard for sure isn’t too large and while it isn’t a problem for me it definitely might be a point of complaint for some of you.
• Wobbly slider mechanism: Total crap! The slider is absolutely fine. It’s not 100% firm and stiff but nowhere near annoying or disturbing!
• Battery runtime: I somewhat agree with this one, but it isn’t worse than e.g. the iPhone. Just switch of push email and use WiFi when at home instead of 3G and battery runtime increases from intolerable to ok ;). A few more tips (in German) can be found here.

My personal Cons

• Hard- and software adaption regarding Europe: Palm claimed that hardware and software adaption are the reason for the late release of the Prē. I know this is true as for the GSM support the Prē needs to work on European networks, but what about the rest of the hardware? What about special characters on the keyboard? There umlauts in German, accents in French and Spanish, etc. You could have adapted the keyboard!!! Even worse for the software: O2 stated things like “support for popular European social networks” (I don’t recall the exact phrasing) in its advertising for the Prē, but in fact the only thing supported is Facebook. I can only speak for Germany, but the most popular networks here are: StudiVZ, lokalisten and maybe Xing (for business). Besides, there other less important ones like Stay Friends and I’m sure Spain, Ireland und UK have their proper social networking sites besides Facebook. Not a single one of those is supported! In fact, Europe did not even get the same software version as the US. We are two versions behind! I honestly did expect more in this regard. Honestly Palm, if you want to win the hearts of your European customers, you’ll probably have to do more than just make your devices technically work on European networks. Please!
• Combined and instant messaging: The idea is admittedly awesome BUT what good is it if only AIM and Google Talk are supported? Again, I don’t know about the US, but in Europe, ICQ and MSN are far more popular. They should be supported since the initial US release of the Prē. I really can see no reason why those are not supported. Please Palm, this is a MUST. It is the feature I miss most!!!!
• Software keyboard: I really love my hardware keyboard but sometimes you just need to type a single word like a login or a street name on Google Maps, not worth the effort of sliding your phone open. This is not among the most important features to add, but a software keyboard would surely make nice plus!
• Auto-correct and auto-complete: The Prē has basic typo correction but nothing more. Even the oldest Windows Mobile phones have auto-complete (in conjunction with hard- as well as software keyboards). Leaving this out is a big one! On mobile devices, T9 or auto-complete just makes typing so much faster. That needs to be added as soon as possible!
• Support for third-party music players: Support for iTunes is really nice, but first of all I need the latest firmware version to able to use it (which isn’t available yet in Europe) and secondly, we probably all know that this cat and mouse game can’t go on forever. Sure, the Prē also support third party players like Windows Media Player or others via its flash drive mode, but it doesn’t provide a reasonable way to sync playlists. There’s not even a way to create playlists within the music app on the Prē itself. I’d be 100% OK not to use iTunes, but you can’t seriously expect me to sync hundreds of songs to my device and not have a single playlist, only being able to choose between all songs or a single artist or album to play. That’s not very satisfying. My suggestion: Focus on supporting other players for music sync instead of continuing that time consuming game with Apple.
• App launcher: Currently one can rearrange icons but not add new pages to the launcher. That’s annoying, with three pages (one being for device & settings related stuff) I can’t figure out a reasonable way to order and arrange my apps. It should be an easy task to allow users to add more pages to the launcher. That’s not really a big challenge. But it would definitely make a difference! As a last thing: Reducing the icon size on the launcher or the launcher bar would allow to add more icons to either of them. (Though I see that they would be harder to touch and icon quality would probably suffer due to the down sampling, so I understand it that one is not coming)
• Lid for the USB charging cable: It’s so hard to reach and open that you’re probably annoyed by the second time you have to do it. Seems like a strategic design aiming to increase the sales of the overpriced, wireless touchstone charger. Sad, but then again, Palm’s goal is to earn money just like any other company out there, so somewhat understandable! Still, if the touchstone charger weren’t so overpriced it would be even more understandable.
• Touchstone charger: Palm obviously has or had a quality problem in the manufacturing of the wireless charger. I had to go to the O2 shop three times to exchange both, the back cover as well as the charger till I had a set that did actually work reliably. Before, my Prē would loose the connection to the charger from every few seconds to every few minutes, just to pick it up again shortly after that, bringing up the “battery charging” notification (along with the according sound) each time. This is just plain annoying and intolerable (see this video). A little bit of internet research also brought up that I’m obviously not the only one with this problem. Anyway, for those experiencing this issue, have your retailer exchange the charger (and possibly the back cover that comes with it). A perfectly working charger (like the one I own now) should not have this issue, not even once a day or so. My Prē hasn’t lost the connection to the charger in over seven days now, except for when I took it off the charger of course. Also, unlike some of the forums posts or Palm support guys tell you, the problem with this issue is not misalignment of the Prē on the charger. Sure, it has to be aligned right, in fact there are only two possible position in which the Prē will charge but you’re not required to align it to the millimeter. The magnets in the charger take care of the alignment as long as you’re not trying to put it on the charger in some completely awkward position like diagonal or so.
• UPDATE: Form factor: While perfect for your pocket and super comfy in your hand while talking, it has quite a few glitches. With the slider open, the phone seems extremely unbalanced  when you type on the keyboard. Even more so if you’re trying to type one-handed. Especially for the latter case, I find this quite annoying.

In the end, the Palm Prē is a great phone in my opinion. In a few ways it’s two years behind the iPhone, in most things it can totally take it up to the iPhone and in some ways, it even beats the cr** out of the iPhone. As long as Palm doesn’t think they can take it slow now (in which case they would be sadly mistaken) and as long as they keep the updates coming and address current shortcomings and problems with the Prē, it has the potential (together with future WebOS phones) to be mentioned in the same breath as the iPhone and any Blackberry.

Oh, and as a last note: The reason I’m comparing it to the iPhone so much, although it’s not meant to be a so called “iPhone killer”, is because that’s the main competitor in functionality in my opinion. RIM / Blackberry I just don’t know well enough, and Android / Windows Mobile and manufacturers supporting those are just way too busy badly imitating the iPhone, trying to make their devices look like yet another iPhone without actually being one and more importantly without putting the necessary effort and creativity into the job to actually make their devices good and shiny. I just can’t get why they’re doing this, as Palm made the solution so obvious: Don’t copy everything, just copy the good and important features and copy them well! Then add a few of your own ideas. There must be some?!

UPDATE: I see the need to revise my statement on Android above. I still think what I said is true for Android 1.x and according phones, but it seems this all just changed with the release of Android 2.0 and and a vast number of manufacturers jumping on the Android train. The new software version seems to do exactly what I recommended above. Copy all the good existing features like the iPhone’s app store idea, multi-touch / touch-oriented interface, the Pre’s combined messaging, synergy, hardware keyboard and multi-tasking. Then add some of your own ideas (like a killer navigation app that’s even free) or / and improve on the existing features like combined messaging, better hardware keyboard, etc. Combine this with a developer with nearly unlimited resources (such as, I don’t know, Google?!) and a variety of Hardware manufacturers willing to go along, and you get a system that should be gaining ground immensely fast, casting a huge shadow on the new Palm. More so since Palm is taking it really slow with its update policy and currently not doing much but fix bugs. (This article says a lot of the things I am thinking.) I really hope they have something big to show with the upcoming update(s) because otherwise I see a lot of dark clouds at Palm’s horizon, again!

Almost two years ago when I was about to move in into a new apartment, I was on the look for some 3D home design tool. Now, there’s plenty of those tools on the market, developed by smaller software companies producing software off the assembly line, i.e. flooding the market with half-baked mass-productions at a ridiculous price point. So I didn’t really consider buying one of those things. Then again, professional CAD software at an even higher (though justified) price point as e.g. various products offered by Autodesk would have been a bit of an overkill for the task at hand, which is why I finally ended up using Google SketchUp.

Now Google SketchUp has a few things going for it:

• First of all, of course, it’s free! That’s as cheap as it gets!
• It’s got a very fast learning curve (compared to pro CAD tools) thought you should know it still has some form of a learning curve, i.e. there’s quite a few smaller rocks to bump into once you try to do more then simple objects
• There’s a large collection of existing models that can be used in SketchUp, to be found at the Google 3D Warehouse which are all free. That’s a real time and money saver, compared to site like http://www.turbosquid.com/ where you pay quite an amount for each 3D model. This also makes Google SketchUp kind of a Web 2.0 thing, since everyone can down- and upload models from and to the 3D Warehouse.

On the other hand, up till then, I had only used SketchUp to design simple objects for Google Earth and never done anything more complex. So designing my new apartment in SketchUp working with true and precise scaling, I also realized quite a few shortcomings on an otherwise awesome product:

• It lacks precision tools and precise ways of interaction which I can only assume are present in the Pro Version of the tool and which I sadly missed building a exact model of my apartment.
• Automatically generated intersections between surfaces and lines or other surfaces often show erratic behavior, meaning surfaces that should be plain no longer are, etc. … making it a pain in the a** to work with them. The real problem here is the spontaneous and unpredictable nature of when this happens or not plus the lack of a proper visualization of such surfaces which makes it really annoying to work with. One way to somewhat deal with it, is using groups and components to keep closed objects together and from intersecting with the rest of your model.
• Last but not least the overall interface for selecting and interacting with your model could use some reworking making it more consistent and predictable, less annoying (though you get used to some of the annoyances and find workarounds to compensate for them) and besides, I’d love to see more import and export functionality in SketchUp (which is again reserved for the Pro Version).

So what’s the verdict? Given it’s price and learning curve compared to other products on the market Google SketchUp is the way to go for most of the hobbyists out there, I’d say! Although the user interface could use some improvement and a bit more pro functionality would be nice to have, with a little bit of patience you can do almost anything with SketchUp, from building a whole city quarter for Google Earth to designing and planning the interior of your new apartment. See the results of my work for an example of the latter one:

There’s also an all-wireframe, all-opaque and all-x-ray version of the video above.

Two final notes:

• In a big copy-cat action Microsoft bought a CAD software manufacturer called Caligari, just to offer this company’s C 3D design product named trueSpace for free to compete with Google SketchUp. While I found trueSpace far less intuitive and easy to use and didn’t really get into it, I still wanted to share the info here and encourage you to head over to their website, get a free copy and come to your own conclusions (which you’re free to share here of course).
• As a second note, I’ve been using Google SketchUp together with Windows 7 RC lately just to find out, that while it’s still useable it shows extremely buggy behavior regarding surface selection and rendering. This may well be related to Win 7 graphics drivers (Intel integrated graphics in my case) and not to Windows 7 itself directly, but being as buggy as it is I can’t really recommend using Google SketchUp 7 in conjunction with Windows 7 for the time being. Anyone any similar experiences? Or updates on this behavior with respect to Win 7 RTM?

In this post, I’d only like to share the final result. More precisely, I’m showing two videos of the actual hardware piece rendered by a software called Eagle3D (or more precisely rendered by POV-Ray based on the script generated by Eagle3D). The result is just amazing. See for yourself!

By the way: Both these videos are using YouTube’s new HD features. To get an impression of how much of a difference this makes, check out the standard quality videos here and here. And as a final note: This tutorial did help a lot in figuring out how to get YouTube to generate a HD version of my uploaded videos. You need to upload your videos in exactly the right format, otherwise YouTube just doesn’t do any HD!

For many 3rd party installer systems, using Microsoft’s compatibility wizard will solve the problem. Just tell the wizard that the program requires special permission and ran on older OS version (e.g. Vista) and it should install fine. Unfortunately, this usually doesn’t work for Microsoft Installer packages (*.msi files). Here’s a short tutorial on how to still force those packages to install (taking the Samsung LightScribe software as an example):

1. Hit Windows+R to open the “Run” command prompt and enter %TEMP% to open your temp folder. Select all files and hit Delete. Confirm and just ignore all files you can’t delete.
2. Run LS_Update_1.14.32.1_.exe, which will extract the installer contents to some folder in your temp folder and start the installation. At some point the installation stops and you’re told that your OS is not supported. DON’T hit OK now, leave the message open!
3. Go to your temp folder and look for some cryptic folder like {C1EFD9F9-2726-4203-A83F-848D81B32CD9}. This folders contains the extracted content from the above installer (including the actual MSI package). COPY THE WHOLE FOLDER TO SOME PLACE SAFE (e.g. your Desktop), as the temp folder will be emptied once you exit the setup procedure. After copying that folder, you can now confirm the “OS not supported” message. The installer will exit and the temp folder be emptied.
4. Go to your copy of the former temp folder (e.g. on your Desktop) and locate the MSI package in it (e.g. LS_HSI.msi). Right-click it and select Edit with Orca (Orca is a Microsoft tool to edit MSI packages and is included in the Windows SDK which can be downloaded here).
5. Now, while there is now absolute standard way how MSI packages check the operating system version, this check usually is part of the launch conditions. Therefore, in Orca, select LaunchCondition under Tables and look for something suspicious like ( (VersionNT=500) OR (VersionNT=501) OR (VersionNT=502) OR (VersionNT = 600) OR Installed ).
6. Delete or modify the above condition to meet you needs and hit Save.
7. Close Orca and run the MSI package by double-clicking it. The program should install fine now.

This is not a universal tutorial for all MSI packages out there. It requires some thinking of yourself once you opened the MSI file in Orca, as the OS checks don’t always look the same, but the trick works for quite a lot of Microsoft Installer packages out there.

I’ve been quite busy writing my master thesis over the last months. That’s basically why neither my blog nor the FSXGET project did receive much attention. Since the other developers on FSXGET are currently inactive, too, the application didn’t receive any updates at all. But YES, I’m definitely planning on continuing and updating the tool. I’m still facing my final exams, so don’t expect any news on the project before the middle of the year, but rest assured the project isn’t dead.

By the way: I’d be happy to have some people taking part in the job, helping to push forward the project. So if you’re interested and have some programming skills, don’t hesitate to mention that!