Ubuntucat

Introduction
Before upgrading from a “dumb phone” to a “smart phone,” I did a lot of online research. I read reviews. I watched YouTube videos. Unfortunately, most online reviews are kind of useless. They’ll say things like “There’s a nifty little switch over here. And you can press this button. That does this. This also does that.” I’m hoping my first-impressions review will be a lot more useful, and I will follow up with a more extensive review after I’ve had a few weeks to really get to know this phone.

Background (narcissistic babble—feel free to skip)
For the past few years, I’ve always had a “dumb” cell phone. It makes calls. It receives calls. It allows me to check voicemail. That’s about it. I’d never understood the need for Blackberries or other “smart” phones. I saw people in expensive business suits using those phones and figured I’d never have use for such a thing.

Then the iPhone happened.

Both my wife and I were very impressed with Steve Jobs’ demonstration of the iPhone. I saw it as revolutionary, even though it had its faults. My wife, a big Apple fan, still waited until at least the the second-generation iPhone came out to get one. Once she got it, though, both of us were impressed.

The whole time she’s been using the iPhone, I’ve been enviously looking on, wanting a smartphone of my own. Unfortunately, since I am a Linux user, and hell will freeze over before Apple makes a Linux port of iTunes, an iPhone is out of the question. And, no, I am not going to dual-boot with Windows to run iTunes. No, I am not going to try to jailbreak the iPhone and then have some update break everything so I can no longer sync with Ubuntu. I want something that just works.

Windows Mobile was out of the question. No more Windows for me, thanks. I got a little bit excited about the Palm Pre, but two things held me back from it. 1) all the reviews said the battery life is terrible and 2) it uses the WebOS, which doesn’t look as if it’s going anywhere, unlike Google’s Android, which is far more likely to be installed on more and more phones as the years go by (making its Android Market—the equivalent of the iTunes App Store—increasingly robust).

Like my wife, I don’t like to buy first-generation products. So the T-Mobile G1 was out. But then the T-Mobile MyTouch 3G arrived. Google Android. Second-generation. Linux-friendly (Linux-based, actually). And with my wife complaining about dropped calls with AT&T (American iPhone users have to sign up with AT&T to use a non-jailbroken iPhone), I was ready to give T-Mobile a chance. So I took the plunge. After one day of use, here are my first impressions.

What I don’t like

• If you’re filling out something, instead of automatically focusing on the text box to fill in, the interface waits for you to manually click on the text box in order to bring up the on-screen keyboard.
• A few dialogues will give you the option to click Done when you’re done with the on-screen keyboard, but most will have only a Return key to go to the next line. So in order to get the keyboard to go away, you have to hold down the Menu key (a plastic key, not a touchscreen key).
• Even though there is an onscreen touch keyboard, there are eight hard plastic keys as well. Once you get used to them, they’re fine, but at first they’re a bit confusing, especially what the difference between Menu and Home is. I’ve found the Menu key to be invaluable, no matter what application I’m in. If I’m ever lost, I can press the Menu key and something useful will come up. The search key is completely useless. I have done quite a bit of fiddling in the last day, and I have never used the search key.
• There is an option to turn off “background data” to save battery life, which is great. Unfortunately, you have to enable it in order to browse the Android Market for new applications. Not awful, but a little annoying. So to browse the Market, I have to turn on Background Data, browse, and then turn Background Data off again.
• I don’t know why T-Mobile or Google didn’t just include this app as part of the default OS, but there is an app to give you visual voicemail (so you can click to listen to or delete messages instead of going through the menus of a call-in system). Unfortunately, in order to use it, you cannot be connected to a wireless network (unencrypted, WEP, WPA, WPA2). You have to be connected to the regular T-Mobile network only.
• You have to have a Google email account or sign up for one before you can use the phone. I had one already (which I don’t really use). Still, that’s a ridiculous requirement.
• There are a lot of times when you’re confronted with a screen and no immediately obvious way to proceed (no submit or enter button, no next or finish button). At first I just got kind of confused and hit the Back plastic key. Eventually, I learned to press Menu to get a contextual menu up, which usually had a useful option. A bit counterintuitive.
• There’s an automatic playlist (what Apple calls a “smart playlist”) in the music section called “Recently Added.” There does not appear to be a way to add other smart playlists, though (recently played, most frequently played, etc.). You can create new playlists manually, but that’s also not obvious (you have to do a long click on the first song you want in the playlist and then select to add it to a playlist and then select to create a new playlist).
• There is no official Facebook app, so if you want to do mobile uploads, you have to use third-party upload-to-Facebook apps (which are kind of annoying and don’t always work) or email the photos or videos to the secret upload-to-Facebook email associated with your account.
• It isn’t obvious how to connect the MyTouch to your computer in order to drag and drop files. I plugged in the USB cord, and it didn’t show up as a removable drive. I checked the output of dmesg | tail in the terminal, and it definitely showed up as being plugged in, but it didn’t show up in sudo fdisk -l even. Eventually, I figured out that you have to go to notifications in the MyTouch and manually dismount (from the MyTouch) the SD card so that it will automatically mount (to your computer). Then after you unmount it from your computer, you also have to manually remount it to the MyTouch.
• Like the iPhone, the MyTouch will switch from portrait to landscape mode if you rotate the phone, but the animation is not smooth at all. First the screen gets a little blurry, and then it jerkily rotates over. It happens quickly… just not smoothly.

Mixed bag

• The touchscreen isn’t as sensitive as the iPhone touchscreen. In some ways, this is a good thing. For example, no matter how slim your hands are, the tip of your finger will always be bigger than the onscreen keyboard keys. So when I try to type on the iPhone, I often end up pressing the wrong key (and the autocorrection never works). With the MyTouch, I pretty much never make a typing mistake. On the other hand, I’m not always typing. Sometimes a simple swipe to scroll up or down in a list or on a page will just not register, and I’ll have to swipe again a little harder to get the scroll to actually work.
• Some reviews I read complained that you can’t just plug a standard headphone into the MyTouch. I can see how that might be annoying, but the MyTouch does come with a USB adapter with a little microphone and play/pause button built into it (and headphones that are half-way decent).
• There’s no Flash in the web browser. This is makes certain websites non-functional, but the iPhone doesn’t have this either. In fact, I don’t think any smartphone has it. Isn’t this an Adobe issue?

What I like

• The voice recognition for voice searches is really good. Sure, you can’t mumble. You do have to enunciate. But you don’t have to train it to recognize your voice, and if you do enunciate, usually Android guesses right on what you want to search for. If I’m in a public place, I may feel a bit self-conscious doing voice searches. If I have to do one, though, it’s nice to know that it works, and it’s much quicker than typing using an onscreen keyboard.
• You can easily delete or move desktop shortcuts by holding them down and dragging them around or to the trash. You can also easily add desktop shortcuts by holding down an empty space and creating a link to an application or even to a browser bookmark.
• Any song on your phone can easily be made into a ringtone. Just do a long hold on the song, and a context menu will pop up with that option.
• Apps can be easily installed and removed from your phone.
• Once you do figure out the whole mounting/unmounting thing, the MyTouch Micro SD card just shows up as removable storage, even in Linux, and you can just drag and drop pictures or music to various folders, and the MyTouch will immediately recognize those once the card is remounted.
• I like the way the phone unlocks (press the menu key twice) better than the way the iPhone unlocks (press the hard button and then draw a horizontal line with your finger).
• Web searches seem pretty fast. And Opera Mini is available for free in the Android Market. I’m going to keep both the default browser and Opera around. With Opera, I have it configured not to load images, so when I do text-only searches, it’ll load even faster. With the default browser, I can see websites that do require images.
• The back button (as a plastic key) is very handy, and it really will bring you back to whatever screen you were last on, regardless of whether you are going from one webpage to the last webpage or from one screen to another screen.
• I knew ahead of time that Android 1.5 did not support multi-touch (the “pinch” that the iPhone has for photos and webpages to zoom in and zoom out). I thought that missing feature would annoy me, but I haven’t found a lot of situations in which zooming seems necessary. I won’t complain if the 2.0 update includes multi-touch, though.

Conclusion
Overall, I’m quite pleased with it (granted, after only one day). Most of the reviews made it sound as if it’s nothing special (not an iPhone killer, not that much better than the G1). With all the pros and cons I’ve laid out, though, it is still fun and easy to use. It has some counterintuitive or annoying elements, sure. Nevertheless, even after only one day, I’m getting used to those or finding workarounds for them. If American Linux users are looking for a good smartphone that works with Linux, definitely consider the MyTouch 3G.

One time when I was in elementary school, my teacher asked us what socio-economic class we thought we belonged to. We lived in one of the richest suburbs in our state, and yet almost all of us said we were either “middle-class” or “upper-middle-class.” No one said “I’m upper-class,” but our teacher insisted anyone living in our town was by definition upper-class. Where did we get this idea that we’re “only” upper-middle-class? Even though relatively few people in the world make over US$120,000 per year for one household, the people who do just make that mark don’t often have a yacht, a second home, a third home, or an exclusive country club membership. They are rich compared to most people, and they live very comfortably, but they can’t just spend money without thinking. Everything at that level still has to be budgeted.

Beyond upper-class… I don’t know what you’d call it—aristocracy?… there are the folks who just make such an insane amount of money that the interest they make on that money is more than most people make in a decade, donating mind-boggling sums of money actually makes them money in tax breaks, and hiring full-time employees (personal assistants, housekeepers, chaffeurs) does not even make a small dent in their savings.

Why is life like this? We’ve all heard the expression the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. I’m not trying to espouse communism here. Not everything has to be equal. But does the difference between the haves and the have-nots have to be so huge? Right now the disparity seems more painful than usual as we see politicians trying to balance budgets by cutting salaries and jobs of government employees who are barely making it while not giving themselves similar salary cuts, and as we see failing corporations giving bailout money to their top execs while laying off thousands of low-level employees.

These tough economic times got me thinking about the tour I took of the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream factory in Vermont. Before you take the tour, they show you a little video about the history of the company. I don’t remember all the details. One thing stuck in mind, though—the attempt Ben & Jerry’s initially made to prevent this ever-widening wealth gap. For years, they had a policy that the highest-paid employee could not make more than five times what the lowest-paid employee made. Of course, in 1994, they dumped that to be competitive in hiring a new CEO. I find that sad. I like the idea of no employee being paid more than five times another employee. I mean, the highest paid employee is still the highest paid, right? And not just the highest, but five times higher than the lowest. Just think how much better things would be if all companies took this approach.

Let’s look at a hypothetical scenario. Let’s say a company has 500 employees with 10 earning an average of $10 million per year, 20 earning an average of $1 million, 25 earning $500,000, 75 earning $100,000, 170 earning $50,000, and 200 earning an average of $25,000 per year.

If the $25,000-a-year employee works 50 weeks out of the year (let’s say there are two weeks of vacation), that’s about $100 per day… before taxes. In this hypothetical scenario for this hypothetical US company, almost half of the workers are pretty close to the poverty line (the poverty-line salary for a 4-person family in 2009 is supposed to be $22,050), with 2% of the company living in the lap of luxury. If you make $10 million a year, you can easily send all your children to private school, you can have fancy cars for everyone in your family, you can own several homes, you can travel often and eat dinners out often, you can donate to charity, you can buy things at auction… and you still probably have plenty leftover.

Something’s wrong with this picture. This is the picture of a company that has the highest-paid employee making 400 times what the lowest-paid employee makes.

But what if we took the same amount of salary money and distributed it so that the highest-paid employees earn 5 times what the lowest-paid employees earn? Let’s say 10 employees make an average of $1 million per year, 20 make $900,000, 25 make $750,000, 75 make $380,000, 170 make $225,000, and 200 make an average of $200,000 per year.

In this new scenario, the highest earners still outearn the lowest earners. $1 million per year is nothing to sneeze at. You can live a very comfortable lifestyle with that kind of salary. And the best part is that the lowest wage earners would be earning the median income in the upper-class town I grew up in.

If this kind of approach were the norm, instead of having the rich and the poor, we’d have only the rich and the richer.

Of course, I know I’m naive. All the economics majors out there are going to say “You don’t understand. This system isn’t sustainable. With the highest earners making only five times what the lowest earners make, there’s little incentive for the best CEOs to go to this company. They’d all go to a company that would pay them more.” Well, it couldn’t just be one company that does it. It’d have to be a bunch of companies, and they would have to “sell” the new scheme to any potential employees. There’d have to be a movement behind it, a snappy name for it, like “organic, locally grown food” or “fair trade coffee.” The idea would be that this is for justice. It’d be like Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto… but for real.

And it doesn’t even have to be this extreme. I was using a hypothetical example going from 400 times higher to only 5 times higher. What if it went from 10,000 times higher to only 100 times higher? In some ways, salaries are a zero-sum game, but the economy and living do not need to be. If everyone can have the basics (food, health care, shelter, and education), I’m fine with a handful of people having more. Right now we don’t have the basics, though. We have a handful of people getting paid billions of dollars and then putting hard-working minimum wage folks out of jobs.

Several years ago (possibly even before the turn of the millennium), my brother told me that books would soon be a thing of the past and that everyone would be reading eBooks. Is it possible? Could eReaders and eBooks replace paperbacks and hardcovers the way cars replaced the horse and buggy, the way portable audio players (iPods, for those of you who don’t know alternatives to Apple exist) have replaced CDs and tapes, and the way email has replaced letters?

I use the word replace rather loosely, of course. In some rural areas, horses and buggies are still around. CDs are still available for purchase in stores, and some used music stores have old tapes, which people will still purchase occasionally. And the post office still delivers letters, mostly from businesses to other businesses. Nevertheless, the primary way for even the most affluent of people to read books is still to read paperback or hardcover books. I know no one who owns a Kindle. The first Kindle I ever saw I saw only once from far away on a bus. I haven’t seen horse-buggy combos outside of Pennsylvania, most people I know use portable audio players, and almost all communication I get from family and friends is electronic.

Will we give up our books for eBooks? I may end up regretting these words in ten years, but I don’t think I ever will. Yes, I’ve heard the Kindle can store hundreds of books. Yes, I’ve heard it doesn’t have a backlight, so it won’t be a strain on your eyes. Still, I don’t believe I’ll ever use an eBook Reader in place of reading real books. Of course, back in the mid-1990s I didn’t think I would ever email instead of writing letters to friends.

I wasn’t around when cars started replacing other modes of transportation, but I do very much remember switching from records to tapes to CDs and, eventually, to MP3s. I do have a bit of nostalgia for exchanging mix tapes with my friends, and I love the sound of a crisp record being gentle stroked by a turntable’s needle. All the letters people wrote me back in high school I have kept and will probably at some point, unlike the emails they’ve sent me over the years, re-read them. Why won’t I give up books for eBooks?

A few reasons:

• Even though I like having hundreds of songs at my fingertips in a small device (because I can actually listen to many of them, if not all, in a week), rarely do I read more than two books at a time—usually only one.
• When I have an electronic device, I have to make sure it’s charged, make sure it doesn’t get damaged. I have to take care of it. Now—I don’t throw any of my books against the wall, spill pizza sauce on them, or rip the pages out, but I like that I can just throw them in a bag, read them in the bath, and even leave them around (without worry they’ll be stolen).
• The idea that Amazon can remotely erase an eBook I bought is ridiculous (as came out in the whole 1984 scandal recently). No book store is ever going to break into my apartment and take a book back that I bought just because they realized they didn’t have the rights to sell that book to me in the first place.

Go ahead, Amazon (or Sony), try to make me eat my words! I think the only way I’d switch to eReaders is if everyone else does and the only bookstores still left around are used book stores…

It’s been a while since I’ve distro-hopped. When I first starting using Linux back in spring 2005, I used Mepis, then Ubuntu. Then I tried about 15 or so other Linux distros and finally settled on Ubuntu again. I’ve been using Ubuntu ever since.

Recently, though, I’ve been getting that itch again, so I’ve tried installing various distros on the 4 GB SD card in my HP Mini.

Arch Linux gets a lot of hype on the Ubuntu Forums, so I thought I’d give that a shot. It isn’t as intimidating as some people make it sound. Yes, the installer doesn’t look pretty, and you have to do some stuff at the command-line, but the defaults in the configuration files are pretty good for most situations. Unfortunately, there was some weird error message when I tried to reboot. When I did some Google searches on the error message, I was told to add various parameters to the kernel line of the Grub entry, but nothing worked. So, Arch didn’t work on the SD card.

Then I tried Simply Mepis. I have to say I was quite surprised that after four years, Mepis is pretty much the same way it was back when I used it in 2005. It even still uses KDE 3 instead of some version of KDE 4. The existence of a wireless setup tool is handy, but it’s a little confusing to actually use. Eventually I did get it working with my Broadcom 4312 card. Unfortunately, once I installed all the pending updates, not only did the wireless card no longer work but all the suspend options disappeared from the power management applet. Nice try, Mepis.

Then I thought I’d give PCLinuxOS a try again. Wouldn’t even boot. I got some kind of BusyBox error message after “burning” it to USB with UNetBootIn and rebooting. Maybe another time, PCLinuxOS.

What about plain old Debian stable (nicknamed Lenny)? Well, when I tried to use the regular .iso through a UNetBootIn’ed USB, I got some error message about the CD-ROM not being detected. I did some considerable searching on this error message, and only a couple of “solutions” showed up in the search results (something about switching to another console and manually mounting the USB drive at /cdrom or /dev/cdroms/cdrom0), but nothing worked. So I went with a minimal net install of Debian, which took forever to install (I’d say something like four hours)—kind of reminded me of a Windows XP installation.

In the middle of trying to configure things, Debian randomly froze up on me. Control-Alt-Delete didn’t work. Control-Alt-Backspace didn’t work. Nothing worked to get out of the freeze. I had to force a shutdown. Once I got it up and running again, I followed the instructions at the Debian wiki for getting Broadcom 4312 working, and it did work… but when I logged in again, it didn’t remember to connect to my preferred network. I had to manually connect and re-enter my password, even though it was listed as a network in the Network Manager connections, and the password was listed in the Gnome Keyring stored passwords.

I experienced random CPU spikes every few minutes and did not always have USB devices automount.

The worst part, though, is that the Debian installer didn’t ask me where to install Grub. It just asked me if I wanted Grub installed, and it overwrote the Ubuntu Grub boot loader, so I couldn’t boot into Ubuntu, and I had to use a Ubuntu live USB to restore Ubuntu’s Grub to the MBR.

And, I also had to UNetBootIn the Ubuntu .iso at work (using Windows), because UNetBootIn won’t install for Debian Lenny, and the old-fashioned method of simply copying the files over and renaming a couple of files left me with a BusyBox error. And I couldn’t just add Ubuntu manually to the Debian Grub menu, because Debian Lenny cannot mount an Ext4 partition, so I wouldn’t have even known what to put in the Grub entry.

So, yeah, I may play around with Debian some more, just because it took so much just to get it installed, but I think I’ll probably be sticking with Ubuntu for another four years. Ubuntu isn’t perfect, but it also doesn’t give me headaches, even when I tried installing it to the SD card instead of the main drive.

I just read Linux Music Workflow: Switching from Mac OS X to Ubuntu with Kim Cascone, and I have to say I’m shocked, especially after reading Kim Cascone’s Wikipedia entry. Kim is a serious musician, not just some schmoe dinking around in his basement.

I’ve been a full-time Ubuntu user for a little over four years now, having switched from Windows XP. My wife switched around the same time but from Windows to Mac, as she uses Mac for serious graphic design work.

Even though I get annoyed when anti-Linux trolls make it sound as if no one could use Linux just because Linux isn’t great for certain niche commercial applications (AutoCAD, Adobe CS, certain graphics-intensive video games), I have to concede that Linux is not for everyone. And if someone had come up to me yesterday and said, “Hey I’m a professional musician who uses a computer full-time for audio stuff. Should I use Linux?” I would probably laugh in her face and tell her to go with Mac OS X.

Even though I don’t use Linux for serious audio work, I’ve seen enough of the Linux audio mess of Pulse Audio, OSS, and ALSA to know it can be an obstacle for someone seeking to use Linux primarily for audio work. After reading that blog post, though, I have to say I’m pleasantly surprised.

And I also think that, even though there is a myth of meritocracy in the software world, arguing about how freedom is important isn’t going to win over the general public. If open source is really a better development model, it will create better software. There shouldn’t be a choice between functionality and ideology. If the ideology of freedom being better is true, then it should produce the best functionality eventually. And maybe it is slowly getting there.

I don’t subscribe to the notion that if Ubuntu (or some other Linux distro) fixes all its usability issues that all of a sudden hundreds of millions of Windows users (and Mac users?) will just download .iso files, burn them to CD, boot from CD, and install and configure a new operating system themselves. But why have extra obstacles?

Keep on bringing the improvements, Linux communities. This is definitely a cool development.