Updated: December 16th, 2009
It's not a secret that my Sprint HTC Hero has been having trouble keeping battery charge – by the time I came home from work, the battery level would oftentimes be at 10% or the phone would be simply dead.
One would give up and accept this futility but I had 2 reasons to keep trying to figure out why:
- my co-worker's battery would consistently hold twice as much charge as mine – by the time I was at 50%, he was at 75%
- a wide range of responses on Internet forums and blog posts suggested some people experienced excellent battery life, while others, like me, did not have as much luck
…
When I visited Mozilla's offices about 6 months ago, I saw a mobile testing station which included about 20-30 different phones lounging around, with their chargers plugged in. I knew something serious was coming soon. There were rumors about Firefox for Mobile for a while but nothing to really show for it. That was then…
Today, however, we know a lot more. Firefox for Mobile, codenamed Fennec, is coming next month (see More Info below) and looks very promising.
Here is a recent video of the Firefox's mobile and design teams discussing and showing the features of Mobile Firefox:
Feature Highlights
For the busy folks, here are the highlights from the video:
Sprint And HTC Release The First HTC Hero Firmware Update 1.56: Fixes Major Bugs, Adds Small Tweaks
Only 2 days after I posted the list of problems with my HTC Hero (The Not So Good, The Bad, And The Ugly: My List Of 20+ Problems With HTC Hero) Sprint and HTC released the first firmware update.
The Update
To update your Hero, go to Settings->About phone->System updates->Firmware update.
The update took about 10 minutes to install, weighed 3.7MB or so, and rebooted the phone twice – once to install and once to reboot after the installation, so make sure you don't need to make any important phone calls during that time.
After the update, I immediately noticed the broken application icons (issue #4 on my bug list) fixed. The phone seems is definitely quite a …
The Not So Good, The Bad, And The Ugly: My List Of 20+ Problems With HTC Hero
Updated: November 27th, 2009
Alright, I was really excited to get the HTC Hero. REALLY. I had extremely high hopes for the Hero (those are long gone) and Android (which I still do – I even began developing for it) but the Hero has so many ridiculous bugs that I am *this* close to bringing it down to the Pre level (I'm not going to dare though – Pre still leads in the "I Want To Smash This Phone Into A Wall" category).
HTC, first of all, what. the. fuck. The idea of a more attractive UI was great, by all means, but did it really have to come at the expense of lagging down the whole phone? And by that I mean LAGGING. …
In this article I will describe the problem I've had with Eclipse's handling of XML file formatting as well as the best way to fix it.
I use Eclipse to do my Android development for a few reasons:
- it's the only IDE fully supported by the Android dev team
- it has a visual Layout/Resources builder that transforms XML files into corresponding visual representations
- it's free and open source
- I've been using Eclipse for many years and am very familiar with it
The Problem
However, one thing about Eclipse Android development has bothered me for a while …
Impressions From The StackOverflow's DevDays Conference In San Francisco
I just got back from the StackOverflow's DevDays conference in the rainy (at least today) San Francisco.
I was really glad to see Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atwood, and the whole StackOverflow team in person, as well as listen to great talks in the following topics:
9:00 – 9:50 Joel Spolsky Opening Keynote
9:50 – 10:45 Mark Harrison Python
11:00 – 11:55 Rory Blyth iPhone
11:55 – 12:25 Joel Spolsky Fogbugz
13:30 – 14:25 Scott Hanselman ASP.NET-MVC
14:25 – 14:45 Jeff Atwood Stack Overflow
14:45 – 15:40 Daniel Rocha Qt
16:10 – 17:05 James Yum Android
17:05 – 18:00 Yehuda Katz jQuery
My own favorite topics were in the following order of fun/usefulness level:
Updated: October 16th, 2009
Today is my first day looking at Android development. My first encounter with the Android plugin for Eclipse has not been very smooth, to say the least. I am not sure if it's Android's or Eclipse's fault but I just wasted 2 hours on errors during the plugin installation and would like to pass on the time savings to you.
The plugin install page provides initial instructions and the location of the plugin to give Eclipse (https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/). This is very standard stuff and I've installed many plugins exactly the same way. However, here's when problems started.
Problem #1: Error while loading manipulator
Eclipse just shows a cryptic Install failed box. Here are the highlights:
HTC Hero Coming To Sprint October 11th! $179.99, Powerful, And Sexy. Here Is Why You Need To Own It
Updated: September 8th, 2009
Well, it looks like the wait is over. I have been waiting for almost 5 years for a new phone that is good enough to make the switch from Samsung A900 (which has free tethering). Don't even get me started on the iPhone and its outrageous monopoly with AT&T. Android and the growing multitude of devices running it is, however, completely different business. Android offers unparallel freedom and I truly believe it will be the top phone OS within a few years as more and more Android phones are introduced to the market.
But where was I? I have been closely following Android news since its inception, then the introduction of the first phone – T-Mobile G1 (aka HTC Dream), …
beer planet is a blog about technology, programming, computers, and geek life. It is run by Artem Russakovskii - a local San Francisco geek who is currently pursuing his own projects and regularly enjoys hacking Android, PHP, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, Perl, and regular expressions, working on Wordpress plugins and tools, tweaking MySQL queries and server settings, administering Linux machines, blogging, learning new things, and other geeky stuff.
