So, I’ve had this WordPress app on my HTC Hero for a while but never used it until now. Now being defined as a prolonged moment of brain ache and lack of productivity. Also readable as I’ll try anything to kickstart my thoughts again and get back to work.

The first thing that I notice while using this app is that having upgraded my Hero to Froyo (Android 2.2) yesterday, my keyboard is lightening fast. I always thought that the keyboard on the Hero was a little laggy but now it’s really good and I’m using it in portriat mode and rarely hitting a typo.

Anyway, back to WordPress mobile blogging. So, I should really be the last person trying this out given my lack of current blog postings but hey, what the heck? The app seems quite nice, easy to use and uncluttered. I like that. I never use much text formatting in my posts but the buttons are there for that too and work fine.

Perhaps this will lend me to a new mode of downtime blogging from my phone? I could see it sparking interest in me for things that venture beyond the limit of Twitter’s payload and deserve more than the scowl of Facebook’s angry army of friends.

Nice work WordPress people.

I’ve been guilty of the moniker “tech fanboy” for most of my adult life and a greater part of my childhood. In the last decade I could even have proudly worn the title of “Mac fanboy”. However, there comes a time when, in spite of my own desire for technology, I have to draw a line.

Not my pad!

The iPad is a truly remarkable device – thank you to Paul Watson for letting me have a quick experience of his – I could see it replacing about 90% of my home online requirements and bizarrely, I could see it encouraging me to read more books (don’t ask). It would consume less power than my iMac, I could wander freely with it on WiFi, it’s form factor is amazing. So why doesn’t my phone have a text message with a code similar to W83xxxxxx giving me a warm fuzzy feeling? By all accounts I should be considerably out of pocket yet strutting about like a turkey on December 26th.

The reasons are many:

1. It costs a whopping €499 for the basic model with WiFi only and a miserly 16GB of storage.
2. An update to the 64GB model would cost me €699 and if I wanted 3G on top of that it would be €799.
3. For the love of <insert your deity here> can somebody explain why it doesn’t have a USB port or SD card slot?
4. Mobile data is still backward. I already have home broadband and a data plan for my smart phone, I don’t want yet another contract for data on the move. It’s not Apple’s fault that this is the case but we need operators to start issuing SIM-1 SIM-2, SIM-x cards under the one download limit plan rather than 2/3 contracts for different SIMs before this becomes a feasible option in my book.
5. Apple are just getting tighter than a duck’s arse under water by not shipping this premium product with a dock and that annoys me. Apple always cost that little bit more but you could always appreciate where the extra money went, that seems to be slipping now.
6. The website quotes operating temperatures of 0ºC to 35ºC and non-operating temperatures of -20ºC to 45ºC. So, when exactly does it work? Okay that’s just a semantic issue with the blurb but it annoys me – Apple isn’t supposed to annoy me, it’s supposed to be perfect and enrich my life, giving me a toothy smile.
7. It’ll cost me 2¢ should I wish Apple to ship me a free micro-SIM from an operator of my choice. WTF?
8. The Steve will invariably announce a brand new one in 3/4 months with built-in camera (and everything else that’s on the iPhone 4) at a slightly increased price and a wave of depression would sweep over me if I had an original device.
9. I’ll show you 9!!
10. Aaaarrrgggghhhhhh!

So, there you have it. The iPad; I lust for its pleasing design and function but there are just too many things about it that cause me inner turmoil and anger. I’ve never had an Apple product do that before – even the iPhone, if I’m honest, reserves a certain space in my techie heart despite the fact that I will never buy one. The way I feel about the iPad right now, I couldn’t even accept one as a gift because there are too many fundamental things wrong to ignore by allowing the exchange a very large quantity of hard earned cash for penny pinching production and an unsuitable market environment.

Perhaps if the price point dropped to a sensible €349 and operators got their game together and offered a multi-SIM plan with one limit but several devices then, maybe then, I could see myself dropping some more cash in Apple’s direction.

Regular readers (ahem, cough) will no doubt notice that my rate of updates has been somewhat stifled in recent times; I don’t blog like I used to anymore.

So, what’s happened? Has everything in the world stopped or have I just stopped leading a life that gives rise to interest and the need to talk about it? Well, the answer is neither really. Like most Irish bloggers who started out in the early days, I too got a little carried away with the 3 P’s of the whole social media triangle: Perusing, Posting, Peering. In that time I learned of some great folk whom I can occasionally drop a line or whom I have at least vaguely introduced myself to such that if I add them on Facebook or Twitter they’ll generally reciprocate and that’s nice because it’s a link to a learned ear whom I can ask questions of or get feedback from.

However, in learning of these folk I also became painfully aware that a journalist, I am not, nor do I have a unique angle or skill to convey material that isn’t better done elsewhere. As such, in recent months (perhaps the last year) my blog has been retired to a personal rant zone, where I can feel free to get things off my chest and with the hope of extracting some sanity check feedback from the masses. I am still a blogger (badge of honour says est. 2001) but blogging my thoughts on a regular basis would only clog up the interweb with meaningless garble that I can simply link to in del.icio.us, snip to Posterous, relay on Twitter or humourously share on Facebook. Apart from the occasional flatulence of niggling societal imbalance, political angst, or corporate discontent the world does not need my contributions and as such I don’t have the audacity nor arrogance to believe that it does.

Blogging a Dead Horse?

The whole experience has been a very worthwhile journey and occasionally I get the odd question popping in about something I wrote years previous, giving me a warm fuzzy feeling that somehow I helped somebody with a small tech problem or provided an angle of required thought – for that alone it is worth 1 post per month or thereabouts but any more would be delusional.

These days I’m more vocal within the Twittersphere, a world whose frontend applications provide a mesmerising view of constant news streams from micro-bloggers and celebrities alike, sometimes useful, sometimes crazy, always entertaining and beyond all else, as addictive and impulsive as licking sugar from donut consuming lips.

Not that I presume you are but should you be missing me or my idle banter, feel free to follow me over on Twitter/jbwan perhaps I’ll say something that will make you smile or at least get you angry enough to tweet back. If you track me down on Facebook and I don’t respond to your add then please don’t take offence. I generally stick to adding folk whom I have at least met, know well through virtual mediums or whom are co-workers of some temporal existence.

For some time now, anyone with their ears open will have heard of the “lock out” problem that is supposedly attributed to a 2G/3G handover issue on Meteor Ireland’s network for all users of the HTC Hero. Now when Meteor became the first Irish operator to launch an Android device last year (i.e. the Hero) they attracted a great deal of interest, myself included. I gave up all my beliefs about not paying monthly subscriptions, ditched my O2 prepay account and signed up for an 18 month contract. Since then there has been an array of issues all attributable to the Meteor network such as port blocking preventing some applications from running as advertised and the simply unbearable “lock out” issue.

Locked out on Android 2.1

The “lock out” issue can affect users of the handset anywhere up to 10 times a day on average. Basically what happens is that the phone drops signal and will not, no matter how long left alone, reconnect to the network. The only way of doing so is to reboot the phone or the faster route is to enter flight mode and then exit flight mode to re-register with the network. I have had friends verify that this is not an issue on other networks, trawling the web seems to throw up nothing in other countries but the Meteor forum is burning with rage about this issue. Some users are apparently being told that the problem will be fixed when the Hero is upgraded to Android 2.1 however, I can unequivocally say that this is not the case as I have been testing for a while now with a “rooted” Hero, running Android 2.1 and the latest radio firmware and I still experience the problem. For example, yesterday I had to cycle flight mode on my phone 6 times.

Normal people don’t check their phone every 5 minutes to see if they have a signal and as such this issue means that so many people are potentially going for the majority of the day without a signal on their Hero; paying for a service that they are not receiving. I can only imagine that this is going to turn ugly for Meteor and will no doubt be a PR disaster as currently, at least in my correspondence and the anecdotal sources on the Meteor forum, the company is not doing anything to appease the affected users and customer care agents are giving wrong information about Android updates solving the problem.

Here’s a video I made this morning of the “lock out” symptom and temporary solution of flight mode cycling.

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  Useful factory reset procedure for non-OEM ink refills.
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