Jonathan Preston . com

Apple recently (less than a month ago) launched their newest smartphone, the iPhone 4. The latest member in a series of devices, including the immensely successful iPhone 3GS, the iPhone 4 sold over 3 million units within weeks of its launch. Unfortunately, as many are now aware, the iPhone 4 has a rather serious flaw in its antenna design, causing a significant degradation in signal strength when held in a particular position.

Reacting in approximately 3-weeks’ time, Steve Jobs held a press conference yesterday, during which he gave a 15-minute presentation explaining the problems experienced by the iPhone 4, passing the blame for these problems around as much as possible, and then offering a disappointing solution.

The problem, dubbed “Antennagate” by the user community, is apparently not Apple’s fault. As Jobs’ explains, it’s really a problem endemic to all smartphones. To demonstrate this point, he shows three phone models. Two of these, by Samsung and RIM, do indeed have similar antenna problems. That said, when he came to the Android phone in his list, the Droid Eris, I just had to laugh, for several reasons.

Most importantly, the Eris is not a recent phone. It’s already reached end-of-life with Verizon, and has been replaced by a number of newer Droid models, including the Droid Incredible
and the Droid X. These newer models don’t feature such an antenna problem. Second, to create this problem, the Apple engineers were forced to slide their hand up to the top of the Eris, a position that no regular user would ever employ while talking on the phone.

Regardless, Apple has offered to give every iPhone 4 owner a free case for their phone. If you’ve already purchased a bumper case directly from Apple, you’ll get a full refund. If you haven’t purchased a case for your iPhone yet, you can click here to get some great iPhone 4 cases.

When you’re working with math or finances, it’s not uncommon to need to convert from one unit of measurement to another. Sometimes you memorize conversions, like the fact that there are 2.54 centimeters in one inch, or 5,280 feet in one mile. But who really memorizes how many grams there are in one ounce, or how many inches there are in a kilometer? It’d be really helpful if you had a calculator that could handle these conversions all on its own, right?

As it turns out, Google provides this functionality. Simply enter your query, be it a value, or a full math equation, and add “in inches” or whatever other unit of measure you’d like to convert to. For instance…

Search Google for “1 mile in mm”

You can also work with more complex equations, like this…

Search Google for “1000cm * 1000cm * 100^2 in km^2″

Google’s search functions become even more useful when dealing with finances. You can search for currency conversions like this…

Search Google for “1 USD in CAD”

Naturally, exchange rates change daily, and different banks will exchange funds at different rates, so be sure to double check your data.

You’re probably read the title of this article and thought “he’s nuts”. After all, a netbook is supposed to be a very lightweight (both physically and in terms of processing capability) and portable system. Equipped with single-core processors ranging in speed from 700MHz to 1.6GHz, how could a netbook possibly handle playing HD videos?

The answer is hardware video acceleration. For years, we’ve seen this technology around — when DVD drives started to appear in computers, the processors of the time couldn’t handle doing all the MPEG-2 video decoding in software. The solution was dedicated hardware capable of decoding and displaying the DVD video. It was expensive, but in time, it found its way into most video cards.

Since that time, we’ve gone from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4. MPEG-4 exists largely in two flavors. MPEG-4 Part 2 (also known as the Advanced Simple Profile, or ASP) is implemented by a variety of codecs, most notably DivX and XviD. While never included as part of a disc-based video standard, this attained great popularity in the world of computers, becoming the de-facto format for storing and sharing video on a computer. MPEG-4 Part 10 (also called Advanced Video Coding, or AVC) is most commonly known as H.264, and is used on Bly-Ray discs, YouTube and Hulu, among others.

These codecs are well-known for their ability to provide similar quality to codecs like MPEG-2, but with much smaller filesizes, due to additional optimizations in encoding architecture. Because of these optimizations, the H.264 files take a lot more processing power to decode than MPEG-2, which puts us back in the same situation we faced with DVDs — playback on low-end machines, like netbooks, just isn’t feasible in software.

Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem — a new generation of hardware video accelerators. New classes of hardware video accelerators are capable of decoding not only MPEG-2, but also various forms of MPEG-4. Many recently released graphics cards from AMD and nVidia include this hardware for desktop platforms, but this still left HD video out of reach of netbooks, until now.

Intel has released its Poulsbo ultra-mobile chipset. Poulsbo includes the GMA500 video core (also known as Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR SGX), which has full H.264 hardware acceleration. This chipset is featured in a variety of netbooks, including my Acer AspireOne AO751h. This model has an 11.6″ HD screen (1366×768 pixels specifically). Although my AO751h only has a 1.3GHz CPU, I don’t have any significant problems displaying HD video on this tiny lightweight system.

If you’re running Windows, in theory the drivers and other necessary software came pre-installed with your system. I found, however, that the performance was not good in Windows. Being a Linux guy, however, this doesn’t really bother me. Unfortunately, Intel hasn’t been all that supportive of the Linux community. So, as usual, we’ll have to do the setup ourselves. I’m using an install of Kubuntu 9.10 for this.

1. To get the Poulsbo graphics running properly in 2D and 3D, we need to install the proper packages. Unfortunately, the Ubuntu repositories don’t yet contain the updated versions, so we’ll need newer packages. Open a shell (in Kubuntu, press Alt+F2, type Konsole and press Enter). Download and execute a script that will get these packages by running this command in the shell:
   wget http://gma500re.altervista.org/scripts/poulsbo_ppa.sh && sh ./poulsbo_ppa.sh
2. Reboot your system. It should load up in your correct full screen resolution.
3. Install the VA API library and compile MPlayer from source by following some of the instructions at http://linux-tipps.blogspot.com/2009/12/vaapi-accelerated-hd-video-on-msi-wind.html . Follow instructions 5 and 6 to set up VA API. Then skip to the section on compiling MPlayer from source and follow instructions to compile and install MPlayer.
4. Download an HD trailer and test the player. Remember to instruct MPlayer to use your hardware by running a command like this:
   mplayer -fs -vo vaapi -va vaapi /path/to/file.mp4

And that’s it! You can now enjoy 1080p HD videos on your netbook. (It’s also very cool to watch the CPU use meter stay at under 30% on a netbook while decoding HD video.)

As a side note — you can actually run two instances of MPlayer and decode two HD videos at the same time without a problem, but you’ll experience issues if you try to render the output at full screen.

One final detail is this — the video acceleration is not compatible with suspend functionality yet. If you try to launch a VA API accelerated video player after resuming from a suspend, your system will completely crash, and will require a reboot.

So, after much ado, rumor, hype and anticipation, Google has released information on its first foray into the cell phone hardware market — The Nexus One. This device promises to be a strong, though perhaps not revolutionary, addition to the line of Android-powered smartphones currently on the market.

Android, for those unaware, is Google’s smartphone operating system. Now approaching the release of version 2.1, this alternative to the more established mobile operating systems (Windows Mobile, iPhone, Palm, etc) is featured on more than 20 smartphone models. It features full phone, messaging, email and web browsing capabilities. In addition, users can watch videos from YouTube, use voice control to conduct searches on Google, or listen to complete libraries of music.

In the past, Google has remained in the role of software development. It has coordinated its development efforts with a number of hardware manufacturers, including notable names like HTC, a Taiwanese company who has released a number of Android-powered devices, and Motorola, who recently released Verizon’s flagship product, the “Droid”. That changed on January 5th, when Google announced the release of the Nexus One.

The Nexus One, manufactured by HTC, was developed under Google’s direction, and with access to Google’s latest Android 2.1 operating system. Though many had speculated that this “Google Phone” would be the first in a new class of data-only phones, using only a cellular or wi-fi data connection, not only for web browsing and email, but for regular phone calls as well, this is not to be the case with the Nexus One. Instead, the Nexus One remains a standard smartphone, intended to run on a variety of cellular networks.

Here are some of its technical specifications:

• Processor: Qualcomm “SnapDragon” QSD 8250 (running at 1GHz)
• Operating System: Android 2.1 (codename “Eclair”)
• Memory: 512MB Flash, 512MB RAM, 4GB microSD Card (expandable to 32GB microSD)
• Display: 3.7″ WVGA AMOLED touchscreen, 800×480 pixels, 100,000:1 contrast ratio
• Location and Orientation: AGPS, digital compass (magnetometer), accelerometer
• Size: 119 mm (4.68 in) x 59.8 mm (2.35 in) x 11.5 mm (0.45 in)
• Weight: 130 g (4.59 oz) with battery
• Battery: Removable 1400mAH battery, 7 hours talk time, 250 hours standby (on 3G networks)
• Camera: 5 megapixels, LED flash, autofocus, 2x digital zoom, location tagging from AGPS
• Video: 720×480 pixels @ 20fps or higher
• Audio: 3.5mm headphone jack, speaker, dual microphones (front and back)
• Input: Capacitive soft-keys (back, home, menu, search) with haptic feedback, clickable trackball, power button, volume control, light sensor, proximity sensor
• Cellular: UTMS, GSM, EDGE, HSDPA, 3G etc (not AT&T compatible)
• Wireless: Wi-Fi (802.11b/g/n), Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, A2DP

The hardware in this device is mostly very standard, compared to other recent Android devices like the Motorola Droid. Personally, I would have expected to see more for the very first phone being sold by Google. Nevertheless, there are a few noteworthy improvements.

Noise Reduction: The Nexus One features two input microphones, one on the front of the device (as is common), and another on the back. The rear one will be used to analyze the ambient sound in the room, allowing Android to generate an inverse sound to cancel that noise. This has not, to my knowledge, been found on any previous phone model.

Processor: The 1GHz SnapDragon CPU is one of the most powerful we’ve seen in a smartphone to date. This should allow the Nexus One to do more CPU-intensive things (including support for Adobe Flash).

Voice Input…Everywhere: The Nexus One is the first device to feature Android 2.1. One of the most notable feature improvements is that you can now use speech recognition as an input method on any text field. This means you’ll be able to input contact information, respond to SMS, and possibly even compose emails by voice. This is a feature I’ve been waiting for since I bought my Droid, and while it will be rolled out to devices like the Droid and Droid Eris over the next few months, the Nexus One has it right now.

Lack of a Sliding Keyboard: While many might call this a negative, I’ve found that keyboards on thin sliders like the Motorola Droid are just not good enough to use regularly. While my Samsung i760 had a very nice slide-out keyboard, it made the device much thicker — too thick for a modern slider. Google has opted to remove the keyboard, making the device lighter and thinner, and making the on-screen keyboard the only option for typing (and not a bad option at that).

Multiple Network Support: In addition to a model subsidized through T-Mobile, Google is also directly selling an unlocked model compatible with other GSM networks, and will be releasing a Verizon-friendly model soon.

In addition to the benefits, there are a few disadvantages this phone has.

Trackball: While most smartphones to date have relied on screen-swiping or button controls to scroll up or down a page of text, the Nexus One adds a trackball, allowing the users to navigate in that way. It’s apparently also clickable. I suppose time will tell whether or not this will be a preferred method of navigation, but personally, I’m going to label this as a rather useless addition to the device.

4GB microSD Card: With the iPhone 3GS at 16/32GB, and the Droid coming with 16GB pre-installed, the 4GB microSD card that comes with the Nexus One is just too small.

Price: $179 with the standard 2-year contract (data plan required), or $529 without. Given that the data plans are similarly priced to those on networks like AT&T and Verizon, the total cost of ownership of this phone with the contract is still very, very high. This, to me, provides little incentive to buy this model, since T-Mobile’s network provides far less coverage, and Verizon presently has the Motorola Droid available with similar features.

Overall, it looks like it’s a good phone, but it’s not the game-changer many hoped it might be. Will Google eventually do a data-only phone? I think so, but apparently they don’t feel the time is right, yet.