The most-publicized caution, battery life, has been a non-issue for me.

The most-publicized feature, 4G via WiMAX, has also been a non-issue, because the coverage isn’t quite what I hoped.

Other than that, my concerns and anticipations of problems had been needless, and the surprises have been good. I’ve come to think of the Evo as the best (for me) pocket computer I can imagine in today’s marketplace, and a good mobile phone, as well.

Let’s get the two most talked about items, battery life & 4G via WiMAX, out of the way first.

Battery Life

The first data on battery life I saw was positive (“We know what you’re thinking, though: what about battery life? Amazingly, …”) in the May 19 Engadget review. However, the same day, Walt Mossberg was reporting Sprint 4G Phone Hits New Speeds, but Battery Lags. That day, still a couple of weeks from my own hands on experience, I accepted those as different experiences due to different usage and expectations.

Nothing since has made me think much differently. I was concerned about battery life, so I ordered a cheap second battery. While waiting for the off-brand battery, I tried to see how long the battery would go with minimal usage, just my normal phone usage. I was able to get three days out of a single charge. That’s not much worse than I was used to with my pocket phone (LG Muziq), so I started thinking that I would be OK with battery life.

After the extra battery came, I fully charged the original battery, set it aside to be my spare, and have used the off-brand battery ever since. With my normal usage habits, including powering down the phone when I’m sleeping, I usally go two days between charges. Only once, after a long day of heavy phone usage, camera usage and my grand-daughter’s game playing, has the phone asked to be recharged, after 13 hours use that day.

The most comprehensive review I’ve seen are the 13 pages from AnandTech on June 28. The page discussing battery life leads off “There’s no other way to put it: the EVO 4G has terrible battery life.” The data there doesn’t contradict my experience. But that reviewer wants perfection — the last sentence says “While I’d be willing to carry something the size of the EVO, I’d need it to be perfect in order to make that tradeoff.”  I’m not expecting perfection. With hardware in general, and certainly “phones” like these, one can always wait for something cheaper/faster/better. I don’t see anything currently available that would be better for me than the Evo. Droid X, though a littler newer, doesn’t seem any better. I ponder about the iPhone 4, but only ponder.

4G via WiMAX

Click on the top map above and you’ll see the coverage at my home, light green to indicate some WiMAX signal, but not the dark green to indicate strong signal, with big patches of white (no signal) nearby.  The other map is a broader picture of our part of town, mostly dark green, but noticeable patches of white and light green.

Though I can use and appreciate the WiMAX in some places, it is mostly artificial, in that I mostly would either not use my pocket computer in those places, or would choose WiFi over WiMAX in the places where I would use the Evo. Most of the places where I’ve really wanted to use WiMAX, the signal just hasn’t been strong enough.

Sometimes it seems the Evo is trying to use WiMAX when it should accept that the WiMAX signal is too weak and revert to 3G. To avoid that apparent phenomenon, I usually leave the WiMAX turned off, turning it on every few days when it seems like it might really be useful. Then I wonder why Sprint is charging me the extra $10/month for 4G, but rather than protest I hope for the day when the coverage here is comprehensive.

All the “little” things

To me some of these are a much bigger deal than battery and WiMAX concerns. They make Evo a good pocket computer for me.

Display

Both the size, 4.3″ diagonal and resolution, 217 pixels/inch, are a delight to me. I can’t imagine anything physically larger that would still be a pocket computer, until flexible displays become practical, if they do. I’m typing this report on a screen with 99 pixels/inch. Looking at photos and videos is so much more pleasant with the Evo’s higher resolution. The difference is dramatic enough to make me curious about the iPhone 4 “Retina” display, at 326 pixels/inch, but not curious enough to go looking for one.

“Keyboard”

I didn’t know what to think before I tried the on-screen keyboard. I didn’t think I’d miss having tiny physical keys and knew that a pocket computer couldn’t have big enough keyboard for touch typing. I’d gotten used to the on-screen keyboard of my i300 easily enough, without learning Graffiti, so I thought I’d be OK but clumsy without a stylus. Learning to use the keyboard, with just my fingers, has been faster than I expected, though I’ll usually rotate the Evo for landscape keyboard unless what I’m entering is very short.

Google integration, Android, HTC Sense

With Evo’s Android, I expect good fit with Google, and that has been true as far as I’ve explored. Besides search, I mostly use Google for Reader, and Reader works OK in mobile mode for skimming tens of headlines (actually groups of 15) at a time. I don’t use Gmail much, but will probably use Gmail a little more as time goes on and I become more dependent on the Evo. Having Google Maps in my pocket has been useful a few times. But I really haven’t explored Android or HTC Sense very much so far. That is an endorsement from my perspective — as an end user I haven’t had the need to explore the software much. Eventually I will, but because I want to, not because I need to.

Camera(s)

“Faster/better/cheaper” applies to cameras, in particular, cameras built-in to computers and phones. The Evo’s built-in cameras suffice for almost all my purposes. The still photos are about as good as the pocket camera I bought last year, with lack of optical zoom being the main limitation. For video, the Evo is definitely preferable to my “marvelous toy” (AIPTEK MPVR+) of three years ago. Optical zoom and 1080p are the main reasons I think of separate cameras now.

YouTube (Flash)

Browsing Android phones at a Sprint store earlier this year, I was dismayed about the absence/clumsiness of YouTube support. So I was expecting to have to deal with that when I got my Evo. But YouTube HQ was already in place, and works just fine. Other Flash video doesn’t work, but I don’t have much need for other Flash video, and will probably just wait for the Evo to have Android 2.2 and Flash 10.1.

Apps

My daughter was dismayed that I’d had the Evo for more than 24 hours and still hadn’t downloaded any apps. I don’t think she was impressed that I responded by getting ConnectBot (SSH client) and AndroidVNC (a.k.a. Android VNC Viewer). I hadn’t tried SSH or VNC on a phone since the i300. They both seem to work just fine. I’ve even tried using vi after logging in to a Fedora machine with ConnectBot, knowing that the on-screen keyboard would make it very hard to use vi normally. That I was able to use vi at all seemed worth celebrating. ConnectBot is mostly for SSH tunneling, at least in my current thinking, and handles that well to the extent I’ve tried it with VNC, IMAP and SMTP.

I’m still behind the curve in downloading apps. Since I haven’t explored many of the factory installed apps, and what I’ve explored has met my needs, I’m not likely to be much of an app consumer. I did download “Barbie in a Mermaid tale” for our grand-daughter — she and our daughter like to play that.

Mail

Ever since I’ve been handling mail servers for myself and others, I’ve been a fan of IMAP for mail servers. I’ve been less of a fan of most mail clients’ handling of IMAP. The only two clients I’ve ever really liked with IMAP, particularly with regard to handling of folders, are Netscape Mail and the Outlook Express lineage of Microsoft options, including the current form, Windows Live Mail. I’m pleasantly surprised by the handling of IMAP folders by the Evo mail client.

Multitouch

Reading about the lack of multi-touch in Android had been one source of trepidation, unnecessary trepidation in my Evo experience. Multi-touch may not be present in all of the apps, or as fully featured as in other environments, but seems OK in the browser and the PDF viewer. AndroidVNC doesn’t seem to have adopted multi-touch yet, presumably because the APIs are relatively new to Android, but does have discrete zoom buttons.

More to come

Froyo

Before I got the Evo, I thought I’d be impatiently waiting for HTC to update from Android 2.1 (Eclair) to 2.2 (Froyo), if for no other reason than to have Flash support. Since the Evo YouTube HQ support seems just fine, I’m simply curious about 2.2, not impatient. Now is probably a good time to start taking a closer look at how Android and HTC/Sprint software all fit together on the Evo.

Travel

I’ve not gone on any trips with Evo yet. I’m expecting that having a pocket computer will make me much less likely to bring out a laptop in airports, etc. On the other hand, the Evo’s (extra $30/month, so far not purchased by me) portable Hotspot capability may be attractive in terms of both convenience and avoiding airport and hotel WiFi charges.

Videoconferencing

I haven’t tried Qik video chat — I don’t know anyone to call with Qik! I’d really like to try Skype on Evo, but my impression is that Skype won’t be offering video calling on Android/Evo any time soom. I keep seeing intriquing reports about fring, and it appears that a production release of fring for Android is available, so I’ll have to give fring a try.

Development

I’m assuming I’ll have to build an app of my own for Android/Evo, if for no other reason than to say “Hello World!”, but it will probably be a while before I do so.

But right now, I need to respond to all the text messages that are making my Evo beep at me…

I’m used to Fedora releases sticking with minor updates to the kernel they start with, i.e., I was expecting Fedora 12 to stick with kernel 2.6.31. Wrong! A few months ago Fedora 12 updated to kernel 2.6.32. Though I was able to get VMware to sort of run on kernel 2.6.32 with the conventional recipes, it wasn’t right. In particular, my Windows 2000 Pro virtual machine would start to boot and then die when running on VMWare Server 1.0.10 on Fedora 12 with kernel 2.6.32.

The advice thread (vmware-specific-specific 5.5.x and kernel 2.6.32) that originally made me optimistic did not continue to offer encouragement. Anticipating Fedora 13 and kernel 2.6.33 left me more pessimistic about the VMWare on Fedora course.

So I started thinking about alternatives. My experience with KVM and VirtualBox didn’t entice in either of those directions. So I flipped over one practice of the last three years [Upside Down (Windows over Fedora 7 Linux)] and switched to another [Real Virtual] — now the machine that had been running Windows 2000 hosted by Fedora 12 is now running Fedora 13 hosted by Windows XP.  I don’t have a solution, yet, for the Digium Wildcard TDM400P. Except for that, which will only matter, if and when I get back to pursuing Asterisk,  ”right side up” (Fedora VM hosted on XP) seems just fine.

A few days ago I was passing by the neighborhood RadioShack and thought “Maybe I could get an Evo from RadioShack faster than directly from Sprint?”.  I walked in, asked a few questions, and a few minutes later I was pre-ordering an Evo, only my second “smartphone”, my first being a Samsung SPH-i300 purchased in late 2001.

I think the i300 was the 2^nd Palm OS (3.5.2) phone on the market (soon after a monochrome phone from Kyocera). I loaded it up with SSH, VNC, a PDF reader, Java ME, Java apps of my own devising and probably some less used apps I’ve forgotten. Using the i300 changed my thinking about email, about web browsing, and application development. But ultimately, the hardware and network weren’t up to what I wanted — I wanted much more screen area in both pixels and physical size, faster processing, and faster transfers.

By some time in 2006 I’d gotten to the point where the i300 sat in the charging cradle most of the time. Late last year I stopped using it entirely — I think it is in my office closet somewhere, along with a spare that a friend gave me. My current phone (an LG Muziq) will nominally browse the web, handle email (even IMAP), and play all the MP3s I put on a MicroSD card, but I rarely use it for more than voice calls, an occasional text message, and an occasional photo.

I couldn’t believe the iPhone, its predecessors and successors, could be all that fundamentally better than the i300. All the pre-3G and post-3G iPhone networking complaints, including the 2009 SXSW reports, didn’t help entice me. I didn’t even touch an iPhone for the longest time. I kept hoping for a larger scale device, bigger than a phone and smaller than a netbook, that I would find satisfying. My XO has not been that. The alluring iPad is too big and, so far, missing too much to convince me.

Since the HTC Evo was announced, it has seemed the closet fit I’m going to find anytime soon. Lots more pixels than the i300, modern processor, and, potentially satisfying networking. (WiMAX seems to cover our neighborhood and my most frequent travel spots.)

Having ordered the phone, now I can’t wait. Every new report or review, even Mossberg’s ambivalence (Sprint 4G Phone Hits New Speeds, but Battery Lags), raises anticipation. In less than two weeks I should be immersed in Evo.

Most people don’t have a use for hardware this old, but I find myself accumulating machines to use as spares, in case the original Optiplex gives out, and for testing and random experiments. I wouldn’t run Windows on this hardware, and probably wouldn’t tolerate the performance of GNOME or KDE on an ongoing basis, but  for “server” stuff it is quite serviceable.

The biggest challenge is memory consumption. This GX1 has 3 slots, and there are 512M DIMMs that would fit physically, but the circuitry won’t address more than 768M. I have a couple of Optiplex GX100s with faster processors, but only 2 memory slots, so they’re maxed out at 512M. They’re useful for testing and one stands ready as a hot spare for this machine, but the difference between 512M and 768M is quite noticeable.

The 512M constraint was most noticeable building a kernel from source. To avoid severe swapping, or worse, I had to stop all the GUI stuff, MySQL, httpd, etc. Even then, watching the memory consumption made me wonder if the build would complete. It did, but it took about 10 hours on a 733MHz Pentium III! The corresponding build on a 3.0GHz P4 with 2G of memory took about 2 hours, a factor of 5 improvement vs. the 4.1x improvement one might expect based on clock frequency. Even that comparison is probably understated, since the 3.0GHz/2G machine was still runing the GUI stuff, MySQL, httpd et al during the build.

1. The keyboard is even more a “fatal flaw” than I thought at first.
2. The LCD panel failed (right side went blank) just before I was going to take it to Nicaragua. (A free under warranty replacement machine was shipped promptly, but not promptly enough.)
3. Miscellaneous software annoyances, most notably the WiFi limitations and the power management deficiencies, also limited applicability.

Obviously, the keyboard is not going to get better, the LCD failure is history, but there is good news about #3.

My opinion last year, “it definitely feels to me like a ‘version 1.0′ product that was pushed out the door too soon.”, still seems apropos. OLPC referred to that version as “release 7.1.0, also known as ‘Ship.2′”.

Now, there are two much more encouraging options:

1. Release 8.2, which came out in October, and which I installed on my XO a few days ago, feels like a real product, what I would have liked to have seen originally.
2. Fedora 10 is available on an SD card as a boot time alternative to the standard OPLC Fedora derivative with “Sugar”. I’ve ordered a copy and expect to try it out in a few days.

(I’m not counting the most publicized option, Windows XP. Based on the specs and experience with release 7.1, I can’t imagine this hardware being sufficient for seriously using XP.)

Some of the improvements I’ve noticed in 8.2:

• Sugar usability and configurability are noticably improved. In particular, Sugar “activities” appear as a large circle on the primary screen, so that they can be easily browsed and selected without the ugly horizontal scrolling of 7.1. Activities can be easily configured to be absent or present in the circle.
• WiFi configuration for WPA is now easy with Sugar.
• Power management seems adequate
• Flash performance under the Browse Activity seems noticably better, e.g., “The Parting Hand” plays reasonably, with continuous audio. (The video is jerky, but so was the video on the alternative XP desktop that I used for comparison last year.)
• It is obvious how to easily configure the system languages other than English.

There have been a few annoyances, but nothing compared to before. (The olpc-update process did not retain applications, e.g., Opera, that I assumed would be retained, and did not retain accounts and passwords I’d established. The latest Flash from Adobe doesn’t seem to work with Opera. Those are the only annoyances I recall at this moment.)

For now, I’m waiting for the Fedora 10 SD card, wondering what the performance will be like, what Fedora packages have been included/excluded in the 4G SD card, and how much space will be left on that card.

I’m assuming I will finally get to try the XO in Nicaragua in a month or two.

But with the plethora of manufacturers producing analogous machines, now typically called “netbooks”, I look forward to getting one with a usable keyboard and robust processing capability sooner or later.

Yesterday I mixed the audio, used it in place of the camera’s audio track, and broke it up into segments for YouTube: Charlie Abbitt – Live at The Wellington May 22, 2008.

I’d hardly touched Cubase LE since August, and didn’t really remember much of what I had learned back then. What I did remember was sending analog output from the iO|14 to the audio input of another computer for mixdown. Though that memory was correct, that was not the best approach.

Fortuanately, I have been using Audacity frequently for simpler recording and sound processing. I routinely export processed audio from Audacity without involving a second system. My main learning yesterday was that Cubase does have export facilities (D’oh!), whch are quite usable and useful, such that a separate computer for mixdown was unnecessary (and potentially would have compromised audio quality).

Before the realization that a second computer was wrong headed, I thought about using the recently acquired iMac G4 pedestal. I thought I spied an analog input on the back next to the (“headphone”) analog output, but I was wrong — that connector is an Apple proprietary “Apple speaker minijack  for connection to Apple Pro Speakers”. OS X System Profiler and System Preferences tell me the only built-in audio input is the mic. Determining that was not easy, with only minimal info readily available from both apple.com & Google, but one of my Mac expert friends confirmed my determination. Even he had to stare at the back of one of his pedestals to be sure.

To try to end this rambling, but finish the story, this morning I wondered more about the 1/8″ combined analog/digital audio jacks on more recent Macs. The iO|14 has S/PDIF coaxial RCA digital input/output. The Mac jacks are S/PDIF optical, but not the typical TOSLINK, since those are different size/shape from the ubiquitous 1/8″ analog jacks. I finally found the explanation that the Mac jacks are “mini-TOSLINK”, that optical adapters are inexpensive, and that bi-directional coaxial/optical converters are not expensive. 

The iMac came with Jaguar on it. It had been unused for a while and no one knew the passwords. So it was time to learn about the esoteric Apple boot options and keyboard commands.

Spending a little time with it every day for a few days, I wondered if I would ever figure it out, but I did, and now could do things much more efficiently.

Part of the challenge was working around optical disc drive limitations, and flakiness in the Tiger DVD-R I’d made from images downloaded from Apple Developer Connection 3? years ago. Eventually I figured out that the Tiger disc was usable with the right choice of drive. Only one of four candidate drives would read the disc without errors, but that one drive was enough.

The least intuitive of the steps was to cable the iMac to another Mac with Firewire, boot the iMac in “Firewire target mode“ by holding down the T key at boot, and letting the second Mac treat the iMac as an external disk. After telling Spotlight to not index the external disk (using the Privacy tab in the Spotlight System Preferences), then Disk Utility quickly removed the old partition and allowed me to create a new one.

Using the Option key at boot to get into Startup Manager seemed the most effective way to figure out which volumes were available for booting. After many false starts and false hypotheses figuring out that with the right choice of drive I could boot from the Tiger DVD-R, the rest of installation and configuration was routine.

Now I can progress to some of my pending Mac projects and postpone thinking about buying a new Mac until they are faster and/or cheaper. I’ve started experimenting with XMeeting again and am pondering next steps.

Observations

The green and white toy-like industrial design draws plenty of attention. Closed, it is not obvious what it is or how to open the display. My 19-year-old neice, properly acquainted with iPods and MacBooks, thought it belonged to my two-year-old grand-daughter. Those already XO aware but unitiatated have reacted with intrigue and envy. Once you open the display and start the browser, people adjust to it quickly after pondering the keyboard and touchpad.

It seems sturdy, ready to survive drops and spills, and designed for hardware serviceability.

The display is delightful. With 200 pixels/inch at 1200×900 layout, photos look great. In reflective monochrome mode it should be fine on the beach, based on my minimal outdoors experience.

The keyboard is frustrating, too small for touch typing with adult hands. I keep trying and am getting closer to touch typing. It is doubtful that any QWERTY keyboard this narrow could be a lot better. At least 10 keys are reserved for future use and at least a few are specific to the “Sugar” environment. The legacy IBM 3270 function keys (F1, F2, …) of PC and Mac keyboards are omitted.

http://wiki.laptop.org/ is the starting point for OLPC external and internal documents. Bunnie Studios and Notebook Review provide relatively detailed hardware analysis.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Suspend_and_resume seems self-contradictory, but right now I see no signs that “standby” is functional — the machine is basically on or off.

The readily visible software, “Sugar,” is unique. The usage model seems intended for mesh networking of groups of children, with roughly a dozen games and basic applications, including browsing and writing. A journal of activities is central, and intended as a replacement for files and file hierarchies as known by most adult computer users. Also see The Journal.

There is an easily accessible Terminal (x-term) ”activity” to escape to the underlying Linux. Without Terminal, I would not have been able to be productive with the XO.

Pondering

Why are so many things unnecessarily different from other PCs? If the fundamental goal is to help children become computer literate, differences from adult computers, whether Windows, Mac, or Linux-based, seem counter-productive.

M.I.T. has pioneered child-oriented software before, going back, at least to Papert’s Logo programming language, but it has never been obvious that Logo helped prepare for adult computing. The benefits of Sugar are not yet obvious, but perhaps they will become apparent.

The relatively small main memory (256MB) and non-volatile storage (1GB) make it challenging to supplement the built-in software. It is easy to add flash storage with the SD and USB slots, but it seems providing 512MB standard main memory would likely be a noticeable performance boost.

Reportedly, Microsoft is preparing to support Windows XP on the XO, and will require a 2GB SD card for XP.

WiFi, the only built-in networking, is intended for both conventional access points and mesh networks, either formal or ad hoc. WPA is not supported by Sugar, but there is a workaround with “Wpa.sh” run from Terminal. Similarly, there is no “airplane mode” from the Sugar GUI, but there is a workaround from Terminal.

Usage

For the first three weeks, I paid relatively little attention to the machine, fiddling around with it every now and then, showing it off when there was an eager audience. This past weekend, I went on my first airplane trip since receiving the XO. I spent most of the departing flight sleuthing around the underlying Linux software and most of the return flight starting to write this. I brought along a Windows laptop just in case the XO was insufficient, but that machine’s charger failed, so I was forced to rely on the XO and hotel lobby machines at my destination.

On the outgoing plane, I also tried many of the pre-installed “Activities,” i.e., applications. I was expecting to be able with “Write“ to revise Microsoft Word documents saved as RTF, but did not understand the drag and drop constraints until reading http://wiki.laptop.org/ more carefully. In the process I discovered that RTF support is not fully enabled yet.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment for me is the Browse activity. Though based on the same “Gecko” rendering engine as FireFox, Browse’ simplistic controls seem very limiting. In particular, there is no “tabbed browsing”. Since Sugar is a full-screen experience, without multiple visible windows, the omission of tabbed browsing is particularly puzzling. Browse also disallows self-signed TLS certificates, which frustrated my attempts to access SquirrelMail.

On the trip home I assumed I would try to install full FireFox to displace Browse. However, I discovered that OLPC sort of encourages Opera as an alternative to Browse. This was a blessing in disguise, since it has been years since I’ve tried Opera. So far Opera on the XO seems very promising, much more like the experience I’m used to with Microsoft/Mozilla/Apple browsers. In particular, Opera for XO supports tabbed browsing and self-signed certificates.

I also was able to easily install (and use) the Lynx text-mode browser from the Fedora 7 distribution RPM. This is encouraging, both that XO has used familiar Linux package management and is compatible with (simple) generic Fedora packages.

Normally, I spend most of my work time using the Windows laptop that has the dead charger. Since that machine is unavailable, today I tried working in my office with the XO, but ended up mostly using XP on a 9-year-old desktop instead. The desktop only has a 450MHz Pentium II, roughly equivalent to the XO’s 433MHz AMD Geode, but has 512MB of main memory and familiar applications. I think the extra memory was the real difference.

As one benchmark, I tried viewing/listening to “The Parting Hand” with both the XO (subsituting Adobe’s Flash player for the built-in “gnash” player) and the 450MHz XP machine. The XO couldn’t keep the audio streaming, and the video was very jerky. The 450MHz XP machine, with twice the memory, had jerky video, but mostly kept the audio streaming.

In finishing writing this, I mostly used the XO, but used vi(m), not Write, and used a full-size USB keyboard.

There’s been lots of controversy surrounding OLPC and the XO. I’m glad they made it. I’m glad I bought one, for the display if nothing else. The XO probably will be a useful travel machine, half the size and weight of my Windows laptop. But the XO is underpowered, and it definitely feels to me like a “version 1.0″ product that was pushed out the door too soon. I’ll be eager to see what Version 2 is like, and what the competitors, especially ASUS, do.

I’ve heard of other attempts since then, but it looks like the first successful realization is available from Gibson. Mechanically, it “sounds” much like what Jerry had in mind in 1969.

Update 2007/11/26: c|net has photos, says there was another realization in 1998, says “The Robot Guitar”, a Gibson Les Paul with self-tuning isn’t really available until December 7. Article at http://www.news.com/Photos-When-tech-tunes-your-guitar/2300-1040_3-6218819.html.