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…

For whatever reasons, I’ve favored the odd-numbered Fedora releases (and the odd-numbered Red Hat releases before Fedora), so I was predisposed to like Fedora 13. And I do like Fedora 13.

I’m not sure what else to say. (I gave up on VMWare hosted on Fedora — trying to accomplish that wasted much of my time with Fedora 11 and 12.) I’ve now, as of Sunday, got Fedora 13 in all of my production Linux environments plus several others.  I can’t remember any noticeable problems migrating from Fedora 12, so 13 must be lucky.

The 450MHz Pentium II mail/web/name server had been seeming more sluggish, and the load average was often in the low single digits, not cause for alarm, but not the totally loafing I was used to seeing less than a year ago.

Every time I would investigate, thinking that web traffic might be the problem, especially MySQL for WordPress, I’d find multiple instances of spamd consuming the most processor and memory.

This was anything but rigorous analysis, but surprising/disappointing. After considering moving both mail and web to the 3.0GHz Pentium 4 sitting next to the 450MHz PII, instead I moved only the web service to the 3.0GHz P4, leaving the 450MHz machine to just handle mail. The web traffic, including MySQL, seems to place minimal load on the 3.0GHz processor, but the load average on the 450MHz processor still creeps up, as it fends off spam.

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.

I’ve been slower to adopt Fedora 11 and, now, Fedora 12. It took me almost 3 months, well into the Fedora 13 release cycle, to get comfortable enough with Fedora 12. Most of this was frustration with virtual machine options,  either not ready for the latest kernels (2.6.31 in Fedora 12) as with VMware Server 1.0.10, or not supporting legacy Windows (my experience with KVM and VirtualBox). Virtual satisfaction with VMware Server and kernel 2.6.31 delves into some of the details and prognosis.

The frustration led to questioning whether or how to continue with Fedora. Maybe CentOS would meet my production needs? Or wait to understand/adopt Fedora releases until the VMware community caught up with them? I was thinking a much longer wait, but the three months seems just about right this time.

After finally finding the seeming solution for VMware Server a few weeks ago, I successfully put Fedora 12 on my primary internally facing machine last week, including VMware Server 1.0.10, and transitioned the main external facing web/mail/name server to Fedora 12 two nights ago.

Outside of the virtualization issues, there’s not much to say, except that Fedora 12 seems more ready for release than Fedora 11 did. Awkward aspects of 11, e.g., needing an ext3 boot partition separate from the ext4 file systems, are gone. So far, 12 seems more polished, pleasantly surprising, and ready for prime time.

I’ve still not gotten interested in Debian proper, barely trying new releases of Ubuntu. But the comparably aggressive release schedule of Ubuntu helps. I don’t know if the virtualization issues would have been resolved nearly so quickly by the VMware community if Ubuntu 9.10 were not also using the 2.6.31 kernel. My latest understandings and successes began with reading How to install VMware Server on Ubuntu and following links and comments there.

Since the old ideas didn’t work, trying KVM seemed a likely alternative. However, my main interest in production virtual machines is running Windows 2000 Professional to run old Windows stuff that I need from time to time, stuff that isn’t likely to work with more recent versions of Windows. (I’ll probably still want Win2K for these purposes even when the support life cycle ends July 13. I still find use for NT4 Server for analogous reasons.) I don’t know whether the KVM project even intends to support legacy Windows. In any case, the Win2K install process seemed to get started OK, but then would not complete. It has been a couple of months since I tried this, so I don’t remember all the details.

While looking for solutions, I kept seeing praise for VirtualBox. The VirtualBox documentation showed promise, particularly the support for existing VMware partitions. I installed an rpm, tried to fire up an existing Win2K bootable partition, but the boot process didn’t get very far. I didn’t succeed in installing Win2K with VirtualBox, either.

Sometimes the right solution is to wait. Roughly once a week, or so,  I’d search to see if there were new possibilities emerging.

About a month ago, I discovered How to install VMware Server on Ubuntu. Though not of direct help, it did link to Kang’s vmware-specific-specific 5.5.x and kernel 2.6.31. I’d seen and used some of Kang’s VMware Server patches before, but the comments on that page referred to init_mm problems that I didn’t know how to solve for Fedora 12.

Aack’s comment #32, posted on January 13, provided the simplest solution I’ve seen to the init_mm problem, simply replacing one line in pgtable.h to avoid the problem altogether. That change doesn’t require kernel builds, it gets picked up when vmware-config.pl builds modules specific to the running kernel. I didn’t notice the comment for some days after it was posted, and also wanted to do some disk reconfiguration before testing, but once I got to testing with the one line change, all seemed well.

So thanks to Kang and Aack, I’m running VMware Server 1.0.10 on Fedora 12 with no apparent difficulties.  Kang’s comment #31, just before Aack’s praised VirtualBox, but Kang still seems to be preparing for kernel 2.6.32 (vmware-specific-specific 5.5.x and kernel 2.6.32), so maybe things will be easy enough by the time Fedora 13 comes out.

Other recipes I’ve found don’t work, and at first I couldn’t get this one to work because it requires building a kernel from source.

The change to the kernel source is only one line, a directive at that, so the source changes aren’t intimidating, but the kernel build and install process are intimidating, at least for someone like me who last built a kernel in 1989 (BSD 4.2 if I recall correctly). Things were certainly simpler then, but things we take for granted today, like VMware, weren’t available, either.

I followed the instructions at Building a custom kernel – FedoraProject first with 2.6.29.6-213. That never worked. I’m not sure if there was a problem in the source RPM or, more likely, that I skipped a critical step. I was using very slow, old iron, a 733MHz Pentium III with only 512M of physical memory.

Busy with other things and frustrated with the process, I let that machine sit until Fedora 11 updated to 2.6.29.6-217.2.3. Then I tried again, followed the instructions more carefully, pruned away unnecessary processes that were gobbling memory, and got a successful build. Successful builds took about 10 hours. I had neglected to build kernel-firmware the first time so repeated the process with better build parameters.

After installing the kernel and firmware RPMs and rebooting, things were ready for the VMware install and configuration. The main remaining glitch was that installing the kernel had not setup paths that vmware-config.pl is used to looking for, mainly /lib/modules stuff. With a kludgey symlink, that seems adequately resolved for making VMware Server work OK. (I have a Fedora 1 virtual machine running on that underpowered hardware, seemingly running OK.)

However, my kludges don’t seem weren’t sufficient to make Asterisk (really DAHDI) build and install properly. So I need to better understand how to get them going. I have a guess, but need to follow up. Update August 16: All that seems needed is this symlink:

ln -s ~/rpmbuild/BUILD/kernel-2.6.29/linux-2.6.29.i686/ /usr/src/kernels/`uname -r`

The equivalent of that probably gets instantiated by the kernel-headers RPM, but I didn’t think to build that one.

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.

Oops. I really meant Apollo 11 delivered…

But it’s not July 20 anymore, so about Fedora 11:

• Overall, no big problems
• Fedora Project slipped their final release schedule a couple of weeks, so I didn’t get started trying Fedora 11 until mid-June.
• VMware Server 1.0.x still doesn’t work with the 2.6.29 kernel(s) in Fedora 11. It appears that a one line kernel change is needed (assuming VMware doesn’t fix directly). However, I’ve never built a linux kernel before, and my first attempts have failed.
• The nastiest surprise, for me, was confusion about BIND. I’m used to Fedora putting BIND in a chroot’d jail. Fedora 11 seems to eschew actually doing this, but provides the /var/named/chroot directory hierarchy as if the jail still exists. I don’t find anything in the release notes about any of the BIND changes, and the additional DNSSEC  support in BIND 9.6 threw me off temporatily, since I don’t know much about DNSSEC. It took me a couple of hours to sort everything out, and my current solution is a bit clumsy, but seems to work.

There are other awkward aspects, such as the need for a /boot ext3 partition when trying to use ext4 for the rest of the filesystems, but these are adequately documented in the release notes, so not big problems for me.

I put Fedora 11 on my primary mail/web/DNS server yesterday, and all seems OK so far. (This post is stored on that server.) But the machine that depends on VMware Server is still running Fedora 10.

a.k.a. ”This looks great! But how do I use it?” (silence)

Back in the 90s, Larry Ellison and others were positing the feasibility of the “Internet Computer” a.k.a. “Network Computer”, based on “thin client” hardware and ubiquitous network access to servers and services. Though impractical then, computing along those lines is (becoming) practical today.

For those with sufficient  motivation, Google Documents (a.k.a. “Docs”) and (Microsoft) SkyDrive provide enticing capabilities.

One motivation is sharing files almost as if the people sharing the files are in the same location, using a conventional file server, even though the people are actually separated by significant distances. I’ve been exploring two scenarios, one city-wide and the other international.

Both Docs and SkyDrive operate along those lines but necessarily attempt to integrate with local “desktop” computing (quite possibly on a portable notebook or netbook) via a web browser. Both succeed and fail,  in different ways, with some of the failures likely by design intent.

For example, SkyDrive doesn’t reasonably permit in-place editing of a document, but rather expects documents to be uploaded/downloaded. Likely Microsoft is trying to protect sales of Office, but likely also waiting until support for in-place editing has been sufficiently well developed.

Less explicably, Docs limits file formats to three application surrogates for the Office core, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, plus non-editable PDFs. The in-place editing capabilities are likely more than enough for many users, but not seriously competitive with the full capabilities of the Office (or OpenOffice, etc.) applications.

Docs (though in seemingly perpetual “beta”, like GMail) has been around longer and seems easier to learn, mostly because it requires relatively little interaction with the traditional desktop environment, compared to SkyDrive. So in choosing whether to try to use Docs or SkyDrive one of the first questions is whether or not the limited file formats of Docs are sufficient. Also, though Docs may be easier to learn than SkyDrive, switching one’s thinking from desktop computing to Docs does require effort, and I’ve struggled to get others to expend that effort.

If those four Docs formats are not sufficient, then SkyDrive seems the best available option. The usage model is different from what most people are used to, and requires substantial interaction with the existing desktop environment, so SkyDrive is not easy to learn. But compared to the problems of carrying USB sticks from computer to computer and/or sending USB sticks in postal mail, there is much to motivate the learning.

Sometime this year, Google may provide another option, GDrive. For now, I’m encouraging people to give SkyDrive a try.

Some more related reading:

Watch out Google Docs – Microsoft SkyDrive is Coming

SkyDrive, Google Docs, Office Live Workspaces – Compared (suspense music…)

From SkyDrive to Google Docs

Yahoo drops its Briefcase

Cloud Storage’s Killer App… Geographic Collaboration