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.

As I’ve become increasingly enamored with WordPress, I’ve been waiting for this day, the day that WordPress 3 is (finally) ready. As I’ve waited, I’ve also thought of “jus’ press” as analogy appropriate to WordPress, beyond (just) the word “press”.

In the almost 3 years since I started with WordPress, I’ve mostly thought, as many do, of WordPress as a blogging tool. Last year a friend, Ryan Owen, asked me about using WordPress for a general web site we managed together, a site with many static pages in addition to more dynamic “blog” pages.  My knee jerk reaction was that WordPress couldn’t do things he and I were used to doing with HTML and CSS. To some extent that reaction was true, but also false due to my ignorance — WordPress 2 was far more general and flexible than I realized. With the capabilities of WordPress 3, some of which have been available for a few months on WordPress.com and available in beta versions of WordPress 3, WordPress is a very compelling application for general purpose web site development.

As I used WordPress 2 more, and browsed through the capabilities I wasn’t using, the flexibility and generality gradually became apparent. I’d read various endorsements, and noticed the broader acceptance of WordPress, especially the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital. (Note the WordPress login page at http://allthingsd.com/wp-admin.)

Early this year I joined a committee established to sort out web strategy for the PET Project. The many existing sites were not coordinated with each other, not keeping up to date, in general not providing the web presence we needed. A typical reaction was along the lines of “I wouldn’t know the sites were related to each other without seeing the Mercy in Motion video.” One person had a strong vision of revamping the sites with a Joomla!-based portal system. However, the expense and organizational complexities of adopting that proposal had left it foundering. Driving home from a meeting in San Antonio in late March, I started pondering a more incremental approach.

At first I tried to see what I could do quickly with Joomla!, without any prior Joomla! experience. Though I could imagine using Joomla! myself, and could understand how it appeals to web professionals, I couldn’t imagine a viable learning curve for the typical content provider without a significant investment in infrastructure and training. That investment made the expense of the foundering proposal seem an underestimate, if anything.

Then I thought back to Ryan’s question, my knee jerk reaction, and my subsequent learning. I started looking at WordPress as a general purpose content management system. Articles such as WordPress vs Joomla vs Drupal encouraged me in this direction.

I started prototyping WordPress-based sites on WordPress.com. The progress was rapid and exhilarating.

However, I started becoming aware of the restrictions at WordPress.com, especially the inability to use <FORM> tags. Since some of the existing sites made use of <FORM>, I started replicating the prototype sites with WordPress 2.9 on my own server.

Though the overall progress and improvement was undeniable, the differences between WordPress.com and separate hosting became apparent, especially in choice of themes and widgets. Themes that worked great at WordPress.com didn’t work at all with separate hosting. Themes that worked great with separate hosting weren’t available at WordPress.com. Widgets available at WordPress.com weren’t available, or didn’t work well, for separate hosting. Other desirable widgets aren’t available at WordPress.com.

Though the widget limitations were annoying, the theme limitations were more than annoying. And that is how I first became a fan of the new Twenty Ten theme. In late April, I think, Twenty Ten became available on WordPress.com. I gave it a try and liked it. Then I listened to some of Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” May 1:

It was evident that Twenty Ten would be emphasized in WordPress 3, available for both WordPress.com and separate hosting, so I started trying the nightly development builds of WordPress 3 on my server. Finally, we had a theme solution that works well in both environments, WordPress.com and separate hosting.

http://wordpress.org/development/2010/06/thelonious/ and the detailed documentation enumerate the many improvements in WordPress 3, and we’re benefiting from some of those, but Twenty Ten was enough to make us “press” forward.

I didn’t wait for WordPress 3 to be final. http://PETInternational.org/ has been live with nightly builds/release candidates for several weeks. Those versions have seemed good enough. But it is nice to now be using a version WordPress endorses more enthusiastically.

Besides http://PETInternational.org/, we have two affiliate sites live, and others in progress. One of the affiliate sites, based on Joomla!, now mimics our Twenty Ten look and feel! Another Joomla!-based site is contributing content to the WordPress environment.

I have been able to return a favor to Ryan. He’s learned from what we’ve done, switched to Twenty Ten, and made http://RainbowNetwork.org/ fully realized with WordPress, now with my encouragement instead of skepticism.

Back to the notion of “jus’ press”, WordPress has plenty of quirks and inconsistencies — it is far from perfect, but WordPress is better for many purposes than any alternative I see. Like Led watching Uncle Fred, jus’ press. That’s what I’ll be doing.

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.

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.

My skepticism dates back to first reading some of the patents in 2004 and the press releases Avistar produced regarding Microsoft’s requests for re-examination of some of the patents (see public display of dis-affection: Avistar patents & Microsoft and AVSR vs. MSFT: numbers of patents or patent numbers?).

In hindsight, it seems that Avistar chose to change course about the time that it brought Bob Kirk in as CEO last July. After that time, Avistar said little publicly about the patents, seemingly not saying anything about U.S. PTO actions or licensing progress. January 19, two days before the Intellectual Ventures transaction, Avistar sold a license to Skype for $3M.  If this had happened a couple of years ago, there would likely have been significant publicity. The only Avistar publicity about the Skype transaction appears to be the SEC 8-K filing.

In the January 26 press release, Bob Kirk is quoted as saying “This also removes what has been a significant distraction for the team and our operation in general, while providing us the capital to more aggressively invest in our business.”

It is difficult to say more without speculation. Avistar had announced licenses with many potential licensees, but, as far as I can tell, had not succeeded in negotiating licenses with Cisco, Hewlett-Packard or Microsoft — it is hard to imagine easy negotiations with those companies. I find it easier to imagine that those companies are some of the investors in Intellectual Ventures and receptive to this latest news. [Update February 26: Verizon Patent Case Marks a First for Intellectual Ventures lists both Cisco and Microsoft as Intellectual Ventures "members".]

Along with the promise have been ambiguity, questions and controversy. This is a brief recap while still waiting for some of the partners to make their moves.

For example, when Cisco announced plans to purchase Tandberg, the largest of the companies committed to ITU-T and SIP interoperability, would Cisco become part of the interoperable crowd, or would Tandberg become less interoperable? It seemed inevitable that interoperability would prevail, but until it happened, who could be sure? Then the real controversy emerged: enough Tandberg shareholders want a higher bid from Cisco that the deal may not happen. A November 9 deadline has been extended to November 18.

The long anticipated sale of Skype by eBay was announced in September in the midst of controversy over intellectual property, and prior announcements of Asterisk interoperability and SIP interoperability. Naysayers widely predicted the demise of Skype. Others, notably LifeSize, joined the dance. With Friday’s announcements resolving the ominous litigation, Skype’s forward momentum seems impressive. Skype hiring of SIP pioneer Jonathan Rosenberg bodes very well for future Skype interoperability.

Assuming Skype overcomes current lack of multi-point video calling, Skype should be able to win a few dance contests.