Pointed

I don’t say much about work here.  Kind of the point, separation of work and life. 

 

But I’m pretty proud of the work a couple of us are doing on "the other blog."  Kind of a round robbin thing as far as the writing goes – we all sign our work though.  The latest is mine. 

 

Family members beware, it’s kind of techie.

Podcast

Saturday I got some quality gaming time in with Doug and Shelly.  Afterwards we recorded episode 19 of Garrett’s Games and Geekiness.  Short episode where we discussed the games we had played, and local Science Fiction conventions.  You can read more and  listen to it here.

Test

Q test of remote blogging (with photo if things actually work!)

Japan

My friend Ash just started blogging his 6 week visit to Japan. You can read that here.

 

Q3.0

More coolness.

 

http://www.minixm.com lets me listen to XMRadio through the Q.  Not sure if that will work if you don’t have a subscription already.  According to QUsers there’s a similar capability for Sirius radio, but that involved a zip file full of stuff and I’m already overwhelmed by the number of ways I can run down my battery entertaining myself with the phone. 🙂

 

Finally figured out the volume control for the Slingbox Mobile app.  It uses the headset volume control, even through the built-in speakers.  Kinda makes sense once you know it… but not intuitive.  Guess written documentation would help there.

 

Still in the problem space… still trying to find a good solution to getting my Outlook notes sync’d. Windows Mobile 5.0 for Smartphones doesn’t include a note app (well, they do, but it’s for recording voice notes, like a pocket dictation machine.) 

Q

Bought a Motorola Q Smartphone this week.  I’d been writing a couple of messages daily to friends also interested in the phone, just letting them know my experiences and discoveries.  Today I realized that I was blogging it through mail and decided to just move the notes here. 
 
Here’s the mail so far…
 
Subject: Q – Day 1.0

OK, all set up now and off the charger since 7am.  I’m syncin’g mail every 10 minutes during prime time, every two hours off prime time. Backlight time out is 10 seconds.  Display time out is 15 seconds.   Used the Bluetooth headset on the way into the office and made three calls.  Demo’ed mobile slingplayer for a few minutes to an interested geekling.

 

Battery still shows four bars at 11:20am!  Going into the power management bar I see the more granular bar is just down a pixel or two.  It the drain monitoring is linear then power won’t be an issue.

 

Other observations:

– It’s a little hard to unlock.   Unlock key has to be numbers.  You have to hold down an “alt” key to enter numbers which makes it hard to unlock single handed.  This is just a design bug, as there are plenty of occasions where you can type numbers without holding that down – so I expect it will be fixed.

– Bluetooth pairing with my headset went great.  I think something in the mix is much better on this phone.  I always had to coax the connection to life with the 5600 – it worked, eventually.

 

Subject: Q – Day 1.1

 

4:00 PM update on Battery:

 

Still four bars on the home screen.  Still just a few pixels down on the detailed power setting bar.  Power does not seem to be a problem.  Haven’t made any calls today, but e-mail keeps syncing and I’ve been reading it a fair bit.

 

FYI – I’m using the standard battery.  The larger battery is still in the packaging at home. 

 

Subject: Q – Day 2.0

 

Interesting discoveries since yesterday.

 

About 5pm yesterday I started to wonder about the battery indicator, was it just not refreshing?  Seemed likely, so I power cycled the phone.  (So fun to say power cycle instead of turned off and on).  Sure enough, the indicator came up one bar down, and the power management graph showed about ¼ of the down.  Towards 7:30 last night I did it again and the power indicators were down to the ½ way point.  So that’s a bug, or some setting I haven’t discovered (“conserve power by not updating power indicator?")

 

Good news on the keylock problem.  Pressing the ALT key twice locks it in numeric mode, so I now can unlock the phone by pressing Unlock ALT ALT # # # # Unlock.  A vast improvement.

 

I’ve been playing with voice command today.  Works pretty well.  Most direct way to dial is to use voice recognition of the number. So you’d say something like "Call 650-693-1005" instead of "Call Microsoft Reception." There are fewer points to confirm.  However you can still say "Call Pizza Hut" and it will look up Pizza Hut in your contacts and ask you to confirm you want to dial that number.  Some other minor glitches there, but nothing worth writing up.  As with most voice command systems, ambient noise and your own voice will matter, so YMMV. 

 

Installed a 1GB mini SD card last night and moved some media onto it.  Quality of speakers is, again, beyond my expectations.  Bluetooth control panel has a setting for Bluetooth stereo headset.  Ah, more gadgets.

 

-Ric