More Thonghts on Helio

Having had the Helio Ocean for 3 months now I thought I would add some additional thoughts.

The all you can eat data is still gravy, and as long as I stay in the populated sections of the world the data is cash, stray off the beaten path say into a house and your cell calls might as well be placed in a tin can full of shit, and data rate plummets. On the bus along the freeway corridor YouTube moves data so fast, I almost never have to buffer in the middle of a video. That is great, and I really like being able to watch video at full speed; even if the quality is a little iffy.

I do have a gripe though. For some reason that I am sure makes sense to like three people in the world the data traffic is routed through Norway. Yeah, Norway. So when I load Myspace through a web browser I get the Norwegian language site. Yes there is a client for myspace on the Ocean, but because there are some things in messaging that cannot be done with the Myspace client like forward some things require you to use a web browser. I am not sure how is to blame for this though as there is a setting in my profile that says I want USA English and I even tried to change the display language in Myspace manually but in Opera Mini the site continued to load in Norwegian. I had a remedy, but it made life suck big time. I run a proxy on my website for such occasions as this and when my wife needs to check NCAA bracket stuff from work and those sites are blocked. The net effect of loading slow web pages like myspace through a mini browser on a mobile phone routed through Norway on a proxy that is hosted in England, and then get all the way back to me here is the bonny US of A is 20-90 second page loads.

So Helio do your customers a favor and stop routing through Norway. That is really fing stupid.

Wireless infrastructure isn't easy

I am not sure if this has any real relevance to the issues that Earthlink ran into trying to put up a city wide wireless network, but below is an account of my small scale implementation of blanket wifi that infrastructure building is not easy.

Last year the decision was made to put in a whole facility wireless network. Seeing as this was the most technology forward project this organization has undertaken probably ever, I was very excited about the prospects of getting to work on my first 100k+ project. Let me warn you now, 300,000 SqFt is way more that it seems to be when you are pulling the cable and installing access points. We determined to install approximately 33 Access Points(AP's) to cover 6 floors and thousands of Square feet of real estate. From the first ceiling tile I popped this project turned more and more suck. I found that no cable infrastructure existed, there where no raceways, cable trays or even J-hooks. In short I found a 20 year old building that had undergone 2 expansions, and had professional in house Telecom service providers that had failed to invest in future infrastructure. The original building had 1/4 inch conduit into each room, but no accommodation for the public spaces, everything run after the initial constructions (basically everything run)was laying on the ceiling tiles. My initial projection of 8-16k for running cable quickly looked started to feel like a sick joke. In the end I finished pulling the cable with the help of 2 different contractors for about 28k, not all the work was perfect but every cable that was pulled would meet code.

During the planning stage of the project we decided to go with the wireless offerings of Cisco Systems for the scalability and security that they offered us. With clients like a software maker from the Northwest you may have heard of and our facility being in a very public space it would appear a gaff to allow unfettered access to our private information to attendees.

The Cisco requires several components the AP's are Power over Ethernet, so either you buy PoE switches or you buy PoE injectors. The injectors make sense in limited applications but for wide distribution, especially if you have to buy switches to build out infrastructure the cost difference for a PoE switch vs the Clutter of dozens of Injectors is a simple decision to make for almost any Network Tech. The other requirements are a Wireless controller (1 controls up to 50 AP's) and a server based controller that gives very high level control of groups and individual AP's. The bulk of the cost was spent on switching infrastructure, so if you already have PoE switches in place the cost would have been significantly reduced.

The end of the ordeal, and the pay off for me is that I have the ability to walk the majority of the facility (front and back of house) and be in wireless coverage, and I have enough additional ap's to fill in holes as they come up. It took 31 Ap's and almost 20 switches to cover my facility, so scale that to an entire city and I can just imagine the work to get service to hundreds or thousands of Ap's. I only had to get 2 other parties to cooperate in a facility that I ultimately had right of way in, I fear the level of push back you would receive from the hundreds of Hot-spot operators that charge for the service, and municipal wifi supported by city government would amount to Government taking so the push back from concerned business owners I imagine would be high.

Thoughts on Helio

So my wife and I have mad the jump to Helio and both are loving the experience. I choose the Ocean for the full features and she chose the Fin because it is the only flip phone (and its blue). The features are absolutely awesome, data speeds are impressive and the capabilities make my iPhone owning friends a little jealous. We use them so much that many days we find the bottom of the battery, (neither of us has run the battery our, but both of us have gotten the low battery warning). In the first few days I owned the Ocean I streamed 80mb of YouTube video. The lagginess was not much worse than I experience on old P4's streaming YouTube, the picture fuzzes sometimes, but the audio rarely skipped.

Most of what I have to say I am sure is covered elsewhere and probably better written, but I just had to gush I love this phone.

I am looking to get started in the developers program, but they are kind of secretive about it, NDA and disclosure of the type of programs you are interested in developing. I was really surprised how closed off they are, but then I realized that Google, (the best damn internet/technology company ever) spoils me constantly with their openness credo.

Anyhow the whole point of this post was to point out the site Heliocity.net has several guides that made me significantly less annoyed with the Ocean and Fin that we own. One of the guides gave pretty good instructions on how to create ringtones from mp3's using free software, and get them on your phone. Part of the guide was windows xp I tried on vista business and no go). Do the mp3 to MMF conversion, you get so much longer ringtones and they actually work.

Another really nice site I found is https://www.peetre001.com/ (remember to type the s in https). Go with your Helio busted ass web browser if for nothing other than to download Opera 4 mini, it is such an improvement over Helio's browser. Not perfect, but better.

Bleeding Dollars - HD DVD

Normally I would leave this type of analysis to Tech Crunch, but I am sad for the quickness of the turn around on HD-DVD. EHomeUpgrade has a post on HD-DVD slashing the cost of their players. Now I have no real vested interest in either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, but I was pulling for HD-DVD solely because of my Sony Hate_tm. As a former Clie, Viao, and PowerShot owner, I love the style and function of many Sony products. They have been the Windows style Ying to Apples style Yang but, their proprietary formats and standards have largely driven me away from them. Mini-Disk, Memory Stick, UMD, Atrac3 I am sure there is more but I will leave it at that have soured my warm fuzzy feelings for Sony. Consumers marginally tolerate Microsoft for this type of B.S., however I think that Mac is proving that F with consumers for too long and you will find the people departing your product sphere at every opportunity.

What does any of this have to do with the Blu-Ray standard? Well HD-DVD was a pretty consumer friendly standard, it was an evolution of technology already in the trenches, and didn't mess with the customer much. First off the HD-DVD spec doesn't have Region Coding, which is a win for lovers of international content (or International viewers with a love for American content). The arbitrary splitting the world up into regions rather pisses me off as the internet has made pretty much anywhere my back yard. I read blogs from England, and Denmark, and some blogs with many posters around the world. Why shouldn't I be able to play my import Anime?¹

Blu-Ray does do region encoding, and slathers some other content protection on for good measure. I find BD+ particularly onerous, as we have seen how well we can trust Sony's software judgment, RootKit anyone how about another? Granted modifying your hardware is often done by Pirates, but modifying your hardware does not a Pirate make you. I bought it, I will break it as I please. In my home Sony doesn't tell me what to do, I tell Sony what to do; and no matter how much that irks people it does not forestall my rights. Make no mistake, BD+ is a shot across the bow buy the Blu-Ray Consortium; put simply they believe that their intellectual property rights trump my consumer and physical property rights.

So to wrap up, the Pile on of the recent Warner Bros. decision to drop HD-DVD and the rumors swirling (or just being copied verbatim from others?)of Paramount leaving in February make me sad. HD-DVD was something of an underdog, and the slashing of prices only makes the smell of blood in the water stronger, I would love to see the broader implications of money changing hands brought up as I have to believe that if IE and Windows Media Player are grounds for anti-trust, buying studios has to rank in there somewhere.


¹ _{Granted the good series are starting to get US distribution, but great Anime is still hard to get legally.}

CES threw up all over Google Reader

Okay, so CES happened and I still have over 1000 unread articles and way, way too much to respond information to digest and respond to.

Tidbits: Engadget had an article about the possibility of ISP level content filtering and suggested that the answer would be to switch to a different provider should this occur. I think that this has been trotted out enough times that it was answered sufficiently some time ago, but I will rehash for them:

Not every one has multiple options for internet service, especially highspeed internet access. In my case in the Pacific NorthWest I have several the Majors Qwest and Comcast, and several minors SpeakEasy (serviced by Covad), Satellite, (randomly Verizion claims that I am in their dsl coverage zone too), and finally Sprint, AT&T and Verizon Wireless data plans. That is for me very near Seattle. My Parents don't have that luxury.

In North Idaho, neither Cable nor Verizon's DSL is offered. Their remaining options are Cellular Data (Sprint and AT&T have pretty good coverage out there), Satellite, or dial-up. They are less than 2 miles away from Adelphia's main Campus on the Edge of Hayden, Rathdrum/Post Falls and Coeur d'Alene. Should they be conscientious objectors to the filtering of internet content what dear Engadget should they do? My point is the gatekeepers are few, and we are relatively powerless (individually) to do anything about it.

Alright that was more than a little half cocked

I think that I may have been out of line with my Fedex Fiasco post, going off half cocked was not the best solution and I am sorry for lashing out.

That being said, I do feel that the criticism was valid and maybe there should be some examination of what your competitors are doing right. This is the 3rd package this year that I have received via Fedex ground or Home Delivery, and every time there has been some trouble. Contrast that with 4 packages from UPS, and every one of those I had held at the facility for pickup.

Think about that for a second. I don't want you to drop off packages to my house, I have had packages and mail stolen from my home. As a result I am not comfortable with the "leave and pray strategy" of package and mail delivery. My incoming mail goes into a locking mailbox, and I send my mail from the Blue Mail drop off points, and UPS lets me have my packages held for pickup (DHL has as well). You are the only company that only holds for pickup after 3 failed delivery attempts.

That means you want a driver to get into a truck and drive from your facility in Redmond I believe, to my house 20 some miles away 3 times before you are willing to hold it for me to come get it. I along with most residents of Washington have a job that keeps me at work from the hours of 8am to 5pm. That means that I will not be home to sign for my package, nor will most people. Imagine that this is true for 50% of your intended recipients, that means that half the time your drivers have to leave packages unattended on doorsteps or try 3 times to get a signature. If 75% of the 50% are fine with you leaving the package on their doorstep that means that 12.5% would like to have the option to have the package held.

Am I wrong? I don't know your company manager have to be gathering metrics on this, and if they aren't well then I am amazed Fedex is still in business.

On a completely related note my Helio Ocean is here!

Fedex, always with the cheap....

In more ways than one, Fedex always brings the cheap. Cheap customer service, cheap drivers, cheap packaging. Awesome Fedex, I swear to as long as I live its UPS for me. Interception of packages is key to good delivery. You want to deliver to my house during the day, and I'm not home I should not have to wait for you to try 3 times and then have you hold it. If I cannot be home wouldn't it save you gas and money to not try 3 times? Wow, what is more highest cost fuel or holding a package?

Genius's at the top could use some help. UPS sees that gas is their biggest cost so they did something, well a couple of somethings about it. You (according to my dock master) failed to even show up today.

On a related note the Helio phone that my wife is drooling about, is not here. Somebody messed up and forgot to bring me my package, and then their customer service told me my only recourse if they don't deliver tomorrow is to wait because their drivers don't get in until after their pickup area closes unlike some other company I can think of.

In their defense it is a large convention center in WA so hard to miss I know, and they only manage to deliver stuff here about 4-600 other times a year so why make it this time. One of the bigger Fedex Kinkos operates there so the location might be a little fuzzy to their deliverys.