a review of the Sprint HTC Evo 4G – after 10 days of use…

By finndo On June 13, 2010 · Leave a Comment

I have been a proud owner of one of Sprint’s HTC Evo 4G cell phones now for an entire week and I have decided to share my thoughts and experiences with you.  I have always used sprint, since 1997 or 1998. To start I need to tell you a bit of [...]

I have been a proud owner of one of Sprint’s HTC Evo 4G cell phones now for an entire week and I have decided to share my thoughts and experiences with you.  I have always used sprint, since 1997 or 1998.
To start I need to tell you a bit of background, I purchased my first smart phone in 2000 (maybe real early 2001) it was a Qualcomm branded Palm phone, was in greyscale and was a touchscreen that did not require a stylus for input, and I was not impressed, but it was cool and no one had anything like it.  the front looked like a normal cell phone, like the classic Pokia (if I can find images I’ll add them to the post at the end), but the face flipped up to reveal the Palm 2.x OS interface.  I replaced that cell phone with the second generation model of that series which was what will now be the standard format of the smart phone, a large-ish screen with a D-pad, Talk and Hangup buttons, plus it had the classic Palm Home and Contacts buttons.  I used that phone for about 3 years and went back to it when other phones died or I broke them for another 2 years after that, and finally sold it for $65 5 years after I bought it!
After that I owned a Toshiba windows 2003 (first edition) smart phone and I liked it tremendously; however my friend had a Dell Axim x3 and it it killed my Toshiba on performance for everything it did, we had a lot of the same apps, having been friends for almost 10 years at that point and having lived together both in college and a bit after I graduated from college.  I was very envious of the power of his PDA and the extra features it had that I did not (like a phone! which I thought was because I had a hybrid device and they had to make comprimises on the hardware), the only thing I noticed as a negative for the Dell is that he had to manually reboot the phone between every 18 and 36 hours to keep it running well.  So, I decided that my next phone would be dumb and I would get a PDA and carry them both around all the time.
I purchased a Dell Axim x31 which was not the newest model, but the newest model (the x50) had just launched and was $200 more expensive.  I was very happy with my choice, so much so, that I sold my Axim on ebay as soon as the Dell x51v started to appear for sale on ebay, and I used the money to pick one of those up, even though by this time I had read all the reviews stating how the Axim’s underperformed compared to similarly spec’d models from other handset makers, but I did not care, as the Dell cost $200-$400 less than those other models and the perfomance was good enough for me.
I loved my Dell and it was very hard for me to let go of it, I used it constantly, everyday, but eventually it became very difficult to carry my Axim around, my cell phone, AND my work cell phone. So I gave in and bought an HTC touch, the processor was 1 generation of ARM newer than my dell, and as the dell was a 600MHz, the Touch was a 524MHz, I knew I would take a hit on the hardware as it was a hybrid device, and I was okay with that to save pocket space.  I was very disapointed with the tiny ass screen, I was very disapointed with the slow performance of the HTC Touch, even being a newer generation of processor, it was MUCH slower, had less system RAM, AND the Dell had WinMo 2k3SE and the Touch had WinMo 2k5.  the biggestdifference between the two was that they removed the slider that let the user adjust how much system memory was to be used for applications and how much was to be used for user storage, gthis was very bad for me (I understand now that it has more to do with the difference in the type of flash media in the device than with the OS). this was very bad for me, as I had a couple of applications that would only run if moved the slider all the way to Programs (I had an external SD card plugged into the device anyway, or maybe it was a miniSD, I forget) and now I could not do that and use my apps because of the amount of available system memory.
I kept my HTC Touch until the day the HTC Evo came out and was moderately happy with it, except for the microscopic screen size and the lack of wi-fi.  right, now that you are all caught up with my past cell phone experiences it’s time to move on to the Evo…
I first heard about the “mysterious” HTC code named:Dragon from engadget back in October 2009, the first smart phone announced to have a 1GHz CPU! unbelieveable!! I was extremely excited, and I though wow I bet it will be out for the holiday sales season, and nothing happend, then I though well maybe in January, still nothing, but a mysterious direct message on twitter replying to my post to HTC to please tell me where and when I could get my hands on one (something I did atleast 2 times most weeks since November), the DM told me “you will, wait until January 24th”.  so I got super excited and told everyone I knew that would care, and several that I knew would not!  Somewhere in there the HTC 2010 roadmap was leaked and the first one was all non-USA, but one device looked to be the Dragon, but it was only rumor.  I waited and waited, and finally the day came!! There was nothing. no tweets, no news releases, nothing on engadget, nothing on the forums, it was like all the hope in my life shrivelled up and died.  Then I thought maybe I was looking in th ewrong places and the news would spread in a day or so and hit the sites I trolled… nothing.  I believe it was around Feb 10th when something finally broke, a report that the fabled dragon was coming to Verizon and would be called “incredible” most of the specs remained the same, but it would not be available until after the HTC HD2 launched with WinMo and the 1GHz snapDragon, so the Dragon would no longer be the first 1GHz smart phone, but at least it would be the first 1GHz Android Phone… finally on March 24th HTC announced to the world that the HTC Evo 4G was coming to Sprint and was almost identical to the Incredible in specifications, code name “Supersonic”.  I was so happy, finally something would be right in the world!  The more I heard about it the happier I got, even the failed Flash Demo was not enough to deter me!
by the time you finish reading this, I should have posted the next part of this post (I wrote it all at the same time, but broke it up so they would not be quite so long)…

I have been a proud owner of one of Sprint‘s HTC Evo 4G cell phones now for about 10 days and I have decided to share my thoughts and experiences with you.  I have always used Sprint, since 1997 or 1998.

To start I need to tell you a bit of background, I purchased my first smartphone in 2000 (maybe real early 2001) it was a Kyocera QCP6035 Palm phone, was in greyscale and was a touchscreen that required a stylus for input in a small box at the bottom and you had to write in palm script, and I was not impressed, but it was cool and no one had anything like it.  the front looked like a normal cell phone, like the classic Nokia (if I can find images I’ll add them to the post at the end), but the face flipped up to reveal the Palm 2.x OS interface.  This phone was broken, while I was talking on it and walking my dog (the phone was pressed between my shoulder and ear, the dog pulled hard, the phone flew out and hit the concrete destroying the screen).  I replaced that cell phone with the Samsung SPH-I300 that was what would become the standard format of the smart phone, a large-ish screen with a D-pad, Talk and Hangup buttons, plus it had the classic Palm Home and Contacts buttons (the website I found the information on these two phones has them listed in order of discontinued date and states the the Kyocera was in use for about a year longer, I replaced the Kyocera with the Samsung, and that the Samsung had only been available for a week when I bought it).  I used that phone for about 3 years and went back to it when other phones died or I broke them for another 2 years after that, and finally sold it for $65 almost 5 years after I bought it!  I loved that phone, it came with 2 batteries, and I had adobe acrobat reader on it, that I used to read books, the battery would last 8 – 10 hours of constant use about 90% of the time, it came with a dock that charged the phone and the spare simultaneously.

After that I owned a Toshiba windows 2003 (first edition) smart phone and I liked it tremendously; however my friend had a Dell Axim x3 and it it killed my Toshiba on performance for everything it did, we had a lot of the same apps, having been friends for almost 10 years at that point and having lived together both in college and a bit after I graduated from college.  I was very envious of the power of his PDA and the extra features it had that I did not (like a phone! which I thought was because I had a hybrid device and they had to make comprimises on the hardware), the only thing I noticed as a negative for the Dell is that he had to manually reboot the phone between every 18 and 36 hours to keep it running well.  So, I decided that my next phone would be dumb and I would get a PDA and carry them both around all the time.

I purchased a Dell Axim x31 which was not the newest model, but the newest model (the x50) had just launched and was $200 more expensive.  I was very happy with my choice, so much so, that I sold my Axim on ebay as soon as the Dell x51v started to appear for sale on ebay, and I used the money to pick one of those up, even though by this time I had read all the reviews stating how the Axim’s underperformed compared to similarly spec’d models from other handset makers, but I did not care, as the Dell cost $200-$400 less than those other models and the perfomance was good enough for me.

I loved my Dell and it was very hard for me to let go of it, I used it constantly, everyday, but eventually it became very difficult to carry my Axim around, my cell phone, AND my work cell phone. So I gave in and bought an HTC touch, the processor was 1 generation of ARM newer than my Dell, and as the Dell was a 624MHz, the Touch was a 400MHz, I knew I would take a hit on the hardware as it was a hybrid device, and I was okay with that to save pocket space.  I was very disapointed with the tiny ass screen, I was very disapointed with the slow performance of the HTC Touch, even being a newer generation of processor, it was MUCH slower, had less system RAM, AND the Dell had WinMo 2k3SE which I upgraded to WinMo 2k5 and the Touch had WinMo 6.  the biggestdifference between the two was that they removed the slider that let the user adjust how much system memory was to be used for applications and how much was to be used for user storage, gthis was very bad for me (I understand now that it has more to do with the difference in the type of flash media in the device than with the OS). this was very bad for me, as I had a couple of applications that would only run if moved the slider all the way to Programs (I had an external SD card plugged into the device anyway, or maybe it was a miniSD, I forget) and now I could not do that and use my apps because of the amount of available system memory.

I kept my HTC Touch until the day the HTC Evo came out and was moderately happy with it, except for the microscopic screen size and the lack of wi-fi.  right, now that you are all caught up with my past cell phone experiences it’s time to move on to the Evo…

I first heard about the “mysterious” HTC code named:Dragon from Engadget back in October 2009, the first smart phone announced to have a 1GHz CPU! unbelieveable!! I was extremely excited, and I though wow I bet it will be out for the holiday sales season, and nothing happend, then I though well maybe in January, still nothing, but a mysterious direct message on twitter replying to my post to HTC to please tell me where and when I could get my hands on one (something I did atleast 2 times most weeks since November), the DM told me “you will, wait until January 24th”.  so I got super excited and told everyone I knew that would care, and several that I knew would not!  Somewhere in there the HTC 2010 roadmap was leaked and the first one was all non-USA, but one device looked to be the Dragon, but it was only rumor.  I waited and waited, and finally the day came!! There was nothing. no tweets, no news releases, nothing on engadget, nothing on the forums, it was like all the hope in my life shrivelled up and died.  Then I thought maybe I was looking in th ewrong places and the news would spread in a day or so and hit the sites I trolled… nothing.  I believe it was around Feb 10th when something finally broke, a report that the fabled dragon was coming to Verizon and would be called “Incredible” most of the specs remained the same, but it would not be available until after the HTC HD2 launched with WinMo and the 1GHz snapDragon, so the Dragon would no longer be the first 1GHz smart phone, but at least it would be the first 1GHz Android Phone… finally on March 23rd HTC announced to the world that the HTC Evo 4G was coming to Sprint and was almost identical to the Incredible in specifications, code name “Supersonic”.  I was so happy, finally something would be right in the world!  The more I heard about it the happier I got, even the failed Flash Demo was not enough to deter me!

this post was published using the Easy Tether application on Android via my HTC Evo 4G, over a 3G network with spotty coverage.  (I learned yesterday my cell coverage is poor where I am currently, because the there is no cell tower, the “antennas” are attached to a water tower, and therefore are not at the height that a normal cell tower would be, and as such is more easily blocked by building.  just a note, there are NO cell towers in this immediate area, I believe all carriers have antennas mounted on the same water tower, I’ll try and get a picture of it later and add it to this post.)

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FreeBSD and Fedora 12

By finndo On April 22, 2010 · 1 Comment

just want to get this started as I hope it will motivate me to finish it, since I have done a LOT of things on my computer since my last post, and obviously I have posted none of it.

So, I got a little impatient about not having my PC functioning, [...]

just want to get this started as I hope it will motivate me to finish it, since I have done a LOT of things on my computer since my last post, and obviously I have posted none of it.

So, I got a little impatient about not having my PC functioning, so I I installed Fedora 12 x64 on the rest of my FreeBSD boot drive and I have about 80% of the things on my list done and working.  I’ll reference them by numbers here, and you can go read what they were by clicking on “my list” above.  I am still hoping to get FreeBSD as my host OS; however everything is working right now with Fedora (except that stupid wireless NIC), although I am still having my “system reached critical temp” error from ACPI, yet the system resource monitor I have running shows a nice pleasant 30C CONSTANT temp.  maybe this summer I’ll pickup a liquid CPU cooler… I already have 5 exhaust fans and 2 intake fans, 2 x 240mm exhaust and a 160mm or 180mm intake, I think I have air flow covered.  (talked to a friend who is more into the details of technical issues, a network engineer, and he says that an inactive CPU, like when the system shutsdown, can drop 40F in about 7-10 seconds so it might be why I cannot catch it reporting a high temp in the BIOS) The BIOS does not report any temps reaching above 45C ever, so I have no idea why this is happening, I do run widgets reporting the internal temp, but have never seen it change!!!) .  most of the time when it shuts there is/has been high CPU/disk IO usage (all 4 cores over 60% sustained, multiple long term large/multiple file movements across drives and/or multiple VMs running).  So it could be valid.

I have come up with a couple of things to try to resolve this issue (going with the cheapest first, even if it is not really going to help a CPU issue, it can’t hurt…)

  1. I could just upgrade some hardware and see if a different BIOS/MB manufacturer makes a difference.  I would love a lower watt CPU (or 6 core!), more L2/L3 cache, and USB 3.0 and SATA 6GB/s, since my current system bottleneck is the SATA 3GB/s HDDs.
  2. Switch to liquid cooling and installing a new thermal sensor with an external readout.
  3. buy cute little 5cfm coolling fans to place on my NorthBridge, SouthBridge, and onboard GPU passive cooling fins (cheapest option, not necessarily attacking the actual issue though)
  4. purchase a pretty new Video card and disable the onboard video (the chip is within an inch or two from the CPU, so there maybe some issue with residual heat from the GPU causing my overheating).

in order from cheapest to most expensive would be 3, 2, 4/1 (really close and might be a tie or within a $20-$30)

My List of things to get working, except this one is for Fedora.

1. VirtualBox is installed, working and I have multiple VMs up and running.

2. Install VMWare Workstation, I have downloaded the newest trial version and it is good for another 3 weeks, but have not gotten around to installing it.

3. Mounting my NTFS drives, all mounted, where I want them, even went through and deleted the Windows OS system folders from all but one.

4. SSH connections, I have started this and was working on it when I decided to start this post, should be done tomorrow.

5. I am posting this from Google Chrome on my Fedora 12 installation right now, so I’d say installed and working.  Java shows up in the plugins, although java.com cannot detect it in my browser.

6. Hulu works great in Firefox or Google Chrome, although is a bit spotty when I have VMs running, and the playback is laggy in Chrome…  So I am trying to get the Hulu Desktop app running.  will make a post after I get some work done on it and let you know how it goes.

7. So far everything is working great, going to try a couple of VM’ed games next week after I get the rest of this done.

8. Firefox is up, running, and is playing hulu; however it does not report Java as installed from the about:plugins page, even though it is and I followed all the steps to link the correct files to the correct places.  I believe this is the Firefox 3.6 doesn’t support Java issue though and not an issue on my part.

9. access NTFS drives remotely via ssh and a chrooted account with links to the mounts.  After I get my SSH working tomorrow I should be able to test this.  I was reading something online I no longer have open and may not have bookmarked that said that I can double mount drives (mount a drive to more than one, specifically 2, locations)

10. convert my NTFS drives to a more suitable linux FS, this again is a last thing item, to be done after everything else is working.

11. convert my drives from MBR to GPT, most likely to be done at the same time as the FS change.

12. GUI package manager for KDE, done, comes with Fedora.

13. eliminate all traces of Gnome from my computer… again, have to be last thing, once all is up and working.

14. build my first kernel, normally done immediately after install, I’ll do it last after EVERYTHING else (including the other things I said I would do last)

15. Wine is installed and works.  will try out some things that I have installed in VMs to see about dropping those VMs

16. install older apps, again part of a couple of other items, I will of course be installing older apps on older OS installation I have, and will try them in Wine as stated.

17. X.org port forwarding to Cygwin on a windows machine (laptop) something I might do in a week or two…

18. start regular backups… I’m getting there, I have the drive formated in ext3, I just have not started backing things up.

19. Java, I think it works in Chrome, I was able to see the animated maps on the NOAA website, which most people use to test their Java. not working in Firefox 3.5.9.2

20. Flash, Hulu is working in Firefox and Chrome, so all good here.

21. Yakuake is fully functional and working.

22. Picasa 3.6 (I think) is installed and working great, except I don’t seem to be able to find the facial recognician system.

23. No idea on this one, can not find where I posted what it was, only that it was completed on BSD.

Unfinished items for Fedora: 2, 4, 9, 10, 11, 19?

apparently Open Office will not load, for an unknown reason, looking into it at this time.

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FreeBSD the next step – update 2

By finndo On April 5, 2010 · Leave a Comment

this may get a bit repetitive with me re-listing everything, so instead I am just going to link to the first post that has the list of things to do… note I have added a couple of things at the bottom so the [...]

this may get a bit repetitive with me re-listing everything, so instead I am just going to link to the first post that has the list of things to do… note I have added a couple of things at the bottom so the numbers now go past 20…

 

1. 75% in progress, troubleshooting and more testing needed.  I have gotten my user added the the “VirtualBox” user group, but I get this error when I try to execute VirtualBox from the command line ”VirtualBox: supR3HardenedExecDir: couldn’t read “”, errno=2 cchLink=-1“  I tried loading VirtualBox from KDE and it was loading for about 12 seconds then nothing happend, also it did not install a manual page.  I’ll have to do some forum surfing to figure this one out.  this exact error is referrenced in the FreeBSD handbook noting that it should only occur if you are using an older version on VirtualBox.

2. 0% not started.  no updates yet, holding off till I get some of these other tasks complete.

3. 100% complete.  everything is automounting at bootup and it is doing it where I want it to.

4. 100% complete.  I am working almost exclusively via ssh now and can connect to it remotely as tested via an Android cell phone ssh client (props to connectbot)

5. 10% in progress, researched only.  Chrome can be installed as a Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE, or Fedora package, I just need to set my system up to handle RPMs and I might be able to get it to install, hopefully the newest version will work easier than last august when everyone was trying to hack the install to make it work, especially since every forum I went to never had a successful complete port available and there were no posts from 2010 and the maintainer of the hacked port is not doing updates anymore except those that match his specific system configuration.

6. duplicate issue.  going to delete this one, as #19 and #20 pretty much sum it up.

7. 30% in progress, trouble shooting and additional testing required.  as noteded else where VirtualBox is installed but not able to run, and I have not started on VMWare.

8. 100% complete.  Firefox 3.6.2 is installed and operational.

9. 90% in progress, trouble shooting and more testing needed.  self testing shows that a user is able to ssh in and access the drives, but is not able to ftp in and access the drives.  I used “sudo ln -s /mnt/<directory> /home/<user>/<directory>” I haven’t used links much and need to see if the -s (symbolic) is what is preventing the user from accessing the data via ftp.

10. 0% not started.  no updates yet, holding off till I get some of these other tasks complete.

11. 20% in progress, 1 out of 5 drives is currently running with GPT.  the new 1.5TB drive was setup with GPT when installed into the system.  the new 500GB drive (FreeBSD boot drive) is still MBR as the FreeBSD fdisk application did not have an option for setting the drive boot record to GPT, although I have found documentation on converting the FreeBSD boot drive to GPT.

12. 0% in progress, initial research turned up nothing useful.

13. -30% not started, situation worsening, additional packages labeled as “gnome-xxxx” or “xxxxx-gnome” have been added as dependencies during other package installations. 

14. 10% in progress, initial research has turned up useful information; however I am not currently in a possition to proceed.

15. 0% not started.  no updates yet, holding off till I get some of these other tasks complete.

16. 0% not started.  no updates yet, holding off till I get some of these other tasks complete, will require at least one of #’s 1, 2, 7, or 15 to be complete before work can begin.

17. 0% not started.  no updates yet, holding off till I get some of these other tasks complete, not a priority and very near the bottom of the list of things to do.

18. 40% in progress.  Still leaning towards rsync, but I have been researching into using dump and I think it will do what I want it to.

19. 60% in progress, I thought I had it installed, but when I went to the test if you have java installed page of www.java.com it failed to test my java installation (might need to add the plugin for firefox, will check); however the java download page only lists “Windows, Mac OS, and Linux” as OS choices, so I will have to do more research.

********update – I am making a java install page because this was such a pain in the rump to do.***********

20. 40% in progress, I thought I had it installed, but when I went to hulu it told me I need java 10.0.22, also amd.com told me I need the flash plugin installed; however again there is no FreeBSD listing on the download page as a supported OS, so I will have to do more research.

21. 100% complete.  (I know I added this one) get Yakuake working in KDE, well I did a “sudo pkg_add -r yakuake” and it started downloading, it has about 6 dependencies and those had about 150 dependencies, most of which I already had installed.  the problem I saw was it force downloaded KDE 3.5 and all of it’s dependencies, I hope that doesn’t screw anything up.  If I remember correctly from when KDE 4.0 first came out they specifically named the port KDE4 instead of just KDE so that there would not be conflicts on systems that had both versions installed.  after it finished I ran a “sudo pkgdb -F” it found a lot of stale dependencies and fixed them, one thing I noticed fly by was Firefox 3.0.## which tells me I need to check my Firefox and see if it is 3.0 or 3.6…

22. 10% researched only.  Get Picasa installed and working, this will be just like chrome and will require using RPM packages.

23. 100% complete.  as part of #5 and #22 (and because I always install this on FreeBSD, but it failed during initial OS installation for some reason) I am installing the linux compatibility/emulation pack.  I’ll do a brief post on this and link it here.

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