Palm Pre battery life log

I'LL BE UPDATING THIS AS DAYS GO BY--SUNDAY IS THE FIRST DAY

For this test turned off Wifi, GPS, and bluetooth, put the screen brightness to maybe 20%, and my gmail account is set to check for new mail every 5 minutes

1 pm -- unplugged Pre at 100% batter level

Sent an email and a couple sms txts.

2 pm -- 96%

Used Pandora app for 20 minutes with 4 bars of volume
(battery status: 91%)

3pm -- 89%

Checked my email and sent a txt
Drove to grab a burger and came home

4:10pm -- 86%

Light email and txt messaging. Just watching The Wire: season 5 on my PC computer.

Watched a couple youtube videos with 7 volume bars
total time maybe (4:12 - 4:28pm) 16 minutes -- battery level at 73%

Attempting to transfer movie file via bluetooth to Pre-- total size 352 MB
Pre says it won't connect (My Treo 700wx connects easily to my Lenovo X61t notebook)
The phone displays a message says 'searching for audio devices -- no devices found.'
I also tried connecting from the X61t side, and it says
"The pairing attept resulted in an unknown error. The reported error code is 0x80070057
*Contact your device manufacturer..."
Lame... I turned bluetooth off again.
4:36pm -- batter is at 71%

5:00pm -- 68%
Did moderate txting just before 5

5:40pm --65%
same

7pm
Friend plays with my phone--surfing web, checking email, etc
48%

8pm
Light use
42%


9pm
Light web surfing over WiFi
28%

10:23pm
20%
Very light use


11:05
17%
Very light use

12:33pm
10%
wifi Pocketmirror sync for a couple minutes
evernote reading for a couple minutes

7pm
Friend plays with my phone--surfing web, checking email, etc
48%

8pm
Light use
42%


9pm
Light web surfing
28%

1023pm
20%
Very light use


1105
17%
Very light use


Monday 6/15/2009

8am--100%

1:15am--37%
After using gps just maybe 10 mins and light mssg, email and web browsing


Tues 6/16/2009

8am--100%

1:16pm--80%
Turned autolocate on

9:11pm--57%
Very light use

11:47pm--40%
same

I graphed my battery life against hours of time used:


You can see that on day 1 the battery was losing 8.6 % per hour, but on day 3 the battery loss had improved to 3.5 % per hour. What did I change? Well I logged myself out of gchat, gps is off, and I changed gmail to push instead of check every 5 minutes.

Fantasy Football Results 2009: Graphs

Click on them for bigger versions

Wall-E Movie Review: 7.5/10

Bottom-line: This is a guilty-pleasure film.

First of all, the movie beats you over the head with the fantastical, pillowy idea that infatuation leads to happiness. Simultaneously, it skillfully teases around the idea that unchecked, corporate irresponsibility will run Earth down into ecological catastrophe. Next it tickles your ribs aggressively with a bunch of obese, devolved humans and cutesy, servant robots. After this sneaky abuse, you probably won't notice the light bruising all over your entire body. Why won't you notice? Because everyone wants to laugh at ridiculous looking humans and adorable, pantomiming robots; and we also want to believe that we will find mutual infatuation with those that tickle our fancy most. The movie is an opium for the hopeless romantic inside each of us.

So, if you want a dark, gritty film... this isn't it. But if you're looking for a painkiller, this is genuine, pure crystal-meth. Nobody will call you a junkie--just don't blame me if you end-up in rehab.

Dark Knight Movie Review : 7/10

Let's do the math: how did I add up to 7 points? I'm giving the movie 5 points for Heath Ledger's acting, by itself. I'll give 1 point each for Bale, Gyllenhaal, Oldman, and 2 for Caine (= 5 +1+1+1+2=10). Minus one point for the script going back to "comic-booky" after the significant departure therefrom in the first movie (10-1=9). Where did the Joker get all his power? I found it difficult to believe that he could maintain power and his apparent influence and and still lack of vulnerability.

And why did they use CG on Two Face? It was simply distracting: minus one point for that (=8). And I didn't like the lines for Eckhart's Harvey Dent: minus one (=7).

Otherwise the movie had a good amount of darkness and intensity, which I enjoyed. But it also seemed both a bit repetitive (violence against look-a-like Batman's and Joker giving speeches) and was kind of hard to follow (like when Batman was using his cell-phone-sonar vision). That vision gimmick seemed like a pointless reach, too, but I won't subtract anymore for that.

what I don't understand about smartphone design

I have the best PDA phone I've ever had, Sprint's Treo 700wx. I like it because it has decent one-hand navigation and the rest of the PDA options. I think this is what most people want from their phone's interface, and so give Palm a pat on the back for giving us most of what we want. It's not perfect though, and even took some small steps back from older designs. But let's talk about steps forward... the design that PDA phones should have adopted months or even years ago.

I think about the market for text/data entry on a smartphone, and it is most efficient right now with two hands and a QWERTY. But designers jam the keyboards two inches long onto the bottom of a candy-bar smartphone. Who wants their thumbs jammed into such a little space for longer than a few seconds? You'll notice that console game controllers have gotten wider and wider; probably because we have more than 2'' of body between our shoulders. I tried to find a picture online using the Google image search of someone using the Treo 700wx keyboard with two hands, but photographers probably know how awkward it looks, and marketing wouldn't work in such awkwardness. I only could find images of people holding the phone with one hand (as seen far above).

I did find this awkward picture of a two-handed "thumbboardist" going-at-it on an old, dinosaur Palm device (Vx?). And this QWERTY pictured might actually be slightly larger than the Treo's. I'm getting tendinitis and other non-ergo syndromes just looking at that image. Ouch!

The other keyboards on smartphones have been slide-out keyboards that then auto-rotate the display to landscape mode. The major problem with slide-outs is that the phones are thicker, and the transition to landscape gets slower and slower as the phone gets older and older. Plus the moving part is going to break more easily, right?

So why am I complaining? I'm only complaining because there is a better way (Maybe you're thinking voice recognition, BUT that doesn't work well when you're in a quiet place: meeting, bathroom, public transit, etc.) What would be great for all the time?

Here is the design that smartphones should have had a long time ago. They should space the keyboards out with keys on either side of the screen, a la GameGear or the Samsung Q1. I made a quick picture with Photoshop of what this would look like below. I used the Treo 800w as my reference and edit-source. See the UGLY, but temporarily effective mock-up below.
Look at this bad boy! Directional pads on either side. Space for my hands to grab and move! I feel like I can breathe! This is a side-by-side to compare size to the original Treo 800w.

I made just a few changes to buttons, and I made the screen a bit wider. Basically, though, I just split the QWERTY on either side of the screen. The keyboard lay-out could be optimized, obviously. For example, the keyboard would probably look and function better as a FROWNY-face shape ;-(, instead of the SMILEY-face shape it was on the old Treos :-) . There is a lot of wasted space and awful trim, etc, but the phone communicates my idea well-enough. Also the number-keys should be on the right side of the keyboard instead of the left; this would help with one-hand operation.

Here's a "frowny" version I made with the liquify option:

Let me know what you think. I've gotten carried away, and here's the unannounced Treo Pro with the horizontal set-up. I will nickname it the Treo Lat or maybe I should jump on the starbuck's wagon and call it the Treo Latte. Imagine what you could do with the dual directional pads!

finish eating your lunch first...

Just when you thought that Michael Jackson or some other person was sick, the international news shocks the world with a truly sick piece of news.

Humanitarian aid workers and United Nation peacekeepers are sexually abusing small children in several war-ravaged and food-poor countries, a leading European charity has said.

What? What? What? What?



....

What?

Children as young as 6 have been forced to have sex with aid workers and peacekeepers in return for food and money

There is nothing left to say.

Who's gonna rock the NBA party?

ESPN has an article in which the writer says the Detroit Pistons and the San Antonio Spurs are the teams which any "true" b-ball fan should cheer for going to the NBA finals this year. The article says to quit whining about the Spurs playing a boring game (i.e., Duncan's bank-shot), and to appreciate the Pistons' working as a team. The writer also makes it sound like SA and DET work harder than the other playoff contenders (Celtics and Lakers). How does the writer back-up the argument? With lots of assumptions, not including statistics. When it comes to quantifying boring, that's hard to do, but most people I know think Duncan is boring. We could grab stats to compare true team-basketball and hard-work: assists, steals, and blocks. (I'm looking at averages per team per game during the regular season.)

I'll rank assists first:
LAL 23.1
BOS 21.9
DET 20.4
SAS 20.0

Interesting, most people would say LAL is the most selfish team with Kobe being a ball-hog... hmm...

Now for steals:
LAL 7.6
BOS 7.6
DET 7.4
SAS 5.2

OK, so this is making the Spurs look bad, and the Lakers great.

Before I comment further, let's look at blocks.

LAL 6.9
DET 5.5
BOS 4.7
SAS 4.5

OK, maybe I'm not being fair because SAS and DET were lazier during the regular season, but LAL rocked the house. So if you think blocks, steals, and assists make an exciting game, then you are more likely to enjoy watching the Lakers or Boston. I'm not anti-Piston, but I do think the Spurs are booooring. I liked the Pistons better when Ben Wallace was at his prime.

***
update 5/27/2008

After talking to my roommate's dad, he suggested that a good measure of hard-working, team-play would be the shooting percentage of the opposing teams. Let's rank that stat:

BOS 41.9
LAL 43.2
DET 44.2
SAS 45.6

So once again we see that the Celtics and Lakers have had a better regular season. Why wouldn't we want those two teams in the finals? Hopefully we will.