Samsung Transform - Sub-par hardware in a pretty package.

Just finished reading the review on Engadget of the Samsung Transform, a "mid-end" Android phone launching on Sprint that shares a lot of similarities with my Epic 4G on the surface. But as the review notes, hardware performance is pretty terrible. And that's not surprising since the Samsung S3C6410 inside is an ARM11 chip that was released in 2008.

That's some pretty tired hardware chugging underneath the surface of the Transform, almost comparable to the hardware in the Droid Eris. The problem is, the hardware in the Eris was called old when it launched nearly a year ago. We shouldn't be seeing ARM11 chips anymore. We're almost 2 generations ahead of that tech. 

Keep in mind that Cortex-A8 chips are way faster MHz for MHz than the ARM11 chips. The 667 MHz processor in the Transform accomplishes the same amount of instructions per second as a Cortex-A8 running at 417 MHz. On top of that, Cortex-A8's ARMv7 architecture accomplishes more with less instructions than the Transform's ARMv6. 

In short, the 550 MHz Cortex-A8 processor in the original Droid (which launched almost a year ago) kicks the pants off this chip. And that's not even going into graphics processing power, where the Mali-200 GPU in the Transform doesn't fare any better.

Releasing phones like this is not healthy for Android, which is moving in a direction that requires phones with better hardware, not stuff that's nearly 3 years old. The new JIT compiler in FroYo (Android 2.2) will allow this chip to perform at least reasonably well by boosting average CPU performance over 4 times. This seems to be the only possible justification that Sprint might have used to launch this phone. Unfortunately, they've made one major oversight; it won't help the miserable performance of the GPU.

Here's hoping this isn't a trend. Improvements to Android's compiler should not be used as an excuse to launching obsolete hardware.

Red handed...

So I caught the guy who had been breaking into cars in my driveway, again and again back in April. No, it wasn't with the home surveillance system I set up (and still have yet to write up a How To on). My webcam did not have a separate IR filter like most do, and I'd been unsuccessful in getting it to be able to see anything in the dark, when the guy had been sneaking into the driveway. No, I've just been keeping my car locked and telling myself that I'll get around to getting up a night-vision camera set up.

I'll start at the beginning. Sunday, Lynn and I took our daughter out on the Wayne County Apple-tasting tour. Wayne County is kind of like the "rural farmland" in Monroe County's backyard, but has a lot of fruit orchards and wine vineyards due to the proximity of Lake Ontario, which provides a lot of moisture. It was a long but exciting day as we trekked across the county to visit various farm markets and vineyards (though we had to avoid more than a few sips of wine). We arrived home and collapsed in the house. An hour or so passed before Lynn realized she'd left her new Blackberry in the car, so I went out the back door to get it. That's when I met our thief. Read past the break for the full story.

An Epic upgrade...

As you may have guessed, I've gone and gotten an Epic 4G from Sprint, which I'm currently taking for a trial run.

Sprint's network has definitely proven to be a bit more spotty than Verizon's, but not unbearably so. I've been spoiled on Verizon. 4G coverage is actually reasonably good, even if the speeds still don't compare to the WiFi connection I have when at home.

I've had the phone for almost 3 weeks now (yeah... sorry for not mentioning anything earlier, life has been busy), so I'm coming up on the end of my trial run. I think I'll be sticking with Sprint, though the network may prove to test my patience.

I'm not going to rattle on too long about the phone, there's dozens of reviews on the web that'll tell you about the Epic 4G. All I can say is that it definitely meets my expectations and is an excellent piece of hardware. It is not, however without its faults, as Samsung's build quality issues do show through. In the first couple of days I got the phone, sometimes the capacitive Menu button would spontaneously and repeatedly act as if it had been touched, even if I wasn't touching it. Other times it would not respond at all. I found that the device was running a pre-production ROM, and had to manually update it. Once I did, I immediately got an OTA update and the problem disappeared. Perhaps Sprint should take the blame for that one. There are also a few very thin gaps (fractions of a millimeter) between the glass on the front and the bezel, which already are gathering small amounts of dust.

But the complaints are few when compared to the great things I have to say about this device. The screen is amazingly bright, colorful, and responsive. Tilt and acceleration sensors are very accurate. Battery life is good, all things considered. I've had no issues with the GPS since the updates have come through. Front camera works right in the main camera app (Self-Portrait option) and the slide-out keyboard has a nice spring open, feels solid, and the keys themselves are well spaced and have excellent response and travel.

The phone is zippy, but does hit an occasional snag. I'm hoping Froyo works this out of the system with the new JIT compiler, though the problem ultimately likely lies with the I/O bug that plagues the Galaxy S line. I know that the XDA developers have produced a fix for the Captivate, hopefully we'll see one soon for the Epic.

As for Samsung's UI, I've played around with a couple custom home launchers and themes but I keep finding myself coming back to TouchWiz. It might not be pretty, but it does get the job done. Perhaps I'll get rid of it when I get around to rooting my phone, but I've got my 7 homescreens already organized at this point and I'm perfectly fine with the way it looks.

I'll leave things at that for the time being. I'll have further things to write about regarding the phone and Android in general in the coming week, so stay tuned... I'll try to do a better job of keeping my blog up to date, I promise!

Hard drive failure...

So Lynn's Sony VAIO laptop started failing S.M.A.R.T last week. I put in a rush order for a replacement drive on Newegg on Wednesday after spending a day or two backing up data from her laptop to mine and waiting on a response from Toshiba about whether they're able to replace the drive under their warranty or if I have to go through Sony.

After I got no response, I decided to just replace the drive myself. I really don't want to ship the laptop off to Sony and wait weeks for it to get sent back. My girlfriend in particular isn't too thrilled with that idea.

So Friday the new drive (a 320 GB Seagate Momentus) arrived. Yesterday morning, I attempted to clone the data on the Toshiba drive (250 GB btw) to the Seagate drive. Clonezilla refused to do this, stating that the drive was flagged for disk checking. Unfortunately, ChkDsk freezes when attempting to repair the drive. I tried cloning with Ghost, and while it allowed me to run the clone process, it froze not long after reporting the detection of a few bad sectors. Last night I fired up HDD Regenerator and began recovering the bad sectors. Frankly, I should probably have done it earlier; but this stuff ain't easy when you've got a 2-year-old running around.

So HDD Regenerator is about halfway done after approximately 12 hours. It's recovered 3 bad blocks on the Toshiba HDD. My girlfriend was frustrated last night about not having a laptop to use, so I burned an Ubuntu 10.04 CD and booted direct from CD. A little unnerving running an OS with a gaping hole in the bottom of the laptop where the HDD is supposed to be; it feels a little unnatural! In any case, by the time I'd burned the disc and come back to the bedroom, she was fast asleep. But hey, now she can use the laptop until I get her new drive cloned.

Hopefully once the drive is repaired, Ghost won't have any issues cloning the damaged drive. Once the damaged drive is copied over, I plan on pulling it apart and taking a look inside. I'll report back here on my progress. :)

UPDATE: After 24 hours of rebuilding data, I've given up. 12 hours has seen about another 1/6th of the data on the drive recovered, and even then, only about 2 out of 3 bad sectors are being successfully restored. I've copied the hidden Sony Recovery Volume to the new drive and I'm simply reinstalling from factory default that way. I've saved the most important data to my own laptop and I'll move it back after a clean install (once I've gotten rid of the Sony bloatware).

UPDATE 2: All went as planned. Killed all the VAIO crap bogging down startup and copied the important data back onto the drive. Lynn's happily using Windows once again. :)

Help me pick my Galaxy S...

Alright folks, I need your help. I have to decide which Galaxy S phone I'm going to buy this fall.

Currently, I'm torn primarily between the Verizon Fascinate and the Sprint Epic 4G. Here's the Pros vs. Cons for me:

Fascinate


Pros:
Already on Verizon (and so is my girlfriend)
Better network
Thinner and lighter

Cons:
Bing Search (Per Engadget it can't be changed to Google either!)
No front-facing camera.
Expensive monthly payment
Only 3G connection


Epic 4G


Pros:
4G connection (available in my city too)
QWERTY keyboard
Front-facing camera

Cons:
Would have to switch carriers (and my girlfriend doesn't really want Sprint)
Less reliable network
Still a fairly expensive monthly payment, and $10 extra for 4G data service.
Phone is heavier and thicker

HTC Glacier and my friends over at AlienBabelTech.com...

A couple weeks back, I was checking on a comment posted in response to my Android Benchmark blog post regarding some interesting performance values for the Droid X on GLBenchmark.com.

GLBenchmark has been a useful tool for me in the past; specifically I used iPhone 3GS performance values to estimate graphics performance in my Hummingbird vs Snapdragon article. I replied to the comment and noticed something strange, a new contender named "HTC Glacier" sitting on GLBenchmark's results list above the Galaxy S phones which were reigning supreme at the time.

It made me raise my eyebrows... an HTC phone of that power could only contain a new Snapdragon of some sort. I started to dig into the specs a bit... and then I was pulled away from my computer by the joys of fatherhood. HTC Glacier was forgotten as I scraped up food flung all over the place by my misbehaving daughter. I remember being tired that night, heading to bed soon after I managed to get my temperamental child down for the night.

Fortunately, someone else was paying better attention; my good friend MrK over at AlienBabelTech.com who has hosted my article and several of my blog posts, and with whom I communicate regularly. He spotted the HTC Glacier as well, and wasted no time in doing some sleuthing, finding that the person who posted the HTC Glacier was a T-Mobile Design Manager... quickly answering the question of which carrier Glacier will end up on. He also theorized that the Glacier contains the 1.5 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8672, and it wasn't long before his article was being linked on tech blogs across the web.

Is the future of gaming in the cloud? OnLive tested; my impressions.

Today, I walked into Burger King while Lynn's car was in the shop, plunked down my laptop and played a game that can't even be run on the laptop's hardware, much less at the resolution, frame rate and graphics quality I was playing it at. How? The cloud, my friend, the cloud.

It seems like the future of everything exists in the cloud, those huge server farms that process and store massive amounts of data. Video games have taken advantage of key elements of the cloud, such as with online gaming and MMOs, but they've almost always required that some sort of application or client run on the PC that the player is using. The landscape is changing quickly however, and I believe that the future of gaming also lies within the cloud, allowing players to play games that they don't actually run on their PC.