The Anphase Blog

Samsung i8910 Petition Hits 5000 Milestone!

5000 Sig­na­tures!

It’s been a while since I’ve men­tioned the Sam­sung i8910 peti­tion. It seems like only yes­ter­day when the peti­tion started on 22nd of Novem­ber 2009. The peti­tion and report were great suc­cess, I got to meet with a Sam­sung man­ager and I met lots of other peo­ple along the way. We didn’t get what we wanted but we got a whole lot more from other peo­ple in the com­mu­nity. Thanks to every­one who signed the peti­tion and helped make a dif­fer­ence.

Windows Phone 7 Shaping Up To Be Monster!(Video)

Win­dows Phone 7: Revolutionary

#include <microsoft>
#include <mobile>

void main() {
(((Zune + XBox_Live)*Simplicity)^Fresh_UI)^2 = Windows_Phone_7; //squared for awesomeness
}

return success;

The For­mula For Success

Yes that’s right, the code with the for­mu­lae for suc­cess right there. No logic required, Win­dows Phone 7 looks like a win­ner right now. Microsoft has taken the things that define ‘mobile’ today i.e games, music,  and the social and pro­duc­tiv­ity aspects, and they’ve bun­dled it up into one oper­at­ing sys­tem that is open to any and all device mak­ers. There’s no other com­pany that’s well versed in all these indus­tries with enough resources and exper­tise to pull it off.

1. For music they have expe­ri­ence from the Zune which has been around for years. The Zune Pass sys­tem is still regarded by many as the future of music dis­tri­b­u­tion — as long as it spreads out more and remains affordable.
2. For gam­ing Microsoft has inte­grated Xbox Live — a com­mu­nity of about 20 mil­lion gamers and non-gamers. Their Xbox con­sole is one of the big three and inte­grat­ing that with their mobile sys­tem is bound to be a suc­cess. Sony had the oppor­tu­nity of inte­grat­ing the PSP line with the Sony Eric­s­son mobile phone line but that still remains to be seen.
3. For pro­duc­tiv­ity they draw expe­ri­ence from the wildly pop­u­lar Microsoft Office Suite and from Win­dows Mobile. The lat­ter has been around for a long time and pro­duc­tiv­ity was/is one of it’s strengths. Compatibility with ser­vices like Microsoft Exchange and Out­look are key to suc­cess in the cor­po­rate arena.
4. For the social ele­ment, they have Win­dows Live to get inspi­ra­tion from and it is some­what tied together with Win­dows Phone 7 in the ‘Peo­ple’ hub. They also must have drawn some­thing from the Kin phones which they sub­se­quently ditched. The web sync­ing, for instance, is a bright idea that I’d like to see more of.

Only time will tell.

Samsung SGH-i707, a whole different device?

Sam­sung SGH-i707

The image above is the the Sam­sung SGH-i707, the device Microsoft is giv­ing out to devel­op­ers and tech review­ers to pre­view Win­dows Phone 7. Accord­ing to Microsoft, this device will never be released to mar­ket. The Sam­sung SGH-i707 is more than just a hacked up i8910. It appears that the only thing sim­i­lar between this device and Sam­sung i8910 is the shell. The devices look almost iden­ti­cal on the out­side except for some small but sig­nif­i­cant differences.

Sam­sung SGH-i707, the back panel reads “GI8910”

From the image above, you can see that the back panel is exactly the same as on the i8910 — in fact is says “CI8910”! The design is the same, dual speak­ers on the top and lower ends of the device, prox­im­ity and light sen­sors on the top, cov­ered head phone jack on the top end and a micro usb slot and micro SD card slot on either side. When they launch, Win­dows Phone 7 devices won’t sup­port expand­able mem­ory. So for this device, the micro SD card is “glued” in to the phone — Microsoft says tak­ing it out will mess it up. It also has a smaller screen, prob­a­bly 3.5″ or less as opposed to the 3.7″ screen of the i8910.

Sam­sung SGH-i707 5MP Camera

Another thing to note is the 5 Mega Pixel cam­era. The Sam­sung i8910 has an 8 Mega Pixel cam­era. This could mean that they have a dif­fer­ent sen­sor and cam­era sys­tem all together or they just have dumbed down settings.

Accord­ing to Tera-WURFL, the device was released in Decem­ber 2009. All this got me won­der­ing — if there were so many dif­fer­ent devices on the mar­ket and with so many part­ners, why did Microsoft go for the i8910? Surely they could have gone out and mod­i­fied a device with Win­dows Mobile 6.5 like the HTC HD2 for instance or even the Sam­sung Omnia II.

That leads me to sev­eral con­clu­sions. First, the only way to run Win­dows Phone 7 on the i8910 is to change not only the soft­ware com­po­nent, but the hard­ware as well. Microsoft prob­a­bly went with the i8910 because it’s now quite cheap, it has flex­i­ble hard­ware i.e it can eas­ily sup­port many dif­fer­ent plat­forms and they only needed to replace the dis­play at least and some writ­ing around the cam­era and front but­tons. Microsoft prob­a­bly avoided exist­ing Win­dows Mobile devices to avoid cre­at­ing false hope or unnec­es­sary pres­sure from the own­ers of those devices. The i8910 just isn’t very pop­u­lar and it runs Sym­bian; it was an easy pick.

gpSP4Symbian for Samsung i8910 Now Live(Video)

Thanks to the per­sis­tence of one Sam­sung i8910  user, @brower, and some hard work by the devel­oper gpSP4Sybian now works on the Sam­sung i8910.

As you can see from the video(by @brower again ), it works great.

gpSP4Symbian is a Game Boy Advance emu­la­tor for Sym­bian phones. This means you can run any GBA games that you have if you have the ROMs. From the ver­sion number(0.51) you can tell that it’s not quite com­plete yet, it’s a work in progress. There’s no sound yet, for instance, but you can bet that the devel­oper is work­ing on mak­ing it better.

You can try it for your­self by down­load­ing it from the devel­op­ers web­site.

To Debrand Or Not To Debrand

To Debrand Or Not To Debrand

That’s the ques­tion. I’ve had a cou­ple of peo­ple email me in the past few days ask­ing whether or not they should debrand and/or hack their phones. So I fig­ured I should just write a post about it to answer that ques­tion once and for all. In my opin­ion, yes.

First off, the rea­son why phones are branded is for pre­dictabil­ity. The car­ri­ers want you to have the firmware that they have, know and under­stand so that when there’s a prob­lem, they know exactly what’s wrong or they can try and repli­cate the prob­lem. It’s all about mak­ing their jobs eas­ier and mak­ing your life less com­pli­cated. Unfor­tu­nately, there’s a flaw in this sys­tem. When the device man­u­fac­tur­ers release updates for these devices, the car­rier has to “cook” a ROM with their bloat-ware  and log heaps of info about the firmware. Every­thing from the intro-animation, the fonts, links in the browser, short­cuts to ser­vices etc. have to be doc­u­mented. It’s a painstak­ing task — so what do the car­ri­ers do? They sim­ply don’t update the firmware! They often stick with what­ever they had at the start and never release any updates despite the man­u­fac­turer hav­ing them. Those peo­ple with devices that are branded can only get updates from the car­rier, they are locked down.

Free your device, you bought it, it’s yours

So debrand­ing your device frees you from the car­rier so you can get updates directly from the manufacturer.

So, what’s the price you pay? Debrand­ing your device voids your war­ranty — and that makes sense. Once you start putting soft­ware that the car­rier didn’t put on your device, what­ever hap­pens is not their prob­lem any­more and they may not have a solu­tion to the prob­lems you present them. In all hon­esty, there are hardly ever any prob­lems that come up any­way. If worst comes to worst, you can always reflash your phone back to the car­ri­ers’ firmware if it’s around — and it prob­a­bly is.

Should you pay for your phone to be debranded? No, do it your­self. There are heaps of tuto­ri­als and numer­ous videos online. The video I made a while back may be a good start although it’s for the Sam­sung i8510. The ideas and the tools are gen­er­ally the same. You can down­load firmware for Sam­sung phones from this web­site(you have to reg­is­ter for free). If you still can’t find out how to do it I could make a post about it. So yes debrand, hack and flash cus­tom ROMs. Sam­sung is no longer releas­ing updates for the i8910, so if you’re not happy with the cur­rent firmware, you have to look for cus­tom ROMs. HyperX is prob­a­bly the best way to go.

HX ROMs are the way to go

Now I’ve always praised Andy and his cus­toms ROMs. Here’s why they are awesome.

1. They are free.
2. They included licensed apps, Phone Torch and Threaded SMS.
3. The have a mas­sive fol­low­ing — the qual­ity of the ROMs is higher than most because many bugs are found and thwarted before a pub­lic release.
4. Easy to install. The eas­i­est way to lib­er­ate your phone. Switch off your phone, hold Vol­ume Up + Lock + Power but­ton, run the appli­ca­tion he supplies, connect the phone and click Dowload All and that’s it!
5. No need to hack the phone, it’s already done.
6. Con­stantly updat­ing; unlike Sam­sung, his updates keep on coming.
7. Col­lab­o­ra­tion; HyperX works with other peo­ple to aid him, that’s rare in the mod­ding community.

I could go on, but these are 7 rea­sons to love HX V7 .

Symbian^4 Screenshots Revealed, Lacking Oomph

Sym­bian 4 Screen Shots

The screen shots for Symbian^4 just leaked, they’ve since been taken down from the offi­cial site but I got them via Daily Mobile(thanks @Snizzl3)

I’m a big fan of Sym­bian but it has let me down lately. Nick Jones from Gart­ner said it per­fectly, it’s like Sym­bian is “re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titatic”. The Sym­bian ship is sail­ing towards its inevitable demise. The foun­da­tion is focus­ing on the wrong issues, they need to focus on the UI and the user expe­ri­ence. While the mobile UIs are about the same(as high­lighted by Ewan Spence), there are some dis­tin­guish­ing and inno­v­a­tive ele­ments that set them apart. Apple, with iOS, has gone for an ele­gant and sim­ple UI which con­sists of a grid of scrol­lable icons that lead to apps. Win­dows, with Win­dows Phone 7, has gone for an equally sim­ple design with ‘hubs’ form­ing the cen­ter of the expe­ri­ence. Sym­bian con­tin­ues to focus on expand­ing fea­tures — sup­port for HDMI, higher res cam­eras, ele­gant archi­tec­ture, open­ness, engag­ing devel­op­ers etc.

All that may not be a bad thing, but they are con­cen­trat­ing on things that do not directly affect the con­sumer, neglect­ing the things that do. At this point in time, it’s all about the expe­ri­ence. If it wasn’t about the expe­ri­ence and more about fea­tures, devices like the iPhone never would have suc­ceeded. What com­pa­nies like Apple and Google did, was focus on the expe­ri­ence first — get peo­ple to fall in love with the prod­uct, buy it, and fall in love with it all over again — then beef up the fea­tures later. As it stands, Symbian/Nokia are behind in both the fea­tures and the expe­ri­ence. They are play­ing catch up now — the tables have turned. Just a few years ago, it was Apple try­ing to catch up to the Sym­bian soft­ware and Nokia hard­ware, Android devices and Android were no match for Sym­bian devices (Google G1 + Android 1.o any­one?). Every­thing has changed and Nokia and Sym­bian are locked in a down­ward spi­ral. The days of Nokia being the mobile supreme are num­bered. Sym­bian was so weak in the smart­phone arena that the iPhone and Android devices took over almost as soon as they stepped into the game. It was like tak­ing candy from a baby.

There could be light at the end of the tun­nel though. I remem­ber Palm was on the way out when they released WebOS and the Palm Pre. Then again, they are gone now any­way, but it goes to show that with some mas­sive inno­va­tion and re-thinking every­thing from the ground up, Nokia/Symbian can make a come­back. Until it does, it’s safe to say that the Sam­sung i8910 is the last Sym­bian device for me. I never say never though. Never ;-P.

A New UI Is Needed for Symbian^3, the existing one doesn’t cut it

Symbian^3 on the Nokia N8

Here’s why:

There are cer­tain prin­ci­ples that make a good User Inter­face (UI). These are struc­ture, sim­plic­ity, vis­i­bil­ity, feed­back, tol­er­ance and reuse. I’m going to take a closer look at the Symbian^3 UI weighed against these fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples. I have been using S60 5th edi­tion for about a year now and the Symbian^3 UI is not much dif­fer­ent. I’ve noted only a few dif­fer­ences from the Symbian^3 demos float­ing around.

Struc­ture

Design should orga­nize the user inter­face pur­pose­fully, in mean­ing­ful and use­ful ways based on clear, con­sis­tent mod­els that are appar­ent and rec­og­niz­able to users, putting related things together and sep­a­rat­ing unre­lated things, dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing dis­sim­i­lar things and mak­ing sim­i­lar things resem­ble one another. The struc­ture prin­ci­ple is con­cerned with over­all user inter­face architecture.

• One of the biggest prob­lems with Symbian^3 is the incon­sis­tent UI. It’s argued that Symbian^3 is just a tran­si­tory OS as we approach Symbian^4. That’s no excuse — they should have just ‘dumped’ it like they did Symbian^2.

Sim­plic­ity

The design should make sim­ple, com­mon tasks easy, com­mu­ni­cat­ing clearly and sim­ply in the user’s own lan­guage, and pro­vid­ing good short­cuts that are mean­ing­fully related to longer procedures.

• After years of using the Sym­bian OS, I still find it dif­fi­cult to carry out the sim­plest tasks. Peo­ple who are unfa­mil­iar with the OS have an even harder time. Symbian^3 is no dif­fer­ent. It main­tains most of the con­fus­ing ele­ments from pre­vi­ous iter­a­tions of the OS.

Vis­i­bil­ity

The design should make all needed options and mate­ri­als for a given task vis­i­ble with­out dis­tract­ing the user with extra­ne­ous or redun­dant infor­ma­tion. Good designs don’t over­whelm users with alter­na­tives or con­fuse with unneeded information.

• Symbian^3 does show users the nec­es­sary infor­ma­tion, but it has been done bet­ter. Android and WebOS have the best noti­fi­ca­tion sys­tems around.

Read the rest of this entry »

ABBYY FotoTranslate Review + Giveaway(Video)

ABBYY Foto­Trans­late

The inter­net is a large net­work where peo­ple of dif­fer­ent back­grounds, cul­tures and lan­guages min­gle. It is not sur­pris­ing that we often encounter con­tent that is for­eign to us, be it in a forum or blog post. When brows­ing the web, the solu­tion is sim­ple, sim­ply copy what­ever text it is that you want to trans­late and let pop­u­lar ser­vices such as Babel Fish or Google Trans­late trans­late it for you. But what hap­pens when the the con­tent you want to trans­late is in an image? What if it’s not even on the inter­net, but in the real world? Enter ABBYY Foto­Trans­late.

ABBYY Foto Trans­late is an appli­ca­tion for Sym­bian mobile phones that com­bines opti­cal char­ac­ter recog­ni­tion (OCR) tech­nol­ogy and a mobile dic­tio­nary to con­vert images of words into trans­lated text  - in other words, the app takes an image of some text in one language, recognizes that text, and trans­lates it to another lan­guge. ABBYY Foto­Trans­late is only com­pat­i­ble with Nokia phones so my Sam­sung i8910 and i8510 didn’t work (I tried). For this review I tried to use the Nokia n96 but that didn’t work very well either. Finally I used the n86 and it worked like a charm. I would advise you to down­load a trail ver­sion of the appli­ca­tion here to check if it’s com­pat­i­ble with your device. The appli­ca­tion is beau­ti­fully crafted and most impor­tantly, it works, it works very well indeed. For the review I got the Ital­ian — Eng­lish Con­cise Oxford Par­avia Dic­tio­nary. Why you ask? Well, the Ital­ians won the World Cup 2010, so I fig­ured: if you can’t beat them, join them! Any­way, I was thor­oughly impressed by the appli­ca­tion. Using it is sim­ple, all you have to do is point the cam­era to the text that needs to be trans­lated and it trans­lates it effort­lessly. The text is trans­lated word for word with the orig­i­nal word in the cap­tured image high­lighted. More on this in the video review after the break. Read the rest of this entry »

Some Awesome s60 5th Edition Apps for the Samsung i8910 pt.4: Games Edition(video)

Game On

Now I’m going to look at games on the Sam­sung i8910. Some of these games are not free, few good things are. In the pre­view I’m going to cover some of the games I got from Gameloft HD Games. They range in price from just $US0.99 to $US4.99 which is about the same as iPhone games. I also found some really neat games from Break Design in South Africa. I also demo a game which I believe is the best to have ever graced the i8910. The video and links are after the break. Read the rest of this entry »

The End for the Samsung i8910 and the iPod Touch (First Gen)

The iPod Touch(1st Gen) and the Sam­sung i8910. The End.

The devices in the pic­ture above have sev­eral things in com­mon.  For one, they have both reached the end of their ‘offi­cial’ life cycle — the com­pa­nies that made them are not pro­vid­ing any more updates for them. Both are aslo hacked, a sign that there’s some­thing not quite com­plete with their soft­ware (as far as many users are con­cerned) and a bit of hope for the future. Despite the sim­i­lar­i­ties, there is one major dif­fer­ence. The iPod Touch (First Gen­er­a­tion) was released almost 3 years ago, and the Sam­sung i8910 is just a year old.

I was an early adopter of the iPod Touch, I got it as soon as it was avail­able in local stores about 3 years back. Back then there wasn’t much to it, it seemed like Apple didn’t know what they wanted to do with it. There were no apps, there was no App Store; the device just looked cool — and hey, it was from Apple. To this day, that iPod Touch is the best tech invest­ment I’ve ever made. It evolved, start­ing with native apps from the iPhone –Notes, Maps, Mail etc. mov­ing on to web apps which became very pop­u­lar all before the Apps Store came along and changed the game. It didn’t end there. Apple went on to add more core fea­tures to the OS, like cut copy and paste. In a nut­shell, the iPod Touch was a truly mag­i­cal device for me, it gave me faith in adopt­ing things early.

On the other side of the scale is the Sam­sung i8910. I got it early on and I had a lot of faith in it. The device showed a lot of poten­tial in the tech­ni­cal demos, from Imag­i­na­tion Tech­nolo­gies and oth­ers, that where float­ing around. The whole sit­u­a­tion reminds me of the cli­max and anti-climax of 3D movies, Avatar and Clash of the Titans. Some review­ers said “if Avatar started the 3D movie rev­o­lu­tion, then Clash of the Titans just ended it”. Clash of the Titans looks ter­ri­ble in 3D, it’s a total rip-off. If the iPod Touch gave me faith in adopt­ing tech­nol­ogy early, then the Sam­sung i8910 just made me lose all hope.

To add insult to injury, Apple just advised devel­op­ers to stop tar­get­ing iOS 2.0 iPhones/iPods — the iPod Touch has iOS 3.1, which means that the iPod Touch (1st Gen)will be sup­ported for at least another year; that brings the total to 4 years of sup­port as opposed to barely a year from Sam­sung. Now I’m a huge fan Sam­sung (some peo­ple think a I actu­ally work for them!), I’ve always admired their prod­ucts and I love my Sam­sung i8910. But even I know when I’ve been taken for a ride.

Cydia and ROM Patcher, my two best friends

All is not lost though, as I’ve said before, both devices are hacked and I’ll be squeez­ing as much life out of them as pos­si­ble. The iPod Touch will prob­a­bly have a more grace­ful retire­ment due the the mas­sive user and hacker base. I only wish there were more users like HyperX and oth­ers around.