We already remember the first weeks – the glory of getting the newest phone in the market and praising how wonderful it was to finally have an actual smartphone. That’s how it was when the Triumph came out in Summer of 2011. It was short-lived though as quality control issues came to light through numerous blogs, forums and just about everywhere else. That tarnished my enthusiasm for the phone and I held off from buying it. I had been using my replaced Optimus V from February 2011, and was nearing the practical limits of what it could do, and only by deleting messages, application caches and just about everything to keep it from displaying the dreaded low on spasce notification, was I able to prolong its life.

The build quality problems I knew about were screen flickering issues, super-weak GPS signals and general system instability. If only I had a source for these uncited problems!

My particular handset does not exhibit the GPS problem, the flickering problem is more likely a software bug and even at that, it’s less noticeable overtime as you learn how to avoid it (wait at least four seconds between pressing the power button into sleep and then out of sleep). So my problems at the very least are not the usually reported problems, are at least not among those that were reported at release of the Triumph.

The Big Problem – Wi-Fi

No, my problem is with wifi. Yes, wifi, the very point of having a smartphone is Internet connectivity and through wifi at that. So what does my Motorola Triumph handset do? It crashes and then restarts.

Here’s the deal. At the University of Minnesota, we have a wifi network called “UofM Secure” because you need your “X500” credentials to login, which is simply a username and password. This is technically a 802.1 EAP network, which is all just a fancy authentication system based on WPA and WPA2. It’s secure and wonderful, and definitely beats having to authenticate through an open wifi network login page.

So with the Motorola Triumph, if I’m in an area with wifi, and it is already connected without going into Settings > Wireless & networks > Wi-Fi settings, there’s a low chance of the crash. But if I do have go through settings to select the network (essentially forcing wifi to connect), it will often become unresponsive and then just crash! But then it gets better. It can do this multiple times if the network does not come back on its own without going through settings. The saving grace now is the phone is fast enough to restart in less than 30 seconds, but still. It is ridiculous to have a phone that crashes because it has connected to wifi.

But the problem does not end there, oh no. In fact, wifi problems continue. If I am connected and either downloading a page, podcast or using some sufficient amount of wifi data transfer, there’s a large possibility that I will lose the connection to the network. And you know that means – more chances to restart. Typically, this is rarer than the previous restarting problem, but it certainly does happen in places where the Optimus V (at the university) had no problems on the network. I can be reading in Google Reader and suddenly, bam! no wifi. But here’s the kicker – and a confusing point – it’s not just 802.1 EAP in this case. It happens at home to in my 802.11n network, the connection will suddenly drop out – just like that, in the blink of an eye.

To explain that better, let me contrast with the Optimus V. At home, I never had a wifi drop out, if it had gone to sleep and turned wifi off, it would reconnect seconds after waking up, no problem, and while using the phone itself, it would stay on perfectly for extended periods of time to the point it never actually dropped out while I was watching. Ever. For instance, my favorite podcast player, Listen by Google, would allow me to listen and download podcasts at the same time. The Motorola Triumph cannot do this because it will often drop out, and Listen even insists that when I try to listen/stream while downloading – especially while the download is incomplete, it will state, “An error occurred while playing this episode.” That error never came up on the Optimus V. It may not be related to the wifi, but the staggering amount “Error (file not found)” and “Error (connection timed out)” notices I receive from Listen is surely a sign of the wifi problem – it simply cannot keep up a stable connection for an entire 60MB file.

But it’s not just Listen, it’s something as simple as browsing. I can be checking my bus schedule and be unsurprised that what I thought was just slow Internet on campus was actually due to the phone losing the connection yet again.

There are certainly lesser problems in the phone, but this is the one I demand to be fixed. It absolutely must be solved. Either by software or hardware or magic.

Let’s talk about some other observations. I have had this phone for two weeks; long enough to get a feel for oddities.

Battery Life

Let’s begin with the battery life. In a normal school day, I clock in at 6am and clock out around 3pm (and by clock in and out, I mean take off and put on the phone from the charger). By noon, I usually from down to 55% with light to moderate usage, though with heavier usage it goes to 40%. That’s no a big deal. Now, if for some reason wifi is being insane inane on any given day and it disconnects and reconnects continuously, well, say goodbye to that battery – 40% by 9am! Great. Actually, barring that exception, I’m pleased with the battery life in the phone. I have not had a close call yet, and I feel like I need to keep more battery life for a longer day (like Wednesday with my physics lab through 5pm), I go into Airplane mode with cuts me off from the celluar network (and who needs that during lab?) Since I only read and despise games, this works fine for me. No problems there.

The Keyboard

Now how about that keyboard? Here’s an example of my poor typing with the stock Android keyboard.

Now, how abiut rhat keyboars. This keybaord isbso easyto use becuas it ahs no ictiondarg. Revooutinary right? This is ibsabity.

Why did it come out like this? Because autocomplete does not exist on this phone naturally. Oh no, somehow, there is no dictionary except for your previously imported list of contacts and built-in names. So the words, “about”, “keyboard”, “easy”, “because” and more are unintelligible because it cannot correct them, it doesn’t know them. This demonstrates a lack of … what, I don’t even know? Who decides to sell a phone without an autocorrection dictionary? Who’s fault is this? Motorola’s? Google’s? The World’s? My solution was to install the ICS Keyboard that was simply too slow on the Optimus V (and immature at the time). But do normal people even know they can do this? My father certainly does not and his messages look like they were often written by birds (that may be angry).

Speed & Stability

Speed and stablity are interesting topics. Barring the occasional wifi-restart, the phone is generally stable. I run LauncherPro as the homescreen, and it runs with minimal effects enabled (none of that cubic nonsense) without any problems, the apps drawer scrolls smoothly, webpages, long lists and everything scrolls just fine. Stability wise, I’ve rarely had an app crash on its own and if it did, it was Facebook, and that didn’t work well on the Optimus V anyway. Switching from portrait to landscape works fast and flawlessly, where on the Optimus V, it was quite slow. On the Triumph, the phone is pretty much always responsive to the touch, but a problem is the capacitive menu, home and back buttons are less responsive than the actual screen, so I have to hit them multiple times quite often to know I registered a response. The haptic feedback helps, but it’s minimal.

Comfort

I’ve spoken about comfort before. Comfort is in terms of being able to swipe with one’s thumb from corner to corner of the phone. That is kinda possible but not easy with this Motorola Triumph’s huge 4.1” diagonal screensize. In fact, it almost hurts. Actually, it does hurt to overextend; with two hands the problem is solved, because you can hold with one hand and swipe with the other. So now I know why everyone claims smaller phones are better. The screensize is great and all, but the pixel density is more important for me compared with actually being able to interact with the controls. If you’re holding the Triumph in one hand, it’ll be a tricky maneuver to hit that notifications bar, which apparently is something you do pretty often.

The Network

Initially, I heard various reports of weak 3G reception and that reasoning isn’t condemned by the fact there is visually 4 bars on the Motorola Triump while there are 5 on the Optimus V. I’m not exactly sure what that means, but in my experience, the Motorola Triumph is fine in the University of Minnesota, Saint Paul region. The bars are a bad indicator of 3G service, and as far as I know, I have always been able to send and receive text messages in all but the deepest depths of the great buildings at the university.

The OS – Android 2.2.2

What else is there? How about the operating system itself? Android 2.2.2 isn’t bad; but it has no more to offer than my already year-old phone, the Optimus V, running the same. 2.3.5 I believe is the leading version of Gingerbread but I don’t even remember what it could do; let alone improve performance. It doesn’t matter either way, every app functions perfectly – nobody can drop 2.2 support because, well, there are 96% of all Android phones running that. Oh yeah. That said, after having experienced the glorious Ice Cream Sandwich, well, it’s a shame this phone will never support either an official build or completely a self-installed variant. Hacking the TouchPad to support CM9 was easy enough but on the phone it’s a slightly different story.

Wrap Up

So, how about a numeric score? I like the 1-5 scoring system, but let me explain how I broke the score down all down.

• -1 for the many and consistent wifi connectivity problems
• -0.1 for the outdated version of Android despite being available for more than a year and half, software wise and hardware wise
• -0.1 for the insane screensize and minor discomfort
• -0.2 for a completely broken stock keyboard

Despite those cons, I liked that the phone is suitably fast for a 1GHz processor and modern phone smartphone; it actually feels fast enough to be smart, and that goes for being responsive too. And of course, for having more storage space even after twice as many apps as I had on the Optimus V at the end of its life. So my final score is 3.6 out of 5. So that’s a 72% satisfaction rate, which is considered a B+ in my physics courses; a C- in the curvless world.

Bonus

While writing this, I did a little more testing. Using my favorite Wifi Analyzer and Listen to download an episode of Tech News Today. The episode in question was only 25MB. While it was downloading in the background, I was watching the Analyzer. My office is about 8 feet away from the n-router, and that’s separated by a single wall. In that time, the wifi dropped out from a nearly -30 dbm signal to a mere -80 dbm signal and of course the download was interrupted; my laptop was still receiving wifi perfectly right next to the phone. Wikipedia explains that anything around -10 dbm is the ceiling on wifi signal but anywhere from -30 to -70 are fair game for wifi. A drop from -30 dbm to -80 dbm is definitely unusual as this is a logarithmic scale and that’s like dropping 50 orders of magnitude. So I don’t think I’m making all of this up.

Despite all of this, I consider myself lucky as there were no restarts while writing.

To save myself and you from having to read another long and inarticulate description, why not just read about it where justice is served chilled. Instead, I’ll tell you what I thought of it.

The best cover art for the book yet - mysterious and cold blue

The book’s split time lines do nothing to confuse me. I know exactly when something is taking place – there is a definite distinction between the keeper-Kvothe and hipster-Kvothe in their style of talking and what is taking place. For instance, in the inn, nothing exciting happens except the two instances of mystical attacks from spider things and a possessed mercenary. Something like that, at any rate.

Kvothe reads his past out loud to his audience of both the scribe and his fairy helper Bast. It might seem odd at first to tell a story this way, but it essentially becomes its own book as if it were written in first person narrative form anyway. In fact, it might be better that the majority of the book is in the first person when listening in audio form. It feels as if Kvothe is telling you the story.

The most repetitive section is of Kvothe’s living the giant city, Tarbean. His poverty and depressing attitude was almost enough to make me lose interest in the long run. It feels as if it takes forever because there is no scientific magic in that part, but once it ends, the magic comes into the story pretty well.

You can imagine the book comprised of three parts, the first part of Tarbean, the second is comprised of his first struggles at the University where he gets kicked out of the library, meets his humanoid arch-nemesis and meets his girlfriend, and the third where Kvothe defeats a dragon of sorts. The ending is actually after the third part in his narration, but it feels as if the climax lies somewhere within heart of the dragon.

The struggles with Kvothe’s lover is interesting. She is mysterious and has men surrounding her most of the time, but she accepts none of them and she says it is because they are not understanding of her either. Kvothe tries to hide his feeling from her and she toys with him in a whimsical way, but neither admit their love for each other, although Kvothe is known to admire her in more than one way.

The magic introduced, sympathy as it is named, is unique from any other type of magic scheme I have encountered in my many years of reading fiction. It’s unlike the rhyming nature of Stile in the Apprentice Adept series and it is not elemental like that of the magic in Golden Sun’s Weyard. Of course in addition of the scientific magic sympathy, there is runic magic that rely on the same principles and alchemy but it is more than just slapping their hands together. The true mysterious magic is the magic of absolutely understanding so well, to know it’s name. Kvothe has a brief glimpse of the name of the wind late in the story and even while fleeting, it wields it powerfully.

The Name of the Wind is a long book full of exciting tales except for a few areas of prolonged engagement. It maintains a high standard of writing, excellent descriptions and well formed character interaction. In my case of the Audible audio book version, Nick Podehl voices Kvothe’s old and younger self differently making the transition points easier. His masterful interpretation of the forgien voices from Kvothe’s teenage friends from other countries also had depth to otherwise simple words on a page.

Fantasy is a hard genre. Harry Potter has ruined magic for children and many young adults and sparkling vampires have ruined the fairy creatures for the same audience. There is no book that will appease everyone, but this makes a great stab at penetrating the mind for the kids beyond their years.

I wish the HP Computer boxes looked this good. Clean, simple and very clear on what's inside.

These are initial thoughts from my first experience with the $99 HP TouchPad. I haven’t used it long – a few days at most has it sat in my house on my kitchen counter, and maybe just over five hours of total hands on time. That’s constitutes my basis.

My first thought as I opened the shipping box: it looks like the MacBook Air’s box. It has a picture of the TouchPad on the front and for the most part, everything else is white except for its name on the sides and a little bit of crediting information on the lower back side.

A truly shameful moment caught me next. I could not grasp how to open the TouchPad box without damaging it. The MacBook’s box was easy to open, simply hold the cover and let the weight of the bottom section slide the bottom-box out. Easy. But the TouchPad was different, it had a side-loaded box. I was not sure if I needed to pull a tab away to let it loose, or some other mystical and innovate method open it. After an embarrassing four minutes, I pulled the side out revealing the TouchPad.

The TouchPad’s compartment was clean: a side-box for cables and a main portion delegated to the goods: the hardware itself. It was wrapped in a plastic sheet for protection and that was luckily easy enough to peel off.

After locating the power button the top of the TouchPad, a little HP logo appeared on the screen. It was generously about the size of a nickel and did nothing apparent for about two minutes but it started to pulsate and glow eventually. For another three minutes I waited for something.

I ended up on a language selection screen, then a country selection screen and finally a confirmation prompt. The TouchPad then launched me into a Wifi-setup dialog.

This dialog kept coming up despite enter the correct details at least eight times, on ninth or tenth, it figured out that it was connected

This Wifi dialog was honestly frustrating and I am rarely frustrated with these kinds of things. I am sure it was obvious mistake I made, but I waiting for ages to get it to work. The TouchPad discovered my Wifi network easily. I tapped it and another dialog appeared entitled “Join Integral” with a text box under it. I assumed it was for the password, but a little indication would’ve been nice. After entering the network password, I would continue but the Wifi-setup dialog would simply come back. I went through this about ten times before it finally registered.

Finally connected, the TouchPad asked me to agree once, agree twice and make an account for WebOS. Then some more mystery setup time was taken from my life followed by the first “The device will restart…” I have ever seen on a mobile device.

The TouchPad has to restart after setup, so what is this? An OS from 1999? Windows? What's going here?

Once I was through all of the setup nonsense, I was at the home screen of nothing. I was not entirely sure what the next step was, so I did what I always do when I am out and see a tablet: I go to my business card homepage.

Any store with a device with a browser, I leave my homepage up when I leave - it's only fair, I'm testing it, after all.

And that was my first experience with the HP TouchPad. It was pretty fast, except for all that setup-waiting I had to do, and it was pretty in a sense that it looked ascetically pleasing. You can see my full gallery of unboxing and setup pictures and egerily await more thoughts on the HP TouchPad, coming soon.

Happy touch-pad-ing.

I first played Angry Birds about eight months ago in October of 2010 when I bought my first iPod touch 4G. I played more recently when Amazon open their own Appstore with Angry Birds Rio as the free-app-of-the-week for Android. It’s always been a lot of fun, either smashing pigs or release fellow birds. That said, I like the simple improvements they made in the new Chrome version.

Let’s start out with the obvious. It’s huge. I can see everything because it’s not sitting in a 3.5 inch screen anymore – it’s on a 21′ monitor running at 720p. It’s fantastic.

Zoomed Way Out - Angry Birds on Chrome

One gripe I always had was that the restart control was hidden in a slide out menu instead of being on the mainscreen. That made the price of restarting higher because it took two taps/clicks instead of one. In the new Chrome version, the restart button is now aligned to the left of the game screen and it’s much easier to try something, hate your choice, and quickly restart before someone else looking over your shoulder notices. It’s just that easy.

Controlling the birds angling and firing is a nice change. Using your fingers was a great way to draw people in but the accuracy and precision wasn’t always there. Or maybe I’m just clumsy without my mouse.

Finally, there are some special Chrome-extras. For instance, on various levels, you’ll see a little Chrome-logo floating around or sitting somewhere. Once you hit it, you’ll get your points and it’ll disappear from the level entirely. It’s a one-time bonus. They’re not always easy to get to either.

Finally, I got 3 Stars - Angry Birds on Chrome

I give Angry Birds a 5 of out 5 for the simplest of improvements that just come naturally for being on the big-screen. Great work, Rovio, and of course, Google, for making Chrome excellent. Finally, I offered a shorter review on the Chrome Web Store for Angry Birds. Oddly, there is no way to link to individual review. Here it is.

It’s hard for the same game to get better every time it’s remade and put on a different platform. This edition of Angry Birds actually puts the restart button on the game screen so experimenting is encouraged now. I’ve officially played Angry Birds on more platforms than any other game, ever. It’s really fun and I really hate games.

The Software

The Galaxy Tab Wifi offers the same system that the 3G models do. It’s nothing special or different in that regard. However, compared to a blank slate (pun?) installation of Android like my LG Optimus V, it’s a little different.

Let’s start out with the home-screen. I believe the Launcher is not TouchWiz. I think it’s just some special Samsung Interface for the Launcher. When you start the Galaxy Tab up, you’re greeted with the normal Android 2.2 Lock-screen with the slide-to-unlock and Mute sliders. Sliding to unlock shows the home-screen. In the vertical orientation, here’s the break down. There is the pane location indicator at the top, nearest to the notifications bar. Then by default the normal Google search bar with Voice functionality. Then you get a bunch of app-icons. By default there is the Market and the useless Samsung App Store. Then YouTube, Camera, Calendar, Kindle and other apps as well. You can swipe to a different pane for something they call the daily briefing which is a digest of weather, news, and stock information. The Samsung/Android equivalent to do the Springboard in iOS or the Dock in OSX is weak. It houses the Applications menu along with two quick jumping buttons for Email and Browser. I was tempted to change this to Launcher Pro but I resisted for the review’s sake.

The GTW Home Screen with a few customizations

The Applications menu itself has two screens of default apps. I’ll list the interesting apps. First, you get the standard pile of build Android apps but with customizations. For instance, the Tab version of the calculator looks different from it does on my Optimus. Then you have the Daily Briefing and Digital Frame apps which serve as poster-board style applications running when you aren’t using the device. There’s the default Gmail app, Latitude and of course Maps. I’m pleased to see someone thought it was a good idea to include a basic Memo-app like Notes on iOS. There is Music and Music Hub which is a lame version of iTunes the store. Then Places, Navigation, and Google Talk of course. Task Manager is included so you can kill apps. And that’s basically all the apps that are blatantly Samsung-touched. Qik and Moviefone are there, but they’re just the same as always.

Applications Menu - Tons of Samsumg-y-apps

The notification drawer is actually useful on the Galaxy Tab. It has quick access to Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS, Silent and the Orientation Lock. I condemned the hardware for not having a physical button for the orientation lock but I suppose this is a decent solution. The other shortcuts are generally useful and well place by being always accessible. On my Optimus, to toggle Wifi, I need to use a widget on one of my home-screen panes. A unique feature is the brightness slider. It also has a check box toggling auto-control that will control brightness based on the viewing content and ambient line in the room.

Notifications Drawer with toggles and slider.

Android apps all function the same as far as I know. Facebook’s app, for example, sucks just as much as it does on my phone. It’s not nearly as polished as the iOS app. TweetDeck is really nice because it has the advantage of a spacious UI. Pandora works exactly the same but it’s great being able to view the album art.

I have a special place in my heart for the Kindle for Android app. I first experimented with Kindle on my computer, then my iPod touch 4G and now this. I never bothered with it on my phone because the display was just too small. The Galaxy Tab’s size is perfect for reading. The application is beautiful. When you start it, you’re brought to a screen with a list of your books. You optionally can have them turn into book-tiles in a grid view, which I prefer. When a book is opened, it will position itself to your orientation, but you can optionally lock it without setting the system-wide orientation lock. Swiping to turn pages will always be stupid in my opinion. Sure, it looks good in ads but in practice it’s annoying, so they allow you to do both a swipe and a simple tap. The problem persists however I always need to hold it in my right hand so I can tap on the right side-edge to move to the next page, on the right. So they’ll need to work on that.

Kindle for Android viewing my collection - beautiful cover art!

The Camera app is my father’s favorite app I think, built-in. Here’s what it does. It offers a resolution by default of 2048 by 1232. It has options for white balance, effects, ISO and image quality ranging from normal to superfine. It also can handle automatic geo-tagging. The shortcuts on the side of the viewfinder itself are: exposure control, flash control, scene control and finally mode. The flash control has three settings, off, on and auto. The flash is bright and works pretty well. It’s a huge LED. The scene control offers Portrait, Landscape, Night and Sports. These change the way light is interpreted and makes adjusts based on movement, light and probably other factors. Finally, Mode offers Single shot, Panorama, Smile shot and Self-shot. Single shot uses the back camera with its high quality resolution, the panorama can merge different shots together at .7mp quality, Smile shot lets you wait while your target smiles, which is clever. Finally, self-shot uses the front facing camera with 1.3mp of quality to picture yourself. Finally, the highest picture quality, it claims it can save around 8800 pictures to the internal memory card. Video is good too. The video side of the Camera app has less settings. It can toggle flash on or off. Exposure control is also an option. Audio capture is available but has to be set in the options panel. It’s just your standard camera app for video.

The browser is unique in that it does not require you to hit the options button to get to different tabs. On the browser address bar, there different buttons. Standard buttons for back and forward, a quick memo-pad, a button that shows you open tabs by screenshot, and finally favorites and history. The memo-pad shortcut can jot down notes and that’s about all, but handy for copy and pasting information since Android’s native copy and pasting support is a big poor. Since there are no true tabs, but instead windows, the on-screen access to the other windows (or tabs) is nice. Of course, the browser has the usual settings. But it additionally has toggles to enable/disable javascript and enable/disable plugins on demand. Flash support you know, well, it works but it’s jittery. I watched Leo Laporte for at least an hour on Twit Live via his flash player. It worked well enough there. With the browser it’s fast and easy to use. My one minor complaint is that it hides the notification drawer, so I can’t check on other things very well.

I noticed that the ringtones on the Galaxy Tab and my Optimus are different. Now, one is a phone and one is not, but why are they different? I guess I noticed but promptly forgot, but there are many differences between the Galaxy Tab OS and the OS on my phone, despite both being Android 2.2 Froyo. Seriously, if someone says there is fragmentation, they are correct.

Overall, the software is good. With more options available, I think it could border perfect, but you know how locked down Android is. And that concludes the software review of the Galaxy Tab Wifi. This review on only software ended