Windows 7 Public Beta

I’m an unapologetic fan of Vista so I’ve been following the whole Windows 7 thing with interest but without feeling a desperate need to get a copy using any means necessary. The whole [very] public Beta appealed to me though so I duly downloaded it yesterday, hacked out a 30GB partition from the system drive of my M1330 (using a GParted Live CD, Windows Vista still can’t reliably shrink a system volume that has been in use for any reasonable length of time) and installed it.

First impressions were pretty underwhelming. I thought the look and feel was a bit flat and didn’t notice anything significant apart from the tweaked Task Bar.

After some digging I found that the installer had left me with a “customized” theme that basically turned off a lot of the UI enhancements. Once I switched to a full Windows 7 Theme it started to look pretty good and then I got digging in earnest and actually found some stuff that I quite liked. Seems like a very nice set of bumped up features at this stage without too many downsides, although this is after just a couple of hours nosing about so I’ll be revisiting this in a week or two to see what I think of it then.

There are some nifty improvements:

• The new style Taskbar is actually quite nice and seem like a sensible UI improvement. Items on the takbar have more intelligent context menus and Win 7 aware apps display a lot of extra info in both the taskbar icon itself (e.g download progress in IE, Presence status info in Messenger) and awareness of tabs within the mouseover previews.
• The “mouse over the end of the taskbar to temporarily display the desktop” trick is simple but useful and effective.
• “Sidebar” is gone but gadgets now have a proper place to live – on the desktop, shich is conveniently now easy to get a quick look at.
• There seem to be quite a few extra “Windows Key + X” shortcuts - Win+P brings up a tab ribbon for handling connectivity to a projector, Win+Arrow keys tell the current window to maximise,minimise,dock to the left or dock to the right. Win+G brings all the Gadgets temporarily to the foreground. Win+T cycles through the Taskbar items. Things like Win+E (Explorer), Win+D (Desktop), Win+F (Find), Win+R (Run) remain as useful as ever.
• Powershell V2 is included by default ( finally )
• There’s quite a nice quick shortcut in the Start Menu that directly brings you to a new “Devices and Printers” control screen that sort of kind of makes it easier to get to most of the setup screens for your “add-on” hardware.
• UAC seems to have been given a major dose of common sense – user initiated tasks that require elevation no longer trigger a UAC confirmation but program initiated actions do. Seems like an excellent balance to me.
• WLAN’s are detected during the OS install and immediately used to download patches and updates. That’s a good idea.
• The concept of file system “Libraries” is introduced – these are collections of files and folders that are presented and used as a single unit without needing to move the underlying files around. Finally we’re getting towards a sensible way to add proper classification structure to collections of files. I very much like this idea.
• We still have dear old Edlin.
• All of the hardware on my laptop was detected and got up to date drivers installed (that includes the Video driver for the Geforce 8400M GS, Intel 3945ABG WLAN, Ricoh SD\XD\CF Card Reader, Creative Labs Webcam, Touchpad..
• The install was quick (20-25 minutes at most) and required very little interaction.
• There appears to be a new higher security layer (facilitated by the Homegroup services) added in to the network places structure by default to ensure that some level of protection is applied to all those easily hacked into Home Networks out there.
• There’s now an option to link your Windows login with an online account. This is a very interesting development and should enable more seamless utilization of online services and sharing\sync across machines. The option doesn’t do anything yet but I’ll be keeping an eye on that feature for certain.
• Once again we have the ability to create a System Recovery Disc (as we did in Vista SP1 Beta but not in the full release of Vista SP1 for some reason)
• We finally have the option to create a full system (Image) backup natively with a Windows OS. 
• All saved credentials seem to be stored in a single location called the Credential Vault that can be selectively backed up and restored. Individual items within it can be selectively removed too. Very, very good ideas.
• Location Sensors (GPS) and location awareness are now configurable as a standard item via the Control Panel.

Performance wise it seems to match the existing Vista install pretty closely apart from having a noticably slower hard drive – but that is entirely due to the fact that I’m using the last (and thus slowest) 30GB of space on this drive for the Windows 7 boot partition.

Everything I’ve tried to run so far runs without a hitch (My XP\Vista portable apps collection all works fine, Firefox 3, Google Chrome, Dropbox Sync + its Explorer plugin, Shockwave\Flash, GTalk’s video plugin).

On the negative side (comparing to Vista remember):

• Finding things like the Advanced Display Settings dialogs, or the properties of a NIC or where to change your TCP/IP Settings and so on remain just as obnoxiously awkward as they are in Vista.
• That default Theme I ended up almost turned me off the thing right at the start – maybe I caused that but it really did give me a very bad first impression.
• Contrary to rumour it doesn’t have a smaller footprint at least on this system but I would only expect that to be evident on very small\low powered sytems if it is true and this is not one of those systems.
• IE8 is pants, nuff said.

So overall it seems like far more pluses than minuses and there are some very, very interesting things hinted at in the features that have been exposed at this stage.

Top Gears Electic Car Tests

I was very happy to see Clarkson & Co get stuck into testing some real electric cars in last Sundays episode of Top Gear but like many I suspect I was disappointed that the Tesla failed to withstand their thrashing on the track. To be fair though I was impressed that the Stig managed to get it to post a time that beat the 911 GT3. We're still on the bleeding edge of electric vehicle technology but it seems that good electric cars might now actually be possible even if they aren't quite there yet.

I was rather disappointed with the final segment where James May sang the praises of Hydrogen Fuel Cells without actually taking the time to be the nit picking pedant that I know he can be and in the process failed to identify the major flaws in the arguments being put forward by the Hydrogen Economy evangelists. I'd love it if they were right but frankly I can't see H2 being the answer to our fuel problems. Fuel Cells are wonderful technical marvels but those that use H2 are hamstrung by the fact that H2 is godawful stuff from a mechanical and practical perspective.

So while I appreciated the praise of Fuel Cells in the segment I can tell you now with 100% confidence that we will never see Hydrogen as a common vehicle fuel in our lifetime, it will certainly never be used as a direct replacement for petrol\diesel in an internal combustion engine (H2 combustion is fine but suffers from the same Carnot cycle inefficiencies as all other internal combustion engines so it's a dead end IMO) or (as is the case with the Honda) as a fuel source for direct electric conversion fuel cells.

My initial reaction to the aricle was that I was disappointed that they didn't dig into how much the Honda's fuel-cell\H2 containment system cost\weighed and how long it could store it's full tank of fuel because I suspect both answers would have been very disappointing. Also while the Tesla might take 16 hours to charge, at least you can get electricity in most places - H2 fuel pumps exist in about 4 places on the planet so good luck if you are an early adopter outside of SoCal, Iceland or Germany. That detail was entirely glossed over.

And then (as I tend to, I got carried away ranting to myself) so in case anyone is still reading here are my arguments against Hydrogen as a vehicle fuel.

Hydrogen may be ultra clean, carbon free and able to fill a pressurized fuel tank in three minutes but it has a couple of insurmountable or damn near insurmountable problems:

1) Density and by direct correlation Energy Density. Pound for Pound (or kilo for kilo for the metric inclined) it's more energy dense than (say) petrol by a factor of just over three (so three kg of H2 has as much potential chemical energy as 1 kg or so of petrol) but in terms of volume it requires a _lot_ of space. A kg of Petrol takes up about 1.3 litres of space, a kg of liquid hydrogen takes up about 14.5 litres of space. The problem with liquid H2 is that it needs to be either cryogenically stored or stored under immense pressure. The best pressure\cryogenic H2 fuel storage systems weigh about 10x what a fully loaded tank of petrol weighs that would contain the same amount of convertible energy. That additional weight and volume alone make H2 uneconomical.

2) H2 does not transport or store easily. Look at any rocket on a launch pad - the plumes of vapour that comes off those is a combination of the O2 (at -173C) and H2 (at -250C) boiling off because it is just not practical to keep them well enough insulated or pressured to avoid boil off. Petrol\oil evaporates at room temperature but at about 1 billionth the rate that O2 does and about 100x less again than H2 does. 

3) To make H2 you still have to have power in the first place and creating H2 from cracking water is not an efficient process (25-40% at best) no matter how efficient your initial energy generation is. It's a hard thing to do, hard in the sense that it wastes energy that ends up not being recoverable from the Hydrogen that you produce so it's vitally improtant to tackle this part of the system honestly. Ironically almost all of the commercially produced hydrogen today is produced by steam reformation of hydrocarbons so basically at the moment most hydrogen comes from oil that has the Carbon removed (and vented as CO2\CO into the atmosphere) by combining it with steam produced by (you guessed it) burning oil, coal or gas which gives it about 2-3x the carbon footprint of just burning petrol in the first place. Interestingly some nuclear power plants can actually generate "clean" H2 rather than electricity but then all of us nucleophobes will have to change our minds about nukes to embrace that method of generating fuel for cars (mind you, mine is pretty much changed already, sorry Greenpeace).

4) Compressing H2 into a liquid (or freezing it, it's basically the same process) adds a not insignificant additional power burden to the process because of the difficulties in reaching -250C or 700-1000 atmospheres of pressure _and_ keeping the damn stuff in that state while you store it and move it across continents.

5) An accident involving a H2 fueled vehicle has a non trivial chance of being an instant bomb. It is quite simply not a safe fuel. Sure much has been done to make more robust fuel tanks but right now I would no more get into a car on a public road with a H2 tank in the boot than I would play Russian Roulette with a revolver with 6 full cylinders. Especially on roads full of the sort of people who need to be reminded that objects in their mirrors may be closer than they seem. Safer H2 fuel tanks == stronger tanks == heavier tanks == more expensive tanks and no doubt they are making huge progress there but all of those efforts detract from efforts that should be being made into making the fuel delivery and conversion processes more efficient. And most importantly those safe but big,heavy and bulky fuel tanks make the vehicles they serve significantly more inefficient at the point where it matters most - on the road.

6) James May claimed that in the glorious fuel cell'ed future he foresaw of the car with no moving parts (eh? what about the wheels? suspension? high pressure\cryogenic fuel pumps?!!)  would need no servicing but any vehicle that has a high pressure (700 atmosphere) fuel tank containing the smallest molecules in the universe (and that are explosive when leaked into our atmosphere) is effectively a dormant bomb and as such will need very, very careful proactive maintenance on a very regular basis in order to avoid turning into an actual bomb. 

7) Long distance (more than a couple of km) bulk H2 transportation systems leak about 70-90% of the initial H2 because the molecule is so bloody small and the pressures are so high that it just leaks out of every single joint, valve and connection like water through a leaky tap. Stored H2 in cylinders escapes at about 10x the rate that more normal gases (like CO2\N2\O2 do), the tanks have to weigh more and are so burdened with transportation restrictions due to safety concerns that I cannot see that anyone will ever produce an economical H2 version of our large scake existing petrol distribution mechanism. The physical challenges involved in storing and transporting liquid H2 are not the sort of things that lend themselves to massive changes due to innovation and unless it can be made 10x or more easier (ie cheaper) it will not be efficient enough to be realistic.

That said I do think that the Fuel Cell car idea is the right track but the "clean" power source of the near term future is far more likely to be Fuel Cells powered by methanol ( which is basically just another hydrocarbon). In the fuel cells themselves it runs to about 30-50% the efficiency of pure H2. The fuel handling mechanics are vastly simpler - there's no need for cryogenic\high pressure storage at any stage in the proiduction\distribution chain and the fuel can be stored\transported as simply and for as long as petrol. The challenge is producing methanol cheaply from air - again all you need is power at the front end (to convert 2 CO2 and 4 Water molecules into 2 CH2OH molecules and 3 O2 molecules just add enough power)  and you have an energy storage fluid that is totally "clean" given that you got the components from the atmosphere in the first place. From the numbers that I've seen methanol will always be 2-3x easier to produce from scratch than H2. Note in both cases the "fuel" is really just a transportation mechanism for energy produced elsewhere so where that initial energy comes from is the real green challenge in any case.

Another couple of source fuel options for fuel cells are either Hydrides (in some liquid or fluid powdered form) or Hydrated Clathrates (ie somewhat frozen slushies of some material with lots of H2 dissolved in them) that might beat out petrochemicals but given that liquid petrol (or methanol) contains about 50% more hydrogen atoms (at 116g of H atoms) per litre than pure liquid H2 (at about 70g of H atoms per litre) I honestly cannot see anything better than the evil petrochemicals at storing energy that will be chemically extracted from Hydrogen. And again the clathrates\hydrates need some practical source and distribution mechanism for the raw H2 that they contain and so share many of raw H2's drawbacks. They dont look like winners to me but at least they have some good answers to the worst of H2's problems.

Finally the FCX Clarity that James May waxed lyrical about has a total H2 storage capacity of 5kg of compressed H2 (about 171 litres at 350 atmospheres pressure) in a car weighing 1.7tons.  The fuel cell generates 100kw (134 horsepower) although it does so with a conversion efficiency about 3x a typical car's ability to turn petrol into power so the 5kg of H2 is equivalent to about 45 litres of Petrol. The Fuel Cell alone though is insufficient to power the vehicle in a sustained sense so it too includes a couple of hundred kg of the LiION batteries to store additional juice so that it can actually climb hills and actually accelerate so in that sense it is hampered by the weight of those fat batteries that the lads had so much trouble with in the Tesla. I've tried to find out the total mass of the fuel storage\handling\fuel cell of the FCX but Honda haven't made that easy to find, I suspect it's more than 60% of that total mass though. By comparison the the Tesla can convert energy to deliver about 248 hp (185kw) at the wheels and weighs in total about 1.1 tons. 

Personally I don't see that the difference between the two is as much of a quantum leap as the lads made out - what it needs is a runabout scale DMFC to replace about 25% (say 50-60bhp) of those batteries, a battery improvement of about 25% in efficiency and possibly a bank of improved ultra-capacitors to capture a higher percentage of regenerative braking power to turn it into an actual practical car running on a practical fuel which the FCX will never be while at the same time being a reasonable sports car. And of course a drop of 75% in the price tag will have to happen whether we're talking about the FCX, the Tesla or any of the others in the current array of first generation genuine electric cars.

Even without any major improvements in efficiency a DMFC (Direct Methanol Fuel Cell) would be about 2-3x less energy efficient at the fuel cell point (20-30% vs 40-60% for an efficient pure H2 Fuel Cell) but H2 has the transport and storage losses that are as I've said somewhere from 70-90% whereas methanol has transport\storage losses measured in the fractions of a percent over continent wide delivery distances and months of time so unless someone comes up with a magic way to handle H2, something like Methanol will easily beat out H2 as long term sustainable fuel. And it's just as safe as petrol and can be delivered using the same infrastructure too.

Just my 2cents.  Well 2002 cents I suppose. Now I need to get back to reading about SAN storage and earning a living.

More on the Porsche VW Corner

The BBC has a very succinct description of why those holding VW Short positions found themselves up the creek without a paddle:

What is upsetting the hedge funds is that if between 10% and 15% of VW shares were on loan to be shorted and only just over 5% were available in the market, it is likely that many of the funds that shorted VW had borrowed the shares from Porsche.

It meant that because Porsche had not declared the proportion of VW shares it controlled, traders may have been indirectly and inadvertently borrowing shares from Porsche, selling them to Porsche, buying them back from Porsche and then returning them to Porsche.

More from the BBC article here.

They left out the “and lose €25 billion in the process” part of that share swapping exchange.

And it gets even better. The best part of this may well be that even though Porsche has just eliminated a large number of their potential customers they are probably not too worried since, as The Irish Times points out, they have made three times as much money in the last few years trading options with the Hedge fund managers than they made from selling the cars that those managers so love to buy.

The Porsche Corner

I first got wind of this from Brad DeLong’s comment on those who don’t learn from history are forced to repeat it.. Very true.

Porsche have managed to pull off quite an amazing stunt on the financial markets. They have been trying to take control of Volkswagen for the past few years and have been steadily acquiring more shares with a stated objective of gaining control of 50% of VW. This has been well known and Porsche’s execution of their plan was no particular secret. What was not known until earlier this week is that Porsche clearly went into overdrive recently and by the start of the week they had control of ~74.1% of VW’s shares (30.1% were in options they had acquired without anyone noticing). Of the remainder, 20.1% is owned by the State of Lower Saxony so this only left about 5% of shares actually available to anyone. Meanwhile quite a number of Hedge funds had taken significant short positions in VW (totally somewhere between 12.5 and 16% of the total volume of VW shares) assuming that their share price would be falling given the imminent recession, current market conditions and all the other perfectly valid reasons for thinking such things. Unfortunately they weren’t watching Porsche (or the overall net position of VW options either) closely enough. Once Porsche announced that they either owned or had controlling interest in over 74% of VW the holders of those shorts realized that 16 into 6 doesn’t go and had to scramble to acquire the shares they needed to ensure they could close out their short positions as quickly as possible – and since there weren’t enough to go round VW’s stock price took off like a rocket – it rose by 348% in just two days going from €278 to over €940. That latter price made VW briefly the most valuable company in the world as measured by Market Capitalization (at $376bn). Clearly that was an artificial situation but it’s pretty incredible that a relatively small company like Porsche (market Cap about €10bn) could be the owner of almost 3/4 of the worlds biggest company just by pulling off a stunt (albeit a very shrewd and well prepared one).

And now for the best bit. Today Porsche indicated that they might settle 5% or so of the 31% of VW’s shares that it holds options on in order to “increase the supply of shares”. VW’s stock price plummeted to €517 on that news  which is no surprise as the previous days closing astronomical price was solely caused by lack of supply forcing the Hedge funds to bid up in order to limit their losses. Still that 5% will probably more than cover the entire cost of the exercise for Porsche. And also note that that only covers about half those with short positions so in order to close out the shorts a lot of those shares are going to have to change hands subsequently amongst those holding the current short positions. Talk about Porsche having their cake, eating it, then making you pay for it and forcing you to pay for it again.

There are lots of folks crying foul over this – not least all the Hedge Funds that have been burned to the tune of a collective €100bn or more. Then again they really should have done their homework better. I notice that apart from the pure Hedge funds there are also some familiar high profile actors from the recent broader financial drama that are also prominent players on this particular stage – viz Societé Generale, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Those guys are really having a bad year.

More details here:

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/10/the-wolfsburg-c.html (a follow up from Brad DeLong)

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601100&sid=ahJ1LlQc4gKs&refer=germany

and earlier

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/engineering/article5033654.ece

http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/081028/business_us_financial_banks_volkswagen.html?.v=1

and some history from last year with a fairly technical article that shows how well planned this Porsche assault on VW had been

http://seekingalpha.com/article/57504-porsche-ag-s-volkswagen-takeover

It’s especially interesting to see how Porsche have mostly funded this entire exercise through trading VW options. That they were able to consistently make money doing that and at the same time create a climate where they could corner the market without all the other market experts noticing is nothing short of brilliant.

European Banking teeters on the edge

I came across interesting (in the chinese sense) numbers on Leverage Ratios for European banks in an article at Vox last week (the original is here ). The highlight quote is:

The key problem on this side of the Atlantic is that the largest European banks have become not only too big to fail but also too big to be saved. For example, the total liabilities of Deutsche Bank (leverage ratio over 50!) amount to around 2,000 billion euro, (more than Fannie Mae) or over 80 % of the GDP of Germany. This is simply too much for the Bundesbank or even the German state to contemplate, given that the German budget is bound by the rules of the Stability pact and the German government cannot order (unlike the US Treasury) its central bank to issue more currency. The total liabilities of Barclays of around 1,300 billion pounds (leverage ratio over 60!) surpasses Britain’s GDP. Fortis bank, which has been in the news recently, has a leverage ratio of "only" 33, but its liabilities are several times larger than the GDP of its home country (Belgium).

Fortis got hacked apart yesterday, who’s next?

For a view of something closer to home (for my two Irish readers) Bank of Ireland’s overall leverage was around 27 as of last year sometime and AIB was around 18. So they’re not quite as bad as some of the worst in Europe but if they were to go catastrophically bust it would sting quite a bit. BoI lists its total “assets” as being $251bn (say €180bn at the going rate) or thereabouts. If I’m understanding such things correctly (and I may not be, feel free to correct me in the comments) then their leverage ratio means they have about €6.5bn in actual liquid capital with about €174bn hanging out in the wind in various financial products if they were to start to unwind. That’s coincidentally close to the GDP of Ireland but at least we have the ECB to help bail us out if something goes badly wrong. Thankfully the Europeans like us because we’re such good Europeans, oh hang on a tick didn’t we just vote no on something to do with that?

Also note that I’m amazed that even though the ISEQ is just continuing down a 2 year long slide from it’s peak of around 10K to its latest close at around 3200 that our glorious local stock market has evaporated 68% of its value in a mere 24 months. Makes Wall Street and the Dollar look like ace performers at the moment.

iPhone 2.01 Firmware Update

So just as I get ready to recap on my iPhone 2.0 firmware review with some comments on whether the 2.01 release was any good, Apple comes out with version 2.02. Anyway I’ve decided to hack away with my impressions of 2.01 and I’ll come back in a week or so with a more comprehensive look at 2.02. Basically I noticed some improvements in 9 of the 15 areas I’d tagged as buggy in 2.0 which isn’t a bad hit rate for a 0.01 point release. I still have some problems though and 2.02 hasn’t fixed the worst of them for me at any rate.

The Good:

EDGE Performance. This might just be due to O2 improving their network but EDGE download speeds have definitely improved. Overall latency\responsiveness of web pages doesn’t appear to be improved but I just downloaded a 1.6Meg Excel Spreadsheet and it only took about 60 seconds (say 200kbps, possibly helped by being nicely compressible) which is way better than I’d expected. I can’t say when exactly this happened but four weeks ago I was seeing 50-100kbps when I checked. Latency still sits in the 100’s of milliseconds range so most web pages take an age to handshake through all the ads no matter how fast the download rate is but 200kbps is a respectable rate for EDGE.

SMS\E-Mail Typing Speed. Fixed ! Yay! Well mostly fixed at any rate, I’ve seen it happen again but I suspect that was due to the  app installer problem detailed below.

Sluggish Contacts. Mostly fixed – there is still a 2-3 second start up delay if you have Exchange Contacts enabled but the general bowl of jelly effect is fixed.

Network Roaming – haven’t been able to test international roaming but my iPhone has been much better at handling cell-cell handovers since V2.01. That might be O2 improving their network but I think it might be the iPhone. Either way I’m happy.

General System Speed. I think this has been improved a bit but it’s a subjective thing and I can’t be certain.

General System Lock ups. Definitely rarer but not eliminated. At a guess we’re back to V1.14 firmware levels of stability which is a step in the right direction.

Safari Crashes. Full crashes don’t appear to be as common. Basic Safari page Amnesia behavior is unchanged.

App Crashes. Rarer but that may be the updated versions of the apps and not 2.01. The crashes may well have been entirely due to the app developers to be fair.

Push Mail Battery Life. I haven’t exhaustively tested this but it does seem to be better – getting more than a full working day from the iPhone now.

The Bad:

2.01 was only a bug fix release so it’s no surprise that the major features that were missing as far as I was concerned, are still missing: Cut and Paste, Contact Groups, Password\Credential Management, SIM Card Contact Export, Background apps, landscape view for built in messaging apps.

WiFi Hotspot Compatibility. No real change but the release of a helper app for Eircom WiFi Hotspots might go some way to resolving this for me and others in Ireland.

Time Zone Detection: No change, but this is a minor problem.

 

The Ugly:

App Store – Installation is now significantly worse. Apps lock up during the “installing” phase and can take anything up to 5 minutes to transition from “Downloading” to Installed. I’ve seen a handful of resets happen during installs too which is very poor. Overall the iPhone Application Installer has to be the worst example of a platform software management service that I’ve ever come across – Windows 1.0 did a better job of it. God help you if you need to make or receive an urgent call while an app is installing. Note – just checked this with 2.02 and it looks like I still have an issue - Bejeweled 2 (8.6Meg) took 30 seconds to download over Wifi and has now been “Installing” for 20 minutes with no sign of any genuine progress, I suspect I will have to “reboot” the poor beastie yet again.

General App Store\App Management issues remain.

Sync Speed – No change, total pants.

iTunes 7.7. Well that hasn’t changed and it’s still a pig. That said when combined with the TuneUp plugin I was able to clean up and polish my entire music library so that everything is now sorted, correctly named, displays with the appropriate art work, fully tagged with accurate metadata in mp3-tags and all the dupes have been removed. So while it is a pig, and an unforgivably slow pig at that it’s got some good points.

 

Additional things about the iPhone that bug me, a lot.

Yet again I have to emphasize that I love my iPhone but you have to be open and honest with the ones you love and well the iPhone, it has some warts and I was reminded of a couple more since my last post

E-Mail Attachments. You can view a range of attachments (Word, PDF, Excel, Powerpoint (?), MP3, AAC, TXT, HTML …..) but you can’t do anything with them beyond look. I got sent an MP3 that I wanted to use as a ring tone and all I could do was play it within the e-mail client, I couldn’t even save it into my music library for later playback as part of a play list. You have no way of saving an attachment for later use, or for making any real use of any attachment apart from viewing it while it’s still in your inbox. That’s just basically ridiculous.

[Not] Running apps in the Background. Apple may have an argument against leaving apps run CPU or other resource intensive threads in the background but I’m getting really sick of having to completely re-launch apps just because I wanted to quickly check a new e-mail, answer a call or some other typical activity that I need to do quite often. Good old fashioned DOS used to handle this better. This behavior makes the Windows Mobile way of doing things (ie never really shut anything down) look inspired, and while I hated that approach when I had to work with it I have to say it is vastly superior to the iPhone’s policy of killing anything that loses focus. I’m certain that virtually all iPhone app developers are screaming with rage over this, I know that as a user I’ve begun to stop using some apps because they just take too long to restart after being unloaded due to my needing to attend to an incoming e-mail or call.

Ringer Volume. Can’t remember why I forgot this before – I often miss calls because I don’t hear the iPhone ringing even when it’s on max volume+vibrate. The 3G apparently fixes this and it’s probably a hardware issue.

Reboot Time. I did this a good few few times because the whole phone appeared to have died during application installs. As it turns out the phone wasn’t completely hung, it was just that the app installer takes forever to do its thing and it basically prevents you doing much else while it’s busy. Anyway a “reboot” AKA a soft reset takes anything up to 5 minutes on my iPhone and that is so bad it’s laughable. I’ve never seen any other personal computing device take anything near as long to boot when it was healthy. Hell, I can hard reset and fully rebuild most Windows Mobile devices with an array of applications from scratch in less time.

WiFi Security Defaults. The iPhone’s WiFi work very well and are so good that you tend to forget about them but they are awfully promiscuous if you are not careful. You can turn them off but frankly I think that its WiFi should be a lot less “open” to connecting to what it thinks are “friendly” WLAN’s. The recent DefCon conference had a special call out wall for iPhone users who’s credentials were stolen by the various “unfriendly” but entirely open WLAN’s that were specifically set up at the conference to snarf victims who were careless enough to leave WLAN enabled devices running in any sort of open mode, and the iPhone was top of that list this year. Now the iPhone’s WiFi stack is amazing for the most part – it’s the best WiFi client for usability that I’ve come across on any computing platform of any type and it’s superbly power efficient – but it needs to be a bit more cautious about its approach to open networks, especially since Safari’s handling of cached credentials is so poor.

Safari. Selecting links has one behavior and it’s stupid by default – your focus is stolen and a new “tab” is opened so you sit staring at an empty page for 30-60 seconds while it downloads. This needs to be controllable and it must be possible to select a link (or links) and have them spawn and populate in the background so that you don’t lose focus and can keep yourself entertained while the links download. That said the current version of iPhone Safari appears to be able to complete the download of tabbed content even when they don’t have the focus so this does appear to be halfway to where I’d like it to be.

Also I really like to be able to download and save arbitrary files to local storage. Seriously Steve, I don’t care if you don’t want to save CrispyFries.MXR on your iPhone but I’d like to be able to save a copy on mine if I choose to, thanks all the same.

World Clock. Why can I set a time zone for Cork  (population 200 thousand ) but I can’t set it to “Johannesburg” (population 10 million) ? Is it that hard to do an online lookup ?

Living with the iPhone 2.0 Firmware

I love my iPhone so the following complaints need to be read as the constructive criticism of an avid fan but that being said there are some major headaches with the initial release of the iPhone 2.0 firmware. I’ve had to rely on my iPhone heavily as both a phone and as my only connected computing device over the past 10 days and by and large it has performed the job superbly, far better than any other phone I’ve ever owned could have I should point out but some of the issues have begun to seriously get under my skin.

Glaring Omissions:

The lack of “Cut and Paste” and basically any significant text editing capability (selecting large blocks of text for deletion or other actions) is just plain stupid. I’ve been reduced to using a pen and paper to make use of phone numbers sent to me by text message, and had to resort to the same stone age approach when trying to make use of other data sent to be via e-mail when I needed to use it elsewhere (passwords for my eReader account and Funambol for example).

The lack of structured contacts that correspond with the structured e-mail account layout. If you set up Exchange E-mail then your private contacts will be deleted unless you have jumped through some hoops first to make sure that you can recover them.

The lack of Groups (Distribution Lists) within Contacts…

The inability to save contacts to your SIM card or to somewhere else. Funambol have sorted that out pretty well but it’s a major flaw especially since the iPhone carrier here in Ireland, O2, provide a contact back up service for all phones apart from the iPhone.

The lack of a landscape view in any of the messaging apps, the places where a larger keyboard would be most useful.

Password\Credential management. My iPhone has about 50 of my username\passwords for web pages stored somewhere in it now but I have no way of checking out which ones they are, selectively or entirely deleting them, or any way to set a master password for the browser to prevent someone with access to the phone itself from accessing the places those passwords control access to. The only option I have is to set an overall password for the iPhone itself which I don’t want to do as it seriously impacts usability.

Apps that can run in the background. Apple’s excuse for this is feeble and they clearly don’t allow it because it might enable classes of applications that would impact Apple’s own product offerings or those of some of their partner carriers. I think it’s very poor form on their part not to admit to that.

Bugs.

General System Speed. 2.0 is noticeably slower than 1.4 at almost everything. It feels as if the device has had it’s CPU slowed down by about 25%.

General system lock ups. These were always an intermittent problem but thankfully I’ve seen only a handful on the original firmware over the three months I used it. With 2.0 I see a total system lockup once every day or so and they are a major pain to clear as the iPhone attempts to restore it’s working state when you shut it down completely and restart it.

Safari now crashes more than it used to. Safari has always had a tendency to just disappear if it hits a page it dislikes, and had major problems remembering your history if you drilled down through a sequence of links. This was most obvious, and most irritating, in Google Reader where Safari would forget the contants of your Reader view if you clicked through a link to read a full article or just follow an embedded link. Once you return to Reader you find that the article you were reading has now disappeared since Google reckons you’ve read it and Safari has forgotten you had it open so it just reloads the current state from Google.

The Safari crashes that I’m now seeing are more severe though – it locks up totally regularly and I’ve seen a situation twice now where the small thumbnail view used for browsing between actively open pages gets stuck permanently as an overlay. This can only be cleared via a full reset.

Application crashes. These are probably the app developers fault more than Apple but since Apple provide almost no diagnostic capability with regard to what’s running on the iPhone at any one time it’s hard to tell. There you are either launching or using an app and suddenly it disappears. In some cases it appears that the app has simply vanished into the background but in most cases it has completely died.

Push Mail battery life. Apple have managed to implement a push mail capability that delivers mail exactly as instantly as it should but it murders battery life even when you are receiving no e-mail in a way that the native Direct Push capability on Windows Mobile does not. Microsoft’s approach of keeping a session open by creating a huge TTL on the connection between the phone and the server while at the same time allowing the GPRS\UMTS\CDMA radio to suspend itself has clearly not been shared with Apple and it means that the Push service is not really usable. I get about six-eight hours of battery life with Push mail enabled without using the phone for anything and with no email being delivered, if I make a few short (<10 minute) calls and get a handful (say 20) e-mails then that time drops down to about 5 hours. Very poor.

The app store and application delivery. Apple had major problems with the Store when it started but those have now been resolved and it works the way they want to now. While it’s easy enough to use in its most basic sense it’s nearly impossible to find stuff within it as the Search function fails to see many of the applications for some reason. Once you have found what you want it downloads and installs apps cleanly the first time but if you have to reinstall them (say after deleting them or because the developer has released an update) it can get confused very easily. A series of updates to my apps got stuck because I lost WiFi connectivity and then refused to restart after I sorted that out. A full reset didn’t help and it took a sequence of steps where I deleted all apps and then reinstalled them in batches of five to get them all back. The real bummer about this is that once you have said that you want to upgrade an app the iPhone immediately disables the existing copy so I ended up losing access to my favourite apps for about two days when this happened.

Managing Apps. Application Management is very crude – you basically have a single flat list of all of your downloaded and installed applications and you have no way to set up any structure within that.

Sync Speed. Oh my God. Even with no music on the phone and only a handful of apps Syncing with iTunes was taking many minutes. Add in a few gig of music, a decent selection of larger apps and an average contact list and the default sync was taking 10-15 minutes – and it wanted to do that every time I connected the phone to my PC. Very poor.

SMS\E-mail typing speed. From time to time the text entry in SMS messages (and e-mails I think but I’m not 100% sure) slows to a complete crawl – when this bug kicks in it takes about 2-3 seconds for each letter typed to be acknowledged. You can actually continue typing ahead as fast as you like (up to the point where the letter highlight feature on the keyboard starts to get in the way) and it will remember all the keystrokes but it can take minutes to enter a short SMS when this happens.

Sluggish response from Contacts. Contacts seems to be permanently slowed down if you choose to enable Exchange E-Mail. There is an initial 5-15 second delay when you open Contacts up either in the phone, within an SMS or in an E-Mail and once it is open the responsiveness to touching the screen in order to navigate feels like you are trying to stir jelly. If I remove Exchange E-Mail the problem goes away.

Network Roaming. I’ve been doing this quite a bit lately and I have to say that the iPhone handles this very badly. It’s slow to realize that it’s in a new country and occasionally it flat out refuses to connect to any network unless you (once again) turn it completely off and start it up fresh.

Compatibility with WiFi Hotspots. So far I’ve found a sum total of one Hotspot provider (BitBuzz here in Ireland) where my iPhone actually worked and was usable.

Time Zone Detection. Despite having the phone set to automatically detect it’s time zone it completely failed to do so while I hopped across zones recently. On other phones it’s fair to say that this is a fault with the service providers as not all of them correctly send out the automatic Time Zone settings that are usually used for this but frankly a device with a built in location service that works that can’t use that information to correctly set it’s own time zone when the cellular network fails to deliver it is an embarrassment.

iTunes 7.7. What a pig of a piece of software. For some reason it refuses to import my music properly – it seems to barf when presented with a directory structure more than one level deep (I like to keep my music structured in folders by Artist and then Album). Once I get over that it has it’s deathly slow synchronization process which I just can’t understand. It seems to be impossible to easily migrate it from once PC to another (I wanted to shove iTunes into an XP VM all on it’s own and it flat out refused to give me a way to do that that didn’t involve dedicating an entire day to the process). The lack of effective keyboard navigation within the App Store in particular makes it quite annoying to browse around looking for stuff. And on top of it all it insists on making its own copies of my music for some reason even though I’ve asked it repeatedly not to – this may have been my own fault for wanting to keep my own music folder separate from Vista’s defaults but I’m determined to do that as Vista’s home directories (Music\Pictures\Videos etc) are seriously problematic for me because of the way they are built on joined directory structures that make it very difficult to back them up using tools like Robocopy.

 

All of the above referred to the 2.00 firmware release. I’ve just upgraded to the 2.01 firmware release and I’ll give it a few days to see how many of the above have been fixed.