1. September 2008: I won a Sagem MY721X “So Ice” for emailing Ben Smith “Ben Smith is the best presenter on Mobile Industry Review”.
2. December 2008: I won a Dell Mini 9 netbook from Mobile Industry Review’s Christmas Presents competition.
3. June 2009: I won a Nokia N97 from The Really Mobile Project’s WeekOfWin competition.
4. November 2009: I won a Sonim XP3 Land Rover phone from Mobile Industry Review.
5. June 2010: I won an HTC HD2 as part of a team entering Microsoft’s MyKindOfPhone competition.
6. Yesterday (July 2010): I won a Sony Ericsson X10 Mini Pro from SE’s “insiders” competition.

So please, forward me any phone competitions you hear about because I really like entering them!

Funnily enough. Even though I win so many phones, it doesn’t stop me buying another every time my contract runs out:

• 2005: HTC BlueAngel
• 2007: HTC Touch
• 2008: HTC Diamond
• 2009: HTC Dream
• 2010: HTC Desire

I really ought to sell one or two of these!

1. I installed “HTC Sync” from HTC’s official website
2. I followed the rooting  instructions over at http://desire.modaco.com
3. I downloaded ROM Manager from the Android Market
4. I used that to install the DeFrost ROM (currently v1.4)

That’s all. No risk. No worry about breaking things, it all just works.

What I’ve lost:

1. All the slow, ugly, bloated, HTC software
2. The ability to record video (for now, until the community find a fix)

What I’ve gained:

1. Lovely pure Android OS with no HTC intrusions
2. 3G -> wifi tethering and other similar little things from Android 2.2

That might not sound a lot, but the benefits for me are huge as it has a big impact on the most used applications:

1. The browser is nicer
2. The phone dialer is nicer
3. The SMS app is nicer
4. The home screen/launcher is nicer
5. The locked screen is nicer
6. OK, the whole phone is just nicer!

If you do like HTC Sense and Rosie and all that Facebook nonsense, then stick with the existing ROMs and wait for an official update hopefully some time in the next 6 months. If you want to have a phone with all the latest and greatest Android capabilities then I highly recommend doing an update.

UPDATE: The latest DeFrost versions already have a working video camera. Android community rocks!

This morning I posted to Twitter:

T-Mobile want to charge me £170 to upgrade to an HTC Desire. Yet another reason I’ll probably switch to Vodafone next month.

£170 for the upgrade, on a contract that was already costing me about £30 every month? No thank you very much.

People can say what they like about Twitter but it’s great when I start getting responses like these, it makes it a great place for me:

gavinlew: speak to @vodafoneukdeals for a good deal on a htc desire – there is a nice guy called Ben who is helping me out

artesea: if you want I can get you 30% the line rental on any (standard) tariff. Makes £35 a month only £24.50

VodafoneUKdeals: We can do the Desire FREE on 18 month 300mins unlimited sms and data for £30 all in [and] artesea’s staff discount would still be available on the £30 offer saving you even more! :-) ^BH

After a quick chat with Vodafone’s Web Relation team, they knocked that £30 monthly contract down to £25 and signed me up. With any luck, artesea (Ryan Cullen) will still be OK giving me that 30% staff discount too.

Here’s a random graph I thought I’d put together just for the fun of it:

Hooray for the interweb!

Seems OK.

Update: seems to work reasonably well on Android too (G1).

First up was the fact that Google Analytics historically never had very good mobile support. Even once that was in place, I had to mess about with Google’s PHP code to add support for Opera Mini’s proxy servers.

Then, once I had the tracking code in place and was starting to get some nice stats – I noticed a piece of text that I should have seen before I started anything:

5M pageview cap per month for non AdWords advertisers.

Whoops – Dabr has a lot more pageviews than that!

AdWords is their service where you pay Google to show adverts that point to your site. Of course I’ve had to sign up to this (at an initial setup cost of £10) and there should begin to be a few Dabr adverts appearing on websites around the web. I’ve even started getting a few clicks.

Google charges me with every click of those adverts, which is a little annoying, so I’ve set up AdSense too.

AdSense is the opposite of AdWords. It’s where I get to add other people’s adverts to my sites and I get a trickle of cash for doing so. Typically I’ve seen clicks earning me about 10p to £1 each, but clicks are fairly rare. I don’t (yet) know enough about CPM and those kind of fancy buzzwords to tell you any real figures. I’m sure I’ll blog something in the new year.

So now I’ve got the three A’s working nicely for Dabr:

• AdWords to bring in potential new users,
• AdSense to bring in a little cash,
• and Analytics to track site usage.

Thanks Google :)

Typically, Google’s way of tracking site usage is to ask you to put a small snippet of HTML onto your site which is essentially a javascript call to their servers. Great – except a lot of mobile phones don’t actually support javascript. So the only good solution is to run some code on the server. I don’t know if it’s related to Google’s purchase of AdMob, but they’ve done exactly that and provided server side code in various programming languages (C#, PHP, etc) to achieve this. See ga.php as a real example.

Great, now I’ve got beautiful graphs showing me how people use my site. But what’s that? 25% of my users live in the country (not set)? I’ve not heard of the place! It turns out those users more or less all used one browser: Opera Mini.

Oh Opera Mini, what a strange beast you are. While the Opera browser is a full normal browser, Opera Mini is a service that installs a thin client on your phone and Norwegian proxy servers visit the site for you. Norway? Well that’s a little better than living in (not set).

Luckily, this whole problem is fixed by a teensy change in their server side code. Rather than always fetching the browser’s current IP address, I tweaked Google’s PHP code so that it detects Opera Mini is in use and sends the real user’s IP address. To be honest, I’m a little confused why this isn’t in Google’s code in the first place.

So here it is. A minor fix to Google’s ga.php file (line 162) to improve Opera Mini handling:

Original line: "&utmip=" . getIP($_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"]);

and my version: "&utmip=" . getIP((stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'opera mini') && array_key_exists('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR', $_SERVER)) ? $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']: $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"]);

That’s all. Now I get real country stats :)

I want to upload them to the internet from my phone, and I’ve recently started appreciating Shozu, but I’ve not seen any official support for sending images from YFrog to Shozu from your phone.

Yesterday I dug a bit deeper and found that YFrog allowed e-mails of photos to be sent in. I tried setting that up with Shozu but it didn’t work. My suspicion is that it failed because my YFrog email address changed in the settings screen every time I tried to look at it.

My solution? PixelPipe. I don’t understand the S60 software at all, but they do provide an email upload address like YFrog do and I know that their YFrog upload routine works. All I have to do is point my Shozu account to e-mail my photos to PixelPipe and that service does the rest. Maybe not the most elegant way to upload pictures, but it works.

The G1?

With the G1 I have a smooth, clean, and fast experience that was designed from the start to be a touch screen interface to be used with your fingers (i.e. without a stylus). Combine that with the 5-row keyboard and I’ve got a device where I can type out very fast text messages and happily browse the internet.

Biggest negatives? The battery life is poor and the camera isn’t too hot.

The N97?

Within days of owning the N97 I had constructed a hefty list of niggles – fairly major problems that I was having with the device. There were 28 of them!

My main outstanding issues are simply summed up like this: the S60 operating system is terrible for a touch phone. A bit harsh? Maybe. The underlying issue is that Nokia have taken their usual OS and added a few touch features to it, ending up with an inconsistant mess that’s frustrating to use. Really, so bad that I packed the phone back in it’s box two days ago and wondered if I should sell it.

All is not lost though – the N97 really does kick G1 butt when comparing both the camera and battery.

Is that enough?

Today’s decision

The N97 simply does have better hardware. It may be frustrating for me to use but that doesn’t mean it won’t eventually do what I want. The G1 on the other hand will never take as good photos or remain charged for as long – it physically can’t.

That’s settled then, for now, the N97 has it’s new home in my right pocket and the G1 will stay in my rucksack, available as a backup and for any moments where I need the extra Google connectivity with it’s better GMail and GTalk clients.

Here’s a start of things that bug me so far. Please feel free to tweet/comment and set me straight on any of these issues:

1. I miss the HTC “back” button.
2. I don’t like the keyboard. There aren’t enough symbols easily accessible.
3. The on-screen input has no qwerty options like the 5800 has.
4. The browser refuses to remember my cookies. Something must have fixed this but now appears to work.
5. There’s no threaded SMS. There’s a third party app that can do threaded SMS (with some extra effort to sign it etc)
6. I miss Gmail. There’s an app for Gmail.
7. I can’t figure out if I should be single tapping or double tapping things – ending up with lots of times where I have to hit back.
8. Scrolling is inconsistent. The whole phone should use kinetic scrolling. Updated firmware has made this worse. Tiny unscrollable lists are now scrollable. And paging down by press below the scrollbar now skips many lines. It’s even more of a nightmare now.
9. The music player has less buttons than Android – specifically the ones I want to use without clicking through nested menus.
10. There’s no native YouTube app. Native YouTube app “coming soon”.
11. Nimbuzz, the IM client I was recommended does not automatically reconnect (it should by default).
12. The GUI elements around the active window are excessive. More so in widescreen mode. Notably: the browser and google maps.
13. The calendar should default to a month view, or make it easier to access. Clicking the date on the home screen opens month view. Clicking the calendar widget opens day view.
14. I miss the “Menu” key from the G1. Much more elegant than using up screen space.
15. I don’t like in-your-face dialogs all over the place telling me vital information such as “unplug your charger to save electricity”. Especially when the handset knows I just unplugged from Nokia suite, not a charger.
16. I don’t want to be harassed by countless network prompts. I just want the internet to work and switch behind the scenes when wifi is around.
17. I expect more default desktops, although I did like being able to switch to a black UI.
18. A recommended screenshot app took a vertical screenshot of a horizontal screen – missing out what I needed. Apparently I must start Best Screen Snap in the orientation I want to take screenshots in.
19. The phone crashed when I tried to enable a mysterious “offline mode”.
20. The video player could not play an MP4 I had downloaded from YouTube (via PC), which plays fine on G1.
21. Contacts with multiple numbers should allow one-click dialling, not yet another menu. Contacts can be given Defaults to speed up the process of calling and texting them.
22. I shouldn’t be constantly given the option to send a text message to someone’s house phone. See above
23. I don’t want to see a “Show open apps” menu item throughout the whole OS.
24. I really miss the (currently) much more standard mini USB port. Seems I need to stock up on micro USB leads/adapters.  At MWC 2009 in February a lot of operators all agreed micro USB was the way forward.
25. Error dialogs appear out of context. I just had an error on the home screen telling me to go to a non-existent Profiles menu.
26. When I get a text message, the screen turns on but gives me no indication that the screen is locked.
27. If I click a web link in a text message nothing happens. I have to use a menu to get to it.
28. The buttons in the browser decided to vanish during one browsing session (just the bookmark / go to URL buttons row). Had to restart the browser to get them back.

All is not doom and gloom! I do really appreciate:

• The hardware build quality feels better than the G1.
• The camera is much better.
• The FM transmitter is my new best friend.

… but that’s all. Really nothing else about the N97 impresses me so far.

1. Nokia 5120 – My first handset. It worked. It made calls. It sent texts. It was enough.
2. Nokia 3310 – It was smaller, cooler, played games, and was my first contract phone.
3. HTC BlueAngel (MDA III) – Windows Mobile, music, camera, big colour touch screen, WiFi, bluetooth and infrared. Amazing.
4. HTC Elf (HTC Touch) – While the BlueAngel rocks, it’s a brick. This phone is half the speed but also much smaller. I accepted that compromise but always hated the slowness.
5. HTC Touch Diamond – Still HTC, still Windows Mobile, but this time the screen was beautifully clear, I had 3G, GPS, a reasonable camera, and a much faster processor.
6. HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1) – Oh no, another brick! I debated with myself quite heavily about whether this was worth getting. The Android OS finally convinced me I wanted to switch. I’m a huge Google fan so this phone suits me really well.

In all I have 4 Windows Mobile devices. When upgrading between them I thought in terms of a PC: Processor speed, RAM, screen, etc. Sure they’re phones (except one), but they act very much like small PCs. The CPU and RAM were really important. I mention this because my ideal handset right now would be an Android phone that has a faster hardware and more memory. I don’t mind the size but I would prefer a better battery.

Now I’ve won a Nokia N97 and I don’t know how much I’ll like it.

Here’s the theory:

• it’s slower (434 MHz vs 528 MHz)
• it’s got less RAM (128 MB vs 192 MB)
• … but has a completely different OS
• a better camera (5MP carl zeiss lens vs 3MP)
• and a fairly kick-ass battery (1500 mAh compared to 1100 mAh)

The S60 operating system is going to be the deal breaker.