Wednesday, October 22, 2008

A Small G1 Problem

One of the things I use a cell phone/PDA for is as a pocket library. The G1, however, has no word processor except for one online, which doesn't help in an airplane, although that problem is seupposed to be fixed realsoon now.

No problem. It has a browser. Save a book in HTML to the microSD card, read it on the browser.

Except that the browser can only access URLs, not files.

One other problem. When I try to write a blog entry, the G1 interprets anything I type as a google search.

Which is why this post is being written in the "edit HTML" tab of blogger.

9 comments:

Joe said...

Doesn't it accept "file://"?

Anonymous said...

See Neil Gaiman's blog
http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/10/fine-wensleydale.html

Batman said...

Clearly, I missed the memo that stated I had to blog on an airplane....

Anonymous said...

David, david, david...

You are quite a mind and I really do respect your ideas and writings.

With tehnology you are an idiot. You should have bought a genuine Nokia cellphone. For an example, Nokia E90 has all the data features you would ever need, and GPS. It has built in navigation platform where you can upload your maps before going to the specified country. And the maps are free and provided in the sales package.

If you like Google more, you can upload google maps as well to your Nokia.

E90 also has high speed data connection and wlan. Qwerty-keyboard for writing, altough I have to admit that the browser isn't the best in the market, but blog-writing can be done easily.

Best of all, it has "flight-mode" you can use your phone normally in the airplane but with no carrier. Phone send your messages and posts as soon as you land. Neat, huh?

David Friedman said...

In response to Anonymous:

1. My previous phone was a Nokia 9300.

2. I bought a Nokia E90--and returned it. It uses Symbion S60 instead of the S90 on the 9300. Among many problems, this means that its word processor takes about ten minutes to load a book length text and can only have one loaded at at time.

3. Its 3G connection is on 2100 MHz, which is not supported by any carrier in North America--describing it as a 3G phone on the Nokia.USA web page is blatant incompetence or deliberate fraud.

4. I discusssed my reasons for sending the D90 back on this blog some time ago.

5. The G1 has flight mode too.

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
eczajnik said...

I've been to your lecture yesterday (in Warsaw) and noticed that you used your nokia instead of the G1.

Why? :)

By the way, I found your lecture really inspiring.

David Friedman said...

Eczajnic asks why I used my Nokia 9300 (named, incidentally, IbnPsion) instead of my G1 for the outline I gave a recent talk in Warsaw from.

The reason is that the G1 currently has no word processor other than Google Docs, which can only be used when connected to the net, and connecting to the net in Europe is, for several reasons, not practical for me. Google is supposed to be solving that problem shortly but hasn't solved it yet. So all my talks in Europe were done using the 9300 to follow the outline of my talk.

I didn't write the outlines on the 9300; neither it nor the G1 has a really adequate keyboard. I started with outlines that I had on my baby laptop, edited them there, copied them to the flash card that goes in the 9300, and read them off it.

The result of the current deficiencies of the G1, at least for me under my circumstances, was that I was travelling with three cell phones. The G1 to experiment with--largely testing battery life and getting disappointing results. The Nokia as a pda. A very inexpensive European phone with a prepaid Sim so that people could reach me in Europe, and I could call, if necessary. I could have used the Nokia for that purpose too, and perhaps should have, but I would have had to get it unlocked, and that cost more than the cheap cell phone (net of the prepaid service).

+Miguel Vinuesa+ said...

Hi, Mr. Friedman. I loved the speech you delivered in San Pablo CEU University. You are clearly quite a character, and for people like me, who like economy but get easily lost in the jargon, it was nice to hear such a clear speech.

Thank you.

M.V.