I had the Samsung Galaxy S2 for three days but had to send it back because of unacceptable battery life, which only seems to affect some users. Below is a summary of my experience with the phone with its upsides and downsides.

Battery Life

Even with everything that makes the phone attractive turned off, the screen brightness kept down, 3G almost permanently off, WiFi only on when I was actively using it and all the battery saving options settings maxed out  (which are very extensive and helpful) I was still getting considerably less than a day on a full charge with normal light usage. I consciously did a full day with “normal” and not “excited new toy testing” usage and it was still unacceptably bad. I might have been just able to scrape by on this but I still can’t accept it — I want to be able to use the phone, and that means not constantly worrying about whether I can do something because of how much battery it might munch.

There seems to be a serious issue with battery life on the S2 for some users but not for others. Many are reporting outstanding battery performance, getting through nearly two days on a charge, others are having the same experience as I did. This may be related to the Android build. I had the KE2 Gingerbread build on mine, KE7 is supposed to be better. I couldn’t test that because O2 Germany had locked out updates on the handset and I didn’t want to root the phone within my narrow return window. I also didn’t want to risk waiting and no longer being able to return it. However, other users reporting the KE2-related problems were also reporting that Android System was accounting for over 40% of the battery drain and that definitely wasn’t the case for me, mine was just at around 14%, which sounds pretty normal.

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I’ve been using a Samsung Galaxy Tab for a few days, having received one as a Christmas bonus/incentive to develop website versions for tablets. This is my first experience with an Android device and my first tablet computer, although I’ve played with iPads quite a lot and I’ve had an iPhone 3GS for nearly two years. These are just my first thoughts and impressions.

The positive view:

Despite its rough edges, much due to Android 2.2, which is not really a tablet OS, the GTab is a wonderful portable device that has the potential to transform the way you access data on the go. It is radically more portable than the iPad in a critical mass way that makes it much more likely that you will have it with you and available when you want to use it. It has a clear, razor-sharp display that makes reading text a pleasure. Instant on and the ability to have it nearby all the time are already changing the way I access the Net and my data. The ability to read newspapers and magazines is amazingly convenient and eliminates the vague sense of guilt caused by all those dead trees piling up in the corner of the room every week.

The in-between screen size means that its success will depend on a lot of applications and web sites being optimized for it. At the moment, quite a few mobile apps are designed for smaller screens and most normal websites are designed for larger screens. That matters less than you might expect, however. Most of the time I find I get on fine with pretty much everything, and the optimization is happening quickly. An increasing number of online forums use Tapatalk, which makes them wonderfully accessible on devices like the GTab and modern smartphones.

The freedom compared to my iPhone is great. I listen to a lot of podcasts and I love being able to install free apps that automatically synch all my podcasts without having to link up to the desktop or laptop mothership. I also love being able to control everything, or install apps that can.

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Privacy online no longer exists and there is nothing at all you can do about it. In fact, everything you can try to do about it will just make it worse. While everyone and the media and their dog have all been screaming and shouting about privacy on Facebook, privacy and Google Street View and privacy on Blackberries and iPhones, the real battle has been going on very quietly in the background. The battle is now over, the war is over, the bad guys won and you have lost your privacy. All of it. And you never even noticed. Everything you do online is trackable. Everything, and it is happening now.

This post just summarizes what is going on. For the full details, listen to the Security Now podcast on “Side Channel Privacy Leaking” by Internet security expert Steve Gibson.

Your computer’s fingerprint is as unique as yours

This is made possible by what is called “computer fingerprinting” or “browser fingerprinting”. The idea is very simple: Your browser and computer have a  large number of characteristics that web pages need to know to be able to display the pages properly, and other characteristics that they don’t really need to know but that your computer shares anyway. Put all this information together, combine it with your computer’s clock time, your IP address range and a few other little items that are all freely available and it is generally possible to identify you with over 99% accuracy. None of these things can be switched off, any more than you can switch off your own fingerprints, height or eye color. Any changes you make to “protect” yourself will actually make it even easier to identify you, because it will make your computer even more easily identifiable.

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In a recent Twitter exchange Helen Emerson, a web designer I admire a lot, celebrated the fact that Internet Explorer 9 is finally going to support rounded corners. My feeling on this to this is that’s nice, but it would have happened a lot sooner if we web designers hadn’t hidden IE’s deficits by finding ways to make it display rounded corners anyway.

This is a general problem, and it’s the reason why web standards generally are still such a mess. Most users aren’t aware of this because we hide it from them. Everything seems to work fine in all browsers – as far as users are concerned we are living in an era of universally compatible browsers. Actually, we’re still a long way away from that.

If you look at the code of almost any modern web page you’ll find it full of workarounds that are necessary to make things work properly in different browsers. This applies particularly for Internet Explorer, which may have got better on the surface but still requires countless special solutions to get it to behave. Much of the work on any modern website is devoted to getting it to work in IE as well as in normal browsers.

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Apple still makes exceptionally good and cool products, many of which may be the best in their classes. That’s not the issue. Apple’s antenna problems with the iPhone 4 are negligible even seen on their own, and piffling when compared to the quality of the iPhone 4, which is an astoundingly good smartphone. That’s also not the issue. The issue is that Apple is becoming an increasingly obnoxious company that it’s almost impossible to like.

The iPhone 4 “Antennagate” fuss is a perfect example of Apple’s dysfunctional public persona. A couple of years ago leading CNET podcaster Molly Wood summed up the same observation in her classic Apple is my bad boyfriend rant, and things have been getting worse rather than better since then. You just can’t help getting the impression that this is a company that is being prevaricating, arrogant, slippery and disingenuous to and frequently beyond the point of dishonesty in almost everything they do.

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If you use both Mac and Windows you may have wished you could use your Mac TextExpander snippet files on your Windows computers or virtual machines. TextExpander radically speeds up your work if you often need to use the same text blocks, and having the same texts with the same hotstrings available on Windows makes life a lot easier.

This post provides a free Perl converter script and instructions for converting your Mac TextExpander snippet files so that you can use them on a Windows machine with the free, open-source AutoHotKey program. In addition to this I will show you how to manage your snippet files for multiple machines in a free Dropbox account. Dropbox is a much better solution for synching your snippets than MobileMe and if you combine these two strategies you’ll never have to worry about synching your snippets again – both on multiple Macs and across Mac and Windows machines (including Windows virtual machines in Parallels or Fusion).

Updated to 1.2 - click for details

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For a long time I was frustrated that I couldn’t access the media files on my Mac with my PlayStation 3, which has everything needed to be a great multimedia center, in addition to being one of the best BluRay players around (and incidentally allowing you to play some pretty good video games as well). Recently I discovered Nullriver MediaLink, which comes close to making Apple’s own AppleTV unnecessary. With one small but important restriction, MediaLink is a perfect solution for accessing all the media on your Mac on your TV. At just $20, it’s worth every penny and more.

The restriction? MediaLink can’t (yet) play anything with Apple’s copy protection on it, which means all movies, TV series and videos bought in the iTunes Store, in addition to any iTunes tracks you still haven’t converted to non-DRM. This is currently where the AppleTV still has a major advantage, but I’ve corresponded with Nullriver and they indicated that they’re working on a solution. My guess would be they want to somehow make it possible to register the PS3 as one of the up to five “computers” that are allowed to play your iTunes protected content. If and when they manage that, MediaLink is going to be the kickass solution for PS3/Mac integration.

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I’ve been playing around with Windows 7 for ever a week now and I have to say that this time Microsoft really got it right. It’s everything that Vista should have been and it’s probably the best operating system that Microsoft has ever produced. The only downside is Internet Explorer 8, which is worse than ever. Hopefully the errors are bugs, if not life is going to get a lot harder for web designers, yet again.

With Apple working so hard to piss off their users (matte screen on 17″ only and costs more, no more firewire on the Macbook, only one firewire port on the 15″, non-removable battery on the 17″) Windows 7 is a welcome breath of fresh air. If Apple don’t clean up their act I may be switching back to Windows machines again real soon.

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I’ve now been using Office 2008 for about five days and I’m already ready to remove it from my Mac. It is painfully, embarrassingly, frustratingly bad. Either the Microsoft Mac team screwed up completely and lost all track of what they were trying to do or Microsoft is consciously trying to force users away from the Mac and back onto Windows. Possibly a little bit of both. This isn’t just my opinion — c’t, Germany’s most reputable professional computer publication, comes out very strongly and warns all users against installing Office 2008 in their new issue due to be published on Monday.

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I just got a nifty little gadget from Gear4 called the BluEye that adds Bluetooth, an FM radio and a wired remote to my iPod Touch and effectively transforms it into a phone with voice dialing. When calls come in anything playing on the Touch is automatically paused and you accept the call by pressing Play on the remote. If your phone supports voice dialing you can use that too, you just press the Bluetooth button on the remote once and speak the name to dial. This means that you can leave the phone in your pocket pretty much all the time and you don’t miss calls because you’re listening to your iPod. You also have the added advantage of the wired remote, so you can pause, skip tracks and adjust the volume without having to futz around with the touchscreen.

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