thewunderbar

The Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant for Bell Mobility is the newest, and highest spec’d Android Phone in Canada, and I have it.  The Galaxy S has some of the best specs that can be found in the mobile market right now.  A 1GHz Hummingbird processor, a 4” Super AMOLED display with a 480×800 resolution, 512MB of ram, and 16GB of internal storage, which is divided about evenly between application storage and media storage. There is also a MicroSD card slot to accommodate an additional 32GB of storage.  There is a 5MP autofocus camera that takes 720p video, but sadly lacking flash.  The Galaxy S from Samsung is actually a line of phones.  The Bell variant of the phone is based on the European version, which also means that it has a front facing camera, and looks different than the Galaxy S Vibrant released on T-Mobile in the USA. The phones at their core are the same, with several small differences.  The phone is almost completely devoid of physical buttons.  Only a power/standby, volume rocker, and home button are mechanical. The back and menu buttons are capacitive touch, and while are easy to press and find are not 100% responsive, though that is partly android’s fault.  There is a 3.5mm jack on top as well as a MicroUSB port, which is covered not by a rubber or plastic flap but actually a sliding door, which is frankly genius and I’m amazed no one has thought of this method before.  Under the battery cover is the afore mentioned MicroSD slot, the SIM card, and a 1500 maH battery.  I’m not a huge fan of having the microSD slot under the battery cover, but with 16GB on board I don’t even have one in right now, and unlike some phones you don’t have to remove the battery to get at the slot, so it’s not terrible. The phone comes with the basic accessories.  A USB cable, power adapter (that you plug the USB cable into), a stereo headset that surprisingly doesn’t suck, and a small quick start guide and warranty info.

To be frank, the Galaxy S is the best phone I have ever held and used.  I haven’t used an iPhone 4 yet, or one of the 4.3” phones (droid X and Evo 4G) that are currently US only.  The Galaxy S is very thin, thanks to the Super AMOLED display, which is 50% thinner than the previous generation.  That makes the phone, while large in the hand, still feel very small, which is appreciated.  The display itself is simply stunning.  Colours are extremely bright and vibrant, to the point where they almost pop out of the screen.  Video looks amazing, and I have watched several movies on the screen and am very impressed.  The screen is visible, if not stellar in direct sunlight. It’s certainly good enough to make a phone call, but I wouldn’t try to read a novel.

This phone is, in a word, fast.  That is largely thanks to it’s 1 GHz processor.  It is leaps and bounds beyond any phone I have ever used, including the Palm Pre, and the BlackBerry Tour 9630 I currently use for work.  In my limited experience using an iPhone 3GS, I can say that the Galaxy S is faster than that as well.  Apps launch nearly instantly, I encountered very little slowdown, and the phone was able to do everything I threw at it, including some gaming, without breaking much of a sweat at all.  When I stop and think about it it really blows my mind where technology is at.  The first computer I ever used at school had a 90 MHz Pentium processor, and 800MB HDD, and 32MB of ram.  the first computer my parents purchased was a Pentium Pro 200MHz with 32MB of ram and 4GB of storage.  Now I hold a phone in my pocket that surpasses that in every way, and then some.

the Galaxy S currently runs Android 2.1 with Samsung’s TouchWiz 3.0 interface on top.  This is my first experience with Android, and I have never played with a stock install of Android, so I can’t really compare it to stock, but overall I do like Samsung’s interface on the phone.  It is plainly obvious that they went for an iPhone clone look, and it works well enough.  Instead of only a phone icon and app launcher on the bottom, there is a “home row” of icons like the iPhone, as well as the app directory, instead of being a vertical scrolling list, is a grid screen of 4×4 icons that scroll horizontally, just like the iPhone.  While it’s not a bad thing, I just wish the cloning wasn’t so obvious.  The home row of icons comes by default from left to right as Phone, messaging, contacts, and an “applications” button that brings up the application list.  The Phone and applications buttons are not customizable, but the messaging and contacts are.  I replaced the contacts icon with Twidroyd, my twitter client.  I completely understand making the app button static, but I really wish I could move the phone icon off the home row, as I rarely use the device to actually make calls.

On the Galaxy S I have 7 home screens, with the “main” screen being on the far left.  I wish I could make that the middle screen, but there doesn’t appear to be a way to do so.  I’m still learning how to mix having widgets and app shortcuts on my home screen, and while I do enjoy having a few widgets, am trying not to go overboard with them.  for example, I have a widget for Twidroyd that lets me put in a quit tweet, as well as one touch access to doing a twitter search, but I find myself out of habit opening the app normally first.  I figure I’ll either get used to having a widget for that or eventually just remove the widget altogether.  Overall I am very impressed with Android.  When comparing it to WebOS, I would put them about par.  WebOS handles multi-tasking and notifications better, but Android I believe overall has more customization options and features.  Samsung has said that a update to Android 2.2 is coming in September for all Galaxy S phones, I hope Bell is on board with that.  There are custom ROM’s floating around with 2.2 for the Galaxy S already, though I haven’t taken that leap yet.

The last comment I want to make software wise has to do with the Android Market.  the WebOS app catalog, as of a week ago when my pre died, had about 2500 apps available.  I was mostly happy with what was there, and about 80% of what I wanted was available, so I didn’t’ care so much.  After a week looking through the android store, I can say that the difference is night and day.  Not only are all the apps I was missing on WebOS there, there are even more I never even thought of.  I’m really enjoying discovering new functional apps and using my phone in ways I frankly couldn’t with WebOS.

New app discovery is also probably my biggest pain point with the Android Market though.  Unless you know exactly what you are searching for, looking through the directory is painful.  I imagine this was manageable when there were only a few thousand apps, but now that there are 70,000+, finding something that it outside of the top 50 in any category, or something not brand new, is very hard.  I hope that Google eventually addresses that issue.

That being said, this is still one of the best phones on the market, and in my opinion the best phone on Bell right now, unless you are really hell bent on getting an iPhone.  My opinion is that if you want an iPhone, you’ll end up with that.  And if you don’t, the Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant is the best phone that money can buy in Canada right now.  With Bell recently discontinuing the HTC Legend it is quite frankly a no brainer.  The closest competitors to the Galaxy S are the Motorola Milestone on Telus (already nearly a year old however, and the successor is already out in the USA), and the Xperia X10 on Rogers, which, while similarly spec’d, is only running Android 1.6 and it is not clear if Sony will be upgrading it to 2.1.  The X10 also lacks Multitouch.  Rumours are flying that Rogers will be releasing a version of the Galaxy S similar to the Captivate model on AT&T in the USA soon, but until then the Galaxy S Vibrant is simply without peer in Canada.

Should you buy this phone?  In a word, yes.  It is that good.  Unless you really want an iPhone, or really don’t want to switch to Bell, the Galaxy S Vibrant is the phone to get in Canada.  If you are on Rogers and can wait a few more weeks, you’ll likely soon have your own Galaxy S option, and Telus right now does not have anything on the radar to match.  If you want the best phone today, this is the phone to get.

You can find more pictures of the Galaxy S Vibrant here.

You can see examples of pictures taken with the Galaxy S here, and here. Note that the low light photos are not fantastic, and I have taken some very good pictures with it, just none that I was able to put on flickr at time of publish

An example of a 720p video taken with the Galaxy S can be found here.

I’ve finally finished uploading pictures and videos I took at Fragapalooza this  year.  You can find the pictures as this flickr set.

A all my Fragapalooza videos can be found here

I don’t have much more to say about Fragapalooza this year, except that a week later I’m still recovering from the lack of sleep, and I can’t wait until next year.

UPDATE: Fixed the youtube link, thanks to the commenter who pointed out that I can’t spell

I didn’t review it on the site, but for about the past 9 months I have been using the Palm Pre phone from Bell.  I loved that phone quite a bit.  It had the form factor I wanted, being a phone with a touch screen and a sliding keyboard, a portrait slider. It also had an innovative operating system, WebOS, that I really enjoy using.  I loved using that phone a lot. But, the Palm Pre had one fatal flaw that has proven too be too much.  The hardware had absolutely terrible quality. In a little over 9 months of use, I had 3 of them break.  On the first unit, the screen actually cracked from bottom to top, and not from being dropped. the headphone jack also stopped working.  Thankfully I purchased warranty on my plan, so I was able to take it into bell and get a different Pre.  The second one lasted another 3 months, and what happened to that was that the touch screen stopped working entirely, making the phone impossible to use.  The third problem, and this happened to me on Monday of this week, was that in the middle of the night the phone rebooted, and never turned back on.

I loved that phone so much, it did absolutely everything I wanted it to do, in the form factor that I wanted.  I’m a huge proponent of Palm’s WebOS operating system. I think it’s significantly better than the iPhone OS, or iOS as apple likes to call it, and I believe it has some great potential.  When I bought that phone I intended on it being a phone I would use for at least 2 years, maybe even 3. Palm was reliable on keeping the software updated, and adding new features, and while small, there were more and more apps being developed every day.

The Pre was plagued with hardware problems at launch. I had heard about this, but didn’t think it would be nearly as bad as it would be.  From what I understand, if you got a good unit, it was solid and never broke. Unfortunately there were far too few of those units that had no problems.  My hope with the first two broken units was that I would replace them with hardware that would not break, and unfortunately that did not happen.  I wanted to make it work, I wanted to keep using the Palm Pre

But the simple fact is that I cannot keep using a phone that dies on average every 3 months.  Especially when it breaks completely and I can’t get a replacement phone immediately. For me my phone is my central communication device. Phone calls, voicemail, email, twitter, Facebook, and pretty much any way possible to communicate with me get funneled through my phone.  I’ve become far too dependant on it to have something that breaks all the time. Whether that’s actually a good thing or not is an entire other issue for another time.

Monday afternoon I went to a bell store and purchased a Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant. This phone just came out on Bell, and is a 4” touch screen Android phone.  After 4 days of use I can say that I really love this phone. Is it as good as the Pre, I’m not sure yet.  There are a few things I miss about the Pre, and some things I really love that the Pre didn’t have.  I’m going to be doing a full review of the phone in the coming days.  The real test will be about 3 months from now. If it doesn’t break by then, it’ll be a success.

Sorry that I’m late on this, but after 4 straight days on a computer, I needed some time away.

Day 3 of Fragapalooza started much like I started day 2, with a swim at the pool. I didn’t swim quite as hard as I only slept for about 5 hours, but it still felt really nice and woke me up.  I’ve always been an early riser so I was able to swim for almost an hour, and still be back at the venue at my computer at about 10am.  the day started off kind of slow, because most people slept until around noon or so, but when it did pick up there were lots of games to be played.  I wasn’t very good at starcraft II when the weekend started, but I played it so much I had to get good at it, really quick. I’m not going to say I’m amazing at the game, because I’m not, but at least I wasn’t getting completely destroyed every game by the end of it.  I also played a whole bunch of Team Fortress 2, which I like to think I’m pretty good at. It’s an older game now so everyone there is pretty good at the game, and it made for some really good matches. I could have played that game for a long time.  With the event being a bit smaller than in past years, there are less “uncommon” games being played.  When there were 800 people attending every year, it was easy to find someone who wanted to play pretty much any game you could think of. It’s been a bit different the past couple of years, as mostly newer and popular games are what everyone is playing, and it’s much harder to find someone to play those older games.

The highlight of Day 3 was, as it was last year, the Rock Band Tournament.  I’m still working on uploading all the video I took, but needless to say it was pretty awesome.

the scary looking staff band

After Rock Band I participated in an unofficial Team Fortress 2 tournament. We ended up making it to the final through the losers side, but were unable to pull out the victory. The tournament was fun, but I had to play a character I’m not *that* good at so I didn’t do as well as I would have liked.  Still it was fun to get involved in a tournament, even if it was just for fun.

The later parts of my evening I didn’t even game all that much.  I spent most of the time in the chat room for the participants, playing a trivia game. I didn’t intend to play it for that long but before I knew it 3 hours had passed by.

The last thing I did before going to bed was play in a track mania tournament. The staff set up probably the most insane track I’ve ever seen, and the person with the fastest time won.  It took me 20 mintues to complete the track on my first try, 15 on my second try, and the eventual winner was finished in it 9:30. Needless to say it was quite insane.

Sunday, the last day of fragapalooza, is always pretty quiet.  Everyone is tired, people tend to start packing up.  I played games for about 2 hours, and did a sommersault to win a case fan. There wasn’t a whole bunch to say about Sunday except for the closing ceremonies, and the final contest of the weekend, the wall sit.  In past years I’ve been pretty terrible at it, and this year I finished in the top 20 out of about 80 people that tried to win I’m impressed with myself, and hope to do better next year. 

the last competitors for the wall sit

I didn’t win any prizes in the closing ceremonies, for the 4th straight year, so that kind of sucks.  But the Fragapalooza staff did say one thing that made me very happy, after the difficulties last year and not knowing if we were even going to have an event, they were up front and said that they already can’t wait for Fragapalooza 2011. And you know what, neither can I.

This isn’t my last post about Fragapalooza, but I want to get all of my pictures and videos uploaded first, and then I’ll talk more about them.  I’m typing this on Wednesday afternoon and I feel like I’m still recovering from lack of sleep.

Fragapalooza in 2009 had a very small “Tent City” for sleeping. You can see my post about it here.  This year is very different, as Tent City is actually outside, behind the venue.  I have a tent set up there, and have been using that to sleep in.  I’m not quite sure if I like it this year though.  I mean, for the amount I use it it’s been ok, but I heard someone equate it to setting up a tent on the side of a mountain, and they are not wrong.  Most of tent city is essentially on a dirt/gravel area.  When setting my tent up the biggest concern I had wasn’t what direction it was pointed (though I screwed up there), but finding a spot that was flat with few rocks so I could lay down and not feel a sharp object.  Once I actually get to sleep it’s fine.  The other issue with it being outside is just a fact of life. In the evening of day 2 we had a thunderstorm watch, and while we didn’t get anything, in Day 3, we probably will. I’m used to camping and sleeping in a tent in the rain, so it’s not a huge deal, unless it gets super nasty, then there could be problems.

My only issue is 100% my problem; which is that I do not sleep well when it’s basically daylight outside.  When I am going to bed at 4:30am, that doesn’t’ leave a lot of darkness before daylight begins. I’m writing this post on 4 hours of sleep because it was too light for me to go back to bed.

Either way, I just appreciate the fact that I actually get a tent this year, as I didn’t get a “roof” over my head at all last year.  Small blessings, I guess.

These are a few of the tents in tent city. Mine is the small blue/gray tent to the right of center on the screen. There are about 8-10 more tents on either side of the frame, as well as a couple of trailers.

So, you didn’t get a blog post from me about day 1 of Fragapalooza simply because there was no way for me to do said blog.  Day 1 of Fragapalooza was plagued with power issues.  We actually had no power at all from 10:30pm on Thursday night until around 11am on Friday. And even then, it took about 3 hours to get every computer running.  It was not fun.  Put simply, through no fault of the event organizers there was not enough power for the number of computers here, and as more got turned on, there were outages.  Entire rows would lose power, shutting down the computers of up to 34 people at a time. There was even an outage that killed someone’s power supply on their computer. It was really neat, as I haven’t heard a pop like that before, nor have I seen a computer smoke quite like that.  Needless to say the first day was a bit of a bust. The organizers did what they could, including having a dodgeball game in the gym beside the soccer pitch we are on, but honestly, 300 people were here to play video games, and we had no power. It didn’t work out well.

I want to stress though that the staff here at Fragapalooza did an amazing job in what was a very difficult situation. They got us power as soon as they could, did everything they could to keep us entertained and informed.  As much as people here have complained about not having any power for basically an entire day, I almost promise you that the staff feel even worse about it.  I was just happy that they were able to resolve the problem and get us back to gaming at a decent time.

This is what the event looked like on Thursday night. over 250 computers, all turned off, with no power.

As was mentioned, we didn’t get power on Friday, day 2, until about 11am.  Because of this, I actually went for a swim at the pool in the rec center where the event is located. I swam for about an hour, which was actually really nice, and made me feel really good to start the day. When I got back to the venue I was one of the lucky ones, my row was one of the first to get power, but there were not many people to play games with for a while, so I ended up playing a couple of online games of Starcraft II against people from somewhere until more people were online.  After about 1 pm though, things really started to kick into high gear.  Throughout the day I played a lot of Starcraft II, Team Fortress 2, and Alien Swarm. I finished off the night/morning with a game of Left 4 Dead 2.

There were also other events, such as the traditional rock-paper-scissors contest. This year there were 128 participants, I made it through the first 2 rounds, but lost in the 3rd, which is actually my worst result ever, so that was pretty disappointing. The gaming decathlon also started, which I failed to qualify for in another game of rock-paper-scissors. The gaming decathlon have 10 people face elimination challenges until a winner is declared. Each challenge eliminates 1 person, so there will be 10 challenges. The first challenge was playing an old game on a computer and seeing who got the highest score. The second was a paper airplane throwing contest, which I have a video of that I will post after the event. The last challenge of the night was forcing the participants to translate 7 lines of 1337 sp33k.  If you do not know what that is, I’m not going to explain it.

At the end of my night, which was about 4:30 in the morning, there were still quite a few people playing games.  And I must say, Day 2 was significantly better than day 1.

this picture was taken at 2:30am on Thursday night/Friday morning. Still going strong.

Now, I have one more quick post to write, then off to gaming!

This post coming to you live from Fragapalooza 2010!  Not much to report on, literally just got everything setup and working.  Looks like less than half the people are here so far, and it’s pretty quiet. Next up is figuring out where I’m pitching the tent, and getting that going. For now, a picture:

Last year for Fragapalooza, I brought a lot of stuff. I purchased 2 seats at the event so I could have my laptop set up to constantly check twitter, the internal IRC chat, and to make notes and blog at any time. This year, partly for cost, partly to lighten the load, I scrapped that idea. that alone saves me a bag or 2 of stuff. I’m also only brining the essentials this year, just my computer and everything I need for that(including my chair), my Phone, iPod, Camera, and an external Hard drive, along with all the necessary accessories for that.  Tent city will be outside this year, so I really will sleep in a tent, which I am bringing, but I am ditching the air mattress in favor of a foam pad. This is smaller, lighter, and really just easier to set up and deal with than stuffing an air mattress into a smaller tent.  The only thing I’m brining that is tent specific is a portable power pack that has a built in light so I can see in the dark, and can charge my phone from.  I really focused on brining less this year, we’ll see how that turns out when I go to pack the car up in the morning.

The only thing I can say I’m bringing more of this year compared to last is food. Last year I relied a lot on eating out, and eating junk.  While I’ll still do that this year, it won’t be nearly to the degree of last year.  Sure, I brought candy and other junk food, but I didn’t bring any pop, sticking mostly with juices and Gatorade. I have also brought more fruit than ever before. I know I wont’ be eating as healthy as possible this weekend, and that’s fine, I’ll start working it off again next week, but anything I can do to make it a little better for me will be appreciated come Sunday afternoon.

There won’t be a picture of everything I’m bringing attached this year like last year’s packing post, because I actually have about half of everything packed in my car as I type this on Wednesday night. I’ll snap a few pictures of my packed up car and put them up at a later date, but it’ll work similar to last year.  My chair will somehow manage to squeeze into the back seat of my Civic, the tower and monitor will sit in the front seat, and pretty much everything else goes in the trunk. It’s a bit of a tight squeeze but I make everything fit. I just wish sometimes that my chair folded, it would make things so much easier.

That’s all for tonight for me folks, I’ll see you tomorrow from Fragapalooza 2010. Be sure to follow my Twitter feed for frequent updates, while I’ll be putting up a blog post at least once a day from the event.

Last year I blogged from Fragapalooza 2009 in Fort Saskatchewan.  This year, Fragapalooza is in Leduc, Alberta and I will be there, and blogging just like last year.  I’m really looking forward to this year’s event, as with it being my 4th time going I know a lot more people, and I know pretty much exactly what to expect now.  I’m just about ready to go, and will be posting my list of everything I’m bringing with me, which should be significantly reduced from last year.

As with last year, I’ll be taking a ton of pictures and video.  Most will be appearing after the event, but you’ll still get to see some of the pictures during the event.

This year I’ll be posting quite a few posts, and pictures to twitter, you can find my twitter account here.  I’ll also be uploading a few pictures on the go to Flickr, which you can find here.  All of the event pictures will be up on Flickr after the event, and video will end up on youtube, but it’s very unlikely that I’ll put any of the videos up until after the event is done.

Fragapalooza 2010 runs from 9:00am Thursday August 5th and goes until the afternoon of Sunday August 8th.