Fedora 12

I am a glutton for punishment. This is the only conclusion I can come to because I keep trying to install newer versions of Fedora on my various computers.  Recently I tried Fedora 12 on my LG R500, which was relatively happily running Fedora 10.

I ran into a problem right off the bat: the installer wouldn't boot.  The kernel just got stuck partway along and froze. It turns out there is a bug with the TPM driver on certain hardware, which causes a timeout error:

tpm_tis 00:0a: tpm_transmit: tpm_send: error -62
tpm_tis 00:0a: tpm_transmit: tpm_send: error -62
tpm_tis 00:0a: tpm_transmit: tpm_send: error -62

This error can be worked around by disabling timeouts in the tpm module.  Unfortunately, even though this issue was known before Fedora 12 was released, it wasn't fixed, nor was it even mentioned in the release notes.  Sigh.


The touchpad also wasn't working properly.  After install, you can't tap it to click on things.  The simulated 3rd button when you click in the top right corner is broken. I googled and found that the touchpad needs to be configured in the Gnome control panel, however I'm running KDE and it didn't seem to have a touchpad applet.  Turns out it wasn't installed; yum install kcm_synaptics fixed that and I was able to enable the functionality that should be on by default.

Fedora 10 introduced a new graphical boot for systems which have appropriate video drivers; in Fedora 12 nVidia hardware is included using the nouveau driver.  The nouveau driver, however, is unfinished and it corrupts the display often (but the graphical boot is nice).  In the end I had to install the binary nvidia driver because flash video was freezing the machine. 

Speaking of boot, on boot Fedora starts the GDM Gnome login manager.  Annoyingly, KDE's switch user feature is still broken unless started from KDM; you try to switch users and instead the screen locks and that's all that happens.  No error, no warning, just a broken feature.  Switching to KDM requires editing a config file.

Installing software through kpackagekit is needlessly difficult.  Finding the right package to enable mp3 playback in amarok is an exercise in futility.  Amarok itself provides no indication of what is wrong; it just tries to play a song and fails, skipping the song and going to the next, with no error message or anything.  If all your music is mp3s amarok will just keep chewing through the playlist, happily not playing anything.

Also, for the first time in about 4 years, my printer doesn't work out of the box.  Drivers for every possible bizarre input type or video card or sound card or network card or HPC IO controller or satellite launcher are installed, but my printer's drivers were not.

Finally, because I wasn't feeling punished enough, I also tried upgrading my HTPC to Fedora 12 from Fedora 11.  I have no idea how badly things are broken because, to be honest, the Fedora 11 installation was pretty fuzzed to begin with.  But at least the upgrade installed and nothing seriously broke.

On the HTPC the KDE installation is missing some pieces because I can't log in using KDE as my desktop; instead I get no error message but am booted back to the login screen.  Some KDE apps don't work properly.  Also annoying is the fact that I can adjust my fonts to make things readable on the TV but only one of GNOME or KDE sees those settings, the other doesn't, but my menu contains either KDE apps or GNOME apps but not both.  An average user would be pretty annoyed that they want large fonts, and 90% of their desktop uses the right fonts, but there is a hidden, mysterious control panel that asks you the same exact questions you already answered in some other program, but you have to answer again or else 10% of your apps will look wrong.  Now, this is a Gnome vs KDE issue, but the fact remains that Fedora 11, installed fresh, and then 12 installed as an upgrade overtop, left me with a hybrid Gnome/KDE system, where the only graphical software installer uses tiny fonts because it's a KDE app and I'm stuck in Gnome.

If I get the HTPC working properly again using MythTV I am going to never upgrade it again.

Fedora 11 Installation

I recently installed Fedora 10 on my media PC. That was the hardest Linux installation I've ever done... until now. Just when I thought Fedora's installer couldn't get worse, it did.

The problems begin when Fedora's installer doesn't know how to start graphical mode on my media PC. You'd think that by now a computer connected to a TV would be one of the things that just works, but sadly, it doesn't. Even the basic VESA driver doesn't work for me. My TV output works fine with the nVidia binary driver, but I don't think there's a way to install the nVidia binary driver during installation, and thus I have to use the text-mode driver.

Well, Fedora is well on its way to having the industry's most useless text-mode installer. The Fedora 10 installer stupidly broke my system when it upgraded Fedora 8, and so I wasn't going to take chances and upgrade again; I wanted to do a fresh install. The installer provided me three options:

• Install using the whole disk
• Upgrade Fedora 10
• Install in the "Free Space"

Well, using the whole disk is out, and using the Free Space is out because I have no free space, and upgrading is out because I want to keep 10 working until I am sure 11 is ready for me to use. Where is the option to repartition?

It was at this point that I should have turned back, but I decided to tough it out. I switched to the second virtual terminal and manually deleted my unused Fedora 7 partition using fdisk. "That should do it," I thought. WRONG. 28GB wasn't enough space to install, according to the installer. So I grudgingly deleted my Windows XP partition, which was unused on that computer. This freed up an additional 120GB and then the installer was happy to continue.

The installer asked me one more question: "What is your root password"? After typing that in, it said "Making filesystem... done. Installing software... done. You may reboot."

Wait, what?

Where did my network setup go? Where did package selection go?

Ok, well... maybe the installer is two-stage and a second installer will start after I reboot?

Nope. Turns out that's all there is: The installer installed the base packages and nothing else. Well, I guess I can set up my wireless network card now... nope, wireless networking packages were not installed. Ok, let me start the X gui: nope, X isn't installed. Hm, let me install software: nope, the yum command-line tool doesn't know how to install from the DVD.

What is going on here?

Fedora's installer

• didn't know how to install on my hard disk because I didn't want to use the whole disk and there were no empty partitions
  
• needed more than 28GB to install nothing
  
• left me with a system that had no network and no way to install software from the DVD.

And even though the installer knows I have a Fedora 10 installation that I didn't overwrite, that I took great pains to protect, it didn't set up a grub entry for it, so the system only boots into Fedora 11 and doesn't offer any other choices.
Maybe the graphical installer would work, but the only monitor I have for this computer is a TV (my other computer is a notebook). Maybe I could use the VNC install, but the wired network is in a different room from the TV, so I can't see what I need to type to set up the vnc install. And the worst part: The text-mode installer doesn't explain, at any point, what it is doing or what other options you have. A single help screen, saying what the text-mode installer was capable of, and notifying me of the fact that I am out of luck using this installer, would have saved hours of aggravation.

So far I've managed to get things working bit by bit by moving the computer to the room with the wired network, typing blind to log in and active the network card (why isn't it on-boot? sigh), and then ssh'ing from my notebook into the computer. At that point I can at least install packages from the network and see what I am doing. But it should not be this difficult! I've been using Linux for 12 years and it seems things have started getting harder, not easier.

Fedora 10

I recently installed Fedora 10. I had to because Fedora 8 stopped working for me: the Fedora 8 kernel stopped working with my network card and then a recent update broke something to do with permissions, so I could no longer use my soundcard or cdrom using a normal user account, I had to use the root superuser account. This was extremely annoying. Since Fedora 8 was end-of-life, I decided to upgrade to the latest shiny toy.

Fedora 10 supposedly has a lot of improvements, including flicker free boot (the boot process normally switches video modes a lot and blanks the screen a handful of times), faster performance, more up-to-date software, and lots of systematic improvements. Many of these improvements are true improvements but I have run into some issues.

Installation

Installing Fedora 10 was rather annoying. For some reason the installer kept crashing just before it finished putting the packages on the disk. I suspect the notebook was overheating, which I blame on insufficient power management software during the install. It could be related to the graphics driver used by the installer, but I couldn't verify this since you can't install a graphics driver for the installer and I couldn't figure out how to enable text mode. I was able to complete the install by selecting fewer packages and by propping the notebook up so that there was more airflow underneath it. Not a good first impression.

Hardware support

It seems that my hardware works better now with Fedora 10 than it did before. In Fedora 8 I had endless problems with the Wireless networking, but it seems to be working reliably now. It still crashes (just the wifi driver) but the system recovers fairly quickly and reconnects to the network. Better than Fedora 8, for which 90% of kernels wouldn't even CONNECT to my WAP.

The free nVidia driver that ships with Fedora works too, which is also better than F8's, which didn't work and caused the notebook to hang. But I use the binary driver anyway, so that's not a problem.

Software Installation

Fedora 10 comes with a new software management tool, PackageKit, which replaces whatever was there before. If only it worked! The KDE version, kpackagekit, is completely broken. I can't get it to do anything, it just hangs and (if running from a terminal) prints garbage on the screen. So I had to use the gnome version, which isn't fun in KDE because there's no icon, and you have to just know that the magic incantation isn't gpackagekit but rather gpk-application. Naturally! Anyway, the Gnome version works... sorta. When you are installing packages, you click a checkbox to say "I choose this to install", but if you search for more packages you can't tell what packages are queued for install. For example, let's say you search for "mp3" to find the mp3 codecs, and pick a package to install. Then you search for "media", to find a media player. If your codec package is in the media player list, it appears unchecked even though you have selected it already. There doesn't seem to be a way to see what you have selected to install. This isn't a big deal until you want to deselect something... I had hundreds of packages selected to install when it told me "oh, this package conflicts with another one you already have..." and there was nothing for me to do but start over.

One improvement in the software update area is the taskbar notification. Now you are notified about what updates are available and you can choose to install security updates or all updates. Only after choosing which updates to install are you prompted for the root password.

Synaptics Touchpad annoyances

I had a heck of a time dealing with the touchpad. For those of you who don't have a notebook, you can't understand what an irritating thing a touchpad is. It's like a trap waiting for the slightest touch of your finger to wreak havoc on your careful typing. In Windows the touchpad driver usually disables the touchpad while you type. Such functionality is available in Linux too, but for some reason doesn't seem to be enabled by default.

In days of yore I used ksynaptics to control the touchpad. It's a nice graphical tool which lets you customize the touchpad's behaviour, and it can also turn the touchpad off while you type. For one reason or another it doesn't work in Fedora 10 (even though it's part of the distribution, it's completely broken). I followed these instructions to enable ksynaptics but then was stymied by some version mismatch between ksynaptics and the synaptics driver. Doubly broken! Luckily, there was another web site which explained an alternate method of disabling the touchpad: run a program in the background. I had to set up this program twice, once for me and once for my wife's login session.... sigh. This should be default behaviour! It should be configurable! Tools which ship with the distro should work! But given KDE's second-class-citizen status in Fedora, I guess I'm not surprised.

KDE

Fedora 10 ships with KDE 4.1.3. This is the latest bleeding edge KDE release, with all the cool new stuff. Unfortunately, KDE 4 is in my opinion a major regression from KDE 3. There are lots of new things and I'm sure lots of imnprovements somewhere, but sweet ginger chicken are there ever a lot of problems.
First, the Desktop has been totally neutered. Ever since the days of Windows 95 normal humans have stored files on their desktop. All kinds of files, from icons for starting programs, to downloaded files, arranged in any way you like. KDE 4 has no such feature. For some reason they decided that the desktop wasn't a place for files. But because people complained they made an applet (called a widget) which shows you the contents of any folder. Guess what? I have a folder called, gee, Deskop? and I want it shown on my Desktop? except this looks like crap and did I mention it's SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW? Clicking on an icon in this file-viewer widget brings my dual-core, 2.2 gHz, 2GB RAM machine to its knees, where it promptly faints. What the heck is wrong with these widgets? And why CAN'T I just have files on the desktop? Ok, the concept of widgets is cool, and I like how KDE does it better than Vista, but PLEASE! I want to put files there!

There are several other major problems with KDE4. Some of these are, I'm sure, integration problems because KDE is always an afterthought for the Fedora developers. They just cram it in next to Gnome, spit on it, then wipe it with a snotty handkerchief to shine it up a bit. Gnome is Red Hat's precious child, a relic of the days when KDE had licensing problems, and thus always gets preferential treatment from the Fedora devs. But I digress: I was ranting about KDE.

The main problem is that the file management widget was completely changed and is now very hard for me to use. It used to be you clicked on a file to select it, and double-clicked to activate it. Not anymore: now you click on it to activate it, and... well, I'm not sure how to just select it. I guess nobody needs to do that? Oh wait... I do. And there doesn't seem to be any option to customize this behaviour. KDE 1.0 had single-click activation, back when MS did the same in Windows 95 + IE 4.0, but there was an option to turn it off and the default became double-click not long after. I find that I need to activate files in the file manager far less often than I need to select them. Thus the KDE file manager went from being awesome, in KDE 3, to useless, in KDE 4. Plus they replaced Konqueror with Dolphin, which I'm not sure is an improvement, but anyway Konq has the same stupid file manager component, so even it has the dumb single-click "feature".

Finally, overall it seems that lots of KDE bits have lots a lot of features. The panel used to be very customizable, now it isn't. For one thing, I used to be able to specify how wide the task-manager applet was, now I can't. There are other examples I can't think of at this time. I used to be able to set a wallpaper to fill the screen according to its maximum dimension; now that feature is gone. I used to be able to configure a bunch of things, but now the configuration options are missing. I used to be able to store files on my desktop, but I've already discussed that. Still bugs me though.

Chinese input

At last it becomes relatively easy to set up Chinese input for all programs. The SCIM tool finally works reliably in KDE and GTK apps. You can install SCIM and the SCIM-QT bridge, log out and log back in, and you can enter your Chinese characters. It doesn't work as well as the Windows Vista Chinese IME (which is awesome) but it works fairly well. This is one thing I am really pleased to see. I have typed a couple of documents in Chinese using OpenOffice and there have been no issues with the input. For some reason, though, OpenOffice printed my Chinese document as a nice page of little boxes. Hm.

Conclusion

Fedora 10 (KDE mode) is clearly a beta-quality release. Much of the blame here has to be laid at the feet of the KDE devs, who have released an immature product as if it were ready for prime-time. It is not. But there are so many other glitchy problems with this Fedora release that I wonder how I'd fare in Gnome-land. Is this solely due to the difficulty in packaging KDE 4 for Fedora? Some of the problems, like the synaptics driver and the package-kit problems are clearly infrastructure related, and KDE is not to blame here. Overall I am disappointed with Fedora 10's quality but I am pleased with its goals and feature set. I hope the quality issues can be resolved with some updates and maybe Fedora 11 will fully meet the expectations everyone had for this one.

Comment usability

Here's something that many blog readers know about: comments. Most blogs allow comments to be posted and now even newspapers like The Toronto Star allow comments on articles. But so many blogs and other sites fail when it comes to usability in this regard.

One big drawback that most sites have is they don't allow replying to comments where the reply is shown with the comment. This means you have to read through all the comments to find replies to the interesting comments. But some blogs are even worse: they post all the comments in descending order by date. This means you read the replies before you read the comments themselves. The Dilbert Blog is one such blog where I stopped reading the comments, since I have to read the page from top to bottom. This, combined with Scott Adam's philosophy of moderating all the comments at once makes it hard to follow conversations as they develop.

The Star's commenting system is even dumber. For one, comments can be voted on but the votes appear to be useless except to indicate that someone, somewhere, agrees or disagrees with the content of a post. Posts are moderated so you can't tell if a reply to a post is pending before posting your own reply. Posts are in reverse chronological order so you either read them backwards or go to the end and work your way back to the beginning. Finally, the posts are PAGED, so you can't actually see them all on one page. You have to click on links to go from page to page, but when you click the link it replaces the content of the current page with the comments from the previous page, but doesn't move you to the top of the list. Try reading the comments on an article with several pages, such as this one, and you'll see that it's basically impossible to navigate these comments without losing your mind. Plus The Star's policy about comments is even worse, because sometimes comments get deleted and comments are shut off for certain articles very quickly, which prevents real discussion.

The commenting system on Blogger, which I use, is primitive but at least it shows all the comments and in their proper order. It's such a simple thing but so many sites get it wrong.

Spice Containers

Club House spice containers are not what you normally think about when you consider the usability of a product. They're quite basic: a little container with three openings: one for sprinkling, one for a spoon, and one to pour the spice. But the newer containers do have a major flaw in their usability: the name of the spice is no longer printed on the side of the package. This means your spice drawer or rack is full of indistinguishable orange boxes, and you have to look at each one individually, potentially going crazy trying to find the cloves. The old package was much smarter: the name of the spice was on the side of the package, making it easy to spot what you need. Such a simple thing, yet some graphics designer somewhere went ahead and ruined it for everyone.

Gift Registries done wrong

Someone I know has a gift registry at Sears, a major Canadian retailer. Now a gift registry is an idea of marketing genius: convince your customer to make a list of everything they want, all in one place, to ensure that their friends/relatives buy everything from you. Wonderful! It works because it is convenient for the customers too, and it's a totally one-sided affair for the business.

However, in this day and age a gift registry must be as easy to use as possible. The stores already use technology to their advantage; if you are in the store you can add items to your registry by walking around the store with a barcode scanner and scanning barcodes. You can edit the quantity or scan an item multiple times if you want two or more. Easy as pie.

However, Sears makes three major blunders with its registry. First, their website, catalogue and retail stores don't all have the same inventory, and what they do have may not always have the same price. This is confusing to the consumer. Howerver the gift registry compounds the problem because it doesn't show the up-to-date price for anything! The price shown is the normal price when the item was added. There is no excuse, in this day and age, for the price being out of date. At the very least it should be accurate as of 24 hours ago. But even worse, as a result of the separate inventories, some things are not available except when you buy by a certain method. I can understand that the catalogue doesn't contain the entire store's inventory, or that the stores don't stock certain items, but you should be able to walk into a store and order a special order item, and the website should contain every product, and should allow delivery of any product. Anything less is simply bad service.

Second, the gift registry doesn't give you the most up-to-date website price when you click "buy now" (I should also note that the registry pages look so bad I couldn't find the buy now link at first). Instead, if you find the item at a lower price on the website, say because of a sale, you have to add it to your cart on the product's page, not on the registry page. WTF? The registry has a big scary warning "explaining" this:

Please note: Prices shown below were in effect at the time of registration. Our current selling prices may be higher or lower at the time you purchase. For retail store purchases, you will be charged the price currently in effect in our retail stores on the day you make your purchase. For catalogue orders and orders placed online from this Gift Registry, you will be charged the lowest current price in Sears printed catalogues on the day you place your order. Items that can be ordered online are indicated with 'Buy Now'. IMPORTANT: Some of these items may be offered at lower prices elsewhere on this website, but you must ‘Add To Basket’ directly from the website item page in order to receive the website price. Sears cannot guarantee that all items in this registry will be available at the time you shop.

It's simply bad customer service in 2008 to offer a product at one price but only if the user clicks a certain link, because your other link doesn't support the current price. Basically the warning message is saying "don't use the registry to buy items".

The third blunder is that the registry page itself is a fossilized relic from 1994; we're talking a plain, ugly HTML table, in monospace font, without a colour or graphic to be seen, but worst of all, without any links to a product description or picture or anything. Sometimes even the name of the product has been truncated so you can't tell what the item is unless you already know what it is. Great design, Sears.

Sears, do yourselves a favour, update your registry system. Maybe more people will use it, and you'll make more money?

Sony Ericsson W810i Part Two: The Bad

I recently bought a W810i from Rogers. It's a pretty nice phone; after using it for a couple months I find that I am generally happy with it. This is part two of my review of the Sony Ericsson W10i. See Part one for the good; this part focuses on the bad.

The downsides
There are several things that are not ideal about this phone. Number one on this list is the audio quality. Two issues prevent this phone from being an iPod killer:
1. There is an audible hiss, even when playing a "silent" MP3 file. This is most noticeable at low music volumes. On the subway I have to raise the volume so this isn't a major problem. However,
2. There are glitches, or chirps, between certain songs. I haven't been able to figure out what causes this, but sometimes when going from one song to another there is a loud chirp. This is the digital equivalent of a record skipping and is extremely annoying, not to mention sometimes painfully loud. I suspect it's due to the MP3 decoder switching modes.

The other major issue with the music application is the sorting of songs. This phone reads ID3 tags from MP3 files in order to sort songs by artist and album. You can't do anything fancy, such as select music by year, or by genre, but the basics are covered. Unfortunately, there is a major problem: the songs in an album are not ordered. Well, they are ordered but they can appear to be random, because the default ordering is by created date. That's right, the date the file was created. In Windows you can't even control this attribute of a file; it just exists. "No problem," you say. "I'll just click 'Sort' from the menu," which would be a reasonable choice if 'Sort' provided anything useful. Sadly, it gives you three choices: 'By Title', 'By Artist', and 'By Created Date'. For most albums, 'By Artist' is completely useless, as the artist is the same for every song. And I can honestly say that I've never wanted to sort songs on my album by title; song titles generally do not reflect on play order. Sony, Sony, wherefore ist there no 'By Track Number'?

Aside from those two major issues, both of which are in the Walkman app, the phone has no serious problems. The rest of the problems can be laid squarely at the feet of Rogers, who provide this phone. First, there is the decision to bundle no real games, only demos and limited versions. The full versions can be purchased online for $5/game. Seems like a lot considering the quality of some of the games out there.

Second, the phone's ability to use MP3s as a ringtone is crippled. Only MP3s purchased from Rogers online music store can be used as a ringtone. This is a pure cash-grab; there is no valid reason why I can't use any MP3 I have as a ringtone. In fact, you can download a utility from Sony that adds DRM information to an MP3 file, thus taking an unencumbered song and encrusting it with grime, which the phone will gladly use for its ringtone. This process works well but requires Windows (I hear the program works under Wine on Linux). I can confirm that a DRM-encrusted file will play as a ringtone on the Rogers phone. Let me just say to Rogers that it's a total disservice to your users if they buy your phone and can't even use the pre-loaded songs as ringtones.

The other thing I don't like about the Rogers-branded variant of this phone is the Rogers music player. This is a Java app shipped by Rogers that adds no value to the phone but consumes one of the keys on the main screen and also a prominent menu location in the main menu. This music player is slow to load, does not recognize songs from the memory stick automatically, and isn't integrated with the phone as fully as the Walkman application. Having two apps to play music is poor usability.

In fact there are three ways to play music; you can play music from the file manager. This plays a song individually without running the full-blown Walkman application. I can see this confusing some users but it's handy when making a playlist or browsing the memory stick.

Speaking of playlists, there is only one way to make a playlist and that's from the Walkman application. There is no way to make a playlist on the PC and then transfer it to the phone. For some people this could be a major problem as they have lots of songs to list. For me I only listen to one album at a time or all songs in a jumble. The phone handles this reasonably well but it can take a long time to load and shuffle all 4 GB of music. And unfortunately there are some "music" files that are pre-loaded into the phone and can't be deleted; these appear in the "All artists - all albums" playlist and always surprise me when I'm in the middle of a Zeppelin/Pink Floyd/Coheed and Cambria/Bjork/Tea Party trainwreck.

Conclusion
The phone is overall quite good, and despite my negative comments I recommend it.

• Lots of features
• Well integrated music player
• Camera, USB storage, memory stick
• Poor audio quality
• No sorting by track number
• Rogers-branded phone has some dumb, but minor, restrictions
  

Sony Ericsson W810i Part One: The Good

I recently bought a W810i from Rogers. It's a pretty nice phone; after using it for a couple months I find that I am generally happy with it. Usability-wise I find few major issues (but several minor ones). This is part one of my review, in which I discuss what I like about the phone.
First Impressions
The phone started off on the right foot with the packaging. It has one of the most elegant boxes ever; everything inside is nicely bundled in sleek black boxes that all fit together, and the phone sits in the middle like a show-piece. Compared to the iPod Nano, which has this ridiculous plastic case that's smaller on the inside than its contents, the W810i box was easy to open and it was easy to get the goodies out and back in again. I don't like destroying packaging just to get at the product and this box sure won in that dept.

Once I started using the phone I was generally happy with the features. Nothing really surprised me except the playlist sorting flaw (which I will discuss later). The phone has lots of options, ranging from wallpaper, ringtone, colour theme, to how long the infrared or bluetooth ports are on, and whether or not the phone auto-locks the keypad. I found that the options were reasonably well organized and generally made sense. The only strange thing is messaging has its own options section which is separate from the main settings area.

As far as basic usage of the phone is concerned, there is nothing to complain about. The menu is very responsive; there is nothing strange involved in making a call, just dial and click "call"; you can easily see your outgoing, incoming, and missed calls; the indicator icons for things such as new text messages are easy to see and understand; the phone can vibrate and ring at the same time (not all phones can), and the phone tells you the time even when it has no signal (my old Audiovox phone could do neither of these two latter features, which is why I mention it).

The Good
The phone has a button which starts the Walkman application, which is the #2 feature (or maybe the #1 feature?) of this phone (the other main feature being making calls, of course). The Walkman application lets you play movies or music (no Ogg Vorbis, sadly) but I only use the music feature. This is flawlessly integrated with the phone: when you are listening to music and a call comes in, the music pauses and you can answer the call, and when the call is done the music resumes. You can play/pause the music with an external button and also control the volume and skip tracks, even when the keypad is locked. When there are no headphones, the music plays on the phone's rear speaker (the same speaker used to play ringtones). This speaker doesn't have great quality but it's still ok for a bit of casual listening. The headphones that come with the phone are the in-ear type, the kind you push in until they touch your brain. They are fairly comfortable to wear and small enough to put into your pocket when not in use. The phone also supports FM Radio, which is integrated as well as the walkman app. In fact the play/pause button will play either the radio or the walkman depending on which app was last used. That's convenient.

The phone ships with a 1 GB Memory Stick Duo, which is a cute little Sony-proprietary memory card, but Rogers was having a promotion when I bought the phone so they mailed me a 4GB card. This makes the phone a very compelling MP3 platform, except for the audio issues.

The phone also has Java (J2ME) installed, and unlike some phones, it loads quite quickly and is very responsive. I was apprehensive about Java on phones but I find it to work very well. The J2ME apps load faster than the built-in web-browser, actually. I downloaded DoomRPG and spent some time blowing up pixellated Imps. The phone comes with 4 games but two of these are pure demos: play for a few minutes and the game ends, while the other games are limited in scope but fun to play.

The phone comes with a USB cable that is capable of charging the phone, as well as a dedicated charging cable. The USB cable doesn't charge the phone as quickly as the dedicated charger, but it does let you copy files to/from a PC, as well as synchronize your phone's contact list and use the phone as a modem. The modem feature is useless to me so I haven't tried it, but on paper it's a fantastic idea. As for file transfer, the phone shows up on the PC as two mass-storage devices, one for the phone itself and one for the memory card. This is very handy, both for adding MP3s and for general file storage.

The phone is also equipped with a 2 Megapixel camera. This camera has a light, which is almost as good as a proper flash, and it can focus to a limited extent. It also has basic zoom capabilities. I found that it doesn't replace a regular 2MP camera, but for a phone it is a very good camera. The pictures are conveniently stored on the memory stick making it easy to get them onto the PC either through the USB cable or using a card-reader. No need to rack up data-charges by sending the picture via email.

Tune in tomorrow when I'll discuss what I don't like about the phone.

The Horn Section

I broke my shoe-horn. This is actually the second one I've broken. The other one was the same as this one and it broke in pretty much the same way. Of course when a shoe-horn breaks it's because you're trying to jam your foot into a shoe and there's a lot of weight on it, and you're holding it, and suddenly you're holding half a horn that's really just a plastic shard cutting your hand, and you're putting lots of weight on THAT. Not a good way to start the day.

I went to the mall to see what I could find in terms of a replacement. I visited a shoe store, the first one that I found when I entered the mall, and asked if they sold shoe horns. The clerk replied that they do not sell shoe horns, but they do give away freebies. He handed me one from a bucket full of shoe-horns. I thanked him and left. The shoe-horn he gave me was not as rugged as I had in mind, so I went from shoe store to shoe store, looking for the right horn. The story was the same everywhere: they didn't sell shoe horns, but they did give them away. A couple stores didn't have shoe horns at all, and one sales clerk didn't even know what a shoe horn was. Kids these days! I was tempted to tell her it was brass instrument, vaguely like a trumpet, only shoe-shaped.

In the end, I came away with these free shoe horns:

There were a couple duplicates, from Aldo and Spring, but as you can see the horns are of three basic types. The most popular type is the one I'll call "Long and Smooth", the second most popular "Short and Flimsy" and the third type, represented by a single horn from Capezio, "Square and Thick".

The Long and Smooth Horns
These horns, which came from Aldo, Stoneridge, Sterling Shoes, and Town Shoes, are a basic all-purpose shoe-horn All horns represented here have a hole in the end, ostensibly for hanging the horn up when you're not using it. For the Long and Smooth horns this hole is quite large, and is situated where the thumb and fingers usually hold the horn as you're putting the shoe on. This weakens the top of the shoe-horn a bit and when I used this horn I could feel the plastic bend somewhat. However the horn has an overall pleasant shape and works well. The plastic itself is a little flexible, so it should bend before it breaks, but overall it does not feel strong enough for my needs.

The Short Flimsy Horns
I received three of these horns, two from Spring and one from Feet-first. These horns are quite short, so they could maybe fit into a purse if a woman needed to bring a horn with her. No man can use this horn, however, because they are absolutely incapable of withstanding any weight at all. When using this horn the horn nearly bent in half as I tried to slip my foot into my shoe. Only a small person whose shoes can already slip on and off could use this horn.

The Square, Thick Horn
This horn is the same shape as my original shoe horn. This horn came from Capezio shoes; it is a practical size and decent thickness. However the hole at the top is prone to breaking (both my original Browns Shoes horns broke here first). This horn differs slightly from the Browns Shoes horn because the plastic is somewhat softer and more flexible. I suspect this horn would be less likely to crack but it still isn't strong enough for my needs.

The Metal Horn
In the end I bought a $5 metal shoe-horn from Moneysworth and Best. This horn is bigger than all the plastic horns and is clearly a professional, enterprise-class shoehorn. This horn is quite heavy and in no way could fit into a purse or briefcase. The hanging-hole is only large enough to admit the head of a nail, such as you'd use in a workshop on which you'd hang your tools. When using this horn there is no bending at all, just pure shoe-stretching, foot-sliding comfort. This horn was infinitely more expensive than the freebies but is worth every penny.

Conclusion
After trying the various horns I have to say that, aside from the metal horn, the Long and Smooth horn wins for aesthetics, the Square and Thick horn wins for durability, and the Short and Flimsy horn fails to be of any use but wins in the compactness department. I recommend that anyone in need of a decent shoe-horn try getting freebies first, but be prepared to spend the real money when the freebies inevitably disappoint.