I've been using the G1 for over a month now. It was quite a ride. In general, I like it a lot, but on the other hand, there are still room for improvement. Since I got the G1, the first phone's RF die on me after 3 weeks, it took me 2 days to convince Tmo to replace it. 10 days later, I found that Tmo shipped me a charger instead of a replacement phone. Then another 4 days to correct their mistake.



As I mentioned in the past (here and here), my next phone need to have 2.5/3G, Wifi, and GPS. Tmo G1 has them all, plus a 3Mp camera. In contrast, Moto Ming has a smaller form factor and flip design, these are the 2 keys reasons I bought it in the first place. However, I missed the Chinese hand-writing input on the Ming, and not really a fan of slide-out keyboard. I'd rather like to see a on-screen keyboard with hand-writing recognition (which also make the phone thinner).

On the other hand, the idea of a phone that is well integrated to the Internet and the Google "cloud" excite me. I always envision that future of the cellphone is on always connected to the Internet. I used many (but not all) Google services such as gmail, maps, and search, they are what I depends on. Even through I am a bit hesitate to take it all with open arm as I have some reservation on being lock-in, having these services on my finger tips is just impressive.

Back to the phone itself:
- The build is solid, but not perfect. i.e. the back cover sometimes not fit snugly
- The touch screen a bit slow response to touch, maybe somewhat due to the screen protector
- Bluetooth contact and file send/receive function is missing
- Camera button is a bit hidden, the camera application response slowly
- The keyboard is somewhat blocked by buttons on the right. It is uncomfortable to type on when headset is connected
- There is a simple notepad application, but data is not save on SD card and it is not integrated to the cloud. Google my notebooks or even Google Doc integration would be nice.
- There is no todo list application or gmail tasks integration. 3rd party applications filled the gap for now, but on-line sync function is missing
- Access to control like Wifi, GPS, Bluetooth, Airplane mode are hard to find. Again, many 3rd party application comes to rescue. i.e. Toggle settings and Andrew S. set of Toggle app

Recently, new applications from Google for Picasa and My maps integration arrived. These applications show Android as a platform are matured rapidly.

Related reading:
T-Mobile G1 impressions: what we love, what we don't
A day with the T-Mobile G1
T-Mobile G1 review

Another Fedora 10 update:
- Bluetooth applet icon is finally hidden when the device is turned off. However, bluez seem to be fubar. Fortunately, a fix is in testing and work. Meanwhile, bluetooth hotkey still not quite working and there is still no control to have bluetooth turn off by default
- Google gadgets all of a sudden start crashing on startup..... bug report filed fixed in a new version
- SMB mounts on NAS and SMB domain are not shown on Nautilus somehow, it's broken for some times (since F9), as reported here, fixes are finally in

The electricity bill at home had grew quite a bit since I moved to San Francisco, that makes me wonder how much of this increase is from the new computers at home; A NAS, Linux web server, Thinkpad T60 laptop, and a MCE has being introduced.

In order to balance lifestyle and being nice to the environment, the first step is to identify any power usage point that is power hunger. With this information, I can decided how best to minimize the power consumption. The tool for the task is this:



The "Kill a Watt" meter measures power usage, that can be used to estimate month power usage of an appliance.

I used the meter and collect the following information:

MCE (AMD Athlon X2 3800+ 2.0Ghz)
- turn off/sleep: ~4W/hour ~2.8kW/month
- idle: ~49W/hour ~35.2kW/month
- heavy use (movie encoding): ~88W/hour ~63.4kW/month

Promise N4300N NAS
- in service: ~58W/hour ~41.5kW/month

web server (AMD Athlon X2 4800+ 2.5Ghz, Cool n' Quiet off)
- in service: ~107W/hour ~77.1kW/month

Thinkpad T60 (Intel Core2Due T5600 1.8GHz, power stepping on)
- in service idle: ~25-40W/hour ~18-29kW/month

Aopen MiniPC (Intel Celeron M 1.4)
- off ~2W/hour ~1.4kW/month
- idle ~24W/hour ~17kW/month

Currently, I keep the MCE suspended when not in use so it can be instant on when I want to watch movie, it sips ~3kW/month. My Thinkpad is 24/7, which consumes ~30kW/month. NAS and web server are also 24/7, that eats 42kW/month and 72kW/month. MiniPC is currently not in use, so no power consumption.

In total, the minimal total power consumption is 147kW/month. A quick check from PG&E, a 200W/hour (144kW/month) consumption costs ~$20/month. This translate to 1 pound/kWhour == ~106k pounds of CO2 generated..... quite a lot! ( info: http://tinyurl.com/8d2hae )

Even with a moderate power usage and coat, I can do better by turn on Cool n' Quiet on my web server since it's on 24/7 and use quite a bit of electricity. In addition, maybe considered suspends my T60 at night when the suspends bug on F10 is fixed.

A few updates:
- Pidgin crashed from time to time when sounds turn on.....
- Pulseaudio + Skype + Youtube/Flash aren't working together, still getting Skype audio playback error after played a Youttube video. After some research, I found that it looks like Flash hogs the audio device, which manually kill it sort of solve it.
- GNOME-Packagekit was broken for a few days, until a new version available [update] It was reported here
- GNOME Bluetooth applet won't hide when bluetooth is turned off

I've spend most of the Thanksgiving weekend tweak Fedora 10 and installed applications. It's finally completed and back to normal.

I continue to use Desktop effect on Fedora 10. It's mostly stable but still crash once in a while when using cubed desktop. Turn off this eye candy solved this problem for now. On the other hand, performance seem degarded when desktop effect is on, dropped frames are noticed when playing full-screen video.

There seem to be a problem since 2.6.27 that X is struck on resume. I've experienced the same problem on F9 recently after 2.6.27 kernel is available.

The Bluetooth problem I encountered is known and a work around is available... in fact it seem like the same bug I reported from F8..... Meanwhile, some recent updates seem caused the Bluetooth applet to stay on tray when I want it to hide when Bluetooth is off..... WTF.

The improved Pulseaudio subsystem seem work better for me, I no longer see pidgin hangs due to unable to output sound. However, there is still no easy way to normalize the gain of each output device/application.

One last observation, Flash plugin on firefox still taking too much CPU when it's running.....

My dad subscribed to the second lowest (of 4 tiers) DSL Internet service from AT&T (formerly Pacbell). My feeling is that it barely meet our bandwidth requirement, I have to shutdown services to compromise from time to time.

A speedtest shows in number what level of bandwidth we are getting.



It's at roughly 1Mb downlink and 200Kb uplink. According to AT&T, I should be getting 1.5Mb downlink and 384 Kb uplink.

Related reading:
How fast is 5MB DSL line?