Overscan: 

So, many TVs have this issue that they miss out on displaying the corners of the image put out by the Odroid U2. The phenomenon is called overscan. Now, all you have to do is select settings such as “Just Scan” or similar on your TV that allows your TV to display image coming from U2 as is. This setting is called “Screen Fit” on Samsung TVs but I found something weird. My TV already had this setting set for the picture mode, but still I had the overscan issue. What I had to do was to switch to another mode and then back to Screen Fit and it started working fine.

emmc Adapter:

The emmc adapter that hardkernel/odroid folks send out with the board to use with a microsd card reader doesn’t seem to work. However, the issue is that it is slightly bigger than a regular microsd and hence doesn’t fit properly inside the reader. All I had to do was to file the top edges a bit and then it worked fine.

HDMI-DVI Adapter:

Currently I’ve attached it to my old Samsung B2030 monitor. A tip btw for B2030 owners (or anyone else having a monitor with only DVI input and not HDMI). Despite many folks (including hardkernel/odroid guys) saying that HDMI to DVI adapters are not supported and won’t work, they do work but the thing is that the monitor should be turned on before turning on the U2 otherwise U2 doesn’t output anything over the HDMI and the monitor won’t display anything.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Odroid U2 Tips: Overscan, emmc Adapter, HDMI-DVI Adapter, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Odroid U2

I’ve got quite a few things planned on how to use it and will post more about my adventures with the U2 here soon.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Odroid U2 is here, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

I headed over to the Android developers site some time later and was pleasantly surprised to see that actually 3rd party widgets can indeed be added to the lock screen. They just need a small change for this. They need to add “android:widgetCategory=”keyguard|home_screen”" parameter to your xml where the appwidget provider element is defined. Simple enough

If you are the one who doesn’t like to wait, you could even change your favorite app’s manifest to allow the widget to be added. There are a few more details if you’d like to get into the nitty gritty which can be read from over here: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/appwidgets/index.html

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Third Party Widgets on Android 4.2 Lock Screen, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

(For the impatient, if you want to use it, I’ve uploaded my profiles to my github account.)

So, I set up and quick and simple but much better working night mode profile. It consists 3 different profiles actually as listed below:

• Night Mode -> This actually turns on the night mode based on a host of different combinations listed later in the post.
• Alarm Detection -> Detects when the alarm goes off
• Unlock Detection -> Detects when the phone display is unlocked.
• Home Detection -> Detects if I’m at home

The basic premise behind this night mode setup is:

• The phone should detect that I’m sleeping by taking a combination of following scenarios:
  • The location should be at home (Done by home detection profile using “Cell Near”. I use this mostly because it is more accurate than network location and works indoors as well which GPS doesn’t do and is very light on battery as well)
  • Time should be between 11 PM to 7 AM (my likely sleep time)
  • Display should not have been unlocked in the last 30 minutes (i.e. make sure I’m not actively using the phone)
  • It’s dark in the room (Make sure that lights are turned off. Need to turn on ambient light sensor to work with screen off in tasker settings for this)
• Once all the above conditions are established, my phone is fairly certain by now that I’m indeed sleeping and turns off auto sync
• The night mode still has to check whether the conditions still exist after every half hour or so (e.g. I might not be sleeping yet but lights turned off to allow my wife to sleep and I didn’t fiddle with the phone for some time)
• If I unlock the phone any time at night, it should tell my phone immediately that I’m not sleeping and it deactivates the night mode (for the next 30 minutes or so when night mode check kicks in again)
• When the alarm goes off, night mode should be stopped since I’m obviously awake now
• There are quite a few other checks and balances incorporated to make sure all these 4 profiles don’t go out of sync and also do as less as possible to preserve battery.

Tested this setup for past few weeks and it works pretty well. If you want to use it, I’ve uploaded my profiles to my github account.

Improvements/Changes:

• Exchange sync still bypasses the auto sync turn off settings. So need to either buy “Synker” to control exchange sync directly or figure out a way to connect droidwall to tasker to cut the internet connection for exchange app.
• The home mode xml in the account does not have anything in cell tower locations , so you need to open it in tasker and scan for your own cell towers
• I just turn off auto sync for me in night mode (want to receive sounds for other notifications, texts etc), you can edit the profile to suit your other needs
• You can change the timings as well as per your needs
• I have some prints done to a file in these profiles, mainly for debugging. You can remove those once you are certain the setup works well for you.
• Let me know if you can think of any other ways to make this more robust. I’ll post the rest of my tasker profiles as well soon.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled My Tasker Night Mode Profile For Android, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Anyways, the threat is averted for now because a good natured githubber, Jason Salaz, registered the domain name and plastered a pretty generic webpage over there which doesn’t do much (except give him a bit of web traffic boost).

After the map fiasco and then this, it looks like Apple is indeed slipping up and things are falling through the cracks. Let’s see what Tim Cook has to say about this.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled BogusApple.com: Apple Screw Up Saved By Githubber, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Before I go into how I went about it, here is what it does now. When I keep the phone into my car’s phone holder, it automatically starts streaming music over BT from my car stereo and then when I keep it in my pocket, it stops.

Ingredients I used:

• 1 Galaxy Nexus
• 2 NFC tags (bought from tagstand guys. Makers of the awesome NFC Tasker Launcher app)
• 1 male to male stereo cable
• 1 Samsung HS3000 BT headset (since my car stereo doesn’t have BT. This little headset is awesome because it is cheap (25$ or so at amazon), has a stereo port where you can connect any headset or stereo cable, implements apt-x protocol for high fidelity audio streaming)
• Android App: NFC Task Launcher
• Android App: Tasker (NFC task launcher is enough for basic things but my task is a bit more involved)
• Android App: Secure Settings plugin for Tasker/Locale

So, what I did is this:

Hardware:

Pasted one NFC tag to my car phone holder and kept another one in my wallet.

Connected the HS3000 headset to the car stereo through aux-in and to power through a car charger (it uses a standard micro usb port to charge).

Stuck the HS3000 near my dashboard. I could have hidden it in dashboard or somewhere but I also wanted to use it to take calls when they come in so I can use its mic for speaking and incoming audio sounds through the car speakers. You can also disconnect the internal battery by popping up the casing so that it turns on and off with the car but it isn’t necessary as it anyways turns off if there is no device connected for a while.

Software:

Created two tasks in Tasker. First as “Car Mode Enter” and second as “Car Mode Exit”. The car mode enter task basically does this:

• If car mode is not already running (based on a variable)
  • Turn on Bluetooth (This also auto connects)
  • Crank up the Media Volume
  • If Battery level is above 40%
    • Keep the screen always on (using Secure Settings)
  • Else keep the screen on if power is connected (through car charger)
  • Crank up the brightness if it is day time (so that I can see the screen) and store the old value for restoring later.
  • If navigation is not on (through another variable set through another profile which monitors if a navigation or maps app is in foreground)
    • Load the Music app
    • Start playing music
  • Turn on the Read SMS profile cuz I’m a safe driver (Another profile in tasker which reads the incoming SMS’ sender’s name and asks if it should read the text (don’t want any embarrassing ones read out while others are there in my car ) and then proceeds to read the text if I speak “Yes”. For anything else or no input, it doesn’t read the text)

The car mode exit task undoes everything done in the car mode enter task and restores everything to how it was before entering the car mode.

Also created two tasks in NFC task launcher which just launch the car mode enter and exit tasks when tapped against 1 of the tags and wrote this task to the tags.

All together now:

So, we are done now. Now when I enter my car, I place the phone on the holder and nice music starts playing. When I get out, I tap it against my pocket (with the wallet) and everything is back at normal.

Let me know if you need any more information about the above setup or the tasker profile xml files. I use tasker for automating a whole other bunch of things as well. Will try to post that stuff soon along with any other NFC tricks I try out.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled My Android NFC Car BT Audio Setup, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

AnandTech's GPU Comparison Featuring SGX543 MP2 and Mali 400

While the above test doesn’t have any discrepancy, one major thing is that the SGX 543MP2 results are from an iPad 2 (a tablet) while the Mali 400 results are from a smartphone. Thus, we can’t readily take this to directly and accurately predict the comparison results for iPhone 4S because there are other things to consider:

1. Mali-400 lags behing SGX543MP2 in “offscreen” tests which are done for resolutions greater than native SGS2 resolution (SGS 2 resolution is 800×480 while test is done at 720p) and brute triangle pushing. Samsung didn’t have to optimize their GPU implementation for this because SGS2 was never going to run a game at 720p resolution and would also need to push lesser triangles for similar detail. Hence they could easily make this trade-off to get lesser power consumption and heat generation

2. Mali-400 goes hand in hand with SGX543MP2 in all other tests as seen on glbenchmark.com

3. It is naive to think that the same SGX543MP2 implementation as iPad 2 will be present in iPhone 4S. Even if iPhone 4S is slated to have “A5″, a lot depends on the actual clock speeds (CPU and GPU), graphics memory, etc. Apple will do similar trade offs like Samsung (and Apple has already done this with A4 in iPad 1 vs iPhone 4) and the real results would be available only then.

So,  the end result is that we will have the real comparison only when iPhone 4S is out.

PS: Not that the results matter anyways since firstly, the comparisons should now be moving to upcoming Nexus Prime and not SGS2 and secondly, the raw power of these GPUs won’t determine much since they cater to two completely different OSs and would have a lot of software and ecosystem dependencies on the user-perceived outcome.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled SGX 543MP2 vs Mali-400: Is iPhone 4S GPU Really Twice As Strong As SGS 2?, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Nexus Prime Image in Samsung's Video

Nexus Prime Image enhanced by an engadget user

The things to take away from here:

1. The phone will have a curved display like Nexus S

2. It has a power button on the side (right side, since it’s marked with the power icon)

3. The interesting thing however is the 3 dots on the left side. People claim that it could be related to camera or volume controls or even speaker grills. But I think that they are for dock connection. Anyone who has owned a Nexus One has seen the same 3 gold dots on the bottom used for dock connection. I believe that on Nexus Prime they have been moved to the side mainly because Prime has (or is supposed to have) a 16:9 screen and hence the optimal placement in a dock would be horizontal and hence the sideways placement.

Let me know what you think

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Deconstructing The Samsung Nexus Prime Video, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Swype 3.25 Beta Pre-release Parse Error Solution, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Huawei Ideos

Display: The display is average and pretty much on par with the other handsets in this range. It’s a low resolution QVGA (320×240) screen. While it’s usable but not a brilliant one and would give a sublime web browsing experience. The brightness of the display was average as well, nothing to write home about but not below the competition either.

Touchscreen: A good thing about this handset is that it has a capacitive touchscreen. A few entry level phones skimp out on this and put a resistive touchscreen but not so with Ideos. The screen response is pretty good.

Android Version: Ideos sports Android 2.2 Froyo which is again a good thing since this is the latest I have seen in any entry/mid-level and most high end phones as well. Gingerbread is still too new and I’m happy enough with Froyo. A lot of other phones are still stuck on Eclair 2.1.

Camera: The camera is ok’ish with its 3.2 MP sensor and no LED flash. It works well for well lit subjects but is useless in dark. The quality of photos taken is average as well. Nothing extremely bad but nothing very good as well, just good enough for capturing spontaneous moments when you are not carrying your proper standalone camera with you.

Connectivity: Ideos has 802.11n wi-fi and 7.2mbps HSDPA 3G for connectivity. wi-fi connected to my router in a snap and it also has hotspot (or wireless tethering) capability for upto 8 devices. 3G connectivity was ok. Speedtest results came out to be similar to my Nexus one over both wi-fi as well as 3G.

Built: Ideos is built sturdily but looks a bit tacky with its shiny back. But then again, it’s hard to find a good looking phone in entry level smartphones which performs according to it’s looks as well. I didn’t try any drop tests on it but I’d fathom it’d easily survive any short falls. The phone is also pretty light and small, easy to pocket.

Performance: Ideos has a Qualcomm MSM7227 processor, rated at a clock speed of 528 MHz. This processor is fairly standard in almost all the entry level devices and is good enough for daily usage and most of the apps. But most games would struggle on it. If you are buying this (or any other entry level smartphone) with the correct expectations of it performing according to it’s price range, you shouldn’t be disappointed.

Web Browsing: Web browsing is mediocre on Ideos because of it’s low resolution screen, low specc’ed processor (which also results in lack of Adobe Flash). If you plan on using the browser for your web needs, don’t bet on opening any javascript heavy pages quickly and should look mostly to fill the void by using specific apps for the services you are trying to access.

Battery: The phone is good on the battery and it was able to last around 1.5-2 days on a single charge for medium usage even though it houses just a 1200 mAh. This is on-par, if not better, than most other phones in this range.

GPS: The GPS was quick to get a fix and retained it to a good accuracy almost same as my Nexus one. Using Google maps on this phone was a breeze.

Other Notes: The phone bundles a free 2GB microSD card and also stereo headphones. The headphones are average at best like most other phones and you should really pair it with a cheap set of Creative IEMs that will give you a much better output while staying on a budget.

Conclusion: While the phone is not a powerhouse in itself, I’d rate it pretty good in it’s price segment. If I had to buy an Android smartphone on a budget around 8000 INR, it’d be a toss up between this and the Samsung Galaxy Pop S5570. So, this is a +1 recommendation from me for this phone.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Huawei Ideos U8150 Review, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings