The Samsung Charge is the second 4G phone Verizon Wireless (VW) has given me to review and my experience was much like the first 4G phone I reviewed – uncertain.

VW 4G territory is in dark red. Blue arrow points to where I live.

That’s because 4G remains 16-18 miles from my home. So I tested it a couple of times as I neared 4G territory closer to Boston. And 4G is much faster and I would probably spring for if it covered more territory . But I won’t deny my frustration with 3G. Most of the time, 3G will not do a credible job downloading videos so I don’t bother. Sometimes they work. Most of the time, 3G is too slow to be practical (of course, you never know whether it’s the speed of the Internet or the phone’s video processor – many times, the latter I suspect).

As I passed into 4G territory, I was in the middle of a Google search and `snap!,’ it finished (the “3G” indicator on the top of the display changes to “4G”). That was good. To me, 4G seems to take a quick breath, then page loads instantly. But the same thing happened with 4G that happens with 3G: occasionally, it just freezes for whatever reason.

VW bills 4G as “blazingly” fast – up to 10x faster than 3G. And I suspect sometimes it is. It all depends where you are and the strength of the signal. VW voice service, which usually ranks the highest among carriers, has declined a bit in my experience if dropped calls and inaudibility are any indications. Technically speaking, 4G operates at up to 100 Megabits per second, but practically speaking, a 4G smart users gets 5-12% of that that. Regardless, that’s a vast improvement over 1-2 megabit speeds with 3G.

BUT, I presently pay for $30 for unlimited 3G downloads which I believe VW is discontinuing once I change plans. As the chart indicates, VW limits usage and charges $10 per GB after you exceed your cap. With faster speeds, guess what? You’re likely to download a lot more.

The Charge is fine Android 2.2 (aka Froyo) smart phone. Click here for an explanation about Android 2.2. I am an iPhone guy and Android can be frustrating, what with four navigation button’s  versus the latter’s one. I am sure the reverse is true and the few Android users I’ve talked to without exception seem unlikely to defect anytime soon.

Noteworthy about about the Charge is that’s it’s the third cheapest 4G smart phones from VW – $150 for the phone assuming you sign up for the two-year service commitment. The Charge is a lot of  phone for the money. The Samsung Stratosphere at $100 is VW’s second least expensive 4G smart phone while the Pantech Breakout is first at $50. VW also offers a couple of pre-owned 4G phones $100 of under.

The phones 4.2 inch AMOLED display is brilliant and carrying the somewhat over sized smart phone in shirt or pants pocket is not a problem. It’s 5 ounce weight is an ounce or more less than early versions of larger smart phones and it’s not as thick. State of the art semiconductors just get better, faster and smaller.

I recommend this phone, but would hold off for 4G until coverage is everywhere I go. On Jan. 19, VW said it brought 4G to five more cities and that now 200 million across the nation have access to it, BUT it’s still 20 miles away from my neighborhood.

I asked a live chat person (“Lily”) when 4G would come to my town, fully expecting a non-answer. That’s exactly what she gave me: “”Our 4G coverage is expanding everyday.” “That did not answer my question,” I shot back. I asked again and waited a minute or so for Lily to respond and did not hear back. It felt very much like trying to watch a video using the 3G.

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I keep hearing about how everyone is watching video on their smart phones. Then I try to do it and the experience is, well, awful most of the time. Particularly lately.

What’s your experience watching video on a smart phone? Comments welcome…

Here’s mine. The other morning I was trying to download a short Youtube video to my iPhone. I clicked on the Quicktime icon and it never played even though it appeared to download. Was it just slow or was my phone unable to play a .wmv video file? It was probably the latter (there’s an add-on for that), but I, like millions of others, could care less about the cause of the problem. All we know is that we did not get the video we wanted to see.

Forget that the display is too small and resolution often blurry.

Besides slow 3G, there are other causes for vanishing video such slow smart phone processors; incompatible video formats (HTML5 promises to fix this) ; microscopic displays and poor resolution. The experience simply is not good enough. Depending on the mood of my home Wifi, video latency is a problem more often than not on my iPad.

I know the world is going gaga over video. Youtube recently said 2,100 hours of video is uploaded every hour. But playing it on a 3G phone is far from satisfying. Perhaps, Gen Yers and Xers are downloading movies and watching them on smart phones. But that quick, hey, watch this Youtube video just isn’t worth the trouble.

Also, note I said a lot of video is being uploaded. I did not say it’s being watched. Maybe it is. I would love to see a breakdown on which platforms. My choice is a cabled desktop or notebook.

I have a Samsung Charge 4G phone from Verizon Wireless up for review and indeed faster connectivity will help – even e-mail has been slow lately on my 3G iPhone! But to get 4G, I still have to drive 15 miles closer to the greater Boston area to get it. Granted the 4G rollout isn’t trivial, but it  seems slow to me – like watching a video using 3G-:). Since 4G debuted almost a year ago, it can’t be said it’s sweeping the nation.

In the video below is former Ziff Davis colleague Greg Jarboe from Search Engine Watch, In it, he alludes to the volume of video being uploaded. And he describes it in a recent blog post. What’s your video experience on a smart phone.

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Two blue screens of death (BSOD)  in as many weeks: Yikes, is it my under a year old desktop? Windows 7? Some of my apps?

I have no idea if I had a garden variety BSOD this morning, but it sounds like quietly muffled explosion. Like a fire, the screen flashes blue  with a bunch of wispy white text (the smoke), then goes blank, sending the PC into shutdown and reboot mode. It asks me if I want safe mode given it did not shut down properly. Like the rest of world, I say “hell, no”  and it boots up again and usually operates fine until the next BSOD (I have only done one PC system restore ever and it was on this machine three months after acquiring it).

After rebooting, up pops the dialog box holding out a shred of hope: “Windows is checking for a solution to this problem.” Having tried this alleged sleuthing and problem-resolution tool enough times to know it’s useless, my question becomes “Is there a solution to “Windows is checking for a solution to this problem?”" (Yes, you can disable it!)

Now I know the BSOD is not always Windows’ fault, but nonetheless gets the blamed in this household. It could be apps or even the HP hardware, but how in creation would I know? And what does it matter? Here’s a detailed description of today’s BSOD.

“Problem signature:  Problem Event Name: BlueScreen  OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.768.3  Locale ID: 1033

Additional information about the problem:  BCCode: 116  BCP1: FFFFFA800AD0D4E0  BCP2: FFFFF8800405FC08  BCP3: 0000000000000000  BCP4: 0000000000000002  OS Version: 6_1_7600  Service Pack: 0_0  Product: 768_1
Files that help describe the problem:  C:\Windows\Minidump\101711-22198-01.dmp  C:\Users\JohnDodge\AppData\Local\Temp\WER-50669-0.sysdata.xml
Read our privacy statement online:  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=104288&clcid=0×0409
If the online privacy statement is not available, please read our privacy statement offline:  C:\Windows\system32\en-US\erofflps.txt”

Anyone care to translate?

I tracked down the attractively named “C:\Windows\Minidump\101711-22198-01.dmp” file and opened it, knowing full well, it would tell me nothing I could understand. It said PAGE a few hundred times and had a bunch of other incomprehensible symbols. Hey, I am just a user, not  a Klingon translator.

I know Flash and Windows 7 are a deadly combination on my Win 7 notebook no matter how many times I uninstall and re-install the former. Flash is just hopelessly unstable on Windows 7…at least, that’s my experience.

In a brief exchange of tweets, ZDNet blogger, Windows expert and former colleague Ed Bott said occasionally Windows does find a solution and said that his experience with Windows 7 has been better than mine. I would add a lot of people “liked” my tweet “I love it when Windows checks for a solution and never finds one.”

Can mere mortals find a solution to a Windows 7 problem using this tool?

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Steve Jobs would have to be at the top of anyone’s list of American innovators and pioneers. Not just modern day, but over a century or more. His name belongs next to Edison, Bell, Ford, Franklin and his long time pal and nemesis, Bill Gates.

Jobs was brilliant, tyrannical, funny, driven and many other things that typify game-changers. He will be endlessly eulogized over coming days and weeks and written about for years and decades. What I can uniquely offer are a few  encounters I had with Jobs and the perspective of someone who has covered computers and IT since January, 1980.

Steve was crazy like most visionaries. Many thought his brilliance would be limited to the Apple I and Apple II. His follow-up to those creations was the  expensive and clunky Lisa, which used this insane input device called a mouse used to point at and click on desktop icons. Little did we know….

Then came the Macintosh which took years to get marketplace traction, but laid the foundation for Apple today.

My career as a tech journalist largely paralleled the timeline of Jobs’ career. One of the first computers I used was an Apple II to write stories and send copy to the typesetter. The Apple I and IIs gave rise to the notion of the PC, which propelled by my 16-year run at PC Week.

As the PC steamrolled everything in its path in the 80s and much of the 90s, Apple became a side show, but Jobs never went away. And neither did legions of Apple zealots.

Upon his premature death, here’s some personal memories:

- Jobs seemed all but finished in the mid-80s after he was driven out of Apple by John Sculley, who had taken over Apple after long career at PepsiCo. A chapter in the book Accidental Empires book portrayed Jobs as driven, tyrannical, uncaring, thin-skinned, brilliant, at moments insane and frequently prone to outbursts. I expected he would fade. But post-Sculley, he hung around and bought Pixar in 1986 and started NeXt Computer.

– I interviewed him at length around 1993-94 at the SF Airport Hyatt over lunch. I can’t recall what we talked about, but the topic was probably NeXt Computer. He was second string in those days, but congenial and engaging. And at that point, he was arguably the father of the personal computer. Apple would lure him back in a few short years where his brilliance would manifest itself once again. And he would engineer the deal with archrival Microsoft in 1997 that would save Apple (it was announced to boos at Macworld in Boston) .

– Finally in personal recollection department, I recall sitting in 1992 or 1993 in the lobby of Apple HQ in Cupertino, Calif. waiting to interview someone who headed up Apple’s business to IT departments. Lo and behold, Jobs and Gates come walking down the stairs and shake hands. Gates glares at me and leaves.

Serendipitously, I been in the right place and right time and broke a story that Apple and Microsoft were in talks to settle a long standing dispute about over the use of the graphical user interface. Apple alleged copyright infringement against Microsoft, which ultimately was let off hook when it rescued a cash-strapped Apple in 1997. But I had the story that these two computing giants were in talks.

Anyhow, those are my recollections of Steve Jobs. What are yours?

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I got a good dose today of what’s wrong with U.S. healthcare and why it is killing the American economy.

$105 for this!?

I went to the drug store to pick up a colonoscopy prep that cleans out you system so the gastroenterologist has clear sailing, so to speak. You might say TMI, but the colonoscopy is routine for the over 50 crowd and over 40 if there’s colon cancer in your family.

The druggist said “that will be $35.”

I shot back, “wait a minute, I have insurance.”

“That’s with insurance. The total cost is $105,” he said ($105.99 to be exact). I was outraged. For two six ounce cough medicine bottles of sheer misery, a plastic cup and a box, $105!  The ingredients sound far from exotic – sodium sulfate, potassium sulfate and magnesium sulfate. It must be that #5 plastic mixing cup.

The product is called Suprep Bowel Prep Kit from Braintree Laboratories and the fine print FAQ does not disclose the price. If you have insurance, why triffle yourself with the total price? It doesn’t matter, right?

It DOES matter.

The druggist was in a chatty mood and gave me another example of how drug companies are gouging the American public (the druggist says the fault lay was the private insurance payers, but I am not sure I understood his point.).

Anyhow, another customer plunked down a $100 co-pay for 30 pills of the Abilify anti-depressant. A $100 co-pay was unusual so he looked up the full price – $900 for 30 pills in that particular dosage. Is it any wonder health insurance and healthcare costs are bankrupting America? And there are much more extreme examples than this, reminding me of the $600 hammers the military used to buy…or I hope used to.

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Two months ago, my wife Ann and I decided to retire our 20-year old KitchenAid (KA) refrigerator. After two new refrigerators, we wish we had it back.

New fridge one from Whirlpool

The old unit, save some broken plastic shelves propped up by wood blocks, was still functioning fine. It looked tired and some of the kids (now grown) hand prints stood out against white plastic veneer door.

But that ship has sailed and it’s two fridges later. Lowe’s where we bought new fridges has almost certainly destroyed KA. One delivery man said they go to charity if they still work. A floor salesman said they automatically get destroyed, but he could not explain why. Seems a shame that a good fridge gets destroyed.

New fridge one was a white Whirlpool Gold model GSS30C7EEYWOO…why we choose white in the age of stainless steel appliances is a question only Ann can answer. But it was huge…so huge in fact, it was literally crammed into the spam where KA sat sentinel for two decades. The left side was scratched as the unit was pushed into the space.

Our kids have left home so we did not need such a large fridge, but its dimensions matched our space. We later learned the space should be two inches larger on both sides so the fridge is ventilated. We went on a leap of faith that it would fit when I knew the space has to be at least a little larger in height and width.

In any event, two defects prompted us to ask Lowe’s to take it back which they happily did. A vegetable drawer came incorrectly assembled and did not open or close smoothly. The Lowe’s appliance salesman said he just swap it for the same drawer in the same model on the floor. I trekked over and found that the tabs that hold the front of the replacement drawer to the rest of the unit were broken. The salesman really wanted to help, but just did have the product knowledge he needed.

I trekked home with my original drawer, took it apart and fixed it. To my dismay, I found out later, the salesman glued the broken drawer together and slid it back into the floor unit. Pity the poor consumer who gets that fridge because without those tabs, the drawer will not stay together. What’s more, I would not want glue near my veggies.

All set we thought. Then the door ajar light and alarm would not go off even though the doors seem securely shut. We put up with this for the better part of a week before a Lowe’s repairman showed up and replaced a switch. Five minutes after he left, the door ajar light lit up again and the alarm starting beeping. The repairman called back and said to unplug it for a minute and plug it in again. You know, the same reset trick that works with modems.

Samsung fridge - a tight squeeze

We called the repairman back and asked if he could do it and he said that was not his job, but he agreed to order a new electrical control panel.

By now, we’d had enough of this fridge. Ann went back to Lowe’s and picked out a very nice Samsung stainless steel Model RF268AB with freezer below and french doors on top. Ann had seen the light on white and agreed to stainless, which adds $200 in cost. This one was  a mere 25.7 cubic feet and had better fit and finish than the Whirlpool. It had real buttons instead of a flush plastic panel where you not tell if the button you pushed did anything.

Cramming the unit with no clearances on either side caused doors to misalign.

Lowe’s delivered the new fridge the next day and literally forced it into the space, denting one side where it rubbed against a granite counter top. This fridge was just as wide as the Whirlpool if not a touch wider, but not as deep.

What we should have done was leave the new fridge out while I cut a piece of molding under the cabinet. This two man crew delivers 6-10 new fridges a day so they were probably in a hurry to leave and cutting the molding would take up to two hours to do it right.  Anyway, I pulled the new fridge today and took an inch of the molding today from top to bottom.

In the process, I found that fridge was not completely resting on the floor, which misaligned the two French doors and forced us to remove a plastic cover on the top so the fridge would fit under two cabinets. The fridge was squeezed in so tight, it titled against the counter top.

Once I cut the molding, I had the better part of an inch of clearance on either side now and the plastic cover could fit under the cabinets. And the doors are now more or less aligned. We like the quality and look of the Samsung unit. The white Whirlpool behemoth looked ghastly and super-sized in that space. I called it our “meat locker.”

Our house was built 20 years ago for a smaller fridge. Today’s fridges are have designer looks and are super-sized as is the habit in America. They are also unnecessarily complex with more than can break such as ice dispensers and panels with pretty blue lights. And the ice makers take substantial space that could be used to, guess what, store and refrigerate more food. Fridge designers are counting on us guys to go for the gadgets.

Should this one we have now hold up, it’ll be a long time before we buy another.

Lowe’s was good about taking the fridge back, but not so great with details. They mailed us a debit card when they promised a check. There was the broken drawer debacle and the appliance delivery and floor people simply do not know have an adequate knowledge of the the products they sell and service. Everyone tried hard and was cordial. Also, keep in mind you do not know how a new fridge will look or sound until you get it into your kitchen.

Now I know why they call Lowe’s and Home Depot big box stores. They are about moving boxes, coming or going. Everything else is a detail.

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For the past few days, I’ve been exploring Bostonglobe.com, the new paid web site for the Boston Globe. It’s longstanding Boston.com will remain free and become  Globe Lite.

I applaud the Globe for taking this bold initiative. After all, as a journalist, I want to make money off my toils, too. BostonGlobe.com is priced at $3.99 a week for non-subscribers and free for subscribers to the paper. We’re in a free trial period that started 10 days ago and ends Sept. 30.

Boston.com

A quick analysis shows a huge savings for online over print. I paid an astronomical $600 plus for paper this year while online nets out to just over $200 a year.

This venture is not without big risks, however. BostonGlobe.com could cannibalize Boston.com, which has been around for more than a decade. With more than 200 million page views a month, it’s a BIG online franchise.

The Globe used to pitch Boston.com and still does occasionally as communal site including some other local media outlets, but to readers, Boston.com is 99.99% the Globe. Does it seem just a tad late that we are just now getting BostonGlobe.com?

Unless BostonGlobe.com is substantially different than Boston.com, it could become what Google+ is to Facebook, a distant, distant also-ran….just something else to ignore in the media space. And unlike Google+, BostonGlobe.com costs money.

Here’s what surprised me so far: BostonGlobe.com from a content perspective is not all that different from Boston.com in the two weeks it’s been live. At least at first glance: on Saturday, for example, the sad passing of Kara Kennedy led both sites. If there are differences, they are not terribly noticeable. As two examples here clearly show, the headlines can’t be the only difference.

I thought its creators would have come out of the gate showing how one could not live without BostonGlobe.com to make clear why it is worth four bucks a week. But nothing in that category has struck me yet although in fairness, I probably need to look a little deeper.

Globe online editors have to win over readers as if BostonGlobe.com with what is essentially a brand new newspaper with little or no pre-existing loyalty except for the Globe brand. And let’s face it: brand loyalty in media these days ranges from fleeting to nonexistent.

Granted, forming one’s opinion can take place after the free trial ends on Sept. 30, but BostonGlobe.com is new and has the public’s attention at the moment. I sense the editors have not quite figured out how to make them different the first time you look at them. After all, the news is the news. They look different, but many of the stories are the same.

BostonGlobe.com

The worst of all scenarios is if BostonGlobe.com is primarily a slug of re-purposed print stories every day (what “Today’s Globe” in Boston.com has been for years) and not much else. Like any good news site, it will need updating every minute of the day. And that’s hard in the era of doing more with much, much less.

On the plus side, BostonGlobe.com is much less cluttered site than Boston.com. It has a fresher appearance and clearly is the flagship online version of the dead tree edition. What’s more, you will be able to save stories that might useful after you initially read them. It looks and feels more serious than the more gossipy and social Boston.com. And mobile version is not bad. The Globe is also soliciting substantial feedback from readers, laying the groundwork for what a news site should be – a robust two-way conversation.

In style, they feel different. But only time will tell whether they are different enough in substance. Indeed, the audience will vote with their pocketbooks.

On a more tactical level, BostonGlobe.com doesn’t use your Boston.com login. You have to register for a new one. Logins are something between a huge pain and a necessary evil. I take that back: they are just a huge pain for we have way too many of them. So they could turn away readers accustomed to getting Globe content for free. Boston.com has required logins off and on for years to get full stories and more often recently in anticipation of the paid site launch.

Hey, free content could not last forever.

Here’s an unedited online chat with a support person at BostonGlobe.com. Did she get a bit testy or was I goading her? In any event, it did feel like I was chatting with real person who pushed back a bit versus someone who just keeps apologizing. The trademark crankiness of journalists on both ends of this conversation was refreshing.

The best way to test if companies are using social media is to complain about them. I had occasion to do so twice this week on Twitter. One was a surprise. One I expected to. And one I expected to didn’t.

First, the surprise – Whirlpool Corp. A new fridge we bought had a misaligned drawer. I didn’t so much slam Whirlpool on Twitter as I did Lowe’s where we bought it. But I nano-dinged Whirlpool. Here’s the complaint and response.

Thedodgeretort: Bought #Whirlpoolfridge at #Lowe‘s. Drawer assembled wrong. Incompetent #Lowe‘s gave me broken drawer replacement, runaround. Fixed it myself 

WhirlpoolCare: @Thedodgeretort I am sorry to hear about your experience. Please let me know if you are needing assistance. 

Pretty good response from an old line manufacturer! We tweeted back and forth and I have to say I was impressed enough to follow @whirlpoolcare.

Lowe’s did not respond on Twitter as I suspected they might, although the store personnel tried to help but ultimately failed to solve the drawer problem. They took a drawer out of floor unit and told me to come get it (grrr). I schlepped to the store only to find the replacement drawer more broken than the one I had.

Unlike Lowe’s flooring people (we just bought carpet), the appliance people could use considerably more training on what they sell. I fixed the original drawer myself by reassembling it – correctly this time. I might have been a little hard on the Lowe’s floor personnel…they were trying.

The other company that responded on Twitter was GEICO, one of the most web savvy companies out there. I complained about a runaround on the phone. Here the thread:

@Thedodgeretort Call #GEICO for umbrella policy…sure, we do that, call transferred, told we can’t do that…gives me another #…on hold…gave up…

GEICO_ServiceSep 01, 11:15am via engage121

@Thedodgeretort: Sorry to hear about the confusion. Here’s the # 1-866-272-5192 -Ivy

This is standard stuff for GEICO. With 615 followers, @Whirlpoolcare is just starting out on Twitter, but at least it is there. Bravo.

But where was Lowe’s (there is a @lowescares, after all)?

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