Someone Else

Samsung Instinct appears to be full of fail

Coming from a snark on John Gruber's site about Samsung's instinct going head to head with the iPhone in a hundred million dollar advertising campaign, I find the Gizmodo article with videos of the two phones side by side. And I have to say what the hell are they smoking in Sprint and Samsung too for that matter?

Maybe I've misunderstood this, but the selling points of the Samsung Instinct are that it has 3G and GPS built in. Like the next version of the iPhone which is supposed to be coming Real Soon Now(tm) is expected to have.

Maybe I'm biased because I'm looking at this with the eyes of a European where our mobile phone infrastructure isn't made entirely out of second hand string and tin cans like it appears to be the case in the USA, but while 3G is important I just don't get boasting about it. Next you'll be telling me that my car comes with tyres or an engine. By all means tell me why yours is special, if it really is, but don't expect me to drool uncontrollably just because you've got one at all.

And let's not forget the adverts that commit the cardinal sin of putting your product next to a competitor's when your product might have slightly better technical chops, for a couple of months maybe, but ultimately looks like crap. And besides that, I think anyone who is that impressed by how the phone looks will already have an iPhone with a contract tied to it, and those of us who are impressed by features more than looks will already have a different phone (here's mine) that does far more than either the Apple or Samsung phone already. So who's left? People who want an iPhone but are too stupid to notice that the one they picked up feels funny and says "Samsung" instead of "Apple" on the casing?

I think John Gruber is right. If I had an extra hundred million dollars to spend on making people buy my mobile phones, I think I'd spend it on building a phone so damn good that I don't need advertising because people besiege my stores to buy the phone anyway. Or I'd wonder who was going to be buying luxury mobile phones during the onset of a recession and save my damn money for a rainy day.

Round-up

I just wanted to quickly gather up some links to articles I've found interesting of late.

First of all, Claus Valca has some great posts over on Grand Stream Dreams. I want to draw your attention to a link roundup and comments post Claus made a week or so ago because of some interesting stuff he's found around Firefox and the implications of how it pre-fetches content (This Week in Firefox Tips (Tinfoil Hats optional but stylish, towards the bottom of the article).

If you use Firefox this should scare you. If you don't use Firefox you should still be worrying about how your browser of choice does pre-fetching and still feeling a little bit scared. While no-one can possibly argue with the lofty goals behind the FBI scheme discussed, it seems pretty clear to me that there is a lot of scope for some horrible mistakes to be made too. Much like the MP in the UK who thought that spam would stop somehow if only we had our postcodes (aka zip code) incorporated into our email addresses, this is clear proof that when politicians and lawyers try to regulate technology they don't understand you frequently end up with bad law.

Once you're done with that article you may want to check out the more recent one with lots of links and tips for improving Windows XP and Vista performance.

There really is something for everyone on that site, unless of course you own a Mac. In which case John Gruber wants to talk to you about Safari Vs. Firefox and also has some useful tips on manipulating the settings for hidden files in the Mac's HFS+ file system.

Next up is Mr Angry's post on Religion vs. Science in IT and Project Management. I've got to be honest, I've been wanting to write something on this myself for a while and mentioned it to Mr Angry in a blog comment on another article of his that is very much worth reading, and he took the idea and ran with it (with my blessing I hasten to add!). I think he ended up writing an article that says pretty much everything I wanted to, except phrased better. Well worth a read. Even more worth keeping in mind when reading other articles.

Nice to see that Joel Spolsky agrees with me about Microsoft Mesh by the way. Though to be fair that's largely because I was agreeing with him. There's an interesting rebuttal of the anti-mesh sentiments expressed by Joel and I at Ashutosh's blog here. Obviously I don't agree *grin* but it's a well written alternative point of view that deserves consideration. Ashutosh thinks file sync is a big deal, and while I can see it will be useful, it just doesn't excite me somehow.

To me Mesh still sounds like some kind of re-write of Groove to turn it into .mac.net and while those Windows users who are interested deserve a decent coherent implementation of .mac it just doesn't seem amazing to me in the way the initial announcements suggested I ought to find it. Phone me when I can use my iPod touch to get a file off my desktop PC at home and transfer it to my Apple laptop in another office at work.

I also found a link to a funny youtube video on Ashutosh's website. I'm not sure if it's a hoax or not but it's nice to see a Lenovo X300 expose the MacBook Air as a triumph of compromise and style over substance. Thanks for making me chuckle! I still think that knowing me I'd rather have the Apple product if I won the lottery and didn't need to justify my purchases any more, but there is no doubt that the MacBook Air is compromised by a desire to hit a certain size and weight in preference to actually being a good laptop.

Lastly, the Windows Connected blog has a few good articles on Vista and the dislike surrounding it. I guess I have to tread carefully here as I'm hardly a fan myself but there are a few good points in the original article about this on the site. I will say that the author of that article knows about as much about Macs as I do about what it feels like to [insert bombastic statement about doing something really really really really bad here], but their point about Vista bashing becoming a sport is well made. I don't agree with the implication that there are no problems with Vista at all, obviously. That's not been my experience, but things are getting better with Vista it has to be said.

I have to say, if you want to criticise something then try to do so based on facts. In other words: approach it as a science not as a religion (did you see what I did there?). Don't tell me Vista or Mac OSX or Lotus Notes or Live Mesh "sucks". Anyone can have an opinion. Tell me why you have a problem with something. Ok I have to admit I'm far from perfect here myself at times, but I'm promising to try harder on this site from now on.

Of course, daring to even go within 20 miles of Mac OSX with a critical attitude provoked the inevitable reaction, which was addressed in a follow-up post. I mean seriously, what is it with the Apple fanboy crowd? Most of them make me embarrassed to own an iPod, let alone my Mac. I just don't understand it. There's never been a better time to own a Mac and yet still there are armies of idiots out there waiting to go off on any writer that dares to so much as look at an Apple product funny, let alone say something bad. Talk about a persecution complex!

I'm not sure I agree with all of the points raised about either Mac OS X or Vista in either post, but the over-reaching theme of the articles remains true I think.

Building a Media Centre

As anyone who takes even a cursory glance at this site will know, I've been critical of Windows Vista for a very long time (way before it became fashionable to bash it! Who says I'm not a trendsetter?). With Service Pack One being released I thought it was time for another decent trial.

Building "Brandine"

So rooting around in my box of spare computer bits, I realised I had enough spare parts to build a new computer, with the exception of a case and motherboard. All the computers I've built have been named after characters from The Simpsons, and most of the old parts were removed from a computer I'd named "Cletus". Obviously this new computer would have to be called Brandine!

On reflection, I also decided I wanted to build a modern media centre, which made me decide to also purchase a video card that could handle HDTV and wouldn't sound like a jet taking off to the mix too. So I now have a new computer built on the hardware below:

ASUS T3P5G965 "BareBone" system (Minitower case inc. i965 BTX Motherboard and 250w Power supply). [Asus website]
Corsair DDR2 memory 4GB (2x2GB) [c'mon you've all seen memory before]
Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 [toms hardware article]
Samsung 20x DVD-r/rw DVD+r/rw DVD-RAM SATA DVD writer [view]
Samsung 500GB SATA II hard drive [view]
Sapphire 512MB HD3650 PCI-E video card (DVI-I HDTV HDCP supported) [view]

As you can see from the Asus T3 specifications, it's quite a well built platform even though the 965 chipset isn't that new anymore. The Asus T3 motherboard is based on a BTX layout and supports up to 8GB of memory. It also supports 3 SATA and 1 PATA drive, which for a small media centre is probably more than enough. In addition to all that, the T3 also includes onboard graphics based on Intel's X3000 graphics, which didn't meet my needs (hence the new video card above) but would be fine for general office use.

Still, you've all come here to watch me chew Microsoft out over Vista again and not to watch me babble about hardware, so lets get on with the software shall we?

Enter Vista

Brandine is running Vista Ultimate Edition x64 with Service Pack One installed, with Office 2007 SP1 also installed. Also installed are the latest versions of iTunes, QuickTime and the very useful Bonjour from Apple. If you have a home network and you're not using Bonjour to help devices find one-another I can only suggest you give it a try.

Nero 8 suite is installed, with the rather useless Nero search indexer service disabled.

Windows Live was also added, all components installed without any of the drama I suffered on the XP machine, and lastly I also installed Paint Shop Pro to help me grab screenshots and Crysis to help me relax... er to test DirectX 10.

I chose the x64 edition of Vista for a couple of reasons:

1) Because I can. I have the licences and x64 is the wave of the future.
2) The hardware supports 8Gb of memory and I might want to see what that performs like one day
3) I already knew what 32-bit vista behaved like.

Installation proceeded very quickly, with no problems just as you'd expect. I created an admin account and a couple of 'normal user' accounts and configured Vista to automatically log in to the account I had set aside for shared media centre use without any issues.

Vista works well on this platform, but even with SP1 installed it still feels more sluggish in response to the user than you'd really expect, but nothing too objectionable. Microsoft Update still downloaded several updates even with SP1 installed and the update process still feels far too slow when compared to Windows XP or Apple OSX 10.5. Still, it gets there in the end.

The WEI report shows a good level of performance from the system too, which isn't too surprising. None of the components I'm using here are the fastest in their class, but all of them were / are well designed and well balanced components that are well up to the job being asked of them. The slowest component here is actually the CPU, the Core 2 Duo E6400 itself, with a WEI of 'only' 5.

This just goes to reinforce the idea that you'd be crazy to buy a new CPU that wasn't a dual core these days, or even quad core if you know why you actually want one (heck, can you even still get single core CPUs outside of budget ranges?).

So how was it?

Vista makes a pretty decent media centre PC when all is said and done. The media centre experience is smooth and pleasant on a large TV screen, and despite one or two quirks the interface is usable enough. I don't think I'm telling you anything there that you haven't already read in any other review of Vista's media centre. A couple of bad points for me might be configuring the PC to auto-logon and run media centre, which isn't difficult so much as clumsy, because you have to make changes in a couple of unrelated areas to get everything set up right.

Another area where x64 Vista Media Centre doesn't do so well is in codec support. There are two things that surprised me here:

1) Codec Support for x64 media centre is relatively poor because of the requirements for 64-bit codecs for media centre playback. It's not as bad as it was, I've read some real horror stories about how bad this was when Vista was still new, but it's still not all it should be. When you consider that video encoding and decoding is one of the things that can definitely benefit from 64-bit multi-core processors, this really surprised me.

2) Being able to play a movie in the 'normal' Windows Media Player is no indication of whether or not you'll be able to play it in Media Centre. This is an unbelievable pain in the hoop because it makes testing a drudge.

I found a good few websites that had a lot of help for us pioneers though. Thanks to The Green Button, Freik's weblog and doom 9 for helping me figure out what's going on and find a fix for most of my codec issues between them.

This is something I think Microsoft need to work on. I realise there are sound technical reasons why this problem happens, and heck if I didn't fix them myself, so what's the big deal? At the end of the day, if I'm sitting in front of my TV trying to watch a film or show I've saved to the hard disk, I want to relax, not to fiddle with the inner workings of the computer driving it. I earn a living doing exactly that, and while I'm fortunate enough to really enjoy my job, the plain and simple truth is that when I'm not at work I just want to get things done without fiddling around.

Another area that surprised and worried me was file performance. Despite doing a clean install of Vista SP1 onto reasonably specified components, all of which are certified Vista Compatible by their manufacturer, it seems the much reported file copying problems remain.

Using a portable disk to move saved films between my computers, I'm still dismayed to report that it took about two to three times as long for Vista to read the data from the portable drive and copy it onto its local disk than it took for the XP machine to write the data onto the portable disk from local storage.

Benchmarking. And Crysis.

Crysis worked well too. It wasn't as fast on this computer as it is on my 'normal' Windows desktop, but then I never expected it to be. It was perfectly playable though, and the graphics looked much the same, possibly very slightly better lighting effects and such-like, but nothing substantial. It's worth mentioning at this point the hardware remained cool and quiet throughout all of this play-testing, remaining inaudible throughout my video playback and my game session.

I grabbed benchmarks using the PCPitstop tools. I'm not saying these numbers are authoritative but they do give some indication of performance. The XP machine is running a faster Quad Core processor so this should be taken as a 'flavour' of the two machines rather than a direct comparison.

As you can see, the two computers show a clear difference in performance, as expected, though both machines perform very well indeed compared to the average tested by PCPitstop. The only area where the Vista machine 'wins' compared to the XP machine is on hard disk performance.

The Internet performance differences surprised me. The connection was idle in the tests apart from the machine being tested.

The Vista machine is connected to my gateway with an 802.11n connection and my XP machine is hardwired through gigabit Ethernet. So far so good, but the connection to the Internet is a 20Mb connection, which should be well within the capacity of both connections.

At the end of the day, the Vista machine's Internet connection is still fast enough to download most things at a fair clip, and that will do me. I tested streaming music from the iTunes library on my XP machine over the wireless connection to the Vista machine and I'm pleased to say it worked just fine.

And yes I do have a lot of music, thanks for asking.

Conclusions

So what did I think of Vista Media Centre? Well I'm keeping it for now, This probably doesn't sound like much of a compliment if you've just Googled your way onto this article and haven't visited my site before (welcome by the way) but as I mentioned at the top of the post, I've not been a fan of Vista for quite some time so simply persuading me not to nuke it and install something else is a major accomplishment.

I'm still not sure I like Vista's desktop eye-candy and generous use of white space for a day to day desktop, but on a media centre designed to be viewed on a TV set at a distance the uncluttered layout, large icons and generous space between groups of items starts to make a lot more sense.

The x64 question is another matter. I'm a geek so I've got no problem with keeping this computer as a 64 bit machine, but at the moment I think if I was building a media centre for 'normal' people I'd use the 32 bit version of Vista rather than the 64 bit version. The point for most people isn't "can you make it work in the end?" but rather "why should I have to struggle to make it work at all?" and for now the 32-bit version of Vista media centre still holds a slight edge here.

Finally, a word about the hardware. I picked a BTX-based system because I knew that it would run cool and quiet. I picked the HD3650 video card because I knew it would provide a good balance between performance and noise. This has to be one of the biggest driving factors behind hardware choice for a media centre. Could I build a faster computer to make Vista run like greased lightning and produce benchmarks where that waxes a XP machine? Of course I could. But would I want that computer in my front room wailing like a banshee while I'm trying to watch a DVD? No.