That’s right, a phone that I have managed to keep for more than a couple of months! And guess how many times it has crashed? Dozens I hear you say? Nope. None. Not a single crash since I got this phone. Sure, apps have crashed. We all know that the Facebook app has it’s flaws, as do some others, but nothing that is stock on the phone has ever crashed on me. That’s more than can be said for my old phones, the LG GTT540 and the Optimus 2x which not only crashed frequently but they also refused to hold a data/wifi/cell connection for longer than a day.

The battery life is also great. Both of my Android phones struggled to get a day if used “normally”. The iPhone easily makes it through the day of normal use. If I use my running/biking app then it gets a bit of a hammering but otherwise it’s perfectly reasonable.

If and when it comes to the point where I need a new phone, I’d have to think long and hard about going back to Android. After a full year using iOS (with frequent updates I might add), I don’t think I could go back to any phone that I know has the possibility to go wrong because of lack of care by the manufacturer. If I were to go back to Android, I would only go for a high end one such as a Samsung Galaxy because they use stock Android and none of the manufacturer bloated crap.

The big question is though, would I buy another iPhone? Yes, I would. Even at £500 up front.

If you read my last blog about my UPS battery woes and it interested you, then this one might help you further.

Batteries are a horrible technology in many respects. They’re expensive, damaging to the environment and incredibly inefficient. Unfortunately we have nothing better so we have to make do until another technology is found.

When it comes to large batteries, you’ll generally only find one type of battery – lead acid. They come in several forms:

1. FLA (Flooded Lead Acid) – The type found in cars
2. AGM (Absorbed Glass Mat) – The type found in UPS’s and alarm systems
3. SLA (Sealed Lead Acid, commonly mislabeled and are really AGM) – Also found in UPS’s and alarm systems

 

While not the best at energy storage compared to Lithium Ion/Polymer, they are much cheaper and store close to the same amount of energy too.

Taking care of these batteries is important (as with any battery actually) because of the way in which they work.

A lead acid battery is comprised of lead plates and an electrolyte solution of sulfuric acid. This is how the battery holds it’s energy. During normal use, the energy will be released and stored via a chemical reaction. This reaction heats the electrolyte and over time this solution evaporates. If this happens too much and the lead plates become exposed and/or dry, the capacity of the battery will drop. Generally “going dry” is what kills a lot of mis-used batteries.

But this isn’t all, there is also another process called “sulphation”. This occurs when the battery is discharged and sulphur builds up on the lead plates. This inhibits it’s ability to hold and release energy. This also kills batteries when mis-used, especially when left discharged. This is common in cars and other vehicles, especially in winter when the battery is put under more strain.

Battery Charging

Now the problem I had was mainly the cells going dry through what is known as “float charging”. This is when the battery is held at a voltage above it’s natural storage voltage to keep the charge level at 100%. This is constantly putting some energy into the battery so it warms up, and the electrolyte dries off. This is what killed my UPS batteries, because the UPS was in essence over-charging the battery.

How can this be avoided? Don’t keep it on float of course, or if you do, do it at a reduced voltage. My Belkin UPS’s keep a float charge of about 13.3-13.6v. A standard 12v battery will sit at about 12.8-13.3v when fully charged, so if you can keep it around that voltage, you should extend the life of the battery. However, if you don’t bring a 12v battery up to 14.0-14.5v when charging, it will never fully charge and so you will end up sulphating the plates quicker. It’s a tricky situation, but it can be avoided.
The answer is 2 or 3 stage charging. 3 stage charging involves:

1. Bulk phase – Charging the battery at a constant current (generally 10-30% of the battery capacity, referred to as “C”). For example,   10Ah battery holds 10,000mAh of capacity, so you would charge it at 1000-3000mA or 1-3A.
2. Absorption phase – Charging the battery at constant voltage (typically 14.0-14.5v for a 12v battery) until the current drops to about 1% of C. For a 10Ah battery this would be 100mA or 0.1A.
3. Trickle phase – Holding the battery at a reduced constant voltage (the tricky part is what voltage to use here).

 

Image Credit: http://www.infinitumstore.my/2009/07/3-stage-charging-process/

 2 stage charging is the same as above but without the trickle charge phase.

My Belkin UPS appears to do 3 stage charging, and it’s trickle voltage is around 13.3-13.6v. The difference with mine is it’s not constant voltage but rather it pulses on and off. Pulsing has been tested but there is no definitive proof it helps over the long run.

The better way to do this would be to do 2 stage charging, then cut off the charging completely until the voltage drops below a set level. Then you begin the process over again. This is the better way as it lets the battery rest with full capacity, without charging to make the electrolyte evaporate off.

I don’t know why more systems don’t do this. I imagine it’s for simplicity in design, otherwise they would need to incorporate a fully battery monitoring system which would cost more money. Who knows, but it makes sense to cut it off after it’s charged. This is especially important for lithium batteries like those in mobile phones. If you over-charge these (continue to charge when full), they can explode! So why do it with lead acids of any kind?

What about discharging?

Now that you know about charging, what about safe discharge levels? This is one that has plagued many people. Generally voltage would be used, wouldn’t you think? Well no, because lead acid batteries charge/discharge level cannot be determined without use of a hydrometer. This is a device that you use to sample the electrolyte from the battery and uses floats to determine the “specific gravity” of the electrolyte. I won’t go into how this works, but it’s something you can only do manually. Voltage on any battery is not a charge level indicator, you can only use it as a dummy guide and it will often fail you.

That said, you should be aware of safe limits that lead acid batteries work to. Here is a handy table to explain it to you.

As a general rule, the battery should never be discharged past 12v when “resting”. Resting means it has been sat for more than 4 hours with zero load connected to it. With a load connected, you should never discharge below 10.5v. If you continue to discharge it, you risk warping the lead plates, and doing so can create a short circuit which will ruin your battery.This is a very basic table of charge level based on voltage and what the specific gravity is expected to be. Going in the standard good to bad colours, you can see that the battery capacity is only good above 50%. This is because below this, sulphation occurs much more quickly. On a totally flat battery this can be as quickly as a day or two.

You should also ALWAYS charge a lead acid battery after it has been used. Even if it was just a few percent, because any discharge speeds up plate sulphation.

This is something I didn’t take into account when building my camping power box. My LED volt meter range goes from 10.7v to 12.5v when really it should have been 12.0 to 12.6v. However, that said, now that I know it’s wrong I can use my own knowledge to determine when to stop using it and recharge it. The added range allows me to see when it’s time to stop using it under load as well.

Hopefully you have learned something from this and it’s a reminder for me if nothing else.

It came to my attention just now that in 2 days I will have been posting to this blog for a full year – the longest I’ve ever kept a blog going for. I wanted to post weekly but I knew from the beginning that wouldn’t happen, but I’ve made sure I’ve posted at least once a month so that’s an achievement.

It was my birthday yesterday and as a present to myself (seeing how I don’t get presents like when I was a kid where I was spoiled more!) I bought myself a new PC! My last one was built 4 1/2 years ago with money from my first job as I had never owned a decent PC before then. I can’t believe this one has lasted me 4 1/2 years and it was still fairly quick. The only upgrade it’s had since it was built was Windows when new versions came out and a new HDD and later an SSD. Nothing else was changed in that entire time, not even memory or graphics card.

I’m not a patient person and computers being slow annoys me the most. If I click something, I expect it to do it instantly. Even though I grew up in the age of Celeron processors and 256MB RAM as a main PC, I never did learn to live with the slowness.

So you might ask what I had before and what I upgraded to. Well here’s a quick run down:

Old PC
Core2Duo E6750 2.66GHz
ASUS P5K-E WiFi
4GB OCZ DDR2-800
Sapphire HD (ATi Radeon HD) 3870 O/C Edition 512MB
Hiper 580w PSU
2x80GB RAID0 (replaced with 64GB OCZ Vertex 2e SSD)
2x250GB RAID0

New PC
Core i5 3570K 3.4GHz
ASUS P8Z77-E LX
8GB G-Skill DDR3 2133MHz
Sapphire HD (AMD Radeon HD) 7770 O/C Edition 1GB
Hiper 580w PSU
64GB OCZ Vertex 2e SSD
2x250GB RAID0

Total cost: £430 delivered from ebuyer.com (cheap compared to a year ago, and compared to my old PC which was £620 new!)

As you can see I’m re-using some parts between machines as there is nothing wrong with the old HDD’s or the PSU. The next thing on my list might be a nice case or two new full HD monitors, I’ve not decided yet since it’s all about money! I also want to find the right deal on the monitors since I’ll be wanting 2 for my dual screens.

The speed difference between these machines is quite large. Boot up time had dropped by 2/3 down to just 24 seconds to the desktop, including BIOS and password screen. The machine is instantly usable when it hits the desktop even though it’s loading in the background still, which the old PC would make you wait about 5-10 seconds before it would open anything.

Installing Windows 7 SP1 tonight took 4 minutes! And it included 3 reboots! That took at least 3-4x longer on the old PC, so I was quite surprised. The difference a new CPU, memory and motherboard can make is immense. The SSD certainly helps any machine however so that should be your first upgrade point if the rest of your hardware is fairly good.

I’ve tried a few games, but one of the games I really wanted to try was Flight Simulator X, one I could never run on decent graphics because my system was too slow. Now I can happily run it on full graphics and still get about 30fps! The big downer is that it’s not multi-threaded, so it just maxes out a single CPU core. I suspect the CPU was always the bottleneck on my old PC.

Minecraft (as crap as Java is) now runs with virtually no lag compared to random bouts of it on my old PC. That’s pleased me a fair bit as the lagging often made it unplayable.

As for others, I’ll get to test those properly at the upcoming LAN party at my friends house in a couple of weeks.

So, the Blackberry was a bad idea, I admit. It was a nice phone but the software was lacking in too many areas (mainly the Java side of it). If RIM bring the Blackberry to Android standards then I’d happily go back.

So anyway I thought it was about time I got myself a new phone. I was definitely after another Android because they’re just so powerful and the apps you want actually exist (and for free too) unlike on Blackberry. I began shopping around quite a while ago but I could never quite find what I wanted for the right price. I didn’t want to spend any more than £300 because I just don’t feel the likes of the iPhone 4S is worth £500 (more if you get more memory). £300 was my set limit, no matter how tempting the iPhone was.

I set myself the challenge of price, it had to be Android and it had to be capable of running Cyanogen Mod (stock ROM’s are awful on most phones). So after much browsing and research, the LG Optimus 2X was my final choice. I wanted the Samsung Galaxy S2 but it’s price tag of £480 put it straight off the list. The LG Optimus 2X however has similar specifications but only cost £269 from Amazon (the cheapest I could find it). What’s more it runs Cyanogen too.

Specs

This phone has some impressive specs packed into such a small area. Lets have a look:

Dual Core 1 GHz Cortex-A9
Nvidia Tegra 2 AP20H Chipset
ULP GeForce GPU
512MB RAM
8GB Internal Storage, up to 32GB more can be added with a micro SD card
480×800 IPS LCD Capacitive Touch Screen
Soft Touch Capacitive Buttons
8MP Main Camera (1080p Video Capable @ 24fps, 720p @ 30fps)
1.3MP Front Camera
LED Flash
GPS
1500mAh Battery

See more specs here >
See TechRadar’s Review >

As you can see, it’s a very powerful device. The 2X was the first dual core phone ever produced, and along with the Nvidia Tegra chipset it makes for a very powerful combination.

512MB RAM is pretty standard for a high end Android smart phone, so nothing special about that. The internal 8GB of memory is double that of most other smart phones, but this can be upgraded with 32GB more with the micro SD card slot. And again with the screen this is a standard size for high end smart phones. I was disappointed to see no OLED screen with this but for the price I’m not going to complain much.

The camera is an 8MP 1080p video capable sensor which I have to say performs pretty well. The focus speed is immense at under 1 second, often quicker. 1080p video doesn’t appear to stutter during my tests but the quality is a little short of that I would expect from a camera designed to do 1080p. It’s a little grainy and lacks definition but certainly does well enough for your average amateur video recording. I’d imagine 720p would look a little sharper but I’ve not tested this as of yet. The LED flash is a little dull, my Blackberry was at least twice the brightness but the quality of the photo makes up for this when lighting is sufficient.

The 1.3MP front camera is very poor. If you’ve ever seen a poor webcam in low light you’ll understand what I mean, that’s how bad it is. There is no lighting on the front either so for low lit video calls it would be useless. Since I won’t be using it for video calls though I’m not fussed, it’s just an “extra”.

I’ve not tried the GPS yet but as a standard function of most modern smart phones I imagine it would perform just as it would in any other device. The only measure you can use for this is its ability to get a GPS lock quickly, but as I say, it’s not been tested yet. Perhaps I’ll write another post once I’ve used it for the first time.

The battery is around the same size as your typical Android device. At 1500mAh it doesn’t pack much power but it’s enough to keep the device alive for around 12 hours of average use. With careful management you could probably get 48 hours out of it. As a light to medium user myself I’m currently trying my hand at some power saving apps that turn off data when it’s not needed, periodically turning it on for email checks etc. I’ll report back on how that gets on once I have the results. I want it to reach the blackberry battery life which was 2-3 days if barely used. If it can do that, I’ll be happy (even if it does need an app to achieve it).

I have an extended life 3500mAh battery on order. While this sounds good, it won’t fit the phone without a replacement back plate for it, as the battery is twice the thickness of the standard battery. However this may turn out to be a sound trade off for decent battery life. We’ll see once it arrives.

Photos

I scanned my device with my scanner so you can get a nice in-focus and close up view of the phone.
Click to enlarge

 

Cyanogen Mod

Ahh Cyanogen, what would Android phones be without you… I’ll tell you… Underused! Cyanogen unleashes the power of your device much more than a stock ROM would. It also adds more features, optimises for your device and gives an overall more pleasant experience… If you get a stable ROM that is! The only problem with Cyanogen Mod is that it’s developed by volunteers. It’s not their day job, it’s something they do for the Cyanogen community. However despite that, updates are frequent and you get a lot of help with your device on their forums.

One thing I will say about Cyanogen though is that is it incredibly difficult to install if you don’t have the capability of doing some research yourself. Although Cyanogen supply instructions, they don’t always work. In my case they didn’t work when it came to using the ADB commands on the Android SDK. However some Googling later and I found the answers I needed and I was on my way to installing it.

I began with the stable build for my phone, which worked for the most part but the nightly builds were much more up to date so I gave one of those a try. It seems a lot more stable with the latest nightly than with the supposed “stable” version. It fixed a lot of bugs in the operating system that are part of the simple operation of the phone, so I was happy about that.

Verdict… Am I happy?

Yes, definitely. I finally have a phone that can do what I want it to do, even if it’s a little buggy at times (come on, it comes with the technology, nothing is perfect!). I can almost use it like a regular PC. I can get my e-mail, browse the web, remote desktop into my server, edit documents, watch videos… you name it. Admittedly it’s much better on a PC but for a phone it’s a great feat.

I’ve only had it a week so we’ll see how it all goes, and I’ll try to post back on the battery life savings I am attempting to get.

You might have heard recently about the huge hike in hard drive prices, due to the temporary closure of a manufacturing plant in Thailand thanks to flooding. Well, it’s hit everyone I can see so far, from small computer shops to the big businesses and even manufacturers. Acer announced recently that they would have to increase the cost of their machines to make up for the loss.

It’s not as bad for big manufacturers like Acer than it is for consumers though. My regular supplier, ebuyer, used to sell 1TB Samsung drives for about £42, they’re now over £100. Similarly they did 2TB Samsung drives for £62, they’re now over £150. It’s been reported the price has been going up £5 a day for the last week.

I’m lucky. I didn’t anticipate this sort of drastic action but I’d already stocked up on a new 2TB drive last month, so I don’t have any storage problems at the moment and I can probably get by about 3-6 months on what I have. But what about those who don’t have space and need more? They’ll be forced to fork out obscene amounts of cash for a new drive. There is little use in waiting either, it’s reported things won’t pick up again until some time early next year, say Feb/March time and prices begin to fall again.

One of the biggest companies hit that I’m following is OVH, my hosting provider. They’re currently only receiving 10% of their requested hard drive stock, and as a result they are finding it hard to deploy new servers. They’re taking drastic action and using old drives from old stock. They’re pulling them out, running a full disk wipe and then putting them in new servers. Customers are being notified that their drives will be used but there is nothing they can do about it except stop deploying new servers. This obviously isn’t an option to such a big company that is still growing.

Some companies have been panic buying stock which has made things even worse. However this sort of behavior is to be expected – how else are companies going to survive? The fact that this plant that is no longer operating because of the floods, and that it produces around 80% of the worlds stock, makes you wonder why they centralised everything so much. It brings you back to the Japan earthquake and a lot of Sony’s production is done there as well (and not just Sony, quite a lot of other big companies too). Infrastructure centralisation is a bad thing! Why won’t anyone learn?! It doesn’t matter if it’s cloud infrastructures or manufacturing, the end result of something messed up like this is always going to be bad.

Anyway, we’ll just have to wait and see how this pans out. I feel sorry for those who are having to suffer with the ridiculous prices and count myself very lucky I have some spare drives to last me.

No doubt you have heard about the recent Blackberry outage this week that spanned over the course of 3 days, Monday 10th to Wednesday 12th October. As a Blackberry user I was hit, although not as badly as some people given that I don’t use it for business purposes. Despite that I still got annoyed over the reasons why it went wrong, as it just shouldn’t have happened the way it did. Even RIM themselves acknowledge this and admit that a lot more could have been done to prevent it. I know for certain they will be looking into this to prevent future occurrences.

So what exactly stopped working? Everything. All e-mail, internet, Blackberry Messenger and everything else data related such as Facebook/Twitter apps. The reason for this is because all data is routed through the Blackberry servers rather than only some data being routed there. It wasn’t until the outage that I realised all data went through the BB servers as I thought browsing went through your providers network as usual. Wifi browsing still worked fine, which is great at home but useless if you’re away from a wifi network. What also annoys me about BB’s is that you can’t use e-mail unless it goes through RIM’s servers. I’d prefer it the way Android allows it where your standard data connection is used and your phone handles it all but I guess that’s what’s unique about the BB service.

I spent a little time trying to figure out if there was a way around this issue with regards to browsing and using the providers network as normal (in my case O2). I tried manually inputting the APN’s but this did nothing. I did discover that tethering still worked as intended which was good to know as the only time I use my BB a lot is when away on business (which is rare in itself).

Over the 3 days I found myself looking at the same news article over and over again, explaining what was happening and when it would be resolved. It was all the same; “It’s being worked on”. That was it, there was no detail at all. At that point I don’t know if they knew what the issue was or whether they were trying to avoid telling people. Regardless, in the end it all spills out and the issue was flagged down to a “faulty core switch”.

Immediately at that point alarm bells started ringing on why the system didn’t have redundancy. It was supplying a service to 10’s of millions of people around the world, surely there was some form of backup? Well according to RIM there was, except it didn’t work “as previously tested”. Fact is, you can’t simulate a failure like this. It’s not like the switch drops off the network and another takes over instead, sometimes the switch fails in a way you can’t predict, causing a flurry of data that causes chaos throughout the software. This itself can result in the fail over not working as intended because it’s not capable of detecting it as an error. I don’t pretend to know how these switches work but that’s my interpretation of articles I read about fail over networking.

So back to the title of this post, what could they do differently? Lets start with the basics of data access. There needs to be some form of fail over for data services. I can accept that because e-mail is controlled by the BB servers that this will be offline, but how about routing internet traffic temporarily through your providers standard network? This at least gets people online and able to check their e-mail via webmail for example.

Secondly the infrastructure itself, as I heard it described, is too centralised. It needs to be spread out over each country and have each country use that infrastructure. This outage took down practically the whole of Europe, plus more. Even USA and Canada were seeing outages. By splitting it on a per country basis they prevent the outage spreading too far, limiting damage and hopefully reducing the recovery time. You could go further and split this into multiple data centers in each country as well but this starts to get costly, so lets just consider 1 data center per country with your fail over being fed into another nearby country’s data center. This would be ideal, IF the fail over works properly if a switch fails.

It all sounds simple but I know it most certainly isn’t. I’d like to think myself technical enough to understand the core levels of networking but I’m not Cisco certified nor am I anywhere near it. RIM can’t afford another outage like this as their revenue is already falling. Disgruntled customers make this even worse when their service is out for 3 days so any and all attempts to avoid this are crucial.

So to summarise, what I think RIM need to do as a part of their strategy is:
1. De-centralise their infrastructure to multiple countries.
2. Fail overs should be another nearby countries BB data center.
3. Formulate a fail over for data services (browsing, etc) by using the providers standard network in an outage.
4. Allow users to choose if their e-mail uses BB’s servers or standard IMAP like Android devices do.
5. Keep users informed if an outage occurs!