Build Quality

One of the first things I look for in any electronic is build quality, and the G2 delivers quite well. It’s a subdued gray plastic/aluminum design, which looks classy and high-end. The plastic is nicely rubberized which helps with grip, but it’s not excessively clingy so it slides into my pocket easily. The minimal bezel around the screen is black, rimmed by brushed aluminum, which helps with both aesthetics and durability. The battery cover is aluminum as well. The hinge mechanism which reveals the keyboard is quite sturdy so far, and flicks open and closes easily. No complaints so far about it, but I’ll see how that holds up over time.

Buttons

The G2 has several ways to navigate, such as the optical trackpad (think Blackberry scroll ball but without the ball), capacitive multitouch touchscreen, and keyboard. The optical trackpad doesn’t get a whole lot of use thanks to the very responsive screen, but I have found it to be quite useful for navigating text and forms. The standard volume rocker is fairly long and works well, so no complaints there. I especially love the camera button when you hold the phone horizontally. It has a two-stage mechanism— press it lightly and the camera will focus, press it harder to actually take the picture. I find this to be a nice little feature, makes it feel more like a real camera. Plus having a physical button is quite useful for self-portraits and such. The power/sleep button up top is fairly standard, and works fairly well. Having had an iPhone 4 before, having the sleep button in the same place is quite nice, no re-learning needed. The four capacitive buttons for home, menu, back, and search are located right below the screen on the black bezel. They are illuminated and work quite well for not being real buttons. I’ve haven’t had any problems with them so far.

Keyboard

This has its own section, as it’s a fairly big selling point for the G2, and one of the main reasons why I bought it. I’m happy to say that overall, the keyboard is very good. Even after only a couple of days’ use, people remarked how fast I was typing on it. The keys themselves are hard plastic, and they have fairly satisfying clicks to them without requiring a whole lot of force to depress. The space bar is well-sized, and the alt button makes it easy to type in pretty much any characters. My only complaint is about the three shortcut keys. They’re not very useful for me, and hitting them leads to a “set up shortcut keys” menu, which can be annoying. I would have just preferred it if HTC ditched the shortcut keys and made the spacebar bigger. I do like the inclusion of a menu button, as well as the “.com” and “@” buttons. Everything is generally well-spaced, and this has definitely got to be one of the best phone keyboards out on the market right now.

Display

Being a smartphone, having a good display is quite important. However, I’m happy to report that the G2′s display is quite good. It’s not that newfangled AMOLED stuff, but honestly I don’t care about what acronym the display is, I just care about the quality. Colors and blacks look quite good on the G2′s display, even at a fairly low brightness. The viewing angles are absolutely superb, a far cry from the early LCD’s I grew up with. The display is very responsive and multitouch works flawlessly. The resolution is quite good, and while pixels aren’t quite as invisible as on the iPhone 4′s display, the G2 display is still impressive. Text is rendered very well, and the default Android font is fairly pleasing to the eye. The only drawback is that a lot of Android apps are still made for lower-res displays, but developers will eventually get on the high-res bandwagon and release updates.

Performance

Don’t be fooled by the seemingly-low-powered 800 MHz processor, it’s quite powerful. Swiping and navigating is completely smooth and lag-free, and Flash videos play at a good framerate. Even with a lot of apps in the background, there is no lag. This phone can handle nearly everything you throw at it. Oh, and don’t worry about upgrading to Gingerbread, there is no actual clock-speed requirement (that was simply a rumor), I’m more than 100% sure this phone will get the upgrade, and sooner than other phones, due to its nearly-stock installation of Android (more on that in the next section).

Android

The G2 is perhaps best known for its nearly-stock installation of Android. This is almost pure 2.2, with minor modifications by T-Mobile. A bunch of apps are included right out of the box. Which can be either good or bad, depending on if you use them or not. In my case, I don’t need Amazon mp3 and several other apps. Unfortunately, you cannot remove these apps normally. To remove them, you have to root your G2 and use a command-line method to disable these apps, because some of them always run in the background and suck up battery life. Fortunately, this is not hard, and if you temporarily root your G2, is very low-risk. Just follow this guide to temp-root your G2, and this guide to disable the apps. Took me about 15 minutes to do all that, so the unremovable apps weren’t such a problem for me. Other than that, the Android experience is pretty much stock. I don’t mind not having the HTC Sense UI, the default Android UI is well-designed and aesthetically pleasing in its own right.

Battery Life

The battery here is removable and replaceable, which is a very good thing, as I plan to have this phone for a while, and being able to put in a larger-capacity battery or simply a new battery, is quite a good thing for future-proofing. The battery capacity is fairly good, I can easily make it through a long 8am to 1am day and still have some battery life to spare. And that’s with 4G enabled, under medium to heavy use (I’m a Facebook/Twitter/Wikipedia addict). Two days would probably be pushing it, so I just charge it at night, which works out just fine. When the phone is in standby mode with the display off, it sips battery at a very slow pace. When I use it as an mp3 player, the battery lasts pretty long too. The battery is on par, or even better than that of the iPhone 4.

Memory

The G2 has 4gb of internal memory, with an 8gb microSD card included in the box. The internal memory is more than enough for apps, and a lot of apps these days can be moved to the SD card, so I’m not worried about running out of room. Another great plus of the G2 (and most Android phones) is the removable memory. In the future, when 32gb microSD cards get cheaper (they’re like $70 now), I’ll upgrade.

Speaker/Calling

The phone speaker is adequately loud, much better than that of my old Blackberry’s, and almost the same as the iPhone 4′s. The speakerphone speaker on the back has often been panned by many reviewers, but I find it to be rather good-sounding for a phone. C’mon guys, it’s a phone, not a speaker set. It lacks bass and is a bit trebly when playing music, but it’s not all that much worse than the iPhone 4′s speaker. The call quality is very good, I can hear the other person easily and they can hear me well too. Plus I can actually make calls on the G2, unlike on the iPhone (sorry Apple, I just had to).

Camera

The default Android camera app isn’t nearly as miserable as everyone makes it out to be. It’s functional, and works well. The aforementioned two-stage camera button makes picture-taking quite easy, and the onscreen controls work well too. I’ll admit, the camera isn’t as good as the iPhone 4′s, but does it really need to be? It takes good shots in most lighting situations, and is more than adequate for a smartphone camera. The gallery is pretty cool though, the pictures tilt slightly based on the phone’s gyroscope. I’m a sucker for niceties like that. Also, if you’re using an Android phone with a decent camera, check out Google Goggles. It’s literally a visual Google search. You take a picture of a bar code, and it links you to the product. Any barcode really. It worked well on most of the stuff in the fridge. I can definitely see this coming in useful for comparison-shopping. It even reads text and can do translations. How cool is that?

4G/Data

The 4G works well and gives pretty amazing speeds. YouTube videos load with almost no buffering, and so do almost all Flash videos as well. The default Android browser is Webkit-based, meaning it renders everything perfectly. It’s clean and functional, no complaints there.

Wrap-Up

Overall, this is an amazing phone, and worth every penny I paid for it. It does everything I need it to, and more. If you have T-Mobile and need a capable smartphone, this is your phone. Apple may not realize it (or refuses to realize it), but Android phones are posing some serious competition to their iPhone. Having used the G2 and Android for a bit over week, I’m not looking back. Goodbye iOS, and hello, Android.

The movie has a rather interesting way of telling the story of Facebook’s foundation. At first, it’s a fairly linear storyline up until where Mark Zuckerberg actually creates Facebook. After that, the story is told in parts to lawyers at a lawsuit, with modern-day Zuckerberg and Saverin telling bits and pieces of the story. That kept the story from feeling too one-dimensional, but it wasn’t confusing or hard to follow, which is good, considering it’s a two-hour movie.

Obviously the movie exaggerates on a lot of activities, such as the high alcohol and drug usage by Zuckerberg and the Facebook team. I can imagine that in reality it was less of a party and more like a bunch of computer science nerds sitting in a dark room, coding and drinking Mountain Dew.

I enjoyed how the directors made sure to keep the 2003-2004 scenes chronologically accurate, by using older computers and LiveJournal rather than the more modern WordPress or Blogger. One thing in particular that I enjoyed was the film’s blatant use of Linux with KDE 3 by Zuckerberg and his team, as programmers tend to gravitate towards Linux in the real world too. I felt especially awesome because I understood every single technical term Zuckerberg used throughout the movie, while the rest of the audience was probably like “uhhh computer talk… me no understands.”

The Social Network was a fairly good movie, with splendid acting, excellent historical accuracy, and the ability to keep me entertained for the two hours that it ran. For that, I’m giving it a 7/10 rating.

Unboxing

The iPhone 4 box is smaller than ever, to save on shipping and packaging costs. Nevertheless, it’s still a very good-looking box and will go into my stack of “I bought an Apple product but I love the box too much to throw it out” boxes. In addition to the iPhone, there was a USB cable, a wall charger, and Apple earphones with the mic and remote control. Unpacking the phone was easy, no unnecessary bags or tape to hack through.

The iPhone

When I pulled my baby out of its box, I noticed how solid it felt. Makes the iPhone 3GS feel like a cheap Chinese piece of shit. The glass and metal construction is absolutely gorgeous, and feels like it will last. Plus the glass won’t get as scratched or nasty as the plastic/aluminum backs of the previous iPhones. It’s thinner and feels like a luxury product, and the buttons are even more satisfying to press. Not only has Apple succeeded in making a phone that looks good, they’ve also made a phone that feels just as good.

Setting It Up

Upon pressing the home button to turn the phone on, it presented me with the “connect to iTunes” screen. After connecting it to my MacBook Pro, setup was fairly quick. I liked that I had the option of restoring my iPod Touch backup to it, which I did. That way, all my favorite apps and music were on my new iPhone, which made the transition completely painless. After charging the phone and syncing it, I was ready to go. The whole setup process took less than five minutes, which was helped in part by the fact that I had done all the contractual stuff online while ordering.

The Display

The Retina display is absolutely gorgeous (almost as much as my girlfriend), and using any other display feels like downgrading. This phone really does make the iPhone 3GS look like a piece of cheap shit. Text is rendered beautifully, which is especially pleasing for a typography enthusiast such as myself. Applications that haven’t been updated for the iPhone 4 don’t look as sharp, but they’re definitely not bad-looking like iPhone apps on an iPad. The colors practically pop off the screen, and the screen is viewable from nearly any angle, which really shows how far LCD technology has gotten in the past years. This is quite possibly the best display ever made so far, I find it hard to imagine how Apple could outdo this beauty. Surprisingly for such a good screen, the battery life is still fairly good (more on that later).

iOS 4

Multitasking works perfectly, as expected. Transitioning from one app to another is smooth and the effect is nice but not overbearing or annoying. The unified mailbox works nicely, now if only Microsoft made Hotmail work with POP without paying extra fees. For now I’ll just have to use mailPro for my school Hotmail account. Folders are a very welcome feature, and it’s allowed me to reduce my apps into just two home screens. They also allow me to easily categorize my apps so I can find them easily. I like how the dock matches the style of the OS X dock, it makes iOS feel a bit closer to its older brother Mac OS X. I particularly enjoy that I can change the background of the home screen, the black got annoying after a while. I like how the iPod app now shows the album cover along with the list of songs in an album. Thanks to Apple’s A4 chip, my iPhone 4 is very quick and responsive, and crashes so infrequently that I forget it does.

The Camera

The new 5-megapixel camera is a welcome improvement, as the iPhone’s camera has always been lacking in comparison to the other smartphones on the market. It’s very good in low light, I’ve been able to actually capture pictures in the dark without using the flash. The flash also helps with low-light, and it’s very useful for the flashlight apps that make it into a very bright flashlight. The pictures on the rear camera are of very good quality, comparable to the lower-end consumer cameras. The pictures taken with the front VGA camera are not of amazing quality, but they get the job done, and the lower quality probably helps with using less bandwidth for FaceTime.

The Battery

With 3G turned off and EDGE turned on, at medium brightness, my battery can easily last two days. With 3G turned on all day and with heavy usage, it lasts about a day on a full charge. I’m a rather heavy user, using my iPhone in class and on the train nearly non-stop, so more moderate users may have even better battery life than me.

The Service

I switched to AT&T so that I could finally have an iPhone. Now, coming from T-Mobile, AT&T’s service and coverage is really good. I have yet to experience a dead zone. I get service in every building, even in the elevators. I also get service in most basement as well, which is something T-Mobile really failed in. As I make about three phone calls a month (I mostly text), the dropped calls issue is of very little relevance to me. I have yet to experience the “death grip” problem as well. However this may be because I live in NYC, which has a lot of antennas and customers.

Summary

In short, this is the best iPhone that Apple’s ever made. I have absolutely no complaints. If I lost it or it got stolen, I’d immediately buy a new one. It’s infinitely useful, for reference, for Facebook, for gaming, for organization, for email, etc. The list of things I can do on my iPhone can go on forever, as it’s an amazing device with nearly infinite possibilities. At this point, I can’t even begin to imagine how Apple will top this magnificent offering next year.

The acting was good and the computer graphics were breathtaking; best of all, it didn’t have the gaping plot holes that movies like The Day After Tomorrow had. The only complaint I have about the movie is that like most disaster movies, it’s a bit predictable. Every time the protagonists would get into a vehicle, they’d narrowly escape death in a similar way, just in the nick of time. Everything in this movie happened just in time, not to mention that the driving and piloting was far from realistic; seriously, who’d drive through a collapsing building or under a falling freeway? The story was fairly straightforward, but it only started to make sense at around the halfway point. About half of the main characters survived, with the other half dying in heroic, manly deaths.

The graphics were incredible, if not a little excessive. The cause of the disaster seems a lot more believable than other movies, which rely on global warming, aliens, etc. However I feel this movie had a bit too many deep emotional moments, and that just made it drag on for even longer, making this two-and-a-half hour movie feel longer than it actually was. The writers of this movie tried to inject a little bit of humor into the dialogue, but it ended up feeling forced and detracted from the whole “end of the world” mood. The ending is your typical sappy ending, with happy couples and a bright future…

All in all, 2012 was a fairly enjoyable movie, and I’d recommend it to anyone who likes disaster movies such as Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and Knowing. Out of 10, this movie earns a solid 7. 

Apps, Apps, and Apps

The app store was one of Apple’s greatest innovations- a centralized database, where users can buy, rate, review, and update their apps. Using it is a joy, and happily, most of the apps are of a very high quality. Just like the ads say, there is an app for everything. If you can think of it, there’s probably an app for it. Since several readers have iPod Touches as well, I’ll list my top apps:

• Mail, Safari, Notes: These are all fantastic apps that come with the iPod by default, and I use them on a daily basis. A lot of the posts here are written in that Notes app and then copy/pasted into the WordPress app for publishing.
• Facebook: A great app for wasting a lot of time.
• Tweetie: A paid app, but it’s one of the best, if not the best, Twitter client for the iPod/iPhone.
• Flashlight: A deceptively simple app, but one of the most useful if you need to find something in the dark.
• Beejive IM: At $9.99, it’s a rather expensive app, but it’s a top-notch IM client, and chatting with multiple accounts on it is seamless.
• Ego: A great stat-tracking app. I can track my Mint stats, Twitter stats, Feedburner stats, and Pagerank.
• Reader: A fantastic RSS reader.
• iStat: It shows the iPods performance, and has a “free memory” feature which frees up valuable RAM, making the iPod run faster without a time and battery-consuming restart.
• Convertbot: An awesome conversion app, it can convert almost anything, and it has a very nice UI to boot.

Durability and Longevity

With a good case and a screen protector, the iPod is virtually indestructible, and has survived long falls unscathed. The battery life is still pretty good, and the screen still functions like new. Using the touch screen feels natural and fun, even after a year. The small animations scattered throughout the OS are still nice and haven’t become annoying, even after a year.

Space

Even after a year I still have plenty of space left on the iPod. This might not be the case for everybody, but 8gb is more than enough for all my needs. Currently I have several movies and about 700 songs on it, with room to spare.

Conclusion

Even after a year, my iPod Touch remains a very useful little gadget. I use it almost every day, and I’d say it was $300 well spent. 

The record starts out with a soft keyboard track, titled Rebirth, which is somewhat reminiscent of the synths in the previous album. The second track is quick and violent, with a nice melody as well. The second track is pretty much more of the same goodness. After that comes Now Arise, which is one of the longer songs on the album. The keyboardist provides some solid backup vocals on the track as well. The following two tracks are good, but nothing exceptional. After those comes Exist, which I consider to be one of the best tracks on he album. It’s heavy as well as melodic, with a lot of technical riffing. The track ends with a fantastic palm-muted breakdown, which is one of the qualities Born of Osiris is known for. The track that comes afterwards is a very melodic one as well, with a catchy, almost chorus-like middle. It ends with a slow melodic section, leading into A Descent, which has a mellow intro, followed by punishing technicality. The title track is unexceptional, much like the title track in their previous release. An Ascent follows after, and is as melodic as A Descent. The last two tracks are good enough, but nothing special.

Compared to their earlier release, the guitars have greatly improved, and they take the lead this time, with the keyboard only providing atmospheric sound. The keyboardist provides more backing vocals in this release, and the bass is inaudible as usual. The drumming remains top-notch, and vocals have improved slightly, but they were pretty good in the last release as well. The vocalist has a somewhat limited vocal range, staying with the mid-range screams, but he uses them well, providing a solid performance throughout. Production is just as good, if not better, than that of the previous album’s.

Summary

In conclusion, this record is a worthy succesor to The New Reign, but it does have some flaws. Some of the tracks on the record feel like filler, and the whole record is a bit short, due to the short song lengths. Out of 10, I’d say this record earns a solid 9. If you like metalcore, deathcore, or any combination of the two, this record is worth picking up. If you’re a Born of Osiris fan, then getting this record should be a no-brainer for you.

Pages load much faster, and even though it’s a beta, Safari 4 never lags or freezes, even after opening ~100 tabs. The develop menu, when enabled, is amazingly useful for web development. I can easily disable images, javascript, and styles with just one click. Safari also has the ability to change its User Agent, so that websites see it as a different browser. For example, I could masquerade as IE 6 for those annoying websites that require IE. The web inspector is almost exactly the same as Firebug, but it looks a lot nicer. See the two screenshots below for comparison:

Firebug (Firefox)

Web Inspector (Safari)

The new tab placement is very much like Chrome’s, with the tabs at the top of the window. After using Firefox for so many years, it feels a bit awkward to have the tabs at the very top, but after using it for a day, I got accustomed to it. My only gripe with the tabs is that I can’t drag the tabs around unless I use the little drag area on the right of each tab.

Safari Tabs

Now Glims adds some nifty features of its own, such as the ability to reopen a recently closed tab with cmd + z. Having closed many tabs by accident, I cannot even begin to stress how useful this features is. Another useful feature is the ability to switch between tabs using only “,” and “.” By far the most useful modification is the expansion of the search bar. I can now choose from dozens of search engines as well as Wikipedia. When I start typing, a whole auto-suggest overlay pops up, which looks cool as well as being quite useful.

Search Suggest

As with all good things, Safari has some annoyances, the main one being its annoying form-handling. Whenever a form element is focused, an ugly glow appears around the element. Unless explicitly defined in the CSS, Safari will always display the glow. It would be nice if Apple gave us the option of turning off the annoying glows.

Safari 4 also has the “Top Pages” view enabled on new tabs and windows by default. It shows the top 9 sites in a rather gimmicky, faux-3D kind of way. Cover flow is also enabled in the history, which is actually quite useful, as it allows me to see previously visited sites rather than just looking at URLs.

By typing any letter (when not in a form, of course), Safari activates the page search and dims the website, highlighting the found terms. Esc closes the search. Very useful and efficient, as I don’t need to use the mouse.

Page Search

So far I’m really pleased with how Safari 4 is turning out. I’m hoping the final version will be even better.