milliAmp

By now you must have heard the noise about Vodafone New Zealand’s announcement of their iPhone 3G Plans.

What a lot of people are saying is that compared to international prices, these plan details are extortionate. Vodafone have made the point that their plans compare with what is on the market in New Zealand already but that doesn’t seem good enough.

A Vodafone Marketing representative got monstered on Campbell Live last night in typical John Campbell fashion. I don’t think the guy completely expected John Campbell to have complete listings of the plans available to iPhone customers from all over the world right in front of him. The guy had to stick to “we are offering a range of plans” that “represent great value” for New Zealand customers.

Vodafone also mentioned that the upfront cost for the handset on their cheapest plan is comparable to the price of an iPod Touch. Currently in the USA, the iPod Touch is more expensive than the iPhone. You normally expect a handset-subsidy when you sign up on a long contract and that point was basically saying that on the $80 a month plan you get no subsidy.

I was waiting out to see these prices to decide whether I’d get an iPhone. The announcement in the US of such cheap prices gave me a little glimmer of hope when Vodafone announced they would also offer the iPhone from as low as $199. The catch is that to get the phone for $199, you have to sign up for a 24 month contract at $250 a month. This includes 1GB of internet traffic and 600 minutes as well as 600 text messages but comparing to plans overseas it falls far short as most countries offer a plan cheaper far cheaper than that which includes unlimited traffic.

Unfortunately, I won’t be getting one in the near future. Public pressure has caused a Swiss provider to alter their iPhone plans, we’ll see if the consumer attitude is similar in New Zealand. I hope Vodafone have shot themselves in the foot. They had the potential to murder the market share statistics by getting a bunch of people who haven’t yet had a PDA or cell phone into the market by making this device affordable, similar to what has happened in the US but it appears they’ve lost that chance. It would have been perfect considering Telecom’s imminent entry into the UMTS world.

You can buy the iPhone from Vodafone without a contract by visiting a Vodafone store but the 8GB model will cost you $979 and the 16GB model $1129. However you apparently won’t be able to access the internet via the Vodafone network without a Mobile Broadband contract.

Also, visual voicemail will not be available from launch in New Zealand and you apparently cannot use an iPhone on Prepay.

Oh well.

It turns out you can use the iPhone on Vodafone’s existing on account plans as long as you have a mobile broadband plan. This means you can get an iPhone for $849 on a plan which includes 200MB Data ($0.50/mb overage charge), 40 text messages, 20 anytime minutes and 60 off-peak minutes for $48.90. This may be appropriate for those who want to only use their iPhone occasionally. This plan is the Mobilise 200 + YouChoose Base plan.

Last Thursday afternoon, a close friend of mine gave me a call to ask whether a discounted price he had seen for an iPod Touch was a good deal or not. He was pretty keen on getting an iPod Touch even though the iPhone 2.0 is released in a couple of weeks but he seemed pretty set and doesn’t have a need for another cellphone as his work supplies one for his use.

They don’t currently have a wireless network at their house and seeing as the iPod Touch has wi-fi capability we ended up discussing that I was interesting in selling my current Airport Express Wireless G base-station to upgrade my infrastructure to Wireless-N.

The main reason I wanted to upgrade was actually to have an Airport Extreme Base Station which would allow me to share both printers and also a couple of hard-drives over the wireless. The Airport Express only supports one printer and no hard-drives so I have had to switch USB cables around to print to the other printer in the past.

So, knowing that he was keen for that deal, I went out and purchased a new Airport Extreme Base Stations with Wireless-N and Gigabit ethernet. I also picked up a new Wireless-N capable Airport Express so that I could once again stream music to our downstairs speakers.

My next mission was obviously to map out how I wanted to set up the network and the devices. I love setting up network infrastructure, I don’t purport to say I’m any good at it at all but I find it a hell of a lot of fun.

I plan to sprinkle this blog post with diagrams of the old set-up and the new set-up but my laptop is currently at the shop getting its iSight looked at and I’m using a user-account on Aimee’s laptop which doesn’t have anything that I can easily draw diagrams in. For now I’ll add a textual description.

My network consisted of:

• An ADSL Modem/Router for internet connectivity
• A LinkSys VOIP to POTS adapter, for use with our Xnet Fusion VOIP account
• An Apple Mac Mini, connected in the lounge for entertainment purposes
• Two Apple MacBook Pro Laptops
• An Apple Airport Express, currently in use only as a base station since we moved to our new house

Then I added:

• An Apple Airport Extreme Base Station
• A new Apple Airport Express

And I’ve packed up the old Airport Express.

I wanted to add to the network

• My Laser printer
• My inkjet Printer
• My 2-disk RAID enclosure
• Possibly a couple more hard-drives for laptop back-up purposes.

There are a couple of restrictions this placed on the network. For internal network QoS, the Linksys VOIP Adapter needs to be placed between the router and the network so that voice traffic gets injected right at the router. This also means that our cordless phone and corded phone need to be connected within a few meters of that adapter.

The RAID enclosure isn’t network capable so it needs to be connected  with a meter or so of the Airport Extreme Base Station. As do the printers.

Also, the only two locations in the entire house with a phone plug are the kitchen/dining area and the master bedroom.

So I went ahead and picked out a possible solution. It all works pretty well.

I went the whole hog and set up my Wireless-N network on the 5GHz frequency using wide-channels to get maximum possible throughput. We don’t have any 802.11b or g devices in the house (or so I thought) and I doubt anyone in our close proximity has a 5GHz network set up so all was well.

I have the router in the master bedroom and an ethernet cable running from that into our work room. In there is the Base Station, the hard-drives, the printers and the VOIP adapter attached to the cordless phone base.

Downstairs I have the Airport Express and the Mac Mini. As I eluded to above, it turns out that the Mac Mini isn’t Wireless-N capable as I thought it was, it only supports 802.11b and 802.11g so it ended up being connected via gigabit to the new Airport Express as they’re right next to each other anyway. The Express is currently connected to the Base Station using WDS.

I had a fun time setting up the printers. I decided to stretch USB to the limits and see how far away I could keep the printers from the base station. It turns out it is 7 meters keeping to the skirting board to the first printer and another 3 meters to the second where they are placed quite conveniently now. There is a maximum length of 5 meters between devices  so I pulled out an old USB Active Extension cable, then plugged in a  2 meters of USB extension, followed by a USB hub and then plugged the first printer in using a short cable and used a 3 meter cable to reach to the other printer.

I thought I had all my numbers worked out but for some reason, the base stations wasn’t recognising either of the printers! I played around a little and found that the base station didn’t like the active extension cable plugged into it, but it didn’t mind having a hub first and then the active extension so I went down that road. Turns out I would have had to add that initial hub anyway to plug in the hard drives next to the base station so all is well.

I wasn’t particularly pleased with the file transfer throughput so I ended up playing around with WDS, wide-channels, different frequencies and even forcing the base station down to wireless-g to see if I could find out what was happening.

I’m just finishing up testing the network performance using the various settings which I’ll post about at a later stage.

A while ago I decided to use my mobile phone for what I wanted to, as often as I needed and not worry much about the costs associated with it. This gave me a better estimate of how much I would normally spend instead of having it biased by how much I had left in my prepay balance. Recently, I investigated how much I was spending and figured out that it is pretty close to $50 a month. So I decided to sign up for Vodafone’s TXTer Plan. It is $40 a month and includes more minutes than I currently use and more text messages than I currently send so it has a bit of growing room. The key for me was that it was less than I was currently spending. The early termination fee, if I should terminate in the first 12 months (of the 24 month contract) is only $160. Along with the plan is a $130 3G Handset subsidy which I used to purchase a Sony Ericsson v640i.

If I cancel and sell the phone at the 6-month mark, if I sell it for $30 less than the purchase price, I work out even as I would’ve been saving $10-a-month on prepay costs.

Anyway, that is enough about the contract, more about the phone. Now, I had a set of criteria for a new phone and a budget so my options were cut down for me quite well. Here are the reasons for choosing this phone:

Awesome Bluetooth support

It supports more Bluetooth services than anything except the Symbian-based Nokias. I use a Bluetooth integration program on my Mac called BluePhoneElite for storing text messages, sending and receiving text messages through my laptop, call logs and proximity actions. This phone had no known issues on their compatibility page and had ticks next to all the functions. No other phone in my price bracket had such good support so that was a definite tick.

Price

This phone dropped to $299 when I got it ordered so that made it very affordable ($160 after the new handset subsidy). I couldn’t justify more than $250 on a phone so that meant I gave it a tick for price.

Size

This thing is small and not very heavy. Until recently all the 3G-capable phones available here have been very bulky and ugly so the small factor of this one was pleasing.

The Style

I really don’t like flip phones, they always feel like they’re going to break when I shut them and to open them you have to either have to use two hands of jam your finger between the halves and flick upwards. It just feels like its putting unnecessary wear-and-tear on the thing. This phone is “candy-bar” style which means it is a solid, one-piece unit.

Colours

The red and black version of this phone is nice but feels a little bit tacky. What I wanted was the “Havana Gold” version which I think looks awesome.

Niggles

There are a couple of things which bug me, they aren’t deal-breakers but they are things which I think should be improved.

• You can’t change the function of the top left and top right buttons. You can reassign the directions of the navigation key but not those two select buttons. You can on Nokias like the Nokia 6085 and on the Motorola RIZR Z3 which I had before this. I don’t know whether this is a restriction added by Vodafone so that you can’t remove their shiny “Vodafone Live!” logo from the Home screen or if it simply was never a feature of this phone but it is a little annoying as I’m unlikely to want to use Vodafone Live and I’d prefer it to be something like “Bluetooth”.
• Text size in the menus. It is quite big, I’d prefer to be able to shrink it like on a Nokia 6085 where you can choose the text size for different sections.

I’ll post another blog entry later about the HID-compliant Bluetooth Remote Control Program Sony Ericssons come with which can be used to control a Mac or PC and the complementing Desktop Application for creating new remote control sets. I’ve set one up now to work exactly as I want and can perform a host of functions straight from my phone (things like controlling music).

A few weeks ago I wrote an article on trying to get the Elgato EyeTV Hybrid TV Tuner working with New Zealand’s and had a mixed result. Well recently Elgato brought out EyeTV 3.0.2 which seems to fix all the problem I was experiencing with it.

• The interlaced channels now actually play properly.
• The “New Zealand” setting has the correct parameters.
• It doesn’t appear to stutter after playing back a recording after 10 minutes

My only issue now is that the signal strength isn’t particularly great and I’m suffering choppiness and dropouts every 10-20 seconds at some times of the day. By the looks, that is a lot to do with the aerial on the roof and slightly broken wall socket for the aerial. It is still very watchable but it does get frustrating after a while.

We rent the place we’re staying in at the moment and only moved in in March so I hadn’t really paid any attention to the roof, turns out, we only have a VHF/UHF combination aerial unlike 90% of the houses in the area which have a VHF aerial and a medium or fringe UHF aerial. This explains why reception of Prime is so crap.

In Hamilton, an “infill” Freeview|HD transmitter has been set up in the CBD which means that we are approximately 2.5km from it. The big problem is that the aerial isn’t pointing in that direction so we can’t really benefit. To show the difference though, the aerial is probably pointing out to Te Aroha at the moment but I can’t get a stable Freeview signal from the Te Aroha frequencies but I can on the Hamilton Infill frequencies so I have a hunch that if the aerial was facing the infill the reception would significantly improve.

Some approximate trigonometry using Google Earth and a ruler shows at least 15º rotation between the two transmitters from our location.

My next step is to investigate options of repointing the aerial or asking the landlord nicely for a UHF antenna.

UPDATE: Most of the problems I’ve been having with EyeTV are resolved in EyeTV 3.0.2. I have written an update article that has more detail.

New Zealand recently launched Freeview|HD, a High-Definition free-to-air television service.
There are now two Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) services in New Zealand. The first is a satellite service which launched last year and the newest is a terrestrial High Definition service.

Last year, I bought a satellite-based Freeview box because the television reception at our flat was shocking and there was a Sky satellite dish on the roof when we moved in. Setting that up was a breeze, just plugged in the cables and it practically set itself up.

Two weeks ago, I decided to buy an Elgato EyeTV Hybrid to see whether it could handle the new terrestrial service so we could watch television is crazy resolution. The answer was a resounding “sort-of”. The software that comes with the EyeTV Hybrid and all Elgato’s products is regarded as the best native Mac PVR software, so I really wanted to give it a go.

I took it all home and plugged it into our Mac Mini. I got the software installed and then mucked around trying to figure out which cable coming from the wall was the UHF aerial. There were three cables, one I knew was the satellite as I had our old Freeview box plugged into it. It didn’t take me too long to find which of the other two it was and then it was on to try and get everything set up.

Continue reading “Freeview|HD”

Steve Jobs has issued a Hot News article detailing Apple’s stance on DRM and it’s future. I’m going to go so far as to say he has laid down a challenge in full public view to the big 4 Music Distribution Companies. However I can see that his account serves only to appease the public’s wrath due to Apple not licensing it’s FairPlay DRM technology to other companies, I can’t see the big wigs in the music world even reading the article, let alone uttering more than a chuckle.

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/

It does appear that yesterday I purchased a small laser printer. They retail for about $178 so we’re talking small, low-end laser printer. Its the Brother HL-2040. According to the reviews, photo printing quality is sketchy at best (even for a black and white laser). I just printed a high resolution photo on it and the only thing I noticed was the shadows just out of focus are blotchy, the actual foreground quality I thought was pretty damn awesome. This is of course from someone who has never printed a high resolution photo on a black and white laser before.

Either way though, I didn’t buy it for photo printing, that’s what my Epson Photo R210 is for. It is really nice to be able to print text faster than I can get up and walk to the printer (save warm-up time if it is in standby mode), I pumps out pages at about 22ppm and damn the text is crisp.

Aimee’s Canon which we’ve used for printed text up until now has some blocked nozzle which the printer can’t clean by itself and if it is the heads that need replacing it may not be worth it considering new printer prices at the moment, anyway, the laser was affordable and it is mine and fits on a desk and is better at printing text than my Photo printer by a long shot.

I’m happy with my purchase. Setting it up was a breeze as well, unplugged Aimee’s Canon from the Airport Express, plugged in the Brother, installed the MacOS X drivers from the supplied CD and that was it, Bonjour really is that great, up pops the printer under Bonjour printers in seconds.

As an aside, I pumped up the resolution to print the photo and maxed out the RAM on the beast, unlike other lasers I’ve seen (albeit much older) instead of failing to print and flashing random lights it printed the document fine and then printed a page telling me the printer had run out of memory on the job and had to downgrade the resolution to get it out, I thought it still looked ok so I can’t wait to print something at 1200dpi instead of having it pushed back down to 600dpi.