There are plenty of reviews out there of the Samsung Galaxy S II  that focus on specs. Instead I’m going to review it based on my own use of the smartphone in the past few months.

First impressions

The Samsung Galaxy S II feels lightweight and thin. The back panel is a bit slippery so one of the first things I did was to acquire a silicone case to get a better grip of the phone. I was concerned about the size of the phone as I had never owned one with a 4.3 inch display but after carrying the phone around in the front pocket of my pants for the last few months I can confidently say that its not a problem at all.

The very first evening of using the device left me with a feeling that I had really gotten more than what I had expected:

• No unpleasant tingling in the hand! You probably don’t see this mentioned in many smartphone reviews but for me none of the smart features are of much use if the smartphone produces so much radiation and heat that I want to put the phone down after only a few minutes of use. This has been the case with previous smartphones I have owned and is also very much a problem with my wifes iPhone 4. The Galaxy S II does in fact get slightly warm to the touch when for instance streaming stuff from YouTube over my home WiFi for a while but its not enough to the cause the unpleasant tingling I experience with other phones – RESPECT
• Very responsive. Starting apps, scrolling lists etc. all feels very responsive. After a few weeks of use I did start to notice that when you use the back button to exit an application you get a 1-2 second delay where nothing happens – no visual or audible feedback to tell you the button was pressed. Apart from this one issue my initial impression still holds. It is a very responsive smartphone.
• Impeccably robust.  I installed quite a few apps but nothing was able to bring down the device. In fact a few months down the line I still haven’t witnessed any crashes with the software on the device itself but of course there 100K+ apps out there so you mileage may vary. The same cannot be said about the synch software for PCs – more about that later.
• Excellent display. The display is crisp and sharp, colours are beautiful, viewing angles is a non-issue.

If I were to rate the device only based on my initial impressions I would have given it 5 out of 5 stars, but over time I did notice some issues that is going to cost a few stars.

Location, location, location

Quite a few applications such as Google Maps and Google Places are location aware. Based on a reading from the GPS Google Maps will show me where I am and when I press the Google Places button I can see the restaurants and shops in the neighbourhood. I can read reviews of places posted by other users and share my own reviews.  I gave my local optician 5 stars on Google Places for finding the perfect set of contact lenses for a difficult customer. My local fast food joint on the other hand took quite a beating in my review because of their greasy door handles!  I try to be fair – but having all this power is intoxicating

Another cool location aware application is Layar. Hold the camera in any direction and Layar will superimpose icons on top of the scene that tell you which shops and other types of places you will find in that direction – its called augmented reality.

From Googles Market you can also download Google Navigation, a free application for GPS navigation. Its not ready to replace my TomTom yet but it looks promising.

But … take your Galaxy S II across the border and this is where the fun stops. Using internet abroad can incur a hefty bill (at least in Europe). To be safe I switch off internet access when I cross the national border. Unfortunately the GPS in Samsung Galaxy S II depends on internet access. Some applications that cache data such as navigation maps should be able to get by without internet access as long as the GPS is operating – however with the Galaxy S II all I’m left with when I go abroad is a dumbphone. Pretty disappointing. This is where Galaxy S II looses it first star.

Messaging and Calendar

A notification panel on the top of the screen can be pulled down to reveal a list of applications that have notifications such as incoming SMS, GMail and Twitter messages. Press the notification and the application opens and displays the message – very intuitive and fast. The panel also plays a little sound when new notifications are created. In other words I’m always very accessible even when I’m on the road. Excellent stuff. The only issue I have encountered is that meeting requests opened with the GMail app cannot be approved and synched with the calendar the way it can in the GMail web app.

Communication issues

Talking to you phone to set a destination, transcribing a message etc. has huge potential. But as long as only english is supported it remains only a potential for me. I can’t even trick it by giving the instructions in english and only the destination in my native tongue. “Directions to” – Google Voice with get the destination name all wrong. A pitty really.

Utility

I listen to very esoteric radio channels from around the world using the application TuneIn while i ride the train to work. At the same time I catch up with the latest gossip in my profession using Twitter and the Web. I’m very accessible to my family and business relations all day long because the built in messaging just works. I backup stuff on the device as if it was a USB key. This is the first smartphone I have allowed myself to become deeply dependent on.

Synching with your PC

There are three ways to sync files with your PC provided by either Samsung or Google.

1. A Samsung application called KIES Air starts a web server on the device. It shows a URL that you can use to access the device from a browser on your PC over the air. Through the browser you can now up and download files.
2. A Samsung Windows application also called KIES that you download from their web site and install on your PC to synch files with the device while its connected to the PC using a USB cable.
3. Hidden on the device under Settings->Wireless and network->USB utilities->USB mass storage you can open up access to the device as a normal disk drive on you PC while the device is connected using a USB cable.

The KIES Windows application is the only way to update Samsungs firmware. Updates are posted regularly. The application is very crashprone. Backup before updating the firmware doesn’t work for me. The error messages I get are gibberish. I have managed to update the firmware in the past but as of this writing I cannot apply the latest update. All in all the KIES application is rubbish. This is where Samsung Galaxy S II looses its second star.

Summa Summarum

All in all I’m very happy to own the Galaxy S II but because of two problems with features essential to the device it is not THE smartphone. I give it 3 of 5 stars

SAS Check-in needs help communicating with customers

First we checked in at the SAS counter and then we went to security. The queue was long and when we finally reached the security counter they told my wife she couldn’t take her manicure set on board because of the nail siccor. After some lengthy discussions with security who kept asserting our only option was to hand over the manicure set or not fly we were finally allowed to go back (or should I say run) to the SAS check-in with the hand luggage. Now time was slipping, not only do we have to stand in line again for security but there is also a very slow line after that for passport check.

Almost out of breath we arrive back a the SAS check-in counter. While we check in the hand luggage my wife explains to the SAS personnel that we weren’t allowed to bring the manicure set which is allowed in other airports.

We are somewhat surprised by the reply from the SAS personnel “You are lying”.

Okay so my wife reiterates that security in other airports allowed the manicure set. No we weren’t mistaking the first reply because the SAS personnel repeats “You are lying”!

I’m not really sure why my wife tries to explain again that this is the truth after being insulted twice but the third reply from the SAS personnel really tops it all “We know your kind from abroad – here you are worth nothing”.

Having observed the demeaning tone and body language of the SAS personnel really got me worked up. I step in front of the SAS personnel raise my voice to a level that probably draw attention from everybody in the check in hall “You customer is in distress and instead of helping her you are disrespectful to her?”. She waves me away with her hand..

I was baffled to say the least..

SAS is a customer service disaster!

When Sun sued Microsoft in the late 90′es because of Microsofts attempts to break the Java standard through the tactic of embrace, extend and extinguish – or as Microsoft put in their own internal documents ”kill cross-platform Java by growing the polluted Java market.” no developer could be in doubt who was the bad guy. We developers spend a lot of our time off trying to keep up with technology – reading, testing, probing. We depend on openness and standards. Companies that sell technology know they have to win the hearths and minds of developers (developers, developers, developer) but some like Microsoft have a hard time with openness and standards.

A decade ago I was not aware of Microsofts game to begin with – I just found it strange that I couldn’t find stuff like JNI and RMI in Microsofts JVM. Boy did I feel stupid when I realized what was going on – a lot of my efforts wasted on a product that was put to rest after the settlement that cost Microsoft a few billion dollars.

So who’s the bad guy this time? Although not as clearcut I have made up my mind and I point my finger at Oracle!

1. Java is supposed to be “general purpose” and I think most Java developers would like to see Java take a more prominent position on the desktop and on mobile. Sun had plenty of time to figure out how but failed. In that regard Oracle is not going to do any better than Sun. Oracle is not going to come up with something more exiting than Android. The only outcome of a trial is less Java outside the serverside. Wrong tactic in my mind.
2. I violate thousands of patents when I develop software – not because I go to the patent office and copy patents but because just about any trivial idea has been patented. Needless to say I find software patents to inhibit progress and innovation and it’s very uneasing to be on the wrong side of law. I find the tactics of big companies to create and defend monopolies using patent portfolios to be distasteful even if sanctioned by US politicians. While big companies don’t go legit either – at least they can cross license when a patent holder comes forward. Microsoft often rattles the patent sable and Oracle likes to play the patent game too as is shown in this case of Oracle suing Google. Therefore they work against the values of openness, standards, innovation and progress.

So what about Google fragmenting Java – dosen’t that carry any weight? It does with me but I feel even stronger that the time for moving Java beyond the serverside through JSR committee or through Suns/Oracle implementation is over long time ago.

In my mind Oracles claims against Google is Javas loss.

Creating a permalink for a sentence written in english is simply a matter of removing any non latin characters and concatenating the groups of latin characters with a hyphen. In Java this can be achieved using regular expressions:

Pattern permalinkPattern = Pattern.compile("\\w+");

Matcher matcher = permalinkPattern.matcher("I like red porridge with cream");

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
boolean separate = false;

while (matcher.find()) {
	if (separate) {
		sb.append("-");
	}
	sb.append(matcher.group());
	separate = true;
}

sb.toString();

For instance if the title of the webpage is “I like red porridge with cream” then the permalink (excluding the domain name and a few other bits) is “I-like-red-porridge-with-cream”.

Internationalizing permalink: The IRI and Transliteration approach

Now lets see what happens to the webpage title written in a national script such as Danish “Jeg kan lide rødgrød med fløde”. The code produces the permalink “Jeg-kan-lide-r-dgr-d-med-fl-de”. Hmm it starts to look like morse code – not very legible to the user.

The reason we filter anything but latin characters is because the path element of URLs only allow the latin alphabet and percent encoding, not UTF-8. While percent encoding can represent national characters it is not legible to the user and therefore by itself not suitable for permalinks. RFC 3987 is a standard for multilingual URLs (called IRIs) whereby URLs encoded in UTF-8 on the clientside are converted to percent encoding before they are sent over the HTTP protocol to the server. Because both client and serverside software must support the standard there are still issues with lack of support in legacy software.

Until IRIs become pervasive another approach is to transliterate the webpage title. Transliteration is the practice of writing a character or a word in another alphabet. For instance by convention the Danish character “ø” is transliterated to “oe” in the latin alphabet. The sentence “Jeg kan lide rødgrød med fløde” is thus transliterated to “Jeg kan lide roedgroed med floede”. This is perfectly legible to a Dane. If we run the transliterated sentence through the permalink code then we get “Jeg-kan-lide-roedgroed-med-floede” which is fine.

A Java API for transliteration

I have created an open source Java API to transliterate national scripts into latin but I’m facing a challenge that some european alphabets share the same national characters but have different conventions for transliteration to latin characters. Therefore I have to create transliteration tables for each language. So far the API supports Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and German.

To use the API download the following two Jar files from google code and put them in your classpath:

scalemania-latin-transliteration-1.0.jar
scalemania-latin-transliteration-data-1.0.jar

To transliterate a String you must first envoke the factory method to create a Transliterator for a language and then call the Transliterators method transliterate(String source).

String language = "da";
String title = "Jeg kan lide rødgrød med føde";

Transliterator transliterator = TransliteratorFactory.newInstance().getTransliterator(language);
if (transliterator != null) {
	title = transliterator.transliterate(title);
}

How to determine the users language

In a web application the language of the user can be determined from the HTTP header called accept-language

String acceptLanguage = request.getHeader("accept-language");

The contents of the field may list several languages separated by comma:

Accept-Language: da,en;q=0.7,en-gb;q=0.3

Some entries have a quality rating that represents the users preference for the language. The default value of the quality “q” is 1.0. In the example above the language “da” has the higest preference of 1.0.

Adding support for languages to the API

Each language has its own XML file containing the mapping of native characters to latin characters. For instance the content of the Danish XML file looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<transliterator language="da">
	<char native="æ" latin="ae" />
	<char native="ø" latin="oe" />
	<char native="å" latin="aa" />
</transliterator>

To add support for another language one would simply have to provide such a mapping file -no programming involved. All the language XML files are packaged in a separate Jar file to allow other implementations to use the same data.

Feedback and language contributions are welcome

08:03:01:121: Message from visual-cortex to conscious-part-of-brain:  WARNING – WE ARE EXPERIENCING EXTREMELY SLOW PROCESSING IN VISUAL CORTEX OF GOOGLE FRONT PAGE.

08:03:01:498: Message from conscious-part-of-brain to visual-cortex: That can’t be – leave me alone…

08:03:04:911: Conscious-part-of-brain: WHAT THE F… HAPPENED TO GOOGLE???

Google - the new Altavista?

Why did you switch to google many years ago and never look back? For me Altavista put way too much strain on my brain by stuffing the search page with ads and uninteresting news while shuffling the location of the actual search field and search button from time to time. Google however had the search field dead center and nothing else on the page to prolong my 4ms long visual scan of the page. After using google for a while I realized that their search results were also better than Altavista.

With the new and ever changing background google is in regression. Maybe not to the state of how things were with Altavista, but definitely as bad as Bing.

When Google wanted to put ads on the search result pages people thought the good times were over – but Google managed to do it in a way that was non-obtrusive. I have wondered how Google kept showing good judgment when introducing new features and channels of revenue – after all that is not what you would expect of any company once it has grown large. You expect it to lose its cleverness and agile characteristics to become just another dogmatic management and marketing driven operation. I think Googles move to copy Bings backgrounds is a sign that Google has finally reached the latter stage.

If any search engine out there is looking for new customers I guess now is the right time to make a frontpage with no noise – only fast search. Those savvy internet users who have no time for nonsense and are heavily reliant on search every day are looking for a new search provider..

Hope Google support will soon answer the questions: How do I remove the background image

Update: supposedly the background images goes away on friday.. maybe? Read here.

But laying all fears aside this could also mean new fresh prioritization of the investments that go into Java. Many bloggers have pitched in on what Oracle should do with Java and here is my view.

Java Web Start

Its been around for a very long time and it has great potential as it offers much smoother download, installation and launch of client-side applications than native applications and its also much safer for the user because of the security sandbox. Unfortunately every time I revisit this technology I find myself wading knee deep in a bug-infested swamp. JWS must be brought on par with the general high quality of JavaSE.

• Put lots more developers on JWS and put things right once and for all.
• More automated tests. Judging from the number of regression bugs in JWS my guess is there’s either no or very few automated tests.
• A change of mentality. It’s not OK to break central features and leave them broken for months or years. A huge rewrite like 1.6.0_10 should live in a private branch until its robust enough to make it into public.

Swing

I’m a serverside programmer but I have been dabbling in Java clientside lately. Swing is actually a pretty cool GUI platform. In my latest project I have been building a Swing application with per-pixel alpha blending and heavy modification of standard Swing components. I’m amazed how flexible Swing really is. But I also recon Swing is a huge complex beast that needs continuous attention and investments:

• Swing is not fast enough. Fixing the grey rect problem and double buffering should not be the last word in that debate. For instance maximizing and minimizing the main window of my Swing application is like watching a movie in slow motion and resizing the window turns it into a horror movie. We need more speed in every aspect of Swing. Perceived speed of Swing applications is very important to Java at large because Swing is the show window of Java. People who are only fleetingly acquainted with Java will form their opinion on what they can see with their eyes (not the abstract idea of whats going on in the belly of a JavaEE server). If the majority of Java GUI application use the very unsexy Metal look and feel and blink and freeze regularly people will equate that with the general state of Java.
• Make either Native or Nimbus the default look and feel for JavaSE 1.7. I prefer Native – dont delay this tough decision!
• Put more developers on Look and feel. Build look and feel for Linux Gnome and KDE on par with the quality of Windows look and feel.
• My windows desktop is running 140 DPI which is probably in the high end but Java assuming 72 DPI is so 15 years ago.. It makes the font tiny compared with native apps. It needs fixing.

Modules

I hope Oracle has their best and brightest on this project – the implications for Java is so far reaching.

From a clientside aspect modules will hopefully improve launch time by leaps and bounds as the dependency mess of Javas runtime is straightened out. Google showed that an extra 0.5s latency can cause a 20% drop in traffic. How many potential users and customers do I lose because my Swing application take 10-20s to load on a freshly booted PC?

From a general Java perspective I hope Oracles module system will have a high degree of usability. How class dependencies are resolved today in a classloader hierarchy is rocket science. A few months ago I spent more than a week together with another consultant trying to make a bunch of JavaEE applications play nice together in a IBM WebSphere app server. They all required different versions of the same logging framework – a recipe for Java dependency hell. In the end we had to throw in the towel and create separate server instances for the applications. A very costly affair for the customer. All I want to define in my application is that it depends on module named “X” version “Y”. I don’t want to have to analyze visibility of dependencies based on hierarchies, classpaths, customized classloades etc.

• Spare no cost in the Java modules project.
• Make usability a prime goal. I want to be able to ask the server administrator, who has no clue about Java, to install the Log4J version 1.2.3 dependecy such that it will be available to my application without having to explain classloader hierarchies to him (from experience I usually end up doing serveradministration at this point). I want to be able to list Log4J as a dependency of my public downloadable application such that any non technical user can download that dependency from a separate site, double click it to automatically add it to the local module repository and thus make it available to my and other applications. And don’t stop at the end users – developers need usability too. Modules and their dependencies should be out of sight for most of the time – not something that requires a dedicated position on the development team.
• Set some goals as to how fast a clientside application should load if it contains 1000, 2000 or 5000 classes and so on. Make load times acceptable for realistic clientside applications.
• Delivering a Module system is very urgent. It should have been available in Java 1.0!
• Notice how I didn’t mention OSGi. Thats because it shouldn’t go in a sentence with usability..

Hybrid functional and imperative programming

Oracle don’t go there! Javas high ground is big enterprise applications in banking and insurance with hundreds of thousands or millions of lines of code. Java is there among other reasons because its maintainable and extendable even at that scale. I won’t join the quireboys singing scala or c#3 because the personal styles of programming they allow are too varied and the crossproduct (new IT complexity term) of all those varied concepts equals high complexity and makes code much harder to maintain and extend. Java is a simple and very verbose language. Lets keep it that way.

• Continue the same conservatism that Sun showed in introducing new language concepts.

Companies come and go and I usually don’t take much notice, but Sun Microsystems was not “just another company of suits”. They managed their Java technology in an un-business-like way. That competitors such as IBM and Oracle put their golden eggs in the Java basket is a testament to this (not without friction of course). But more importantly it allowed for a huge ecosystem to grow – a very roomy one where hobbyists to enterprise developers from around the world have found a home. The number of frameworks and solutions built on Java to tackle just about anything I want to do as a developer shows the massive scale of the Java ecosystem.

I’ve already paid my respects here: James Gosling: So long old friend.

To be honest I think C# is getting its own share of academic just in a different way than Java.

• JavaSE is missing – in which case it will be installed automatically before the application is launched but dialogs are abundant.
• The application requires permission to do stuff outside the normal security sandbox – in which case a security dialog is shown.

The latter dialog may actually deter mom-and-pops from starting the application but despite this I consider their chances of successfully starting a JWS application to be far greater than that of a native windows application.

A few months ago i revisited JWS but sadly reaffirmed my impression from years back that JWS is not production quality. Many features have been implemented in fashion that I can only describe as “strange”, the documentation is a mess and central features are bug ridden.

Glossing over the release notes for JavaSE 6 update 18 today my eyes caught a number of fixes for JWS. Particularly the fix for a bug I reported myself 6888118: “JNLP Extension Installer is never invoked when uninstalling application“. Uninstalling a JWS application on windows is supposedly simple. The user navigates to the same place in the windows Control Panel where native applications are uninstalled, finds the JWS application and hits “uninstall”. Unfortunately JWS has been broken and would only uninstall some parts of the application – in some cases leaving the user with a system that would complain again and again that the remaining pieces of the application was crashing. Pretty awful bug for such a “mature” system – who dares install this “java stuff” from the net on their PC if it can’t be uninstalled? I hope to test this fix soon.

And oh yea the offline launch of cached applications was broken 6800992. If the webserver was down you couldnt launch the application even though the application was right there on your local system and it was configured to allow offline launch. I built a fairly complicated solution to this problem. I can’t go back to vanilla JNLP if I want to support all those users with a broken version of Java 6.

Another real awful one was this 6863499. The automatic update of jars didn’t work unless your JNLP file that describe the application was simple.

One strange design of JNLP was the requirement of a codebase href inside the JNLP file. Its looks like its now optional for the common case 6866509.

I’m happy that many critical bugs have been addressed but some of them are regression bugs. So with these fixed, what has been broken now? Alright thats a bit pessimistic, I really want to use JWS and I hope update 18 will turn out to have production quality!

Here are the release notes for JavaSE 6 update 18. I recommend this feed to follow the Java SE 6 updates.

I love the sound of crunching snow under my boots

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