iConverged

(Update July 16: Nope. Better, but still messed up. See update below)

So I just patched my iphone 4 with ios 4.0.1. While consumers, and specifically tech sites were going nuts about the reception, I just installed the bumper and it fixed the problem for me. That was pretty much a non issue with me post the bumper.

The one issue that really bugged me was the buggy proximity sensor. Every time I put the phone to my ear, with a bit of movement, I would either mute the call or add another line. Most irritating. My initial tests seem to indicate that ios 4.0.1 fixes this nuisance. I certainly hope that is true as I continue to use it. I’ve been reading others say it does not fix it, but I tried 3-4 calls now and I did not experience that issue. But time will tell.

I don’t really care if they increased the bar size, decreased the bar count and what not.

What do you feel? Did 4.0.1 fix the proximity sensor bug?

Update: July 16:

No, 4.0.1 does not completely fix this. It seems to certainly be better, but I can’t say its completely fixed. I’ve made several calls now and I’ve managed to:

a) Start Facetime by mistake

b) Put a call on mute

without my doing anything out of the normal (sitting on my chair, talking to a colleague over the phone)

Fortunately, Jobs publicly announced the proximity sensor fix in the next release. I look forward to it, and a refund on my bumper.

And the apple antenna page is cool too.

(July 13: sorry for the downtime, looks like my bandwidth limits were exceeded. Upgraded my hosting package – fixed)

(note: Only the call part is Vanilla SIP. The procedure for registering a Facetime user into their servers etc. is all non-SIP, encrypted/ciphered.)

(for my user review of the iphone4 and bumper read here)

Well heck, good job Apple! I just tested facetime and did a quick check on its protocol. No hacking needed – just an on the wire black box inspection – its just plain SIP and STUN for firewall discovery. Apple plans to make this protocol public, and they seem to have done an excellent job. And thanks for showing the world that you don’t need complicated encryption and proprietary tunneling tricks for an excellent experience. You need a good codec set, a good media stack that can adaptively switch codecs and manage buffers  and a good ‘point-of-presence’ network for the most part.

I am just going to restrict this post to an overview of the flow.

Enjoy:

click on each image for a larger size (if they are small)

This is a facetime all flow – good, plain, SIP (they use MESSAGE for some proprietary data exchange during the call)

rest is perfect sip.

The protocols are here to see (besides SIP)

Ah here is their 200OK for INVITE

A quick look at their RTP stream:

Good Job Apple. Thanks for putting in an excellent quality, standards compliant SIP client embedded into your dialer experience.

(Updated Jun 30 with iphone 4 bumper strip review)

I was one of the 600,000 people who managed to get in their iphone 4 orders on day one, before all the servers collapsed.

So anyway, I got my iphone 4 yesterday (Fedex dropped it in at around 11:30 in the morning). Here is my brief review so far:

(These are just my observations as a user. For a more indepth review, read Engadet’s iphone 4 review. )

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Live from TMCnet ITEXPO 2010 (Miami, Florida)

Interviews with Arjun Roychowdhury, Asst. Vice President at Hughes Systique Corp (HSC). HSC is a HUGHES company, an industry leader in IP and communications technology.

(recorded at 2010-01-21 12:04:39)

click HERE if the video below does not show up.

As a frequent traveler, I’ve flown several airlines to several places. However, the one airline I’ve categorically avoided in the past is India’s own Air-India (AI) for international travel. I guess it’s because pretty much all my life, I’ve only heard bad things about its service, quality of airlines etc from my parents , their friends and friends of friends. But this was 15 years ago. Times change. However, I was still not willing to try AI due to its (in)glorious past track record that was handed down to me by word of mouth and from generation to generation.

A week ago, I had to travel to India for work. This was January 2010 and the fog conditions in Delhi were particularly bad. As I sit in my hotel in India and look out of the window and write this article, the fog is really bad – hardly any visibility. With this much of fog,  most flights that arrive in Delhi late at night get rerouted to other cities and make it into Delhi only during daytime the next day. My colleagues who arrived in India earlier warned me of the condition, so I looked around for flights that landed in the day in delhi. Pretty soon I realized there was only one option for me to try: Air India. Drat. All the other flights like Lufthansa, United etc all arrived late at night and the only other daytime options were ridiculously expensive. I had read that Air-India had recently re-done its entire international fleets and there were new planes and newly re-designed business class and first class seats which according to their marketing was “comparable to other international flights”. Furthermore, the fact that it flew directly from IAD to Delhi with a short stop at JFK was a very attractive option for me, so I decided to take the plunge and try out this carrier for the first time in my life. What follows next is my experience.

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I finally get why people tweet. It lets you speak your mind the way it is, without requiring you to make a paragraph out of it. When I blog, I think, then form, then rehearse then post. When I tweet, I think and tweet. The link between my thoughts and the tweets is more direct. And of course, very often, I don’t have paragraphs to talk about, but still experience exciting new things that can be written in 3 lines. So now I understand the subtle difference of tweeting vs blogging. I’ve wiped the dust off my twitter account. I will use that more often now. I will still occasionally post, but only if I have lots to say.

Follow on at http://twitter.com/arjunrc

XKCD has a hilarious cartoon on “Estimation”. I just burst out laughing when I read the footnote. If you are a windows user, you will burst out laughing too.

Estimation

After 4 years of serious Blackberry 8700 and 8800 use, my wife convinced me to switch to the sexier iphone. I was pretty wary knowing it is not very good for business usage. However, my wife’s prime interest was to get me off the keypad while driving. To her dismay, I am now an expert fast typist on my iphone virtual keyboard – but I do listen to her and for my own safety don’t thumb responses to email while stopping at a light. Here are my experiences (so far) on what I did to bring my iphone closer to my needs. I have the iphone 32G 3GS. My previous phone was the wonderful, but, well not oomphy BB 8800.

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There has been a lot of posts and flutter on Google’s new purported Chrome OS and how it will be a great battle with Microsoft, how it will confuse and/or kill Android etc. And also, of course, taking off from the Google Blog on Chrome OS “For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies” people are also throwing in “Web OS” everywhere.

I thought I’d write a post detailing my thoughts (technical) on this entire issue.

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So yesterday, Google finally announced it is getting into the “OS” business with Chrome OS.

Similar to Google Wave, this one is also just an announcement (gee, it doesn’t even have a front page yet  )

But anyway, here are my predictions on where this will go:

• The core OS will continue to be Linux based, with a Webkit layer built into the kernel, or, more likely, a priviledged layer (thus making “reaching to the web quicker” as google suggests) [okay, my bad, I did not need to predict this - I re-read their post - they already state "Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel"...]

• Even though Google says this is different from the Android initiative, and choice is good, from my perspective, Android is an SDK, while Chrome OS is an “OS”. The former can, and will, eventually ride on top of Chrome OS (in other words, Android SDK will be ported to Chrome OS, which itself will be based on linux) – thereby making Android apps more ubiqutous

• Android will be just one SDK on top of Chrome. Others will be available for environments where Android may not be ready yet (again, the OS vs SDK difference)

• Palm’s WebOS took the earlystep, though not from a general purpose WebOS way, more from mobile WebOS way. There is no question now “Web” close to kernel is going to be a common way ahead for may of these companies.
• Eventually, they will integrate an HTML/CSS/JS programming interface on top that Chrome will execute natively (or, well, faster)
• The usual tools like Google Gears et all will obviously be tightly integrated into their OS layer