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So I picked up the Huawei U8100 and I have to say it’s pretty snappy. For a phone with the same CPU speed as my HTC Dream (T-mobile G1) it performs much better.
I did break down and download Celestial Teapot in a bid to fix an annoying bug however. There’s a problem where if you plug in headphones and you don’t have music playing when you do, it halves the bitrate of the sound output or something. Basically everything sounds muffled.
You can fix this by simply going into the music player before plugging in your headphones.
With Celestial Teapot I am running my phone at 672Mhz, so a full 100Mhz overclock I believe. Even with this overclock the phone lasts a few days on a single charge. Oh, did I mention it uses the exact same power battery as the Dream? Somehow with pretty much the same components Huawei has managed to save a ton of battery life, and I certainly appreciate it.
In fact that’s pretty much the only reason I went for a new phone. My HTC Dream could barely make it through a day anymore. That and the price was right. At $160 without a contract or free with, you can’t go wrong there.
Normal Bogomips: 594.73 (The HTC Dream gets 421.72)
Overclocked CPU Info:
$cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor : ARMv6-compatible processor rev 2 (v6l)
BogoMIPS: 666.10
Features: swp half thumb fastmult edsp java
CPU implementer : 0×41
CPU architecture: 6TEJ
CPU variant : 0×1
CPU part: 0xb36
CPU revision : 2
Hardware: HUAWEI U8109 BOARD
Revision: 0000
Serial : 0000000000000000
Update: Somehow Celestial Teapot locked my phone’s network down so I couldn’t connect to Wind anymore. So I installed the proper Wind ROM and have been using that since. I get better battery life running at stock speed anyway, and the built-in WiFi tether app is better than the free ones I’ve found.
New Tiger Rice Cooker
I just picked up this Tiger rice cooker at the Pacific Mall in Toronto and I have to say I couldn’t be more pleased with the results.
Other rice cookers I’ve used seem to do a poor job of cooking just the right amount of time, but this little guy did the job quickly and perfectly. Every grain was just right.
I know it seems silly to get excited over a rice cooker but I appreciate when things work properly.
Die, fire alarm, die!
Ugh, today was annoying. I don’t usually say that. I’m not really a big complainer, but this really sucked.
So this morning I was making toast in a crappy Hamilton Beach toaster oven. Now, this thing hasn’t worked properly since I got it, and I probably should have just sent it back.
When the timer finishes, the quartz elements stay on for a while after it dings. It almost always burns anything inside unless you’re closely watching it. I’m pretty sure this stupid thing is a fire hazard.
Anyway, I made myself some toast, and it dinged, and a friend was talking to me so I left it for like 5 minutes. Soon I noticed smoke coming from it. My toast was black.
I put the toast outside, opened both doors and not a peep from my fire alarm… and then it started. And it didn’t stop, either. My alarm kept going off long after my apartment had been completely aired out. I had both doors open, every window. A fan blowing in and out of the place and still every alarm in the house, including those not in my apartment were going off.
I actually left my house and came back hours later to the alarms STILL going off.
I don’t have the manual, but I did find one online. I mean I don’t own these things, my landlord does. The manual says it has a hush mode, but that it won’t work if there’s too much smoke. Well my apartment had none in it at this point, and the hush button simply didn’t work.
The only thing that finally shut the damn things up was to cut power to every fire alarm in the house simultaneously. This thankfully was easily done since they were all on the same breaker.
Now, these things are all battery backed-up. So when there’s no house power they should still be running on batteries. My only thought is that they somehow communicate through the ground wire with each other. Either that or they were all in some kind of panic mode and wouldn’t reset until electricity was cut.
The units themselves couldn’t have reset since they all have batteries, and I’m pretty sure they all have good batteries since they work without power and don’t chirp.
What the hell was wrong with these things? Ugh… I want to smack a Kidde engineer upside the head. Why do they behave this way?
So I bought a crazy 7″ Windows CE netbook from ebay just for something to hack around with. One day I came across this recovery image which can re-write your netbook’s flash to boot Android OS 1.6.
Well I just had to try it out, so I did. I found in the ZIP file you can find a BMP which is used as the boot screen. Well I just had to try changing that.
I noticed that this netbook, although it reported a 600Mhz ARM processor in Windows CE, actually seemed much slower, and System Panel wasn’t showing a CPU speed. Hmm, let’s cat /proc/cpuinfo:
And in the above photo you can see that my HTC Dream gets over twice the rating in bogomips than the Chinese Netbook does. So in the end, it’s kind-of cool to play with, but it can’t even run a NES emulator at an acceptable speed. It’s pretty damn slow. But web browsing, checking email and other tasks are bearable.
Some things have changed about the interface. Most notably you get a mouse cursor with this version. As well, they opted to make the notification area twice as tall as usual and have thus caused the default icons to scale in ugly ways. They’ve also added a speaker up and down icon that look fairly amateur. And there’s a bunch of horizontal bars which represent the menu button. You can also get to menus by right-clicking. The back button is the Esc key. And to get straight to home you click the house.
All-in-all, it’s pretty useless if you have a decent cell phone with you. Your cell phone can take pictures, make calls, use the GPS for geo-location, use an accelerometer for games or use bluetooth. This netbook with Android has web browsing and email. It can barely run anything else. Oh music… you can do that too. Oh well.
HOW-TO: Flash the Android Software to your Netbook
I thought I’d include this for those of you who were having trouble flashing the ROM. All you have to do is extract the contents of the archive and put the script folder directly in the root of your SD card.
WARNING: FLASHING ANY DEVICE IS A DELICATE PROCEDURE AND MAY RESULT IN YOU BREAKING YOUR DEVICE.
Make sure your battery is FULLY CHARGED and better yet DON’T EVER FLASH ANY DEVICE AT ALL WHILE UNPLUGGED. ALWAYS FLASH WHILE HOOKED UP TO THE WALL SOCKET!
If your device shuts off in the middle of flashing, it WILL NOT WORK and will have to be JTAG flashed by someone who can do so, if that fix is even possible.
These rules hold true for flashing anything at all. So don’t pretend you haven’t been warned numerous other places as well. That said, let’s continue.
Inside the script folder it should look like the above screenshot. After your SD card is set up, just boot up with it in the card slot on your netbook and you’ll see the installer begin.
That’s it!