It’s the future. You have a device in your pocket that is exponentially more powerful and has hundreds, maybe thousands of times more storage than the largest computers of 30 years ago. Maybe you have a bag with a tablet computer in it which is roughly comparable in terms of storage and processing power to the phone in your pocket. Only bigger. They are massively-capable devices by any measurement we care to throw at them.

You’re listening to music from your phone on your headphones.

This is where our story gets a little strange. Where did that music come from? More and more, people are streaming music from an online service without actually storing anything on their local device. Services like rdio, 8tracks, spotify seem to be growing in popularity. Most people think the notion of buying music on a CD is quaint or even absurd. If you happen to be someplace and want to watch a video on your tablet, chances are you’ve downloaded it or streamed it from somewhere. Almost nobody would consider buying a movie on a DVD and transferring it to their iPad.

iPad Workplace 2.0 by mbiebusch

Yes, iPad. If you have a tablet, there is a high probability it’s one of those things that Apple sells. Android on tablets has not taken off with the exception of the Kindle Fire. And Apple just released a new one this week.

While they’re marvelous devices, getting content onto them is something of a challenge. They only support a very narrow band of video formats for playback. If you’ve downloaded a video from somewhere, unless you carefully checked the format beforehand, it probably won’t play directly on your iPad. If you’re a determined sort of individual, you might have Handbrake or Miro Converter on your computer and can transcode that video before transferring it to your iPad.

The key ingredient here is “computer”. There are no tools native to the iPad that let you do this sort of conversion. Worse, there are very few players capable of playing back these alien formats on the iPad. The short-lived VLC promised to do for the iPad what it does for general purpose computers but it was not meant to be. Now it’s dead. There is an Xvid/DivX player but it is predictably awful.

This is no accident. Apple really wants you to get all your content from the iTunes Store. They’ve made it difficult to write software to do this sort of thing on the iPad and even more difficult to actually get it into the app store where people can download it. They’ve limited the codecs they support. And they don’t provide tools to convert video to it on your computer. Services like Netflix exist and will happily stream video to you if you’re a member, but you’re borrowing that media. When it’s off their servers, you don’t get to watch it again.

How many years until this same thing has happened to computers? Not soon enough for the media companies.

The GF2 served me well. It’s a great little travel camera, but the lack of dedicated hardware controls made it feel a little toy-like, despite the excellent implementation of its touch screen controls. The GF2 also lacked an external shutter release, a feature I use constantly for macro shots or when on a tripod. Long exposures take as long to process as your shutter release time – a 30 second exposure takes 30 seconds to finish recording – that’s pure waiting time when you can’t take another shot. It makes the GF2 useless for some types of time-lapse photography.

Which brings us to the GX1. Announced late in 2011, the GX1 promised to be the true successor to the now cult-status GF1, the origin of the micro-four-thirds species. With the updated 16MP sensor replacing the now aged 12MP LiveMOS sensor and a processor that’s been tweaked and upgraded from the top-end G3, the GX1 is probably the fastest m4/3 camera in Panasonic’s lineup.

The camera starts up and is ready to fire in just over a second (depending on lens). DPReview clocked power to exposure time at around 1.4s in their excellent review. Subsequent shots are a mere 0.2s including auto-focus. Long exposure shots are recorded with very little delay regardless of exposure time. Touch screen controls feel responsive and snappy for the most part, the exceptions being a few animated UI elements that feel a tad sluggish (the touch tabs interface, for instance). Fortunately, for most of these touchscreen features, there are now dedicated hardware controls to access functions directly.

Construction-wise, the GX1 is a solid little camera. The addition of the extra chunky rubber grip on the front feels good in the hand, though it does feel like there isn’t a lot of space for your thumb on the rubber grip surrounding the command dial. That said, I don’t think I’ve accidentally hit any of the controls with my thumb during shooting. It’s a fairly comfortable camera to hold with one hand if you need to. Shutter release feel is excellent with good feedback on half-presses.

Controls

The controls are comprehensive. Two hardware Fn buttons are assignable and an additional two are available in the touch tab interface. By default they’re set to Auto Exposure for Fn1, AF/AE Lock for Fn2, and Fn3 and 4 are set to adjust display paramaters (level guide and histogram respectively). These are pretty sane defaults and I like the positions of Fn1 and Fn2 for auto exposure and AF/AE lock well enough. Astoundingly, the button labeling on the four-position buttons are silver on silver guaranteeing they’re impossible to read in any light. Fortunately, you’ll get to know them pretty quickly. I chose the “silver” body for my GX1 and the other button labels are white on the somewhat dark silver body. Also not super-easy to read, but I still like the nearly titanium color of the aluminum body.

One slightly surprising change is the single control dial (referred to as Rear Dial in the manual) has been made slightly smaller on the GX1. This means you need more rotations to accomplish the same change as on previous models. A minor point but one that makes the control dial feel a little bit clunky. I’m also not a huge fan of the feel of this control. I’d prefer something more solid with better feel. As probably the single-most heavily used control after the shutter release, it’s a control I’d prefer had better tactility. This does however encourage use of the auto exposure button on Fn1 when shooting in any of the manual exposure modes. The rocking power switch next to the excellent mode dial on top has a somewhat cheap feel to it as well. I’m worried that I’ll break it off someday. The battery and memory card door on the bottom is the only other piece of plastic on the body that feels like it could break if I weren’t careful. I’d probably have to be a complete ass to manage that though as when it’s closed, it’s fairly tight.

My only other quibble with this camera is the inclusion of Panasonic’s iA button. iA stands for “Intelligent Auto” and is a feature for novice shooters who just want a point and shoot. Dedicating a full button on the top plate for this feature is pretty annoying on a camera aimed at enthusiast shooters. I’d far prefer it were programmable. Your only option is to set the iA button to “click and hold” to eliminate accidental presses. If you’re into iA mode, it lights up in a garish blue when activated letting the world know that you don’t know how to use your camera.

Video

Other fun features on the mode dial are various scene and creative modes that let you alter the colors and shooting characteristics if you’re into the whole instagram thing and shoot in JPEG. One nice feature of these modes is that they work when shooting video. This gives you an easy way to shoot in sepia or black and white without requiring time-consuming post-processing on your computer. More-importantly, the custom white balance modes also function in movie recording. If you want to shoot with a cyan or orange filter or green up your fluorescent lights like you’re in an episode of CSI, you can do it.

These are great little cameras for video and honestly one of the main reasons I became interested in micro 4/3. They take a bit of getting used to. Some lenses have different focusing characteristics and if you’re shooting in continuous auto-focus they tend to hunt a bit. This is where the touch screen auto-focus really comes in handy. Setting yourself in single shot auto-focus and using the touch screen to pick your focus point mid-shot (called “rack-focus”) or using face or target tracking autofocus modes let you shoot a scene with impressive results. Something I still need more practice with.

The GX1 has returned to offering a stereo condenser mic on the top, a feature missing from the GF3. I don’t believe it’s possible to attach a hot-shoe mounted stereo mic as is possible on the more video-focused GH2 though for my needs, the built-in mic is just fine.

Conclusion

So there you have it! The GX1 is a superb “little” walking around camera. With the 14mm pancake lens or the 14-42mm power-zoom, it’s quite pocketable. Having traveled with it a couple of times now, I have no qualms about carrying it in a small camera bag, you can pack a surprising amount of photo gear into a compact carrier. Would this replace my Nikon DSLR? Probably not (14 bit color in the Nikon, multiple exposure capabilities, a whole different range of high quality lenses, etc.). But for travel or street shooting, I think the GX1 and a couple of hot primes fits the bill nicely.

A high ISO test shot, cleaned up in Light Room.

Camera Pron with the 45mm Leica 2.8 Macro.

But one area where iOS has a distinct advantage is in games, or so I thought. They have some awesome titles. For most of them, I’m pretty happy playing on my iPad as it’s a great platform for games. There were a few that I always had with me on my phone though. Games that made sense on a phone, were kind of casual and easy to get into but you can put them down at a moment’s notice to do something else. And I’ve found them on Android.

Orbital (Bitforge Ltd). $4.00 for the “pro” version, Free version to try, but trust me, you want the full game. It’s simple, it’s fun, has a two player head-to-head mode and entertaining noises. I have probably logged more hours on Orbital than any other game on my iPhone. And now it’s on Android! Sweet.

Dungeon Raid (Fireflame Games). $3.19CDN. I used to play this a lot on short-hop flights, in line at the grocery store, couch surfing or well, anywhere. Kind of a connect-three dungeon RPG thing with different character classes and abilities. Humorous loot names and scary monsters. It has endless replayability.

Tiny Tower (Mobage). Free! OK, this is a new one to me having never played it on the iPhone. But with it winning Game of the Year on iTunes I figured I’d give the Android version a try. Also, the price is certainly right. Not disappointed! Takes only a few seconds to keep your tower running. It will haunt your dreams.

Other standbys like Doodle Jump, Flight Control and others will keep your thumbs entertained for hours. You don’t have to fear, there are plenty of good games on Android. You’ll just have to buy them all over again.

iPhone 5 will have a dual core (A5) processor, 1GB of RAM, a slightly larger screen edge-to-edge but approximately the same form factor. Camera will be upgraded to 8MP.

It will come with an aluminum back.

Available in 16, 32 and for the first time, 64GB sizes. White and Black.

And then things started getting interesting. I heard about the Fujifilm X100 around CES (or was it Photokina?) earlier this year and it sounded pretty special, even without any actual units capable of producing images, people were going nuts over it. Sporting a proper Fujinon 35mm-equivalent F2 fixed lens, this was a totally different point and shoot. A range finder camera with an innovative prism allowing it to work as either a straight optical or an electronic viewfinder. And man, it looked great.

Unfortunately, once the hardware started shipping, the reviews weren’t off the charts. With a $1200 price tag, I’d kind of expect this little gem to be the best thing short of a Leica M9 you can fit in your jacket. While the image quality is great, the performance seems a little average. Noticeable shutter lag and some confusing controls make for a fiddly experience and more than likely, some lost shots. Then again, I’ve been eating up CoffeeGeek‘s reviews of his X100 and he’s making it sound pretty sweet. They’re also, apparently not available due to manufacturing shortages in Japan. If you’ve got one, consider yourself very lucky.

Enter the GF2. I did a bunch of reading, comparing some of the different available cameras like the Olympus E-PL2, the Canon G12 and the S95 as well as the new Nikon P7000 and Lumix LX5 and the Sony NEX3. The Micro Four Thirds (m4:3) cameras were looking more and more interesting. Despite an aging sensor, the Panasonic GF2 had some very innovative features. Not all reviewers were keen on the touch screen, but I was willing to give it a shot (or several thousand).

One big advantage over the fixed zooms was the interchangeable lens format. I wanted to keep the camera as compact as possible while providing a solid, fast lens. My primary focal range when I’m walking around with my D300 is a 24mm (38mm equivalent on full frame) which mapped very closely to the Panasonic 20mm F1.7. As a pancake lens, it’s quite compact, though not quite as svelte as the 14mm F2.5 pancake that came with it.

In addition to some processing improvements over the GF1, the GF2 eschews many of its predecessors’ hardware controls in favor of a very well-implemented touch screen system. This was a concern of mine and something some reviewers haven’t been too kind about, proclaiming the GF2 a  “dumbed-down” camera. In practice though, I find the touch-screen both very intuitive and surprisingly fast to access frequently-used controls. The touch screen controls are very customizable via the Q-menu functions allowing you to set your preferred controls on a dock-like, scrollable menu. Augmenting the touch screen is a command dial which does dual-duty as an extra selection button. In manual mode, the command dial toggles between F-stops and shutter speed. In aperture priority, between aperture and exposure adjustment.

It is also Very Fast. Not just for a point-and-shoot, either. The GF2 is under a second from power-on to recording a shot. Shutter response is instantaneous with no noticeable lag. Focus is quick and intelligent. The 23-point AF system has a bunch of features I haven’t really played with yet. I did play a little with the focus-tracking system where you select a subject on the touch screen and the camera magically keeps it in focus as it moves around.

My one beef is the Q-menu button does double duty as a programmable Function button. There’s one other button on the top of the camera that serves as a “noob” button for novices, the GF2′s “Intelligent Auto” button would be a lot more useful if it were programmable to something else. I don’t see myself ever using iA mode. Maybe a firmware update will provide a programming option. Please. In any case, the one programmable button means having to use the screen to access the Q-menu feature if you want to program the button to do something else.

Image quality from the supplied 14mm lens is excellent. The optional 20mm pancake lens is even better, providing great low-light performance and impressive bokeh. Lens distortion on both lenses is surprisingly minimal. Noise-levels at ISO 800 are stellar. Even up to 1600, you can take a decent shot – the Foveon X3 sensor giving a nice film-like grain. Color noise is acceptable and easily removed in a decent image editor.

Yes. I like this camera a lot. Having spent a week with it in a bunch of different lighting situations, I’m more than happy with the pictures that come out of it. I’m really happy to have a portable, well-built camera to carry around.

See some more pics here.

Performance and Battery

The Streak kind of surprised me after I got Froyo running on it. The 1GHz Snapdragon processor (source: streaksmart) feels pretty responsive. With 512MB of RAM, there’s a lot of room for applications. The UI (with LauncherPro) is snappy.

Running the benchmarking app Quadrant, with DJ_Steve’s StreakDroid 1.8.1, I was able to get a score of 1267 which I hear is pretty good. I certainly have no complaints about the speed of applications running on the Streak.

The battery feels a little weak under use. Having a 30 minute Skype conversation while connected to 3G almost killed my charge (after running a day on standby). I tend to nurse the battery by keeping the Streak in airplane mode most of the time and only turning on wifi or 3G when I need to connect to something. If I were using this as a phone, that’d be a royal pain. The battery’s replaceable in this, so you could have a backup, but with the annoyance of pulling the back plate off, that’d feel like a pretty big failure.

The charging cable’s a proprietary 30pin edge connector similar to an iPhone dock plug. I assume they did this for connection to the AV Dock accessory, but it’s a real pain in the ass as the Streak only comes with one (short) cable in the box. With a battery like this, I’d want to stow chargers in my vehicles and carry one in my laptop bag. If you’re planning on taking this on a long trip and expect to be able to read a book, listen to music, watch a video and do some communications with it, you’d better bring some extra batteries, a cable and a power-source.

The Form

For starters, it’s the first touch-screen device I’ve used that’s comfortable to thumb type on in portrait mode. The iPad is too wide for this, and I usually turn it to landscape for finger typing. The iPhone is too small to comfortably type on in portrait mode, though I keep trying to do it and botching it. I find the iPhone uncomfortable in landscape. The 5″ screen of the Dell Streak actually works really well, especially after disabling Swype.

The soft buttons on the Streak are stuck in landscape mode, suggesting the device is meant to be used in that orientation most of the time. This is weird. For reading web pages and viewing text, portrait is so much more comfortable. The lockscreen even defaults to landscape and won’t reorient into portrait if you’re holding it that way so you end up reading the clock sideways all the time. That’s annoying and feels kind of silly. Also, the Streak is possibly the only Android device without a search button. I have to say, I think the search button is unnecessary so I don’t mind its omission.

The case is predominantly hard black plastic with a removable metal plate on the back housing the SIM, microSD slot and battery. Removal is awkward but reseating the little metal tabs back into their slots is even trickier. There is no indication that the plate is fully-seated. It just sort of slides into place with no click to let you know it’s all the way in. I think I’ve already bent at least one of the tabs that hold it in during the many times I had to pull the battery during my firmware upgrade trials.

Still, fully assembled, the Streak actually looks pretty good. I got no shortage of oohs and ahhs when I pulled it out at my local bar and passed it around. People asked if it was a phone. If it was for reading books. If it was a little computer. I even ended up in a conversation about Android with a non-techie friend who showed me her phone when she recognized I was running the same OS and Launcher as her. Even some of the tech-jaded people in California on a recent visit would take a look and ask about it and give it a whirl.

It’s weird, but I actually think the Streak was a bigger hit than my iPhone 4 which, from a hardware angle, is decidedly sexier, in my opinion. The build quality is certainly an order of magnitude higher and I can buy a decent case for the iPhone.

The Radios

The Streak has a capable GSM/HSDPA Qualcomm radio in it. It’ll operate in quad-band GSM or in one of two 3G HSDPA modes (source: gsmarena) depending on your carrier and firmware. Speedtest.net’s application gave between 1000 and 2500kbps download and 50-250kbps up on Rogers. Having used some terminal clients remotely, I can say that the connection is perfectly acceptable. With Froyo, the Streak works as a wifi hotspot as well so you can use it to power a portable personal network.

The Wifi radios are not exactly state-of-the-art though. The best the Streak can manage is 802.11g and it seems to have a hard time staying connected for more than about an hour on a WPA connection. I had to open an 802.11g network in my house to support it since everything I use now has 802.11n. Range appears to be adequate though.

A funny thing happened the first time I turned on Bluetooth on the streak to pair a headset. It was sitting on my desk and I powered on the radio. I have a bunch of bluetooth and wifi devices on my work desk, keyboards, mice, trackpads and my main computer, a Mac Pro uses bluetooth for its keyboard and trackpad. When I turned on bluetooth on the streak, the bluetooth radio in my Mac stopped working and flashed an error in the little bluetooth indicator in the menu bar. I had to reboot the computer to get bluetooth working again. That’s some radio! Presumably it works fine if you keep it away from your computers.

The Screen

It has been maligned across the web as being too hard to view from an angle. Honestly, I don’t find the 5″ TFT gorilla glass LCD that bad. How often do you look at these things off-axis? My one beef is that the screen’s resolution should be higher. Not sure if it’s a limitation of the original operating system it shipped with or if it was to keep the price down but it should really have more pixels. Touch controls feel precise and colors are reasonably vibrant even if the temperature is a tad cool.

The Sound

The sound hardware in the Streak was pretty disappointing the first time I plugged in the provided in-ear headphones that came with it. Powering up Winamp or Songbird, when you first hit play on a song with any quiet passage, you can hear the audio hardware come online with a noticeable hiss. Signal-to-noise must be extremely low as the white-noise of the audio circuitry is easy to hear in the background of all but the loudest music. It’s less annoying when using it for Skype or watching Youtube video, but that’s hardly demanding. I will say that the built-in speaker can crank out some volume which is nice if you’re showing off a youtube video in a room. Not much else I can say about that, other than if you like quality sound, this is probably not going to make you happy.

The Cameras

The Dell Streak has both a front-facing and a rear camera. The rear camera is a 5 megapixel shooter with two LED flashes mounted next to it. It’s a pretty decent sensor and lens combination and I do like the pictures that come out of it… when I can get the camera to fire on time. The dual-position shutter button is very slow, sometimes taking a second or two to fire the shutter after focusing. The button itself requires a pretty firm press to push in shutter release mode which often means anything you’re shooting in low-light will come out looking blurry. I’m not a fan of LED flashes, but the ones on the Streak are powerful enough to light a subject up to a good 20ft away, based on some test shots. I’d put the camera roughly on par with the iPhone’s in terms of quality of image, but due to the lack of responsiveness, it’s going to lose points.

The front-facing camera is your typical 640×480 VGA chat cam. Not HD. Noisy.

Conclusions

After the painful process of ordering and receiving the Streak, I was all set to dislike this thing. The reviews I read during the long wait didn’t make me terribly excited to actually get my hands on it. Despite some of the limitations though, I do really like this thing. I’d feel a little silly using it as a phone (sidetalkin’!) without a headset, but as a datapad, it works really well. This is my first Android device and though lots of it feels a bit fiddly at times and upgrading different devices is a total crap-shoot, they’ve done some nice things with the operating system. It’s customizable to a fault. Picking up someone else’s Android device, there’s a big chance it’ll take you awhile to figure out what’s going on. Desktop widgets are a great feature that I wish iOS had. The back button is a very sticky interface element that I find myself trying to hit on my iPhone. I notice that I have to look for the back button on an iPhone now because they’re not really in a consistent place. Some of the apps available on Android are very nice and will give their iOS counterparts a strong run.

I think when we get some real video players on these things we’ll finally have a worthy alternative to iOS. This is a very good thing.

[update, official Rogers update available via this thread: http://communityforums.rogers.com/t5/forums/forumtopicpage/board-id/Android/message-id/927]

Now that Rogers has finally released a Froyo update for the Streak, I think my own upgrade exploits are a little less necessary for the average human. Or maybe not. I haven’t read any reviews of the Rogers version yet, but I have a hard time believing it works as well as DJ_Steve’s StreakDroid firmwares. I’m using 1.8.0 now (aka Chernobyl Meltdown) and it seems to work very very well. He’s done a great job of packaging up a ROM with useful features and software and I recommend it heartily.

My own upgrade path took me all over the internet. With some helpful pointers from @gav_taylor on twitter, I found the XDA forums and from there, links to a trove of firmware options tailored (pun!) to my very needs. I started with an O2 version of the ROM which made my radios think they were operating somewhere in England and unable to work in high-speed mode on Rogers. But at least I could see the device’s potential. From there, I upgraded to a stock Dell 2.2 ROM (v318) and finally migrated to StreakDroid 1.6 (still Froyo, despite the confusing numbering). It was tricky, required a lot of removing the battery, and felt like I was going to brick my device at any second. Since then, DJ_Steve’s had two more releases, 1.7.0 and 1.8.0. I just installed the latter yesterday and it doesn’t seem very different from 1.7.0. I think it’s mostly a bug-fix release. Battery life seems improved, I think. [and so does jdmcivic, it appears]

So now that I’ve got this Froyo thing what do I think?

It makes a helluva difference for starters. It takes this smallish slab of metal and glass and plastic and turns it from being a cumbersome, graphically antiquated toy to something you can actually use and even enjoy. Froyo looks good and works well on this device. DJ_Steve’s tweaks make the Streak feel like a pretty capable device and adds some extra glitz to the environment. App switching is instantanous. LauncherPro (thanks for the rec, madhava!) with all the eye candy turned up to full is silky smooth. It runs very well, but is a little battery intensive (more on that in my review of the hardware). The Gingerbread keyboard is a huge improvement, especially with swype disabled.

There’s already a huge array of software available for Android. I was amazed to see the number of entries in the store is comparable to the iTunes app store, if not ahead of it now. Of course, there are some caveats. Not all of the software I’ve tested is as high quality as most of the featured items on the iTunes app store. The bar to entry feels a bit lower. That said, there are whole classes of application available for Android you just can’t get on iTunes. File managers, wifi hotspots (unnecessary with Froyo which has that capability built-in), rooting tools for the hacker-minded.

Appz

Like the iTunes App Store, one of the weakest aspects of the Android Marketplace is the application itself. There is a cool alternative for Android users though. I recommend AppBrain for managing your applications. It has some extra features like notifying you when your apps have updates and the ability to sync your installed apps. Highly recommended.

For music players, WinAmp seems like a pretty capable player. I haven’t played with the desktop version yet on Windows which will allow syncing and file management, but it looks like a pretty solid player. It comes with some widgets for controlling the app from your desktop launcher too. There’s also Songbird which I was surprised to find in here. There are various built-in music player apps as well.

Some apps have jumped  the AppStore boundary and are available in both Android and iTunes. Kindle for one I’ll be watching closely over the coming months as Apple’s tyrannical bid for Moar Monayz unfolds. I will say that the Android version feels like it’s a bit behind the iPhone version. Some features are missing (syncing books not purchased from the Kindle store) and some of the polish on the iTunes version. The music identifier Shazam is also here as well as the omnipresent Angry Birds. I haven’t tested either of these, but it’s nice to see that some of my favorites are on both platforms. It’ll make the eventual total migration less painful.

One completely absent category is the media player. Whither video players galore? I was totally shocked to see that the base media player that ships with Froyo is a really basic, incapable device mostly included to play recorded videos from the camera app. Apparently Android is turning on accelerated video in some future release of Android. I have no idea what codecs that will include (hopefully WebM?) or what that’ll mean for video apps like VLC who I hear is working on a port. This is kind of a deal-breaker for me as one of the best parts of my iPad is its ability to play glorious, high-quality video (admittedly after some transcoding in Handbrake). I have no doubt it will come, but it’s absence feels strange and unexpected. It is a let down.

Also exciting to see several web browsers on offer. The two I’ve been playing with most are the Firefox beta and Miren. I hear good things about Dolphin too. All of these are easily better than the default browser that Android ships with and it begs the question: Do Android devs talk to Chrome devs? Then again, I’m happy to have Firefox there so I don’t really care.

Still have a post on upgrading to alternate firmware forthcoming, though it’s less urgent all of a sudden.