Carbide.C++ is Given Free (Quietly)

New thoughts as of Dec 26:
On the PC-front, Apple's Mac OS is gaining market share and this could be the most serious threat MS has to deal with. Linux although has been touted as the Windows replacement for years, due to its decentralized nature of development, I feel it still has a long way to go.

Will MS release Visual Studio for free when further threatened by The Fruit? We will see, but the giving away of Carbide.C++ will keep me from buying any MS development tools in the near future. Freebie is good. :)

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Carbide.C++ is an IDE for Symbian OS, developed by Nokia. As recent as a few weeks ago it was still selling for as much as 3500 Euros for the OEM edition where the user gets all the works.

The tide has changed course and all editions are available for download, totally free of charge.

Nokia must has felt the heat from gPhone (running Android), iPhone (running trimmed down Mac OS?), and probably phone running a new OS from Palm (pPhone?). This step is on the right path, but its effectiveness remains yet to be seen. For the mean while, I am delighted to have the full-featured IDE to play with.

The Quality Problem of My Sony Ericsson P1i

Updated 8/8/2008:
SE called me today and I was told they had the phone main board changed. But when I got my phone, it was a new one. The staff seemed quite reluctant to admit they gave me a new phone. All in all their service was not as bad as what I read on web. Case closed. :)

NOTE: I went to the SE service center at Simei

------------ End of Update ------------------

My P1i has a broken jog dial recently. Since no product is perfect, I just took my phone to the SE service center without much complaints.

Initially I was told the phone only needed a few days to be repaired, it was reasonable and I waited.

However, yesterday I got another call from SE and was told due to lack of parts, it will take a further 2 weeks. This is clearly not acceptable. Worse still, the phone loaned to me cannot send SMS properly and it really makes no sense for consumers to buy high-end phones from SE if the reliability and service level are so low.

Let's talk about consumer loyalty. I think my next phone most likely will not be SE.

P1i Update Service Fiasco

I encountered some issue while trying to run the Sony Ericsson Upgrade Service (SEUS) program for my P1i.

The error message is as cryptic as ever, and the programmer is extremely strong a candidate to get the 'idiotic programmer of the year' award for the very informative message:

"Incompatible Macromedia version. Required verision available from http://www.macromedia.com. Application will terminate"

Macromedia is (should be 'was', because it is now owned by Adobe) a company name, and there are quite a few products in the Macromedia family. On top of that, what is the 'required' version anyway?

After some search, it turns out the update service requires the Flash Player version 8 or later.

If you are not using Internet Explorer, as most sane programmers do, you are screwed, despite the fact you downloaded and installed the latest flash player. Reason being SEUS only looks at the flash player installed at Internet Explorer, and my IE 7 told me the version it had was version 6. Duh.

Use this link:

http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/welcome/

Solution is simple: Open the above link with Internet Explorer and upgrade Flash Player accordingly. Even if you did that for firefox/opera/etc., you still gotta do it again for IE. Yeah, stupid, that is the price to pay for using Windoze.

Technical Deep Dive of P1i

After some investigation, this phone is in fact a miniature computer.

First of all, it will be more apt to call it "a computer with phone ability": it has all the characteristics of a computer. A display, inputs, a standard processor (ARM9 running at 200MHz), primary storage: memory (128Mb), and secondary storage which consists of in-built flash (256Mb) and external flash (M2 card, max 4Gb). On top of that, it even has Bluetooth, GPRS, WLAN (802.11b only...), and the standard USB connection. So from any angle, this is computer-grade piece of hardware. Full spec of this phone can be found here (2.62Mb PDF).

How about software then? It has a pretty robust OS - Symbian OSv9.1 with UIQ3 graphical user interface. Symbian employs a micro-kernel-ism approach with the core kernel only keeps the minimal functionalities while other features are implemented elsewhere and interact with the core kernel through message-passing. This contrasts greatly with monolithic kernels like Linux and Windoze. However, this OS is coded in C++, which is something Cuppa Chai not familiar with.

It turns out Nokia is very keen to promote the Symbian + UIQ combo (Nokia has 47.9% stake in Symbian Ltd.). The result is Carbide.C++.

Carbide.C++ is an Eclipse-based IDE targeting Symbian-based devices. It even comes with a variant with much-reduced functionality (read: nearly useless for anything serious) for free. To produce something more useful, you need to pay at least US$450 and purchase the missing essential functions like on-device debugging and real-time profiling. Even more advanced version where you can work on the ROM and do kernel debugging is available at a whopping US$6000 price tag.

Familiarity notwithstanding, C++ can't prevent me from having a shot at programming this device. Well, this is what the free Carbide.C++ can do anyway.

Here you go.

My salute to all my fellow nerds in this world: Hello World

The Life of Having P1i

This is the third day I have my SE P1i, and let me write down some of my thoughts.

Some of my friends questioned my decision of getting such fancy phone, arguing 90% of the time we will only use it to talk and sms.

Reading documents on the go? "You must be kidding" they said with both mouth and eyes wide-open.

Truth be told I would have been in their camp just a couple of months back, saying "I can buy 4 phones with this price!"

However I know I can't keep running away from technology. Now ubiquitous devices is the trend and as a software engineer, the least that I can do is to understand, but not necessary to embrace it.

Ok, the above sounds cheesy.

I admit I want a new toy :P

Bye Bye Moto

With mixed emotions, I announce the demise of my Moto Razr V3i phone.

I am not happy because this stupid V3i died at the time where there wasn't any phone on the market that I like. In order to replace it, I had to bite the bullet and chose one that I hate the least.

The symptoms of its ailing showed on last Friday, which I suspected was a sickness called firmware-couldn't-boot-properly, which led to complications like all-white-screen and slow-to-start.

An engineer I am, I was quick to give it the highly complicated operations of removing-battery-and-put-it-back and also removing-sim-card-and-also-put-it-back, hoping to save its life (Thanks to LY for suggestion of the latter operation). It survived for another 2 days until the following Monday.

It was a fine Monday morning, I powered on the V3i as usual, but it responded very slowly. The air was filled with ominous aura, foretelling the withering life of V3i. After trying all the methods I knew, the phone went from bad to worse and it couldn't even power down properly.

"Must be the stupid bootloader can't boot without a proper prior shutdown."

With that hypothesis, I painstakingly boot the device without sim card and let it shut down, to make sure the shut down sequences were done in order. It proved this indeed again pulled the V3i from the brink of dying.

Like a hunter in a treacherous ground, I trust no luck. With the gait of a well-trained innocent wolf, I dashed out my house, phone in hand and wallet in pocket. I didn't need much anyway. I reached down, yes, my undies was still on. Good.

Time was ticking, I went to a few places where famous hunter-gatherers meet and weighted the bargains. The games were abundant: Sony Ericsson, Nokia, LG, Samsung, etc. My mind had purposefully filtered out any combination of "Moto" or "Rola". No, these terms freak me out.

I was considering Nokia and went to one of the shops, but there was a sign caught my attention:

"Our shop has terminated the 7-days refund and exchange policy. Kindly please inspect your new handset before leaving the counter. Any issue after the purchase please proceed to the Nokia service center."

Shit, I heard Nokia is having quality issue, but I never thought it is so severe. I backed out and there was only Sony Ericsson. When looking at the selections, I was thinking to get T250i which costs S$200+, but the camera is only VGA.

I had been the ardent advocate of "a phone only needs to be a phone, no more", but I start to wonder will a multi-purpose phone can boost my productivity? With that in mind, with a big round of applause, please welcome the new member to my humble abode, Sony P1i!!!!

P/S: What happened to the dying V3i? I sold it, together with all its accessories, for S$70. It would be worthless in no time if I chose to keep it. S$70 is better than a piece of junk, in my opinion.