So Android has this “accessibility” feature that lets you hang up on a call by tapping the power button.

Except what happens if you’re on a call, the screen turns off (say, you’re using the speakerphone, it’s on a table). How do you turn the screen back on?

You’re right! The answer is: you can’t! Instead it helpfully always hangs up on your caller.

Should only hang up on people with that button if the screen is already on. Not if it’s off.

Of course, this isn’t if during normal use the phone doesn’t decide to turn the screen back on when it’s held against your face, start pressing the hangup button then get the touchscreen “jammed” because of persperation.

My normal phone arrangement consists of an iPhone 4 and a Nokia N900. iPhone gets my main SIM card for calls and the majority of my web browsing, N900 gets a mobile broadband SIM card for SSH, and other mobile Linux usage that doesn’t require a full laptop. Unfortunately the N900 is starting to show age, and I would use it as a primary phone, if not for the lack of UTMS-850 support that I require, and living in a blackspot for all carriers but Telstra.

Recently, a friend challenged me to put my Android trash-talking where my mouth was, and loaned me a Nexus S for a week, Google’s previous flagship Gingerbread phone. It’s okay — he has to use a HTC Mozart (a Windows Phone 7 device). In both cases we’re using devices that are released in late 2010, so they’re now showing their age.

I should point out from the start that he loaded the latest Gingerbread CyanogenMod ROM onto his phone, having failed to get an Android 4 CyanogenMod ROM to work (it popped up lots of crash messages). He got the Mozart with some custom ROM made by some Russian that I found on XDA developers, that gave it Windows Phone 7.5 (instead of 7.0) as well as all the Nokia applications, effectively turning it into a poor man’s Nokia Lumia phone. In both cases the phone is running a custom ROM with various enhancements not available in the stock ROM, and are rooted and unlocked — it’s a fair fight.

My friend attempted to load an Android 4 ROM on the device which didn’t work properly at all, with all the applications crashing. After loading the previous stable Gingerbread ROM instead and attempting four times to get my microSIM aligned in the slot, I was ready to go.

Immediately I’m told “download ConnectBot and Hacker’s Keyboard”. Okay. Done that. Installed it. The nice part of this is I don’t think it required any special sideloading trickery to get these things on there, and now I have a Dvorak soft keyboard.

I also notice there’s a big difference between this and my co-worker’s Samsung Galaxy S, which has an entirely broken build of some custom Android ROM on it. Talking my friends who use Android, CyanogenMod seems the way to go, and every one of them has loaded this onto their device. Manufacturer’s custom ROMs don’t last long.

Playing with it, there’s a nice complex “permissions” system for Market applications. I like this. But the problem with this system is it’s “take it or leave it”, there’s no way to revoke individual permissions to applications. I’m told later that there is infact a way to do this with CyanogenMod’s hacks, however it means temporarily granting applications the full requested access, and there’s no guarantee that the application won’t crash.

If I was to “fix” this, I’d force every Market application to either have an option to degrade gracefully in the absence of functionality, or give it access to a subset of or false information. For example, an application that wants access to your contact list may be granted access to an empty contact list just for that application, or only certain groups of your contacts. It could also push writes to the contact list to another list entirely, or allow you to prompt on those. In the end the applications that leak your entire contact list to third parties would be exposed, shamed, and removed.

The default homescreen, while it looks cute, I’m told uses a lot of battery life. It also lags the interface a lot. In fact, even with the fancy homescreen, the phone is still very unresponsive, and UI transitions are choppy. This is the price for running your UI in a virtual machine.

The calendar widget doesn’t appear on the home screen by default — almost like the calendar is an afterthought. Several UI problems present themselves, all of them are fixed in Android 4:

• The homescreen applet only shows your next appointment, but still lets you occupy large amounts of screen space to hold the applet.
• When you want to edit an appointment, the only way to do this is by a context menu. There’s no edit button that’s just shown, despite loads of space to put one.
• When you actually edit that appointment, the button order is: Done, Cancel, Delete. It is very easy to confuse “Done” and “Delete” (who reads labels), and there should be a very obvious cue that you’re about to do a potentially disasterous operation. As an example, on the iPhone, delete buttons are marked in red.

I’m having a lot of reception problems with the phone at home on data, it seems to be using Telstra’s GSM-900 GPRS network (despite being connected to WiFi). The 3TELSTRA UTMS-2100 network has patchy coverage at best at my house, and the lack of UTMS-850 on this version of the phone is really starting to show a problem. I imagine this is only going to get worse once I try to teather with it. There is another version of this phone that supports UTMS-850, however this is at the exclusion of GSM-900, meaning it won’t work on other Australian mobile networks.

There is a VGA adapter available for them, however I notice that the buttons on the controller and menus do not operate properly on Linux — after the first button press, the menu stops responding. This makes it impossible to select 3D mode or adjust any settings.

The controller works fine on Mac OSX and Windows in my tests, which left me scratching my head. It also works fine when you plug the VGA of a Linux box into it, and USB into another computer. I’ve also tried it with several other configurations, where I had a powered hub not connected to upstream USB, and plugging it into an iPhone USB wall charger, and still wouldn’t work.

Turns out, the controller presents in addition to a USB interface (1BAE:014B) for an internal sound card, a HID interface for the (optional) head tracking module. Linux doesn’t know how to handle it, so it presents it as a “hidraw” interface (typically /dev/hidraw0). You just need to read from the device, and suddenly it starts working! You can’t just ignore the device entirely (with a usbhid quirk or unloading the module), you must read from it otherwise events are blocked. This is probably due to a bug in the VGA adapter firmware, but was never found because Linux isn’t a supported platform.

This is simple to deal with. As root, run: dd if=/dev/hidraw0 of=/dev/null.

All the events will be read from the device, and simply discarded. If you watch it with hexdump, there’s some events that come up whenever you press a button on the controller. In the end, they don’t matter. I haven’t looked much in to it yet, but there’s probably a way that you could parse them, and possibly even reconfigure the device from software. This is needed regardless of whether you have the optional head-tracking sensors installed — I don’t have them.

I think that Mac OSX and Windows both do this in-kernel when it doesn’t know how to handle events, it’s probably just a quirk in how Linux handles these devices.

I’ve since updated the driver so that it treats the directional buttons on the big button controllers as the X and Y axes. This means that joydev.c will now detect the xbox360bb as a joystick driver, and so ordinary programs that use Linux’s joystick API can receive events from the controllers (and not just those that use evdev).

I also wrote a simple pygame version of Simon. This works whenever you have four joystick devices attached to your computer. You play by pressing any button on the controller. The colours match up to how the Big Button controllers are presented in xbox360bb. As soon as one person makes a mistake, the game ends. The loser is reported on the console.

These are written by James Mastros (not me). At the moment, the Linux kernel developers have not accepted any patches for supporting the device, because of code quality issues. So if you wanted to have a go with these drivers, be aware that it’s experimental in nature, may cause your computer to catch fire, or crash your system if you press the wrong combination of buttons. Take care!

For convenience, I’ve tarballed up the driver and a basic Makefile (for Debian) that will allow you to build the module without recompiling your whole kernel. It should be a simple matter of extracting the archive to /usr/src and typing ‘make’. This will build the module ‘xbox360bb.ko’, which you can insmod. You’ll need build-essential, linux-headers and linux-kbuild packages for your kernel installed.

It presents the controller has four input event devices, one for each coloured controller (green, red, blue and yellow). Each controller has 7 “normal” buttons, plus a big button on the top acts as a D-Pad and can be pushed straight down as another button.

You can test their operation with evtest. These don’t come up as regular joystick devices, which may make their use with other software difficult (ie: the program will have to be specifically designed to handle evdev to be able to use it as a controller).

The devices themselves use Consumer IR to talk to the receiver, so if you have a CIR receiver already in your computer, you can probably use the controllers without the dongle. However the dongle itself does not act as a CIR receiver with the xbox360bb module (so you couldn’t use it with a Windows Media Centre remote for a HTPC… but you could use the Big Button controllers for that).

Some ideas for these controllers, in case you had these or Buzz controllers and wanted a project idea:

• A quiz game (obviously) with customizable questions. There’s a few programs out there that already do this, and chances are they could be extended to use the Big Button controllers. It could be linked to a speech recognition software in order to allow players to verbally give their answer to a question.
• An image categorization/rating program. It could be used for up to four people to sort through images at once, and quickly give feedback.
• A Simon game.

Note: I’ve since written a second round to this post.

To do this, install [Registry Explorer][rexplrce11] on your device. If you don’t want to boot Windows (or can’t), you can use [this copy of the files][rexplrce11tbz2], which has the CAB files you’ll need to install it to your device. You can then [follow the HOWTO][sshwin20howto], then use Registry Explorer to add in the registry entries. Registry Explorer uses a GUI similar to the standard Win32 Registry Editor.

For convienience, I’ve created [a copy of my registry entries][unixreg], which you can import using the Registry Explorer software. Be aware that I store my UNIX root in `\Storage Card\unix`, due to limited internal memory. I’ve found that SSH will still try to store it’s `known_hosts` file in the `\unix` directory, so you’ll need to create that directory anyway (just leave it empty – don’t copy your UNIX root into it). The space used by the `known_hosts` file is minimal. My registry dump also uses the default username of “michael”, which you’ll need to change so it matches what you wrote in your `/etc/passwd` file.

One final thing is that ncurses apps (like irssi) seem to have some problems with the terminal type being set to ‘wince’. I’m presently working on getting a working terminfo file for Linux systems, so that they can properly handle OpenSSH on WinCE.

[sshwin20howto]: http://www.eskimo.com/%7Ewebguy/service/openssh.html
[rexplrce11tbz2]: /static/wince/rexplrce-1.1.tar.bz2
[unixreg]: /static/wince/unix.reg
[rexplrce11]: http://www.tucows.com/preview/32379

I’ve recently bought one of these devices from eBay, for a mere 70$. Bargin basement, considering the cost of an ATA is 70$, plus the cost of a phone, and that many other IP Phones sell for 300-400$, and I wasn’t willing to spend that much money on a phone.

It’s a nice gadget, it has a “straight through” RJ-45 100mbit socket, and a crossover socket, allowing you to use an existing cable for your computer for your phone as well – something ideal in offices or other situations where there is limited cabling and you want to save money on VoIP rollout.

There are five different firmwares for the device: H.323, IAX2, MGCP, Net2Phone, and SIP. By default, my unit had a SIP firmware on it, however it is painlessly switchable by downloading the firmware from Cirrus’ website, then uploading it via a web interface. It takes about 5 minutes to complete the update. Something interesting about the images is that the filesystem isn’t encrypted or encrapted at all – and you can see the raw HTML source in the file, as well as some of the strings used on the phone. Initial minipulation hasn’t really been successful, however I could be in the wrong place, or there may be a checksum on the file to prevent modified or corrupted firmware from being uploaded to the device.

A couple of issues I had was that I found the manual difficult to follow to configure the device via the handset. After I switched the device to using DHCP (it was using a static IP of 192.168.1.100 by default), it then was trivial to configure via a web interface.

Something I noticed using the original firmware that when reading out the “index” of the speed dial, that the numbers weren’t really right. So for number “98″, it would read “9 ten 8″. In v1.50 of the firmware, this issue was resolved.

I notice you can set a “phone number” to be displayed on the phone as any string you wish using the web interface, but not the handset. I actually use this functionality (it simply pops up that it’s my phone), and then it displays my local extension number. It would be good if that sort of thing was consistant.

The “Flash” button doesn’t do a “flash” (or “recall”) at all, but in fact accesses an interactive speed dial menu. Additionally, the abbreviations for some of the buttons could be better (“anscal”, “miscal”, “diacal”), and there should be some functionality to change the ringing, and dialtone, much like the Sipura ATA units do.

So, we shall see how this all goes….

The f and j keys have keyholes that are at a 90° angle in relation to the rest of the key holes, where the keys sit in. So I currently have my j, f, u and h keys all sideways. They still fit, and I guess having h and u sideways kinda compensates for the lack of little lump at the bottom
of the key. But it’s a helluva lot better than the old one.

Using the mouse feels like I’m trying to fly a plane… very large and lots of buttons. I swear it has it’s own self destruct sequence…