For the last 7 years, I’ve had a Sony Ericsson phone. The usability on these phones (for a regular, inexpensive phone) is outstanding. Every time I have an acquaintance show me a ‘new free phone’ they got from a carrier for renewing their contract, I cringe. The interfaces suck.

I still don’t need or want a “smart” phone. Since it’s not something I’m interested in, I don’t feel compelled to burden myself with a data plan. I won’t debate the merits here. Yes, they’re nice. Yes, they’re utilitarian. But until the wireless carriers start charging a price point I am willing to pay for those devices, I’m not getting one. Period.

But I needed a new phone, and we want to port Kylene’s number to the Ooma and get her a prepaid SIM to cut the monthly bills.

The problem was, kylene’s old phone (a SE w510) had a half-dead screen. Then Alice pulled the ‘send’ button off of my w850. Gah!

So I found a few unlocked Sony Ericsson Cedar phones at a really good price. (Amazon Outlet) YAY! An unlocked, non-branded phone! DOUBLE YAY!

I can’t believe I’m excited about this, but these are the things I like about the Cedar:

• The old Sony Ericsson platform is fantastic. I love the menus.
• It doesn’t require a data plan!
• Standardized Parts Almost hard to believe this came from a “Sony” venture.
  • Micro-USB for charging / PC transfer
  • 3.5mm headphone jack
  • MicroSD card
• The battery life is crazy long.
• It still comfortably fits in my pocket
• No moving Parts (hinge, slider, etc.)

The biggest change from my other SE phones, is that the Cedar uses standard ports, connectors, and memory expansion.
I know, I can’t believe I’m excited about that, but industry standards seems to be one of my hot buttons.

Oh, and the music-playback quality is fantastic. Stuck my 8gb micro sd card in my phone loaded up with mp3s last night, and I’ve been jamming at my desk all morning.

I really like my new laptop.

There, I got that out of the way.

I’ve been using a Dell Precision M4600 with Debian 6, “Squeeze” for about a week now. Today I stumbled across solutions to the remaining hardware ‘driver issues’ I had. I’m going to make this really simple for everyone, and enumerate exactly what I’ve done, and exactly what it fixed.

1. Upgraded to linux kernel 3.2
   Install the Debian backports apt repository.

   sudo apt-get -t squeeze-backports install linux-image-amd64

   • Resolved Power management (reboot / shutdown / suspend) issues
   • Resolved Audio issues (no sound from the speakers, but the headphone jack worked)
   • Resolved Touchpad issues (actually detected as a touchpad, complete with multi-touch)
2. Disabled “Optimus” in the BIOS.
   The Intel graphics chipset will get a lower PCI id than your Nvidia chipset, causing the next action to fail….
   • Resolved an issue I had after installing the nvidia driver.
3. Installed the Nvidia driver.
   I downloaded the driver from Nvidia’s driver page.
   I pressed ctrl-alt-F1 to switch to a console pty, and log in as root.
   We’re going to move to the proper directory, shut down the X server, and run the installer.

   cd /path/to/your/download
   /etc/init.d/gdm3 stop
   chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-295.49.run
   ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-295.49.run

   I let the installer to all the work for me. This did require a reboot after having it disable the “nouveau” open-source driver.
   After the reboot, I had to switch to a pty again, stop gdm3, and start the installer once more.
   If you end up with a screen that just has a flashing cursor in the top left after rebooting once the driver is installed, then make sure you really did disable Optimus in the BIOS. The other option is to try and restrict the PCI id’s that X will detect as display devices in the Xorg.conf file. I treat that file as a “HERE BE DRAGONS” kind of thing. The less I acknowledge it exists, the happier I am.

   • Resolved seriously lackluster gfx performance.

Today my new laptop arrived. A Dell Precision M4600.

This is my new ‘work’ laptop. I use this for coding, for fidgeting, etc. The iMac (family computer) and the PowerBook are family utilities. They’re the day-to-day computers used by myself and the rest of the family. As such, I don’t experiment on those. I don’t want to interrupt other people.

That said, I don’t experiment much on my work laptops either, since they’re productivity tools and very utilitarian to me. I get them setup, I get them how I like them, and then I just keep using them. Stability is important to me on these machines.

I’ll just come out and say it: I hate Windows as a productivity OS for what I do. I hate it. Installing app servers, web servers, databases, coding, etc. just seems so… second-rate on windows compared to a real ‘server(like?)’ OS. I also prefer to dog-food whenever I can, which is why I use the same linux distro on my laptop that we target for deployment at work.

Anyhow, I needed to install Debian. It works. Almost perfectly. There’s a few things that I’ve found which aren’t ‘perfect’ yet, but most of the things I’ve run into are … I can get around them for some time.

• “Shutdown” doesn’t seem to work. Or is it “Restart”? I can’t remember. One of them just sits there. You know what? I can push the power button and hold it down for six seconds. My fingers work fine for that.
• Touchpad support: The touchpad gets treated as a bare-bones affair. No fancy scrolling, gestures, etc. The erase nub in the middle can’t even be configured yet. From what I’ve found on google, this may be Dell witholding information about ALPS? I don’t know. Either way, the device works, it’s just that you loose some of the ‘fancy’ bits in linux.
• Graphics Drivers…. My laptop has a discrete Nvidia Quadro 1000M card onboard, yet it seems that Linux is using the Intel GMA device instead. I’m OK with this. In Linux, I’m not normally doing 3D stuff (at this point). I did try to get the Nvidia driver installed, and that was a colossal failure. I’m not sure if it’s due to this laptop being able to switch which chipset is active, or what, but I’m just fine with the intel graphics in linux. I may play around with this again in the future, but for now, full resolution with 2d acceleration is fine with me.
• The wireless wouldn’t pick up a dhcp address at work (under linux) but worked fine on windows. I have no idea why. We have a 128WEP key at work. I’m going to try at home here tonight (WPA2) and see how that goes. At work, I can plug a cable in. At home…. Oh heck I can plug a cable in here too if I need to.

Those are the only “issues” I’ve had. None of them are show-stoppers. All of them are pretty typical with ‘new’ hardware and a Linux based OS. In another year or two, I’m sure these will be resolved. That’s another reason I’ve stayed away from ‘new’ laptops the last few years. Hardware support gets a little bit sketchy when you’re dealing with ‘new’ stuff.

All in all. I love this laptop. The display is GORGEOUS.

Update
WiFi at home worked fine with WPA2. I don’t get it. I’ll try again tomorrow. Perhaps I had the wrong firmware pack loaded.

Civ5 under Windows 7 on this machine is AMAZING. Holy cow. How did I ever put up with playing this on the iMac? It’s SO SMOOTH on the laptop.

For the last few months I’ve been mulling a new work laptop. I should emphasize, work, laptop.

If this were to be the home laptop (email and web browsing), or the coffee-table convenience item, I’d plunk down the cash for a new iPad and be done with it. But this is my development box — what I make a living with. I don’t use OS X for that. I have my reasons. Many of them revolve around the fact that I do most of my work in linux, for a good reason — there’s fewer distractions.

For the last two years, I’ve been making due with a Dell Latitude D620 I picked up used. It was two years old when I bought it, so I’m really dealing with a 4+ year old laptop. It’s long in the tooth. The reason I haven’t replaced it yet, is that it’s been fairly inexpensive to maintain and upgrade slightly. It’s kept pace with what I needed it to do pretty well, but I’m done limping this thing along.

So I’ve been looking for new laptops. The problem with this, is that I have pretty high expectations for something I spend a lot of time working with, and I won’t compromise on stupid little things that are insanely annoying to me. I’ve noticed some -horrible- design trends in laptops over the last few years, and I needed to find a machine that wasn’t going to aggravate me every time I tried to open the lid, or shortly after.

* The “Battery In the Back” brain-dead stupid idiotic design flaw. My first run-in with this was an employer-provided HP laptop about five years ago. The battery was under the hinge of the laptop lid. The front palm-rest area of the laptop wasn’t heavy enough to hold the laptop to the desk when you tried to open it one-handed. You had to do all sorts of stupid contortions or -shake- the laptop to get it to open one-handed. This is a big problem if you’ve got a cup of coffee in your hand when you want to raise the lid and show someone something. I’ve even noticed some manufacturers have started moving the hinge forward 1/2″ to 3/4″ forward and on the ‘top’ of the laptop to move the center of gravity forward when the battery is in the back, and use the battery as a lever to pry the thing open if you try it one-handed. This cop-out actually promotes the next issue, by making the top bezel smaller than the actual base of the laptop.

* Display Resolution ATROPHY. Manufacturers are using this as a major price-point differentiator. MOST screens out there on consumer (and even low-mid range business) laptops are 720p displays with a resolution of 1280×720. My 14″ D620 is sporting 1440×900. If I were to drop to the crappy 720 displays most laptops are using these days (in the price range I’d normally want to pay for) I’d end up losing 29% of my screen real-estate. That’s crazy. Vertically, you can’t fit squat on a 720p display, and I consider them useless for anything but a toy laptop.

* Serviceability. Consumer-grade laptops are flimsy plastic disposable things full of creaky cheap mechanical parts. Hinges break. Latches break. Bezels flex. It drives me nuts. I want something that’s made with some parts that have some heft and durability. (Yes, the macbook pro line is nice)

* I don’t expect my laptop to be ‘thin’ or ‘sleek’. For me, it’s a desktop replacement, and a tool. I like my tools to feel like tools, not toys. I can deal with an ugly looking tool that does the job I need it to do at a price I’m willing to pay. Style isn’t high on my list. That’s probably why I haven’t had a haircut in about 3 months. Huh.

This is how I ended up settling on a Dell Precision M4600 to replace my D620. The battery is in the front. The hing is set at the very back. The display is a respectable 1920×1080. It looks hefty (it is hefty), it has a range of CPU options (upgrade path in a few years!) GPU options (ditto), and has gobs of ports (which I probably won’t use). The step-by-step take-apart manual is available online, it’s made with aluminum and magnesium, it should take what I through at it. And performance-wise, it’s darn near what my desktop at work currently is.

Yes, this is a big laptop, but it’s going to do a lot of good work for me, and my laptop upgrade cycle seems to be about 4 years — which is nearly twice as long as what most businesses aim for in laptop cycles.

As I did with the iMac, I bought the M4600 as a refurbished machine. Doing that got me a 45% discount over a brand-new, identically configured brand-new box would cost.