iPhone never made it

StatCounter collects different web usage data and nicely visualizes the trends. The race between three most popular smart phone operating systems has been quite exiting in last few months. Diagram below visualizes what operating systems have been most used globally (actually used to access internet, not sold devices). Interestingly iOS never got the first prize as many had expected. Symbian has been clear leader in smart phone operating systems till May 2012 and iOS has been second. But just before Symbian's plunge the Android took second place in April. Symbian is dropping because world's leading smart phone manufacturer Nokia switched to Windows Phone. I don't see that iOS has any change to get on top on Android again as more and more people are realizing how much better Android is technically, ethically and in openness and undeserved hype around iPhone settles.

See diagram in StatCounter.

Drisk game review

Drisk (Droid Risk) by Brian DeWolff is Android version of famous strategy board game Risk. I never liked the original board game version but there was excellent freeware computer game version for Amiga that I played a lot back then. After that I have tried many computer game version for DOS, Windows and Linux but non of them have had as good playability as that old Amiga version had. Unfortunately I don't remember name or developer of that Amiga version but I still think that is the best Risk version I have ever played. Drisk with my Samsung Galaxy 10.1" tablet gets close to that experience. I dried only free version but the full version has support for multiple maps and online multiplayer game too.

Good

• Clear appearance in game itself
• Smooth playability
• AI is a tough opponent but even I can win and get the kicks

Bad

• No possibility to choose to play against different level AIs
• Sounds get soon annoying (luckily they can be turned off)
• Menus and options are a bit confusing and don't use tablet size screen well

A link to game in Google Play

Top Web Store Bugs

Couple of sofware bugs I have faced:

Worst: In some web stores there is a software bug that they process credit card number as integer number not as character string. Because first number in my credit card is zero it gets dropped out and I am not able to buy from those stores.

Best: In one web shop (I am not going to tell which) there is a bug that after payment the order is placed as many times as you press refresh page button in browser. So you pay just once but get as many products shipped as you want. It is nice and I am pretty sure this is not the only store that has this same bug.

Open Letter to Acer

I recently bought Acer Aspire 7250 laptop. My purpose was to install Ubuntu alongside with Windows 7 and carefull man as I am I created Acer recovery disks (took 4 DVDs) to be able to restore device to factory default state if something goes wrong. And something did go wrong and boot loader got corrupted somehow and device did not boot anymore. Luckily I had created recovery disks - I thought. But it appeared that "lighter" recovery only restores contents of C: drive and it did not fix boot sector and when I tried "harder" total restore I got this:

WTF?! How am I supposed to clear disk when device does not boot and even if it boots what am I supposed to do? Why the hell recovery does not do cleanup itself? Recovery disks appeared to be totally unusable. There must be somewhere in Acer some braindead individual who is actually responsible for this total crap recovery system. I hope - and I believe I speak on behalf of many who have rendered their brand new laptops unusable - that this idiot will be executed. Thank you.

p.s. Luckily I was able to install Grub from Ubuntu cd and then boot to Windows and create Windows recovery CD and then use that to rewrite MBR.

p.p.s. I did not succeed to make WLAN work from Ubuntu on this laptop (and that was reason I wanted to get rid of it). Good hints are welcomed.

hezMobile Launched

I started another blog where I am going to collect links to interesting mobile world news and trends. You may want to take a look it. Hint, hint.

Interesting statistics

StatCounter site provides interesting global web usage statistics over many years. E.g. different browser and operating system trends are visualized as nice and clear diagrams. It is interesting e.g. to see that Symbian is still clearly dominating smartphone operating system globally having circa 32% share of all web usage in last month.

Samsung's tab beats Apple 1-0

I am happy Samsung Galaxy 10.1" owner and have been very happy with it. Unfortunately Apple is so well aware of how superior Galaxy is compared to iPad that it is trying to prevent Samsung selling its product. And actually have succeeded to ban it in some countries. Samsung has offered to remove some features to make it less iPad look a like.