My almost three year old Droid phone still works great and it was not so easy getting a new phone. What convinced me to upgrade was the Samsung Galaxy S III's screen resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels. Sure upgrading from Android 2.x to 4.x is nice, but having a high density screen makes reading email, browsing the web, reading using the Kindle app, etc. all feel very natural, even on such a small device as a cellphone. Also: the Netflix app is fantastic: unbelievably easy to watch video at this screen resolution, even on a tiny device. I have been an enthusiastic iPad owner, but I think that the Samsung Galaxy S III will replace using the iPad about half the time. I had thought about getting a Nexus 7 tablet for occasions then the iPad was bigger (and heavier!!) than what I needed it for. At least for now, a larger cell phone with a high density screen seems to fill that niche better. One thing that surprised me after using my old phone for almost three years: I didn't manua...

Setting it up took 45 minutes because it immediately downloaded a new version of the OS when I set up the wireless Internet connection. I use Directv and it synced up with my DVR and Sony TV with no problems. The keyboard is nice, with a trackpad and mouse button top right corner. It is much nicer using the keyboard rather than the remote for Directv guide and DVR control. I have experimented with writing Android cellphone apps with the SDK and now I want to try some HTML 5 apps for both the Android cellphones and Google TV. Fun! I had a consulting job two years ago writing some Java blu-ray example apps and the development environment for that was, frankly, painful. Both Android and Google TV seem much more developer-friendly. You personalize Google TV by logging into your Google/GMail/Apps account. I had to enter my account information multiple times for Youtube.com and Picasa photo albums. There are some wrinklles to iron out but the platform has a lot of promise. We watched p...

I used the advice on this Rails Cast to start converting one of my Rails apps to nicely support mobile devices. Working on my MacBook, I use the iPhone Simulator (since I don't own an iPhone) and my Droid phone to test on a real device. So far most of the work has been deciding what I don't want to show when web requests come from a small screen device and tweaking the mobile device CSS file.