After a bit of research (and getting an ear bashing for keeping all my data and programs on the same HDD), I took the plunge and ordered a 64Gb SSD by Crucial. Last Wednesday came, and despite the postal strikes, so did my copy of Win7 and my SSD. After some tinkering to get the 2.5″ drive in the best place in a standard 3.5″ bay, everything was ready and Win7 was duely thrown on.

Boy oh boy – what a difference!. It’s like going from a cronky all 486 dx2 to a shiny Pentium 1. Now, I realise the improvments are a combination of a) The SSD b) Win7 c) A clean install. But still:

• Win7 x64 installed without any problems. Dell offer “no 64 Bit support” for my 3 yr old Inspiron. Every single one of the drivers for my system came from the Windows DVD, and everything works without a hitch
• The SSD is blazingly fast. Even after piling on a load of applications, including sql-server, my PC still goes from POST to login prompt in 10 seconds, and from there to a usable desktop in another 3 or 4
• Applications load virtually instantly. The only thing I’ve found that takes a while is Netbeans, which takes 3 or 4 seconds to load completly.
• Win7 is just Vista with polish, but it’s the triple-wax, hand buffed version of polish. As a dual-screen user, the new Aero keyboard shortcuts for moving windows to a specific screen are just awesome.
• The 64Gb drive has about 55% free, and thats with Win7, VS, Netbeans, broswer, email, Open Office, sql-server and a heap of utilities installed. Oh, and it’s Fast!

1. Install Yum from RPM’s
Yum is really just some clever Python scripts, so assuming you already have Python on your system (which was installed by default on my VPS via the Virtuozzo manager), theoretically you can just install the update manager from RPM’s.  It does have a few dependencies – the packages I needed were:

• Yum
• python-elementtree
• python-iniparse
• python-sqlite
• python-urlgrabber
• yum-metadata-parser
• m2crypto

These can all be installed in one deft command, executed as root of course [the following is for Centos 5 on i386 - the package versioning will change with time, so this may need manual tweaking]

rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/os/i386/CentOS/yum-3.2.19-18.el5.centos.noarch.rpm http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/os/i386/CentOS/yum-metadata-parser-1.1.2-2.el5.i386.rpm http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/os/i386/CentOS/m2crypto-0.16-6.el5.3.i386.rpm http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/os/i386/CentOS/yum-fastestmirror-1.1.16-13.el5.centos.noarch.rpm http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/os/i386/CentOS/python-elementtree-1.2.6-5.i386.rpm http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/os/i386/CentOS/python-iniparse-0.2.3-4.el5.noarch.rpm http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/os/i386/CentOS/python-sqlite-1.1.7-1.2.1.i386.rpm http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/os/i386/CentOS/python-urlgrabber-3.1.0-5.el5.noarch.rpm

2. Add the Atomic repository

The Atomic repository is a third-party community channel specifically aimed at VPS owners and users and  covers Redhat/Fedora/Centos OSes.  The channel contains far more recent versions of packages that is found on the main “official channels”.  It can be installed into Yum with an easy installer:

wget -q -O - http://www.atomicorp.com/installers/atomic.sh | sh

3. Update PHP

yum update php and voila

• Battery – it is a lot better. The reports about needing to condition the battery are definitly spot on – it needs half a dozen power cycles (from full charge through to ‘turn itself off’ empty), but now it’s a lot better. With a medium selection of features turned on (wifi & 3G on, GPS and BlueTooth off), it easily lasts 24 hours with half an hour of talk time and an hour or so of internet usage.
• Instant Messaging – is still missing everything but GoogleTalk in the UK – despite the recent firmware release, which plain sucks. There are a couple of alternatives available in the Market – and whilst on face value they work well, they still don’t integrate with the built in address book.
• Camera – I still don’t think the lack of a flash is a serious issue – unfortunatly the lack of manual controls – exposure and the like, actually are. Assuming the hardware supports it, it really needs something here (hmm, maybe time for (another) pet project …)

As I touched on in my first post on the G1, I use Google Apps for Domains to power my email for geekcubed.org – and the G1 now makes this is just totally totally awesome. One contact list, one mailbox – available everywhere – nothing lost, overlooked or forgotten. Many might say “well duh – where have you been for the last X years” – evidently under a rock, so humour me. Now, in fairness, if you were willing to surrender some choice and a lot of cash, you could get similar results by plumping for a Microsoft stack – Exchange, Outlook and a Windows Mobile device, but I wasn’t – Google all the way.

The handset itself is seemingly standard fair for HTC – probably not their best offering, but far from their worst, especially in light of some of the bricks churned out in the past. As my first “proper” smartphone, the keyboard took a while for my less than nimble fingers to adjust to, but it’s perfectly usable after some practice (though I ocasionally nudge the nipple which steals focus, which is annoying) – and it’s very comfortable in the hand. The screen is excellent, as is wifi: GPS is mediocre – slightly more useful than “novelty” but falling short of “navigaton device” – it does take a while locate those satellites. Bluetooth is crap, but then I rarely have a need for it.

The true gemstone is, of course, the Market – apps for anything and everythingn- most are useless, a few are nothing short of excellent. Some nice Twitter clients, a super little ssh client and a few more neat apps besides. Plus plenty of games to pass the time of those boring commutes.

It should be fairly obvious as to where I stand – the G1, at least for me, is nothing short of revolutionary. It’s become a key portion of my business – I don’t need to worry about missing a critical email because I’ve popped to the shops, nor being at a loss for a someones contact details because they are locked away in my desktop email client. Yes, there are some shortcomings that mean it does fall short; specifically I’m thinking about handling documents / PDFs (or the total lack of support thereof), but then the world is far from a perfect place …

Back in October when I switched hosting, I moved the email provider for geekcubed.org over to Google Apps – I had worked with my ex employer to set it up for them and I was thoroughly impressed – it completely removes the load on a sys admin for starters, and delivers a 100% polished experience for end users. The G1 requires you to use (or register) a gmail account to get started – as soon as I read that I could use my domain based account, I was sold …

So, with the phone unboxed and charging up, I completed to setup using my geekcubed.org account – 30 seconds later, all my emails, and more importantly, all my contacts, magically appeared on my handset – super! It’s only been five days, but I’ve already become totally acustomed to it – the faint chirp of an email coming in (or a new tweet for that matter, thanks to a wonderful app from the Market Place – Twidroid)

All well and good, but to keep the Ying and Yang in order, I have to list a few of the niggles:

• Battery – It is pretty poor – but it is getting better. The first day saw it only last 8 hours – but then I hardly put it down and spent most of the day performing a long-overdue clear out of my newly synchronised address book. There are some reports that the battery needs “conditioning” with a few charge-discharge cycles, and it looks at though that’s the case.
• Instant Messaging app – for some reason unbeknown to the rest of us, T-Mobile in the UK have decided to remove all the instant-messaging protocols from the built in app except the Google messenger – which is pretty shabby – there are, of course, 3rd party apps in the Market but they don’t integrate with the address book (which bizaarly still registers MSN accounts as valid IM shortcuts, even though they don’t work)
• Camera – a few years ago, 3MP wasn’t bad for a dedicated digital camera, let alone a phone. In my mind, the G1 as a camera comes third behind it being PDA and phone (not sure which of those is first yet) – yes it lacks a flash (but then most mobile flashes are crap anyway) and there are no manual controls – but that could / should be fixed by a firmware update.

I think I’ll leave it there for now – I’ll let the dust continue to settle for a while before re-evaluating whether the G1 (or, lets be honest, Android), is as good as it initially appears to be.