iPhone – what is the buzz about?

The world is a strange place. Apple launches a phone with specifications worse than any top range phone. They provide a nice design, but a mediocre phone. Touted as the first ever multimedia phone the adverts are well “less than true”

I have tested more than a fair share of phones – from Symbian (Nokia/Sony Ericsson) to every other Microsoft phone (HTC/I-mate and many others)

Right now my phone is the HCT S710. A Microsoft WM6 based phone, with browser, media player, WiFi, GSM Edge/GPRS and basically everything I need for business. It even got a real keyboard. I can stream files from my Microsoft Media Center to my phone in great quality. The WiFi is the best I ever seen – the phone can pickup and use wireless signals from every room in my flat where often my notebooks, other phones and gadgets can’t pickup any signals. (2nd best is actually my Sony US90s...)

But the real iPhone deal breaker for me is that it is NOT a business phone – its a consumer phone. No integration with Microsoft Exchange – only POP3 and maybe IMAP mail – not good enough in our day in age.

And what about forcing you to have iTunes on your pc? What a piece of crap software... just to run your phone? I wish Apple could make nice software and not only make up for it by making it “look nice”...

So the only iPhone i consider buying is the Cisco/Linksys one :-)

The Missing Router Firmware

I’m the proud owner of 2 Linksys 300N and 1 Netgear 854T Pre-N wireless routers. Really neat routers with great performance when they work. Pre-N is the new very fast Wi-Fi standard that should be the “Next Generation”.

But what really puzzles me is that all 3 have a similar bug. A bug where after some operation time, the router no longer accepts any traffic and stops working. It is impossible to figure out what goes wrong and it seems like nothing really makes it break down. It can happen anytime. But why does it happen? And on both equipment from Linksys and Netgear? And in different locations with different clients attached?

Could it be that both routers use some Open Source or BSD TCP/IP stack, with a know bug? The bug being that router does not close the “ports” in use so when the router runs out of ports – then the router dies. (A normal IP stack closes a used port after about 5 minutes of no activity.)

And why do Linksys and Netgear not fix it?

Well development departments are busy. They are likely already working on the next generation of gear for you. Bug or no bug – when the public does not cry foul – the manufactures do not fix the bugs.. CAN YOU HEAR ME CRY FOUL? Sometimes I think a class action suit is the only thing that makes them go back and fix the old bugs.

So in short – do not buy the above routers – they will give you grief. I replaced them with some old Linksys routers with DD-WRT firmware, an Open Source firmware with lot of options – and since then my support life has been bliss. No problems at all. They perform superb with features far exceeding that of Linksys and Netgear’s “ readymade consumer products”

So on my shopping list now – are ONLY products that are compatible with DD-WRT. They can be a bit hard to find – but well worth it.