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I will be the first to admit that I have not been keeping up with smartphone trends - computer science is no more about (extra-small) computers than astronomy is about telescopes, after all - but after realising that I had been eligible to recontract my mobile line for over a year, and that this meant that I could get one for next to nothing and at no increase in my monthly phone bill (after booting autoroaming and voicemail), I figured that it was time to hop on. So what should be my first smartphone? My uncle and cousin have apparently been bitten by the iPhone bug, though the latter did have good things to say about the Nokia Lumia, and my brother got a Galaxy Note that's the size of a small tablet. I quickly cobbled together a short list of requirements:
On to check out the available goods: of the free options with Singtel's basic 3G Flexi Lite plan, the Nokia 603 is on Symbian, but is out of stock anyway, while the Sony Xperia Neo V fitted most of the bill, but had just 320MB of internal memory, which was a concern from what I had heard about apps. Samsung's Galaxy line had a couple of pretty attractive offerings, but I eventually settled on the HTC One V for S$48, with it coming with the latest version of Android and generous purported standby time tilting me towards it. The transaction was fully online - having recontracted (with email copies of legal forms) and paid through SingTelshop on Thursday afternoon, a lad came over to my place on Friday afternoon to deliver the phone; it's almost a wonder how knickknacks get sold in brick-and-mortar stores nowadays, with rock-bottom prices and free delivery widespread. [N.B. This was later confirmed on a detour to Sim Lim Square before a family dinner for a 32GB microSD card (available on Qoo100, or the former Gmarket among other online retailers, but I didn't want to wait), where I had the most befitting ice cream sandwich of my life (and not a moment too soon); offhand, the retailers couldn't quite compete on price or variety, especially on the smaller purchases. 3G surfing was iffy at Bugis Junction, but the GPS worked swell.]  In very appropriate minimalist packaging Not having touched a smartphone previously (ok, perhaps on a few occasions), I spent the evening figuring things out. While sliding stuff about felt nifty, the setup procedure reinforced my suspicions that inputting text would be a pain (and I don't consider myself to have particularly thick fingertips). Connecting to my router's Wi-Fi did work like a charm. The simplification of required extras was also very well received, with a single standard microUSB connector handling everything from power (with a compact power transformer, unlike the old days) to data transfer, and all at once! Goodbye forever, old blocky one-use-only power adapters! My complete newbie self was horrified at the lack of screen real estate, which had space for only 16 icons, after discovering that widgets could be removed by holding a finger down on them, and added by holding down on an empty spot. Happily, I next realised that there were five available screens, accessible by sliding horizontally. Oh, and after searching in vain for a display off/sleep icon, it hit me that that was what the power button was for. Oops. Pity about how the screen is a fingerprint magnet (not that the iPhone's vaunted oleophobic technology works that well either, from observation), but that should be partly fixed with a good protector (to be obtained); can't knock the glass, which happens to be a happy accident, otherwise. This doesn't affect operation at all, since the smudges are invisible when the screen is lit, but it's still unsightly nevertheless.  Background picture soon changed by sponsor Mr. Ham Being a cellphone at heart, though, it still needs a contact list to be useful, and I got mine onto it by exporting to CSV from Nokia PC Suite (and culling those contacts for which I had no recollection of), before transferring to Google Contacts (which did a good job of merging duplicates), which was seamlessly integrated with the One V. Too bad about the tons of Facebook duplicates, but it seems that designers nowadays expect users to search for contacts instead of scrolling anyway. I was taken slightly aback at how tightly services are inter-connected nowadays (as one petty thief discovered to his detriment - this phone does automatically store photos onto Dropbox too), when snooping about for useful apps - apps can be pushed to a phone after being selected from the store, just like that! Okay, I'm an old fogey. Downloaded WhatsApp (of course), as well as some utilities such as file, storage and battery tools, as well as Chrome and Translate. Shifting it all over to the 32GB SD card, after watching the 2GB free gift fill up at an alarming pace with my music collection, was done by cloning the latter to the PC (a de facto backup) before restoring it to the former (and resizing the resulting partition) It should be mentioned that the phone came with ribbon earbuds, which while less tangly (though still no match for the dedicated solutions), weren't too comfortable - but for an optional extra, I'm not complaining. It's kind of hard to wind one's head around how smartphones full so many roles nowadays - phone, music player, camera, watch, GPS, personal organizer... did it all start when Jobs looked at an iPod and wondered, hey, why can't I make calls from this? On the whole, I'm quite chuffed with the phone, and if I had to nitpick it would be the abrupt stop-starting of music as notifications come in, as well as widgets being slow to update, but nothing that prevents it from doing all I expect it to. It may be time to delve into some app programming... The Pattern Code While fiddling about, I got to the security preference of setting a lock screen, and after looking through what was available, decided on a pattern lock. For those not in the know, this basically requires the user to trace a preset pattern to enable the phone to be used after some period of inactivity:  Obviously, this [1-6-3-2-5-7] is not my actual pattern It was then natural to ask: what is the total number of possible valid patterns? Mr. Ham was very quick to rustle up an answer from StackExchange's Math/combinatorics section (which happens to correspond to an official integer sequence), but it turns out that it's not quite applicable for the implementation on my phone, which as can be seen allows diagonal moves as long as the path doesn't touch another node on the way. For example, numbering the nodes from left to right and then top to bottom, node 1 can connect to 2, 4, 5, 6 and 8. The only other rule is that each node can only be visited once, which limits the maximum sequence length to nine. Mr. Robo, who had wisely hidden away, was therefore able to claim credit this time. After crunching the numbers, he reported that there are 139880 possible sequences - 1400 of (minimum allowable) length 4, 5328 of length 5, 16032 of length 6, 35328 of length 7, 49536 of length 8 and 32256 of length 9, or rather more than the 10000 combinations possible with four-digit PINs. He also confirmed the answer of 576 if only horizontal and vertical immediate neighbours are allowed, and believes that solutions for other rule variants can be swiftly obtained by modifying the linked Perl code. [Errata 23 July 2012: This paper gives a figure of 389112, which turns out to be correct due to an understandable oversight - a special case exists where previously non-directly accessible nodes can be reached. For example, it was assumed that node 3 could never be reached directly from node 1, but this is in fact possible if the intervening node 2 was already used. Therefore, more sequences like 4-2-5-1-3, previously thought impossible, are possible. The updated code is offered.] I suppose the restricted version could be solved by hand, but that might be cruel. Heck, even the FBI are not amused, though as it happens there may be a far simpler way to defeat this protection, as also noted on the StackExchange page. All the more reason to get a good screen protector. Next: Robo Goes App
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