How to set up the HTC One IR Blaster to control your Xbox 360 or media PC

Just a quick post as I see online that many people can't figure out how to get the HTC One Sense TV app to control a PC or Xbox (they are compatible with each other).

Instead of trying some weird, complicated setup, simply select "Cable Box" and select "Microsoft" as the manufacturer. I had it running my Xbox and PC in about twenty seconds.

Tips on using Blinkfeed on the HTC One

HTC's fabulous new "One" phone has a few tricks that extensive market research has led them to create.  Blinkfeed is one of the most misunderstood and panned features of the new phone.  It actually has some neat little features that never noticed and learned through hard experience.  These features make Blinkfeed much more useful than they appear.  My experience is that it runs faster than Flipboard and integrates with other apps (something Flipboard can't do).  One of the first things I must tell you (as I couldn't figure it out myself) is that tapping the notification bar on your phone returns you to the top of the Blinkfeed page.  This is huge because, waiting in line, you can easily scroll down ten pages of stories and social updates and you don't want to have to swipe your phone 10 times to get back to your clock!

Your Blinkfeed landing screen (homepage)

The first thing you'll see is this the landing page for Blinkfeed:
From here, you can click on the time to go to the clock or the weather (sunny in Seattle...can you believe it???) to open the weather app.  Tap on any news story to expand it.  Simple and quick.









To the left, I've clicked on the top story from Engadget.  From here, you get a nice, scrolling view of the story.  Videos usually work from within here and the feeds from selected partners looks very clean and nice.  You can adjust the font size from the menu on the top right of the screen.  You can share to social networks using the share button on the bottom.  This button disappears but reappears on a single tap within the news article.






Tapping on the feed logo (in this case, the Engadget logo on the top of the story) takes me to an Engadget only feed.  This is very useful to get to just the stories from a selected source.  Unfortunately, this is for selected partners only at this point...you can't do this on your social app feeds (like Facebook) because tapping on those simply opens the app and takes you to that post.  HTC promises updates to Blinkfeed in the coming months...they've already released a software update to the rest of the world but the US has to wait for carrier approval (T-Mobile, AT&T, etc.) before the updates hit US phones.  The update doesn't improve Blinkfeed, but shows that HTC is serious about getting updates out quickly.

Dragging a half inch down reveals
Blinkfeed options.

Want to post to your social account straight from your homescreen?  Blinkfeed will do that for you.  Simply drag the feed screen down about a half inch and you get the options menu in between the clock and your feeds.  Click on the pencil for a quick post.  In the captures, I've selected Facebook and it presents the blank screen with a "Post to" button.  This allows me to (by default) post on my wall or (by clicking the button and selecting) post on a friend's wall.  No opening any apps.  This is a neat feature to get right to business when you need to post something in a hurry.  Of course, you can share an article if you find something interesting.

This is the Facebook post screen.
The Twitter one looks nicer.  The
"Post To" button allows you to
select a friend so you can post on
their wall.

Lastly, clicking on the feed list can narrow down what you want to see.  It defaults to Highlights which is the coolest feature.  Highlights will draw your social feeds, your calendar appointments, and your TV listings (once you set up the TV app...another wholly awesome feature that I hope to write about soon) and news feeds into one continuous magazine.  If you are in the mood for NFL only news, you can tap the top left and get your selector drop-down and select just NFL news and your feed will switch in real time to the news you want.

Hopefully, you don't just skip Blinkfeed and give it a try before you pass on it.  Ultimately, you can set it to be a secondary screen on your phone so you can swipe over to it.  It's not a big deal and still gives you what you need quickly.

Here's a link to HTC's official story about it to get more information:
http://blog.htc.com/2013/03/htc-one-blinkfeed/

Here's a link to buy the HTC One (I get no revenue from this, but I wholeheartedly endorse this phone!)
http://www.htc.com/us/smartphones/htc-one/?PS=1&cid=sem157p174347&gclid=CIDZxLP5i7cCFSU6Qgod93YApQ

Does a Wall Charger Waste Electricity?

A lot of eco-friendly people have beaten the drum about unplugging your chargers when not in use.  Their well-meaning mantra has been stating that most wall-warts (as they are called) are simple transformers and thusly, are always converting electricity, wasting energy and money and adding to your carbon footprint.  The science was sound, so I always believed them; however, I've forgotten the other mantra of the modern age:

There are computer chips in everything these days!

Yes...indeed.  There are computer chips in your modern chargers.  Basically, most cellphones and all smartphones use chargers that have a microprocessor in them.  This allows the charger to negotiate how much power it can/should send to your device for optimum charging.  Who would have thunk?

I ran some personal tests on smartphone and tablet chargers and found that the microprocessor turns the power off when there is no device connected.  Using a Kill-A-Watt device (a great tool if you are serious about reducing electric waste with your devices), I measured electricity usage.  The Kill-A-Watt plugs into the wall and you plug things into it.  It measures the electrical use.

This first picture is of an old-fashioned wall-wart charger.  This one charges portable speakers and has a regular round pin plug:

As you can see, the old wall-wart is eating almost 7 watts...the same as an old, large Christmas light or night light.  Now, let's plug in a phone charger from my HTC One:

As you can see, the computer inside that little phone charger sees that nothing is connected, and so, draws no power.  Most modern cell phones comply with this standard.  Every micro USB charger I could find in my house also drew no power.

So, sleep well, my friends, knowing that you don't have to keep performing that annoying task of pulling it out and plugging it in everyday.  I hope I saved you 3 seconds of your life each day!

Windows Phone 8 - 60 days

Well, when I initially set out to do this, I thought I could barely make it 30 days. To my surprise, I went two full months!  A big part of that was the hardware I was using. The HTC 8X is a beautiful phone and, without its beautiful screen and outstanding sound quality, I, honestly, would have put the phone down or given it away (my daughter thought it was beautiful and wanted it to replace her iPhone 4S).  The reason I say this about the hardware is that it was a big incentive to stay on Windows Phone 8 (WP8) even though I was having a less than stellar time to start out, and I wanted this test to be about WP8 and be phone independent. I have played with the Nokia Lumia 920 and, despite front facing photos, these phones do not look alike at all.  The Nokia is large, heavy, and not attractive at all. On the flip side, I got lots of compliments about the HTC. I even had people come across the dining room of a coffee shop to investigate. Your mileage may vary depending on which phone you use. I would plug the HTC over the Nokia any day due to the look and feel and the Beats headphone amp. Seriously, if you use your phone to listen to music, this phone sounds so much better than any other portable device I've used, that I replaced my iPod with it.

One big piece of news is that Microsoft has announced that all WP8 phones will receive operating system updates and the rumor is that there will be a new one released around Christmas 2013.  They appear to have learned their lesson from WP7 and are attempting to make the platform have some life instead of being disposable.

Back to the real point of my experiment: can an Android user make the switch? We'll get to that at the end.

One big point of using Android, in the USA anyway, is free texting via Google Voice. Fortunately, I was able to do this using Metro Talk. It was hard at first as it lacked voice input... A crucial feature for the occasional reply while driving. About 14 days in, they updated it and it worked pretty well. I was surprised at its accuracy until I got in my car.  My personal tests show that it doesn't screen background noise nearly a well as Android does.  Minus one for WP8.  It is important to note that traditional texting supported voice input from the outset of WP8.

What about apps? At first, this department was really lacking. I have been amazed at the speed of development. The only apps I couldn't replace were the more obscure ones where I couldn't access an existing Android account (like Studyblue). All of my maps were there: Spotify, Yelp, Open Table, Starbucks.  there are a lot of apps that don't exist on Windows Phone, but for just about each 1 of those, there's a Windows Phone equivalent. This can be completely acceptable to many people, especially first time smartphone users or those that didn't invest heavily in their app ecosystem (you know what I'm talking about...people that use, say, 3 apps, versus people that have invested hours and hours putting things into an app that they can't access from a different platform, not to mention people that have spent $100 on apps and want to keep them!).  I, personally, have invested too much in a couple of apps that I couldn't move from, most notably, Studyblue, which is a study flashcard app, that I simply needed to pass tests!

Web Browsing is a good experience on mobile Internet Explorer (IE).  The browser works great.  It's fast, and handled most sites better than Android's Chrome browser.  A big disadvantage is that, on Android, I have 4 browsers in case one doesn't play well with specific websites.  There's no option to switch on WP8 if you come across something that doesn't play well with IE.

Something taken for granted by all smartphone users is the method of input.  Apple has famously had a keyboard that users like.  I personally don't get it.  It's fairly rudimentary.  Android is famous for the ability to switch keyboards with several on the market and a quick and easy switch between them.  Something else neat about Android is the "Swype" style keyboard. The WP8 keyboard is surprisingly good.  I seemed to have fewer mistyped letters and the word prediction is pretty reliable.  Additionally, if you don't see your word predicted up top, you can swipe the predictions to the left and it brings up more predictions, something that came in handy with a lot of long words.  Unfortunately, there is no "Swype" style input.  Instead, I found myself using text input a lot to send many message (as long as I wasn't in a noisy place!)

The app tray was very nice because, while all of the apps were in a single file, alphabetical list, they were quick to access because you can touch the header letter (such as "A" for the apps starting with "A") to jump to that section.  This great feature also works in contacts/people to quickly get to the person you want.

One of the best features of WP8 is the People hub.  Going into that app gives you a slick layout that shows all of your contacts' latest social posts as well as their social photos and contact information, all in one continuous feed.  Combining these all into one space is the best thing about the operating system.  This works the same way with the "Me" hub.  It compiles all of your social interactions from all of your feeds into one slick page.  The only drawback to this is that it removes the ability for you to "Like" the comments from individuals on a post (while you can still like a post).

The one last section I want to touch on that was a big difference in the way WP8 shares files.  WP8 does not integrate with apps the way Android does (neither does iOS...Apple).  With Android, I can tap any file and share with just about any app on my phone, so I can post a photo on service, and I can upload files straight to Dropbox, Box, Skydrive, etc.  With WP8, I can only upload to Skydrive, or to specific apps that work with WP8 (Facebook, Mail, it's pretty limited).  There was no way to load from the gallery to Dropbox or other services, although there are workarounds from within some apps to upload from within the app.  Something else very frustrating is that there is no way to see a file size, so sending a small video is a trial and failure type approach.  It will let you share any size file with e-mail, but it's hard to tell if your short video is going to be 2MB or 10MB.  There is literally no preview.

The camera started out really weak (why does Microsoft do this?  They have consistently...all the way back to Windows 1.0...released software that wasn't finished and then patched it later down the line).  It was frustrating as the camera sensor is the same as in my One S, which is marvelous, but I was unable to get some of the same great photos due to WP8's camera app.  This has finally changed as several camera apps and "lenses" have come out since the October launch of this operating system.   Now, apps like CameraPro (and others) have added all of the features I had on my Android phone and I could finally take better photos.  Interestingly, the video camera seems to do a better job than video on my Android devices.  "Lenses" are like mini plug-ins that go into the WP8 camera that let you do things like: take a panorama pic, take a time-lapse pic, and, Blink, a new lense that lets you pic the right moment in time out of a series of fast exposures.

Turn by turn navigation was something lacking, but Microsoft forced Nokia to open this up, so Nokia drive (which works as well, and with a few more bells and whistles than Google) can be installed on any WP8 phone.

Finally, WP8 has a multitasking window, accessed by long pressing the back arrow key.  It brings up cards, much like a webOS or Android phone. Unfortunately, it only lets you jump into the other apps.  There is no way to close them from this screen.  You have to manually enter each app and hit the back key repeatedly to kill other apps.  This is a simple and terrible design flaw that can (and hopefully will be) fixed with a simple little "X" button to kill the app.

Overall, I could live within the WP8 universe if I didn't already have so much invested in the Android apps that are not existing in a WP8 format.  I have a few friends now that are converts after checking out my phone and haven't looked back, really loving their HTC 8X.  I know several people who have their Nokia's but they just look so cheap and ugly in comparison, and I haven't seen as much difference in the photos as they claim that the Nokia has.  The bottom line is, if you are not heavily invested elsewhere, give WP8 a try.  It's the new, hip operating system that is growing faster than any of the others, has a fresh feel, and has a few excellent, innovative features built in.

Come back soon as I will have walk through videos showing you how to use many of the features of this innovative operating system.

$100 Rebate for HTC One Pre-Orders

I have never been as excited as I am about the launch of a new phone.  The new HTC One with Blinkfeed and Zoe has the hair on the back of my neck standing up.  It's going to be great.  In the meantime, head over to this link: http://s.htc.com/htconereg to pre-register...no commitment...but pre-registering will make you eligible to get a minimum $100 rebate on this phone.  Since it's rumored to be selling for $200 when it comes out, that's a significant discount for a top-of-the-line beast.  Not only is this a great geek phone, it's also got the middle-aged-person ease of use baked right in.  This thing is milled out of a solid block of aluminum.  You will never use a phone constructed as well as this.  So go do it!