Category: Gadgets

Review: CitiGeeks.com screen protectors

I used to be one of those that strongly believed screen protectors were not worth the money. Over time I had a series a devices which I carried with me daily with no screen protection, sure after a year or two I’d inevitably end up with a small scratch but at that point the value of the device had dropped significantly anyways. The cost of screen protectors seemed outrageous, you could buy from a brand name and pay a big price – or opt for the super cheap knock offs from eBay. I assumed the cheap ones were not worth the money as the name brand ones were 10x more expensive.

The first phone I had with a screen protector was the NexusOne. It came to me with a Zagg invisibleshield installed. The invisibleshield model was one of the ones with the self healing property and had a slightly mottled surface. This felt a little different than a naked screen, your finger had a little drag. It was easy to get used to this. I never bothered to remove the screen protector during the time I had that phone.

Readers of this blog will know that the next phone I had was an HTC Desire. This came with no screen protector. The screen showed a few tiny (nearly invisible) scratches in the Gorilla Glass screen. The scratches were not enough to bother me in day to day use. When I bought a case for the phone from eBay, a cheap screen protector came along with it. I wrote back then that I was pretty impressed with the screen protector as it felt exactly like the screen.

My current phone is a well used Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant (i9000m). It’s got a few nicks and dings, and a handful of fairly deep scratches on the screen. Honestly you don’t notice them in normal use, but you can see them if you look up close as should be evident in the picture below. This is the lower part of the phone close up, a lamp is reflected off the screen but hopefully the scratch marks are clear (a deep one is centered, about 1/4 down from the top).

While I liked the case, it added a lot of bulk to the HTC Desire. This round I decided against a case but thought a couple of bucks was worth getting some screen protection. A screen protector can also help hide some of the existing scratches on a screen (true from my experience).

After looking around a little, I decided on an anti-glare screen. The cost was a little bit more than the clear ones, but less than a cup of coffee more. The youtube video demonstrating it also looked pretty cool. I made the purchase from eBay, but it turns out CitiGeeks has a web store and is based in Canada.

The packaging looked professional and included their logo. What was inside is pictured below.

You get the screen protector, a small card that you use to prevent air bubbles when installing, and a cleaning cloth. They have very good installation instructions on their website, and a youtube video which is very helpful.

The resulting installed anti-glare screen looks very good on the phone, turning it into a matte black surface when off. You can see the anti-glare properties in the photo below giving a soft halo reflection of the light. It also does a reasonable job hiding some of the small scratches, but not the deeper ones. Again, during normal use you don’t see any of the scratches.

I wouldn’t recommend the anti-glare screen having used it for a while. It does cut down on glare, but I find it adds a strange sparkle effect to images. If you look at the picture at the top of this post the right side of the image shows some of this as a multi-color graininess. This is difficult to capture in a picture, but is quite distracting in some situations.

I will recommend CitiGeeks. They provided a 20% discount coupon for my next order (if you search for this coupon online you should be able to find it easily). They also have pretty good email support, even at off hours. When I got my Galaxy Tab, I bought a crystal clear protector for it using the coupon and was able to get a better price than eBay. The clear screen protector is completely invisible, I had two Galaxy Tabs next to each other – one with a protector and one without – you could not tell the difference.

Low cost screen protectors do work well, and pay for themselves with the peace of mind they provide you when you accidentally toss your car keys into the same pocket as your phone. Should you get one? I think it’s still personal preference, I’m sold on them but only if I can get them at very low cost.

Unlocking Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant (Bell)

I’ve been a big fan of unlocked GSM phones since my first one back in 2009. I’ve also been through a surprising number of different phone since then, but all of them have been 2nd (or 3rd) hand and have been a good price for a phone that still has lots of use left in it. My latest phone the Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant (i9000m) is no different, but it came to me locked to Bell.

I purchased the i9000m knowing it could be easily unlocked if you had the right magic. With the stock firmware, if you don’t have the phone unlocked you’ll see what’s pictured at the top of this post when you install a SIM card.

It turns out the forums have a great how to guide, with pointers to an app on the Android Market if you’re afraid of a little bit of hex editing. It should go without saying that I selected the hex editing route. I’ll describe the steps I used here, but  all credit to the folks in the forums for figuring this out.

I will assume that you’ve rooted your i9000m and you’re not incapable of using a hex editor.

Step 1: We’re going to copy some non-volatile memory off the phone that contains the ‘lock’. Perform the following commands on the phone (probably via ADB).

$ su
# cat /efs/nv_data.bin >> /sdcard/nv_data.bin

Now copy that file onto your PC for editing. Make a backup of the original before step 2.

Step 2: Edit that file, I used hexedit on Ubuntu. The lock bit is inside of the byte at 0x181469 in the file. See the green circle below, change that 01 into a 00 and save the file.

Starting at offset 0x181468 you should see the series of digits: ff 01 00 00 00 00 46 46

The XDA post describes it as follows:

There are 5 different types of locks in 5 different bytes

the FF byte should be left alone
the first byte after the FF is the network lock
the next byte is the network subset lock
the next byte is the sp lock
the next byte is the cp lock
the last byte appears to be a data lock.
the 46 46 should be left alone

Step 3: Use the modified file to update your phone. Let’s assume you copied the modified file to /sdcard/nv_data.bin on the phone, and again the commands below are executed on the phone.

$ su
# rm /efs/nv_data.bin
# rm /efs/nv_data.bin.md5
# cat /sdcard/nv_data.bin >> /efs/nv_data.bin
# chmod 755 /efs/nv_data.bin
# chown radio.radio /efs/nv_data.bin || chown 1001.1001 /efs/nv_data.bin
# reboot

That’s it, you’re unlocked. The unlock should persist across ROM (firmware) changes.

References: a great article with pointers to valuable information on the i9000 series.

A $200 tablet

Let me start by saying that the Apple iPad2 is an amazing device, and while it exceeds the price point that I want to talk about it is still a very good value if you treat it like a portable computing device. The lowest price I’ve seen is $299 for the 1st generation iPad, the iPod Touch sneaks under the $200 price point but only has a 3.5″ screen.

Some will point to the HP TouchPad starting this but the race to the bottom has been on for a while in the android tablet market. Of course at the very bottom are tablets like the Aakash, with a retail price in the $60 range. There is admitedly a big difference between the two; the TouchPad is high capability hardware at a fire sale price and the Aakash is a series of price/performance trade-offs.

If you simply want a cheap tablet, there are plenty in the sub $100 price point. It will have wifi, a 7″ screen, resistive screen input (non-multitouch), and a lower end processor. You’ll likely be stuck with the software that is installed on it, if you’re lucky it might have access to the Android Market or have ‘hacks’ available to expand it’s software capabilities. A fun device if you can live inside of its limits.

I’ve been looking at tablets for a while, and while the iPad is very nice I personally prefer an Android based device. As for price point, I had mentally set my price at $200 – in part influenced by the Nook sale that happened earlier this year.

What I liked about the nook is it has reasonable community support, including CyanogenMod. I had the chance to play with a Nook running CyanogenMod, it felt fine but I had missed the sale price and at the retail price of $250 it felt like there wasn’t enough to it. Recently the Nook Color has dropped to $199 and while it is still tricky to get in Canada, eBay has refurbished ones under $200 with shipping to Canada.

After looking around at various 7″ tablets I kept coming back to the Galaxy Tab. It had all the features I wanted and more, and as it turns out every once in a while they appear on kijiji for around $200. It does take a bit of waiting around, and I used the RSS feed [RSS] to watch the search term to keep me alerted when one was posted.

I suppose I should also drop in a reference to the very recently released Kindle Fire. This is a bold move by Amazon, but one that is an obvious evolution of their storefront if you think about it. There is currently problems getting them in Canada, but it is a very interesting device and price point. Certainly a direct threat to Apple due to the ecosystem Amazon is providing with the devices.

Let’s take a look at the three and compare a few features I think are key:

Nook Color Kindle Fire Galaxy Tab
Screen 7″ 1024×600 7″ 1024×600 7″ 1024×600
CPU 800MHz 1GHz(dual core) 1GHz
RAM 512MB 512MB 512MB
Storage 8Gb + MicroSD 8Gb 16Gb + MicroSD
Weight 450g 413g 380g
Camera none none 3.2MP + 1.3MP front
Wireless Wifi b/g/n + bluetooth Wifi b/g/n 3G GSM + Wifi b/g/n + bluetooth
GPS none none yes
Community Yes Not yet Yes

The Galaxy Tab beats the Nook on all fronts, but if 3G data, GPS and camera are not important features to you, the Nook looks very nice. The Nook probably has the strongest community support right now, but the Galaxy Tab is not far behind. The Kindle is very new, so there isn’t much of a hacking community yet (I’m sure there will be) and if you live in the US then the Amazon ecosystem looks very compelling.

I’ve actually purchased two Galaxy Tabs so far. The first I ended up passing along to my father in law who had been on the hunt for a tablet for some time. He had actually tried the iPad2 and Playbook out before settling on the Galaxy Tab. I think price point and functionality combined to meet his criteria. The second one appeared the other day for $150 including a leather case, how could I say no? Yes, that’s my $150 tablet pictured at the top of the post.

I haven’t had any time to play with it so we’ll see if it finds a niche in my gadget use, I’m encouraged by folks like Tim Bray who seems to prefer the 7″ tab vs. other more powerful and newer devices. It is a little tempting to turn it into a phone as it’d make the Galaxy Note seem a bit undersized, but I’d never live down the sidetalking comments at work.

Parting words:  WOW!  If this is the price point we’re at now the future looks amazing for gadgets with mind blowing technology.