For Data/Text:

Name: Rogers
APN: rogers-core-appl1.apn
Proxy: <Not Set>
Port: <Not Set>
Username: <Not Set>
Password: <Not Set>
Server: <Not Set>
MMSC: <Not Set>
MMS proxy: <Not Set>
MMS port: <Not Set>
MMC: 302 (might be different – is auto-set by your SIM card)
MNC: 720 (might be 72 – is auto0set by your SIM card)
Authentication type: <Not Set>
APN type: <Not Set>
APN protocol: IPv4

For MMS (edit the bottom entry in the APN list called ‘Rogers MMS‘):

Name: Rogers MMS
APN: media.com
Proxy: <Not Set>
Port: <Not Set>
Username: media
Password: mda01
Server: 172.25.0.107
MMSC: http://mms.gprs.rogers.com (IMPORTANT: in the default settings, this is listed as grps rather than gprs – make sure to correct this!)
MMS proxy: 10.128.1.69
MMS port: 80
MMC: 302 (might be different – is auto-set by your SIM card)
MNC: 720 (might be 72 – is auto0set by your SIM card)
Authentication type: <Not Set>
APN type: mms
APN protocol: IPv4

And that should be it. Make sure that the first ‘Rogers’ entry is selected, and your MMS messages should now send correctly.

I took a trip to the UK at the beginning of the month, and when I returned on the 13th immediately checked my credit card statement. I wasn’t surprised to see that the refund still hadn’t been processed (now past the 14-business-day cut-off mark for credit card refunds). I called HTC yet again, and after a bit of hold time was given some good-ish news.

The agent confirmed that yes, HTC’s warehouse had received my phone and they had accepted it. However, someone at said-warehouse hadn’t closed the ticket in their system which prevented the refund from being processed. I was promised that the ticket would once again be escalated and that the escalations team would get the warehouse to close the ticket and things would get moving again.

I asked if HTC would compensate me for the interest accrued on my credit card from having this charge sitting on it for nearly two months, but was told they wouldn’t do anything. It was worth asking about, though.

So, on Tuesday the 17th I once again checked my credit card statement and there it was! A line item showing a credit for the DoA Nexus One. Although I wasn’t happy with the time it took to deal with the issue, and the interest charges that built up from it, I was ready to put the issue to bed.

And then I got the following email from HTC:

Dear Laslow,

Thank you for using HTC Customer Service. We want to make your next visit even better and would like your feedback. If you haven’t already done so please help us improve by taking a quick survey on your experience using HTC Customer Service.

Get Started

Thank you very much for your time. Be sure to visit us online at http://www.htc.com to read the latest announcements and check out our newly released products.

We are unable to receive replies to this email account. Please visit us at http://www.htc.com if you have any questions or need further assistance.

Sincerely,

HTC

I couldn’t pass it up. I filled out the survey and was completely honest about the experience I had with trying to get a refund for a DoA unit and how ridiculous that I had to choose that route in the first place, rather than having the option to simply get a new, non-refurbished replacement like American customers. I submitted it, and then completely forgot about it.

This morning, while I was off rebuilding a borked IPCop box, HTC left me a voice mail message that went something like this:

Good morning Mr. Laslow. My name <redacted> from HTC, and I’m just calling to follow up on your return. I am very, very sorry that it took so long to process your refund. I’m also very sorry that you received a DoA unit in the first place. If you need any further assistance with this, please call us at 866-449-8358. Once again, we appreciate your business and are very sorry about this whole thing.

I was stunned; I never expected to hear back from HTC at all. I’m not, however, surprised by the fact that they simply apologized rather than offering some form of compensation (be it an accessory, a t-shirt, anything really). Regardless, I’m happy that this is over and I can finally end the tale of an HTC DoA.

I know it’s impossible to expect Google to preload hundreds of megabytes of map data on to your phone (you know, those pesky storage restrictions and all), but how about this: after Maps provides the directions for your route in text form, and you click ‘Show on map’, Maps could pop up an option (this could also be a configurable setting) asking if you want to preload map data.

My crappy mock-up of the prompt made on my netbook with a trackpad.

If you choose yes, it downloads the map data from Google’s servers for the planned route and caches it to your SD card. If existing map data is present that overlaps, it uses that after checking to make sure it’s up-to-date.

Probably a long shot that something like this could ever be implemented, but it would make life for those using their Android device as a Sat Nav so much easier, especially if you’re going on a long trip.

So the unthinkable has happened – I actually received the shipping label from HTC yesterday! I immediately boxed up the phone and dropped it at a nearby FedEx box, and then proceeded to hammer the F5 key on the FedEx tracking screen.

Also to my surprise was the fact that the shipping label was for Priority Overnight shipping, and that the package reached its destination at 7:45am (PST) this morning! I’ll update this post later on when HTC contacts me regarding my refund.

Update (07/16/2010): Still no contact from HTC. However, after re-reading the initial email they sent, it does state:

Once we receive the items we will review the condition and we will contact you by phone or email if we have any further questions. If no additional information is needed a refund should show on your credit card within 14 business days of receipt of the return.

So at this point I’ll be sitting back and waiting for my credit card balance to update. I did end up ordering the replacement phone from Google on Tuesday, and it arrived (in working condition, no less!) this morning! Good thing, to, because I hear that this is Google’s last batch of N1′s that they’ll be selling through the web store….

Concluded in Part 5.

Day four of the return process and no real progress to report. According to the details given to me by HTC on Monday (see part 1), I should have received a shipping label in my email the following day. When I didn’t, I called HTC support back. The agent I spoke with told me to check my spam folder (already done – nothing), and then said that she would ‘escalate the ticket’ and a label sent out right away. I thanked her, disconnected, and waited.

And waited.

End of day Wednesday rolled around and still no shipping label. I called HTC again and was told that it can take an extra day when things go through the escalation process and that I should expect it to show up in my email no later than Thursday.

Well, here we are on Thursday and still no label.

I called HTC yet again, and was told that yes, I should have received the shipping label today. The agent then proceeded to tell me that he update the ticket, ‘increase the priority’, and that I should keep waiting.

Really, HTC? I’m normally a pretty patient guy, but come on! I’ve heard of American customers getting new, replacement phones within days, but we Canadians need to go through this gong show of a return process and then re-purchase the device because otherwise we end up a refurbished phone instead of a new one. This is bad PR, people. It’s time to start spreading the news.

Find out what happens next in Part 3.

Click ‘Continue Reading’ below for the wall-of-text review.

What’s This Twitter Thing About?

Well, the short of it is that Twitter was originally designed for mobile phone users. You could setup an account linked to your phone and text your thoughts. When someone you follow updated their status you’d get a text in return. This is the reason for the 140 character limit. SMS messages can be a maximum of 160 characters, so Twitter gives 140 for the message, and 20 for your username.

These days, most people use either the Twitter website of one of the plethora of clients to tweet their thoughts, as when you follow a lot of people (in my case, just over 100) you’d get more text messages than you’d be able to deal with.

What’s With the @’s and the #’s

There are a few different special symbols you can use on Twitter. The most common one is @, which you place in front of the username of someone you want to mention. For example, if you tweet “Hey @laslow, what’s up”, you tweet will show up in my ‘Mentions’ section regardless of whether I follow you or not. If you start a tweet out with an @, though, such as “@laslow What’s up?” none of your followers will see the tweet unless they either follow me or click on your profile to see all of your tweets.

The # symbol denotes a hash tag. The intent of this is that if you tag a tweet with something that follows a particular theme, and other people do the same, you can easily find similar tweets. For example, my favourite hash tag is #firstworldproblems – I use it when I whine about something that’s more of an inconvenience than a real issue (a perfect example: @ferrous My hot chocolate is now a lukewarm chocolate. #firstworldproblems). People also tend to use them as one-offs that really bring attention to something (“@angelamelick Of course there is a BOATLOAD of work AFTER that but I am NOT thinking about it right now #denydenydeny”).

What Do You Tweet About?

Some people tweet about the mundane (“I just ate a turkey sandwich #lunchtweets”) or for profit (“Follow me to get another 2000 followers instantly #scam #spam”), or to impersonate celebrities/fictional characters. Some actual celebrities use Twitter to tweet about their daily lives, and others tweet about what they do behind the scenes.

Myself? I tend to tweet just about anything that happens to pop in to my head. Odd thoughts, rants, when I post to my blog, technology advice, and occasionally even to help people. I also have a penchant for getting in to arguments with people.

So Is It Fun?

If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be using it.

…Okay, that’s a bit of a cop-out. Really, though, it is. You get a quick way of staying up-to-date with things (I tend to follow a large number of Android developers to stay on top of what’s going to be coming to my phone), you can quickly communicate with any number of people about any number of topics, and best of all, there really are no privacy issues (unlike Facebook).

Wait, No Privacy Issues?

Well, it’s more to the tune of, you don’t post anything to Twitter than you want to keep private, even if your profile is marked as such. By making your Twitter profile private, you have control over who can see your tweets. Unfortunately, you have no control over what those people do with your tweets. If you post something personal that you don’t want getting out, someone who has access to your profile can still re-tweet that message and all of their followers will suddenly have access to it.

The best policy? Don’t post anything that you don’t want public.

In regards to personal information, though, Twitter really doesn’t want it. Unlike Facebook, which immediately asks for the password to your email account(s) when you sign up (just so that they can get your contact lists — honest!), Twitter doesn’t require any of it. You can fill in what you want and leave it. They only ask for your cell number if you want to use the SMS features, and otherwise couldn’t care less. Even your location is totally up to you – I have GPS coordinates listed as mine (48.5236 S 123.2336 W, if you’re curious). As such, even if someone does happen to break in to Twitter’s servers, they aren’t going to get a lot of information on you.

What’s With the Fail Whale?

The Fail Whale is Twitter’s one truly annoying point – occasionally their servers get overloaded by increased demand (usually when there’s breaking news of a celebrity dying or a massive oil slick, or Justin Beiber), and the site tanks. When this happens, you get the Fail Whale:

What’s a Trend?

When enough people are tweeting about something, Twitter picks up the key related words in the tweets and adds them to the Trending Topics list. For a long period of time (far too long, really), Justin Beiber was a Trending Topic because a massive number of people would only tweet about him, and some created accounts just to tweet about him. Fortunately, Twitter changed their method of determining trends and now focuses on thing that are recent – topics now rarely trend for more than a few days.

Often, the reason a topic is trending isn’t always clear. When it a particularly strange topic (for example, “Bellana”) trends, you often get more tweets asking “Why is x trending” that obscure the original reason for the trend. One site, What the Trend, is a community-based system that allows people to comment on a trend and spread insight as to why something is trending. Twitter itself has recently added a line at the top on the page when you click on certain trending topics that explains what’s going on (in the previous example, “Bellana”, the text is “Bellana means ‘Whale’ in English”, which goes in line with Twitter continually going over capacity at the time I was writing this post). Sadly, this text doesn’t appear for all topics.

Mobile Tweeting, and Clients in General

I tend to stay away from Twitter clients on my computer for a few reasons – they rarely add anything to the experience beyond what Twitter’s own website can do, and typically, when I’m not gaming I have Chrome open. As such, having yet another program running doesn’t make a lot of sense.

However, I do tweet from my phone quite a bit, and that’s where third-party Twitter clients really shine. For a while I was using Seesmic for Android, but I recently switched to Touiteur (pronounced the same as Twitter, just with a French accent). The darker theme is a lot easier on the eyes, and the built-in browser is much less flaky than the one in Seesmic (although you have to buy the premium version of Touiteur for the browser).

There are a plethora of clients for Android, and even more for the iPhone, but the vast majority of them are buggy and ugly. Twitter recently entered the mobile app market by buying Tweetie for iPhone and turning it in a free, Twitter-branded client. They then proceeded to make an Android client as well. I’ve tried Twitter for Android, and although it is pretty slick, it’s full of bloat (who needs an animated background, anyway?) and misses some key features such as the ability to remember your place in the timeline (Seesmic and Touiteur both do this).

In Summary

So, will I still be using Twitter in another year? Most likely yes. As long as there are interesting people tweeting about things I like, I’ll check it, and as long as I have something that I want to write/rant/scream about, I’ll be tweeting. It’s a fun, mindless time-sink that keeps me up to date with the world and some of my favourite things, and as long as it does that, Twitter will be my social network of choice.

Now if only they’d upgrade their damn servers….

I’m no fan of browser redirects in any form, and I’m even less of a fan of Yahoo which Rogers partners with to, among other things, provide results on their hijacked landing page. But what can you do? It’s their service, and there’s no opt-out link on the page.

Well, the answer is to manually opt-out. Unfortunately, you need to have a rooted/jail-broken phone to do this. As stated above, I have a Google Nexus One which runs CyanogenMod, but this should work with any other rooted Android phone and even jail-broken iPhones (although the paths are different — you’ll need to alter them as applicable).

To manually opt-out, do the following (assumes Android phone):

1. Open a shell on your phone. You can use ConnectBot, Terminal Emulator, or adb shell.
2. Assume root (su command).
3. Remount the system partition in to read/write mode —  mount -o rw,remount /system
4. Browse to /system/etc.
5. Use your favourite text editor to open hosts.
6. Add the following to the bottom of the hosts file — 127.0.0.1 www20.search.rogers.com
7. Save and quit!

You’re done! You’ve just manually opt’ed-out of Rogers Wildcard DNS hijack. Now you’ll just get the normal ‘Not Found’ errors, as when Rogers see that the domain you’ve entered doesn’t exist and tried to redirect you to their search page, your phone will point that domain to itself and fail as it isn’t running a webserver.

TL;DR Version: To prevent getting directed to Rogers’ Search Page when you mistype an address, edit your hosts file to point www20.search.rogers.com to the 127.0.0.1 loopback address.

Update (05/01/2011): You can now officially opt-out using this link: http://searchassist.teoma.com/templates/rogers/optout

It's Froyo!

IMPORTANT NOTE: It’s been pointed out that the Froyo ROM floating around is nothing more than a Release Candidate. Although that means that it’s technically feature complete, it’s still little more than a beta. Expect bugs, expect brokenness, and don’t expect any help with it.

I’ve been using the pre-rooted Froyo update (Android 2.2) for a few hours now, and here are my first impressions:

• Speed: Holy crap is this fast! In fact, it’s even faster than some of the ROMs running over-clocked kernels. It takes about the same amount of time to boot, but the phone is very responsive as soon as the lock screen appears, and I haven’t encountered any lag throughout the system.

• App Restore: I had no idea this feature was in Froyo, but imagine my surprise when I booted up Froyo after a full wipe only to have it immediately restore all of my installed apps! Talk about a time saver!

• Bookmarks: Even though I was missing a few, most of my bookmarks in Browser were automatically synced. This alone almost makes the Froyo update worth while.

• Exchange Sync: Everything works exactly as before, only now it syncs with my Exchange calendar out-of-box quickly and painlessly. No more need for CorpCAL.apk!

• Froyo-Only Apps: One of the first apps out for Froyo is ChromeToPhone — it lets you send links from Chrome on your desktop/laptop computer directly to your Android device. Gone are the days of using URL shorteners or QR codes to get something on your phone – instead, simply browse to the site you want on your computer, then click a button in the toolbar. You’re Android device will near-instantly receive the link and notify you.

• Bugs: Yes, there are a few. The main one I’ve run in to is trying to turn off USB Storage. If you attempt to turn it off on the phone before ‘Safely Removing’ the device in Windows, Android becomes generally unresponsive and eventually reboots. While annoying, I’m not really that surprised, as I did it wrong. Also, Terminal Emulator crashes in Froyo due to a compatibility issue with the stock ROM. This will hopefully be addressed in a future update, but for the time being, use ConnectBot.

I can’t wait for the eventual CyanogenMod 6.x based on Froyo, but that won’t be out for a while, as Google has yet to release the source code for 2.2. Things are definitely looking good for Android, though!

UPDATE: The HTC_IME (virtual keyboard) has been updated for Froyo. Get it on XDA.

Razer Carcharias - Image Credit: hardwarelogic.com

However, at $99 CAD, they were a little outside of my price range. All was not lost, though – I walked up the counter and asked if the clerk could do anything about the price. After being initially rebuffed (“Sorry, this is the best price I can offer”), I pulled out my Nexus One and loaded up Barcode Scanner. I proceeded to scan the UPC code on the box, then do a Product Search. I showed the clerk that, according the results listed, I could get the same product from Wal-Mart for $69 CAD.

Five minutes later, I walked out with my new $69 headset. And I can honestly say, they are the best headphones I’ve ever owned.