This also applies to the WWAN menu:

Not a whole lot of information, but better than nothing. Also, the driver is built in for my Sprint card, which wasn’t the case in 10.5

Flash can and will crash your browser at times. Watch your CPU usage spike whenever you load a page with flash – by running someone’s crappy code, there goes your battery life. This is especially bad on some platforms (linux, PPC macs). I can only imagine it would be much worse on the iPhone.

Used sparingly and for certain things where it’s the only option (games, video) it’s fine.

Outside of that, flash breaks a whole lot of what is good about the web. It’s not searchable – text you may want to show up in a search engine dissappears into a black hole if your site is all-flash. This also causes problems with accessibility for the blind.

What’s interesting from my perspective is that it’s built on many technologies in common with Apple’s iPhone, such as a Unix-like kernel, WebKit for rendering web pages (also used by some Symbian-based Nokia phones), SQLite for data storage, and a GUI compositing library for rendering data to the screen. Additionally, Android supports XMPP (aka “Jabber”) which is being used by both Apple and Google for interoperable chat – Apple has shipped a Jabber server in the last two revisions of Mac OS X Server. I wouldn’t be surprised if a future version of the iPhone firmware supports chat via Jabber. From Android’s API overview, it looks like they also intend to use XMPP for other device-to-device communications (for interactive games, location notification, etc.).

Where Android differes from the iPhone is that Android’s applications are written in Java and processed into a special bytecode (i.e. not Sun’s default java bytecode) made to work well on the Dalvik Virtual Machine, which supposedly runs better on slower mobile CPU’s. This sounds, to me at least, like a way to allow compatibility between phones, as opposed to the “write once run everywhere” idea that Java was designed for. From the design, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone develops an “Android Environment” for the iPhone, but I’d expect that most applications would look like crud, as they wouldn’t fit with the iPhone UI style.

So where does this fit in with the larger phone market? It really depends on hardware support – if the hardware looks good, the UI looks good, and, more importantly, works really well, Android will be a winner. Is this likely?

Looking at the current crop of phones beyond the iPhone, I don’t think so.

It’s a good effort, and I hope it succeeds, but decentralized development in the Linux community hasn’t come up with a consistent, polished UI as of yet. From a UI perspective the ideal would be that the default applications from a small team at Google are solid and well designed, to the point that they don’t get reinvented ever time. If not… good luck Android users.

I annotated the heck out of this in Flickr, so click on the image to see what all the parts are, and what they do.

This took me a while to do… I would punch down a few cables, my arm would get tired (the panel is in a very awkward position), then leave it for a few days. Then a cable wouldn’t verify with my tester, so I’d get frustrated and leave it be. But it’s finally done, and I even have the whole top shelf empty.

I’m happy with it now.

Yesterday I visited a custmer who had purchased new WRT54G version 5, and it was a rude awakening. They downsized the hardware (half the RAM and ROM), and removed features – it no longer has WDS. The router now runs VxWorks, not Linux like the previous version, and there is no replacement firmware available. Configuration and setup was very flaky as well- I had to reset it several times to get it working right.

Sveasoft (a well known 3rd party firmware creation group) has more information on this model.

The solution? Buy the WRT54GS (now to version 4), which can take replacement firmware, still runs linux, and has quadruple the memory and rom space as the WRT54G v5.