BillDay.com

If you’re like me, you often get roped into helping friends and family set up a new PC or troubleshoot their applications and home network. I’ve joked more than once that I’d be glad to help if they’d pay my standard hourly fee…this usually draws a blank stare or a little bit of angst, and unfortunately has never resulted in any consulting fees.

I guess that’s just a personal hazard for techies. Even if it is inevitable, however, I’m still resigned to helping people help themselves as much as possible.

Three great resources I’ve come across recently for helping to teach a man to fish:

• “Make the Most of Your New PC” from PC Magazine walks one through setting up a new system (works best for XP but should be ok with minor mods for earlier versions of Windows, too); sections highlight setup, data and settings migration, security issues, networking, backing up, and maintaining
• Speaking of XP, “Windows XP Home Edition: The Missing Manual” by David Pogue from Pogue’s and O’Reilly’s Missing Manual series (click here for the book’s homepage) should be in the box with each new Win XP sysetm but isn’t; good overviews on how XP Home Service Pack 2 works, what applications are bundled in, and how an end user can get the best bang for their Windoze bucks
• O’Reilly’s recently published “Home Networking Annoyances” by Kathy Ivens details many of the wired and wireless network issues home users face; O’Reilly’s homepage for the book includes a free chapter on File-Sharing Annoyances

Do yourself a favor and have copies of these handy to share the next time someone asks you for free support.

I’ve been using the LG L1400 for the last couple of months and I’m longing to have a Series 60 or at least MIDP 2 powerhouse back as my main mobile.

Stacked against the L1400 for developers:

You can’t test any ideas you might have for Nokia’s new Python implementation. No MIDP 2 support severely constrains MIDlet hacking, too. Worse than that is the lack of socket support, which means none of the open source J2ME SSH clients you might normally use to firefight on your server will work. The lack of USB or Bluetooth synching makes installation of MIDlets much more painful, especially for a developer who needs to install fairly frequently. The limited memory size (somewhere above 61KB but below 85KB based upon MIDlets I’ve tried to install) renders many potential MIDP 1.0 installs impossible.

Comparing the L1400 to Nokia’s latest Series 60 MIDP 2 handsets wouldn’t be fair, but heck, even my trusty old Nokia 3650 beats the LG in most of the above areas, and the 3650’s been available for a couple of years now!

OK, so that’s the bad news for developers. The good news for consumers:

• The LG L1400 seems to have a reliable antenna and works well in relatively weak GSM and GPRS signal environments, at least as good as my Nokia 7610 did
• WAP just works, at GPRS speed mind you, but it works
• L1400 fits better in my pocket than 3650 and many other MIDP 1 phones, even if it really isn’t much smaller than a lot of them
• LG’s VGA camera does a decent job for what it is, probably as good or slightly better than the 3650’s at outdoor scenes and much less blurry at indoor pictures
• L1400 includes an AIM client (but none for Yahoo! Messenger, my IM of choice, so you have to use Y!M via SMS)
• You’ll feel like you sold your soul to the cheap fold cellcam devil with the constant Cingular ad scrolling on the outside screen everytime you close the phone, but the outside photo caller ID is quite nice otherwise
• It’s a heck of a lot cheaper than the Razr for the same res camera (click here to read my earlier post on that)
• Taking pictures with the flip closed can be particularly useful for skiing self portraits

Verdict: Non-developers should consider buying the L1400 if it meets their requirements. Developers, there be dragons here, enter only to better understand what your average US mobile user can and cannot do with their phone. Hackers, steer clear.