Motorola Atrix2 Review

Here are my early impressions of the Motorola Atrix2 I bought my wife for Christmas.

• 1. Price - Free (with upgrade/new account) Thanks Radio Shack!
• 2. Fast - everything is fast with virtually no lag ever
• 3. Pretty - the screen looks fantastic
• 4. Big - the large screen is nice for web surfing, but it is definitely not as pocketable as I would like.
• 5. Crapware - it comes with it - but you can uninstall most or all of it!
• 6. Android - comes with version 2.3 - I am holding out hope that it will get an upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich.
• 7. Battery - good enough - at least as good as other smart phones I have tried.

More Video Rotation

I also got some video from a relative that was shot in portrait mode on an iphone so when trying to view it on a computer it was sideways. To rotate it I used Avidemux on Linux. Here are the steps I used to convert it:

• Open the file
• Choose MPEG-4 AVC (x264) for the video codec
• Click Filters
• Find rotate in the list and double click it
• Choose whatever rotation you need (for me it was 90 degrees)
• Click Close button
• Click Save
• Choose filename to save converted video
• Done

I believe it will not apply any filters if you try 'Copy' as the video codec - but you should be able to choose other video codecs if x264 is not what you want.

Hope this helps!

Update to Aria Review (Froyo)

HTC & AT&T finally updated the HTC Aria to Froyo (Android 2.2). After about 2 weeks of using it my impressions are mixed. They added some eye candy (fading in and out) which unfortunately slowed down the sense UI. I have since turned off the animations so they don't slow anything down. Otherwise however, the phone does seem a little snappier. The update also seems to have fixed the headphone glitches I was experiencing so I don't have to reboot any more to get it to play sound through headphones. I also have not experienced loss of mobile network connectivity (I was sometimes not getting any network connectivity even when it showed '3G' and a good signal). I have not experienced and browser crashes or total phone crashes since the update either - but hey - it's only been 2 weeks. We'll reserve judgment on crashes for 6 months from now.

Android Ant Build Problem WIth Proguard and Latest SDK

Just like many Android developers, I had a working Ant build that included obfuscation using Proguard. When I upgraded to the latest SDK and tools (to include Android 2.3 and higher) my Ant build no longer worked. Instead I got this error:

add-proguard-release.xml:37: Expecting class path separator ':' before '{' in argument number 1

After adding a few echo Ant tasks before the offending error, I found that the value for external.libs.dir was not being set so it was still ${external.libs.dir} when used as part of another path (a classpath actually). My project didn't need any external libs so I simply commented it out of the add-proguard.release-xml. I hope this helps other Android developers!

Sideways (revisited)

This time a friend sent me a video that was recorded sideways on an iPhone. I first tried the same mencoder command I tried for an AVI file and that didn't work. Then I googled it and found lots of people using AVIDemux. This worked great. The thing to keep in mind is that you can't just copy the stream. You have to set up a rotate filter and then convert to video format so that it gets decoded and reencoded. I chose mpeg4 and it worked great. The quality was very good and the file size even shrunk about about 30-40%.