I bought this device from DealExtreme for 206.1 USD , this is the first expensive thing that I bought from DealExtreme (I only bought small things from then, usually my total is less than 20 USD). The thing shipped in about 10 days, but I need to get the thing from the post office, because I need to pay extra tax 350 baht (~11 USD).

SmartQ 7 is a 7″ MID (mobile internet device) running ubuntu. It has ARM processor (the SoC is Samsung S3C6410), the RAM is 128 Mb, with 1GB internal flash storage. There are 2 USB ports, one for USB Host, and the other for USB OTG. It doesn’t have an internal bluetooth, buat a bluetooth dongle is given, it looks like this thing in DealExtreme. It has 4500mAh battery. The screen resolution is 800×600.

My short opinion is: this thing is great, but needs better software. There is no accelerated driver for Xorg (X uses fbdev, an unaccelerated framebuffer driver). By default it allocates 128Mb swap space in the internal flash. I am a little bit worried about this (the flash have limited write cycle), and I move the swap to external SD Card. Because the memory is only 128Mb, it swaps a lot.

This SoC has a 3D graphics support, but of course, no driver for it yet. It also has a hardware JPEG decoder (no driver for it yet), hardware MPEG-4 video decoder (no driver for it also). I hope someone will make those drivers (or may be I will if I have finished the FreeBSD stuff).

The power management is still not so good. Sometimes it works perfectly, but sometimes not. On the first day, I can use it about 9.5 hours (according to uptime, part of this uptime is when the LCD is off when i left it for a while) reading comic books while installing several softwares using apt-get (the wifi is kept on). On the next day, it shows some strange behaviour, such as refusing to resume after sleep. And restarting it several times makes the battery drain faster (I think it lasted less than 5 hours). I still don’t know whether this behaviour is from the factory, or may be I have messed around too much.

Most sofware are not designed to be touch operated. I have seen several modal dialog box that appears beneath current window, and you can not switch to it. Plugging an external USB Keyboard seems to be the only good solution when it happens. Sometimes you ocan still escape by holding some combination of buttons, but sometimes plugging a USB keyboard or resetting the device is the only solution (or if you have installed an openssh server, SSH-ing to the device and killing the application).

You have several options for the operating system: the built in OS (Ubuntu), Mer, Google Android (just some initial support, I haven’t tested it), and Windows CE (Chinese version only for now). You can also do multiboot using those OSes (dual boot, tripeboot, or even quadboot).

Just a note: the device is perfect for reading Manga, but not American comic books. The size fits perfectly for a manga page (except when they show double page). I suggest you use latest Comix application, because it is more touch friendly.

If you are looking for a device that “just works”, then this not the device that youare looking for. If you are like me, who likes to mess around with stuff, then this device has many potential. I can use this device as a very large PDA, and I can use it as a netbook by connecting a USB keyboard. It is not pocketable, but it is very portable (smaller than my wife’s EEE PC). With the USB Host functionality, I can do almost everything that I can do with laptops, such as copying things from USB Disks.

My wife have an EEE PC for her traveling needs, and she also owns a MacBook Pro, which is quite portable around the house, but too heavy for long trips. I wanted to buy another netbook, but I think this device is better for me. I can carry the SmartQ, and put the USB keyboard on my bag. For my traveling preparation, I have bought a USB hub (with power adapter, for those devices that requires it) and a small keyboard, the total for both are 500 baht (~15 USD).

I wrote this post on SmartQ 7, using usb keyboard on Emacs, and then I copy paste the text to Midori web browser.

My wife was happy with her Asus EEE 701, but she would like something better with the same size. We sold the old Asus 701 to my brother, and she bought Asus EEE 900A. Compared to EE PC 701, the EEE PC 900A has a faster processor (Intel Atom 1.6 ghz vs the 900 Mhz EEE), more memory (1 gb vs 512 mb), bigger disk space (16 gb vs 4 gb), higher resolution (1024 x 600 vs 840×400), and better graphic processors (Intel GMA 950 vs Intel GMA 900). The only problem is the 16 GB SSD is much slower than the EEE 701 4 GB SSD. You can really feel it when running almost any applications, especially the firefox browser.

My wife uses Windows XP on the new Asus. After reading several blog posts and many forums, the conclusion is: to make everything faster, try to reduce the number of disk access. Here is how to reduce the disk access in Windows XP:

1. Buy more memory, we bought 2 GB memory  (quite cheap, around 690 baht/20 usd) to replace the 1 GB default
2. Allocate some of the memory (384 Mb for RAM disk). I set the environment variables TEMP and TMP to point to the RAM Disk. I also point firefox cache to the RAM disk.
3. Turn off page file
4. Disable indexing on all drives
5. Disable System restore
6. Don’t install firefox on the SSD. Firefox 3 will try to write its history every few seconds. I use Firefox portable on SD Card, and it is much faster now.

When I bought a Torx T6 screw driver to replace MacBook Pro’s hard drive, I realized that the same screwdriver can be used to open P990i casing. So, I opened the casing, and I can pull out the old stylus. The stylus was stuck in a spring mechanism which I guess used to prevent the stylus from falling to easily.

You can look the disassembly pictures at
my photo album.

One thing that may not be clear from the instructions on the Internet is this: To open the part that covers the front camera: pull it upward (that is toward the upper side of the phone).

Instead, I will talk about information tecnology (IT) in Bali, specifically about Internet access and mobile stuff. Internet Access is quite easy to get, four stars and five stars hotels provides Internet access over WIFI, and sometimes I can find it at dining places. You can also access the Internet through GPRS or thorough 3G data connection with your cellphone. Starter pack for GSM is very cheap, but the internet access cost is quite expensive (25 rupiah/kb, or about 2.8 USD/megabyte, at current rate).

I haven’t been able to find a guide for Bali that can be put in my PDA or smartphone, so you will need to use online resources, or paper based information (from the Hotel, or from the airport). If you can speak english, you won’t need a translation program in your PDA, because most people can speak English.

May be you think I am a bit strange or too geeky: people come to Bali to enjoy the view and the culture, and not working with their computer. Well, I came to Bali to attend the Asia Open Source Software Symposium in Bali, to report the result of the Codefest that was held at Bandung, so going here is part of my work.

And now, as the AOSSS is over, I can extend my stay here, and enjoy my honeymoon.

The phone number (complete with the country code) is included on the request HTTP_USER_IDENTITY_FORWARD_MSISDN. it seems that my mobile carrier (XL) uses Huawei Technologies Gateway. I know the gateway from the value of HTTP_VIA Which says: "(InfoX WAP Gateway), HTTP/1.1, Huawei Technologies", and the existence of HTTP_X_HUAWEI_NASIP that says my private (internal) IP address.

How can this happen? This happens because of a combination of a lot of things. First: this is because I have set a proxy in my Access Point setting. Well actually I didn’t set the proxy manually, but the it was automatically set by the setup wizard. There are other ways to setup your access point: by asking for a configuration to be sent through SMS (which will give you the exact same settings, including the proxy), or by manual configuration.

So you have a proxy, big deal, this shouldn’t be a problem. But the second element that gives trouble is that: the default web browser uses the proxy settings defined in the access point. You might say that they should use the proxy defined in the access point setting (after all what does it do if you don’t use it). But unfortunately the proxy itself has a problem.

The problem is that the proxy was meant to be used by WAP browsers. WAP 1.0 must use a proxy to connect to the Internet, buat WAP 2.0 doesn’t need a proxy at all. The setting wizard and the SMS configuration assume that you will need a proxy. Since this proxy is now used not only by WAP browser, but also by a Web browser, the proxy must support both protocol. Supporting both protocol is fine, if it was properly set.
The third part of the combination that causes the problem is that: the proxy is not properly configured. Some people had the idea of sending phone numbers to WAP Sites for billing purpose using HTTP headers. This is actually not a bad idea, but the problem is that it should only send the phone numbers to a predefined WAP sites (sites that has a deal with the mobile carrier). The proxy has been misconfigured in because It sends phone numbers to any sites on the Internet. For WAP 1.0, the proxy can actually detect if the request is for WAP or HTTP, but since WAP 2.0 uses direct HTTP request, the proxy can not diferentiate the request.
My phone number will not be leaked if I do one or both of these things:

• I dont use a proxy. I.e I define a new access point without a proxy
• I don’t use the default web browser (e.g using opera or opera mini)
• I don’t browse through the phone (i.e by connecting the phone to a computer or a PDA)

Other mobile carriers may leak your phone number in different ways. I have created a script, that you can use to test this leak at http://www.tinyhack.com/check.php that will show the HTTP headers this server received. If you try to browse using your phone and you see your phone number there, then you’re in trouble. Imagine you get a call from a marketer when you visit their site, not very funny isn’t it?.

What scares me is that a wrong setup in a mobile carrier can make your phone number to be visible to outside world. Imagine if my provider uses transparent proxy, then it doesn’t matter if I use opera, the default web browser, or even my computer, my phone number will still be visible. If that happens, I have to use an anonymizing proxy (with the hope that they will strip those headers) or use Opera Mini (which is a bit limited for some purpose).