Google Tools: Dumber and Dumber

Annoyance of the day: New and Updated Google Maps: My Places.

It used to be an awesome tool. Then, in July 2013, they broke it without a warning (incidentally, that happened the day I departed for a month long trip, right after I spent about two months planning the trip to a minute detail. I found myself on the road with no access to trip plans and maps whatsoever - soured it quite a bit).

They promised to bring it back.

More than a year later, they keep trying to reintroduce the "new and improved" My Maps, but it is still multitude of order times slower on the desktop, is missing critical features, and, unlike the previous implementation, is *not* integrated with Maps.

This is not the only case - other Google tools keep losing features as time goes (not to mention products that are just killed, sometimes despite vehement protests from their users, with the only notable exception that won't die despite general contempt).

While I was advocating using Google tools when they were in their prime, I have to admit now that I can't and won't do that anymore. The only reasons to keep using them now is "they suck less than alternatives", and the moment a viable replacement shows up - I'll be the first to jump off this bandwagon.

And, once again, this is a stark warning that nobody escapes the fate. Just as people, companies are born, grow up, mature, then outgrow themselves, wither, and die. Google is no exception.

BlackBerry Curve 8320: Mystery Overheating, Battery Drain

Suddenly found the phone quite hot, with the battery completely drained. At first I thought that I just kept the keyboard jammed in my pocket for a few hours - said to myself, no big deal, I'll just charge it overnight.

In the morning, the phone was still hot - I thought, no big deal, it's just been charging.

Then the battery charge started rapidly disappearing again. Cold reboot helped.

Trivial analysis would offer an educated guess - there was a runaway process consuming CPU and power. Too bad BlackBerry in production configuration doesn't offer any diagnostic tools...

So I just wrote it off as a weird bug.

Until the next time it happened, few days later.

Primary suspect: Google Maps for Mobile. Not everything is clear at this point, but it seems that the necessary conditions are:

• fetching driving directions;
• following the route;
  
• driving through a no reception zone (not sure).

Apparently, the My Location feature, dependent on cell tower triangulation, is implemented in a way that goes nuts once in a while and just drains the battery. I am also wondering what does it do to sustained radiation emission levels - can't imagine the hot device in my pocket not pinging stations like crazy on maximum power level when this bug is triggered.

Interestingly enough, a similar problem was reported for iPhone 3G (read this, search for "draws") - apparently, it is possible to drain the battery faster than the power adapter charges it.


Last time, it was possible to stop the drain by closing Google Maps - it took me a few tries, however, and I'm not sure how exactly did I get the BlackBerry out of that condition. Let's see if this happens again, and what would Google do to Maps to fix this.