That's pretty much true of any customizable UI, not just phones. Ever browse through the WinAmp skins? Sure, most of them are poo, but if the owner of the phone likes it, then why shouldn't they be allowed to do it? It's their phone, right?

I lol'd at the battery indicator on the second to last one.

Very much agreed. The base experience should be a clean, well designed setup, but if people want to alter it, they should be able to. Phones are highly personal devices, more so then computers. While some of us may point and laugh at the ugly designs some people come up with, others out there have embraced this trend and made a ton of money off of that desire to customize. Just look at the market that exists around cell phone cases, skins, ringtones and so on.

Oh, the link wasn't supposed to be a rip on Android at all. It was just a rip on the design sensibility of the people that most often want to skin things. It seems to me that the people who want that kind of thing the most are the ones without any talent to make use of it. I see the same thing in the Boxee forum when people ask for skinning because XBMC has it.

Yeah I agree pretty much every time I see something that can get skinned it ends up ugly. WMP and winamp skins are always ugly.

What! It only had one misplaced element.

Those fugly android shots remind me of how people used to customzie their Myspace pages. Oh the horror of some of those pages. I think that was one big reason people fled to Facebook so fast- it was just cleaner.

Anyway to import a .ics into Google Calendar ?

Settings / Calendar Settings / Calendars / Import calendar.

I don't have that setting.

OK. Main Google Calendar page / Other Calendars sidebar / Add dropdown / Import Calendar.

Are you having talking about the website? I am trying to get to do it on my android phone.

If you do it on the main website, won't it show up on your phone?

Well... Yes. To my mind, the calendar on the phone isn't Google Calendar. It's just "the calendar". I very rarely enter events into the phone. What happens if you open the .ICS file from an email?

If I go to the main website and open the email with the invite I get a preview of the invite and I can click to add it to my calendar. On the phone I see the attachment of the .ics file and when I click it I get asked what I want to open it with.

I guess I don't really know if I am using the Google calendar mine is just called calendar too.

It would be nice if I could tell where theses programs are from.

Google Docs is out for Android now I can preview Excel and Word docs yay

Yeah, this had me thrilled this week. Mostly I'm extremely happy that it was a good Google app and not a bad one, like Scoreboard.

I haven't tried the OCR features yet, but I've heard they're so-so. I'm not surprised, given the limitations of the camera. I'm more excited by the ability to use the Share menu to put something up to Google Docs.

So what is having Picasa set to sync doing for me? I'm not sure what is being synced.

It's supposed to give you your Picasa Web Albums in the Gallery. If it's not working for you, then I can only offer the typical aggravating response of: "perhaps it doesn't work on non-vanilla Android?"

It is the google Gallery application. I can see my Picasa albums in there so I guess it's working as it should. I was thinking sync would mean more than viewing my albums.

Here is a good link for people trying to tell where they applications are from http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=29767

Sadly that list isn't a good indicator if something is stock though. Samsung modified the stock Android Mail program to the point that it was worthless for me on the Captivate.

I'm not sure what else it would mean. What else could you sync? I guess it would be nice if it went the other way, and that you could have the option of syncing photos taken on the phone with PWA, but I wouldn't personally want that, since not every photo I take on my phone is one I want to share with everyone. Instead, I use an app that waits until I'm on a WiFi connection and then syncs new photos to my Dropbox account.

Uploading from the phone is what I was thinking. I hear sync and I think both ways. I am not sure if I want that either I was just thinking I wonder if it will do it. Then I saw picasa under the sync choices and wondered what it did.

Link?

I use that too. I think I saw it linked here earlier. Unfortunately, I don't have the Droid handy to see what app.

Sorry, I've mentioned it a few times here already so I think I just assumed.

It's called Dropin. It works pretty well, actually. There are a few quirks, but it's the app that finally made it completely unnecessary to connect my phone to my computer. Android has always had this reputation for being sync-free, but that doesn't mean you didn't have to connect it to the computer sometimes for certain purposes. Now I don't.

Here is a real issue I am having. I can't figure out how to send an email to a group. The groups show up in Gmail online but not in the Gmail app or contacts.

All my searching is finding is people asking how to do it

I'm not very impressed with the gmail app. I can do what I want with the mobile web page. I haven't tried sending an email to a group, though.

I'm not very impressed with Google Groups in general. For personal discussion groups they seem fine. But Google also sells Groups as the feature to replace mailing lists in Exchange. I've seen all kinds of weirdness when Groups is combine with calendar invites. Sending an invite to the group address (very common thing to do with Exchange) results in an e-mail message at gmail.com with two separate yes/no/maybe links. Clicking one set returns errors that you aren't on the invite, while clicking the other works. Problem is, the working set of links only shows on gmail.com, and is not propagated to IMAP users, iOS users, Android users or Blackberry users.

Anyone get the Netflix app working?

The modified apk here works on my un-rooted Optimus V if anyone else wants to try it and doesn't have one of the five officially supported phones.