"Good" Android phone

Ok... I will finally take this challenge. I'm going to set a few ground rules though, to avoid sinking a ton of money into this that I may just be tossing in the toilet.

1. I want a 30 day no questions asked return policy, and ability to escape a contract. I have a feeling a "good" phone is probably going to be on a non world standard carrier like Verizon or Sprint. I do not want to be locked into either carrier for 2 years if I decide the Android device is not for me.

2. My limit for spending any money on Android apps during the 30 days will be $30. Again, don't want to invest heavily in another app marketplace just to throw it out if the device doesn't work out. So App recommendations to meet my needs will hopefully fit within there.

3. Any software for syncing to the device must be OS X compatible. I will not reboot one of my machines into Windows just for the phone. The main things I will be syncing are music (Stored in iTunes), photos (Stored in iPhoto), and podcasts (Also currently stored in iTunes, though I'm fine with audio only ones being dealt with differently).

4. I will not flash any phone with unofficial firmware. This is likely to void any return period anyhow, and I'm not going to hack a phone to make it usable. It needs to work out of the box and be a phone, not a hackers toy.

Already, the Nexus One is out, as http://google.com/phone lacks any info on how to buy one in the US.

I've been on a waiting list with a local Sprint store for the Evo since June 19th. Sprint called when I was on vacation and said they would not hold the phone they had for me for more then 24 hours. I wasn't going to cancel my vacation over a phone, so they tossed me back on the bottom of the waiting list. Not really thrilled about the Evo now due to this.

So where does that leave me?

Re: Syncing. This is a foreign concept to me as I don't have a need to move things back and forth that much, aside from retrieving the occasional photo. However, I believe you should be able to achieve all of these things by just mounting the SD card when you plug the device in via USB. That's what I usually do when I want to put something on or take something off of it.

Let me save you the trouble, there's no such thing as a "good" Android phone. They're all dump from what I've seen.

1. If you want to stick with AT&T, then the HTC Aria seems like a reasonable phone. AT&T supposedly somehow prevents you from installing apps that are not on the Market, but you can still actually load them using the Android SDK. That said, I think I've maybe installed a total of one application that didn't come from the market. As far as I know, T-Mobile's the only other GSM game in town, and they don't seem to have any cheap Android phones available, if that's an issue. The Aria and all the T-Mobile phones I've looked at are all quad-band. I don't know about AT&T's policies. I know that T-Mobile has a no-questions asked return policy, but it's 20 days, not 30.

2. I have spent $0.00 on apps. There are a few I have considered paying for, but I figured that if I was still thinking about it a few days from when I considered it, then it made sense to buy it. That has yet to happen.

3. Like Caleb, I don't really do syncing, but I'm sure that there's something available. A quick glance at the App Market seems to show a few. Check out the external links on the Android Market Wikipedia entry for PC-accessible interfaces to the Market so you can look for yourself.

4. No reason you need to, IMO. Some folks dislike the modifications that vendors make, but most of them aren't terribly invasive, AT&T aside. Everyone seems to really dislike the MOTOBLUR "UI", FWIW. Some folks like the HTC Sense UI, others dislike it.

So, recommendations: Try to find a phone that has the normal Android UI. If you can't do that, at least avoid MOTOBLUR. Try to get one that is on Android 2.2. The JIT compiler under 2.2 is a significant improvement. Failing that, definitely avoid phones stuck on anything less than 2.0, and try avoid any phones that are less than 2.1. You don't want to get something that's already been obsoleted.

The only syncing I do is Outlook <--> Gmail and then the phone goes the Gmail <--> phone part itself.

Only app which I'm considering buying is a iPeng like Squeezebox controller.

Android 2.1 has just over 50% of the handsets covered. There are phones out there that will never be upgraded to 2.anything, but I'm not sure if any of them are still being sold as new.

The Nexus One, for the short-term, is the only handset that will have relatively quick access to new OS versions. Other handsets, even brand new ones, might have to wait months (or longer) for updates.

Handsets other than Google's own all come with crapware installed on them that you cannot remove, including time-limited commercial/subscription crapware. None of the add-on UIs are fully integrated from top to bottom, so you'll still feel like you're using two (or three) different operating systems. Motorola can't even properly justify nor size their text labels.

When you have a company pumping out 100 different devices per year, you have to figure that their support for any particular handset isn't really going to go the distance.

There may not be any handsets currently available that meet all of Tom's requirements. At least I don't know of any. Third-party software like DoubleTwist may help with the sync aspects though.

As far as I can find, there isn't a single Android phone for sale in the US today with 2.2. Looks like I may be stuck with 2.1 if I'm going to start this trial this weekend. Only vague timeframes on when various devices might get 2.2.

Andy Ihnatko recommended the Droid Incredible. Possibly the Droid X if software bugs are addressed.

On the syncing front, DoubleTwist or Missing Sync may do what I want. Basically, if I add new music or photos to my computer, I usually want them on my phone too, and thats what I use syncing for. Currently the computer is also where all my podcasts come from. With the iPhone I get syncing of playback position too, allowing me to start a podcast on my phone, come home and sync and resume on the computer. Or then sync to the iPad and resume there. Same for resuming on the AppleTV. It's not something I do often these days though, as the phone has become my audio podcast player in the car, and at home I tend to watch video podcasts.

For contacts, calendar, and bookmarks, I sync over the air using MobileMe. I know Android can do contacts and calendar when tying into the Google services, not sure about bookmarks or how to get my Safari ones to Google if it is possible.

I'm sorry, but I'm just not sure that's true at all. Unless I'm not understanding what you're referring to. Are you talking about specific apps, or are you talking about custom UIs? As far as UIs like Motoblur and Sense, I believe there are a number of phones that don't have them, like the original Droid. I can't remember off the top of my head which others don't at the moment, but I'll be responding to this thread later on tonight when I have more time.


What are you talking about?

I'm talking about all the latest phones coming with carrier-installed apps of a time-limited/demo (unless you pay up) nature that you can't remove. "Crapware" - http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=crapware

The only true/clean Android experience is Google's Nexus One. It lacks both an extra UI layer and third-party unremovable crapware.

Here's a story from Wired on the subject: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/07/bloatware-android-phones/

They mistakenly call it "bloatware."

The major differences between 2.1 and 2.2 are the JIT and the ability to move apps (that explicitly allow it) to "external" storage (that is, the SD card). (Which brings up another point: prefer phones with more internal storage.)

My contacts and calendar are mostly on Google services, which get synced pretty much automatically. Contacts and calendars are both extensible, but I don't know for sure what extensions are available.

Bookmarks are a bigger problem. Largely I just don't worry about it. There are bookmark sync apps, though. I haven't tried any of them. I do all my desktop bookmarks syncing with Xmarks, but their Android client costs money, and I just don't care that much.

Oh, it's worth pointing out that you can get full refunds on App Market purchases for up to 24 hours after purchase.

If your Google account is a GAFYD account, you can't use Picasa or purchase items from the Market. It's pretty retarded and annoying.

Really? That is pretty stupid especially since Google seem to push quite a bit for people to transfer everything over to be hosted by them.

As far as the market goes, it looks like you can associate it with a plain vanilla GMail account. It's an annoyance, for sure, but it can be done.

Yeah, that's an option that I'd like to not do. I haven't seen anything I must purchase, so I'm okay not being able to for now. Saves me some money.

Tom, I can't believe I didn't think about this phone, but the Samsung Captivate just launched.

This is one of the four Samsung Android phones that were just released, all essentially the same phone (except one with a physical keyboard), that have been released on each of the four main carriers. At Samsung it's known as the Galaxy S.

Specs-wise it's pretty much the top Android phone at the moment. Unfortunately I can't remember if Samsung has put their own UI on it, though I wouldn't be surprised. They do say that Froyo should be on the phones by the end of the year.

In what year are they going to update their phones to the OS version Google has out by the end of the year?

Crapware on Samsung Captivate: http://www.phonescoop.com/articles/article.php?a=394&p=2888

How to rename some of the "apps" to hide them (instead of deleting them):
http://androidforums.com/samsung-captivate/124736-t-bloatware-getting-your-way-delete-some.html

Gizmodo posted How to be an Android Power User today. It has some good info.

Seems the Samsung phones do have their own custom UI as well.

I'm really not quite sure what direction to go now. I have my choice of phones on every carrier, all with crapware to some extent. None offer 2.2 currently and none offer a definite date, just vague timeframes, some past when 3.0 is supposed to be out.

I'm investigating the route of also just paying for a phone outright, then selling it if I don't like it. Only T-Mobile offers non subsided monthly plans if I go that route though. Not sure how big the aftermarket T-Mobile phone arena is. Would have been nice if the new Samsung Galaxy devices were pentaband, to at least allow mixing of the T-Mobile and AT&T devices.

Twice now I've considered Android seriously, and the barrier to even get in seems annoying. Not quite sure what to think about that. At least in the PC world, if I find a system running Windows, I know how to use it and how to upgrade it to the latest OS. With the Android fragmentation and customization, I can't even say for sure how to unlock a device and start using it or when a new update will come out (if at all).

Odd, thought I made another post here, must have been eaten by my browser crash at work while I was distracted by, well, work things.

Anyhow, the Samsung Captivate did rise to the top of my list after giving it a bit of thought. Being that AT&T is my current carrier, and they support world standards, I have a valid SIM I can just put into the phone, and take out if I need to go back to my iPhone 3GS. The SuperAMOLED screen is supposed to be much better in direct sunlight compared to the initial AMOLED release, alleviating one of my issues had I chosen a Nexus One.

After work, I wandered by a Verizon store to see a Droid X in person, then decided to wander to the nearby AT&T store. And it now seems I have this.

Going to sync my contacts with Google, and then unbox it to set it up. Hopefully this time when I sync, Google doesn't decide to randomly nuke most of my GTalk list.

FWIW, the Nexus One's problem in daylight has far more to do with automatic brightness control than the display itself. If I manually turn the brightness all the way up, I have no problem seeing it at all.

Agreed. I think there might have been two times where I couldn't see my phone outdoors in the brightest light possible, but I think I just had to turn the phone ever so slightly and I could see it.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the phone. Or rather, I hope you're sufficiently Captivated. Haha.

I'm certain there will be points that annoy you to no end. Just keep plugging away and give it a shot.

You mentioned podcasts earlier in the thread. Well, I do have one suggestion for a paid app. Doggcatcher is my #1 most-used app on my phone (yes, more than email). I listen to podcasts on my phone constantly, and IMO there's no better podcast manager than Doggcatcher.

I've mentioned it here before, but here's a summary, sort of all strung together:

First, forget about the feed reading aspect of the app. I have no idea why the dev added those on, but they're an afterthought.

One of my favorite things about the app are the multitude of settings. You can configure each podcast's downloads separately or leave a global setting. You can also set things like "pause playback when power is removed." I like this because if I'm charging my phone in the car, and I make a quick stop without taking the phone with me, when I turn off the car the podcast stops automatically. It does the usual "pause when headphones are removed" too.

Tell me, on the iPhone, can you download new episodes over the air? This is the main thing that brought me back to Doggcatcher from my Zune HD. I love that if I'm out on a job, I can download the day's Buzz Out Loud wherever I am. That just seems like the coolest thing to me, and it happens automatically (it checks for new episodes on a user-selected schedule).

There are two downsides:

First, you're not in Apple's walled garden anymore. So now, you don't get the syncing. I fully admit, I'm envious of that feature. I often wish that I could pick up a podcast on my computer or my home theater when I get home. It's not too bad, though, because I tend to watch the video versions of episodes at the computer or on the TV, and listen to the audio on my phone.

Second, your previous requirement of "free" isn't met. It's actually a relatively expensive app. I believe it's $7.99. For me, it's worth every single damn penny and far more. I'd pay $20 for it, with the amount of utility I get from it. Not to mention, the developer is extremely active with his updates, is constantly improving the app, and is completely open to his users. He's even incorporated at least two features that I requested myself.

Sorry for going on for a while here, but I rave about this app every chance I get. It's one of the reasons I love Android.

Ok, so first WTF moment, plugging it into my Mac. Phone goes into a mode saying "MTP Application" at the top, big USB plug in the middle, and animated dots saying connected. Home, menu, search and back buttons do nothing, and the notification bar won't open. iPhoto launched on my Mac, so I assume MTP Application is some Android speak for "I'm in photo upload mode".

First instinct, lets search for USB settings. Search, well, didn't help as typing in USB just appears to show a bunch of web suggestions, and it's not seeing any phone settings. Though to be fair, this trick only works on OS X, and not search on the iPhone. Ok, lets browse around in settings. Nothing really stood out, until Caleb linked me an article that pointed me in the direction of looking under "Applications" to find "USB Settings". Why is it under Applications? Anyhow, I changed it from "Samsung Kies" to "Ask on Connection". Still have really no idea what the difference is between all my options. I have "Media player" "Mass storage" "PC Internet" and the Samsung entry. Mass Storage doesn't show anything on my Mac, even when I hit mount on the phone. Media Player does the same thing as Kies, switching to MTP Application and rendering the phone useless. PC Internet does nothing, even though my Mac saw a new network interface. Guess I'll go grab Doubletwist to figure out how to get my music and photos onto this thing.


Yes, as long as it's under 20MB. Otherwise it requires WiFi. You can however stream the full episode over the air if desired.

And I'll look into your suggestion. First podcast app I tried is Google Listen, and well, it failed to find "This Week in Tech" when I tried searching for it, or even just TWIT. $8 though has me pondering other solutions for now.

As for other things, I did resync my contacts to Google from the OS X Address Book, and this time it seems it didn't nuke GTalk people off my list. Also set up CalDAV in iCal and brought over my calendar. Not as painless here, had to export it, then reimport it specifically into the Google account.

My Android phone doesn't do that. Plug it in and it'll have a USB connected option in the notifications. Tap that and select mount if I want to mount the phone. Thats about it. I don't get your MTP option at all.

Ok, I have DoubleTwist installed (gogo drag and drop), and it sees my phone as a device, but tells me I have to pick mount on the phone. Ok, no problem, I'll unplug and replug the USB cord, tell it mass storage, then pull down notifications, pick USB and select Mount...

And nothing happens.

Same result after power cycling the phone and restarting my Mac.

I did get my podcasts into Listen, by using google search to find the RSS feeds of the ones I wanted. Pretty cool that clicking an RSS link prompted me to open in the browser or in Listen, so it was pretty painless to add the few I wanted on the device for tomorrow.

You got a memory card in it? The mount option just mounts the memory card in my phone.

I'm not sure how your phone does it, but my G1 mounts the microsd card when I plug in the phone and click the mount option.


I've seen many different "Iphone to Android" type articles over that last 6 months, I recommend that you read as many of these as you can find.

http://lifehacker.com/5581029/jumping-ship-from-iphone-to-android-a-switchers-guide
http://gizmodo.com/5398942/the-iphone+to+android-switch-10-things-you-need-to-know
http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/09/android-iphone-switch/

And also there are third party apps that don't have the 20MB limit, for example I use Podcaster to download podcasts when I'm out and about.

No, this is a Samsung thing. Android (at least on the two phones I've used that haven't had vendorware on them) doesn't do this.

No memory card came with it, but it has 16 GB of storage, or so says the box.

Used the built in alarm to wake me this morning. Took me a bit to figure out what "Smart Alarm" was, turns out it's some pre alarm sound to help wake you. Thats pretty cool. Stayed in bed till the main alarm went off. One problem though, I remember hitting snooze (had to press and hold the button), and the phone never rang the alarm again. Good thing I still use the Chumby, since I tend to hit snooze a few times before being fully awake and out of bed.

Attack, thanks for the links. I'll admit for now I'm avoiding most of them as I am also trying to evaluate Android from a pure consumer standpoint. So far it's been an ok experience using just the quick start guide and a brief understanding of how Android works. There's no way I'd recommend an Android phone to a family member or non technical user though at this point. I am interested to see what grows on me though over the next month of trying to use it as my primary phone.

Also, shortly before leaving for work, I discovered a comment in the Engadget review of this phone:

Well, I suppose this bug can be excused, since only a small portion of the world uses these Mac things. No need to QA your products on them before shipping them out the door. At least I know MTP means Media Transfer now, even though DoubleTwist wouldn't transfer media in that mode.

Agreed, that's been my experience with my two Android phones as well.

However, my best guess for why it's not working that way on the Captivate is that I believe the Galaxy S phones are the first Android devices to have a reasonable amount of internal memory. They have 16GB of storage on the phone its self, which is a huge amount compared to any other Android phone. I don't know if this is what's causing the issues here, but perhaps Doubletwist is getting confused by the way Samsung has dealt with this additional storage when the phone connects to the computer?

Unfortunately I'm just not certain...

Does this forum post help at all?

Ahhh, that is a problem. Though, from what I'm reading after a Google search of the issue, it does sound like turning on USB debugging mode will make it work in regular old mass storage mode. That should make DoubleTwist happy.

I'll accept your conclusion of Android not being ready for the newbie family member. However, I'd say that if that family member were a heavy GMail, Google Calendar, and other Google services user, Android is a fine option.

Any other things you're liking about the phone? I don't think I can help you out on the alarm snooze issue, as I think the alarm you were using was a Samsung-created app. At least, my default alarm doesn't do that pre-alarm thing you mentioned, and I don't have to long-press to snooze...and my snooze button works

I have to say, I think if you decided to stick with the phone, and someone released instructions for getting stock Android on that model, I'd probably try rooting it and putting that on there. I'm a little sad that you can't try out Froyo during this trial period, because the speed difference is tremendous.

While there's no excuse for an MTP or mass-storage implementation that doesn't actually work (nor for bad UI or bad documentation), it's important to realise that the reason you're given more choices here than an Iphone gives you, is because your phone can do useful things that an Iphone can't. There's no mass-storage ("act as a USB key") support on Iphone, though there was on earlier Ipods; and surely "PC Internet" is USB tethering, which Iphone can't do either.

Peter

From an outsider's perspective, it seems to me that Android has regressed much of what other companies had advanced in the Smart Phone game. And that's leaving Apple completely out of the picture. I've never heard of the mass consumer really having a problem with a BlackBerry, Treo or Nokia phone.

Tom's descriptions and the reviews don't jive at all with what's being promoted in the commercials. And here we're ignoring the Verizon Droid and the HTC Evo commercials because those don't promote phones at all - does anyone even understand those commercials? I think they're going to end up the like Taco Bell dog spots. Fun/funny to watch, while leading to lower (and lost) sales for the companies.

Anyway, at this stage I have an affinity for Android (and Meego as well) from a development standpoint and for the purposes of integrating custom designs on those platforms. But from a consumer phone perspective, at this stage, I can't think of anything as horrible. Maybe WinCE... Though at least it had easy-ish syncing.

Tom, I'd also recommend an app that Bitt clued me into:

Apps Organizer

It's funny, iOS just got folders, and I'm already onto the next thing.

I'm obsessed with how my apps are organized on my primary home screen, and Apps Organizer has really helped. Half of the app is a screen that shows all the apps on the phone. In this screen you can apply to each app any of a set of labels (you can change the labels). The other half of the app is the ability to create a widget on your home screen for any of those labels, which creates an icon. When you press that icon, you can a window with all the apps to which you've applied that label.

As someone who maximizes efficiency on his home screen, the part I really like is stars. On the screen where you apply labels to each app, you can also star the apps individually. This lets me launch the widgets and only show starred apps, the 4-8 I use most often in any category of apps, and puts them front and center. The other apps, that I might use once every two weeks to two months, get hidden and don't take up space.

Bitt, is there anything else you're liking about Apps Organizer?

Oh, and Tom, have you gone through the various Android threads on the board here and downloaded some other recommended apps? I'm curious if there are any that you've enjoyed.

Dignan, have you checked out ADW Launcher?

While true that the iPhone lacks mass storage (much like my Android device did until I turned on USB debugging), it does offer USB tethering for internet and has since 3.0 came out in mid 2009. If tethering is turned on in Settings, it automatically tethers and still allows iTunes to sync or files to be manually copied via the iTunes storage window. Tethering is indicated by the clock area on the lock screen being blue with the text "Internet Tethering".

For me with the Captivate, PC Internet never did anything either. My Mac never showed the connection as connected, and


Ahh, the finger pointing has started, I missed that from the PC world. "Nono, thats not Windows, thats Dell, blame them". I knew full well coming into this that Google has even less control over their OS then Microsoft does over Windows, but I didn't understand the extent. I wonder how many more fun "issues" this will cause for me.

I know, I'm being a bit difficult on all this, hopefully something on the phone will grow on me to counter all the negative experiences I've had so far. The rough edges are very rough to people used to polished products.

I'm not intending to finger point, simply making sure that you don't blame Android for a problem that isn't Android.

Because there are so many variants of Android phones your experience will vary depending on what phone you use. Clearly you've chosen a phone that has issues that other phones don't (and I'm sure the opposite is true as well). I'd probably end up frustrated as well. I'm glad my Nexus One is just Android.

Fair enough, though the end result is still the same. Frustrated user, poor experience. Knowing who to blame doesn't fix the problem. Google doesn't sell phones anymore, so I don't have many options to get a "pure" experience. I'm getting the same experience any other customer pondering an Android device would get.

I did try Google Maps Navigation this morning to get to work. Put in Tom into the search field, and it showed my home and work address (though it didn't differentiate these, just listed both addresses), so far so good. Told it to route to work and it sat on "Searching for GPS" for a while, with a flashing icon in the notification area changing between a satellite dish, and one receiving data. Saw the same thing last night a few times, seems thats it's way of telling me it's trying to lock onto my location. Very distracting. Finally five minutes later the phone started routing me to my work, after I had already given up and just started driving. I also ignored the first route suggestion, as Google seems to like going through a very scenic neighborhood with speed bumps and 15mph limits in parts, instead of on a 65mph highway. Once I turned on the highway, it quickly rerouted. It did seem to frequently see me off course though, and interrupted my podcast with bizarre directions due to it thinking I was a few blocks over. I guess the GPS wasn't getting a good signal, though I had the Samsung phone in the same place 3 generations of iPhones have been, and never had a problem that bad. Will probably improve if I can track down a proper car dock for this thing.

Rereading the Engadget review, seems they may know what is going on here too, again awesome QA on this product.

Did a little digging on what the default USB mode "Samsung Kies" meant, and found it refers to Windows software Samsung makes to do media syncing. Trying to download it in the US leads to the message "In many countries, Samsung Apps is available for use on a PC. We aim to provide you with these services in the near future."

So they shipped a US only phone set to a USB mode that only works with software not available in the US. Clever.

Ugh. That sucks. The GPS on my Nexus One, for comparison, is the best GPS I've ever had (at least as far as time to lock and accuracy go), including on dedicated GPS devices.

Actually no, the iPhone can and does do USB tethering (appears as a network interface) since v3.0 software.

iPhone doesn't do mass storage, no, because it doesn't use anything as broken as FAT for internal storage (something that we'd decided was a good idea at Rio, though the market didn't agree ) and also because there's no restriction on things that can happen when connected to USB - on the android phones, when connected to USB and "mounted", nothing can access the FAT partition for obvious reasons.

Yes, you can pick "charge only" if you want to use the phone when connected to USB, and at least it doesn't go into airplane mode when plugged into USB (like the Palm Pre) but personally I don't find the lack of MSC a problem on the phone.

The fact that their MSC implementation doesn't work with macs sounds like a pretty obvious bug; Macs don't have problems with every other MSC device I've ever tried so they're not doing anything out of the ordinary. I wonder if it passes the USB-IF MSC test?

It's actually pretty smart, you can do PTP/MTP, iTunes sync *and* tethering concurrently over the same USB connection on an iPhone (multiple active USB configurations).

The main plus is that the user doesn't have to choose, it "just works" (as long as they aren't expecting MSC anyway )

Actually, the Pre only goes into airplane mode if you mount it as a USB drive. You get three options when you plug into USB: "Just charge", "Media Sync", and "USB Drive". If you select "just charge" (or do nothing) the wifi and radio still work and you can take calls, etc.

Android phones (at least generic ones) can do multiple connections over USB. I've got USB debugging enabled and it works at the same time as MSC mounting of the memory card.

Not saying it's a HW issue, it's just a matter of whether it's been implemented or not. Can you tether and do MSC at the same time?

No one knows; who wants to tether with a cord when you can just turn on the access point?

When 500+ other people near you are also using their private access points...

...in which case, bluetooth might stand a chance of working for tethering, as offered by the iPhone (btw, multiple devices can connect to a single tethering iphone with bluetooth concurrently)

IMO the lack of a WiFi AP mode for tethering on the iPhone is annoying. Bluetooth works fine for me but it feels very last decade.

One reason to use a cable is that you don't drain your phone battery - just your much bigger laptop battery.

All I know is that I can unlock my phone and with one tap on my home screen my laptop is connected to the internet. I prefer that.

Tom, I'm sorry to hear about your troubles with your phone. I wasn't aware that the Samsung phones had these issues, so I apologize for recommending it (although I don't think any of the reviews were out yet).

While I honestly don't think OS release version fragmentation is a huge problem, I do think that this skinning is a big problem. The Engadget podcast just reminded me today that the original Motorola Droid is the only phone for sale left that doesn't have a skin on it.

So yes, it saddens me if these skins are screwing up the Android experience for users. I seriously don't see any problem with the stock Android OS.

...sigh...

Did someone come up with a widget to turn that on?

Actually, I hadn't had a lot of chance to play with it yet. I was doing so today. One thing I discovered is that, seemingly, if you load an icon pack and use an icon from it as a folder icon, you don't need to leave the icon pack installed. I guess it copies the icon into its local storage. Which is nice.

I'm also playing with AutoAppOrganizer and App Categories. They're kind of neat in that they try to categorize your applications on their own, the former doing a much better job.

Coming late into this thread... I've had my Motorola/Verizon Droid X for just over a week now, coming from two years on my iPhone 3G. Random thoughts, in no particular order:

- I adore the notification pane along the top. The iPhone can be quite annoying in trying to get your attention (meeting in five minutes! there's an unknown AP nearby, should I connect to it?), while the Droid keeps all of that where you can check it if you care and otherwise easily ignore it.

- I *really* adore Swype. I can go very, very fast with Swype. My only two gripes are that (1) if you're halfway through a long word and you have a brain fart, there's no way to pick up where you left off. You have to delete the old cruft it failed to recognize and then start again. (2) Swype's custom word dictionary is disjoint from the Android user custom dictionary. Dumb.

- I've disabled pretty much all the Moto app crap.

- The nav system is almost brilliant but has a variety of quirky UI features and one genuinely annoying bug, wherein it seems to randomly hit the "back" button on me every five minutes, requiring me to reach out and have it start navigating again. I have no idea why this happens, but we were on vacation all last week, with the Droid X as our navigation system, and this got very old, very fast.

- The Gmail integration is sweet. It was a pain to get my Gmail contacts all cleaned up and merged properly, but synchronization happens transparently over the air. Unlike the iPhone, I particularly like that the Gmail app knows about Gmail labels, stars, spam handling, etc.

- The voice recognition stuff (powered by code from Nuance) is occasionally brilliant, occasionally dumbfounding.

- The built-in eight megapixel camera is total garbage. My iPhone 3G (with what, two megapixels?) takes radically better pictures.

- Call quality, over Verizon, seems to be uniformly better than AT&T. Data service is unquestionably better.

- WiFi on the iPhone is superior. The Droid X seems really dumb about dealing with my home WPA2 network. Sometimes, it just wedges on "acquiring an IP address." The support for the WPA2 Enterprise WiFi at work is also odd. It does connect and work, but there was no way to install the client-side certs. That means that any server could well pretend to by my office network and use that to spoof me, possibly getting my login credentials (although I'm not entirely clear on the relative security of the different WPA2 Enterprise authentication modes). On the iPhone, all of this just magically worked, including downloading our enterprise WiFi config as an email attachment which auto-configured everything in one click.

- The Droid X is remarkably comfortable in the hand. I thought it would be too big, but it isn't. The goofy curve on the back turns out to be perfect for pressing the speaker into your ear.

- Battery life is comparable to my iPhone.

- DoubleTwist on my Mac "works for me." It was slow to scan my library, but after that it really just magically worked, transcoding my Apple Lossless audio files and my various video files.

- There's enough internal memory on the Droid X, unlike earlier phones, that you don't have to get particularly wigged out by what goes where.

- The Droid X web browser is very fast, but an iPhone's browser is optimized to scroll smoother, zoom smoother, etc.

- The Droid X charges via micro USB. So does my Jawbone Bluetooth gizmo, as does my Kindle 2, as does my wife's new LG cheapo phone. I can now standardize on micro USB chargers everywhere and be done with proprietary cabling and chargers. (Didn't Apple promise to switch to micro USB to follow some new EU initiative?)

- Of course, the new treadmills at my gym have iPhone-proprietary connectors on them, to blow up video from your iPhone for everybody to watch over your shoulder, versus the micro-HDMI connector on my Droid X. (And, the new Panasonic LX5 camera I've got on order has **mini** HDMI, so I'd have to buy a mess of oddball cables if I wanted to support both of those.)

- I haven't yet tried to tether or jailbreak or whatnot through my Droid X. Regular old-fashioned WiFi seems to be amply available for my laptop anywhere that I'd care to actually use it.

- I intend to jailbreak/unlock my old iPhone 3G for the next trip I make overseas and see about acquiring a local SIM card. I have no such travel yet on the agenda, so we'll see how that goes.

I'd prefer the option that doesn't even require me to touch the phone, and the Bluetooth DUN support of the iPhone allows for that. Of course, I'd also have to have tethering as an option, so the Nexus One on T-Mobile still wins here. With how infrequently I need tethering, I can't justify the $20 a month fee AT&T wants (or the $30 fee Sprint wanted on the Evo).

As for the app suggestions, I'll probably come back through and look at them more later. For now I still feel like I'm settling in trying to figure things out, so I don't want to rush ahead too quickly. Priority for now is to try and do everything I was doing with the iPhone and adjust to the little things.

The AGPS "fix" of putting in a google server instead of some other one via a deeply hidden menu seems to have fixed the AGPS issue. Gowalla is locking on to my location now quickly enough to check into places. One annoyance though, the GPS icon in the bar at the top is very distracting, any way to make it less so? It flashes between two states rapidly that it draws my attention every time, and I could really care less what the exact status of the GPS lock is.

I've found a number of apps that came with the phone that require WiFi to be disabled, including the built in AIM messaging. Well, again here comes a confusing point, is AIM actually built into Android? If I go into contacts, I see "Chat using AIM" to any of the people I have in there with account info, just as I see "Chat using Google Talk". It then launches an AIM login that requires WiFi to be off. I downloaded AIM from the Marketplace, and it appears to be different. To add to the confusion, under "Android Widgets" I have Instant Messaging which appears to be ties to the AIM stuff out of contacts. This is separate from the "Samsung Widgets" section.

I did get work e-mail set up, and one feature that is nice on Android compared to iPhone is the ability to set a push schedule, and poll or disable outside the schedule. Keeps the phone from beeping like crazy at night, but still lets me get instant delivery during work hours. Also, on the topic of e-mail, any way to turn off or change my mailbox view at the top? It's nearly worthless for my home IMAP server, due to shortening the visible folder text. For example, I have a folder titles "Online Receipts", then inside that folder are additional folders for various places. All I get on the Android e-mail client are "Online Recie" over and over again without the ability to tell what each is.

Battery life is hard to judge so far. I don't feel I've used it a ton, and am down to 12% now. It was fully charged 13 hours ago, though oddly the phone says 9 hours ago. I'll have to see how it goes over the next few days. The battery indicator does seem pretty useless though. For how many pixels it uses, it seems to just have 4 or 5 positions. I found the iPhone icon much more usable, and even better when battery percentage was added.

Google Listen so far seems to be dealing with my podcast needs, once I got bast the useless built in search. One feature I really like is the queue. I can wake up, queue up "Today in the Past", then start my drive to work, with the phone seamlessly going right back to where I was in another podcast once John Hodgeman is done entertaining me in the morning. I never did find a quick way to do this on the iPhone, so I tended to just resume whatever long podcast I was last on.

Doubletwist seems to work for syncing music onto the phone, but photos, not so much. As best that I can tell, I get the option to just select then drag and drop. Not much syncing there. The mess it leaves in Gallery is also useless, with a bunch of folders in alphabetical order. The folders are all my various named events out of iPhoto. I'm used to a chronological order, makes finding photos much easier.

One day down, 29 more to go. I'm slowly getting used to the android way, though I still don't always remember what button is where. It doesn't help that the phone seems to enjoy turning off the backlighting on the buttons as quickly as possible. I've also has a number of times where I thought I pressed something, and nothing happened, probably due to being in the dead spot between the screen and the buttons. Overall, if forced to have touch buttons, I prefer this layout compared to the Nexus One. The gap allows enough space that I haven't hit a button accidentally when typing. Back is a very strange button so far, sometimes doing what I expect, other times showing some unexpected behavior.

Oh, random odd thing that came in from somewhere outside normal Android. Certain places, including system settings do have the little springback when scrolling past the end. It's not everywhere though, so not sure what is doing it. I think having it in some places but not everywhere is even more confusing then not having it at all. Something more pure Android, what is with the tendency to have checkboxes with fake checkmarks? I've noticed the default checkbox also has an outline of where the check will go, and on a number of screens with certain color schemes, this makes it look like the box is already checked.

Text selection is going to drive me up the wall at some point. So far I haven't needed to do much, but even simple cursor placement, well, isn't simple. Really understanding why the Nexus One and a few other devices have hardware to control the cursor now.

Also, any easy way to take screenshots these days? Would make describing certain things much easier.

AIM isn't a standard part of Android. By the sounds of the not-usable-with-WiFi I'd assume its something that AT&T added to the handset.

As Trevor says, AIM is not part of the core of Android. I'm sure that there are a variety of IM apps available, but I haven't looked.

I've never encountered any app under Android that required a particular type of connection. I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm just saying that's really odd.

Battery life is obviously very hardware specific, but I find that the two things that kill the battery the most are the GPS and the display. Since you're doing initial playing with it, you're probably using both of those more than you're likely to in "real" use. That said, I definitely have to charge my N1 every night, and if I use it a lot during the day, I might fail to get 15 hours out of it.

I'm not sure what you're saying about the button placement. I don't think I've ever accidentally hit one of the buttons while typing.

I've not noticed that the unchecked checkbox ever looks checked to me, though I understand what you mean. That's just the default checkbox widget.

There's currently no way to acquire screenshots without attaching the phone to your computer and using the SDK. Google cites security as the reason for this, which sounds lame to me.

This is annoying (what else do you expect from me?), but a big "ditto" to everything Bitt just said. I really hate to say it, Tom, but I've never experienced 90% of the problems you're having, and for fear of proving certain people on this forum correct, it sounds like the biggest problem with Android today is the skinning done by the manufacturers. I still don't think that the OS fragmentation is as big a deal as people make of it, but the skinning is, and that's a big problem.

Google made a big deal about this to these companies - how they could differentiate themselves from the other guys with their own skins. Apparently Motorola forgot that they're awful at writing software... (and the others are no better)

And Dan, I fear that your problem with the GPS glitch has something to do with this too. I never once had the problems that you or Tom are experiencing with your GPS. Like Bitt, mine worked perfectly in Phoenix, and hasn't led me astray the few times I've used it around my own area...

I've kept mum on a couple of things but I'll say them now. Samsung. Korea. Yeah that's it. I don't know when we'll ever see quality design coming out of that country on anything but some Hyundais, but they're completely out to lunch in software/IT, I'm sorry. It's a good place for component manufacturing and they seem to be able to do that well, but IMO, that's about it.

Samsung used to make some nice displays, but I can't honestly say that I'd ever buy any consumer electronics product from them today, whether it be a phone or a television.

As for the apps that only work over 3G, I'm not certain where they come from. One was an AT&T TV service that actually looked kinda cool, but not something I'm going to pay for. The built in AIM one is what puzzles me the most, as it makes it pretty worthless if it's just going to disconnect me on WiFi. I wonder if it's some weird attempt by AT&T to get people to use more data. It's a good thing this phone is riding on my still unlimited plan from the iPhone. I'd be curious to hear if the Galaxy S on T-Mobile has similar apps with 3G only modes.

The official AIM app from the marketplace is also bad, in that it keeps setting me to available. This causes messages to go to both my desktop and phone at the same time. I did try checking for BeeJive IM, but it seems the only thing available is a free download to try and show interest in getting the company to bring it to the platform. Odd, but ok. On my iPhone, it was my preferred IM solution, as it gave me one buddy list for both AIM and Google Talk, and used peoples real names if their info was found in my address book. It also allowed me to tweak priorities on Google Talk, resulting in messages going to the phone only if I was AFK at my desk or not logged in. I'll have to do a deeper search of the marketplace later.

Also had my first near miss with malware. Was searching the marketplace for a LinkedIn app, and found one in there that steals peoples accounts. Thankfully the usage of "2" for to in the description, and comments from about 30 people tipped me off.

Another mail issue beyond worthless folder support, worthless HTML e-mail support. At work, we have build e-mails that go out when something breaks, and it includes a color coded section to see at a glance what broke along with text. All I get is the text, no color coding anywhere in the message. It's clearly HTML as fonts are different where they should be, the layout is kinda right, and links are in it, but no coloring.

Battery isn't looking good today. Fully charged this morning, and now 7 hours later, I'm at 38% left. I've been using the phone less today then I did yesterday, with most of my use being listening to a podcast during my drive into work, then some e-mail and browsing for maybe 20-30 minutes. Guess I should bring a spare micro USB cable to work just in case. For a battery the same capacity as the new iPhone 4, it's not lasting half as long.

*Edit* Is there a way to quickly scroll to the top of something? With the iPhone, tapping the very top returns to the very top of a scrolling page, in any app. Couldn't get similar to work, but I may be missing something.

You can scroll faster by throwing the page faster. It'd be nice if all (instead of just some) apps that have potential to have long pages added the quick scroll that pops up on the right in the contacts app.

Dan, please let us know what you think of 2.2 when you get it.

Just disabled work e-mail on the phone. IT requires a passcode, and Android's interpretation of this requirement causes it to always present the full keyboard to type out a 4 digit PIN I set. Unlocking the phone has been very annoying over the past day and a half.

Battery icon is now flashing, and the phone has warned me it's about to die twice. A little under 12 hours off the charger and it's about dead. I'm going to let it shut off this time before charging, just to make sure it's not some weird calibration issue.

I was drooling over the Droid when it came out last year. Nearly got it, but decided to wait until they fixed the issue with hands-free dialing via bluetooth.
Froyo has the fix!
Now I have to choose between Droid, Droid X, and Droid 2.
I'm leaning toward Droid 2.

Hopefully Seido comes up with some nice Droid 2 accessories quickly.

I don't think you'll have the Droid as an option for much longer. I think they won't be selling it any more...

Tom, I'm not sure what to say about the battery issue. I don't really have an issue with it. On an average day with a good deal of work, I'll have two or three support calls, and during such a day:

- I'll listen to podcasts in the car in-between clients
- I keep the WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS on at all times
- I check email on it constantly
- I write constant email reminders
- when waiting in line or something, I'll play a game of Air Control
- I browse the web or use IMDb for tidbits of info
- whatever other stuff I do with my smartphone that I can't even remember

I consider that to be pretty heavy use of the phone. On some days of use like this, I have to charge the phone when I get home. That's no problem for me, as we have micro USB chargers in three places in our home to charge my phone, my wife's work Blackberry, and her Kindle.

But most days, it's just enough to get me through, and I don't have a problem with that. These phones are doing a whole lot, so I don't expect any of them to last that long.

Besides, didn't you connect your iPhone to your computer when you got home to sync your podcast positions?

Yep. And with the iPhone 4, I was usually at 50-60% battery life left, at a time when this phone was yelling at me because it was below 10% when I got home. I was very impressed with how the iPhone 4 battery held up during my trip to the pacific northwest, even with heavy camera use.

It's unfortunate that your transition to Android is a little rocky. Funny, I pegged you as a non-iPhone kind of guy.

I chose pure Android and got the Moto Droid. I compared it to the Incredible and hated the HTC Sense modifications. However, once I got my sister on the Incredible, I learned to appreciate Sense.

HTC added some very cool features to Android:
- Seeing the call log for an individual contact
- "Quick contact" buttons to choose how to contact the person
- Better text selection, copy, and paste than stock

Incredible's home screens and "card view" is its biggest feature. This promotes the use of widgets for customizable quick access to your information without launching apps. It's an order of magnitude better with Themes, letting you choose between different sets of home screens. This gives you MULTIPLE sets of seven home screens; one set for each activity you may be doing (work, travel, relaxing, home, etc).

My final word on handset manufacturers modifying Android: Approach each phone as a unique product, that's the manufacturers intention. Remember, the majority of users don't know "pure Android" and simply take theirs at face value. Just let it grow on you.

But even with all that, I ditched Android for the Palm Pre Plus. Best hardware keyboard layout of any smartphone ever. Wifi tethering is better than iPhone 4 bluetooth and FREE. Multitasking and the UI in general has a usable flow that I really appreciate. A great replacement for my Treo.

Enjoy your Android.

Matt has been working with me over IM, and now we are both a little puzzled. It seems my phone is doing things that shouldn't be possible till 2.2, like exchange calendar support. Also, the HTML e-mail that gave the phone problems looks fine if I send it to my IMAP account, and I also sent one to Matt to a POP account on his 2.2 phone. So for some reason, it's only busted when looking at it via my exchange account. Possible more Samsung or AT&T foolery under the hood here.


I have changed a bit over the years, leaning more towards tech products and software that work well and have a high level of polish. I attribute it to two things, one my initial adoption of OS X for computing at home and work, and now also my job focus. I am in a position now that has me considering end user use of products a lot. End users either being actual paying customers of the games I work on, or also coworkers in other disciplines like art or production. The easier things are for them, the easier my job is, as I'm not being bugged with support questions as much. In this transition, I'm much less interested about under the hood things about how it works, and have lost a lot of my tinkering spirit. It's still been somewhat jarring to see things like "com.google.maps" and such sprinkled all over the place in the user interface of Android. It's a very techie thing to show and expose.

As a specific curiosity, where are you seeing "com.google.maps?"

It shouldn't and doesn't show that normally. If it does then there is a problem with the firmware build for that phone/version.

It shows up for a brief moment when in Settings -> Applications -> Manage applications. It does resolve to show the normal name and icon usually pretty quickly, though it's there long enough for me to make it out.

The full names do show in "Running services" under process too. That whole screen just is a nightmare for a non techie, and even someone like myself is a bit confused at first when entering it. Whats an SnSService, should I tap to stop it? What about OmaDrmConfigService?

I think I should just drop the whole trying to evaluate the phone as a typical consumer, as I'm pretty much determined I'd never recommend one to a non techie at this point. Even ignoring the Samsung or AT&T specifics, it's just not an experience I can see people being satisfied with. It is very much a built by engineers for engineers platform, at least from my experiences so far. I want to try and give the platform an honest chance, and may consider trying to get to just a "pure" Android experience somehow, but so far the flaws and unpolished areas are definitely overshadowing anything that might be nice here.

I wanted to say I saw the full names in the Marketplace too, but now I can't find it. I did however spot an oddity, one app priced at UK£1.99. Does the marketplace not translate into the local currency? I'm seeing that app alongside another reporting US$1.99.

No, the currency doesn't convert. It is a little annoying, but I think it's an aesthetic thing. I think they don't want someone saying "why is this app here 99 cents, and this other one is $1.54? That's a weird number!

Tom, I do think much of what you're seeing is Samsung screwups. That's not an excuse for that phone at all, though, and I fully admit that. The stuff you mention about what's exposed to the user doesn't worry me either. You have to dig a little deep to get to that, don't you? I don't know why a regular user would care about that stuff or even find their way there. And even if they did, I don't think they can screw their phone up with it...

You can use the long name (in Android parlance, "name" or "package" vs. "label") to search for a particular application, and is often used in links to applications. You may have noticed it in that context.

For whatever reason, the app prices are not localized to the buyer. One would assume that it is before you pay, but I've never bought a foreign-ly priced app.

Ah okay. That does happen on other Android devices. It'll show you every package installed on that screen including system ones which you can't remove or alter. It is a bit strange to expose that to the end users though.

The end user app screen is within the Market app. That shows only items that you've installed yourself. Only with the Market though unfortunately. If you've manually installed something then you need to trawl through the app list in settings to find it again.


Not sure what screen you're talking about here.


As others have pointed out, the reversed domain IDs are what each individual app is identified by. Similar to the system used in Java I guess.


It displays whatever the developers currency is bizarrely. Not sure why it does that since it doesn't make much sense.

IMO Android 2.0 should have been 1.0 and even now in 2.2 there are some rough edges which need to be fixed. I'm okay with the platform and I use an Android handset as my phone still.

Similar to? It is the system used in Java. Those are the Java class names of the applications...

Peter

Yeah, I did the same (on my HTC Desire), because of that requirement. Since I don't particularly care about work email, but I do care about my calendar, I just use Google Calendar Sync running on my desktop at work to push my calendar up to Google Apps and I pull it down from there.

Matt pointed me to something last night showing off 2.2 features, and one is a simple passcode entry screen for the exchange lock. I'll probably turn it back on once 2.2 comes out, as tapping out a 4 digit PIN on a large T9 entry screen isn't that bad.

I haven't used the visual password lock on mine, since it seems a bit too easy to crack. I managed to unlock 2 devices at work a while back, with the owners somewhat puzzled at first. All I did was tilt the device sideways slightly and look for the clear smudge trail tracing out a pattern. With the passcode, the taps blend in with the frequent taps used to operate the device.

Oh, update on the alarm, it's been working fine for snooze now. Maybe the first time I pressed stop accidentally, as I am quite blind without my glasses on. I'm not fully willing to trust it since the buttons are so close. With the Chumby or iPhone, snooze functions are much easier to hit then the turn off alarm, so my half awake self usually doesn't defeat them so easily.

Attached is the mail view I get on my phone, with the blue bar being the useless IMAP folder selector I was pointing out earlier. Any ideas if this is actually an Android mail client, or some Samsung creation? (Managed to find a screenshot function, using an iPhone camera :-)

Are those the checkboxes you were talking about ? I can't tell whether they are checked, unchecked or disabled ?

Well. I wasn't 100% sure whether it is just similar to or atcually is the same as the Java system because Google seem to like doing their own thing with Android e.g. Dalvik.

Yep, those would be the ones. In that screenshot, all were unchecked. Checking one turns the entire box green and the checkmark white. In other places, sometimes only the checkbox changes. It varies by app, with the Gowalla one being the worst place for them. On a light background, they are even more deceptive. Add in some bad lighting situations like bright sun, and it's near impossible to tell at a glance what state they are in.

Weird, if I had had to guess (without context) I'd have said they were checked but disabled. Very strange design for the unchecked state to show a tick.

It's a feature. Eclectic UI design.

It's one menu option away from where users have to go to uninstall apps. Odds are, most people will poke their head in at some point if they see it near a section they use frequently. Oh, that reminds me, another deceptive thing about the Samsung interface (and maybe pure Android) is how to uninstall apps. If I press and hold on an icon, a trash can appears at the bottom. It seems that is how you remove icons off the main screens, but oddly it shows up when in the full application launcher too. Dragging to the icon makes it turn red, and does nothing when you drag an app there.

Until you pointed that out, I had no idea I could remove apps from the Market app. Market -> Menu button -> Downloads -> Click an app -> Uninstall seems like a buried place to put it, especially since no text leading up to the final button indicates uninstall.

Settings -> Applications -> Manage applications (complete with text about manage and remove installed apps) is what I came across first. And none of the built in apps show up in either place. I'm still stuck with my crapware.

Also had my first experience with Flash. I clicked a link in my Twitter feed that went to a video player indicating "Flash Player upgrade required". Clicked "Get Flash Player", and I'm lead to a page that says "Sorry, Adobe Flash Player is not available from Adobe.com for your device..." The same link on my iPad leads to a working video. So does that mean I somehow have flash on this thing, but it's not a version that does anything? Settings in the browser just has a simple checkbox to turn on or off plugins, nothing lists what is installed. Even tried the normal about:plugins URL, and nothing.

Tom, you haven't said it specifically yet, but it sounds like this Android implementation is no more than half-baked. Is this a fair statement? It sounds like a terrible mess from everything you've written so far.

The Bruno I-told-you-so vulture is circling?

Nope. It doesn't surprise me very much, but I thought for sure it would be the hardware that would be weak with this phone. Some other people have been giving it decent reviews, including Walt Mosberg. I can only assume they haven't really used it very much judging by what Tom's written.

Battery life again near critical when I was home. Also tried to take the touchpad picture, and it wouldn't let me. It showed the camera active with the view updating, but displayed a dialog indicating the battery was low. Had to plug it into USB to take the picture. Also, the picture has location info embedded, but at 0 latitude and longitude. Not very useful.

Also, it seems the built in e-mail client will alert me to new messages, including adding a dialog I have to dismiss in the notification bar even if I've already gotten the message and read it on another system first. The iPhone/iPad won't ping or display a notification if it pulls down an IMAP message already marked as read.

Still no idea if this is even the normal Android e-mail client. I guess everyone else uses GMail and the GMail app.

Two things:

I don't understand, you're saying your iPad shows Flash?

I wasn't entirely clear on that whole description. Are you saying you're surprised that Flash IS working or ISN'T working? If it IS working, then I'm the one who's surprised, because Flash doesn't work in 2.1, just 2.2 with the Flash app installed.

With the iPad you don't need Flash, because every web site works with it. Every web site has implemented video in a superior way so as not to need a crutch.

With Tom's Android phone, the web site wants to use Flash but can't because it's not available for the phone. The web site however thinks that there's already some version of Flash installed as reported by the "upgrade required" error. Someone needs to tell those web masters that Tom's phone also doesn't need a crutch.

Every web site? That Apple brainwashing team sure has done a number on you.

Ok, there are still three or four sites out there that also require Internet Explorer 4.

Every web site that fits your argument, perhaps. The rest are inferior and not worth mentioning or including in metrics.

It worked on the iPad without Flash, because the site gave my iPad an HTML 5 version. The same site on the Samsung Captive gave me Flash content, and inside the black flash video window, it gave me the "Flash Player upgrade required" button.

Bruno spin or not, I've so far had better luck watching videos online using my iPhone 4 or iPad then I have the Samsung Captivate. Call it Apple brainwashing if you want, but many sites have indeed moved to supporting HTML 5 video, but usually only for the iDevices. Kinda wish they would do so for Safari and Chrome too.

And I'm pretty certain at this point the phone has some version of Flash running, possibly Flash Lite. I just can't figure out how to tell for sure. I've now seen a number of places where a Flash logo appears and a small 9, indicating to me the phone is trying, and failing to load the SWF. Flash Lite has been out for ages on phones, it's just mostly worthless since it isn't anywhere close to supporting desktop Flash.

And I'm 100% certain that, as usual, this is another case of something that Samsung has put on the phone. Android 2.1 doesn't have any Flash whatsoever. Before 2.2, you could get a few browsers that would handle Flash video for you, but there was no Flash.

In 2.2, though, I don't have to worry about any of it, because Flash works, and without issue for me. It's like - shocker! - I can browse the freaking internet!

Wait, so up until 2.2, the Nexus One wouldn't let you browse the internet? I was able to do that in 2007 with my iPhone :-P

Joking aside, has having Flash really made a difference for you browsing now that you have had it for a little while? If I remember right, Bitt indicated he turned it off. I still don't honestly see the usefulness of it on a mobile myself. The type of browsing I do on the go is usually idle reading of a few news related sites, maybe a comic or two, and possibly videos linked off social networks. The only time the lack of Flash affects me slightly is on the iPad, with it being a larger form factor device, it's been natural to do a bit more browsing on it. Being that there isn't a viable Froyo Android tablet to compete with the iPad yet, I still see enough pressure out there to get more sites to move to standards adopted by Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, Google and Opera instead of Adobe. For a lot of people, Flash means video, and the iPad works fine with video off most sites, including the big ones like ABC, CBS, Hulu, YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook and others.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/30/samsung-confirms-galaxy-s-will-get-froyo-in-september/

Hrm. Droids are getting it soonish, same with HTC phones, but Samsung, maybe late September. Gogo fragmentation. Not sure what I want to do now. I somewhat doubt 2.2 will address the major day to day issues I'm still having with the platform, like a working e-mail client.

Would forwarding your email to a Gmail account and using the Gmail client resolve that ?

Samsung may just beat Google's release of Android 3.0 out the door with their update to 2.2. I won't hold my breath though.

IMO, the problem with current OEM's treatment of Android is they're simply using it as they would any other proprietary OS to populate what they're treating as otherwise disposable handsets. They're not showing any signs that they're in it for the long term from either a hardware nor software perspective. They're not building a solid brand identity nor platform. They're continuing down the commodity path and that's why Apple is going to not only continue to slaughter them in revenues, but do so by an ever increasing margin.

Things are going to really be divided when many of these Android "proponents" start shipping Windows phones in a few months.

Nope. I'd violate IT security policies at work if I forwarded on my e-mail there. For home, it would be somewhat doable, but I'd have to migrate 10+ years of e-mail and folder structure, and still somehow send e-mail through my server if I want to keep my anti spam strategy in place.

Does the Best Videos 2010 thread crash the browser for any of the other Android users here? Tried reading it at lunch, and it just crashes every time.

Also, GPS is borked again, at lunch it said I was 1.1 km away from where I was when trying to check in via Gowalla. Kept the maps app up on the drive back to work, and it only locked on to my position after 5 minutes, right as we were pulling into the parking garage.

I'm really leaning towards just returning this phone early. Most of the posts here from Matt and others seem to be pointing the finger towards Samsung as the problem. Maybe I will reconsider the Evo once Sprint decides to call me. Any thoughts on going that route? My main concern there when entertaining that idea earlier was the battery life.

Ha! Well, you got me there!


Doesn't crash for me. The entire thread loads, followed a moment later by every embedded Youtube video. I can click on any of them to make it start playing.


Completely unrelated to anything we're talking about here, but one of the several reasons I stopped using Foursquare was that every single time I launched it it would not give me the business I wanted to check into. This had nothing to do with the phone or GPS, either. For example, if I was checking into the Glory Days Grill near my home, when I bring up Foursquare it would list the Micro Center, the Safeway, the cleaners, the Michael's, and almost every other store in the shopping center. Then, lets say I wanted to check into Micro Center. At that point it won't list Micro Center, and it will list other stores in the shopping center including Glory Days Grill! I'm sure a portion of this can be attributed to Murphy's Law or something, but I would experience this problem about 90% of the time I tried to check into places.

Anyway, sorry for the brief rant that has nothing to do with anything, I just had to get that off my chest...


From what I've heard, the Sense UI is the best of the skins, though it has its own performance issues. At this point, it pains me, but I don't know what phone to recommend.

I was listening to This Week in Google today, and they were saying that apparently it's very simple to root the Droid X now, and that while this doesn't mean that you can put a new ROM on the phone, you can remove the software that was locked onto into the phone, like the Motorola skin and any Verizon apps (if any). From what I've heard, the Droid X sounds like a really great phone.

Oh, those checkboxes are different from the normal Android checkboxes. The normal ones are medium-to-light gray. Unchecked ones have the "empty slot". Checked ones have a green checkmark. Disabled ones have a flat appearance as opposed to the regular ones' slightly convex shiny appearance.

One of Android's features is the ability to apply styles to UI elements. It sounds like Samsung may have done that across the board.

I'm going to be very attentive to Droid news in the weeks ahead.
I'm torn between the Droid 2 and the Droid X.
It makes no sense to go for the original Droid. About the only thing it has going for it is the lack of a skin. Tom's skin problems are quite worrisome (but perhaps staying with Motorola would be not as badTM).
The Droid 2, it seems, has this e-fuse to keep rooters from preparing a 'clean' unit for themselves.
I'm not sure I need a pull-out keyboard, so Droid X would be the answer for me in that case.

At any rate, I'm not leaving Verizon any time soon. I'd also like to stick with a Motorola phone.

Either there's something weird going on with your phone, or you're oddly misinterpreting the UI.

When in the full app list, you can press and hold an icon to put it on one of the main launcher screens. When you do this, the UI switches back to the main screen so you can place it. At this point, though, you're at the same position as if the icon has been on the screen to begin with. You can move it wherever you want, including to the trashcan to delete it from the screen.

It does not appear to be. I've never seen folders presented like that. On my client, folders are accessible via a menu option.

I don't have notifications turned on, though. Sorry.

Ok, so that is basically whats going on. Why have the trashcan appear then if it doesn't do anything, until after I've placed the icon onto the main screen? To me, a trash can means delete something, but yet it doesn't delete the app, only the icon and only after it's been placed. Part of this may be the Samsung launcher, as it does appear different then the stock Android one.

I deleted it, but only because the install is so freaking huge and I'm (apparently) obsessed with packing as many apps onto the phone as possible.

If that wasn't a concern, I definitely would have left it installed, especially since there's a click-to-activate option.

But it does do something. If you dropped the icon anywhere else, it would be placed on the main launch screen. It's the place you drop the icon if you don't want it on your main launch screen, regardless of where you started dragging it from.

Also no crash for me, and the embedded videos are links to the YouTube web site, which launches the dedicated YouTube app to play the video, since I don't have Flash installed.

There are (at least) two alternative browsers for Android: Dolphin and xScope. There are free versions of both. I'd be curious to know if those crash.

Ok, I see what your saying, and the trash can basically means "oh, oops, I didn't mean to press and hold this icon and move it to a main screen" when the icon wasn't already on a main screen. This still seems really strange to me to represent an "undo my accidental press and hold" with a trash can. When I didn't know that press and hold moved icons from the master list to a home screen, I assumed the trash can meant what it does on desktop OSes, ie Delete.

Home a little earlier then normal, due to an event I'm attending later. Battery life is much better today, at 66% charge left. And I think I know why. AIM wasn't signed in today, seems I forgot to restart it after a reboot of the phone. I guess I shot myself in the foot because I did the same thing I did on my iPhone for a while. I used the official AIM client from AOL. On the iPhone, and iPad it never kills the battery. But clearly it's doing something on Android that takes 40-50% of a charge by running it for 8-12 hours. Guess I'll have to investigate some other way of being on AIM now.

Oh, and the Battery usage screen never indicated AIM was anywhere near the top. It tended to show up below Google Listen, and it always listed the Screen entry as the main battery user. Highly misleading and really useless to me now that I know it can't even properly identify the major component causing power loss.

You could convince your friends and such to not use AIM and switch to Google Talk. I have zero issues with the talk client and I've found that people that require me to talk to them on AIM (AOL, blech) generally aren't worth talking to.

Doubtful I'd get even a portion of my list to move to Google Talk. And overall, I still prefer AIM to it anyhow. I like Google Talk for being a jabber based service, but overall I've seen much better reliability and uptime from AIM. Dropping AIM would mean dropping ~70 people off my list. And thats not going to happen just to keep a phone that ultimately has been a huge disappointment.

Tried to use Google Navigation again tonight. Worked fine for leading me to a friends house. I then spent 10 minutes there before we headed out somewhere. In that time, the phone dropped off the data network and wouldn't reconnect. Rebooted to resolve that issue, then tried to navigate to our destination. 15 minutes later we were there, and the phone was still lost.

Left the phone in the car, since I figured it wouldn't be too happy in Lake Travis (Saw Jaws tonight while sitting on an intertube in the lake). After the movie tried navigation again, and no GPS lock occurred until 10 minutes later.

I did want to try Android for a full month, but realistically, I need a working phone including GPS. I'll likely take this back this weekend, and write up a final summary of sorts of things I did like (and yes, there were some benefits I saw), along with the outstanding issues that would need to be addressed in some way before I try this again. A coworker picked up an Evo tonight, I'm curious to see what he thinks about it on Monday.

Yeah, that's a terrible thing for an operating system to do.

Maybe try one of the other IM apps? eBuddy, Fring, Meebo, Palringo, Nimbuzz, among others.

Sounds to me like your biggest issue is with the GPS. Which sucks, because I can assure you that the GPS on my N1 is awesome. That doesn't solve your problem, though.

Sounds to me like his biggest issue is with the Samsung. I haven't experienced any of the issues he's seen with my N1 which leads me to believe that not all Android experiences are the same. Which sucks.

Went over to compare the screen against Caleb's Nexus One, and I'm not sure what the Super part is all about. Screen readability for both appeared the same in sunlight. As far as readability of the OLED screen, it is a bit worse then LCD on the iPhone 3GS and 4 under sunlight, but not terrible. The biggest issue I could find was more the glare the screen has at certain angles. Still seemed usable enough outside though.

One odd issue I did notice is banding in the blue color on a website, that Caleb wasn't getting. Also, I did notice dithering artifacts here and there. Handing the phone to someone else at work who owns a Droid also noticed it without any prompting, so there is some quirkiness there for some reason. Dealbreaker either way? Not for me, but the Droid owner did say he wouldn't buy it for that reason. I was impressed with the blacks on the phone though. It was dark enough, that black on the screen just seamlessly blended into the black of the bezel.

I did find conformation in a video from Samsung showing the devices at some trade show confirming they did customize the mail program to offer a Unified Inbox, so odds are the folder rework was their handy work too.

AT&T now has the phone back, and I've woken the iPhone 3GS back up from it's nap. Had the GPS worked reliably this weekend, I would have been a bit more willing to keep the phone at least for the full return period window. Today I tried getting a GPS lock for an hour with the phone sitting next to an iPad that picked up accurate GPS location in 30 seconds after a cold boot.


This is why I'm more leaning towards just not even trying Android on another phone at this point, because I can't try pure Android. Every single phone for sale in the US, with the exception of the initial Droid has modifications. And with the Droid set to not receive 3.0 (due to not meeting minimum CPU requirements), I'm not going to invest in a phone that can't even run the newest OS a year after it's release. By not having a consistent experience across devices, it makes it much harder for people like me to even receive support from fellow Android owners. Most of this thread has been "I don't have that problem, or mine doesn't work like that", and ultimately that just had lead to more frustration on my side.

Even ignoring the Apple iPhone ecosystem, it seems like other smartphone platforms are able to provide a very consistent experience. Palm did for ages with their old OS and still does with WebOS. RIM has done the same with Blackberries, with the exceptions of the ones designed around full touch interfaces. Symbian seemed pretty consistent too. Windows Mobile had some fragmentation issues, but not a ton. Android though is suffering badly, and someone at work I think put it best with "Android is the Linux Desktop for mobile phones". Open, and no clear direction with so many parties pulling it in different directions all the time. While this might be great for the geeks out there, it's not great for providing a good and solid user experience.

That announcement wasn't official. Somebody was presenting rumour as fact. Google later tweeted that the requirements are recommended and not minimum.

Ahh, ok. Well, at least we know Android is popular enough to have the same style of inaccurate rumors as Apple these days :-)

That seems like a fair assessment, and a fair list of concerns. Sucks ass about the lousy GPS, though, as that's most definitely not an Android problem, but solely hardware.

Also, I know that as of Android 2.2, the default mail app has a unified inbox. I don't recall if that was there before then. I'm guessing not.

Seems like it would have been more cost-effective for Samsung to get 2.2 running on the phone rather than wasting their time making pointless additions to 2.1, doesn't it?

It has been said (and I don't recall if this was a rumor or from Google directly) that the bundled base applications are to be moved out of the base OS and into the market. That way, even if the phone vendor decides to replace it with something else, the user can get the base app if they want it. Hopefully, if true, that includes the Launcher application, so that people can get rid of the vendor's "skin" if desired.

Surely that would be easily defeated by the vendors, they get to build the OS how they want to don't then ?

2.1 was probably all that was available at the time that Samsung was developing the phone. Google aren't very open with development of future versions of Android.


It is supposed to be so that you can update the built in applications even if your phone vendor decides to no longer release newer firmware.


Doubt it.

People with phones with skins now can download and run as default any of a variety of alternative home/launcher apps. I don't see why Google's would be any different.

I was more thinking of potential issues with updating the launcher since if it breaks then people could end up with a non functioning phone.

Google already have issues with Android not being amazingly userfriendly. Mix in weird procedures to update your launcher and apps and its just getting worse.

If the update to Gmail breaks then the worst that happens is they need to reinstall and they can't access Gmail until its fixed.

I'm in a graph mood today it seems.

US sales of smartphones. These numbers go right to before the iPhone 4 release. Verizon's push of Android with their Droid marketing is clearly doing something, and was enough to push past the iPhone during the iPhones weakest 2 quarters. Will be interesting to see what Q3 and Q4 brings, since Verizon and the other carriers are filling each quarter with new Android devices, compared to Apple only updating once a year.

Which line is which there?
The two that end in 27% and 11% appear to be the same color. I'm assuming Android is the 27%?

33% is RIM
27% Android
23% iPhone
11% Windows
3% Linux (No idea what that means)
2% Symbian
1% Palm

Not a good colorblind chart, since they skipped showing symbols and didn't label the lines in the chart.

Observations: iPhone purchases likely decline as June approaches, due to the (pending) announcement of a newer model. This year there were a ton of leaks about iPhone 4, so I suspect the effect was even worse due to the mainstream coverage.

Android is not only featured in some marketing-heavy phones such as Verizon's Droid brand, but it's also quickly becoming the default OS on your run of the mill cheap go-to phone. The "smartphone" category is dead. It doesn't exist anymore. App phones, what we've been talking about, are simply on their way to becoming ubiquitous. With the iPhone stuck on AT&T there's simply far too much opportunity for Android to gain share against it, even if those gains don't come at the expense of iPhone unit sales.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens with some phone producers once Windows Phone comes out. IMO, if I wanted to change my bottom line, I would not commoditize my product line further by making models running every OS. HP, for example, might be on the right track by trying to build WebOS and taking a pass on Windows Phone.

With Android, the skinning doesn't seem to be cutting it and I don't think it's going to get any easier for manufacturers to make their products distinctive without heavy carrier marketing blitzes. That's only going to lead to regional branding and continued high turn-over in models. Expect your new Android phone to have a lifespan of well under a year. I don't see most of these phones being able to take multiple full revision OS updates. At least they'll have the apps.

BTW, no one includes the iPod Touch nor iPad when they look at iPhone/iOS numbers. There's no iPod equivalent with any of the other OS platforms. If you're marketer or software vendor, that's very important to consider. I still think it's Apple's game right now, regardless of the most recent quarterly numbers.

===
EDIT: fixed a few grammatical errors, one of them quite important (re: "not" commoditize)

It makes no sense to include them since they are in different markets. Why would they combine the numbers for a portable music player, a tablet/net device and a phone?

Requoting Bruno, " If you're marketer or software vendor, that's very important to consider"

iOS and the devices that run it are one target for software vendors in many cases. A game doesn't care if it's a phone or not, and has a larger market to sell to due to the non phone iOS owners out there. Same for a majority of other categories of software. On the hardware side, vendors can (and do) make many accessories that work on any of the iOS devices.

Because at the end of the day market share is about dollars. And the fact the other companies don't recognize this is why they're all floundering and why some of them won't make it another 10 years in the business.

When you're taking into account "market" it's really about the platform, not about the specific device. When tallying Android numbers which devices do you pick? Do you pick only those with a cellular baseband? Must it support voice? The iPad has 3G service and you can run voip apps. Maybe its screen is too big? Do you include the Dell Streak? Do you include the Evo?

I'm not saying one should include the iPod (touch, not other models) when doing a simple phone-based chart, but rather that such a chart and analysis doesn't tell a story that's very significant. Everyone knows there's only one iPhone, so it's not going to be a big surprise that 30 other companies shipping phones with "Android" OS are going to eventually catch up. To me that doesn't signify dominance, it signifies how pathetic the rest of the industry is. It takes more than a dozen OEMs to even come close to match Apple's unit sales on a single SKU, while still not matching their profits. Pathetic.

As an investor it should be clear where to steer your money. As a developer it should be clear what platform to invest in.

I hate it when Bruno is 100% right

Bringing this back to an Android thread (there's an active iPhone thread, people ), have you formulated your final thoughts on the Captivate, Tom? I'd love to hear the positive points of your experience, as I don't believe that up to this point you've mentioned any

Droid and Evo have started upgrading to 2.2/Froyo in the last few days.

Not yet. I am still leaning towards not trying Android again for a while though, as I don't believe 2.2 will do anything to address my big negatives. I'll try to do the final writeup in the next few days, definitely want to get it done while the experience is fresh.

Tom, if you want to try out another Droid phone, apparently the easiest phones to get to stock Android appear to be the ones with Sense UI. It looks like it's trivial to turn off Sense and use the default Android launcher.

That only changes the launcher back and as the updates to the article mention, it doesn't work for all phones.

The rest of the phone will still have the manufacturer changes so you're not getting the stock Android experience.

True, true. Damn, this is becoming a definite problem for the platform. It's quite irritating, because although Android has its quirks (and I'm not saying it's totally ready for every consumer), I think it's a fine operating system. And for a user like myself, I'm absolutely loving it.

My HTC Desire upgraded to 2.2 OTA yesterday. Still crashes at least once a day, though

Android does or apps on it?

Okay, it looks like I've encountered my first, legitimately stupid bug in Android. I'd be grateful if other Android owners in this thread could let me know if this happens for them:

For those of you with more calendars in Google Calendar than just your base calendar: on your phone, please create a new even for a certain time in the future (say, tomorrow), and attribute it to one of your additional calendars (not the default one) while creating it.

After you've done that, please get on a computer and pull up Google Calendar and look at the appointment you just made.

If you're like me, then the appointment annoyingly shows up as an invitation, not just an event. It's a small thing, but it's driving me up the wall simply that it works this way. I don't want that little question mark sitting there, as it's distracting and it takes up space for the event description.

I can't do much with the invitation either. Denying it grays-out the event, making it less noticeable (which of course I don't want), and accepting it is the worst, as it creates a duplicate entry under my default calendar! I've actually taken to accepting the invitation, deleting the original, and going into the duplicate and changing the calendar it lives under. Clearly, this is not ideal.

I've been posting in a Google "Help" forum, which Google apparently has nobody looking at, and it sounds like this affects many different phones running more than one version of Android. It also happens whether the calendar you're adding to is shared with anyone or not.

I'd appreciate it if you guys could test this out and let me know what happens.

I'm really shocked that empeg owners are upset that Android is "the Linux of mobile." Just use it. You all "just used" your iPhones and got to know them. Try that same approach with your flavor Android. If it's not for you, try a different flavor.

I'm also surprised to see confusion about the Android UI. I was fluent with Android after 1 hour of using it in a busy Verizon store, and my only prior smartphone experience was the ancient Treo 650. I agree, Android is geeky and requires digging through menus. But, have we lost our geek edge and gone soft?

I've gotten non-techs comfortable with Android and its quirks. You just need an open mind.

While I mostly agree with the spirit of your post, I don't feel this particular analogy works at all. The barrier to trying out different "distros" of Android involves purchasing different phones and returning them, and even more difficultly switching between cell phone contracts.

And that's just the practical challenges. On top of that you have to deal with companies that just don't make software well at all (the phone manufacturers). It's not just that you have to get used to each interface, it's that often (especially on the Samsung phones), there's fundamental problems with the software (GPS doesn't work, broken PC syncing, etc).

I don't blame Tom for returning his phone. The UI that Samsung has put on there has been panned all over the place (except for Mossberg, I guess).

Exactly what Matt said. I don't have the time or desire to check out every flavor of Android out there. Could I get used to the quirks over time? Sure. But would I enjoy the experience more then my iPhone experience? No, not after what I saw with the Samsung Captivate after a week.

As for losing my geek edge and going soft, maybe, if you look at it that way. To me though, that says that geeks are only really geeks if they use a half baked product full of major issues that they have to work around or deal with, instead of buying a fully functional product that does what they need. Is Android half baked? For me it is, at least the Android as presented by Samsung and AT&T with the Captivate. I guess a geek is ok with GPS not working, or not being able to sync pictures of his family, and losing most of a battery charge in a day due to wanting to stay connected with friends.

And maybe I've been soft for a long time then. The empeg attracted me because it was a car stereo solution that did work properly, and had hackability under a polished usability layer. OS X attracted me for the same reasons, a very powerful core, and a very polished UI/Application framework. If I wanted half baked "geeky" solutions, I would have bought a Neo35 or gone the MP3Car route in 1999 instead.

My mind was open enough to try Android for a bit, and had the device actually functioned, the trial would have been for a full month. But I'll go back to my closed minded world of the Apple iPhone, where I get the geeky bits when I want them, but it doesn't interfere with my ability to get navigation directions to somewhere.

I am still slowly working on the writeup. Some people at work are also interested. Ultimately I still appreciate Android for being out there and providing competition. I'm just not a Google person it seems.

By the way, I have another app recommendation for everyone, and I wasn't sure if it was mentioned already:

Tasker

There are other apps that do similar things, like Locale. It basically gives you an incredible amount of condition-based control over the phone. The simplest example is that I can set my phone to go into silent mode at a certain time each evening and go out of it again in the morning. From there it gets really insane, really fast. This article did a better job of explaining everything it can do than I could.

*edit*
Example: I have the Nexus One dock and I keep it on my night stand. I created a profile that puts the phone on silent mode specifically when it's placed on the dock. That way it won't trigger when/if I plug it into a power chord anywhere else. I friggin' love this app. It's not free, but I think it's worth it.

So you rock out with your guitar?

Heh, exactly.

...or simply a micro USB cable plugged into one of those USB AC adapters.

I've also set up location-based events. Now, when the app checks in with GPS it detects if I'm at home, my mother's house, or my in-laws house. If it sees that I am, it turns on the WiFi, and turns off Bluetooth and GPS.

I recently started playing with the Prey Project, which now supports Android. Your phone (or laptop) pings a URL, either on the Prey Project's home page or on your own. If the phone gets a 404 error, then it starts generating reports with GPS and whatnot, and sends you email notifications. The whole thing is open source, free, relatively stable, and seems to work as advertised.

So...anybody with an Android phone tested the calendar bug I mentioned, and/or had the problem?

Ooo, I could try that new phone from Sony Ericsson on AT&T running Android. It's got one of them fast processors (a snappy dragon or something) a 4 inch screen, some gigs of storage, and ... umm, an 11 month old 1.6 OS...

http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/09/sony-ericsson-xperia-10-officially-debuts-on-atandt-130-on-contr/

I don't think I can express to everyone how frustrating this calendar problem has been. Google is deaf to the users in their "support" forums. I've brought up the issue in at least three Android user forums. I've sent the question to 2 or 3 Android blogs. I've emailed tech journalists. I haven't received a single response, even on any of the forums (now including this one).

I'll say this, the issue its self (events made on Android later appear as invitations) is a small one. It's still very annoying to me, though. But the bigger issue I see is that there's an obvious bug, yet Google has decided not to listen to user feedback. It continues to amaze me that in this day and age, with all the technology available to companies, and with an internet-centric company like Google, they still refuse to accept any feedback from the people who use their products.

I understand that the users don't always know the best thing to do. But how would it hurt Google to put one person on their own support forums to listen to users and respond to them, perhaps passing on obvious bugs like this to the appropriate team in the company? Every time I post on Google's own forums, I feel like I'm talking into a void. Do they really want their customers to feel like that?

Anyway, please, if you use an Android phone and you have a secondary Google calendar, could you please simply try adding an event to it on your phone, then check that event on your computer and see if it shows up as an event or an invitation? I would really appreciate it. Thanks.

The problem is that Google customers are the people buying ads, not the people buying phones.

Matt, if I had an Android phone I'd test that issue out for you right now. It does sound annoying. In this respect I'm not sure Google is much different than Apple.

A while ago I went looking for the answer to Android's hands-free bluetooth dialing issue on the Droid. It's the main reason I didn't move off of my dumb-phone. I found google's bug tracking forum and signed on to follow the issue.
Occasionally I'd get emails when various tracking threads merged. The last one I got stated the issue was resolved in Froyo.

I ditched all the emails I got, but it shouldn't be hard to find that tracking forum again. Have you signed on there?

edit: yah, easy to find: http://code.google.com/p/android/
Good luck!

Confirmed. I see the same thing: "<Calendar name> hasn't responded".

And Stew's right; the Android bug tracker is definitely the place for this.

Added an event on the phone; turns up in Google Calendar as an invitation, to which I've not responded; (although you didn't ask) Google Calendar Sync puts it into Outlook as an unfilled meeting request.

Could this be the same issue?
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/...Summary%20Stars

I only read a few of the posts, but it seems to hint at problems with multiple google calendars.

It is the same issue. It's just unfortunate that the initial post was written so confusingly.

Thanks for confirming, guys. I actually called Nexus One support today (one of the benefits of having "the Google phone"), and the very nice gentleman on the other end unfortunately didn't have any answers for me. He acknowledged the problem, but of course couldn't do anything about it. He saw somewhere that apparently a Google employee confirmed there was a problem and that a team was working on it, but sadly that was back in late March.

I hadn't gone through the bug tracker because it felt like just as much of a black hole as the help forums. I was contributing to another bug thread about something in GMail. It was a thread that was started in 2008, and had no response whatsoever from anyone at Google, and dozens of people contributing to it. Then, all of a sudden, a Google employee went through about three dozen bugs and copied and pasted a message that said something like "this is a bug in the GMail app and therefore does not belong in the code forums." This outright dismissal, of course, only made everyone involved angrier as the first response in two years was a brush-off. Even if the discussion did belong elsewhere, it was still frustrating. We were then directed to the Google "help" forums, where that issue still exists with no response from Google.

Thanks again for checking, everyone. It helps at least knowing that it's affecting other users

As it's a problem in Android, the bug tracker is the appropriate place. In fact, you can probably find the bug in the actual open source Calendar application. It's probably somewhere in here.

Google even accepts patches.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/11/exclusive-sony-ericsson-to-introduce-android-3-0-gaming-platfor/

If thats true, I'll consider picking one of those up for my next Android experiment. That way even if it doesn't work out as a phone, I can still justify keeping it around for portable gaming.

Wonder if you have to look goofy holding it up to your ear. Remember that other phone/game thing a few years back?

Haha; the N-Gage. Was it really only seven years ago? I remember thinking at the time that it was kinda neat, if troubled. Now it looks sooooo dated.

The N-Gage was pretty much just a really chunky Nokia handset. The games didn't hook into anything special in there and people managed to make loaders that decrypted and ran the N-Gage games on other Nokia handsets.

The talking with a taco stuck to the side of your head in the first gen N-Gage really was an awful design. How did that ever get through product testing?

Hmm interesting. Maybe it will actually get some decent support since the gaming section of Sony is involved as well. The cell phone section along with Ericsson aren't known for giving you timely updates if they ever come at all.

There's only one question about this Sony handset... Why bother with Google/Android? IMO, that's only going to devalue Sony's brand and position.

You really want Sony Ericsson to homebrew their own phone OS? *shudder*

They've already got a lot of IP in mobile communications and gaming. Enough that spawning a new gaming platform is probably much more wasteful. I'm not saying that I have confidence that Sony could pull it off, I'm just saying that jumping on Android for this seems rather at odds with the rest of their business.

They need to go back to UIQ!

I'm not really sure how I feel about this news. I think it's fascinating, but I really don't know how well it'll work.

Sony is already working with Google for the Google TV setup. Having at least one good Sony phone with Android for integration makes sense. It's also easier for Sony to open a "Playstation Phone" games market to third party and independent developers using a modified Android SDK. This would allow widespread development without the costs of becoming a normal console developer, and also allow Sony to keep their internal SDK for proper Playstation consoles locked away. Even if a Playstation specific market didn't take hold, the device could still fallback to everything else in the Android market and still provide people with a reason to buy the device. The failure of the PSP Go probably has the Playstation division thinking about radical futures that take into account mobile phones and iPod Touch like devices eating into their handheld console market.

This on the other hand is proving Android is picking up momentum worldwide too, outselling the iPhone for the first half of this year (the iPhone downcycle).

http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/12/gartner-and-idc-agree-the-android-invasions-accelerating-aroun/

On the Sony "Playstation Phone", an interesting question is whether games for it will run on other Android phones, or whether they'll be providing some specific features (graphics libraries? UI controls?) that aren't available elsewhere. Wouldn't it be amazing if Sony ended up defining a standard gaming API that became widely adopted across the Android space? Unlikely, but amazing.

I've never understood this obsession with turning wifi, bt and gps off... from a system power point of view:

- There is just no point in turning bluetooth off. The power of bluetooth in standby is pretty much nothing (like, much less than 1/10th of cell standby power, the one that's quoted in hundreds of hours if you're not doing push mail). Remember bluetooth headsets can be on standby for literally weeks with tiny batteries.

- Wifi power is also very small, because it's just waking up to do a network scan "every now and then". At least on the iPhone, it'll only scan when the screen is on or there are live network connections, which instantly dwarfs the power required for the scan. Not sure on Android but I wouldn't be surprised if it works much the same.

- GPS is one thing which does truly suck power (can easily take almost half a watt, and will likely fire up the cellular radio for AGPS assistance too)... but do you run background GPS tasks on your phone?

If it were up to me I'd take the buttons away from the user, but I guess there are valid reasons to disable the radios beyond airplane mode... it's actually fairly likely that your location-based event system is burning more power than the subsystems would have taken had they been left on.

Aside from killing batteries is there any real reason for airplane mode to exist? Mythbusters looked into it and didn't find anything (IIRC). They're not exactly the FCC or the FAA, though.

I had issues with the Mythbusters tests, but your recollection is the opposite of their stated conclusion, which was that some aircraft instruments *can* be affected by RF interference from electronic devices. I'm not sure that a couple of cell phone users is truly an issue for modern aircraft instruments though. I mean, Virgin has WiFi available on their flights for goodness sake.

It's my belief (entirely uninformed belief) that the real reason they prohibit cell phone usage on a flight is the other thing stated in the Mythbusters conclusions: A cell phone that's up high in the air will connect to too many cell towers at the same time. If everyone who got onto airplanes was allowed to fire up up their cell phones, the cell networks would be overloaded by the sheer number of simultaneous cell tower handoffs happening.

I will concede that an airplane full of people using active radio transceivers is going to put out more a lot more RF interference than just a few cell phones would, so I'll give the FAA the benefit of the doubt, assuming that it's not the onesie-twosie cell phones they're prohibiting, but rather the hundreds-of-cell-phones-on-the-same-plane problem they're trying to prevent.

Wikipedia discusses it at length, too, it seems.

Hugo, I pretty much stopped using the profiles that turned off the radios.

I decided that I haven't really had battery issues with all the radios turned on before, so I might as well just leave them on all the time.

Tom: I just heard on a random internet video that even the Samsung app launcher is different. Apparently when you brought up that master list of apps, it had you scroll sideways? I just wanted to add this to the "that's not how it is on my phone" list.

In default Android it's a vertical scrolling list, which I think I like more.

The Samsung definitely was not something I'd want to use.

That seems odd to me. There are numerous GPS chips out there that run on 3.3V and suck less than 30mA, which I suppose equates to about 1/10th of a watt.

Uhhh... yeah.



tanstaafl.

One of the biggest reasons is that the testing for interference between every combination of instrument package and cell phone would be prohibitevly expensive. Each single test is outrageously expensive, then you add in the different combinations and it is mind boggling. The FAA requires stuff to be tested to be proven that it isn't going to interfere with the aircraft's systems. I can't really give any more details than that (it was a discussion on an internal news server and that was the only part I really understood).

The Wikipedia article goes into detail about that, too. It seems to say: "devices are banned until FAA can conclusively prove they won't kill anyone", rather than "devices are allowed until FAA conclusively proves they have killed someone". And yeah, I see how you can't really test all the devices with all the airplanes. That would be an interesting test matrix. As a QA guy, it makes me shudder to think about it.

If I thought for one minute that turning on my iPod Shuffle was going to cause a 400-ton airliner to go spiraling out of the sky in flames, I would never get on an airplane again.

tanstaafl.

Eh, either way works, and it definitely didn't factor into my like or dislike of the device. Left to right made sense to me, since the home screens also move left to right. Also, to get into that list it's a single button. From what I've seen of "stock" Android, it's normally a button on the bottom that you swipe up, so up and down makes a bit more sense there.

What did strike me as odd with the Samsung one is the random color blocks it would put behind all the apps in the launcher. If I put an app on one of the home screens, the colored background went away.


I found this odd when reading the Engadget Epic 4G (Galaxy S for Sprint) review

Even with that setting on with my Captivate, GPS performance was, well, horrible. I can't remember what the default was, but I definitely had that setting on, and I do know my wireless equipment is at least in Skyhook's database.

The same Engadget review also noted the misleading power information from the Android battery monitor.

WiFi systems on airplanes disable themselves when the cabin door is closed, and only turn back on when the plane is above 10,000 feet. Also, WiFi use on a plane is not going to have as much RF power as a cell phone trying to transmit to a tower a few miles below the plane.

There are several planes out there now equipped with picocells to allow cell phone use. The idea here is the cell phones inside the plane transmit to antennas in the cabin, and the picocell takes care of retransmitting the signal via either satellite, or down to the ground with antennas on the outside of the plane. This way, cell phones will only use minimal RF power to transmit.


The danger isn't in a device causing the plane to fall from the sky, it's usually either interfering with navigational equipment, or the radio transmissions between the control tower and pilots. If electronics did pose a risk to anything really vital, better steps would be taken to ensure the marketing guy in row 5 did actually turn off his Blackberry. As for an iPod shuffle, it's more a distraction reducing issue. If a passenger has headphones on and music blaring, they may miss vital information if something does go wrong during takeoff or landing (the highest risk part of a flight). It's also far easier to say "turn off everything" instead of "turn off A, B, C and D, but E, F, G and H are ok".

I just had an idea for an app I think Apple might never approve....

Odd. On my phone, that option just turns on/off the WiFi SSID and cell tower ID lookup which only gives you a vague idea of where you are. There is another option to turn Assisted GPS on and off which does the faster GPS position fix by downloading data from a server.

Yeah, I know, I was amazed too given the chips I'd used years before that were in the 30mA ballpark... some of the phone gps chips do the frontend stuff in "the gps chip" but run the algorithms in software on the baseband, which makes it cheaper but means you don't have all those specialized hardware that proper GPS chips have which is a lot more efficient about tracking satellites.

iPhone4 is more in the state of the art ballpark for GPS power though...

http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/08/nexus-one-developer-phone.html

That's classy. Remind me again how big Google are? This seems so much like an operation running out of someone's garage.

I don't get it. Should they be free?

Agreed, I have no idea what you're referring to, Bruno. I mean, I expect you to lash out negatively at every single tiny thing that Google does, particularly when it comes to Android, but now you're not even being clear in your negativity.

It's quite simple, really:

Google tried something new with the Nexus One.

The experiment didn't work (for the most part), so they stopped selling it.

Now, they're shipping it as a developer phone, replacing the aged G1 that they used to have in the role.

I'm not sure why you'd even bother to get worked up over such a thing...

Google's whole Nexus operation is like someone running a first-time business from their parents' garage, except what's worse is that they seem to put no effort into it. It's shameful for a company this well funded to demonstrate that they don't give a rat's ass about fit and polish, not only of the product, but how they sell it.

You want accessories? No problem, buy them from HTC's *European* site. Classy. They may as well be selling these things out of white vans in parking lots.

I'm not an Apple apologist, but anyone who doesn't think this is some cheap low-rent and low-class way to run a product and platform is drinking way too much Google Evil Juice.

lulz

I think you're missing the point of the Nexus One, but I really don't feel like defending it again. What good would it do anyway?


It says right on that page that you can buy them from the US HTC store. They were only available through the European store for a short while, probably while the stock of accessories made their way to HTC's fulfillment centers. I don't find that offensive.

It's Google cheesy and unprofessional execution of their mobile product(s) I have issues with. The Nexus is and always has been nothing more than a basic/typical HTC-built Android reference, essentially used as same, a reference platform. Maybe Google were testing the waters with retail sales, maybe not. It's clear from their actions that retail didn't pan out - sales were abysmal.

As an aside, apart from a select few geeky types, I don't believe for a second that anyone is actively seeking out Android phones. Google has put itself in the Microsoft-style position by simply becoming a de-facto fall-back for OEMs. They're going a few better than MS however because they're essentially providing the goods for free and allowing OEMs to change whatever they want. This is a win-win for most OEMs since it gives them a base OS to start with along with a ton of tools they don't need to develop themselves. It's not turning out to produce great handsets, but that's not something most OEMs have been concerned with anyway, as long as they're able to crank out a dozen models per year.

I still have great interest in Android personally, but again, because it provides a nice package of a base OS, graphics libraries and tools. This is from the OEM perspective. I wouldn't be interested in the least in developing commercially *for* Android handsets, since Google has made it pretty clear they're not going to stand by it to make it really shine as a stable and polished platform, nor are they interested in helping ISVs monetize their work. Free software is better for Google's ad revenue. And as long as OEMs are leading the charge and providing ad hits, there's really little impetus for Google to cater to the retail market and consumers with fit and polish.

Very well stated, Bruno.

tanstaafl.

I'm happy to hear that apparently the G2 is going to be a "Google experience" phone. That's a terrible name for it, but I wish all Android phones had this, or at least had the option to go to it.

Motorola not exactly doing a fine job with upgrades

It seems that all the usual players are still doing the usual thing. It doesn't matter that it's Android this time around, once a shite manufacturer, always a shite manufacturer it seems.

Too bad they didn't have this on the Captivate, Tom. At least part of the annoyances would have been alleviated.

It honestly wouldn't have changed my opinion much. The TouchWiz launcher wasn't bad. Most of the Samsung/AT&T bad parts couldn't be turned off, like the broken Mail client or all the "value added" crapware.

Seems like Android handsets are shaping up to be closed systems and the iPhone, all things considered, seems more open every day...

http://www.androidcentral.com/shenanigans-skype-mobile-update-does-not-allow-use-wifi-after-all

You see, Android is only as open as your carrier wants it to be. There doesn't seem to be any indication this will ever change. And recent Verizon/Google announcements only reinforce that.

G2 will come with vanilla Android, from what I hear.

Surely that has nothing to do with Android as such, more about some deal between Skype and Verizon ?

Whose to say that if the iPhone was on Verizon that Skype wouldn't have the same issue ?

Or am I missing something ?

While it is due to the deal between Verizon and Skype, it does show Google is pretty much asleep at the wheel when it comes to keeping their "open" platform open to the end user. Want Skype on Android? Go buy a Verizon Droid phone. And be forced to use it over 3G only, on a device and platform touted to be "open".

This is a very different situation then the open nature of Linux. The GPL forces certain things to ensure the core remains open all the way to the end user to the point of allowing that user to see the source code behind the OS. It also has provisions to ensure a vendor like Dell can't package it up, lock it down, and ship it on their computers. If Dell want to ship Linux, it has to remain open.

I still don't see what any of that has got to do with Android. If Dell did some deal with Skype for example they could easily ship PCs with Linux and bundle a version of Skype that for example was some wizzy version of Skype that did things other other versions couldn't do but only worked on Dell PCs.

I really don't see that this Skype-locked-down-to-Verizon situation is anything to do with how open Android is.

And how could Google do anything about the Skype-Verizon thing anyway ? I guess they could ban the app from the market place, but then wouldn't people be shouting at them for being closed in the same way Apple are ?

Can you download Skype software from the marketplace to run on an Android phone on Verizon?

The difference is only that the iPhone is an Apple product. Android phones are pretty much getting segmented into carrier products. I'd be surprised if a universal app market lasts forever.

Yes.

Other than the skype software that link was talking about. In other words, a skype program that will work on any handset over wifi.

Well, if Google doesn't do anything, they risk carriers getting rid of the source of revenue helping to make Android free.



So, I have my locked down, closed walled garden device that lets me run Skype over WiFi or 3G, and offers me a choice of three search providers. Or I could choose the device from Samsung on Verizon powered by open Google that locks me down to using Bing, and no Skype over WiFi.

I guess the issue is, what does open mean and how does it apply to Android? Does it mean freedom for the end user? Or just for the carriers and device manufacturers? Google should probably clarify that and make a stand if it means freedom for the end user. In less then a year, Verizon went from offering the Droid, a stock Android experience pretty much, to now devices that don't even let you use Google Search on a Google OS.

What I can't believe is that people thought it would go any other way. Apple is the only company in mobile who cares one bit about a somewhat open end-user experience. Sure, they have a curated app store and SDK rules, but their philosophy has always been a customer-driven one, rather than a carrier-driven one like every other handset manufacturer.

When these other guys see Android, they don't think about the customer or customer experience. That's their last priority if it's on their list at all. What they see is a FREE OS that they can re-brand. That saves them millions of dollars in development costs.

You make a good point.

I think the answer is that the operating system is open, but there's (currently) nothing restricting hardware vendors from making their hardware not open. In other arenas, I'd tell you that it's your own fault for purchasing restricted hardware, but that's obviously a much more contentious position with a cell phone. You don't have innumerable choices like you do with a PC.

The search in stock Android is extensible, with plugins available for it, from Wikipedia, to calculators, to other search engines. If Verizon has crippled the browser, that really sucks. The only thing you can do is not buy it.

Thanks for the well-reasoned post, Tom, and I agree with you here.

I suspected from the beginning that the carriers might do something to these phones, but hoped they wouldn't or at least that there would be an alternative. Clearly things haven't turned out as I'd hoped. The problem as I see it is not that the OS is open, but that the carriers are making it closed.

I have one wish for Google when it comes to this issue: that they declare that if a carrier or manufacturer wants to use Android, they have to give they users the option of using the stock OS. It could be when the user first turns on the phone, or just a settings screen. But somehow, Google needs to give people the option of using the regular OS.

I've disagreed all along with the people who thought that the OS version fragmentation was an issue. I still don't think it is, because at least with every version of the OS there's some consistency, and while you may not have all the features with older versions, you still have a decent user experience.

But I completely agree that this skinning issue is a big problem. So far, I'm disappointed that Google hasn't said word one about it.

I don't know if Google should necessarily say what a vendor can do with the OS, but they should make perhaps more stipulations on the way the carriers use the branding. Remember that if they put too many restrictions in place then it might also affect other areas of revenue for them, such as the marketplace, namely in ad-sponsored apps.

As someone who'd like to use Android in the future, I don't want any restrictions. But I won't be using it in a handset. Nor would I ever expose the fact it's running Android, so there would be no OS branding apart from whatever custom UI I have sitting on top of the base. No app market, etc. Basically just using it as a nice free embedded OS with decent support for all kinds of technologies already baked in.

I think you're going to see feature phones going this way as well.

Acute.

I could have written this: Android Is As Open As The Clenched Fist I’d Like To Punch The Carriers With

Hmm, maybe not even open for OEMs...

Skyhook sues Google for business interference. PDF link of the court filing. Basically boils down to Skyhook negotiating with Motorola and "Company X" to use Skyhook in their Android products. Google interfered by issuing stop ships orders claiming the devices were no longer "Android compatible", and in the case of Company X, this was after products had previously been certified and were already out on the market.

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/desde/google_is_now_officially_evil/

What's wrong with an exclusive contract? Google seems to be ok with Verizon signing an exclusive contract with Bing for the Fascinate based on inaction and no such stop ship order given. As far as "proprietary application stack", is Google Location Service open source? Or is it part of the closed off Android stack similar to the Marketplace and several apps? (Honest question, I can't find evidence either way). Also, as pointed out by the court filing, and comments on reddit, the Skyhook api wasn't breaking any Google apps that use location as far as they know, considering the phones were passing all of Google's certification processes.

From what I read in the court filing, Skyhook's side of the story seems to be one eerily similar to maneuvers Microsoft was pulling in the 90s. Show interest in a technology from a small company, talk friendly with them, then create a competing version, embed it in the OS, and squash business deals that favor the small company.

Ultimately we will have to see what the courts say on this, if it goes that far. May just be easier for Google to settle this one out of court.

Since the first release of Android, there has been a hook into the OS for arbitrary location services and it's intended that there be more than one location provider. Android itself provides at least two.

From the filing, it sounds like Skyhook had Motorola strip out Google's builtin location providers. I wouldn't be surprised if they also had them strip out the ability to add additional location providers. In fact, they say that Google has "allowed" another similar location provider to run on Android. My guess is that that other provider doesn't supersede the Android API. Again, this is speculation; I could be wrong.

I would imagine that anything that modifies the public API that developers code against renders the product Android non-compliant.

(Finally posting my summary of good and bad about my experience with Android on the Samsung Captivate. Not sure why I let this sit on my desktop so long.)


Google Maps Navigation - For being a free app, it's very impressive. The few times where the Captivate GPS worked, the navigation was decent, and as expected came up with routes the same way Google Maps does. I have a few quibbles with how it wanted to route me to work from home (mostly because it likes to route up a very hilly residential road with speed limits dropping to 5mph in some tricky turns) but I've yet to find a GPS solution that routes the way I'd expect every time. Voice quality was ok, and good enough to understand street names. Google Streetview integrated is really helpful. I was a bit disappointed to find voice search didn't work for contacts on my phone though. Overall, this was probably the best part of Android for me, and I'm hoping Google sticks to their promise to bring it to the iPhone one day.

Notifications - This one I'm mixed about. Not being blasted with popups is a definite improvement over the iPhone for sure. However, I found myself having to clean up notifications frequently to prevent the icon bar at the top from just filling up. Mail would commonly leave notifications about "1 new message" even if I've read the e-mail on my computer. Gowalla would blast several into there when it checked from time to time, and none were realtime due to the lack of push notifications in Android 2.1. I also wish there was a way to see a small preview without action, similar to WebOS notifications. It's kinda annoying to be driving and have to try and pull down the tray to see what SMS came in, vs being able to see it at a glance on iOS or WebOS. This is mostly a timing issue though, and I may have missed a setting allowing the notification text to stay in the bar at the top longer before it returned to icon view.

Google Listen - Having all my podcasts just download directly on the device was nice. I could set a schedule, and know for certain my episode was ready for me in the morning. Since the iPhone only does a sync when the device is first connected, I sometimes miss the morning sync to grab new podcasts.

Swype - I'm mixed on this one too, mostly because I didn't have a lot of time to adapt. I did however like the idea the keyboard could be replaced, and did start using swype more and more. I'd need additional time to really give it a proper review though. Doing normal hunt and peck typing on swype was definitely worse then the iPhone touch keyboard. I didn't spend much time with the other keyboards to really compare them.


My curiosity is much lower about Android now that I've had a week of hands on time, and overall I am sticking to not trying it again until at least 3.0. I am interested to see what steps are taken to add a bit more polish to the experience as a whole. These are the negatives I saw outside the Captivate issues:

Photo syncing - I've had all my photos with me since my iPhone in mid 2007 and it's not something I want to give up. Apple even chops the size down of each image during sync to help preserve space, while still presenting a good looking image on the device. DoubleTwist was an absolute failure here, with no ability to sync photos. All it offers is drag and drop, and I'm not going to drag and drop new photos every time I add them to my computer. The full Google solution would be to upload everything to Picassa and then let the device have access over the air. This is also not acceptable due to my collection exceeding the storage space provided for free, and the slow browsing speed on the phone as it downloaded them over the air.

Search - For as good as Google is supposed to be about search, it was horrible on the phone. Google Listen just outright failed to find podcasts by name, and overall the Google search options seem more focused on looking online then looking on the phone. With my iPhone I can go into search and in mere moments find any app on the phone, any contact, any e-mail, or any music file. Spotlight is just natural to me after having it in an OS for 5 years and on a phone for 2, and stepping back to a less polished experience here was harsh. I didn't realize how much I depend on good local search until I had the Android phone for the trial.

Battery life- While somewhat device specific, I just generally didn't feel I could trust having the phone survive the day. The AIM issue was specific to that app, but what was worse was being provided a tool to analyze power usage and finding out it's faulty. I also don't want to deal with task killers and other apps just to know the phone will have a charge left. After talking to my coworker with the Evo, he's having a much harder time, backing up the battery concerns of all the Evo reviews I saw. When Sprint calls next time, I'll tell them to take me off the list. (As an update on the Evo, the local Sprint store never did call me, so I guess when they told me in July they would put me back at the bottom of the list, they instead just dropped me off it.)

I don't feel I had enough time to really evaluate Android apps and the marketplace, so I don't have much to say there. Most of the apps I tried were counterparts to ones I use frequently on the iPhone, like Gowalla. I think 2.2 will help bring some better apps to the platform as long as developer interest is there due to both push and the ability to run them from the external SD card. I've got certain ones on my iPhone that just simply can't exist on Android pre 2.2, such as handheld console equivalent games with lots of assets. And adding push capabilities should help cut down power usage, instead of forcing apps like Gowalla to always be in the background to poll for updates.

The iPod podcast syncing can be pretty much solved by the Podcaster app that can now be set to sync automatically at your chosen times (and also be set to only sync when on wifi).

There are higher-quality voices available for download.


There are two background notification types: notifications, which are the things in the icon bar, and toasts, which appear over top of the screen, and go away on their own. So there is a way to do that, even if the app doesn't provide it as an option. You're at least in part talking about built-in apps, so that doesn't push the blame elsewhere; I'm just letting you know that there is another option available to developers.


Or the default Android keyboard, in my experience. I never could adapt to Swype or its clones.


Actually, only the executable has to be on the internal storage. Data can exist anywhere. This is at the discretion of the developer, though.

One thing I wish AT&T would have left in for the Captivate. This is the lock screen on other Galaxy S phones, and it's pretty clever. Standard unlock is pretty much a swipe, but it also adds two other swipe points to go right to missed calls or unread e-mail.

Congratulations to all Sony Android phone owners, today you'll be able to update to Android 2.1 and be only one generation of OS behind (for a few weeks). Android 2.1 was released to the world in early January 2010. Maybe next October lucky Sony owners will be able to update to Froyo, 2.2 on their even newer PSP phones.

BTW Sony, Apple just knocked you out of the top-5 mobile handset makers in the world. So sorry. You used to make nice sets.

Vixy's got a Galaxy... a Samsung Vibrant on the Tmobile network. I think it's on 2.1. Anyone know when/how it'll get 2.2?

Huh? When was that??

He meant "TV sets".

When it debuted , the T68i was pretty nice. And the UI was miles better than anything Nokia had at the time.

That phone wasn't really SE though. The T68i was a firmware upgraded T68 which was released by Ericsson before they merged. You could even upgrade the old Ericsson T68 into a SE T68i just by doing the firmware update.

I've got a T68 somewhere in a drawer because I wanted to use it as a SMS gateway for something but it wasn't really designed to be on for very long periods of time. I would always get a random crash after a 2-3 weeks.

I'm not sure what possessed SE to make what in theory was a high end phone and then leave it stuck with 1.6 for such a long time. As you mentioned, its not even up to date even with 2.1.

I just looked at the SE blog and 2.1 isn't actually out yet. They're rolling it out for Nordic regions on Sunday and then the other regions sometime after that with an unspecified schedule. If you've got a carrier branded version then you could be waiting forever or at least a long time.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I've always thought Sony only brought Ericsson down. But I didn't realize the T68 predated their collaboration.

September. No, wait, maybe October 18th. Or sometime, since the 18th is when Samsung Kies users can install it. And Kies is still not available to download here in the US.

Out of curiosity, does the GPS seem to function on her Vibrant? I wonder if the fix they rolled out sometime after I returned my Captivate actually fixed it, of if the whole Skyhook issue remained unsolved until 2.2.

I don't think she's been using the GPS much, but it would be an interesting thing to try.

So I see that she has to have the Kies application to install it. Cool, there was another reason to have Kies but she didn't want to do the big download of it at the time. This is now a second reason. Thanks!

Is Kies now available for the US? I looked yesterday and couldn't find it. I'd say be careful about going that route if the Vibrant isn't fully supported in it yet, as loading international 2.2 firmware may blow away the settings on the phone to work with T-Mobile. I didn't dig too deeply into how separate the firmware was from regional cellular settings when I had the Captivate.

At some point, 2.2 will be pushed over the air.

And I'd be curious to hear her experiences with the phone. I attribute my bad experiences to buying the device so soon after release (thus I was hit bad with the GPS issue) along with the inability to have it work like my iPhone in regards to media sync/playback. For a non Apple product, the hardware seemed decent. If I were to look at a Windows Phone 7 device, it would probably be the Samsung variant.

She just loves the phone to death. She was especially enamored of the Swype text entry, which was a critical factor in choosing that phone over an iPhone.

Occasionally she gets stumped by things on it, but that'll happen with any phone. Here's an interesting recent stumpy example:

She ordered a customized "skin" for the thing. Plastic vinyl wrapping for the back and the front bezel with a picture printed on it. Front bezel picture is supposed to line up with the digital wallpaper for the icon screen background. The company sent her an email with a correctly-cropped and positioned version of the wallpaper file.

But opening it up in the email app, there was no way to save the wallpaper file. It was an inline image instead of an attachment, and there was no way to save the inline image from within the email app.

I don't know if the iPhone would have a similar problem or not. Probably would. Anyway, I thought it was funny how they send you a file that you're supposed to save on that particular brand/model of phone, and they send it to you the exact way that the email app on that phone won't allow you to save.

No, the iPhone can save inline images in email to the photo album (and from there, set as background). Ditto for images on web pages too.

Do they have a web page where you can get the image, then save it from the android browser? Or maybe cut and paste it to the photo app?

Heh. I should have actually tried it before posting that.




Don't know for sure, I think she used these guys. The email from them didn't seem to indicate there was any other way to get the file. She ended up having to open up the email on her PC and re-mail the file to herself as an attachment, which she could then save on the phone.

In theory she could have just attached the phone to her PC with the USB cable and put the original source image file on there herself (we had already discussed the absurdity of Gelaskins emailing you back a cropped version of a file that you already had to begin with), but when she tried connecting with the USB cable, she had trouble actually being able to open the phone as a USB storage device in Windows Explorer.

It's probably the same issue that I had on the Mac. The phone ships in a mode where it only talks to Kies by default. Go into settings, Applications, USB Mode, and try the other options. On my Mac, I also had to turn on USB Debugging on the phone to get things working.

Looks like my Android 1.6 device is finally going to see Froyo. I'll have to tinker with this once I'm settled in out in California.

http://www.funkyspacemonkey.com/bootlance-install-android-os-iphone-2g3g-computer

Android fragmentation! Android fragmentation!

Heh, I saw that. I still don't know how you use Android without any of the face buttons. You could get by without the home and search buttons, I think, but the back and menu buttons are pretty essential...

And where had your AutoAppOrganizer survey ended?

Uh, nowhere, really.

Looks like this should be doable now once your account is transitioned.


And not to stir this old pot too much, but had I kept the Captivate, I'd still be running 2.1 today had I chosen to stay within the supported bounds of the device. Samsung is starting to upset a lot of Android owners with a nearly non existent update cycle for their US bound products. T-Mobile's variant, the Vibrant is supposed to start seeing Froyo updates today. All during a time when the Nexus S (A slightly tweaked Galaxy S) is shipping with 2.3 Gingerbread.

Unfortunately I'm tagged by this: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1050693

Looks like my Analytics and Voice accounts are holding me back.

Most manufacturers seem to be getting little better in regards to updates, but over-all you're not going to see the same type of upgradeability as general-purpose computers and a certain other brand of phones.

These companies just come from a different background and their business methodologies are completely different, based on high product churn. They're trying to apply the same principles to smart phones as they always have to feature and dumb phones.

Google isn't interested in the slightest either because their OS is geared toward one thing and one thing only, delivering ad impressions. Android will get better and even more wide spread than it is now, but I think 2 or even 5 years from now, the same complaints will exist.

Interesting to note that the Nexus One has been updated to Android 2.2.2.

Interesting because 2.3 has been out for a month on the Nexus S.

Loving the Desire HD I have had for a week now. (Needed to get something that would happily do Active Sync with my exchange server) - Froyo with the Go Launcher is fast, and I like some of the GPS/compass tools

I would still far rather have buttons, but where this wins hands down over the iPhone is I just throw my fingers at the screen keyboard and 99% of the time it figures it out even if I hit the wrong buttons!

It's pretty damn whizzy :-)

Battery life isn't good - need to charge it every couple of days, so I've had to get used to not just charging it on a Saturday, but I'll cope I guess

A couple of days! I had/have the battery draining problem with mine, it will drain it in under 12 hours unless I have USB Debugging enabled. With it enabled it will easily do over 24hrs, but the only things syncing are GMail/Yahoo Mail and eBay.

Jeez - well, second day I got it I got a full set of toggle widgets, so my default is nothing connecting except phone and my Exchange mail. I have gmail connect hourly.

Everything else I toggle on when I need it (magnetics, GPS, wifi etc) with one touch. Although I haven't looked at USB debugging - it only ever comes on briefly when I connect to my laptop but then is disabled as soon as sync starts.

Yeah, a couple days amazes me.

Fortunately, I have a dock for my phone that sits on my nightstand. I've always used my phone as an alarm clock anyway, so I just set it on that dock (it has contact charging) and it charges every night.

Rory, you might be interested in "Power Control Plus." It costs a couple bucks, but gives you the best, most customizable power control widget I've seen. Definitely blows away the stock Android power widget.

Also, while I haven't seen the Go Launcher, my launcher of choice these days is called Zeam. I've attached a photo of the home screen I've created using it, and I like how clean it is. I've had it remove the text from my shortcuts, I've added 1 row and 1 column, the menu bar is hidden, and the dock at the bottom only has some shortcuts I use a lot on it. I launch the dialer by swiping up, I bring notification shade down by swiping down, and I launch the master list of apps by double tapping on the screen (these are all customizable).

The power widget you see there isn't the one I was talking about, it's just the standard one. The power widget I have now has the following buttons (that I chose): auto rotate on/off, bluetooth on/off, wifi on/off, brightness toggle (w/ four levels), mute on/off, and a flashlight button that turns the LED on for a surprisingly bright light.

Anyway, I'm glad you're liking your Android phone. What keyboard is on there? The way you talk about it, it sounds like non-stock, but I can't tell what it is...

Whilst I don't know how you'd do better since all smartphones have loads of icons, I don't see how thats "clean". Its just a mass of icons and widgets. You not use the multiple screens?

I just use Launcher Pro along with some widgets like the calendar and Google Voice. All the random items which I don't use all the time get stuck on one of the extra screens which I just swipe left/right to get to.

Meh. Your opinion. I think it looks better than when it has the text under the icons. Fine, I'll say it's "Cleaner." I've also tweaked it since then, taking some of it off.

And no, I have a single home screen. IMO, if you have more than two screens that you have to swipe between, it takes far longer to get to an icon you need by swiping. The three icons on the top right (the ones with text) are actually widgets that act like folders (they don't let me take the text off). Those apps are two taps away, and I find that quicker than even one swipe and a tap.

Anyway, I have pretty quick access to everything on my phone - that I use - with my current setup. Nothing is more than one screen press away.


Sorry, you added this after I started my reply. I was using Launcher Pro, but from what I've seen, Zeam is faster. I also wanted to minimize the widgets I use, as those can slow things down and clutter up the screen. I'm down to three widgets: Tweetdeck, which posts to Twitter and Facebook in one widget; Power Control Plus, which lets me toggle almost anything on my phone; and App Organizer for organizing the remaining apps that I don't have on my home screen.

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/revie...-on-a-leash.ars

For future reference if I try Android again. The Samsung modified mail client was one of my biggest issues, though it sounds like the stock Android one is also pretty bad.

Yeah, from what I've seen of it it's not very good. Fortunately I live in GMail, and that client works beautifully.

Sprint announces dual-screen Android phone

It's hideously ugly.

It's made by Kyocera.

The dual screens are completely unnecessary.

Using the few applications that can take advantage of the two screens sounds like a complicated mess.


But damn, I just find it interesting There's not a chance I would buy it, and it will fail miserably on the market, but I'd love to check it out.

Hopefully it might be one of those things that fails and is availed used quite cheaply. The problem would be that it will never get upgrades, and if it's unloved by the community there won't be any unofficial ROMs

Hallelujah! If you have a Nexus One (I know there are a couple people here), you can now run Gingerbread!

It might just because it's new, but there seem to be some speed and stability improvements.

My current favorite new feature (aside from the darker theme) is the standby animation. I took a video of it:



*edit* if you need a guide on the installation, here

Woohoo!

Bitt, I have to ask if you ever see this on your N1:

Sometimes, when I press the power button to turn the phone on from standby, for some reason the lock screen won't respond to my touch. Mostly, it just seems frozen. I'm then led on this journey of frustration:

• I press the power button again, and it doesn't turn off the phone, it just dims the screen like it does when it starts timing out
• I press the power button again, and the screen returns to full brightness - I'm still unable to get it to react to my touch
• I press the button again, and sometimes the screen will turn off or it will repeat steps 1 and 2
• If it goes off, I press it again and sometimes only the "hard" buttons will come on, but pressing any of them doesn't do anything, and I don't get that haptic feedback I usually get from them

All this stuff will repeat in various orders for about two minutes or until I leave the phone alone or (what I've resorted to recently) until I pop the battery out.

So far I haven't had the experience in 2.3, and in fact I haven't noticed any little weirdness at all that I can think of. This was the only really bad bug I was having before the upgrade (and it was only happening one out of every 30-60 or so times I'd try to use the phone).

In fact, another bug that I've been trying to get Google to listen to for almost a year now seems to have been fixed! Thank goodness for Gingerbread!

...now I want some cookies...

Nope, never seen that. Occasionally it'll be slow to respond, but that's usually when the CPU is maxed out doing something else. But I don't think I've had a pull-the-battery situation more than once or twice ever.

I think I've seen something similar a couple of times, but I don't run plain Android. I use Kang-o-rama 1.1 SP1 ROM. Just waiting for 1.2 to be released...

Stig

Interesting. I'm guessing it's some app I've installed. Wish I knew which one so I could write the developer an angry letter. I bet it's this one awful app called "SD Move" or something...



ps- just kidding, everyone should download SD Move. I use it every time I download a new app or see old apps get updates.

I'm curious, what made you pick that one over the Cyanogen ROM?

No other reason than that it had several programs bundled in, so most of them were put in the more write-protected flash than if you installed them yourself, giving you more space for other programs. At least, I think that was the reason why I installed it. I was running CM first. KoR is basically CM with extra programs added.

Stig

You know about my SDWatch, right? It's even better for maintenance.

No I did not! But I just went to the Market website and installed it! Thanks!

Ps- have you guys used the Market site? I love being able to install applications directly from the web...

I'm using both, and they work very good. Unless, of course, they're causing the problem Matt reported...


Haven't even heard of it. I take it you're browsing a certain address using the phone? What's the difference from the regular market?

Stig

Nope! I'm talking about a site I browse to on my PC. If you go here, you can browse the entire market, and when you click "Install" on any app, it automatically installs on your device.

The general idea is that while using an app repository to download a specific app is fine on the phone, it's not the greatest browsing experience. A full desktop or laptop might be better for that.

I think it's also a nice way for people interested in Android to see the apps available.

The iOS side has had both options from the start, and I'd say about 80% of the apps I have came from iTunes on the desktop. The remaining 20% or so were downloaded on the phone or iPad directly, usually when someone recommends me an app while out and about. It's a nice upgrade for Android, and even has the benefit of doing the install directly on the phone when you click buy, instead of having to then run a manual sync.

But that's it, it's not quite the same thing. There's no syncing, and there's no software you have to install on your computer. I can just browse around, and in two clicks the app is installed one my phone.

*edit*
It's been possible to do this on Android for quite a while now. There's a site/app called AppBrain that did the same thing and added social features. I've uninstalled it now because this does the same thing and is from Google.

One thing: are you certain iOS has had that "from the start?" I seem to recall that apps weren't part of iTunes at first... I know it had that feature before Android has this one, but I didn't think it was right out of the gate like you're saying...

I meant to say it's the same general idea, the concept of on phone or on computer browsing. With both options, it meets peoples needs well, no matter their situation. From my experience, I do prefer browsing on a larger screen. The on phone method tends to only be used when I'm going for a specific app and I'm away from a computer. Since AppBrain wasn't built in, fewer people would know and use it, so this is a good thing for Google to host themselves.


Yes, the apps were in iTunes before the phone could even use them (by a day). I remember browsing and grabbing a few before updating my iPhone to the 2.0 release.


Prior to 2.0, Apple did add an iTunes store to the phone, for music and podcast downloading only.

Cool, wasn't aware of that.

One benefit of not requiring iTunes is that you can easily provide a link to an application that the user can then install to their phone. I'm aware that you can do this for iOS devices too, but when you don't have iTunes those links are seriously annoying (and not always well identified).

It's a definite improvement over what most blogs would do in the past for Android apps, which was to include a QR code in their article that the user had to scan with a barcode reader app.

I have a tip for Android users. For a while now, I've been trying to figure out a way to get photos I take with my phone to sync to my desktop without having to plug into USB. I've always been a little surprised that this wasn't built into Android using something like Picasa or Google Desktop.

Well, after quite a bit of research today, I stumbled across an app called Dropin. You do have to give it your DropBox credentials (I'm always wary of giving a site credentials for another site), but once you do it works extremely well. It syncs all your photos and videos to DropBox and then to your PC.

Hopefully Google will eventually make a first party app or Gallery feature that will do something similar, but for now I'm finding this to be a pretty good way to do it.

Thanks...I've been looking for that and am already a Dropbox user, so this is perfect.

What do you Android guys think of this one. LINK

I am thinking of getting one with the 25 dollar a month plan. I don't really need the phone much. This sounds like a good deal to me I haven't seen any other data plan this cheap and I don't want a contract anyway.

The place I work at has deemed us unworthy of have Black Berries. (I need a new job ) We are supposed to have another way to get company email in the field but I would miss having a mobile way to get my personal email.

I pretty much use Gmail and Google Maps now.

Huh. Didn't know they had that. I always thought it was stupid that they didn't have an official mechanism for browsing and installing apps on the market that wasn't via your phone. Thanks. Much easier and nicer using that site!

To be honest, I probably wouldn't recommend that phone, purely due to the speed. It's 600Mhz, which is just a hair faster than the first round of Android phones from the beginning of '09. It'll be faster than most of those because of 2.2 (if it has the JIT), but it's still going to be slow.

The plans are good though...

That's what some of the comments say on the Virgin site but then some people come back saying that it's faster than that because it has multiple processors. What kind of processor speeds does something like the Nexus S (which I am thinking is the Cadillac of Android phones)have ?

The other one they offer is a Samsung http://www.virginmobileusa.com/cell-phones/samsung-intercept-phone.jsp

The downside to this one is it only has 2.1 and it sounds like Samsung never updates their stuff.

I originally thought I would want a physical keyboard but after using a horizontal sliding one like this phone i'm thinking the on screen would be better. Plus the phone is smaller without one. I haven't tried an on screen one though so I might hate that more
That's one thing that sucks with the Virgin Mobile stuff I have never seen working demo units anyplace.

The Virgin one has a relatively low power CPU (more-or-less equivalent to the original Motorola Droid), has pretty limited internal storage (which means you won't be able to have a lot of apps installed at once*), and has a low-res display. However, the plan is awfully cheap. I personally like Virgin Mobile for calls, but they used to try to screw you on the data. Assuming that the data plan isn't weirdly limited in some way, and as long as you know you're not getting anything near top-of-the-line specs on the phone, I think it sounds like a good deal. I'd actually been considering getting one for the wife (her current phone is a Virgin Mobile dumbphone), but she wouldn't know what to do with it.

* There are ways to get around the limited internal storage, though, where you can kind of automatically install and uninstall apps as you need them, keeping them on the SD card.

The Optimus is 600MHz vs 1GHz for the Nexus S. Unless I'm missing something, the Optimus has a normal ARM processor, single core, and just one of them.

The onscreen keyboard on the Optimus should be pretty much like any other Android phone. Play with another one and see how it works for you. I thought I'd hate the onscreen keyboards, too, but, other than every once in a while when I can't seem to type anything to save my life, I've been pretty pleased with the normal Android keyboard.

Well, the 3GS runs OS4.x and is "only" 600MHz too... though yes, it's a Cortex-A8 600MHz and not an ARM11 600MHz, which is a decent difference and further reinforces why it's stupid comparing clock rates between architectures even from the same vendor (eg: original 1GHz snapdragons vs the new 1GHz snapdragons)

That's true, and thanks for the input. Though, I'd point out that while it might be the speed of the 3GS, that phone is also nearing two years old now.


I'm right there with you, Bitt. I chose to get the G1 for two reasons: it did GMail better than the iPhone, and it had a physical keyboard. I insisted that I hated on-screen keyboards. I've changed my tune on the keyboard (Android still does GMail better than any other phone, though ).

The one caveat I'd have about the virtual keyboard on the Optimus (and the Intercept, now that I look at it), though, is that the 3.2" screen is smaller than average. That might make the keyboard pretty cramped. For comparison, the iPhone is 3.5" (the difference might not seem like much, but it is), the Nexus One is 3.7", and the Nexus S is 4".

One solution might be to buy a used phone and bring it to Virgin. Unfortunately, Virgin is an MVNO of Sprint here in the US, so it's CDMA, which might be tricky. Does anyone know if this would be possible? You might have to give Virgin a call to find out. Also unfortunate is that Sprint doesn't have the best selection of Android phones to begin with. I'm not sure which one I'd recommend if you were going with them, either...

*edit*
ps- A grammar question for you, Bitt: I actually looked this one up, but couldn't find much. If I'm ending a sentence with a measurement (like 4"), do I still put the period inside the quotes? It seems wrong to me, but that happens a great deal I also stumbled across some page that claimed there were instances in which you put a question mark outside a quote, but I'm not sure about that either...

Virgin does not do BYOD.

The " indicating inches is not a quotation mark, so: no, you do not put a period before it.

American standard usage is to put the final period inside quotation marks, but (I believe) British standard usage is to close the quotation mark then have a period. (But what of Canadians?) I often find myself doing it the British way. It just seems more natural to me, as a matter of grammar, although typographically it's prettier to have the period inside the quotation marks.

Okay Bitt, double or nothing: You want to end a sentence with a quotation of a sentence (e.g., Bob said, "you must be crazy."). In standard American usage, you'd have one period, inside the quotation mark. In British usage, what, two periods? And furthermore, if you want to have a footnote at the end of the sentence to say where you got the quote, where does that go?

AFAIK, British usage requires the punctuation inside the quotes. At least, that's how I was taught. Almost nobody does it that way, though. In particular I don't do it because it offends my mathematical/computer-programming/OCD-afflicted brain in that it's not nested correctly.

God I would hope so

I was watching some videos and I can't imagine how Swype with one finger would be faster than being able to use two thumbs. The Swype website has a video of a guy entering text pretty fast but two thumbs seems like it would be faster.

I also saw a video comparing the Optimus to the Intercept which is 800mhz and the Optimus was going a lot faster. The Intercept has 2.1 so that could be the reason but the guy recording the video also said the Optimus has a separate GPU and the Intercept does not.

Didn't Optimus used to be a crappy Radio Shack brand ?

Just one period. You always leave off the period of the quotation, the same as if the it were not at the end of the surrounding sentence, but American usage pulls the sentence-ending period back inside the quotation mark, because it's prettier. It's really just a typographical convention, not really a grammatical one.

My opinion is that a footnote indicator should immediately follow whatever it's referring to, and it might be referring either to the quotation or the sentence, so I don't know that there's a single answer there. If you're footnoting the quotation, and it's at the end of the sentence, and you're putting the period outside the quotation, I would put the footnote indicator on the same vertical as the period, if possible. Otherwise, I'd put it after the period, as that gap that would be created between the end of the sentence and the period is awkward and ugly.

The notion is that you don't have to be as precise. I personally find that normal typing is easier and faster.


There are some potential performance improvements with 2.2, but the biggest one, the JIT, is only available for Snapdragon CPUs, so that's not relevant here.

Doing some more research, it seems that the CPU in the Optimus does have some additional on-die cores for GPU, etc. So I guess you're right about that.

It's the same phone as the Optimus S, Optimus T, and Vertex, though, so maybe you could go to a Sprint, T-Mobile, or Verizon store (respectively) and play with one of their display models.

I gave Swype a good long trial period, but in the end I just didn't like it at all. Not only did I not find it faster in the long run, I found it far slower because it would frequently get words wrong, necessitating that I delete the word and try it again. For a while, I was trying to use it with a mix of typing and swiping, but then I just felt like I might as well type all the time.

Personally, I've found that SwiftKey is phenomenal. I prefer it to Swype because with Swype, you have to rely on the swipe mechanism to use the keyboard. With Swiftkey, it's basically just a very advanced version of the built-in keyboard, it just has FAR better predictive capabilities from the start, and learns your own patterns as you use it. Because of this, you are at the very least as fast as you would be with a standard typing keyboard, but in some cases I've tapped out 10-word sentences in about 12-14 screen presses.

Swype user sets Guinness World Record for texting speed

The record is/was 37.28 seconds and that was with a Nokia N85 which has a regular phone keypad.

Ooh, over half as fast as morse!

I've long thought it would be cool to have a couple touch sensors on the sides of the phone I could use as morse paddles. Lots of folks can morse faster than I can type on a full sized keyboard.

Heh he he. So neatly twisted.

So I bought the Optimus V and it seems to move pretty fast to me.

I am still trying to figure out how to do everything but here's one dumb thing so far.

They had a email icon on the home screen I figure ok that must be Gmail. So I put it my login info and my email comes up but i'm thinking this really sucks for a os made by Google I would expect Gmail to work better on it.

Then I decide to go to the marketplace and see a Gmail app from Google. I installed that and it's much better !

It's odd that the thing didn't come with Gmail on there by default but whatever. Google maps wasn't on there either.