Let's talk Android Apps

What apps do I use on my Google Phone?

Generally, I install apps that are either useful or diverting. Often there's a bit of overlap, and some categories include show-offy or just-in-case-someday-maybe.

Toggle Settings: I use this one constantly to toggle wireless, Bluetooth, and GPS. I also use it to quick toggle brightness and ringer mode. It's pretty flexible. I used to use Any Cut to quick toggle Bluetooth, but Toggle Settings works better for me.

Twidroid: If you follow my twitter, you know I use this a fair amount. It's a little crashy, but the developers have a strong and active release cycle, which is nice.

AK Notepad: I carry around a 99-cent paper spiral notebook in my back pocket for most note-taking, but this is a handy digital alternative until Google Docs works on my phone. A lot of people seem surprised that I use paper.

Flashlight: When it says light, it means light. Max brightness, no sleep, all white. Very practical.

The Weather Channel: Boring but useful. Has some neat smarts about location if you travel.

Bubble and Compass are a bubble level and compass, respectively. Countdown Alarm++ and Stopwatch do what they say they do. Handy to have.

ParkMark and Location Log are "where's my car" sort of apps. I don't have a preference for one or the other yet. YMMV.

Wifiscan does the wardriving for you and outputs a Google Earth KML or CSV to your SD card. The developer is super friendly, too.

ConnectBot does ssh and does it well.

Magic 8-Ball is a fun show-off toy. Sky Map falls into the same category, but as a real star map that changes view as the phone moves and shows real-world views based on GPS and compass readings is much sexier to show off. Somewhat geekier is The Schwartz Unleashed, complete with motion-sensing lightsaber noises and custom colors.

Phonalyzr and Power Manager are usage tools. The former reads my call log and displays nifty usage data; I don't know how long it will stay around. The latter lets me tweak power preferences, but I don't use it fully.

Shazam really pushes the envelope for the cool factor. Play music, hold the phone to the speaker, wait, and it'll tell you what song you're hearing. Like having a portable music trivia geek in your pocket.

ShopSavvy scans UPS barcodes and returns real-world and web pricing. Very handy when comparison shopping.

I currently only have a few games on my phone, would you believe?

Tetroid: A tetris clone I haven't played yet. Gotta have tetris.

Scrambled Net: A nice port of the puzzle game knetwalk, but since lost its appeal for me. I'm good at these sorts of visual spatial puzzles.

Lexic: A Boggle clone. I like word games, but I have poor skill in Boggle.

Coloroid: Another puzzle game that's a bit maze-like, but not as addicting for me.

DroidDice and Chess Clock do not count as games; they are tools for real face-to-face gaming.

Communications convergence

Non-ironically, I want to opine about the various forms of communication I have at my fingertips, despite the fact that I've barely managed one blog post a week this month.

First, an examination of last month's NaBloPoMo experiment-slash-activity. Out of thirty days hath November, I wrote twenty-five posts. Not surprisingly, five of those days I went to BGG.Con and twittered my words. After con, I did up a Geeklist of the things I taught and played. I had thought that blogging once-a-day in November would have gotten me into the blogging habit; I think that BGG.Con and Twittering disrupted that nascent habit. Even though I cheated a little with some timestamps and missed a few days, I consider my November a blogging success.

Why the slowdown? Some of it is Twitter and my Google Phone. Right now, I get email, SMS messages, Google IM, Twitter, voice mail and phone calls on my telephone. I feel like I am communicating enough. Couple the tethering to my phone (sorry dear) with my sharing nifty RSS stuff, I know that I'm scratching my communications itch.

I still feel that blogging is/should be/is to me/feels like op-ed pieces; I want what I write to be interesting to everyone that I know reads it, plus the strangers who I don't know. Success is a variable here. Tweeting is the opposite of blogging.

I like my Gphone

I've seen a rfew reviews of the iPhone that basically acknowledge its coolness as a platform and a data window, but question its value as a phone. Many people come down on both sides of the fence, but the reviews I've seen generally fuss about dropped calls and the like, saying it's a great device, but an okay phone.

The Google phone (AKA HTC Dream, AKA the Android OS, AKA the Open Handset Alliance) is pretty nifty and generally succeeds as a phone.

Let me talk about the Dialer/contacts list app. It has four tabs at the top: Dialer, Call Log, Contacts, and Favorites. The actual phone dialer itself is straightforward: you press the button, you get the number Like virtually every cell phone, it's not a live dial pad in the sense that you can edit your number before you call in case you fat-finger it.

Call Log has all outgoing/incoming/missed together together, with handy icons in white and blue/green/red to catch the eye. If you're worried about not being able to ferret out your missed called amidst a sea of completed calls, worry not- missed calls are shunted to a "notification" section, so I an easily quickly check all new missed calls since the last time I checked.

Contacts sync with Gmail contacts pretty easily. I've had a few snags where I need to force a sync from my phone or touch a contact in Gmail so it would know to sync, but generally it's pretty good. I also had a huge kerfluffle when I accidentally imported hundreds of useless old contacts into Gmail, so be careful if you go that route. I'm also not happy with iSync's unwillingness to sync to Google unless I bought an iPhone.. but there are ways around everything.

The Favorites tab is particularly well-implemented. Star any contact, and it shows up in Favorites as well as in Gmail as "Starred in Android." It also is pretty smart about keeping frequently-contacted numbers automatically as part of favorites. I'll see how things change in the coming weeks as my dialing habits change.

Nutshell? I got a smart phone.

Android update

My phone tells me this morning that it wants a software update.

One selling point for me wrt the Android platform is the fact that it is an open platform- anybody can develop for it, or improve it, or build upon the work. Open Source, me likey. I know, on a deep an instinctual level, that hardware is much less important than it used to be- atoms are more and more a commodity these days. You buy a $50 off-the-shelf Linksys router, drop in a free third-party custom firmware, and you have the power of a full-on expensive router that would probably cost you at least few hundred bucks.

I don't really expect this first update to change the world or my phone to suddenly bake bread, but I'm pleased with the fact more than the details. This "minor bugfix" of an update evidently patches a security vulnerability in the browser. Big surprise, it's a buffer overflow.


For posterity's sake, before the update, my phone thought the following:

Firmware version: 1.0
Baseband: 62.33.20.08H_1.22.12.28
Kernel version: 2.6.25-01828-g18ac882 android-build@apa27 #1
Build number: kila-user 1.0 TC4-RC19 109652 ota-rel-keys,release-keys

The update took about four or five minutes to download, install, and reboot.

After the update, my phone thinks the following:

Firmware version: 1.0
Baseband: 62.33.20.08H_1.22.12.29
Kernel version: 2.6.25-01843-gfea26b0 android-build@apa27 #6
Build number: kila-user 1.0 TC4-RC29 115247 ota-rel-keys,release-keys

Neener, Neener, Neener

My Google Phone arrived today.