Android!

[Quinton]

I suppose I could get a Bluetooth thumb-board (lag wouldn't matter so much there), but that's another card-deck sized piece of hardware to find pocket room for, and remember to charge (Yay, another wall-wart to keep track of).

Our BT guys are working on BT HID for an upcoming release, so external BT keyboards should be doable.  I don't think you'll see anything that can do HDMI out with UI above WVGA/FWVGA until at least 2011 (the current generation of mobile ARM SoCs just can't move that many pixels -- many have 720p/1080p video decode but none that I've seen have the GPU or CPU bandwidth to pull off HD UI).

I do miss a good hard keyboard.  Droid doesn't quite have the keyboard I want.  Love NexusOne but I'm just never going to type as fast on a soft keyboard which means I use my phone a lot less for messaging/email/notetaking than I did back when I worked on and carried a hiptop device.

[ffc]

http://android.clients.google.com/packages/passion/signed-passion-FRF72-from-FRF50.bc033f9e.zip

Froyo update for the Nexus One, must have already installed the FRF50 build.  I still have it on my phone if anyone needs it.  Going to update in a bit.

[Draegan]

Since I still have the G1 and I'm a dinosaur now, can someone explain the differences in the different versions?  I lost track right around before 2.0 came out.

[Lantien]

FYI:

http://www.androidpolice.com/2010/06/21/google-officially-updates-us-on-froyo-status-frf72-was-not-final-release-date-still-unknown-on-its-way-shortly/

Ry Guy

Google Employee
07:03 PM

Hey guys,

Just dropping in to let you know that the FRF72 build that is floating around is not the official update. The Android team is feverishly working to get a final version out the door, but like passion-ate has mentioned this will only happen once a release candidate meets our quality criteria.

Since today is the Summer Solstice, we know things will be heating up a bit so hopefully Froyo will be on its way shortly. Thanks for your continued patience!

-Ry Guy

I've set July 1st as my drop dead date for just updating it manually with one of the pre-releases (I'd like froyo on the phone before I travel internationally).

Since I still have the G1 and I'm a dinosaur now, can someone explain the differences in the different versions?  I lost track right around before 2.0 came out.

Honestly wikipedia does it so much better than I could: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29

[Draegan]

Honestly wikipedia does it so much better than I could: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29

Thank you sir.

[ffc]

Despite not being the official release, FRF50 and 72 sure feel like it.  Even typing is faster.

When the official release is pushed out it should have a different build number so people who manually updated will get the official update as well.

[Quinton]

FRF50 and FRF72 are indeed quite close to final.  There have only been minor changes (chasing one or two release blocking bugs).

[Salamok]

Is there a way to browse the android marketplace from a computer?

[Quinton]

Not officially (yet).  We demoed the web front-end to the Android Market and it'll be available in the future (don't know if we've set any hard dates on this yet off the top of my head).  It'll include being able to buy/install apps from the web interface, etc, etc.

There are a number of third party sites that scrape the market data (I haven't played with many of these, no promises about how good they are), here are a few:
http://www.androidzoom.com/
http://www.androlib.com/
http://www.cyrket.com/m/android/

[Segoris]

I've browsed around with www.androlib.com/ before and that was okay. http://www.android.com/market/#app=com.epocrates was also one I've seen before but I felt it was limited without having a search box. It is basically limited to featured apps, top free, and top paid of certain categories.

I know I'm still looking for something that can offer more search options though if someone knows of an app or website (things like by developer, or storing trusted developers on your sd card and able to make recommendations based on those developers and/or apps).

edit - for androilib, it also shows the QR code which I've found handy when searching the actual market doesn't work. An example would be Quinton's mentioning of Digital Rain wallpaper a few pages back. I couldn't get that on my phone without that QR code, since searching the market from my phone only produced frustrations and never produced the result of the application I was looking for. So that is one nice thing about that website at least.

[Salamok]

edit - for androilib, it also shows the QR code which I've found handy when searching the actual market doesn't work. An example would be Quinton's mentioning of Digital Rain wallpaper a few pages back. I couldn't get that on my phone without that QR code, since searching the market from my phone only produced frustrations and never produced the result of the application I was looking for. So that is one nice thing about that website at least.

exactly what I was looking for, next best thing to being able to install an app to your phone from your web browser.

[bhodi]

On my incredible (2.1) my battery life is total crap. It's actually really frustrating; I can't figure out what's draining it, but I'm getting about 18 hours on standby, not using the phone at all. Looking at the about->battery->battery use it's about 45% cell standby and 45% idle on 'regular' use, which is basically no texts, no phone calls, and an hour or two of non-streamed music. I've turned everything to 4 hour or greater check (except gmail, can't find the frequency check of that) and there aren't any programs running in the background unless they are embedded into the com.whatever.

It's extremely frustrating that I can't even go 24 hours without charging even if I do literally nothing with the phone. Is there maybe something that I accidentally installed that's sucking the life? Is there anything I can do but put it into airplane mode? Maybe a program that breaks down what's using it better? Turn off gps/3g(cdma) unless I intend to use it? I'm pretty much out of ideas. Airplane mode (obviously) significantly increases my battery life. My coworker who has a nexus one has a completely different battery breakdown while idle so I keep thinking there is something funky going on.

[Quinton]

Do you have really poor reception?  That will, unfortunately, seriously impact battery life.

Do you have wifi enabled?  In some environments this also can be rough on battery life.

If you want to get a more extensive breakdown of use, you can install the sdk, enable usb debugging (under settings / manage applications/ development) and grab a full bugreport like so:  adb bugreport > bugreport.txt

I'd be happy to take a look and/or point out things you can look at.  For example under "DUMP OF SERVICE batteryinfo" in the bugreport there will be extensive data on what is waking the phone up, how many times, and for how long, which looks like: http://frotz.net/misc/battery-stats-unplugged.txt

Charging the device to full and letting it run unplugged for at least a few hours before plugging it in and grabbing the bugreport gives the best pictures usually.

[Ingmar]

It seems to be a common complaint with the Incredible, I have a couple co-workers with the same issue - won't last even a day on one charge.

Happily doesn't seem to be an issue with the regular Droid.

[Engels]

GF is reporting pretty poor battery life on the HTC EVO. Its down to 30% after 12 hours. After I told her what Quinton said about poor reception, she thinks it may be due to her workplace, where she gets poor reception. Kinda a drag to have to put your phone into airplane mode or shut it off for 8 hours of the day just to use it :/

[Quinton]

One thing I've heard with the EVO is the 4G network can be *really* power hungry.  Combined with poor coverage, I imagine it'd be even more painful.  I think there's an option to disable that somewhere.  Might be worth checking out.   

I'm curious what's different with the Incredible (since the hardware platform is almost identical to Nexus One) -- I routinely see 2-3 days with my N1 with light usage and only extremely rarely (usually under pretty heavy usage) don't make it through a day.  Installed apps can definitely make a big difference.  In particular anything that regularly hits the network to poll for data can have a large impact on battery life.  The new Cloud-to-Device-Sync service rolling out with froyo will let third party apps make use of the existing sync connection for notifications, which should help with that a bit.

[KallDrexx]

Woo

So the Droid X was officially announced.  Furthermore they announced that anyone on Verizon with a 2010 contract expiration/upgrade eligibility date will automatically be able to renew their contract for a Droid X. 

[bhodi]

I'm curious what's different with the Incredible (since the hardware platform is almost identical to Nexus One) -- I routinely see 2-3 days with my N1 with light usage and only extremely rarely (usually under pretty heavy usage) don't make it through a day.  Installed apps can definitely make a big difference.  In particular anything that regularly hits the network to poll for data can have a large impact on battery life.  The new Cloud-to-Device-Sync service rolling out with froyo will let third party apps make use of the existing sync connection for notifications, which should help with that a bit.

Yeah, it's very strange. It was fully charged at work when I left last night, have done a few texts this morning and listened to an hour or so of music. Went to dinner, walked around last night, and battery is currently half full 7/10 bars full. 40% cell standby, 38% phone idle, 16% android system, 6% display. uptime 9:19, awake time 1:02. 9h19m since unplugged.  signal strength -96dBm to -78dBm depending on where on my desk it is. One bar. I believe I'm mid 80s at home where I spend most of my day normally. Wifi is turned off, as is bluetooth. Sadly I'm still a version behind, running 2.1-update1.

Normal services running. Calandar/ObexService. Touch Input. com.google.process.gapps gtalk service. com.fusionone.android.sync.service (this is a sense ui thing which I think gmail hooks into?) messages transaction service.  HTC message uploader, upload message service.

There's an app called juicedefender but it doesn't work on the incredible, unfortunately. I wonder if it's low cell strength that's sapping my battery; that seems likely. People have mentioned the incredible does not have as good reception as the N1, so maybe it's that. I definitely wish I could see how often gmail checks/syncs but I can't break the sneaking suspicion it's some hidden app, maybe that was installed by default. I notice my 3g bar lights up briefly after I take the phone out of standby/lock.


On tha app front, people are talking endlessly abut how wonderful launcherpro is and there's now a new dock-esque app that you can double tap from anywhere to bring up applications that's apparently useful / borderline addicting. Called quickdesk. Also, swype is officially giving out beta versions for 4 different varieties of phones. I'll try swype someday.

[Engels]

One thing I've heard with the EVO is the 4G network can be *really* power hungry.  Combined with poor coverage, I imagine it'd be even more painful.  I think there's an option to disable that somewhere.  Might be worth checking out.   

This is unfortunately true, and as such, she hasn't used 4G since she got the phone. It kills the phone in 3 hours, just on idle. Its essentially an unusable feature.

Her problem is different. I think maybe her email accounts are constantly polling the exchange/yahoo servers for new mail. It seems great, since she gets a blinky green light to notify her of new email, but I don't think we're there quite yet.

[TripleDES]

The new Cloud-to-Device-Sync service rolling out with froyo will let third party apps make use of the existing sync connection for notifications, which should help with that a bit.

It's already in Froyo? Wasn't there a Chrome extension that required you to install something additional phone-side, too, Froyo or not?

Also, FRF83, final or not? I've received it OTA on my FRF72 install.

[Quinton]

One thing I've heard with the EVO is the 4G network can be *really* power hungry.  Combined with poor coverage, I imagine it'd be even more painful.  I think there's an option to disable that somewhere.  Might be worth checking out.   

Her problem is different. I think maybe her email accounts are constantly polling the exchange/yahoo servers for new mail. It seems great, since she gets a blinky green light to notify her of new email, but I don't think we're there quite yet.

How many email accounts?  Using the email app or gmail?  The gmail app will tend to win battery-wise, since it's more push based using the sync system, and uses a single channel for all notifications.  The email app is actually polling the POP or IMAP servers which is more network traffic, more wakeups, and more battery drain.  It does have a setting to adjust how often it polls.

[Quinton]

There's an app called juicedefender but it doesn't work on the incredible, unfortunately. I wonder if it's low cell strength that's sapping my battery; that seems likely. People have mentioned the incredible does not have as good reception as the N1, so maybe it's that. I definitely wish I could see how often gmail checks/syncs but I can't break the sneaking suspicion it's some hidden app, maybe that was installed by default. I notice my 3g bar lights up briefly after I take the phone out of standby/lock.

If you're feeling adventuresome, start grabbing some bugreports and poking through the logs.  There's a *lot* of data that the device gathers about what's going on, and often you can find some useful clues.  I should check and see if we have any documents published on how to read the entrails of a bugreport.

For battery drain stuff, I usually start by searching for:

Unplugged Statistics (Since last unplugged from power):
  Time on battery: 16h 7m 47s 323ms (100.0%) realtime, 48m 55s 622ms (5.1%) uptime
  Total run time: 16h 7m 55s 323ms realtime, 49m 3s 622ms uptime,
  Screen on: 16m 17s 394ms (1.7%), Input events: 287, Active phone call: 1m 1s 160ms (0.1%)
  Screen brightnesses: dark 21s 5ms (2.1%), medium 15m 56s 388ms (97.9%)

Then scan down for the various app status (by process ID), for example:

  #10027:
    Network: 293.51KB received, 240.43KB sent
    Wake lock window: (nothing executed)
    Wake lock GmailProviderProviderChangedBroadcastWakeLock: 1m 31s 662ms partial (48 times) realtime

In this case, across 16 hours of operation, gmail requested to keep the CPU running 48 times, for a total of 91 seconds, and moved a bit over 500KB over the network interface.   Probably not a smoking gun.

In all these logs "uptime" means "time the CPU was running" and "realtime" means "wall clock time".  Typically uptime is a tiny fraction of realtime, since the device spends the vast majority of its operational time with the CPU halted and powered down.

[Engels]

Quinton, thanks tons for spending time with these issues. I'll see how the GF's set up her email accounts. She's got yahoo and an exchange account, as well as an unused gmail account she needed to use to access android features (or so she tells me).

Its just fantastic to have you around as a resource like this. I promise not to abuse the privilege!

[Jherad]

Not sure if it has been mentioned before in this thread, but I find Appbrain pretty good for web-installing android market apps.

Install the appbrain app from the market on your phone, then browse the site on your PC and select everything you want installed. When you sync with the app on your phone, it'll prompt you for installs of each app. Also handles app updates, though the market place app seems to be doing this itself now.

Annoyingly, can't seem to sort apps by rating/downloads however.

I'm using an incredible, and get absolutely shocking battery life, with admittedly fairly heavy usage. Getting through about 2 1/2 batteries per 24h (original 1300 battery, along with 2 cheap 1500 knockoffs). I generally don't have wifi or gps on, but often have a pretty poor signal.

[KallDrexx]

On tha app front, people are talking endlessly abut how wonderful launcherpro is...

Launcher pro is amazingly fast.  It's so fast it boggles my mind that some random developer was able to make such a smooth and high performance launcher and yet even Google's own Froyo launcher isn't nearly as smooth.

[NiX]

I'm using an incredible, and get absolutely shocking battery life, with admittedly fairly heavy usage. Getting through about 2 1/2 batteries per 24h (original 1300 battery, along with 2 cheap 1500 knockoffs). I generally don't have wifi or gps on, but often have a pretty poor signal.

Something has to be up. Especially if you're running a 2.X version of Android. My hero is on 1.5 and I get about a day and a half if not more out of it. I do lots of texting and at least 2-3 calls a day (5-10 minutes each). Are you using a task manager? Any time I go to lock my phone, I open the task manager and kill all running processes. You'd be surprised what just decides it's going to run for no apparent reason (Sudoku was a culprit for me.)

[Jherad]

Yeah, been using 'Task Manager' (with the grey android icon) for that purpose, though to be honest, I've not noticed a big battery performance increase when I keep clearing out the background apps.

Breaking down my battery use information, it appears my 'time without a signal' is pretty high (between 20% and 40%) in a given day, so perhaps the constant re-connections are killing me. I use both the mail app (with hourly polling), and gmail, and have a couple of news apps (NYT and HPost) which have dug themselves in as services.

Edit: Polling!

[snowwy]

Can you open the damn app store to european customers soon pwease? Trial versions of excellent apps gets old real fast

edit : battery-life on new HTC Desire is ..........shit. Yeah, i use it a lot cause it's new and it's fun but damn.........

[Engels]

Well, the mystery of my GF's android phone is at least partially solved; she stayed home all day, where we get perfect Sprint reception, and even with the phone checking email every now and again, the charge stayed at 90%. In other words, at work, where she gets cruddy reception, her phone is draining ~60-70% from spotty reception.

[Lantien]

Well, the mystery of my GF's android phone is at least partially solved; she stayed home all day, where we get perfect Sprint reception, and even with the phone checking email every now and again, the charge stayed at 90%. In other words, at work, where she gets cruddy reception, her phone is draining ~60-70% from spotty reception.

If your girlfriend has a job that tethers her to her desk, one compromise might be to get a USB charge cable and just dock the phone to the computer for the bulk of the day.  Fairly non-intrusive, just remember to take the phone with you at night.

[Engels]

Ya, that's a good thought. We probably have to buy an extra charger USB cable, cuz the phone only came with one.

[KallDrexx]

Ya, that's a good thought. We probably have to buy an extra charger USB cable, cuz the phone only came with one.

See if the charging cable is a plain mini or micro USB.  Then you can get a good cable for $4 instead of $30 from sprint.

[caladein]

Ya, that's a good thought. We probably have to buy an extra charger USB cable, cuz the phone only came with one.

See if the charging cable is a plain mini or micro USB.  Then you can get a good cable for $4 instead of $30 from sprint.

HTC says it's micro USB.

[Engels]

Looks like one of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812816066&cm_re=micro_usb_cable-_-12-816-066-_-Product

[MuffinMan]

Also in regards to the cable it might look like a special cable but a regular usb cable would still work. The cable that came with my Hero is a different shape but a regular mini-usb cable still plugs in and works the same. Don't know if they did the same with the EVO's micro though.