Android!

[Ghambit]

Nice.  SLCD will be much better for screen-on battery life.

How you figure?  LCD takes waaay more power than LED.  What exactly is so super about super LCD aside from better viewing angles and perhaps more natural colors?
Honestly, to me the move back to LCD was done simply due to the lack of OLED manufacturing.  Going organic LED is way expensive and supply is low.  Dont believe the hype when it comes to SLCD.  It's all about cost/reward.

I cant find anything definitive on power consumption comparisons...as largely that's dependent on graphics drivers, screen size, amount of zones, resolutions, etc.  Each phone is different, but taken pound for pound there's no LCD tech out there that draws less juice than LED no?

[Jherad]

Ok I feel somewhat retarded for asking this but how the hell do I join different contacts together? I manually plugged in pretty much all of my old phone book and then the Facebook app synced up, creating a whole load of new contacts. I'd like to be able to identify the contacts I've manually put in with their facebook contacts (since duplicates are bad, facebook profiles seem to mostly have old or no phone numbers and I don't have a lot of email addresses on my old phone). I know it's possible since I managed to do it with one of the first contacts I put in but since then I haven't been able to find the option. I've tried searching the web but the only mention I've found has been along the lines of "Use the join feature on the contacts".

I've got a Nexus One with 2.2 and it's really driving me crazy since the one time I did it it seemed fairly easy, the fact that I can't find anyone explaining how to do it on-line suggests to me that it's really, really easy but I just cannot seem to figure it out.

When viewing a contact, you should see a little icon of a linked or unlinked chain in the top right corner. Click that.

At least, that's how it works on the Incredible.

[WoopeeTuralyon]

My Droid is driving me crazy. The keyboard is awful. Never have I had to backspace so many times because it put in 2 of a letter I pressed once, or because it put in no letter at all...love everything else about phone, but the keyboard is just sad.

[Ghambit]

I find the keyboard on the GalaxyS just fine with the big screen.  There ARE themes you can DL which will change the button layout though, making buttons smaller and spaced further apart, etc.  Or just get swype.

[Quinton]

Nice.  SLCD will be much better for screen-on battery life.

How you figure?  LCD takes waaay more power than LED.  What exactly is so super about super LCD aside from better viewing angles and perhaps more natural colors?
Honestly, to me the move back to LCD was done simply due to the lack of OLED manufacturing.  Going organic LED is way expensive and supply is low.  Dont believe the hype when it comes to SLCD.  It's all about cost/reward.

I cant find anything definitive on power consumption comparisons...as largely that's dependent on graphics drivers, screen size, amount of zones, resolutions, etc.  Each phone is different, but taken pound for pound there's no LCD tech out there that draws less juice than LED no?

Actually, OLED draws up to 2.5x power of LCD+backlight when displaying white/blue heavy imagery.  It has the advantage of consuming nearly nothing when displaying pure black imagery.   On average, measuring power at the battery, with two similar Android platforms running the same build, we would see (on average) almost twice the power consumption on the OLED based platform for screen-on modes (typical apps, browser usage, etc).

[NowhereMan]

When viewing a contact, you should see a little icon of a linked or unlinked chain in the top right corner. Click that.

At least, that's how it works on the Incredible.

Actually just managed to figure it out. On the Nexus you need to go into edit contact then hit the menu key to be given the join option. Not overly intuitive but, like I said, it was a simple thing I just couldn't get and feel like an idiot for spending three days plinking about with it and failing to get that.

[Ghambit]

Nice.  SLCD will be much better for screen-on battery life.

How you figure?  LCD takes waaay more power than LED.  What exactly is so super about super LCD aside from better viewing angles and perhaps more natural colors?
Honestly, to me the move back to LCD was done simply due to the lack of OLED manufacturing.  Going organic LED is way expensive and supply is low.  Dont believe the hype when it comes to SLCD.  It's all about cost/reward.

I cant find anything definitive on power consumption comparisons...as largely that's dependent on graphics drivers, screen size, amount of zones, resolutions, etc.  Each phone is different, but taken pound for pound there's no LCD tech out there that draws less juice than LED no?

Actually, OLED draws up to 2.5x power of LCD+backlight when displaying white/blue heavy imagery.  It has the advantage of consuming nearly nothing when displaying pure black imagery.   On average, measuring power at the battery, with two similar Android platforms running the same build, we would see (on average) almost twice the power consumption on the OLED based platform for screen-on modes (typical apps, browser usage, etc).

Now all we need is local-dimming.   

[Lantien]

Didn't know about quite a few they had on the list, worth checking out...

http://lifehacker.com/5616299/lifehacker-pack-for-android-our-list-of-the-best-android-apps

[MahrinSkel]

The iPhone is *toast*.  History, stick a fork in it.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/22/att-iphone-activations/

At last week’s press conference about Antennagate, CEO Steve Jobs kicked off the event by touting sales numbers for the iPhone 4, saying Apple had sold more than 3 million of them in the first 3 weeks on sale.

http://www.androidguys.com/2010/08/05/200000-android-activations-day/

Remember how exciting it was, at the beginning of the year, to hear that 60,000 new Android phones were being activated each day? Then at Google I/O in May, Vic Gundotra announced it was up to 100,000 a day.  And then not long after, that number got bumped up to 160,000. At the Technomy conference yesterday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt annouced that, thanks to new devices like the Droid X, Google is activating 200,000 Android devices every day.

That'd be 6,000,000 a month if it stayed at that rate, but Schmidt also pointed out that the rate hasn't leveled off at 200,000-- we're still in the middle of huge growth.

Android is now outselling the rate at which iPhone 4 peaked out, *before* people found out the design was fucked.  In fact, Android probably outsold the iPhone *during* that unsustainable hype-fed circus.

Walled gardens (RIM, Palm, Apple) lose, comparatively open platforms (Android, Windows Mobile) win again, what a surprise.  Who could have predicted it?

--Dave

[naum]

Android is now outselling the rate at which iPhone 4 peaked out, *before* people found out the design was fucked.  In fact, Android probably outsold the iPhone *during* that unsustainable hype-fed circus.

Walled gardens (RIM, Palm, Apple) lose, comparatively open platforms (Android, Windows Mobile) win again, what a surprise.  Who could have predicted it?

I wouldn't exactly call Android "open" — we'll see developments now that Google decided to become a carrier-humping net neutrality surrender monkey, kill its Nexus development, and cede total control (in contrast to Apple) to the carriers. Carriers are going to lock down the phones, and just like Apple platform, only geeks willing to jailbreak/root go beyond the carrier crafted (or in case of Apple, default iOS) setup.

Plus, most that have used an iPhone, and then go to Android are disappointed in the UI and functionality.

Android thread, but Apple doesn't care about market majority, they can print money hats with just 10-20% of the market.

Also, Android surpassing due in large part to AT&T sole carrier. What happens if iPhone goes to Verizon if rumored?

[Ingmar]

It's still comparatively open, which is all he said.

[Quinton]

Even on "locked down" variants (grr, at&t), you can develop apps on android devices (and install locally, via usb) with no additional fees, you can install any app you want from the market or usb, etc.  The market remains massively more open than the app store (apple shamelessly denies competitive apps entry, just for starters)

When iPhone ships on VZW, they'll get a nice boost from people abandoning AT&T and die-hard VZW users who would like an iPhone but won't switch networks.  Duh! 

I don't think we've seen the last of very open Android devices.  In fact, I will go so far as to say that we will see Android devices that are *more* open than before (while also seeing locked down devices, special-vertical-market devices, etc).

Believe it or not, Steve's a latecomer to the whole smartphone and app store thing (we did it at Danger in 2002, and the iPhone team benefited from a number of awesome ex-Danger folks the same way that Android and Palm did).  I've been doing smartphone platforms in silicon valley for 10 years now, and platform and device openness has only steadily improved over that decade.

[KallDrexx]

Honestly, gingerbread is make it or break it for me (since I am up for renewal in December).  If they can't get things polished to where Android is fun for me again then I will stay and get another Android phone, but the lack of polish, smoothness, and consistency is starting to annoy me. 

My friend ended up buying a Droid 2, and I don't know if it's because of the widgets he is using or what but it's a TON more sluggish than my Droid 1.  However, my Droid 1 is partially only smooth because I'm using Launcher Pro, the stock launcher is still sluggish (even with only 3 home screens)

And what the hell is up with Google announcing all these *amazing* Froyo features (like music streaming, app browsing from a browser, library management from a browser) and yet none of those are available yet or even being talked about 4 or so months later.  The only feature we really have is chrome to phone.

And honestly, Android having an open market is worthless if the stuff in there isn't good.  You can distinctly tell that Android apps don't have anywhere the same level of polish (graphically and UI wise) than IPhone apps (or even what I've seen so far of WP7 apps).  Also people outside of the geek circle don't care about Android's open marketplace.  My girlfriend certainly doesn't as she plays games and apps that are better than what I can play or do on my phone, with some exceptions that she doesn't really care about.

[Draegan]

My DroidX is awesome.  Watching tv shows, audio books while traveling, a great web browser etc. 

Best phone I ever owned.

[Engels]

Honestly, gingerbread is make it or break it for me (since I am up for renewal in December).  If they can't get things polished to where Android is fun for me again then I will stay and get another Android phone, but the lack of polish, smoothness, and consistency is starting to annoy me. 

My friend ended up buying a Droid 2, and I don't know if it's because of the widgets he is using or what but it's a TON more sluggish than my Droid 1.  However, my Droid 1 is partially only smooth because I'm using Launcher Pro, the stock launcher is still sluggish (even with only 3 home screens)

And what the hell is up with Google announcing all these *amazing* Froyo features (like music streaming, app browsing from a browser, library management from a browser) and yet none of those are available yet or even being talked about 4 or so months later.  The only feature we really have is chrome to phone.

And honestly, Android having an open market is worthless if the stuff in there isn't good.  You can distinctly tell that Android apps don't have anywhere the same level of polish (graphically and UI wise) than IPhone apps (or even what I've seen so far of WP7 apps).  Also people outside of the geek circle don't care about Android's open marketplace.  My girlfriend certainly doesn't as she plays games and apps that are better than what I can play or do on my phone, with some exceptions that she doesn't really care about.

Sounds like you'd be happier with an iPhone. This coming from a current iPhone user that's going to switch to Droid as soon as the contract's up because I'm tired of the polished crimped and unimaginative world of iTunes, which works like a charm yet has none.

[KallDrexx]

Sounds like you'd be happier with an iPhone. This coming from a current iPhone user that's going to switch to Droid as soon as the contract's up because I'm tired of the polished crimped and unimaginative world of iTunes, which works like a charm yet has none.

No I don't want an iPhone, Mostly because of ITunes but also for small little things that Android does do well, such as widgets, apps in the top bar such as weather, and notifications. 

I just wish Google had more of a user experience focus and realize that a good user experience isn't just about pretty graphics (I'm looking at you crappy gallery app).  Palm realized this and not only made a pretty good touch UI, but also made it so developers are more encouraged to create a consistent UI between applications, it's just too bad WebOS had too many minor annoyances or I'd still be on my Pre. 

WP7 has me intrigued so far so we'll see about that.

[naum]

Believe it or not, Steve's a latecomer to the whole smartphone and app store thing (we did it at Danger in 2002, and the iPhone team benefited from a number of awesome ex-Danger folks the same way that Android and Palm did).  I've been doing smartphone platforms in silicon valley for 10 years now, and platform and device openness has only steadily improved over that decade.

A smartphone retrospective

This is what high-end smartphones looked like in 2007:




Smartphones were an established consumer-electronics market with devices that people thought were pretty cool, but often frustrating and with serious shortcomings and design flaws.

Then this happened:



Other manufacturers had neglected touchscreens for years, but Apple figured out how to do a touchscreen well, and did.

Fans of the former types of smartphones and much of the tech press declared this smartphone useless or not capable enough because of its lack of a keyboard, its non-removable battery, its lack of expansion slots or ports, and other hardware features in which Apple chose differently from what most other manufacturers were doing.

That ended up not mattering. Now, most high-end smartphones look like this:

[Nerf]

Except all of those phones at the bottom do have removable batteries, expansion slots and ports.  The Palm phones did have a touchscreen as well, but they had a hard keyboard in addition to it.  The touch keyboards *are* a pain in the ass, and far more frustrating than the hard keyboards on my palm and wm phones ever were, it's just an acceptable evil that we traded for a bigger screen and more shiny.

[Draegan]

Why did you leave out the retarded end of that article?

Oh and the touch keyboard with swype on my DroidX is fucking awesome.  And this is coming from a guy who though he had to get a hard keyboard with the G1.

[Ingmar]

I had a full touchscreen phone in 2007.  

[Nerf]

I'm in desperate need of an app to record calls on an HTC incredible and a hero on sprint, running 1.6 still I believe.  The market is pretty useless, searching for call recorder brings up a bunch of apps with 1 star and comments saying they don't work at all, sigh.

[ffc]

My cousin is visiting from out of the country and wants an iPhone 4.  I suggested an Android phone instead but after looking into it apparently her country can't access the Android Marketplace.  Is there a way around this?  My Google-fu turns up many complaints about various countries unable to access the marketplace but no workarounds. 

I'm assuming her friends have jailbroken / unlocked the iPhone and have a way to access iPhone apps over there so that may be the better choice for her.

[Jherad]

So after a bit of messing around, I'm getting Froyo on my Incredible now, yay!

It appears that Google/VZW in their infinite wisdom have made the 2.2 update contingent on the presence of that nasty CityID nagware app (why?!) - so if you've rooted and removed/renamed that, you'll want to put it back first. Sigh.

Edit2: Sorted.2.2 is definitely much snappier.

[Draegan]

I'm in desperate need of an app to record calls on an HTC incredible and a hero on sprint, running 1.6 still I believe.  The market is pretty useless, searching for call recorder brings up a bunch of apps with 1 star and comments saying they don't work at all, sigh.

I was looking for this as well, but the best I got was put the phone on speaker and get a digital recorder.

[stu]

One cool thing about my Nokia is it has a pre-loaded recorder that can be used in-call. Nifty.

[Nerf]

I'm in desperate need of an app to record calls on an HTC incredible and a hero on sprint, running 1.6 still I believe.  The market is pretty useless, searching for call recorder brings up a bunch of apps with 1 star and comments saying they don't work at all, sigh.

I was looking for this as well, but the best I got was put the phone on speaker and get a digital recorder.

Yeah,we just bought a $60 digital recorder that can upload via USB and I'm using speakerphone a lot more.  Still a hassle tho, it'd be a lot nicer to just be able to hit a button while driving or in an environment not conducive to speakerphone and a small recorder.

[eldaec]

My Desire just started downloading 2.2
 

[NowhereMan]

My cousin is visiting from out of the country and wants an iPhone 4.  I suggested an Android phone instead but after looking into it apparently her country can't access the Android Marketplace.  Is there a way around this?  My Google-fu turns up many complaints about various countries unable to access the marketplace but no workarounds.  

I'm assuming her friends have jailbroken / unlocked the iPhone and have a way to access iPhone apps over there so that may be the better choice for her.

AppBrain can let you sync your phone with your PC so you can download off the web straight to the phone if it's connected to your PC, not sure if this will circumvent geographic restrictions or not. It's also possible to download the .apk files and manually install them, bypassing the market entirely but with both of these options I'm not sure how they work with pay for apps. I'd imagine free apps would definitely be a go though.

Edit: Turns out you can't skip bits of forum code and still have it work.

[Obo]

The methods I've seen are to either use a SIM from a region that does have the full market enabled - in Ireland people have gotten prepaid UK SIMs that they put in just when they want to get something from the market (Dublin is Googles euro HQ and there is *still* only the gimped market in Ireland!?) - or if you have root then you could use Market Enabler to temporarily spoof a carrier from a market enabled region.

[TripleDES]

Honestly, gingerbread is make it or break it for me (since I am up for renewal in December).  If they can't get things polished to where Android is fun for me again then I will stay and get another Android phone, but the lack of polish, smoothness, and consistency is starting to annoy me.  

I feel similarly. I've been with Android since version 1.5 and my HTC Magic. I've been willing enough to wait out for improvements. But here I am, owning a smartphone based on a platform that's basically one of the top end ones (a Nexus, not the magic...), it still doesn't run as smoothly as way old lesser specced hardware (i.e. my iPhone 3G). There was plenty of time to get shit in order. Actually what I remember is that Android 2.0 (or was it 2.1)  did get a better graphics framework/code/driver-model/whatever applies and still didn't get anywhere (probably just the Linux kernel's inability to do its shit correctly in relation to multimedia, like on the desktop). By now, the only reasons I continued to stick with it is because I don't like Apple/Steve's attitude, how Apple generally handles the ecosystem, that their stuff's overpriced as shit and generally me wanting to avoid the Me-Too effect (iPhone as fashion accessory).

Due to what I've seen over in the WP7 camp (video demos and messing with the SDK), as soon HTC shows off their HD7 so that I can finally decide on a model, I'm practically gone. I'm going to hold onto the Nexus for a while to test drive Gingerbread, but I don't think that the UI polish promises will hold a candle, and if they do, that they won't go far enough. The current UI isn't even internally consistent. See dialer style vs. flat ugly application style (gmail, music app) vs. widget style (news/weather) vs. gallery style (completely breaking with the rest of the system) vs. the rest. The goddamn SIM unlock screen suffers from the Windows Font Dialog syndrome, it apparently hasn't been updated since 1.0 and there's equal duplicate functionality in form of the PIN code lock already in system that mirrors the up-to-date styles. And you run into the damn SIM unlock screen everytime you fiddle with airplane mode. If they didn't manage to turn up something attractive the last bunch of releases, I don't think that Gingerbread will.

Excuse me for being shallow, I value form as much as function.

[Jherad]

To be honest, I'm still wondering if/how VZW is going to try to monetize the tethering in 2.2 now, given their 'Mobile Broadband Connect' monthly fee shenanigans with unrooted tethering on the 2.1 incredible.

Well, that question has been answered now.

The '3G Mobile Hotspot' included in 2.2 on the Incredible will only work if I activate it through Verizon. They want $20 a month for it, with a 2gig limit after which it is charged per mb.

Heh. I'll wait for a new root, to get back what I had for free in 2.1.

Edit: 2gb not 5gb.

[KallDrexx]

Heh. I'll wait for a new root, to get back what I had for free in 2.1.

I think there's a non-root tethering app in the marketplace

[Salamok]

Heh. I'll wait for a new root, to get back what I had for free in 2.1.

I think there's a non-root tethering app in the marketplace

pdanet is $18 1 time fee, only does wired USB tether or wireless tether over bluetooth (if you can get that working).


So yesterday I decided to switch all my web stuff over to a VPS (linode).  Rather than set up a mail server to handle my wife and mines email I went ahead and set the mx records to Google apps.  I did not see a way to upgrade my existing gmail account to a Google apps standard account, so I ended up creating a new account and having to migrate all my mail and contacts from 1 to the other.  I could add the new account to the droid but it would not then let me remove the old account w/o resetting to factory default.

I now need to go through this same somewhat painful experience for my wife's email/phone, is there an easier way?  Can I merge an existing gmail account to become a child of my Google apps account?  The entire time I was doing this I had the "I am doing this ass backwards" feeling but it was 2am and I just wanted to geterdone.

[NowhereMan]

There's a section in settings on gmail accounts, 'accounts and imports' that seems to be exactly what you want. Of course I haven't tried it so maybe that's exactly what you used and it's a pain in the ass.

[Salamok]

There's a section in settings on gmail accounts, 'accounts and imports' that seems to be exactly what you want. Of course I haven't tried it so maybe that's exactly what you used and it's a pain in the ass.

Yeah that let me bring my mail over to the new account (slow as shit), had to export my contacts from my phone to vcard and mail them to get those back though.