New smartphone, thoughts, experiences
Nov. 28th, 2010 04:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sparrFour days ago I joined the modern era by buying a smartphone. I was an early adopter in the PDA market, with a Palm in the 90s, then again with an HP iPaq and Asus MyPal in the early 00s, but at some point in the last three years the revolution happened. I can thank Apple, however grudgingly, for that. Without the iPhone we would not have Android, and without either of them we would not have the thriving and growing ecosystem of mobile applications today that dwarfs the market for RIM/Palm/Symbian/Zaurus apps in the past. This post chronicles my joys and woes in the first half-week of use.
First I called T-Mobile to move the phone number from my old phone (which was prepaid) to my new phone. This took about 5 minutes on the phone with the activation department and then a randomly long delay where I did 4 hours of day job and then found the # has switched without my receiving the SMS notification that I was promised. +5 for ease, -1 for misinformation and uncertainty.
Second, I synced my contacts from my old phone to my new phone. This was my first mistake. My Nokia 3555b allows me to copy the 250 oldest contacts to the SIM, which left only 50 contacts to be copied manually. The SIM copy process was painless, and the entry of the other contacts was delightfully easy. My first exposure to Swype involved mostly proper nouns, but enough of them were common anglic names that I was pleased with the experience. Half an hour later I had my 300-entry phone book copied over, minus a dozen entries that needed pruning for historical reasons. A few test SMSes and voice calls later and I considered that step done, with no anticipation of how wrong I was.
Next, I tried to sync the phone to my Google account. This proved difficult because the phone insisted that I didn't have a network connection. I spent 45 minutes on the phone with T-Mobile regarding the fact that I had a 3G connection with zero bars of signal strength, despite being able to make crystal clear voice calls. They put me through a few reboots and network selection criteria changes (manual select, auto select, 2G only, etc). In the end they gave me some mumbo jumbo about a provisioning mistake when the phone was activated and everything seemed to be working normally after they worked their magic. I could now get 2-3 bars of signal in the office highrise where I work, and [E]dge or [3G] data signal in various places.
Coming back to syncing to my Google account, I tried again. This time it appeared successful. I got access to my email, a gchat message arrived at the phone, and my contacts synced. Or did they? First, I should point out that the phone synced every contact in my Gmail account, including every email address I have ever sent email to, which amounts to about 300 contacts that I want and 2000 that I don't. I toggled the option in the Contacts app to only show contacts with phone numbers, which is only a band-aid since I still have to view the full list when I want to find an email address, and the list pollutes my text entry autocomplete results (no, I never want to type sale-x638923, despite the fact that I sent them an email about a craigslist posting three years ago). I also added Facebook as a contact sync account, which is a great feature, except for the lack of local history[1], but that was so easy to undo and redo that I'll gloss over it for the next bit of the story. Now I am faced with the problem of the phone having 4 contacts stored on the SIM (the default T-mobile customer service #s and such), 300 contacts stored in the Phone (that is, the place contacts go if you never sync the phone to Google, or if you naively add contacts before doing so), and 2300 contacts stored in "Google" (synced to my Google Contacts).
I plan to do most of my contact management on the web instead of the phone, so my next step was to figure out how to get those 300 Phone contacts into my Google Contacts. Ten minutes of playing with the phone yielded no results. Thirty minutes of googling found a lot of users in the same predicament, but no quick solution. Another hour on IRC left me wondering why the hell this situation was completely overlooked by the devs at Google. I wasted an hour or so trying to find an old app called "ContactSync", designed for just this situation, which is unfortunately not on the Android Market any more. I tried out some other apps, such as "Merge Contact", which purported to have the desired functionality but didn't. In the end I had to export all of my contacts (SIM+Phone+Google) on the phone to my SD card as a VCF, then wipe all of the contacts from my phone (by clearing the data for the Contacts Storage app), then re-import the contacts from the VCF with my Google account as the target. This resulted in ~2604 contacts on the phone showing as in the Google account, and took about 30 minutes. My next sync of that account took about 35 minutes, at which point the phone said everything was fine and Google Contacts on the web showed that almost every contact had been duplicated. Fortunately removing duplicates is just a few clicks of work, so I did that on the web then synced the phone again, which took about 5 more minutes. This left me in the desired state, with all of the same contacts on the phone and the web (except those 4 from the SIM, I guess the phone knows not to duplicate those or send them to GContacts).
Looking over my contacts, I realized that I have a lot of duplicates with identical names or not, and different email addresses or different punctuation in the phone numbers. I spent about an hour cleaning up the 10% of those with phone number issues, and didn't even touch all my email addresses and chat contacts that need to be merged. There is one person, who we shall call "LV", whose AIM name is "p" and has a dozen email addresses of the form "p@domain" or "L@domain" or "LV@domain" and multiple chat accounts on AIM and GChat, and multiple phone numbers entered into GChat as SMS #s. Finding all of those accounts and merging them is going to be tedious, but in the end worthwhile because it means I no longer have to remember which accounts are linked when trying to send him messages in GMail or SMSes in GChat. That is a process that I am putting off for another day, and dreading the task while looking forward to its results. I blame Google for letting my contacts get into that state in the first place. There is absolutely no reason to create two separate contacts when I email "LV <l@domain1>" and "LV <l@domain2>".
4 hours of effort in and I finally had my contacts synced and the phone playing nice with the internet. This left me in a position of not really knowing where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do next, since the phone was finally at least as usable as my previous phone. I looked through the apps that came with the phone, some of which are provided as part of Android, some of which are part of the licensed Google apps for Android, and the rest are provided by Samsung. Because I had swapped SD cards before booting the phone for the first time, I was never able to watch the copy of Avatar that came with it, which wasn't much of a disappointment in not seeing the movie, but a great disappointment in whoever implemented such a broken DRM scheme. The various apps seem to provide a great set of basic functionality (alarms, notes, organizer, web browser, media player, rss reader, still and video camera, etc), and the phone would be a useful device without ever downloading any third party apps.
Of course, my next stop was downloading apps. Thanks to a friend who is an Android user (and sometimes developer) with similar technical aptitude and interests with me, and who publishes his favorite apps as a set of lists on AppBrain, I was able to get a pretty good head start on a core set of apps to meet my daily needs. First stop was the AppBrain App Market app, which provides a nice interface to the Android Market along with all of AppBrain's more detailed features such as reviews, a recommendation engine, access to other users' favorite app lists, and the ability to install apps on the phone by clicking a button on the web from your desktop. I queued up about 30 apps for installation, and have since installed about 30 more. I won't bore you with the list here, but it's visible to the public until I get around to making recommendation lists.
I spent about two days with the phone, playing with all of the apps I had downloaded and mostly happy with the performance, before I got around to rooting it. There's something to be said for having shell access to any computer, and getting access to iptables and better task management is the icing on the cake. I have not installed a new kernel or flashed an alternate firmware yet, mostly because the ones I am most interested in aren't confirmed working on my phone yet. I really want to get a kernel that supports powertop, so that I can go the extra mile on extending my phone's battery life.
Now I am using the phone daily. Yesterday I had my first "I can take a photo of that and it will be on Facebook instantly" moment, which was fun. I've made good use of the web and email access functionality already as well. At some point in the next week or two I am going to put in a few hours delving into Tasker, which is the most expensive app I have purchased and, from reviews that I trust, the most awesome event response and settings management app ever. Want the phone to change wallpaper and send out a specific SMS when it is turned upside down, pointed north, inside a certain building, at a certain time of day, when it's sunny and below freezing outside and there is a solar flare? Done.
My biggest complaint so far is the lack of integration between SMS and IM and email. On my desktop, in Gmail, I can search for "LV" and see every email we have shared, every gchat/aim we have sent, and every SMS we have exchanged. Add in GVoice on the desktop and I can also see when he called me and a transcript of the voicemails he left me. Two apps, 5+ combined methods of communication from the same contact. On the phone so far I have found no way to integrate any of that information except for different IM clients. I cannot get SMS and IM information in the same window, or IM and email, or SMS and phone calls. To Google I say, "WTF!?!".
I have a few other small complaints about my specific phone, the Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant[2], as well. Putting the charge port on top is very silly, it makes the phone hard to use when it's plugged in, and especially hard to hold up to my ear. I will never again buy an Android phone where the four "hardware" buttons are part of the touchscreen. Just holding the edge of the phone wrong can activate those buttons, which is disastrous when I am composing a message and accidentally hit Home (or Back, in some apps). I want buttons that depress, thank you very much. Placing the power and volume buttons directly opposite each other yields some accidental presses as well, and results in having to grip the phone in unnatural ways on a regular basis.
Overall I am greatly enjoying the experience, despite the hurdles, most of which were at least somewhat expected. I think that having an internet connected phone will make my life more productive and efficient, and only slightly more distracted. Having one device to take the place of a media player, PDA, phone, and pocket camera[3] is great, but everyone who has one already knew that. I'm looking forward to starting to develop apps. I have some great ideas, and my Java skills are decent but rusty, so maybe I can even make a little money.
[1] There are apps to copy contact details from one source to another. I'll be doing that en masse at some point, to avoid losing phone numbers of Facebook friends when they remove the # from their profile.
[2] I'm familiar with carrier locking. I'm even familiar with handset renaming. When did manufacturers start building physically distinct (different body, etc) versions of the same phone for different carriers? Why do I have a Vibrant instead of a Captivate? What if I don't like rounded corners?
[3] I carry a DSLR in my backpack, but being able to snap a photo on 5 seconds notice instead of 30 changes things. When I have a Looxcie things will change again, in an even more fundamental way. I cannot wait until 10% of the population has devices like that.
First I called T-Mobile to move the phone number from my old phone (which was prepaid) to my new phone. This took about 5 minutes on the phone with the activation department and then a randomly long delay where I did 4 hours of day job and then found the # has switched without my receiving the SMS notification that I was promised. +5 for ease, -1 for misinformation and uncertainty.
Second, I synced my contacts from my old phone to my new phone. This was my first mistake. My Nokia 3555b allows me to copy the 250 oldest contacts to the SIM, which left only 50 contacts to be copied manually. The SIM copy process was painless, and the entry of the other contacts was delightfully easy. My first exposure to Swype involved mostly proper nouns, but enough of them were common anglic names that I was pleased with the experience. Half an hour later I had my 300-entry phone book copied over, minus a dozen entries that needed pruning for historical reasons. A few test SMSes and voice calls later and I considered that step done, with no anticipation of how wrong I was.
Next, I tried to sync the phone to my Google account. This proved difficult because the phone insisted that I didn't have a network connection. I spent 45 minutes on the phone with T-Mobile regarding the fact that I had a 3G connection with zero bars of signal strength, despite being able to make crystal clear voice calls. They put me through a few reboots and network selection criteria changes (manual select, auto select, 2G only, etc). In the end they gave me some mumbo jumbo about a provisioning mistake when the phone was activated and everything seemed to be working normally after they worked their magic. I could now get 2-3 bars of signal in the office highrise where I work, and [E]dge or [3G] data signal in various places.
Coming back to syncing to my Google account, I tried again. This time it appeared successful. I got access to my email, a gchat message arrived at the phone, and my contacts synced. Or did they? First, I should point out that the phone synced every contact in my Gmail account, including every email address I have ever sent email to, which amounts to about 300 contacts that I want and 2000 that I don't. I toggled the option in the Contacts app to only show contacts with phone numbers, which is only a band-aid since I still have to view the full list when I want to find an email address, and the list pollutes my text entry autocomplete results (no, I never want to type sale-x638923, despite the fact that I sent them an email about a craigslist posting three years ago). I also added Facebook as a contact sync account, which is a great feature, except for the lack of local history[1], but that was so easy to undo and redo that I'll gloss over it for the next bit of the story. Now I am faced with the problem of the phone having 4 contacts stored on the SIM (the default T-mobile customer service #s and such), 300 contacts stored in the Phone (that is, the place contacts go if you never sync the phone to Google, or if you naively add contacts before doing so), and 2300 contacts stored in "Google" (synced to my Google Contacts).
I plan to do most of my contact management on the web instead of the phone, so my next step was to figure out how to get those 300 Phone contacts into my Google Contacts. Ten minutes of playing with the phone yielded no results. Thirty minutes of googling found a lot of users in the same predicament, but no quick solution. Another hour on IRC left me wondering why the hell this situation was completely overlooked by the devs at Google. I wasted an hour or so trying to find an old app called "ContactSync", designed for just this situation, which is unfortunately not on the Android Market any more. I tried out some other apps, such as "Merge Contact", which purported to have the desired functionality but didn't. In the end I had to export all of my contacts (SIM+Phone+Google) on the phone to my SD card as a VCF, then wipe all of the contacts from my phone (by clearing the data for the Contacts Storage app), then re-import the contacts from the VCF with my Google account as the target. This resulted in ~2604 contacts on the phone showing as in the Google account, and took about 30 minutes. My next sync of that account took about 35 minutes, at which point the phone said everything was fine and Google Contacts on the web showed that almost every contact had been duplicated. Fortunately removing duplicates is just a few clicks of work, so I did that on the web then synced the phone again, which took about 5 more minutes. This left me in the desired state, with all of the same contacts on the phone and the web (except those 4 from the SIM, I guess the phone knows not to duplicate those or send them to GContacts).
Looking over my contacts, I realized that I have a lot of duplicates with identical names or not, and different email addresses or different punctuation in the phone numbers. I spent about an hour cleaning up the 10% of those with phone number issues, and didn't even touch all my email addresses and chat contacts that need to be merged. There is one person, who we shall call "LV", whose AIM name is "p" and has a dozen email addresses of the form "p@domain" or "L@domain" or "LV@domain" and multiple chat accounts on AIM and GChat, and multiple phone numbers entered into GChat as SMS #s. Finding all of those accounts and merging them is going to be tedious, but in the end worthwhile because it means I no longer have to remember which accounts are linked when trying to send him messages in GMail or SMSes in GChat. That is a process that I am putting off for another day, and dreading the task while looking forward to its results. I blame Google for letting my contacts get into that state in the first place. There is absolutely no reason to create two separate contacts when I email "LV <l@domain1>" and "LV <l@domain2>".
4 hours of effort in and I finally had my contacts synced and the phone playing nice with the internet. This left me in a position of not really knowing where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do next, since the phone was finally at least as usable as my previous phone. I looked through the apps that came with the phone, some of which are provided as part of Android, some of which are part of the licensed Google apps for Android, and the rest are provided by Samsung. Because I had swapped SD cards before booting the phone for the first time, I was never able to watch the copy of Avatar that came with it, which wasn't much of a disappointment in not seeing the movie, but a great disappointment in whoever implemented such a broken DRM scheme. The various apps seem to provide a great set of basic functionality (alarms, notes, organizer, web browser, media player, rss reader, still and video camera, etc), and the phone would be a useful device without ever downloading any third party apps.
Of course, my next stop was downloading apps. Thanks to a friend who is an Android user (and sometimes developer) with similar technical aptitude and interests with me, and who publishes his favorite apps as a set of lists on AppBrain, I was able to get a pretty good head start on a core set of apps to meet my daily needs. First stop was the AppBrain App Market app, which provides a nice interface to the Android Market along with all of AppBrain's more detailed features such as reviews, a recommendation engine, access to other users' favorite app lists, and the ability to install apps on the phone by clicking a button on the web from your desktop. I queued up about 30 apps for installation, and have since installed about 30 more. I won't bore you with the list here, but it's visible to the public until I get around to making recommendation lists.
I spent about two days with the phone, playing with all of the apps I had downloaded and mostly happy with the performance, before I got around to rooting it. There's something to be said for having shell access to any computer, and getting access to iptables and better task management is the icing on the cake. I have not installed a new kernel or flashed an alternate firmware yet, mostly because the ones I am most interested in aren't confirmed working on my phone yet. I really want to get a kernel that supports powertop, so that I can go the extra mile on extending my phone's battery life.
Now I am using the phone daily. Yesterday I had my first "I can take a photo of that and it will be on Facebook instantly" moment, which was fun. I've made good use of the web and email access functionality already as well. At some point in the next week or two I am going to put in a few hours delving into Tasker, which is the most expensive app I have purchased and, from reviews that I trust, the most awesome event response and settings management app ever. Want the phone to change wallpaper and send out a specific SMS when it is turned upside down, pointed north, inside a certain building, at a certain time of day, when it's sunny and below freezing outside and there is a solar flare? Done.
My biggest complaint so far is the lack of integration between SMS and IM and email. On my desktop, in Gmail, I can search for "LV" and see every email we have shared, every gchat/aim we have sent, and every SMS we have exchanged. Add in GVoice on the desktop and I can also see when he called me and a transcript of the voicemails he left me. Two apps, 5+ combined methods of communication from the same contact. On the phone so far I have found no way to integrate any of that information except for different IM clients. I cannot get SMS and IM information in the same window, or IM and email, or SMS and phone calls. To Google I say, "WTF!?!".
I have a few other small complaints about my specific phone, the Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant[2], as well. Putting the charge port on top is very silly, it makes the phone hard to use when it's plugged in, and especially hard to hold up to my ear. I will never again buy an Android phone where the four "hardware" buttons are part of the touchscreen. Just holding the edge of the phone wrong can activate those buttons, which is disastrous when I am composing a message and accidentally hit Home (or Back, in some apps). I want buttons that depress, thank you very much. Placing the power and volume buttons directly opposite each other yields some accidental presses as well, and results in having to grip the phone in unnatural ways on a regular basis.
Overall I am greatly enjoying the experience, despite the hurdles, most of which were at least somewhat expected. I think that having an internet connected phone will make my life more productive and efficient, and only slightly more distracted. Having one device to take the place of a media player, PDA, phone, and pocket camera[3] is great, but everyone who has one already knew that. I'm looking forward to starting to develop apps. I have some great ideas, and my Java skills are decent but rusty, so maybe I can even make a little money.
[1] There are apps to copy contact details from one source to another. I'll be doing that en masse at some point, to avoid losing phone numbers of Facebook friends when they remove the # from their profile.
[2] I'm familiar with carrier locking. I'm even familiar with handset renaming. When did manufacturers start building physically distinct (different body, etc) versions of the same phone for different carriers? Why do I have a Vibrant instead of a Captivate? What if I don't like rounded corners?
[3] I carry a DSLR in my backpack, but being able to snap a photo on 5 seconds notice instead of 30 changes things. When I have a Looxcie things will change again, in an even more fundamental way. I cannot wait until 10% of the population has devices like that.
