Month: June 2009

Just read a tweet from @DevDroid linking to a post by TalkAndroid entitled “Adobe Flash Player 10 For Android Due In October”.  I haven’t listened to the entire talk from Adobe but here’s the quote from their slideshow:

Flash Player 10 for smartphone-class devices to be made available in beta at MAX conference in October  [adobe.com]

According to TalkAndroid, the Adobe CEO Shantanu Naraye said:

Google’s Android, Nokia’s Symbian OS, Windows Mobile and the new Palm Web OS will be the first devices to support web browsing with the new Flash player [via Talk Android]

So, still no word on iPhone getting Flash.  It makes me really glad that I chose to purchase a phone based on an open platform.

A “smartphone” without applications isn’t a SMART phone, its just a phone.  I know I’ve complained about the lack of the Android Market in South Africa.  Apparently the guy at Google in South Africa who’s responsible for the Android Market has said that it’s coming soon. (I didn’t get a response to my email to him asking him for a comment, but that’s what I’ve been told by another local Android fan)

My favourite so far is Handango, but here’s my list of markets.  Worst of the pack (so bad I didn’t include them, were AndroidFreeware.mobi and AndroidFreeware.net – no “on device” experience, and a lot of really bad applications.)

Handango –

Handango has been around for years.  I’ve used them for apps on my old Palm pilot, Windows Mobile phone and now on my Android phone.  Their Android selection isn’t huge, but they have some fun games, apps, and tools.  If you go to http://handango.com from your device you’ll be prompted to install “InHand” – their Android application for browsing through their store and downloading apps.  They even have some EA games in their catalogue.

Rating: 4/5 – Good, but really not as good as Android Market – no way to be informed of updates to an application that you’ve downloaded already.

MobiHand –

I hadn’t heard of them until I started looking for alternative App stores. MobiHand seem to have a pretty extensive collection of applications for many devices.  They have a really well trimmed down mobile site at http://mobihand.com which you can use easily from your Android device.  My only complaint about the online store on the Android devices is that when the list of apps is too long and they start to split them into pages, the links to swap from one page to another are so incredibly small that it’s virtually impossible to click them without zooming in 3 or 4 times.

Rating: 3/5 – It’s good, has a start in the “on phone” experience for browsing for apps, but it’s not a happy experience and could use a few more apps.

Handmark –

Yet another new store to me, Handmark seem to have made a really clean site.  Their software selection seems a little less impressive than both MobiHand and Handango.  That could be because both their mobile and full website seem quite tough to use to find applications.   It looks good, but just seems to require too many clicks to get there.  However, they seem to be the only app store that is selling some of the great EA games like The Sims 3, Spore, Sim City and a bunch of others.

Rating: 2/5 – Not a great search or “on device” experience, but the EA games are a big plus.

Google Search –

Thanks to Google, I found my a great app for Geocaching, which had just been released for Android.  It’s called CacheMate.   I also found GeoBeagle, which is a free app.  That’s how I found Twitli – a really nice Twitter application.

Rating: 1/5 – You can get some nice things here, but it’s a lot of work.

Open Market –

I’ve written about this before – you can get to it at Open Market.  It’s great, but is missing a load of apps. Doesn’t do paid apps, and I still haven’t heard back from them about the app I wrote and submitted to them a few days ago.  Until it gets more fully fledged, it’s not going to be a real contender, but you can download it on your phone at http://tr.im/nX6E. 

Rating: 1/5 – because it’s just South African, has no paid apps, doesn’t let you register as an app developer or downloader.

For those of you wondering how I made the super awesome screenshots in the previous post.  It’s really easy.  Apparently there’s a $3 app that does something similar, but you can do it all for free if you have Java on your machine and have downloaded the Android SDK.  I got the steps to do this from “Taking screenshots on an Android-based phone”.

I’m going to quote a fair bit of their instructions, and make one or two modifications as necessary:

Step 1: Enable USB Debugging
On your Android phone (in this case, the G1), go to Settings, then Applications, and then Development. Check the checkbox for "USB debugging."

Then

Step 2: Download the Android SDK
Download the SDK for your platform here. Google also has some great installation documentation if you get lost. You will need to make sure you have a current copy of the JDK.

They then go on to say that you’ll need Eclipse to carry on, but you shouldn’t.  All the functionality is contained in the SDK.  I’m working on Windows XP, so your mileage may vary on other OS’s.

Go ahead and plugin your Android handset into a USB port on your computer, if it is not plugged in already.

Step 3: Run DDMS
After configuring Eclipse or whatever IDE you use to work with Android, you need to open up the DDMS application from within the "tools" folder in the Android SDK’s main folder.
After DDMS launches, select your handset from the menu on the left (it should be the only device listed). You might see an error message, but the debug tool should be loaded. Then, click CTRL-S on your keyboard. This will bring up the "Device Screen Capture" interface. From here, a static image is captured from what is appearing on your handset. You can save the image (nicely defaulted as PNG) and then refresh to your heart’s content to grab updated or different screenshots from your phone.

That should be it… Easy and quick screenshots.  Just remember, if you choose to make the SD card accessible to your PC by doing the following, then you won’t be able to use it on your phone for your demo’s:

But if you don’t do that, then the phone should operate like normal.

I have the plain HTC Magic (i.e. not the “with Google” version), and have been learning how to type with it.  My first complaint was that the keyboard in portrait mode, the standard QWERTY keyboard became a little small to work with.  Especially if you have slightly wider fingers or not too accurate hand-eye-coordination.  So one of my first missions was to investigate the alternative keyboards.

From my initial reading, I’d not seen much that gave me great hope for any better keyboards in portrait mode.  One of the guys in our offices recently got a Samsung Omnia and was showing how he’d swapped to an “XT9” keyboard in portrait, and I wished that Android had been clever enough to do the same.  With little hope I clicked on the little “cog” and went through the following steps:

Click the “Setup” cog< /td>	Touch Input Settings	Click Keyboard Types
Keyboard Types List	Click “Compact QWERTY”	Enter Text

The result is a slightly fatter keyed QWERTY keyboard.  It’s not one I’m used to using so this didn’t quite work out too well for me.  Looking at the other option in the list of keyboard types (“Phone Keypad”) I just assumed it would be a quick way to enter numbers.  Boy was I wrong.  I followed the same steps as above, and chose “Phone Keypad” and came back to my browser and found this:

I now had a phone keypad just like the physical pad I used to have on my old iMate SP3.  The little “XT9”/”ABC” button on the left swaps between T9 predictive text and standard multiple-push ABC style entry.  To make things even cooler, if I tilt the phone on it’s side, it doesn’t stick with this keyboard but rather swaps to the standard QWERTY layout again because there is now enough space to use bigger keys, as follows:

Now I can have the best of both worlds.  Of course my fingers still sometimes make mistakes, but that’s where the clever “auto correct” type feature kicks in and saves the day.  For example, if I’m typing an SMS and I want to start with “Hello” but by mistake I miss the “h” and press “g” to start with, the following happens:

It actually lists alternative words that use keys near to the ones that I pressed, and selects the one it thinks is the most likely correction.  If I press “space”, it will automatically choose the word highlighted in green.  This is really useful and, as Leo Laporte said in an episode of TWIT (referring to the iPhone’s auto-correct feature) “as long as you trust in Steve, it will all work out” (slightly paraphrased). 

There are times when it’s not so great, as in the first time I typed in “Er” where it helpfully substituted the word “We”.  I didn’t realise that it thought I’d made a spelling mistake, so I happily sent off a rather cryptic sentence via Google Talk.  But that’s where Android have been really smart.  If I type in a word that the phone doesn’t recognise, I just have to tap on the word in the list of suggestions and it adds it to it’s dictionary and will use the new word in future.

I think the reason that the “T9” style keyboard is called “XT9” is because they’ve extended the standard “T9” to allow for similar mis-pressed keys.  So that the same ability that the landscape keyboard has to recover gracefully from my badly pressed keys extends to the “T9” keyboard too.

By mistake I also found out that doing a “long press” on a key gives you an “options” menu as follows:

For people who have to write Afrikaans stuff often, the ability to write é or ö at will could be great in the standard keyboard and when using the “ABC” mode of the “Phone Keypad”, it can be a nice time saver sometimes.

I’m going to do this in a few parts:

1. Unboxing and initial impressions
2. My first app for the HTC Magic
3. Any updates to the impressions after my Vodacom sim card starts working
4. Review after a week

On Friday morning I finally got the call that the phone had arrived at Vodashop Rivonia, unfortunately my HTC TyTn has a *really* bad camera so the pics from the shop didn’t come out too well.  The process signup was pretty smooth, although it took almost an hour to get completed.  (The shop didn’t have the HTC Magic on various lists and they all needed to get updated, and then the manager needed to do some approval but he’d popped out)

The phone came with a full battery charge (possibly because Vodacom updated the ROMs on the phones before selling them) which was great – no need to charge it before you can play with it.   Since I’m porting form MTN to Vodacom, I need to wait for the port to complete before I can actually make calls on the phone, so I’ll be writing another post to give any updated impressions of the phone once I can use it to make calls and such.

I’ve had 2 other HTC phones and this packaging was probably one of the cooler ones that I can remember.  Nice and compact, and easy to open.  Relatively minimal clutter on the packaging.

Once you take off the outer shell, you see the phone, covered by a plastic film that says “Important – to prevent damage, do not apply excessive pressure to the screen or device case. Please remove the device from your pants pocket before sitting down.  For more details, see the Quick Start Guide.”  Now I’m assuming that this must not be present on the phones sold in the UK for two reasons.  Firstly, UK people would have to wonder why anyone would keep their phone in their underwear, and might be wondering about the logic in placing a pocket in one’s underwear.  Secondly, its assuming that everyone who uses this phone wears trousers and not skirts/dresses which is semi-sexist.  Sorry ladies/gents, you can’t use this phone if you’re wearing a dress!

Underneath the cardboard that the phone is resting on, is the rest of the contents of the box which looks like this:

Going from left to right and top to bottom, those are: Charger, Accessories booklet, Corded earphones, HTC Care booklet, Warranty Statement, USB Cable, Quick Start Guide, Battery (below the guide), slim “leather” case, phone, and the cover with the warning described above.

What you’ll notice, if you compare this list of goodies with the list of goodies that Vodafone UK customers get, you’ll see that we’re missing the USB to Headphone jack converter cable.  HTC (in their usual style) don’t give you a Headphone jack to plug into on the phone so you have to use their USB headphones.   Vodafone UK clearly saw this downfall and rectified it by including a USB to Headphone jack converter cable, while Vodacom decided not to do that.

While I’m happily bashing Vodacom and praising Vodafone, my initial look at the Vodafone offering showed that they get the “with Google” branded phones which means that they’re missing a few apps that the Vodacom guys do get.  You can see the spec’s of the two phones here:  HTC Magic “with google” vs HTC Magic (not “with google”) .  From what I can see on the spec sheets here’s the bonuses of getting the one that is NOT branded “with google”:

288mb RAM instead of 198mb, “A2DP for wireless stereo headsets”, HTC Sync (for syncronising data with your PC), Microsoft® Exchange Server synchronization

[HTC Magic Comparison]

BUT there is more that they don’t tell you…the phones not branded “with google “ get:

1. “HTC Mail” which besides being their Exchange integration, also does POP3 and IMAP mail
2. PDF Viewer – for viewing PDF’s
3. Quick Office – for viewing MS Office documents

So on the whole Vodacom are getting us a better deal than the Vodafone guys.  I’d be really impressed if there were no downsides, but there is just one (even though it’s not Vodacom’s fault).  The HTC Magic’s sold by Vodafone include Android Market which is where most of the great Android applications can be found.  It’s like selling the iPhone without the App Store, or a car without some place to “pimp it out”.  As far as I’ve been able to tell, most of this is under Google’s control, so there’s not much that Vodacom or Leaf can do.

What they have done is to create their own “Open Market” which is a great idea except that it doesn’t yet have many apps.  And as luck would have it, as I start trying to list some now their application starts off hanging (causing Android to try to close it as a non-responsive application) and then tells me that my device has not been given access to the Open Market and that I should contact my provider.

If you want to get apps I’ve found a few ways of getting them:

1. Go to Cyrket (pronounced like Circuit), there you can find the app, then do a google search and hope that the developer has provided a direct download.  If not, PLEASE take the time to email the developer and ask them to make it available elsewhere.  I’ve found 3 or 4 developers who have been more than happy to send me a direct link to their software.
2. Handango
3. Handmark
4. Mobihand
5. Android Freeware (http://www.androidfreeware.net/)   I am not linking directly to it because their apps just seemed dodgy, like the “Facebook” app which really is just a shortcut to launching http://m.facebook.com
6. Google – Just google for: Android Weather download, or Android Geocaching download.  It takes a while, but its been one of the best ways for me to get some nice apps.

If you’re a geek, you can take a look at http://code.google.com, then search for Android apps, download the source, open it in Eclipse, build the project, and then transfer the resulting .apk to your phone.  That’s how I got ZXing – the Barcode scanner – on my phone.  I’m not sure of the legalities of posting a link to the apk, so I won’t do it just yet.  I’ve also got a really basic Solitaire app too.  Some of the projects even link directly to their own APK, like GeoBeagle (A GeoCaching application for Android)

On the whole I’m really happy with the phone even though the lack of applications is slightly frustrating.  Apparently it took 6-8 months before Australia got the Android Market, and even then they only got access to the free apps so hopefully this will be fixed in time.  But until then we’re at the mercy of Leaf, Handango, Handmark, Mobihand, and the developers of applications.   If I think about the trade off – Android Market vs all the benefits of the non “with google” phone, I think we’re better off without the Market for now.