Posts Tagged ‘ Android ’
If you are also a Samsung Galaxy Tab owner, watch out for the Android Gingerbread update that Samsung has started rolling out to Tabs. Italy was reportedly the first country to receive the over-the-air update. Maybe South Africa will be next – ha ha – probably not. If you can’t wait for Samsung, and are up to flashing your own roms, you will find them at xda-developers.com.
The HTC HD2 remains one of the favourities for fiddling with. The phone launched in late 2009 as a WinMo device, with world beating hardware specs. I think it was the first 1GHz device at the time, as well as having the biggest screen at 4.3inches. Now, a year and a half later, its hardware capabilities are still very good.
Now, if you want to make your HD2 sing with the latest version of Android, namely 2.3 aka Gingerbread (Android 3.0 is out I know but is for tablets), then read on. The modding community has been working on various Android incarnations for the HD2, many of which I have experimented with, but for the first time now I think the state of the art is good enough to be used on a permanent basis. Forget about WinMo. With Android Gingerbread your HD2 will be as good, if not better, than the new HTC Desire HD. The latter is essentially an Android remake of the HD2, but runs Android 2.2 only, ha ha.
Take a deep breath and then follow these steps:
1. Backup and format the sd card in your phone.
2. Install Hard SPL (SPL3) a custom bootloader available on XDA. HSPL is required to update the radio and flash custom ROMs to the phone. It is safe to install and can be uninstalled by rerunning the program setup file.
3. Next update to a new radio. Radios and installation instructions can be found at XDA. Be sure to use a compatible version. 2.15.50.14 is a good one.
4. Install MAGLDR bootloader. MAGLDR serves as a second bootloader, which runs after HSPL, and can be used to Flash Nandroid ROMs to the HD2. Download MAGLDR from the forums at XDA.
5. To install Gingerbread on the HD2 first download any of the recent Gingerbread Nandroid ROMs from the XDA HD2 Android NAND Development forum to a PC and extract it. I recommend NexusHD2-Gingerbread V2.5 [Android2.3.3][Kernel: tytung_r8.3].Then perform a soft reset while holding down the power off button until the MAGLDR boot menu appears. Select the “USB Flasher” option and connect the HD2 to a PC using a USB cable. Once the USB connection is established run the Android installer EXE file that came with the NAND ROM to complete the installation.
And there you have it. You are now running Android Gingerbread, recently released by Google for use on the Google Nexus S. RIP Windows Mobile.
You will have to tweak some of the phone settings to get the best battery life. I use the following:
1. SetCPU changes the phone’s CPU clock speed automatically. Get the paid version from the Android Market. If you live in a country that has not yet been enabled by Google for paid apps, check this post of mine on how to enable paid apps. Pay with your credit card. Otherwise google the free version.
2. Ultimate Juice Defender, also available from the Market in paid and free guises, will switch various juice sucking features off and on, e.g. data connection, wifi.
3. Reduce the number of accounts that sync automatically, under Settings -> Accounts, or even disable automatic background sync if you are happy to manually sync your emails.
4. Set the radio to 2g only under Settings -> Mobile Networks
5. Don’t use a live wallpaper
If you have been following my blog you know that I have not posted in a long time. Partly because I got a bit bored with what was happening in the mobile world. In addition I have been using an iPhone 4 and that is so good that I started thinking we should simply all use iPhones. Why bother using anything else? There is no Android phone available today that really matches let alone surpasses, the iPhone. But that was yesterday. Today is a new day. Today is my first day with the new Nokia E7.
Yes, I know Symbian is not nearly as good as iOS or Android, and yes I know I have slagged off the N8 in previous posts. But man the E7 is an awesome piece of hardware. Forget about Apple, forget about HTC, forget about Samsung, forget about Motorola, forget about SonyE. Those okes build boring phones. Nokia’s hardware design rules. The hardware is so good that it makes up for the software. And I don’t know what Nokia has done to achieve it, but Symbian runs and feels better on the E7 than the N8.
I bought mine at Incredible Connection (yes it is freely available in SA) and as soon as the sales person removed the phone from its box, I desired it. It is large and sleek and shiny in an understated classy way thanks to the aluminium casing. The edges are round and smooth, which makes a welcome change from the sharp iPhone 4 edges. The 4 inch screen, an AMOLED capacitive touch screen with Nokia’s ClearBlack technology, is beautifully bright with deep colours, and the 4 inch size hits the sweet spot for me. The 3-5 inches of the N8 is too small for me, ditto for the iPhone’s screen. You can get a 4.3 inch screen on some Androids these days but that results in too big a phone for my liking. 4 inches is perfect. You will notice the difference when you read a PDF using the bundled Adobe PDF reader. On the E7 you can read a page without having to scroll from left to right, while on the N8 the smaller screen size means you have to zoom and scroll, which makes it a very frustrating experience.
The E7 has 5 stylish buttons, the usual power button on the top, a volume rocker switch on the right, the menu key on the front face, a camera button and the screen lock slider button on the left. The slider button has gained cool features. You can associate specific phone functions with the switch, and if you slide and hold it down for a second or so, the phone’s camera flash light turns on and you can use the phone as a flashlight. Pretty cool.
The camera is flush with the phone, unlike the N8′s one which sticks out. It is an 8MP affair, versus the N8′s 12MP, but 8MP is still industry leading compared with the iPhone and most Androids out there, which tend to use 5MP. The E7 takes good pictures, having a flash is great, and the dedicated camera button is the cherry on top. I see there is some photo and video editing software on the phone also.
When you have finished drooling over the beautifully crafted exterior of the E7, slide it open. Maybe slide is not the right expression, it more likes, jumps open. The screen mechanism is spring loaded and the screen opens up at an angle. The mechanism feels very well made and solid. So does the keyboard it reveals. Nokia has outdone themselves with this keyboard. It is large with 4 rows and well spaced keys. It even has arrow buttons to move the cursor around with. Typing on this phone is joy, and yes I know you can type fast on the iPhone, but you do not, can not, get the physical tactile pleasure offered up by the E7′s keyboard.
And then there is the HDMI output. Very cool. Lets you plug your phone into your TV and play movies from your phone directly on your TV. Of course it is a drag having to copy the movie on to the phone first, so Nokia equipped this phone (and the N8) with USB-on-the-go technology. So don’t copy the movie on to the phone, simply stick a USB memory stick containing the movie into the phone and off you go. When I tried the HDMI movie playing business on the N8 I wasn’t that impressed as the N8 didn’t support enough video formats to my liking, e.g. it couldn’t handle XViD (which my Samsung Galaxy S could by the way). Hopefully the E7′s can do better.
Some other cool hardware features on the E7 include a SIM card slot in the side, non-removable battery, no back panel to slide off, compass, accelerometer, and of course it is a quad band phone, which means it will work pretty much everywhere in the world, even in the US. And of course as you would expect, call quality is good.
Ok, so I guess I can’t ignore the elephant in the room any longer. I have to say something about the software on the phone. As you probably know Nokia has ditched Symbian as its top-end OS in favour of Windows Phone 7, and you can see why. Don’t get me wrong, Symbian is not a bad phone OS – it even has proper multi-tasking – but the interface is old and clunky compared with iOS and Android. And there are few apps, a situation that will worsen now that Nokia has ditched Symbian. For example using the iPhone I can control my Crestron home automation system using an app from Crestron, I can control all the TVs in my house using an app called Plugplayer which connects DLNA compatible media sources to media players. The list goes on. Try finding similar apps that will run on the Nokia. Good luck.
I can’t wait for Nokia to bring out an E7 running Microsoft Windows Phone 7. It will be fantastic. In the meantime, I am using the Symbian E7. I will run the Crestron and Plugplayer apps on my iPad and use my iPhone as an iPod.
Not to be outdone by HP, HTC launched 5 new phones today and one tablet. The tablet is a 7inch Android device a-la Galaxy Tab with one party trick – it comes with a special stylus that works on its capacitive screen. Should be cool for those who want to write on their tablets. It is called the HTC Flyer.
Among the 5 phones there are two that are interesting. The ChaCha and the Salsa each have a Facebook button on the front. These are the first of the so-called Facebook phones that Mark Zuckerberg has been talking about. The royal blue button is context aware with a pulsating light surrounding it any time there is an opportunity to share whatever you are doing on the phone through Facebook. For example, take a picture, press the Facebook and the picture is uploaded. The Facebook junkies are going to like these phones.
While the Salsa looks similar to the usual Android formfactor the ChaCha has a Blackberry formfactor with a dedicated keyboard.
The long-awaited E7 is arguably the best looking Nokia ever. And the keyboard is apparently excellent according to those who have used it. The screen is a tilting 4 inch AMOLED with ClearBlack. Having used the 4 inch Samsung Galaxy S I can tell you that the bigger screen size is worth it. Unfortunately this gorgeous piece of hardware will no doubt be let down by the software inside. When the E7 was first announced I was dead set on getting one, but in the meantime I have had a N8 and a C7 and the clunky Symbian interface and sub-standard and out-of-date Symbian apps on these phones have changed my mind. I think you will like the E7 only if you have never owned an iPhone or Android phone.
Anyway, the full text of the press release appears below the picture, courtesy of Engadget. I doubt that South Africa is included in the ‘select markets’, but the Nokia faithful will hope nevertheless.
The press release contains no mention of Lotus Notes Traveler, so stay away if you are a corporate Notes user.
The press release from Nokia:
All-in-one business smartphone, the Nokia E7, arrives in stores
Espoo, Finland – The highly anticipated Nokia E7 will begin arriving in stores in select markets this week, with broader availability building up quickly in several markets.
With its tilting 4 inch ClearBlack display, full qwerty keyboard and a fast access to a wide variety of apps directly on the homescreen, the Nokia E7 is the key to having a successful day in or out of the office. Importantly, the device supports business applications from leading enterprise technology partners including Microsoft and IBM.
Key features of the Nokia E7
- Easy access to private and business email
- Create, edit and share office documents and view PDF files with Adobe Reader
- Fast, secure intranet access with the built-in VPN
- High-resolution photos and HD video with the 8 megapixel camera and dual LED flash
- HDMI connectivity to project files, videos and images onto large screens
- 16 gigabytes of on-board flash memory
- USB-On-The-Go, enabling easy file sharing by connecting a USB stick to the smartphone
For business users, Nokia E7 provides direct, secure and real-time access to email, calendar, contacts, tasks and the corporate directory through Microsoft Exchange servers, as well as Office Communicator Mobile, developed by Microsoft for Nokia smartphones, which brings presence and corporate instant messaging.
Additionally, a wide range of entertainment and social services available on the Nokia E7 make it the perfect off-duty companion, and the Ovi Store offers a wealth of apps such as Bloomberg, Angry Birds and Sports Tracker.
The new arrival offers drive or walk navigation in 80 countries. The latest commercial version of Ovi Maps, available immediately via Ovi Store or Ovi Suite, adds visibility to subways, trams and trains, real-time traffic, safety alerts, visibility to parking and petrol stations, speed limit warnings, and improved search and location sharing capabilities.
So anyway my new Motorola Droid Pro arrived just over a week ago. My initial impressions were a mixed bag. I liked the relatively low weight, when compared with my HTC G2/Desire Z, and liked not having to flip the phone into landscape mode in order to type on the keyboard, but wasn’t impressed by the screen, which apart from being as small as the screen on the Palm Pre, was not as bright and clear as I expected. The keys were also surprisingly difficult to type on. They are small and have ridges that are unlike other keypads I have experienced. Guess this will get better as I get used to the phone.
I wasn’t surprised when the phone prompted me for a code to unlock it. My supplier, CA-Cellular, warned me that the phone was locked to Verizon, and that they will email me the unlock code. When the code arrived a day later, I was however surprised when entering it failed to unlock the phone. A few email exchanges later I received another code from my supplier, which also didn’t work. I then bought my own unlock codes through Swiftunlocks, but knew I had a problem when these guys sent me the same two codes I had received from my supplier previously. With the aid of Google I soon discovered that the anal suits at Verizon have implemented a sophisticated locking mechanism that changes the lock codes continuously over the air. So apparently the only way to get the code is to phone Verizon and ask pretty please. Except they won’t give it to you if you are not a Verizon customer, which of course I am not, living in South Africa. So I had to send my phone back to my supplier, and am now waiting to see if they succeed in unlocking it. It has been more than a week, so am getting worried…
Don’t know about you, but I think these restrictive business practices are really irritating, out of sync with customer sentiments, and am convinced that they don’t result in the outcomes the providers are seeking. Why lock the phone to your network? If the customer wants to buy a contract from a particular network he will. And a willing customer is the best kind. You know why I don’t have an iPhone 4? Because once I have replaced my normal sim with a micro sim, it makes it that much harder to use another phone again. Apple clearly went the micro sim route as a way to lock in their customers. This kind of strategy can work in the short term, and possibly even for a long time, but at some point it will back fire. Look at Egypt. Mubarak’s customers have had enough of being locked into a single party dictatorship, even if it has been benevolent to a degree. They want freedom of choice of their service provide aka government. Take note Verizon, and Apple. Upshot of all this is that I am still using my HTC G2, and am still happy with it. I know I have called it boring in a previous post, but it is a good phone. Excellent keyboard, fast processor, Android 2.2. Everything works well on it, except that it loses cellphone signal from time to time in places where other phones don’t.
According to research firm Canalys, over 33m smartphones running Android were shipped in Q4 2010. This marks the first quarter that Android devices has outsold Nokia’s Symbian phones. What makes this even more remarkable is that a year earlier, in Q4 2009, only 4.7m Android phones were sold. At that point Nokia had 44% of the smartphone market. This has now dropped to an estimated 30.6% compared to 32.9% for Android.
It has been more than a month since my last post. Sorry for that. Moved house, been on holiday, kitesurfed, now I am back. Not that much has changed on the smartphone front during this time. Still waiting on the release of Nokia’s new qwerty slider the E7, although having had the N8 for a while now, I doubt that the addition of a physical qwerty will be enough. Compared to iOS and Android, Symbian^3 is pretty pathetic, with or without a keyboard. O, and I see there are a couple of Windows Phone7 phones available in SA. Too early to buy a Windows phone I think. Not nearly enough apps and developer support for Microsoft’s new phone platform.
I have also been using an HTC Desire Z aka TMobile G2 for a month or so now, so expect some comments in future posts about this phone. Or maybe not. It is good, runs Android 2.2 and has excellent qwerty keyboard, but is somewhat boring. So maybe I won’t have much to say about it.
Now the Droid Pro looks a lot more interesting. I haven’t got one in my hands yet, but hopefully will soon. It is the first Android phone with a candy bar form factor and fixed portrait qwerty keyboard a-la Blackberry. Motorola is clearly taking aim at Blackberry with this phone, especially when you look at the activesync enterprise features loaded on the phone.
The Pro has a 1GHz processor so I expect it to be very nippy. Screen is a bit small for my liking at 3.1 inches but that is the trade-off to get the fixed qwerty I guess. Should be great for one handed use, and will also be great to not have to flip the phone landscape every time you need the keyboard.
It is also a true quad band phone with support for GSM and CDMA. So you can use it in the USA (CDMA) and the rest of the world (GSM).
Will let you know what I think of this phone soon as I get it.
Having used the N8 for the past week I have figured out that there are three reasons, and only three, why you should consider getting Nokia’s new flagship phone. Of course if you already have an N8 you will know what I am talking about.
I raved about the hardware in a previous post, so I am not going to repeat mysefl. Suffice to say that it is a beautifully made phone.
But lets look at the reasons why you should not get one, or why, after only a week, I am no longer using my N8 (It is for sale by the way):
Symbian^3
The latest version of Symbian is better than the previous ones, but is still light years behind the competition (Android and iOS). The user interface is not nearly as slick and polished. It is still clunky in places. You still have to double-press in places and single-press in others. The browser still does not wrap the text to fit the screen when you zoom in. And it is not completely compatible with pre-Symbian^3 versions of third party software. Nor is it completely stable. I had lots of crashes, and after one of the restarts some rapidly changing blue numbers appeared in the top right corner of my screen, and stubbornly refused to leave. Resetting to factory settings got rid of it temporarily only. Eventually I gave up trying to remove the numbers which was ok while holding the phone in portrait mode as the numbers were in the top right corner, but when I flipped to the phone to landscape, the numbers appeared slap bang in the middle of the screen. I got the impression that the N8′s software needed more work.
I hope that MeeGo is going to finally get Nokia’s software to the level of Android and iOS, because Symbian ain’t gonna do it.
Text input
This is one phone that cries out for a qwerty. Yes, I know the E7 is coming. The on-screen keyboard entry is painful. Not nearly in the league of Android or iOS. If you get an N8 you absolutely have to get Swype. There isn’t a version available for the N8, but there is one for the C7. So, login to Ovi store on your PC, set your device to C7, locate Swype, then send the link to your phone. Unfortunately Swype only works in landscape mode on the N8, and the Swype keyboard takes too long to appear when you turn the phone from portrait to landscape, but it is still the best way to enter text.
Software on the phone
I think I have already complained about this in a previous post, but some of the software on the phone is plain crap. Especially the Quickoffice Adobe Reader. I found it impossible to read documents with this software. It is too slow to zoom in or out or scroll, and it doesn’t support kinetic scrolling, which means you have to somehow grab hold of the very thin scroll bars on the side of the image and try to drag them. Good luck with that. And then Quickoffice wanted money from me before it would let me view a Word document. What’s with that?
Social networking
Twittering and Facebooking on older Nokia phones like the N97, was rubbish. You had to resort to third party apps such as Gravity. Symbian^3′s social networking is a major improvement on that. There is now a single app that serves up Twitter and Facebook, which is good, but it provides no notifications of incoming tweets for example. Compare this with any one of a hundred free Twitter apps on the Android market, who will all provide you with background updates and notification, all displayed in the notification bar at the top of the screen on an Android phone. Different topic, but notifications in Symbian^3 is an inconsistent mishmash affair.
Calendar
Yes I know not many N8 users will be interested to know that the calendar does not have the ability to store/display meeting participants. E7 users may be interested in this though.
Nokia Mail
The new mail app is much better than the old built-in messaging app (the latter is still used for SMSs). It serves up reasonable looking HTML format emails, but I had on-going problems in downloading attachments. Sometimes the phone would wait minutes before starting a download.
OK, ok enough already. If you still want an N8, here are the three reasons to consider one:
Camera
The camera kicks ass with 12MP and a Carl Zeiss lens. Half-press the dedicated camera button and it locks the focus. It takes beautiful pictures and it takes them quickly. The only thing it lacks is optical zoom, but then so does every other cellphone camera, except for a nasty LG phone I saw the other day.
HDMI output
You can plug this phone straight into your HDMI equipped TV, which means you can watch videos and even youtube on your tv, streamed from your phone. This is seriously cool. The N8 is home entertainment system! Pity it doesn’t support all the popular video formats. It doesn’t do xvid or divx, go figure. The Samsung Galaxy S does. More about this phone in future posts.
Price
The third and final reason to consider getting an N8, is if you can get for free it may be worth it. If you going to have pay for it though, you can spend your money better.
There you have it, three reasons to get an N8. Actually there is a fourth reason – it is very good for playing games, and I mean 3D games like Need for Speed and Avatar – but I didn’t feel like changing the title of my post.
The built-in email client on the Nokia N8 is good, very good actually, especially in its rendering of HTML format emails. But it is let down by the document viewers on the N8. And this goes for other Nokias and Symbian smartphones in general. Quickoffice on the N8 is good enough for viewing Word, Excel and Powerpoint files, but you have to pay extra money to get it to work properly. And the supplied PDF reader, also from QuickOffice, is a shocker. Instead of using the precious screen real estate to display as much of the document, it uses easily a third of the screen for menu buttons and stuff, with no full screen option. And forget about kinetic scrolling, you are lucky if you get to scroll at all, and when it does move, it jumps in big sections. And it is slow. It is unusable. You could give PDF+ a try, which is available at a price in the Ovi store, but I have been using it for a few days and still have to find one pdf document of mine that it can display properly on the N8. Have emailed the developer so will see what happens with that.
Enter Mobile Documents. This a push email solution for Symbian (also for Android soon I hear) with a difference. The email functionality is similar to Nokia’s mail app, but it is its ability to display documents that sets MobileDocuments apart. It uses its own servers to render the document and streams it to your phone. Viewing is fast a-la-blackberry and document size is not limited to the phone’s capability. To top it off MobileDocuments lets you access and edit your cloud-based documents, e.g. I can access my GoogleDocs documents, edit them and save them back to my Google account.
Check it out. It is in beta at the moment and you can sign up for unlimited free email addresses to be pushed to your phone, including your corporate exchange server emails.
Motorola has been turning out Android-based smartphones at a rate of knots, and in every conceivable form factor. Have you seen the Flipout or the Backflip? I think they are simply throwing designs out to see which ones will stick. The Droid Pro is one such design which is going to stick I think. It is a design that has been used successfully for years by Blackberry – portrait with a fixed qwerty keyboard. Coupled with a 1GHz processor and Android 2.2 which provides enterprise email integration and document editing capabilities this promises to be an impressive device. The device will come with other enterprise goodies, such as remote wipe, complex passwords, device and sd card encryption and VPN ability.
If you are a corporate Lotus Notes user you will be very pleased to hear that Notes Traveler for Android is in beta. Hopefully by the time the Droid Pro lands on your desk you will be able to sync your Notes email, calendar and contacts using Notes Traveler.
The Droid Pro will launch on Verizon in the States in the next month or so. No word yet on a European launch, but if Motorola does release it in Europe it is likely to be called the Milestone Pro. South African droiders shouldn’t hold their breath though, as Motorola has been very slow in releasing their Android phones here. Point in case: the Milestone was launched in Europe/UK a year ago, while it became available in South Africa only a month or so ago.
Thanks to my trusty on-line mobile phone retailer Ca-Cellular I have the new Blackberry 9800 aka Torch in my hands. It is AT&T branded but that is the price you have to pay to be the first Torch owner in South Africa. Actually I bought two Torches. Gave one to my wife who is now completely in love with the device. She moved from a Blackberry Curve to the Torch, which is like moving from chalk to cheese. She loves the combination of large(ish) touchscreen, usual blackberry keyboard, and slicker new OS. I am somewhat more jaded and critical, having used the latest high-end Android devices and iPhone 4. But even I am taken with the device, which strikes a nice balance between touchscreen and keyboard. The new OS works well with both, making it easy and smooth to use whichever interface you want. Web browsing is also much improved, and the Torch has a proper Youtube client, not as good as on the iPhone or Android, but nearly. I quite like the new notification system and home page, and the integration with Twitter and Facebook is very good. Even though the OS is new, Blackberry users will be instantly at home, as the new UI is very similar to the old one. And the Blackberry’s bread and butter – email and messenger – work as well as it always has.
The device looks great and feels great in my hand. The spring-loaded slide mechanism works well also, making one handed use of the Torch a pleasure.
My only real complaint is the speed. It is not that the device is slow, but it is not snappy.
Will people queue for hours to get their hands on this device? No, but if you are a Blackberry fan you will love it. O, and if you are going to upgrade from your existing Blackberry to the Torch, make sure you download and install the latest version of Blackberry Desktop Manager on your pc. It will move all the data from your old Blackberry to the new one – contacts, emails, text messages, pictures, videos, wifi settings, everything.
Motorola launched the non-US version of the Droid 2 today, calling it surprise surprise Milestone 2. Apparently the Droid moniker is somehow tied to Verizon in the states, which is why the rest of the world has to make do with the much less catchy Milestone label. Nevertheless, as a happy Milestone 1 owner, I am looking forward to the faster processor (1GHz OMAP), improved keyboard and Android 2.2 Froyo. The Milestone 2 also looks nicer than its older sibling, although still not really a good looking phone. But then, I know a die-hard iPhone user, who after 2 days with the Milestone 1, swore to never go back to iPhone. Go Android. Best news is that the Milestone 2 is due to hit SA shores before the end of 2010. See below for more pictures.
Last week I overclocked my Palm Pre to 800MHz. Today my 500MHz Motorola Milestone is clocking 1.2GHz. Does that make it the fastest Android phone on the planet? Close, if not. You need two apps to achieve this, both available from the Android Market: Easy Root and Milestone Overclock. Easy Root from unstableapps.com lets you root your phone without having to do any techie stuff. Will cost you a dollar or two, payable via paypal at unstableapps.com, in order to get your registration key, but definitely worth the money. Milestone Overclock is free and lets you set your phone’s cpu at various speeds all the way up to 1.2GHz.
Google today released the Chrome to Phone extension to the Chrome web browser. It works together with the Android Chrome to Phone app (available for free on the Android Market on your phone), by letting you send stuff from Chrome on your pc to your phone, via Wifi or cellphone network. The main features are:
* Send browser links from Chrome to your phone.
* Google Maps links launch the Google Maps application on Android.
* YouTube links launch the YouTube application on Android.
* Selecting a phone number will automatically launch the dialer with the number populated.
* Selecting text on a Web page will copy the clipboard to Android (long press a text box to paste on Android).
It is way cool. Give it a go. Download the chrome extension here.
The Android Market is not available in all countries (yet). South Africa is one of the countries still left out in the cold. As a result SA Android users (HTC Magic, Dream, Hero, Desire, SonyEricsson X10, etcetera) can get only free apps from the Market. Some of the paid apps are available outside of the Market, usually by going directly to the developer, but some developers do not have payment mechanisms outside the Market. Enter the MarketEnabler. This clever bit of code fakes your rooted Android phone’s location (as seen by the Market). I have tried it on my HD2 running Android 2.2 and it worked. The Market now thinks my phone is on T-Mobile in the US and is happy to show me paid apps and let me buy them using my visa. Priceless.
Download MarketEnabler here (free of charge of course): http://code.google.com/p/market-enabler/
See these photos of my HTC HD2 (well actually my brother-in-law’s HD2) running Android Froyo 2.2. Pretty much everything is working, and very nicely too. Check my previous posts on this topic for links to the Android builds if you want to try it for yourself. The builds are not being punted as completely stable, but I am using it as my primary phone and so far so good. Best of all is that Android runs from the SD card in the phone, so no damage to the Windows Mobile on the phone. I am running jmztaylor’s dual-boot utility which lets me choose to boot either Windows or Android at startup. Pretty nifty.
As far as I know only Google’s own Nexus One runs Froyo 2.2, which puts the HD2 in a very select group of phones. And with its hardware specs (1GHz processor, 4.3 inch screen), the HD2 running Android is a hard act to beat. Don’t know why HTC hasn’t released an Android upgrade for the phone. They will sell a zillion of them. Should call it the HDa.
Engadget reports that Verizon will be launching the Droid 2 in August. Apparently it will be launched with Froyo 2.2 making it the first Android phone to be released with the latest version of the OS. I have also heard that it will have a 1GHz processor, compared with the 600MHz engine of the original Droid. I hope that the Milestone 2 will follow quickly on the heels of its US twin. I still use my Milestone regularly. Still the best qwerty based Android phone available currently. It is now freely available in South Africa, but the advertising has been very sparse. Think I have seen one ad for it only – in a Sunday newspaper. Haven’t seen anyone around here with a Milestone in their hands, except for yours truly.
The HD2 is a fantastic piece of hardware. It has a 1GHz processor, still the fastest processor available in mobile phones. It has a humungous beautiful 4.3 inch capacitive touchscreen. It is thin enough to fit comfortably in my pocket despite the big dimensions of the screen. There is only one problem with it – it runs Windows Mobile, which is old, not suited to touchscreen devices and defunct since Microsoft announced Windows Phone 7. Luckily for us ordinary mortals the geekgods at XDA-Developers have been working an porting Android to the HD2. This has not been an easy process, apparently some issues relating to the SnapDragon processor, but recently a major breakthrough was made and since then in the last few weeks, one after the other builds have appeared. The latest ones are starting to be fairly stable. They are not ready for public consumption and daily use, as major bits of functionality are still missing, such as no audio through the microphone or speaker when making a call, but they are beginning to show that the HD2 will be a fantastic phone soon. Check out this video of Android running on the HD2 and if you are feeling adventurous and have an HD2 in your collection, head over to the forum thread at xda-developers.com. The installation procedure is not complex and not really risky at all, as it does not flash your phone’s rom. These early Android builds run from your phone’s SD card, and to get back to Windows Mobile you simply have to restart your phone.
This morning I re-read my January post on Nokia’s Maemo-based qwerty slider called the N900. Why? Because I have had one in my hands for the past few days so I wanted to compare my expectations with reality.
Reality bites.
I know the phone is already 6-7 months old, but still, Nokia could not have thought that they can take on the iPhone or Android (or even Palm WebOS) with the N900. Firstly the phone just is not stylish – it is too thick and chunky. It doesn’t say look at me I am cool. It says look at my I am a geek. I know there are many geeks out there, and some of them are loving the open-source nature of the N900 and Maemo, but there are not enough of them to create serious market momentum behind the Maemo platform.
The slide-out qwerty keyboard is not bad, but is also not good. It has three rows only, with very little space between the top row and the edge of the screen. As a result my thumbs bump against the screen edge when I type on the top row. At least the keys are nice and large with decent travel. The keyboard on my Motorola Droid/Milestone is much better.
The screen is nice and bright with good resolution (not as bright as the Milestone), but is resistive. Those Finns and their gloves again I guess. The response of the screen is poor compared to any of the zillion capacitive screens out there. It is similar to the N97′s screen in terms of response. The N900 even comes with a stylus! I thought styluses (is that a word?) died out with Windows Mobile. Anyway nothing shouts geek like a stylus.
And then there is the screen orientation. Nokia has been marketing the N900 as a “mobile computer” rather than a phone, but forcing one to do everything in landscape orientation, except for phoning, is a bit much. It means you need both hands for pretty much everything. What a drag. Anyway I don’t see how this phone is more of a computer than any of the other high end phones out there, except maybe for the iPhone 4 which still cannot properly multi-task, something which computers have been doing for years.
Let’s look inside the phone, at Maemo the operating system, which at one point was touted as Nokia’s new high-end operating platform. If it is, Nokia is in trouble. Maemo may be open-source and powerful underneath, but it is dressed in out-of-date unstylish clothes. The user interface is better than Symbian’s but only just. Compared to WebOS, Android, and iPhone OS, it looks and feels way out of date. And it is just not finger-friendly enough. The multi-tasking works well though, with a single screen called the dashboard showing all your open apps. Not that you will have many apps open, as there are only a handful of apps available for Maemo.
The list of shortcomings in Maemo/N900 is long:
* No Youtube viewer. The browser (try Mozilla Firefox if you don’t like the on-board browser) supports Flash so you can view videos directly in the browser, but the performance and image quality is a distant second to the excellent Youtube apps available on all Android phones, Palm Pres and iPhones. Even the Winmobile HTC HD2 has a Youtube app.
* The browser is so-so. It doesn’t even reformat the text when you zoom in, so you have to drag the screen left and right in order to read text. What a pain.
* The N900 wouldn’t upload the phone contacts to my car’s bluetooth system. I read up on this and it seems this a missing feature in Maemo. More pain.
* The phone does not sync properly with Gmail calendar and contacts. Read about Maemo’s Mail for Exchange implementation here before you buy this phone.
* The biggest killer for me is that the support for corporate email and calendar stops at Mail for Exchange with no plans to support Lotus Notes. Not clear why Nokia has not provides Lotus Notes support, especially considering that the E72 comes with Notes Traveler built in. To me this is big sign saying that Nokia does not (never has or no longer) regard the N900 as their flagship nor Maemo as their new platform. I have asked the guys at Commontime to see if they can get their mNotes5 product working with the N900. If they succeed then the Lotus Notes geeks (like myself) will be able to sync our corporate email, calendar and contacts.
I can carry on with the litany of shortcomings, but I am fast losing interest in the N900. So, in summary, it is not good enough. Nokia needs something better, and they need it fast. Roll on Symbian 4.
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