Droid!

I don’t like writing posts with a low useful content quotient, but here goes.

After having only one new (i.e. not used) phone in eight years - and the one new one was a Treo 700p, obsolete when I bought it - I decided to bite the bullet. I bought a Droid! While I was almost dead-set on it before I even held it in the store, my feelings of love at first sight were even more clear when I started to play around with it.

So, here’s a little overview of what I did first, what my plans/questions are, and what’s next.

First minutes/day:

  1. Unpack everything and start to figure things out. Test phone, SMS, data.
  2. Setup IMAP email for my personal account (need to look into IMAP-IDLE).
  3. Go through the entire Settings menu and try to set things up. Find out that the default apps can’t be removed. The app screen, by default, is pretty full…
  4. Export my contacts from my Palm (no sync cable, had to use php-pdb to export a CSV, then manually edit ALL of them in Gmail.

So after having the phone for about 12 hours, here’s what I’ve installed on it:

  • Listen (Google Labs) - Great podcatcher app. The speaker is a bit too quiet for easy listening on the drive to work, so I’ll need to get one of those FM radio interfaces.
  • AnyCut - allows creation of arbitrary shortcuts on the desktop, including direct dial.
  • ConnectBot - full-featured SSH client including key-based auth and storage of multiple user/host settings.
  • Meebo IM - IM client. It does AIM, which is nice, but doesn’t do IRC.
  • Android Battery Dog - App that graphs battery voltage, temperature, capacity over time and also stores a simple CSV log (which I intend to parse out later for historical data).
  • Bookmarking for Delicious - Allows saving of bookmarks to del.icio.us (but not retrieval).
  • To Do List - A very simple To Do list app, until I find something that works with Google Tasks. No syncing.
  • VoiceMemo (JavaCodeLand.com) - A really simple voice memo app.
  • WiFinder (PGMsoft) - Pretty much useless. Shows a scan of WiFi networks, but only shows encryption, channel number, and signal strength in bars.

The few problems I’ve noticed so far:

  • The touch-sensitive buttons along the bottom row (specifically the search button) seem to be right where my thumb wants to rest when holding the phone in landscape mode.
  • As others have mentioned, the camera quality isn’t great, but it’s much better than my Treo 700p.

My list for future research/development:

  • WAP pages for my web-based personal finance app, fuel log, etc.
  • IMAP IDLE
  • Tasks/to do app that syncs with Google Tasks.
  • A Cycle System app.
  • How to quickly mute all sounds on the phone.
  • How to do tones by person or group for not only ringtones (phone) but also SMS, Email, etc. Also, a way to set certain hours of the day when audible alerts will be disabled, other than a specified whitelist (email, SMS, etc.)
  • Verizon Visual Voicemail
  • Do some development with the geolocation JS API.
  • Console on the phone?
  • SCP/SFTP program.
  • TV listings (perhaps a WAP version of my script that pulls from SchedulesDirect (unfortunately, due to their redistribution policy, this is a private, authenticated page).
  • Nagios checker/notifier
  • RSS reader
  • WAP page for PHP EMS Tools callin.
  • How to handle IMAP folders?
  • Script to backup Gmail contacts, other data stored with Google.
  • Thunderbird Gmail contact sync.
  • A wifi scanner/survey software that shows all of the important stuff like signal strength in dbm, noise floor, etc.
  • Something like kismet that integrates the GPS and wifi scanning.

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