Droid Trek: An Android Primer

I love smart phones.  I have used smart phones since their fledgling, rudimentary stages when compared to the smart phones of today. The arrival of Android has changed everything.  It wasn’t first but it is still a game changer even in comparison with the iPhone.  Why?

When I heard that Apple was planning to make one I thought that they would make a beautiful, elegant device that would be limited in what it could do or more importantly, would be limited in terms of what Apple would let customers do with it.  I expressed that opinion long before the original iPhone was released.  When it finally arrived, I was actually surprised at how much they allowed it to do.  It’s features were quite liberal…for Apple.  When compared to phones available outside the U.S. however, the multi-touch features and large button interface were really the only things that were new—and even then, only new with phones.  Nevertheless, it sounded interesting until I heard the restrictions Apple placed on it.  They made you pledge everything but your first-born child for the privilege of being allowed to buy one.

Obviously, the iPhone was a closed door to anyone who thinks like I do.  I’m convinced that when I buy a device, I should treat it like it’s mine.  Call me crazy.  So I stuck with my Nokia 3870, then my Nokia N-95, followed by my Sony-Ericsson Xperia.  Now that I have outgrown both Symbian and Windows Mobile, I wanted to go with a top of the line smart phone.  Since I am unable to even consider an iPhone for obvious reasons, an Android phone was the obvious choice.  This was a no-brainer especially because I make heavy use of Google and its most popular products every single day.

I watched the Google phones enter the market starting with the G-1, slightly more than a year ago.  The Nexus One was the first one that made me drool.  I really had a soft spot for that one.  It was the one I planned to buy but others have also looked good from a feature standpoint, like the Droid, the EVO, and the Droid X.  Eventually I decided to go to a local store to hold the devices in my hand to see how my ideas, which are based on articles I’ve read, matched the reality of the actual devices.  When I got around to the HTC Desire, which is essentially the Nexus One without a front-facing camera, it seemed to call my name.  I could not bear to put the phone down, so I bought it.

I got the phone home.  I followed the simple instruction sheet, which involved essentially opening the rear cover, inserting my Sim card, swapping-in my 16GB micro-SD card for the 4GB card that came with the phone, inserting the battery, closing the cover, plugging in the power cord to charge the battery, and turning it on.  This all took about 3 minutes since I had to be careful the first time so as not to damage the fragile cover.  The phone takes longer to boot than Symbian or WinMo.  Then again, it is a full-fledged Linux operating system.

On the first start, a wizard starts that gives you a couple of tips to help you navigate, followed by a prompt for your Google account credentials.  If you do not have an account you can create one during this step.  I put in my credentials and then it asked if I would like to sign into Twitter as well.  I typed in my Twitter credentials and off I went.  After I got to the home screen, I was quite impressed.  The resolution was great and the graphics were beautiful and very fast.  What was even more impressive was how quickly Android pulled in all my contacts and other info.

I had previously synchronized my outlook contacts list with my phone contacts from an older Nokia.  Then probably a couple of years ago, I imported those contacts to my Gmail account.  Previously, I had to manually import those contacts on every phone that I had prior to this one.  Not this time.  Just by signing into my Google account all of my contacts, calendar events, and tasks (integrated into my calendar) were there.  When the phone rang, I saw the caller id immediately without having to import anything.  That was awesome.  One of my 7 home desktops had my Twitter feed running already.  The interface of the Twitter client is nice and has the functionality you need.

[Side note: For anyone unfamiliar, a home desktop---and I'm not certain that's the proper term---is the main interface where icons, widgets, and shortcuts can be placed. It is what you see when people are scrolling left and right past rows of icons. There are essentially 7 desktop screens placed side by side and you navigate them by scrolling right or left. Except for the first, default screen they are empty until you place your frequently used items there. Each desktop can have 4x4 rows of icons or 16 per screen. Widgets, like a live weather app or the Google search box usually take several spaces, which of course decreases the number of icons that can be displayed on that particular screen.]

I continue to be surprised about the Google account integration.  Some of it may actually be unsettling if you are not aware of how well Google knows you.  When I used the Google Maps app the first time, it remembered the last destinations I had searched for on my last phone and my laptop.  Since I was going somewhere near one of these points, I just selected the nearest one with the intention of modifying the address if needed when I got near the destination.  Also, when using the “mini-Chrome” included with the system, it knows my browsing history already.  Even without importing bookmarks, after I type the first few characters of a URL, it correctly fills in the rest most of the time.  Auto-fill has been around a while but what is different about this is that while you are typing, a drop down list with matching URLs opens under the address bar.  Listed for me were not just matching URLs—but only URLs that I had visited before.  An interesting trick on a device I’ve only had for 20 minutes.  Later on, I configured my Google Apps domain and 2 other non-Google, IMAP email accounts.  I can customize each account individually so that each downloads as often or as seldom as required.

I love this phone.  I’ve even slept with the phone (ok, ok, for listening to media, you know what I mean).  But how enlightening are the pros without any of the cons?  I immediately ran into some brick walls that made me pull my hair out.  The most frustrating were the things I’ve seen demonstrated on other phones, so I know Android has the capability but which have been removed by the provider—in this case HTC.  I will give a quick run through of the problems and missing things I had to tackle and tell you how I overcame them.  That way, if you get an Android-based phone you can consider using the same solutions.  No sense in re-inventing the wheel.

The first thing I did on my trek to configuring my new Android phone was to learn how to use the Android Market.  While this was not at all difficult, it was also not quite as intuitive as I had hoped.  This would be a nice addition to the default icons on the desktop but on this particular phone, HTC lets you dig through the menu to find it.  Since it’s how you will install most of the other apps you will need, I recommend adding the icon to the home screen immediately.  Getting to know it is a top priority.  Finding it is the easy part.  Knowing what apps to install with it is where the research will come in.  After you’ve located it, hold your finger down on an empty area of the home screen for 2 seconds (a long press).  Choose Program from the resulting dialog and select Market.  Done.

The second thing that will be helpful is a barcode scanner app. Most Android friendly websites will put barcode links called QR codes on their sites for things you should visit from your phone.  You will definitely want an app that can read these QR codes as well as the normal product barcodes.  I read many articles about Android’s adroitness (try saying that 3 times) with barcodes. It is spoken of so matter-of-factly that I was surprised to find the phone missing this capability out of the box.  In order to use it, one must first download a barcode app. The most popular apps for that are Barcode Scanner and ShopSavvy.  Both work well.  One difference is that Barcode Scanner goes directly to scan mode and ShopSavvy goes to a menu first (press Search for a Product, the top button).  I like ShopSavvy because it seems to know what to do with each code and just does it whereas BC waits for you to choose an action.  Try them both.  Search the Android Market for one of these by tapping the search button in the upper right hand corner of the Market app, then install the app and  use it to scan the other for practice.

Barcode Scanner

ShopSavvy

After learning that barcode reading had to be added manually, the other deficiencies began to add up.  Here is a list of gripes:

1. Cannot reverse tether.  In other words, I can tether my laptop to the phone’s Internet but not the phone to the laptop’s for example, to avoid roaming charges while staying in a hotel that provides a connection.  Microsoft’s Active-sync provides this functionality but not Android.  Bummer.
2. No Ad Hoc networking at all, neither secure nor otherwise.  There are supposedly some hacks but I haven’t gotten any of them to work yet.
3. No built-in management of to do lists.  I’d like to see and manage tasks on my desktop.  My task list was imported into my Calendar but aside from that, there is nothing included to manage my tasks.
4. Power options allow you to specify a sleep mode and can lock the phone.  I see no way to separate the two.  Once locking is enabled, sleep mode always requires the phone to be unlocked.  Very often I press the power button to shut off the screen, then remember something I needed to do.  I have to unlock the screen again even though I have not reached the timeout I set for locking.  This is an annoyance.
5. No integrated Google Docs support.  At all!  This flabbergasted me. This was one of the main things I hoped to use a “Google phone” for.  I have all these documents imported on my micro-SD card but can do nothing with them.
6. Can’t read .rtf (rich text) files.  Before I said goodbye to MS Word 5 or 6 years ago,  I started using .rtf format instead of .doc because in addition to being virus-proof, every word processor in the universe can read this format…except Google’s.  There isn’t a single app on this phone that can read .rtf files and I can’t find one in the Android Market.  That sucks big time because I have tons of these which will need to be converted.
7. Cannot create documents on the phone.  At all!  The included QuickOffice is worthless.  It renders MS Office documents horribly and can’t create so much as a simple text file.
8. No built-in file manager.
9. No way to attach files to emails except for photos.
10. No way to pause audio after shutting off  the screen.  Would be nice if you could pause or skip songs without having to unlock the phone.  If you shut off the screen to save power, you’ve lost control.  See number 4 for explanation.
11. The much touted voice input and speech recognition functionality is notably absent.  Why on Earth would HTC remove this???
12. No Amazon apps installed and won’t appear in Market (because I’m outside the U.S.).  This is annoying since I do have a U.S.-based account I’d like to use.  If you research this problem you find this to be a hot issue abroad.  In some markets like parts of India, the Android Market has been blocked entirely.  This must infuriate lots of people who don’t understand why their phones are crippled.
13. I noticed that a visible streak revealing the unlock pattern can be obvious when viewed at an angle in the sunlight, unless you wipe down your screen every time you use it.  An obvious security issue.
14. The built-in location awareness can be used by websites to provide you more detailed service.  It can also be used to deny you service, particularly if you are outside the United States.  Even if you use a proxy, the phone “narcs” on you by giving the website your location directly.  This makes it harder to specify language preferences.  Even my Google pages keep switching me to Dutch though I specify English over and over.  If I cross into Germany, the language of my pages changes.  How does that make sense?  I still have the same brain no matter which border I cross and I’m still signed in.  I know what you are thinking—but this problem is far worse than IP-based location awareness because the problem took on new life after switching to this phone.

Wow.  Looking at the list above, you can see that my gripes are more extensive than I thought.  I overcame most of the problems.  I will go through the status/solution one at a time in the order of the previous list.  For any of the apps that are not in the Market, you will have to enable “Unknown Sources” by selecting Menu->Settings->Applications->Unknown Sources, otherwise you will get an error.

1. There is currently no solution for the reverse tethering deficiency.  According to what I have read, it will be addressed in the next version of Android.  This is inconvenient but acceptable considering how young the platform is in its development.
2. There is a website that claims to have a fix for the Ad Hoc networking.  It readily pops up when you search this topic but I find no way view the topic.  It acts like a honey trap.  Makes you sign up to view the page but never delivers the info.  Wait for the next version, which should also address this or search it out yourself if you can’t wait.
3. To address my to do list issue. I installed gtasx.  It has all the functionality I need but is a bit bloated for managing tasks.  It seems to want to manage all your Google tools including Buzz and others.  For a more streamlined app, try GTasks by Dato.  It has become necessary to be very specific on which app you mean because variants of the name GTask is being thrown around by several developers.  Try as many as you like but these 2 will give you an idea what to expect.  I recommend GTasks.  It’s simpler and has widgets that you can pin to your desktop.


GTasx



GTasks

4. Haven’t found a solution for the sleep mode hassles yet.  Maybe a developer will fill that niche at some point.
5. The lack of Google Docs support is unacceptable.  There is a tool that makes using Google Docs bearable for the time being.  It’s called GDocs.  It has 2 massive Achilles heels.  First, it’s allows little more than basic text editing.  You can edit and sync with your cloud docs, but you will lose ALL of your formatting!


GDocs

This is acceptable for editing lists and notes.  Actual word processing is out of the question.  The second irritant is that it gives you no way to upload a document that isn’t already in the cloud.  Want to create a new document and upload it to your Google Docs?  Or maybe to upload some of those imported docs from your transferred SD card?  FORGET IT!  (Update:  A recent update has remedied this situation. Through a menu option you can now create and upload documents. However, you will still lose your formatting.)  Anything more than simple text operations and you will need a laptop (or heaven forbid, go back to WinMo because it can do word processing).

6. Obviously Google has something against the .rtf format.  I don’t know what.  But they won’t support it on Docs or Android.  There is a tool that claims to support it that I won’t mention.  It requires you to upload the file to a remote server where it is rendered and sent back to your browser.  The very thought of doing that makes my skin crawl.  If you are interested you can search for rtf and you will probably find it but I prefer to wait for a real program rather than a gimmick that wants me to send my documents to their server.  Who do they think they are?  Google?
7. In addition to #6, you can’t create any documents at all on this thing without 3rd party apps.  I sincerely hope Google will address this.  You should never ship a product that can’t do “hello world” at least to itself.  Unless you count email, you can’t write any documents.
8. The file manager is not only important for familiarizing oneself with the file system but is also solves #9 as well.  After installing the file manager Astro, it became a browse target that I can choose after I select Attachment in Gmail.  I can now select and attach any file after browsing with Astro.  There are limitations to Astro.  It will not show you hidden files or folders and cannot modify permissions like Root Explorer can on a rooted phone.


Astro File Manager

9. Install Astro File Manager:
10. The only workaround that I know of is to not lock your screen.  Hopefully I will find another way to resolve this.
11. Voice input and speech recognition are some of the coolest features of Android.  Someone at HTC was on some serious drugs when they removed it from the Desire.  The good news is, you can reinstall it.  If you have 2.1, you will need the voice search package and the microphone keyboard if want a mic button on your keyboard.  It will work with your original keyboard however.  Here I will list the QR codes for the Desire/Legend.  Scan and install the Voice Search code on the left for the basic apparatus.  Get the mic-enabled keyboard with the code on the right or follow this guide for other configs or more detailed info about switching keyboards after install.  After this step, your phone is now officially cool!


Add Voice Search



Add Voice Search enabled keyboard

12. Some Amazon links seem to only appear in US versions of Android.  The Market is observing location to choose results for app searches.  That works in most cases.  But what about servicemen and DoD civilians overseas who are entitled to use U.S. accounts?  You can get results tailored to a region by installing the miraculous Market Enabler.  It lets you emulate a carrier in the desired region.  This will let you list the apps but they may still refuse to work (like Amazon MP3 did) because of an incorrect system region setting.  You can change this setting with LocaleSwitch(QR code below).  Using these 2 apps I was able to download and configure Amazon MP3.  Of course Amazon’s policy states that you must use an account that bills to a U.S. address to download mp3′s so if you don’t have one, don’t be surprised if this doesn’t work.


Market Enabler

13. What’s the fix for streaks that reveal your lock code?  Kleenex.  Not actually a defect but it’s worth pointing out lest one feel too confident.
14. After installing the apps mentioned in #12 and disabling location the settings, this problem went away.  If you are U.S. bound, you should not encounter the language issues in any case.  Just be aware that your IP address is not the only method a website has of establishing your location.  They can get a pretty accurate position by interrogating the browser.  You do not even need the gps enabled.

LocaleSwitch

Amazon MP3

Now what?

Now that the problems that can be solved have been solved, it’s time for some more advanced things, which will only become available once you root your phone.  Why would you want to do that?  If you are not the kind of person who knows what all the Windows Control Panel items do and don’t know a few of the shortcuts to get to them without having to navigate the menu, then you probably won’t want to go any farther.  A rooted phone is for geeks.  Not normal geeks though.  Rooting your phone is for the kind of geek who is prepared to buy a new phone tomorrow if anything goes wrong.  I used a simple, 1-click tool to root my phone.  You  can do the same.  But before starting, I resolved in my mind that I was prepared to buy a new phone and that the possibility of having to do so was worth the risk.  I cannot over emphasize this.  The authors of this tool have said very clearly that they do not want any frantic emails or pleas for help because such pleas will fall on deaf ears.  If that does not deter you, then proceed.  No shortcut.  Read it first.  I found it to be pretty straight forward.

Busybox

Audible Player

After you are rooted, check this page out.  It lists some tools that will make any geek happy.  You definitely need Root Explorer if you want full access to your file system.  It’s well worth the cash.  Busybox is great for anyone who is familiar with the Unix command line (The market app says Busybox does not work with the Desire yet but the version that comes with Titanium Backup does.  Sit tight for an update.).  If you shell into the phone you won’t have most basic commands like ‘ls’ unless you install Busybox.  I also included a link for the Audible Player for those who like audio-books.  This player was actually the last thing I had been waiting for before diving into Android.  They’ve done a great job with it.

If you have any questions about my adventures with the things on this page, don’t hesitate to ask in the comments or on Twitter.  Enjoy.

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