Having been an Android user for 10 months or so, I’ve decided to call it a day; quit; move on.

Here’s why:

As many carrier-provided Android users have found out, their handsets are hamstrung by a combination of carrier-provided ROM, woefully small internal memory and the inability to delete stuff you don’t want.

The first problem I had was with the apps, thoughtfully loaded on to the phone for me by my carrier, Orange.  Facebook, I concede, might be useful to one or two people, but not to me; in addition, there were demo versions of Monopoly and Uno. Seriously. Orange also thought it would be fun to to provide their own browser and own maps application, too. Quite what makes them think their branded apps would be better than the stock Android versions, is anyone’s guess. The thing is, I didn’t ask for, want or need any of these things, but because they’re burned into the ROM, I was unable to delete them. Imagine buying a PC with demo versions of software installed on it and you weren’t allowed to delete them. So much for open.

Although I could (and did) download alternative browsers, keyboards, SMS app from the Android Marketplace, I soon found I’d run out of space on my 4gb phone.  Of course, it’s not a 4gb phone, it’s actually a 148mb phone stuffed with bloatware I don’t need and can’t delete which happens to have a 4gb SD card installed in it. Even with the modest number of apps I’d installed, I was forever seeing the low-storage warning, clearing down temp files and generally having to babysit a phone!

Oh, and here’s a fun feature for a handset: when the internal storage does fall too low, it rejects SMS messages and for added hilarity, it doesn’t even display the phone number of the sender so you know who to get back to; it just refuses the message.

Then there was the Calendar app, which would frequently crash back to the home screen when I tried to scroll through my agenda  or do something out of the ordinary, like create a new appointment.

There were problems with GPS signal acquisition too, which, even outside, could take up to 15 minutes; 3g signal acquisition wasn’t much better and always seemed to be balanced on a knife-edge.  There were the random lock-ups, shutdowns and reboots. The camera app would helpfully Force Close when I hit the shutter button, and occasionally leave the LED flash lit up until I power-cycled the phone.

This was all before 2.2  had been released, so I was prepared to wait it out on the promise that Froyo provided the ability to move and install apps to the SD card, and offered all manner of stability and performance improvements.  The Orange-supplied version of Froyo did make the phone more stable – the shutdowns and reboots were much reduced (but not eliminated) – but the GPS and 3G problems persisted and it turns out not all many apps can be moved to the SD card so I still couldn’t move the preinstalled bloatware off the phone.

After further reading, I installed the Cyanogen Mod, which combined with App2SD, offered the ability to move any app to the SD card. The installation was remarkably straightforward and without a doubt, CM is vastly better than any ROM supplied by Orange. The phone was more stable still than the Orange Froyo and the screen much more responsive (pro tip: if you’ve bought an Android handset, then I’d recommend the first thing you do is wipe whatever your carrier has landed you with and install CM instead).

Good as CM is, though, it’s still over-encumbered with crap like Facebook, an FM radio and a default Twitter client, which wouldn’t be so bad, but because they’re deemed to be system files, still can’t be moved to the SD card. Once again, I was reduced to deleting the apps I wanted to run, while apps I don’t need are taking up valuable system space. Yet more further reading revealed that you can bake your own ROM, and remove the components you don’t want, but at that point, I thought, “Screw it; this is just too much work for a phone”. And I jumped into walled garden of the iPhone.

Sure, the notifications aren’t as good as Android; it’s not as customisable as Android, but all 16gb of storage is available for me to use how I want; there are no apps installed that I haven’t chose myself; there’s no lag on the camera; the calendar app actually lets me make appointments; calls are clearer; 3g signal appears to be stronger and the GPS works… indoors!

To me, the iPhone vs. Android argument isn’t about open vs. closed any more, it’s about what works and for me, the iPhone is what works.

I use Splashblog on my Windows Smartphone, but the mobile client started out as a Palm application and so the news of Splashblog’s passing has, for once, united Palm and Windows Mobile users who are equally sad to see the end of such a great service.

So, where now for mobile photoblogging? I keep a few photos online at Sharpcast, because the client app makes uploading and synching a) as easy as pie and b) slicker than Flickr (fancy a new tagline, Sharpcast?). Sharpcast have released a mobile client, but I haven’t played with it yet. With Splashblog closing down, I guess that’s the obvious choice.

What do you use for moblogging?

I’d had a bit of a problem with email reminders, which I posted to the GooSync Google group. Within an hour or so, Stuart from GooSync had posted a reply to say that the feature I was asking about wasn’t available in the free subscription, but was available in the paid subscription.

About an hour after that, this appeared in my Inbox:

Dear Andrew Terry
*********************
Special GooSync Offer
*********************
For this month ONLY the GooSync team are giving you 24 months subscription for the price of 12, that’s a full 2 years worth of GooSyncing for an amazing £19.95. Don’t delay order TODAY, offer ends 30th June 2007.
If you think your FREE GooSync account is good check out the list of the great addtional features available in our paid subscription service:
 - Configurable Sync Window: You can select +- 365 days, allowing you to sync any events that fall within this sync window.
 - Multi Calendar Support: Allows you to select and sync events from any of your Google calendars.
 - Attendees: Allows you to know who’s coming to that meeting by syncing any confirmed attendees to your device.
 - Additional Sync Modes: Supports all SyncML sync modes.
To take advantage of this rare offer and get all these great features visit: http://www.goosync.com/Subscription.aspx
Do not hesitate to contact us if you require any further information or assistance.
Thank you,
Kindest Regards,
The GooSync Team.
***************************

The timing is too perfect for this to be coincidence and I have to applaud GooSync for being so on the ball; what better time to  wave a special offer under someone’s nose than when they’ve just been told that the feature they want is available by subscription only? That is smart, targeted marketing.

I had to replace my cell-phone last week after my trusty SPV C600 died; Orange don’t stock the C600 anymore, so I was given an SPV E650 as a free upgrade – now, I know what you’re thinking, “Dude, it was free, stop complaining!!!!”.

Even though I knew I would have to replace my existing 2gb mini-SD with a micro-SD card; that I’d have yet another power adapter to add to the collection; that my FM transmitter would be rendered useless because the E650 doesn’t have “normal” headphone socket; I was expecting the E650 to be a better user experience than my C600. Sadly, despite the free upgrade, this has not been so; to whit:

I’ve yet to have a day without a crash – that includes recoverable errors (the ones that generate an MS error report) from Comm Manager, Calendar, the messaging applet, and non-recoverable errors (which don’t even respond to the power button, so I have to take the battery out). And on one intensely frustrating day, all of the above within about 2 hours.

If that wasn’t enough, I can’t install the GMail Java client (which worked just fine on my C600) because of a certificate error; Efficasoft’s GPRS monitor installs but doesn’t appear on the Home screen, or monitor GPRS usage (and it worked just fine on my C600).

Wireless almost works – I’ve tried it on two APs; one which is wide-open and one which isn’t,  and the results were the same. I get an IP address, but can’t browse out so the phone resorts to GPRS.

Application installs take forever – seriously; 25 minutes with the rotating Trivial Pursuit pie-icon.

Sliding the keyboard out and then back in hangs the phone.

This thing is so bad it’s practically unusable. There are so many things wrong, that I’m actually beginning to wonder if I’ve got a faulty unit… Am I alone in my growing hatred of this device? If you’re an Orange customer, and you’ve got an E650, I’d love to hear if your experience has been the same as mine; even better, if your experience was the same and you found a way to fix it, I’d especially love to hear from you.

[tags]HTC, Vox, , S710, E650, problems, cellphone, mobile, handset[/tags]

What makes it more complex for me is that I run one Google Calendar, but two Outlook calendars on two separate machines. If this seems strange, let me explain – my personal Outlook calendar runs on my home PC and I use Outlook for calendaring so that I can sync my appointments on my Smartphone; the clients I work with prefer not maintain freelancers as external contacts on their Exchange servers, so my laptop usually gets plugged into my their networks, making Outlook on the laptop “work only”. Again, I want to see those calendar appointments on my Smartphone.

I’ve tried Remote Calendars, and although Google-to-Outlook works quite well, I’ve never managed to get Outlook-to-Google working, and looking at the support forum, I’m not alone. I’ve also tried CompanionLink, but that seemed to treat each sync as a “refresh whole calendar” request, meaning I ended up with multiple, duplicate entries on both Outlook and my Google Calendar.

So when I heard about GooSync on Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, I didn’t get my hopes up, but sometimes having low expectations means that you get a pleasant surprise!

Installing the software on to the handset is fairly painless – use Explorer on your PC to drop the .cab file on to your phone, and then use Explorer on your phone to run the .cab file. Then you create an account with GooSync, and register your calendar details with them. At the Smartphone end of things you provide the details of your GooSync account.

I have to admit that when I hit the “Sync” key for the first time, I was expecting it to go horribly wrong – duplicated appointments, or worse, a calendar reset - but in fact it did exactly what it said on the tin! For the first time, I have trouble-free synchronization between my Google Calendar and Outlook on my Smartphone.

The only thing I’d like to do now (and this isn’t a problem for GooSync to figure out; it’s an ActiveSync thing) is have one-way push from the Outlook Calendar on my laptop to my phone rather than two-way sync, so if anyone knows how can I achieve that, I would love to hear from you!

[tags]Google Calendar, calendar, Outlook, sync, GooSync, Remote Calendars, CompanionLink, Windows Mobile[/tags]

For Smartphone users, like me, the coolest thing about these screenshots is that they’re showing Office application icons for Word and Excel.

If Windows Mobile 6.0 does indeed ship with Smartphone version of these applications, it’ll be a major plus for corporate users of Exchange Push email services, because the only reason to carry around a GPRS-enabled PDA is so that you’ve got Office applications handy and, lets face it, carrying a PDA around on one of those utility belt things make you look like kind of a knob.

[tags]crossbow, microsoft, windows mobile, office, productivity[/tags]