Android-Powered Phones

[marnold]

Any of your Fretters have an Android-powered phone? There hasn't been much discussion on them on here. My cellular provider is giving the HTC Desire away free after rebate on Black Friday so I'm going to pick one up to replace my Palm TX and Motorola RAZR. I've been researching apps to replace the ones I used all the time on my TX. Should be a cool device. WRT to the data package charge that I complained about in the past, we managed to get a like amount out of the budget so we're clear there.

[vroomery]

I've been using Android for about a year. I currently have the HTC droid eris and hope to upgrade soon to the Evo. I absolutely love mine. So many apps and amazing cool things you can do with them.

[deeaa]

I have a HTC HD2 which is win 6.5, so can't comment on Android but the phone itself is a marvel. The HTC sense OS is the same on android and win, so I guess the real differences can be seen in lower level adjustments etc. how they work.

But, based on my experience my next phone will most likely also be a HTC, and I'd guess windows mobile as well, but I'm not averse to android either. However, the calendar app must work just like Outlook. The calendar is by far the most important app I use on my phones, and I absolutely loathe the calendars on every phone I've tried - even my HD2's own calendar sucks big time - so the most important thing for me is I must be able to run a real Outlook calendar on the phone.

By that I mean, I want the view of the day be like a drawn schelude where I can see boxes for classes and how they overlap and what kind of breaks there are with one glance, not just a list of things. It has to be boxes like in Outlook, very visual etc. and I must be able to move those boxes with my finger and edit them etc. as well, and be able to jump to any day with a sweep of finger and again see proper colorful boxes for lessons, not just lists.

So whatever the next phone is, it MUST have a proper outlook calendar, not just a sync. It seems like there are some apps with a proper calendar, like this looks a lot like the Outlook one and could work:

http://www.dejaoffice.com/screenshots/android-cal-day.png

[vroomery]

Well there are a ton of various calendar apps for android. The built in app for android has an option to have a daily view with the various items in colored blocks according to time.

[marnold]

Yeah, the calendar is huge for me too. Thankfully I found out about Goosync so I could sync my Palm calendar to Google. I paid for it so I could upload 365 days in the past and 365 in the future. I wish I could go further into the past, but this will do. I've never used Outlook, though, so similarity to it is irrelevant for me.

A think I found replacement apps for the PalmOS Tasks (Astrid) and Memos (AK Notepad). The Bible stuff I use now has an Android version, so I'll just have to pay for an upgrade. I've got a couple of expense trackers to try. I'm going to see whether I'd really need Documents2Go or if Google Docs will do the trick. I've got to find a good Yahtzee game that I can play against the phone. I've beaten that one to death on my TX. Beyond that, I plan on getting Google Shopper, Earth, and Sky Map. I'll probably snag the Astro file manager too.

Anyone know of any good guitar or brewing apps?

I do know this: the battery in this thing won't have a prayer for the first few weeks. :)

[vroomery]

I use a free Bible app that works really well. It's put up by "youversion"

As for guitar, you have to get the "gstrings" tuner. Works pretty well using just the cell phones built in mic.

[marnold]

Huzzah! My cell provider just now announced that they have a $15/mo data plan for cheapskates like me who can use WiFi 90% of the time anyway. There's a cap of 200M/mo, but you can read a lot of email, etc., for that price. Just don't go downloading a bunch of stuff :)