Monday, January 12, 2009

Test post from android application

Test post for creating a post from android phone,

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Thursday, January 8, 2009

Android, Airtel India and Calendar

Right from the day one, I started facing this strange bug on phone calendar. Any alert that I put in the calendar would go off 3:30 hrs before its scheduled time. I tried to find what was going on and I would some issues with Automatic Network Time from Airtel Network.

When your date and time settings are set to "Automatic" the time zone goofs up at times and because of that the alert goes off at a wrong time. The resolution to this problem is to manually set the time and time zone to IST.

After that I have not seen the problem at all.

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Uploading phone book to GMail Contacts

The G1 or Android developer phone both require a gmail account to work properly. The phonebook on the phone is automatically synchronized with the associated GMail contacts. Once anybody acquires a phone, the first thing that is needed to be done is to put your phonebook to google contacts. Here is what I did and it worked.

Most of the phones allow the phonebook to be synchronized to Outlook, that should be the first step that you take. Once you are in the outlook or outlook express, export the phonebook to a CSV format.

Go to GMail contacts and import this CSV file. After successful import, you can cleanup the phone book on your computer. Now as soon as you powerup the phone and it connects to google, the phonebook will be synchronized to your phone. From there on it is a two way automatic sync so one does not need to worry.

Import Error

Many times when you try to import the CSV file to GMail, you will get a message saying that "an unknown error has occurred". Following work around can be tried and it worked for me.

On the top right menu in Gmail, switch to Older Version of gmail and then perform contact import. After that it works and gives you messages on how many contacts were imported and how many could not be imported.

Monday, January 5, 2009

Android Developer Phone 1 -- first impressions

I finally got my android developer phone 1, I would say that I am impressed with the software. I have used phones from most manufacturers except the most notable exception of iPhone and I would have to say that this phone probably is right there at the top. I use google services for most of my stuff and this phone, as is expected, integrates very well with google services.

The setup of the phone was very easy, I just had to pop in the SIM card from Airtel in India, setup the GPRS settings and then I entered the details for my google apps account. This becomes the primary google account for the phone and all the other stuff like calendar, google talk etc. are used from this account.

Following are the most notable interesting things that I found about the phone.

  • GMail

  • Google Calendar

  • Google Talk

  • Read only integration of Google Docs

  • Google Maps with street view

  • Contacts integration with GMail contacts

  • Email app for additional email accounts (POP3, IMAP)

  • Android Market

  • Barcode reader app and its intergation with Google search


There are things that need improvement and most probably would be improved in future.

  • GMail (not the Email) app needs to have option to add more accounts. It is very common to have one GMail tied to Google Apps and another one @gmail.com. Currently one needs to choose one of these as GMail while other one as to be setup in the Email app. The Email app does not have option for Archive and some of the other GMail specific features

  • GMail needs to have option to accept and reject invitations sent through the calendar

  • Google Talk needs to integrate with Orkut and may be at a later date Facebook

  • Docs should be editable -- probably limited by the processing power on the phone but would be good to have

  • Service that would generate notifications for feeds registered in google reader. For reading itself the webbased stuff is good enough.


I will add most stuff as I use the phone more. Overall I think I like this phone and would recommend to anyone who uses google services.  For users in India I would suggest rather than buying T-Mobile G1 and worrying about unlocking etc., they can register themselves with android market and buy the Android Developer Phone 1.