new android toy
The Google Nexus S finally arrived in Canada, so I picked one up. My old phone is an unlocked T-Mobile G1, the first phone on the market to use Android. It still works well, but Android 1.6 was feeling very old, and I was also constantly bumping up against the limited internal storage capacity. I toyed with the idea of rooting it and upgrading to Android 2.* using the CyanogenMod firmware, but then I'd still be unable to install the apps I want due to the limited storage. One upside to getting the new phone is that now I'm free to root the G1 and do whatever I want with it, without stressing too hard about bricking it.
The Nexus S is lovely so far. There is of course no physical keyboard, but that doesn't seem to be a problem for my fingers yet. Android 2 and higher allow you to keep a backup copy of your phone data with Google to make switching phones and restoring data easier. This feature isn't available for Android 1.6, so I ended up installing SMS Backup & Restore to move my SMS conversations over. Very simple - the app backed up my SMSes on the G1 to an xml file, I moved the file into dropbox, and then restored from it on the new phone. The Nexus S was set by default to limit SMS conversations to 200 messages and begin deleting afterwards, which I disabled.
I'm a little uncertain about two of the things that have been recommended to me: Swype (better on-screen text entry) and Handcent (super-configurable SMS client). I worry a bit about giving apps access to all my text input or all my SMS conversations. This is slightly more worrisome with Swype because they're not distributed through the Android Market, so I'm not sure what means there are to determine that they're not doing something evil. Or I could just be really paranoid. I accept that Google probably has a copy of everything I do, but I have a bit more confidence in the security of Google's servers than those of random company X.
Also I've been told that the Repligo pdf reader is amazing. PDF support was lacking in Android 1.6, and I ended up paying a few bucks for Beamreader. Adobe Reader is available in 2+, but it's only a reader. Apparently Repligo has all kinds of nifty annotation features that get saved to the pdf, so I'll be giving that a try.
Firefox 4 is available, which is very, very nice, especially using the bookmark sync feature. I could never understand why Google Chrome/Chromium allowed bookmark sync across multiple machines, but not with the default Android browser. Fail.
Good apps that I have carried over from the G1 include:
The Nexus S is lovely so far. There is of course no physical keyboard, but that doesn't seem to be a problem for my fingers yet. Android 2 and higher allow you to keep a backup copy of your phone data with Google to make switching phones and restoring data easier. This feature isn't available for Android 1.6, so I ended up installing SMS Backup & Restore to move my SMS conversations over. Very simple - the app backed up my SMSes on the G1 to an xml file, I moved the file into dropbox, and then restored from it on the new phone. The Nexus S was set by default to limit SMS conversations to 200 messages and begin deleting afterwards, which I disabled.
I'm a little uncertain about two of the things that have been recommended to me: Swype (better on-screen text entry) and Handcent (super-configurable SMS client). I worry a bit about giving apps access to all my text input or all my SMS conversations. This is slightly more worrisome with Swype because they're not distributed through the Android Market, so I'm not sure what means there are to determine that they're not doing something evil. Or I could just be really paranoid. I accept that Google probably has a copy of everything I do, but I have a bit more confidence in the security of Google's servers than those of random company X.
Also I've been told that the Repligo pdf reader is amazing. PDF support was lacking in Android 1.6, and I ended up paying a few bucks for Beamreader. Adobe Reader is available in 2+, but it's only a reader. Apparently Repligo has all kinds of nifty annotation features that get saved to the pdf, so I'll be giving that a try.
Firefox 4 is available, which is very, very nice, especially using the bookmark sync feature. I could never understand why Google Chrome/Chromium allowed bookmark sync across multiple machines, but not with the default Android browser. Fail.
Good apps that I have carried over from the G1 include:
- Adao file manager - good, lightweight file manager.
- AndChat - solid IRC client
- Astrid Tasks - good task manager, syncs with tasks in google calendar
- ConnectBot - ssh client
- Dropbox
- HamSatDroid - calculate upcoming satellite passes
- K-9 mail - so much better than the default Android IMAP client, supports push
- Kindle - the larger screen on the Nexus S is definitely a win here