The Android Market Place is way too hard to use

A lot of things in Android are very well done and others are extremely "average", the market place and its integration into the phone is one of these where the implementation is lacking...

Note that while "http://www.androlib.com/" shows whats in the market place and itself could use improvements, I'm talking about in this post is the phone and its online market place.

If you look through the market place you will see that there are some rough categories of applications, once you are in one of those you will note that:

1. You can't sort apps (for example by # stars)
2. You can't search that category for apps (search looks through whole market).

For a company making a lot of money out of searching, the search engine is near useless, it badly needs an advanced search and I'd like to suggest that the simple search not find matches in the user comments etc...

My Download list if not sorted in any way I've managed to work out, its just one huge list of everything (randomly ordered) I've downloaded at any time (and not in categories).

If you look at this application "Note Everything" (quite good notepad that imports palmos memos) you will see that its in the category "Applications > Productivity". Once downloaded to my phone it just gets dumped uncategorised in any way along with all the rest of the apps and games (and not even always under the same name). To put it on a home page I need to first find it, it would be better if firstly it was categories on my phone and secondly clicking the notification shouldn't start the app but "locate" it (I'm perfectly capable of clicking on it myself).

A lot of apps don't even say what they do (they list last change details) and no screen dumps. I'd like to suggest that a bit of quality control over the listings wouldn't hurt any...

Anyway I could go one but I won't :-)

Migrate PalmOs Contacts to Android (the beginning)

Hi,

I've just ordered my Motorola Milestone and hopefully it arrives soon :-)

My many Contact Details are probably the most important so I started looking into their migration in more detail.

I'm using a Palm Desktop software version 6.2.2 (and phone TREO 680), you can select the contacts you wish and export these as VCARD.

While Google can import VCARDS it ignores the photos! After a while I found mention of the "http://www.soocial.com/" site. At first it wouldn't work so I decided to create a single contact and export (backup) to my workstation and look at the binary in detail.

After examination of the file and a small amount of trial and error it appears that the issue is that this site doesn't like Windows files (CR+LF), so the carriage return needs to be stripped. A bit of error checking and handling wouldn't hurt....

There are probably easier ways but to strip the CRs I used my "filter$" program as it was handy. This command creates a text file (text.txt) containing the hex sequences:

filter$ -BinToTxt < AllContacts.vcf > Text.txt

Using a text editor (I used jedit) I simply replaced all "0D\n" with "" and then ran the opposite command to rebuild the binary vcard file (now in "unix" format):

filter$ -TxtToBin < Text.txt > AllContacts2.vcf

Because the upload can take a while I suggest a dry run on a small number of records to start with, at the end of the import a yellow message will appear for a milisecond or two before the "backup" page is displayed, so be sure to watch for it very carefully.


It took me a while to see the message but when it was originally failing it would say it imported "0" records, here is a more successful example:

After a quick check of the data it would appear to have migrated accross pretty well and with the pictures. I think the photos will probably look average on the android phone but its a starting point.

The next step will be to add a link to GMAIL but I haven't had time for this today.

Google Contacts can't import Pictures! No Android phone for me?

Hi,

I would really like an Android based phone (probably the HTC Hero) but am unsure because its hard to tell "how connected" you need to be (as I just want GSM and no data plan) and what features are available disconnected. You have to be in the secret society to tell what most of the available applications are and what these will cost (you need to commit yourself by buying have a google phone and go to the market place to find out).

Anyway the above issue aside I had a look at the Google Contacts Application online and it looks like it would suit my needs and contacts can be members of multiple groups (unfortunately you can't nest groups). I decided to give the import feature a go.

The import reads the vCard file and seems to create contacts OK but all without the contact's picture. I have confirmed that the vcards do have the picture (it contains "PHOTO;JPEG;BASE64") so the issue would appear to be google's.

Unless someone tells me I'm wrong then I have to assume that Google contacts is what the google phone will sync to and if it doesn't want to accept photos then you have to wonder what they were thinking when they created the import (and from some searching the export) feature. Surely I can't be the only one who doesn't want to spend untold hours to upload and attach about 100 photos...

My other main alternatives are the iPhone and Palm Pre, which I'll now be spending more time looking at.

TomTom Go 730 Firmware 8.301 kills "Operate my Go" functionality

Hi,

Well my first update of firmware (from 8.300) was only a few minutes ago and already I'm swearing :-)

They broke the TomTom Home "Operate my Go" functionality, you will probably get a message like "This function is not yet supported for your navigation device or operating system". At least I'm not the only one with the problem, hopefully will be fixed soon...

Anyway I didn't make a backup just before the firmware update and TomTom home doesn't prompt for one (another failing in my opinion).

I've only just realised that tomtom can't actually import contacts as claimed (at least from my Treo) so I'm not really happy with "them" right now...

Treo 680 SIM PIN BUG and Service LED Application

I have now migrated from my TREO 650 to a TREO 680 which was a bigger step than I expected :-)

There are a few annoying things I'm working through one of which is the fact that the 680 has a bug which means that if the telephone's radio signal is lost then it will request the sim's PIN when it comes back up. Both the 650 and the 680 request the PIN when the phone is turned on (as they should).

I originally thought that I needed to make the connection better (by the old paper over the sim card trick) and in fact this may have helped so its possible I started with two sim pin issues!

Unfortunately the Telstra network also seems to fade in and out quite often (never had this issue with Optus) and after much experimentation I confirmed the pin gets requested when the signal comes back.

This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that the phone doesn't alert you to this fact by any means. The 650 would have made the LED a blinking red and it would have blinked green when the connected.

Some Idiot decided that the 680 wouldn't do this so I tried the "Service LED" application, this would then makem it easy to confirm everythings fine by occassionaly glancing at the LED.

I did read that ServiceLed used up the battery quicklyand unfortunately that was the case for me so I had to remove it.

Which left me only the option of removing the PIN on my SIM, not happy but what can you do...