OK, so I made the plunge and purchased my first ever “smart” phone. Things I noticed during the first day
As my wife and I previously had VZ Navigator on our phones, and saw that this was preinstalled on our new phones, we immediately tried out that. Apparently that app is crippleware and to unlock the full function requires an additional 10 bucks a month over and above the data plan. This prompted an angry return visit to the store where the people there calmly pointed out that what we really wanted was the Google Navigation application. Don’t get me wrong, VZ Navigator is an excellent application, but its pricing model makes no sense on a phone that has the world class Google Navigation app preinstalled and available for free.
There is a free Facebook app. Unlike the web interface which prioritizes close family and friend updates in the news feed, the app shows everybody. You also can’t see who liked a given comment. Of course, you can use the web interface and it works just fine, so I’ll just do that.
We selected the Droid2 as we felt that we would use the keyboard a lot, like we did on our previous phone. I’m finding that I’m already using the touchscreen way more than I expected to.
The browser doesn’t do SVG, but I knew that. I downloaded Firefox and verified that it does; but for now I am going to see how far I can get with the stock browser. I’m told that this will be fixed in Honeycomb. <insert snarky comment about bundling browsers with the operating system>. In any case, this is miles ahead of the browser on the LG enV3 which couldn’t even handle non-ASCII characters.
As expected, GMail works great. The only thing I have yet to figure out how to do is to mark an email as spam.
Setting up IMAP access to my other email accounts was harder than I expected. Autodetect options didn’t auto detect, even for my ISP. I could have sworn that RR had IMAP, but I may be misremembering. But I managed to muddle through it. Again, I miss Thunderbird’s Baysian filters; but at least I have SpamAssassin in the pipeline. Integration is a pleasant surprise. With my enV3, I couldn’t click on a web link. With my Droid2 I can click on a phone number.
Battery life isn’t an issue, but is something that one needs to be more conscious of, particularly with applications continuing in the background. I expect that this will quickly become second nature.
There still is plenty of exploration required. My current puzzle is exporting my security certificate so that I don’t see security warnings every time I visit my own personal website. I didn’t have the right adapter for the microSD card, so I used AndFTP instead. With that application, SCP requires a paid upgrade, but SSHCP is free. Go figure.
Might try K-9 Mail for better IMAP support, [link]. Also, [link] will do SFTP in the free version.
I just got my first “smart” phone too, an LG Optimus V on Virgin Mobile.
There seem to be two ways to mark an email as spam: In the list view touch-and-hold on the email, and you get a list of actions, “Report spam” is the second to last. The other way is when looking at an individual email, press the menu button (left-most physical button), then select “More” (bottom-right virtual button), then “Report spam” (2nd action).
Just as an FYI, in the Gmail app, “report spam” is accessed via [Menu]->More->Report spam. I seem to use it too frequently, and wish it were a first-level option. When tagging messages for bulk actions, it should be immediately available once you hit [Menu]. At least, on my Samsung that’s where the option is in these cases, and I can’t imagine there are different interfaces for different hardware running Android...
You can also click on most US-formatted addresses and open them in maps of your preference.
Also, don’t try to micro-manage background services. This won’t extend battery life very much since Android is actually good at managing them itself. Biggest contributors to battery usage are usually screen, GPS and cell waiting (on a GSM network).
So you’re supporting my previous employer and my new one in one device. Nice.
One thing that isn’t easily discoverable for Android newbies is the “long press” technique. Touch and hold an item and you’ll get a popup menu with further actions you can take on that item. It’s closest to a context-click on the desktop. That’s how I “Report spam” anyway.
StartCom have been doing completely free certificates for a while now. (Free for class 1 - i.e. those verified online via domain ownership, rather than more stringent identity checks). I can confirm they’re good for web and mail servers alike, and are accepted as standard in every browser and mail client I’ve tried with - Android included.
In light of that, there’s little excuse for going through all the hassles of self-signed.
I’ve found the Gmail web app better than the native app since it even has priority mail. The same goes for Google Reader which begs the question about when it makes sense go do html versus native.
Basically, put your certificates in the appropriate files and point the dovecot config at them. Pretty much the same procedure with postfix. The only difference between this and the self-signed procedure you presumably used before is that you need to download two additional PEM files from the CA’s site (something like startssl.pem and subclass1.pem) which you cat together with your own (those two first in that order, then yours).
I foolishly didn’t document this process in detail last time I did it.
I seemed to have figured out how to work with my own self-signed certificate, which I generated using these instructions.
Starting where that left off, the next step is to copy $HOSTNAME.crt to some place where it can be downloaded via the web. Note the file extension is important as it causes the file to be served using the application/x-x509-ca-cert MIME type.
Next visit that page using the Android browser. Select Complete action using Certificate Manager (not Certificate Installer). Click Install certificate.
