Paul Gardner

Having got my Samsung Galaxy humming by using a non-standard ROM, over the next few posts I’ll let you know what my favourite applications are (at least at this point in time!)

So without any further fluffing around, here are my five Social Media applications.

Plume (Twitter)

The joy of android over iPhone is the availability of so many additional applications. The pain of android over iPhone is the availability of so many additional applications!

I tried so many different applications before I found one that really suited my Twitter requirements. My two favourite aspects are being able to change the re-tweet style with a long press and being able to can follow, block or even pick a special colour for someone you follow from your mobile.

Facebook for Android

There’s certainly nothing particularly special about this application but I have to be honest and say I couldn’t find one that worked better for android. Not very exciting but it’s pretty solid.

AnyPost

I love AnyPost. It’s a name that is being put out to allow you to update any number of social media services and blogs using the ping.fm api.

You can also use it after having taken a photo by accessing it to be “Send to” button.

Foursquare

The Foursquare application uses both GPS and the mobile network to let you know what is close at hand so you can check-in using just a few clicks. It also lets you post your check ins to a number of different social media sites.

eBuddy

This is a nifty little chat application that gives me access to Facebook chat as well as AIM and AOL.

What Are Your Favourite Social Media Applications for Android?

Let me know in the comments section.

I have been reminded of this clip by so many people lately, so a hat tip to all of them!

I have to wonder as well, with all android releases being named after sweet food, what Ronnie would do with that.

Enjoy.

If you recall, in my last post, I at last isolated the problem with connecting my Samsung Galaxy S with Telecom New Zealand. The new ROM I had loaded onto my phone to improve the speed and reduce my frustration was not set up to operate on 850 MHz.

A further search of the good old “InterWeb” indicated I should flash a new modem to my phone. Isolating just which modem was a little bit more difficult but by no means impossible.

However… Actually flashing the modem to the phone proved to be somewhat problematic.

Effectively the problem is as follows:

1. The mode file is not a .zip file that can be put on the phone and run from recovery mode (like the ROM itself was)
2. There is a program called Odin that needs to be run from a PC to put the modem file on the phone
3. Surprisingly, although android is basically a Linux-based operating system, Odin must be put on a Windows PC.
4. We run a Linux operating system at home.
5. My work PC is Windows-based but it is locked down and I do not have administrator status.
6. And besides, the disk that came with the phone did not load suitable drivers so I couldn’t attach my phone to my PC via a USB cable anyway!

Searching the Internet for suitable drivers for my phone was not too difficult, but I had to borrow my daughters Windows-based laptop to actually install the modem on my phone.

It worked!

A fully functional, fast, fun, fantastic phone… At last.

Next: My Must Have Android Apps

Well that was a mistake wasn’t it. Clearly in my last post I shouldn’t have said that “tomorrow’s” post would be entitled “Two Days of Worry”.

Because that would make this post very very late wouldn’t it.

As we all deserve to go through life with at least one justification per day, here it is for the long delay!

My wife and I have had an appointment change and we have now moved from Wellington to Napier. At the time of my last post we were in the middle of packing and cleaning the house for the new people. Clearly I greatly overestimated the time I would have available to be on my computer. In fact until today, the vast majority of time I’ve spent online has been via my phone.

Anyway… Back to my little issue.

If you recall I had got frustrated with the lag on my new Samsung Galaxy and had taken the plunge by rooting the phone and installing a new ROM. Everything had gone swimmingly and my phone was now blazing fast… Except that I could make neither calls nor texts because it wouldn’t connect to Telecom New Zealand.

After a bit of searching, I figured it might be the APN’s and was delighted to find a site that gave me the detail.

Alas, this didn’t fix the issue.

Fiddling with my phone I found that although my phone was working on the correct type of network it wasn’t at the right frequency for where I was living. Telecom New Zealand operates at a 2100 MHz frequency in central business districts only, but elsewhere operates at 850 MHz. Apparently now my phone would work at 2100, but not at 850.

And don’t forget that my backup, although apparently successful, was refusing to restore correctly!

Next… A Result at Last

So having decided that I didn’t want to go through life totally frustrated, I did some research on alternative ROMs that would be suitable for a Samsung Galaxy S.  The main thing I wanted was to fix the lag - that incredibly frustrating time of waiting from pressing a button until someone actually happened!

A very helpful site I found was a place called the xda-developer forums.  This issue had been debated at length and I found the ROM that I decided to go with there.  It’s called Darky’s ROM and the forum thread can be found here.  It’s specifically designed to give you a blazing fast Samsung Galaxy and the instructions on the forum were easy to follow.

I can happily say that once I had rooted my phone (that’s simply means I hand true admin status and could get to the bits of the phone that mattered), I backed up my current system using an application called ROM Manager and then went about actually flashing the new ROM.

I was absolutely amazed.  It really was lightning fast.  I can now press a button and almost instantaneously the next screen would appear.

But…

Oops

All of a sudden I had no access to Telecom New Zealand.  I couldn’t make calls, I couldn’t send texts and I couldn’t receive data except through Wi-Fi!

No problem I thought.  I’ll just restore the backup and find another ROM to try.

Oops

Restoring the backup seemed to work until it tried to boot back in.  Then it would simply hang!

Tomorrow… [Two Days of Worry(http://www.paulgardner.info/productivity/two-days-of-worry/)

In my last post I told you why I chose the Samsung Galaxy over the Motorola Milestone and why I chose Android over iPhone.

Having got my shiny new toy, I was extremely excited and started to have a play around. Very quickly, I became aware of the “ugly” – the fact that the Telecom New Zealand Samsung Galaxy running Android 2.1 has incredibly bad lag. Yep… You press a button… And then you wait… A long time!

I was loving some of the things I could do on my Samsung, things from productivity to social networking to just plain fun. But the frustration was getting to me. And on top of it, I was getting regular “forced closes” which would have been annoying by themselves but when you had to wait up to a minute (or so it seems when you’re waiting) it was doing my head in.

How on earth could Samsung make a phone that was:

• great to look at;
• incredible to hold;and
• used an open source operating system as good as Android

Yet choose a ROM that made it run like a dog?

What was the solution going to be?

Obviously I was going to have to take the plunge and find a better ROM for it. There were obvious dangers in this, the one uppermost in my mind is that I could “brick” the phone and I could have an expensive paperweight on my hands.

But the frustration of the lag was just too much so with much trepidation and with not inconsiderable research, I jumped in boots and all.

Tomorrow…  Oops

Here I sit… At headquarters… Waiting for my laptop to be re-imaged (and apparently even though it was a standard lease option there’s no “correct” image available for it!)… So it seems a good time to write a post on my new Android phone about my new Android phone, the Samsung Galaxy…

At least that was how this post started quite a few days ago but then I got heavily involved in trying to sort the re-image out… a process that took a couple of days.

Since then lots has happened with my phone.

I chose Android over iPhone because of the open source nature which suits my inner spirit. With Telecom New Zealand being the required carrier because we’re a corporate customer my real choice was between the Motorola Milestone running 2.0 or the Samsung Galaxy S i9000 running 2.1 and the Galaxy won out due to good reviews on the net (and because I figured the later version of android would have more bells and whistles.)

Over the next few weeks I’ll comment on the good, the bad and the ugly.

Tomorrow… Buyer’s Remorse