TechBait

The biggest news for many developers and users in the Android smart phone community this week is the rollout of the latest Android OS, version 2.2 or “Froyo”, and it’s support for moving certain applications, or apps, to the external SD card.  One of the issues that have plagued owners of the Motorola Droid and some other phones is the small amount of internal storage capacity that the phones have shipped with.  The Droid, for example, only provides a paltry 512mb ROM/256mb RAM, which sounds like a lot until you start installing large multi megabyte (20+ megabyte) game apps.  You can quickly run out of storage space.  Add to this the tendency for the phone dialer storage to fill with the increase in text and multimedia messages, you you have a recipe for frustration on the part of many Android users.

Well, the one caveat to this is that the apps have to be enabled to be moved to the SD card.  Google has left it up to the app developers to decide if this is feasible.  At first I thought this was bad, and I heard some chatter that the reason this wasn’t allowed is the fear of apps on SD cards leading to piracy, but the technical reason that this makes sense is that there are some apps that should not be moved since the SD card bing unmounted and removed could pose problems in some case.  For a list of apps that should NOT be moved to external storage, check this link.  Anyway, in searching I found a nice little article explaining to developers how to enable their apps for this handy feature.  If your app does not really need to be in internal storage, please enable it to be moved and let the user decide where they want it.  In time this feature won’t be as necessary as memory prices drop and more phone come with oodles of internal storage, but for now at least, having as many apps as possible allowing this feature is in the best interest of the Android user community.  Developers might also want to note that if they are stubborn in allowing this feature when there is no sound technical reason for not doing so, many users will just uninstall their app and look for movable alternatives.

Today my Motorola Droid greeted me with a system update.  The Android OS went from 2.1 to 2.2 in an almost seemless upgrade to the OS.  Some of my ringtones got messed up for some reason, but they were easy to reset.  Two more desktops were added for more application shortcuts and widgets.  The slide up app window was replaced with three buttons signalling instant access to phone, apps, or web browser.  The whole thing moves faster now, and there are many other improvements inside.  Lifehacker did a nice writeup on Android 2.2 new features.  I have to say that the best feature for me, being the owner of a Motorola Droid with sparse internal memory, is the move to SD card feature for the apps.  Unfortunately as of this writing, almost no apps have this support, including some vary large Google apps like Gmail and Google Maps and Sky, as well as large apps like Facebook and games.  Hopefully over time developers will enable this feature in their apps, as Google has left it up to the individual app developers.  Gizmodo also has a nice nitpicky general Android 2.2 Froyo review here.

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I recently bought a Motorola DROID smart phone on the Verizon Wireless network.  The phone seems to be very durable, and the Android operating system is a wonderful competitor to Apple’s iPhone.  There are a growing number of apps available for these phones, with some notable ports of iPhone apps to the Android platform.  There are some weaknesses of the Motorola DROID phone that potential customers should know about.  The ones that I have stumbled upon are that text messages get deleted often by the phone, even when the auto delete setting is switched off, the fact that the phone has pathetically small internal memory for apps (about 256 megabytes, which is pathetic), and that multimedia messages take up so much internal memory that you might end up deleting apps just so that the phone dialer storage doesn’t run you into the wall when its growth runs wild, and vanishing bluetooth devices.

• Text message threads are set to auto delete when they hit a certain number of messages.  You can alter or turn off this default behavior in the test message app settings, but it will eventually delete them anyway.  It happened to me several times and it is happening to others our there.  The only thing you can do right now is to install SMS Backup, a nifty free app that will copy your text messages to your Gmail account for archiving.  It works, and there are paid apps that will also do this for multimedia messages (picture and video containing messages).

• The Motorola DROID has a pathetically small internal memory of 512 MB, half of which is available for apps.  To add insult to injury, Verizon is advertising that phone as having 16GB of memory due to the micro SD card that they ship with.  The problem is that Google has made it so that only internal phone memory is available for app executables, and most apps are made in a way that they use the internal memory for everything, so if you install many apps you run out of memory pretty quickly.  Regular apps are small, but install a few games or some data crazy apps and see how far you get.  Shame on Motorola for cheaping out on memory, Verizon for false advertising, and Google for not allowing some more leeway for using the SD card for applications, although they cite security and piracy concerns.

• The “phone dialer storage” app seems to store data of some sort on the phone, and it tends to runaway with itself as you create more message threads, especially those rich with photos or video attachments.  The obvious cure would be to delete the photos and other attachments or purge your text messages every so often, which works up to a point, but I found that my phone dialer storage held it’s data cache even after I purged.  The phone got sluggish and rebooted itself a few times too.  Finally after one spontaneous reboot, the cache was somehow purged.  Perhaps there is some internal software setting that does this, but it’s VERY annoying and not a graceful way to go about it.  The best thing that Android users who hit their phone’s memory limits can do in the meantime is to get an app management application which allows them to shuffle apps around from the SD card back to phone memory.  What this means is that you have to archive the app to the SD card and then uninstall it through the management app.  If you want to use it later you can reinstall it from the archived copy.  This allows you to archive those many megabyte game apps that you might not use everyday but don’t want to ditch for good.  It’s a compromise but it works.

• My bluetooth ear piece, a Samsung WEP470, occasionally vanishes from the phone.  Usually rebooting the ear piece fixes the problem, but I found that one time it did not.  Sometimes turning the phone’s bluetooth on and off would fix the problem.  One time nothing worked, and you could hear the incoming phone call beep in the ear piece but when the call was answered no sound came through the ear piece.  I thought the Samsung bit the dust and even started shopping for a new one.  I tried a shot in the dark approach of turning the phone off and removing the battery for a few seconds, about 10, and then powering it up again.  My bluetooth ear piece now worked fine again.  Go figure.

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