It seems like a few of us either have, or are getting Android phones so I thought a dedicated thread on them could be beneficial.

Hints, tips, good apps? Share the fun.

You can find a handy new user guide to the HTC Desire here.

what IS and android phone?

Android is the operating system designed by Google that they're putting on to touch screen phones. It's a functional counter to the iPhone.

So Android is a offshoot tree of the Linux kernel, but the Desire has no Linux support.. wonderful!

For apps on the Android phone, I'm finding AppBrain to be very handy for discovering new stuff and managing apps.

For extending the daily battery life on your Desire, I really like JuiceDefender (even with its basic default settings in the free version) and Quick Settings.

I'm also using ShopSavvy (to help slow down my impulse buys), Google Goggles (it's very surprising in what it can do), & LED Light as a quick tiny spotlight.

So Android is a offshoot tree of the Linux kernel, but the Desire has no Linux support.. wonderful!

When you browse the Desire's file system (I'm using Astro File Manager) you definitely see a Linux file system and structure.

Oh I'm sure it would be workable after a fiddle in the shell, but still it's retarded.

booooorrrring

What's the music support like? I want to be able to just upload music to it in a filesystem manner, as a USB mass storage device, and I want it to support gapless playback (via LAME mp3 headers or whatever). I'm pretty sure it does neither. FUCK YOU ANDROID.

(With an iPhone I can use foobar to manage the music, and upload gapless info etc. I hate/detest iTunes, and would dearly love an alternative to iPhone/iPod, but Android seems to effectively not care. Bah.)

Try Google Sky Map, Ben. It's fun, not boring. And with a little bit of effort you can see Uranus.

Raven. I have a tiny Sony 16Gb mp3 player.
I'm very happy with it.

Trouble is, I have 200GB+ of music on my hard drive. I don't want to carry a tiny-capacity mp3 player around really, which I have to continually manage. I want either a huge one that can just mirror my entire collection, or one that's part of my phone, and I'll deal with managing it.

But if it doesn't do gapless playback it can fuck off. Ah wells.

Android definitely plays mp3, wav, wma, midi, ogg, amr, & aac files. I'm only just starting to play around with mine re music. I've found it very easy to put music on it & I haven't even set up a sync folder yet.

The Cubed (otherwise known as 3) music player works well for browsing your music.

Raven, you can apparently set up Songbird so that it can play your music at home on your phone (data costs might be a bit high though).

I'm going to get a 32Gb microSD card and just live with that amount of music on the phone.

raven said 11 minutes ago: Trouble is, I have 200GB+ of music on my hard drive. I don't want to carry a tiny-capacity mp3 player around really, which I have to continually manage. I want either a huge one that can just mirror my entire collection, or one that's part of my phone, and I'll deal with managing it.

True that.
Can you still rockbox a iPod nowaday?
I guess if you use mp3tag to clean up the id3, iPod would be kinda slightly less unbearable.

Back in phone chat.
What about the sony Android phone?

I've found it very easy to put music on it

Can you drag and drop files on it like a USB mass storage device?

Can you drag and drop files on it like a USB mass storage device?

Yep, that's all that I've been doing so far. When you connect the Android phone to your pc you get the options of charge only/HTC sync/disk drive/internet sharing. Drag & drop is pretty straightforward.

Apparently you can set up a DropBox type folder to sync stuff, I haven't set that up as yet but there are instructions on how to do it (& there might be easier methods, I've not searched for them yet).

About time this bandwagon started getting some people on the back of it.

I've got the first gen, qwerty keyboard model, and it does a great job, except for one button on the keyboard that doesn't work. It's about a year old now, so I'm pretty happy with that.

I have had a bit of issues with updating the OS in the past though, but only once.

I'm waiting for the over-the-air update from Telstra of Android 2.2 as it then allows you to save apps to the storage card, and is apparently 2-5 times faster than the current v2.1 software.

As it's a Telstra phone I have a feeling I might be waiting a while...

The smaller HTC Wildfire looks pretty good:

It has an app-sharing widget, which I'm sure the other Android phones will get soon.

For facebook, you open it, click on bottom left button, settings, right down the bottom - dont sync contacts. but i think i had the same problem so you might have to reinstall and then choose the option on start up of new facebook.

I'm making the switch!

what kind of phone tenzemen? http://androidforums.com/samsung-galaxy-s3/577362-how-show-only-contacts-numbers.html

thanks CiC - that's what i needed!

''Lol I just had the same problem, the thing here is that when u tap the menú button while on Contacts App it shows a menu but ''settings'' is hide in the bottom and I didnt noticed there were more options below.''

duh!

Anyone have a recent Sony Xperia or know much about them? I'm thinking about getting the Xperia P to replace my HTC Legend.

I'm eyeing off the Sony Xperia Z as an iPhone replacement - that or one of the Samsung Galaxy ones. Anyone tips? One of my friends is trying to sell me on the idea of getting one of the windows phones, but I'm not really convinced.

(I'm embarrassed by how much the idea of switching is freaking me out. It's a phone, ffs. This is causing far too much anxiety.)

hurry up and come to android, vine.

the fuck is vine?

how do you not know what it is? i only posted about it so you could tell me about the more obscure, but superior equivolent.

vine

Okay....

Less than a week after its debut, pornographic video clips started appearing on the service. Pornography is not forbidden by Twitter's guidelines.[7] One sexually explicit clip was featured as an ''Editor's Pick'' in the Vine app, which Twitter blamed on ''human error''.[8] Because pornographic content does violate Apple's terms service[9], on February 5, 2013 Twitter raised the minimum age limit for the Vine app from 12 to 17 following a request by Apple, to download the application.[10]

LOL

it's an interesting app when used well. adam goldberg has been all up in that shit.

marlo meekins wins at vine. tyra banks is runner up.

fuck this fucking piece of shit android phone.

i think you got dud hardware. i don't have any of the problems with my s3 that you seem to

touches wood

so I bought a Chromebook...

the Samsung one for $330 from HN.

i really like it. it's really quite small.

and I didn't know until I got home, but you can stick a simcard in it. score.

It is really good. People basically need those not a fucking MacBook pro to fucken browse interweb at cafes. You can do lots of stuff offline too.

oh wait. i was wrong about the simcard. bummer.

doesn't matter ^

i got slightly excited cos i thought i could order a data only plan from someone using telstra.. in theory i can just use my phone as a wifi hotspot.. but i'm with vodafone and might as well not bother it's that bad.

awesome little computer though. i'm totally writing a book on this thing.

they look awfully similar to macbook airs