Monthly Archives: December 2008

Android Dev Phone 1

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I’ve received my brand new Android Dev Phone 1 today, the main reason is to use it to help testing out the Android SDK and APIs.  It was made available around early December this year.

The phone setup was easy, all I needed was to setup the APN/WAP on the phone, and to provide my Google login information.  Note that without setting up the APN for the phone carrier, the phone won’t let me bypass the step. Once I completed the setup, the phone started to sync up with my Google mail, contacts and calendar.  It was seamless!  Good thing my mail box was less than 100MB in total, so the initial sync was not even 5 minutes.  And honestly, I didn’t even bother to keep track of it.

Now that the phone is not designed for regular end-users.  Although they stated that the phone is for developers, I think as long as you are technology savvy you’ll be fine using the phone.  The phone doesn’t come with a 50 page user manual like my older cell phone, instead all the package comes with are:

  1. a Single page double sided Setup Guide
  2. a Limited Warranty Card, and
  3. a “How to set up your Android Dev Phone 1?” card – essentially a card for README 1st

And you know what, I actually like it this way since I can just jump into using the phone right away.  How many people manage to read the owner manual of their new cars?  :)

Android Market is the Google equivalent to the iPhone App Store.  Here is the list of application that I have downloaded so far:

  1. Cooking Capsules
  2. Opera Mini 4.2
  3. Wikitude
  4. twidroid
  5. The Weather Channel
  6. Shazam
  7. PicSay
  8. fBook
  9. Bartender
  10. WikiMobile Encyclopedia
  11. CompareEverywhere
  12. Ringdroid

UPDATED (Dec 23): A few things I have noticed so far:

  • The contact list is sync with Google, however, the import/export feature in Google Mail doesn’t pull the list off generated .csv files (from Palm Desktop) correctly.  Granted that I had custom fields in my Palm to store additional fields, it took me a couple hours to fix it in Google Mail.  It would be nice if the contacts in Google Mail will support in browser editing through Google Spreedsheet.  Just a thought.

My Top 5 Gifts For Consultants

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In the last few weeks, I have seen lists of “Top 10 Gifts for Geeks” everywhere. So I have decided to create a list for IT consultants, people who’ll be on the road a lot, and work 60-70+ hours a week. For IT consultants, coding at the airport is given. Here is my top 5 list:

  • ZUCA Pro – A hand-carry suitcase where you can sit on without breaking. You don’t have to worry about sitting on the floor closer to the power outlet at the airport anymore. Here is a video.
  • Amazon Kindle – if you don’t want to bring all those tech books with you, this may be a solution. Save the battery at the airport.
  • Mino and MinoHD – you will never know when you like to take pictures or video with your coworkers. It has built-in USB plug as well. In this economy, corporate parties are mostly cancelled, but it doesn’t stop us celebrating the holiday over a beer or two. (Link to Amazon)
  • Maxtor BlackArmor – Hardware based encryption – “Prohibits access without a password, no exceptions-not even a professional data recovery service can access the data without the password.”. So basically, you have the power of data backup, and yet secure the data if you lose it by accident. Then if you pick your birthday as the password, then no one can help you there.
  • Powerful laptop – Alienware Area-51 m15x or ThinkPad W500 – a powerful laptop goes a long way. And for home – HP TouchSmart. Now if they have a lightweight dual screens laptop, that would be sweet.

Honorable mentions:

  • GPS like TomTom. Seriously, just because we are consultants or in IT, it doesn’t mean we have good senses of direction.
  • Laptop stands – check out this DIY article from Lifehacker first before spending too much money.
  • Portable electronics charger station – like this one.

Charity:

My December 08 Projects

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I have decided to spend some time during this Christmas holiday to test out some of the new tools out there. The goal is to create an environment hosting multiple mini POC web applications. Not sure what these apps are going to be yet, but I would at least want to test out some of the new APIs out there in the Rich Internet Application space.

So here are the items that I’ll need to work on:

  1. Install Ubuntu 8.10 into a VMWare instance, well actually I’ll be creating multiple of them in case I wrack them
  2. Test out GlassFish and JBoss 5
  3. Test out ICEfaces
  4. Test out JavaFX or Silverlight 2, one or the other.
  5. If time allowed, I may test out jQuery

But after all, this is a holiday season… family and friends are more important than being a computer geek or glorified (code) monkey! :)