Eventually, I gave up on the Prē and switched to my current, Android-powered Samsung Epic. I figured I was in for a boring day of transferring my contacts over manually… until I discovered that many of them had been synced to my Gmail account, and so they showed up in my new phone without me having to do anything.

Considering all the work I had to go to in order to get my to-do list items, memos and notes transferred over manually… I decided that having stuff transfer automatically was actually pretty damn cool. Since I got my Epic, I’ve been picking “Save contact to Google” whenever I create a new contact. So, if I accidentally drop my phone on the street and it gets run over by an 18-wheeler and then the fragments get kicked into the bay and sink to the bottom, I can just buy a new Android phone and have all my contacts “magically” appear there.

On the other hand, all my contacts are sitting on Google’s servers.

My lover uses Google Calendar. I’ve now started using it myself, and we have three calendars: mine, hers, and a shared calendar for stuff that both of us want to do. Either of us can edit events on all three calendars, so that if, for example, she asks me to make a phone call on her behalf and set up a doctor’s appointment, I can just add the event to her schedule.

Once again, I’ve traded away privacy in order to gain some convenience.

Since this is a shift away from my previous choices about privacy, I’ve been feeling a little uncomfortable about it. I’d like to note, however, that while it’s a different choice from my previous ones, it doesn’t represent a fundamental shift in my stance on privacy. That stance has always been that:

1. Individual privacy is a fundamental human right. Those who want to take it away, or intimidate us into giving it up, are to be distrusted.
2. If someone offers to exchange something for our privacy, on the other hand — as a free market transaction — then we have the choice to accept or decline.

Google’s offered me something in return for my privacy: They make my life more convenient. The only weird part is that I used to decline such offers. Why am I accepting now? (Is it just because I’ve gotten older and tireder? There are only so many times you can manually copy information from one device to another before you say, “Screw this, I’ll take the easy option!”)

And then, just to remind me of why I usually don’t accept such offers, the news came out: In addition to iOS devices, Android phones also collect location data and send it back to its corporate headquarters.

It seems that using a modern, mainstream smartphone at all subjects you to the kind of privacy invasions I’ve never before accepted on my server or desktop platforms. On the other hand, my phone means that I’ve got a tiny, portable, full-featured computer in my pocket. Mine runs SSH and SCP clients as well as the more usual apps; if I had to, I could use it to do remote maintenance on my server or web sites. That’s something I actually can’t do with my work-supplied laptop, (whose corporate security policies keep it from doing any kind of outbound port-22 connections).

I seem to have chosen convenience over privacy. And I’m not sure how I feel about that. But I keep being reminded of the Dead Kennedys’ album, “Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death“. That’s not a comforting thought. It isn’t supposed to be.

Quick Tips

Android version numbers went: 1.5, 1.6, then 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3, and now the latest 3.0 release. Starting with 1.5, releases get code-names that start with successive letters of the alphabet, and which are based on “sweet things” or desserts. 1.5 was Cupcake, then 1.6 was Donut. The “Eclair” code-name is applied to both 2.0 and 2.1.

Most modern Android phones should (hopefully) be using at least version 2.2, “Froyo” — or 2.3, “Gingerbread” if they’re nice and up-to-date. The 3.0 “Honeycomb” release is currently intended only for tablets.

Since there’s no way to right-click on things with a touchscreen, Android uses the long-tap, or tap-and-hold, method. This is probably familiar to Mac users already. Try long-tapping on things; you’ll find a lot of features that way.

The home screen is not just one screen; it’s anywhere from 3 to 7 of them, depending on what particular model of phone you’ve got. Just swipe left and right to access the other home screens.

You can long-tap anywhere on any home screen to get a context menu that allows you to add folders, widgets, and so on. Long-tap any home screen icon to move it around from place to place. If you drag it to the edge of the screen and wait a moment or two, the screen will slide over to the next home screen.

Widgets are pretty much like “apps that are always showing on your home screen”. You can drag them around from place to place and screen to screen like any other icon.

You can also drag apps onto the home screen, or into a home screen folder, by long-tapping the app itself in the Apps menu. This makes a shortcut (or alias or symlink) to the app in the new location; the real app is still in the apps menu. Deleting the shortcut won’t uninstall the app; to do that, use Menu > Settings > Applications > Manage Applications. Note that deleting a folder (by long-tapping it, then dragging it down to the trash can that appears at the bottom of the screen while you’re in drag mode) will make the folder and all its contents vanish, without even prompting for confirmation.

If you want to rename a folder, open it and then long-tap the folder’s title bar.

You can access the notifications menu by “pulling” the menu down from the top of screen. It may help to start your stroke off the actual touch-sensitive portion of the screen. The notifications menu also has controls to let you easily toggle your wifi, Bluetooth, GPS, and/or 4G network on and off.

USB Connection

You can connect an Android phone up to your computer using a USB cable. When you connect the phone, it should prompt you to ask if you’d like to enter “Mass Storage” mode, which lets the phone act like a USB drive. The computer can browse and edit the contents of your phone’s SD card.

If you don’t get that prompt — or if you said you just wanted to charge the phone, but then you change your mind later — just pull down the notifications menu and tap the “USB connected” item. Then choose “Mount” in the confirmation dialog that pops up.

Input Methods

Android allows multiple “input methods”. Pretty much every phone has a standard on-screen keyboard as its default input method, but you can download and install others if you don’t like the standard. You can have multiple input methods installed on your phone, and switch between them quite easily. Input methods include everything from an emulation of the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard to Graffiti (the input method from PalmOS, dating back to the late ’90s!) to Nick Zhang’s “Cellular” keyboard with hexagonal keys (which he claims provides better surface-area ratio, so the keys are easier to hit) to Dasher, the continuous-motion, predictive-text entry system developed Cambridge University. There are also a variety of systems to enter text in other languages and alphabets, such as Japanese, Russian, and Greek.

You can get input methods from the Android Market‘s “Tools” section (try searching for “input method” or “keyboard“). There are also a few in the “Productivity” section. Once you install an input method, you’ll need to go to Settings > Language & Keyboard. Look under “Select Input Method” to find the new input method, and toggle the checkbox on. That will add it to the list of enabled input methods.

Then, switching between enabled methods is easy as pie: Just do a long-tap in any text entry field, and a context menu will appear with “Input Method” at the bottom. Select that, and you’ll get a list of all enabled input methods.

If you have a Droid X, Droid 2, or one of the Samsung Galaxy S line, you should have Swype preinstalled. Seriously, try out Swype before you go searching for other input methods. Swype rocks.

And now, on to app recommendations:

General Apps for Everyone

• Alarm Clock Plus: The built-in alarm clock is okay, but this one is much more full-featured. It’ll let you set alarms that fade in gradually, and lets you use any music on your phone for any alarm sound.
• Barcode Scanner: Also called ZXing (pronounced “Zebra Crossing”); the most popular Android app for scanning QR codes.
• Battery Status (Ad Free): Since many Android phones have limited battery life, this app is worth paying for. It gives you actual percentages for how much battery you have left, and customizable icons, too. I like the Green->Yellow->Red color-changing icon.
• Bookmark Sort & Backup: Lets you re-order your bookmarks in the web browser.
• Bump: Transfer contact info, apps, pictures, etc., by “fist-bumping” your phone with someone else’s. A very cool idea, and it brings back a version of the Palm’s “beaming” feature, which made it easy to transfer information with people in the same room.
• Ringdroid: Snip a piece out of any MP3 in your library and use it as a ringtone.
• Ringo Lite: Assign custom per-contact SMS notification tones. Stock Android will let you assign custom per-user ringtones, but I use SMS a lot more than voice calls, and I want to know when a particular friend is texting me.
• Sound Manager: This allows you to change the notification and ringer volumes independently of each other (they’re normally yoked). It also lets you tweak the alarm, media, system, and other volumes, and lets you set schedules to adjust them automatically. (For example, my office environment is pretty quiet, so I have it automatically drop the ringer and notification volumes to just-above-silent at 9:00 am, then automatically maximize them at 5:00 pm so I can hear incoming calls or texts on the noisy street when I leave the office.)
• Tricorder: Mimics a ST:TNG-style tricorder. Uses the phone’s actual sensors to measure all kinds of stuff. Incredibly cool!
• Where’s My Droid?: Set a custom word or phrase that you can text to your phone which will make the ringer go off at maximum volume — even if you previously had your phone set to vibrate or silent. Useful for the absent-minded types who often misplace their phones.

Also, practically everyone winds up installing Advanced Task Killer, or ATK. Reports (i.e., anecdotal data) differ on whether it helps or not. It may well be related to what model of phone you have, what version of Android you’re running, and what applications you use most often.

Productivity/PDA Apps

Since I originally got my start with the Palm III, I’ve tended to use hand-held computing devices more like PDAs than like a phone. I jot notes, I set calendar events with reminders, I keep track of my to-do list… if I can also receive calls, that’s a nice extra bonus, but really, I want to be able to pull something out of my pocket and write, “Remember to buy milk” at any time.

• Noodles: A pretty good “to-do list” app. Has multiple categories; allows you to re-order items within a category and set any of three priority levels to items.
• NoteEverything: A multi-format note-taking app that allows text, audio, and visual notes. Very full-featured!
• TxtPad Lite: A text-file editor. This has the advantage that you can save your work in files that can be read and edited by your computer when you put your phone in USB drive mode. Unfortunately, the text files always seem to save with Unix line-breaks, even when you set the option to use Windows line-breaks. If that’s a deal-breaker, Ted (Text Editor) gets it right. However, TxtPad has a nice feature where you can set up a toolbar that includes “Cursor Left” and “Cursor Right” buttons, which are indispensable for text editing. Since I have a few editors that will open Unix-style text files, I find the cursor-control buttons useful enough to make up for the broken line-break format, but others might not.

Flashlights

These two together seem to supply everything one might need in a smartphone flashlight:

• Color Flashlight: Adjustable color and brightness. Has various blinky effects, if you want, plus a “candle” mode.
• TeslaLED: Uses your phone’s LED (camera flash) as a super-bright flashlight.

Augmented Reality Coolness:

• Google Sky Map: Shows stars, constellations, and planets overlaid on a sky map that moves with your phone.
• Satellite AR: Point your phone at the sky and see where possibly-visible orbiting objects are, from the ISS to comsats in geosynch. (Yes, I’m a nerd who loves outer space. This should come as no surprise.)
• Yelp: I’m dubious about their recommendations and business practices, but try out the “monocle” mode in this app. It’s quite cool.

For Those Studying Japanese:

Since I happen to be one of that group, I may as well share what I’ve found…

• Graffiti: Yes, this is the Graffiti input method originally built by Palm back in the late ’90s. However, this version also has a Japanese IME mode available, which is really useful for inputting Japanese text.
• WWWJDIC: Access Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC on your phone. とてもすごいですよ！
• JED —Japanese Dictionary: A Japanese dictionary. After downloading it, you’ll need to manually download the main data file, and you’ll probably want the kanji stroke order file, too. Then restart the application to actually start using it as a dictionary.

Getting used to it has occupied a fair bit of my time, but here are a few early impressions. Obviously, some of these are impressions of the Android OS, and others are about the phone’s hardware.

• The Android calendar will let me set alarms anywhere from 1-99 units in advance of events, where the units can be minutes, hours, days, or even weeks. This actually beats what the old PalmOS used to let me do (and the webOS replaced by a simple drop-down of 5, 10, 15, and 30 minutes, 1 hour, and 1 day — not very useful; sometimes I want 3 hours’ warning).
• The Epic is a much bigger, chunkier device than the Prē was. It still fits in my pants pocket, but not so smoothly. Not only is it just plain larger than the Prē, it also has less-rounded corners. Also, the protective case I got for the Epic is the rubberized kind, noticeably thicker than the “invisible skin” I had on my Prē.
• What’s with the battery gauge not giving an actual percent? That seems so… naff. I’ve found a nice app to give me usable information: Modded Logic’s Battery Status Bar.
• Live Wallpaper is cool as anything. It also seems to eat batteries like a very hungry thing. I’m still trying to decide if it’s worth it or not.
• Also, the battery seems to take a looooong time to charge. I could plug in a Prē with a nearly-empty battery and have it back up near full in only a couple of hours. The Epic seems to gain only about 20% or so of battery charge in a similar period of time. Yikes!
• Swype works impressively well. Even using the phone one-handed (and hence Swyping with my thumb as I cradle the phone in my fingers), I can frequently get it to understand me well enough (after only a day and a half!) that I rarely slide out the physical keyboard.
• On the other hand, having that physical keyboard available is still really nice, not least because it has cursor-arrow keys, allowing easy editing of text in a way that was tooth-grindingly frustrating at best (and sometimes simply impossible) on the Palm Prē.
• Another big win: visible scroll bars while you’re scrolling a list (then they fade out). The lack of any indication of where you were in a list (especially a long one) was one of my strongest complaints against webOS when it first came out, and Palm hasn’t addressed it in the various updates over the past more-than-a-year. Google’s gotten this right: The scroll bar doesn’t take up any screen space except when you’re using it, and at that point, it gives you both size and position feedback, like a good scroll bar should.
• And, for yet another win that I wasn’t expecting: Haptic feedback! It turns out to be really useful, not just a bell and/or whistle. (Honestly, I’ll have to put some thought into just what’s so cool about it — and what’s so useful; they’re not quite the same things! That can become another article for another time.)
• The standard Android Memo application astounds me. I didn’t think it was possible to design one that was worse than webOS’ “sticky-note inspired” design, but this actually manages it. In its favor, it has 5 colors instead of 4. To its detriment, it can’t display more than 4 of them on the screen at once (as compared to webOS’ 12), and it won’t let you sort the memos by anything other than last edit time. This is a total loss for user experience: Not only does the sorting look completely random until you figure out what’s going on, but it keeps changing, meaning the user can never learn where in the list a given memo’s going to be.

Obviously, there are other memo- and note-pad apps in the Android marketplace. I have faith that quite a few of them will prove better and more useful than the one that came with the OS.

Also, the screen is big and bright and clear. That huge screen is part of the reason for both the device’s size and the battery-life problems, but it sure does look pretty.

All in all, I think I like it. I’ve certainly found more to like than to dislike in the past couple of days, which puts it noticeably ahead of the Palm Prē and webOS, which caused me such grief and anguish last summer (and last autumn, and this spring).

If only it were smaller and had twice the battery capacity… (Yes, I know I’m asking for something completely unreasonable. After all, I’d like that smaller phone to still have the same size screen. Who cares if it’s geometrically impossible?)

It’s a trade-off, and I’m probably missing some aspects of it. What I’m wondering about, simply, is whether the trade is a net gain or a net loss.

Another way to put this — in harshly evolutionary terms, in fact — is: If someone with augmented reality and someone without it were competing for some life-or-death resource, who would win?

Of course, I’m not the first person to wonder this. In 1992, Neal Stephenson wrote about Hiro Protagonist going into battle with a high-tech combat suit and a bad-ass heads-up display:

He stumbles forward helplessly as something terrible happens to his back. It feels like being massaged with a hundred ballpeen hammers. At the same time… a screaming red display flashes up on the goggles informing him that the millimeter-wave radar has noticed a stream of bullets headed in his direction and would you like to know where they came from, sir?

Hiro has just been shot in the back with a burst of machine-gun fire. All of the bullets have slapped into his vest and dropped to the floor, but in doing so they have cracked about half of the ribs on that side of his body and bruised a few internal organs. He turns around, which hurts.

The [enemy who's shooting at him] has … whipped out another weapon. It says so right on Hiro’s goggles: PACIFIC ENFORCEMENT HARDWARE, INC. MODEL SX-29 RESTRAINT PROJECTION DEVICE (LOOGIE GUN). [...]

He turns off all of the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it’s happening to him. Very post-modern. Time to get immersed in Reality, like all the people around him.

As prophetic as Snow Crash was, though, Stephenson was nowhere near the first to tackle the topic of high- versus low-tech in combat situations. Way back in 1959, Robert Heinlein wrote, in Starship Troopers:

If you load a mudfoot down with a lot of gadgets that he has to watch, somebody a lot more simply equipped — say with a stone ax — will sneak up on him and bash his head in while he’s trying to read a vernier.

Of course, Heinlein isn’t arguing against giving soldiers high-tech gadgets; this is in the context of the introduction of powered armor as a major sci-fi trope. The important part of the quote above isn’t “a lot of gadgets”; it’s ones “that he has to watch”.

Which is a good way of saying that maybe it was more of a user-interface problem. (And, of course, Stephenson was probably familiar with the Heinlein book, and may have even been deliberately tipping his hat to it.)

Smartphone users today don’t usually have to face life-or-death situations (unless you count crossing the street in a busy city). But it’s worth considering whether we could make our user interfaces any easier to use.

For some people, the iPhone’s lack of a physical keyboard is a deal-breaker. For me, the smaller-than-standard keyboard on the average netbook is a powerful disincentive: If I had to use one, it would slow down my interaction with the netbook — and if I learned to be fluent and productive with the small keyboard, it might mess up my muscle memory for dealing with full-size keyboards on my “real” computers. It’s not a trade-off I’m willing to make.

The Palm Prē’s physical keyboard is tiny. I can only key it with my thumbs, and there’s no risk of interference with my pre-existing keyboarding skills. Inputting data with it is achingly slow, but offset by the device’s wonderful portability (it fits into a pocket even easier than an iPhone does). But I can’t really edit text with it, because there’s no D-pad to do precise cursor positioning with. Even the Orange+finger-movement trick is balky and awkward, in my experience; if I want to correct a single-letter typo, getting the cursor after the incorrect character so I can backspace and correct it is such an ordeal, it’s often quicker and easier for me to use Shift+Backspace to delete the entire word and then retype the whole thing.

In effect, even though the phone has the ability to edit text, the interface makes it so difficult that I can’t use the capability. It might as well not be there. What would a better interface mechanism look like?

In Charles Stross’ Accelerando, the protagonist starts off with a set of glasses that provide him with a constant Net connection and heads-up displays of whatever he desires: maps, email, people’s vCards, and so on. But Stross (perhaps wisely) doesn’t give much detail about the glasses’ input mechanism. “He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot and squirts it at his weblog to show he’s arrived.” How? That part’s left to the reader’s imagination. (A very crafty trick on Stross’ part, and one that writers can pull off and user-interface engineers cannot.)

If I want to do with my phone what Stross’ character did, I have to yank it out of my pocket, press the power switch, then make a swiping gesture that tells the phone its attention has been requested by a real human (rather than simply being jostled in a pocket or handbag). But Stross’ protagonist’s glasses were already powered up and in use, so suppose I were already using my phone and decided I wanted to take a picture of something?

Tap a physical button to escape from whatever app I was already using, then press an on-screen button for the main “launcher” feature. Find the “camera” icon, tap it, wait for the camera to load. Then I can aim and press another on-screen button to capture the image.

Cropping is pretty much out of the question, although someone could write an app for it. And I actually can update my blog from my phone; it has a WebKit-based browser and enough screen real estate to make writing and posting an entry possible, albeit painful.

Stross’ interface has the luxury of not having to be real, of course. But something that already works as a real-life prototype is the Sixth Sense system, built by Pranav Mistry of MIT’s Media Lab. It senses the user’s hands, and you can take a picture simply by framing whatever-it-is you want to capture with your fingers and thumbs. (It does a whole lot of other things, too, and I highly recommend the entire video.)