It’s been ten days, which I think is a pretty good time to have settled into using a new Phone. Unfortunately I have some major gripes about my G1 and the underlying Android OS. 

First, Contacts. I’ve talk about this before, but its now a MAJOR headache. The contact application in Android needs an overhaul. There is no way to sort contacts by anything other than first name. This is fine if you are on a first name bases with everyone you know, I however am not. I have a couple of hundred contacts, and 50+ of those are not people, but Companies. These are manly contacts to support numbers, reservation numbers, sales numbers, etc, etc. These 50+ not sorted by First name (because they have no “name” in the contact) but rather they are sorted numerically via the “work” number. The “Company Name” field is not even displayed in the Contact List. So trying to find any one of these companies is pointless, and my contact list is cluttered up with 50+ numerical entries I have to scroll through to get to the other contacts. I’m sure that someone will tell me that I can somehow edit my contacts to fix this, but the fact remains that my as they stand my contacts look correct on Gmail and correct on Apple Address Book, and I d not have the time or inclination to edit all my contacts to overcome an OS problem. 

Third Party Apps. I know it’s only been 10 days, and I know that speaking as a model, Android has the best chance for real third party apps, but I’ve found almost nothing in the Android Market that could not already be done on the iPhone, even with it’s limitations. The noted exceptions are:

   ShopSavvy. Because the G1’s camera can be focused, and the Android SDK allows direct access to the camera, this product is the sort of thing that will work on G1 but is unlikly to ever work on iPhone.

   Caller ID by White Pages. This is one of those applications that is AWSOME in concept and miserable by implantation. The ideal is that when you are getting a call, the phone goes out and “looks up” the number of the person calling you. Various bits of information are then displayed such as Name, Address, or Business Name. Now this is a great concept. I receive sales calls all the time. In fact the aformentioned Contact Problem is in part because I get lots of sales calls. When I get a call, the Caller ID shows me a number, but I can never tell from that number WHO is calling me. So to weed out my calls, I have taken the time to put in contacts for various sales people, so that when they call, I can send them to voice mail. This system is about 40% effective. With a program like Caller ID by White Pages I am given data on a phone number regardless of weather or not it is in my contacts list. See, great concept. However in implementation, the program is not so hot because it requires a data connection at the time of the call, meaning 3G or wifi. EDGE data is cut the moment a call comes in, so by the very fact you are getting a call, means that you cannot look that call up. While this program is mostly useless in practice, it’s one of those things that the iPhone SDK will not allow a developer to do, and why I feel that Android is a better platform. 

As to the rest of the Third Party App on the Android Market, there are some good ones out there, but we still have a long way to go.

My third biggest gripe about the G1 is the hardware.

The Keyboard is hard to use, and REQUIRES two hands. People have talked about the USB charging port on the “chin”. I’ve not really had a need to both type and charge at the same time, but I can where it would be difficult/impossible. 

The Screen is not exactly alined. When the unit is shut, I can “feel” a tiny overlap on left side of the unit. I have my doubts if this screen moving will hold up over two years of use. After 10 days, the screen when open wobbles a bit. Not at all inspiring.

Battery life. This one is killing me. I’m on the go about 16 hours on any given day. With Bluetooth active, using the Internet for about an hour total and 90 minutes of talk time total, I get around 13 hours out of the battery. If I use wifi or GPS for more than a few minutes, I’m lucky to get to 10 hours. 

The SD card is near useless. I cannot store Apps on the SD card, and the phone is NOT a personal media player. I’m running out of application space on the device. 

Bluetooth. I need more than just headset access.  

In the end, after 10 days, I find myself looking at the iPhone more and more. I hate that I’m doing it, but I just feel like I could do more with it than I could with my G1. In the end, it sill does not feel as productive as my Windows Mobile World.

Here are some thing thing that I need my G1 to do:

CLI – Command Line Interface. I how the G1 is hard to type on, but having command line level access, with all my shell tools would be nice. 

VNC – both a server and a client.

VLC – A Port Video Lan Client, This will let me play and stream media. 

Nmap – so I can use my G1 for Basic Pen testing (would work better if we had CLI)

Wifi and Bluetooth scanning – good to see what is around me. 

Tethering - I need to be able to hook my laptop up in a pinch and get access.

Skype and VoIP – I need to be able to use Skype from the phone over IP (wifi or 3G), and not with an iSkoot hack. 

As I write this, I am ending my first full days worth of use with my Android Phone. I actually received the unit yesterday afternoon, and after about 90 minutes I had gone over every feature and all the current apps in the apps store.

The first thing to mention is that battery life is not so good. The phone came off its charger at 6:55 AM, and by 4:30 PM it had to go back on to charger. It takes about 30 minutes to get a full charge. Now my days use today was pretty typical for me, I spent 78 minutes on the phone, 54 of those minutes on speaker phone. No bluetooth. I did have the GPS turned on all day, and I used WIFI for about 20 minutes. The phone is set to auto sync with my Google Apps account. I did travel about 75 miles today, crossing some areas where I lose cell signal for about 15 minutes. I can only use edge, because there is no T-mobile 3G in Crossville, or all of Tennessee for that matter.

Oddly, the phone is crashing my 10.5 Macbook when I try to plug it into the USB port to charge. It does this both with USB storage turned on or off. I don’t think it’s my G1, because it plugs in fine to my 10.4 eMac at home to charge. So I think it might be my Macbook, it has some other issues anyway.

The interface is kind of kludgy, but I’m warming up to it pretty quick.

I use my own domain with Google Apps, and the Phone had NO PROBLEM syncing up and keeping me up-to-date with Emails and Calendar reminders. My Google Calendar has a couple of sub calendars on it, Business, Personal, Public, etc. I can only add stuff to ONE of those calendars, but the UI seems to have a spot where I could select another one, but no other one shows up. I’m guessing that it picked the default one for me to enter stuff in on. Entering an appointment is a little awkward, the UI for selecting time seems a bit inconsistent.

Email, I can read and reply to my messages, however, when I went to put in a signature, I could only “see” a couple of lines, but it seemed like I could enter more. Looks like a UI bug.

Contacts. BAD BUG!!! My contacts pulled down from Google, images and all. However, those contacts which are only a company name, are not showing up in the Android Contact list by the Company name, but rather by the phone number. (or just by the address for one contact that is only a company name and mailing address). There seems to be no way to adjust the view or sorting of contacts, they come up alphabetically by last name. I fear that contact feature on the phone is as bad as the contact feature on G-Mail.

Voice Dialing. Having been spoiled on Microsoft Voice Command, this feature seems very lacking. However, the voice recognition did work rather well, and was quiet accurate. However, you still have a UI button to confirm the call, so it’s not quite as nice as you think it should be. Also, no bluetooth activation of the feature. The good news is that the hard part of voice dialing is the accuracy of recognition, and android seems to have that licked, so if that polish up the apps functionality it might be a fair competitor to MS Voice Command. Also, Company Names do not work here, only first and last name, and the tag line “on mobile” or “at home” only changes the ORDER in which the number confirmation UI is given to you.

On a funny side note, the “flick to scroll” feature of the phone is messing with my head. My multi-touch Macbook has a feature to scroll pages. However the interface for scrolling “up” and “down” is exactly reversed between my G1 and my Macbook. On the Macbook the multi-touch gesture is designed to emulate the mouse wheel. To move down a scrollable page, your fingers move down the trackpad. But on the G1, it designed to emulate moving a peace of paper, which is the exact opposite motion. To move down a scrollable page, your finger moved “up” the screen.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had a phone that had a movable screen, and even then I used my bluetooth headset 90% of the time. Now, when holding the G1 o my ear, my fingers feel the slide-out screen move ever so little, and it just feels odd.

All in all, it was a good day. In the world I am in now, with Google Apps and Macintosh, the phone made me feel more productive than my t-mobile Dash. However, it still did not have the same feeling of productivity as my T-mobile Dash did when I was in the Windows, Outlook, and Exchange world.

What will make or break this phone will be third party apps. As a phone by itself, it’s ok, but without the additional functionality of apps, it would not be worth it.

If you look at the iPhone, it survived the first year without third party apps, because it had the iTunes integration to fall back on, and a great web browser. Android does not have that “fall back” position of a media infrastructure. (yes, it did come with the Amazon MP3 store, but the lack of a headphone jack and/or bluetooth stereo, and NO video player, makes this phone a non-starter for a Portable Media Player.) So the only thing it can rely on would be awesome third party apps.

So comparing Android to iPhone on the merits of third party apps, I think Android has the greater potential. Yes, at this moment, there are tons of apps for the iPhone, but as a third party platform the iPhone biggest problem is Apple’s obsessive need to control it. Android has no such road block, it is free and open, and yes that will lead to chaos and we will see apps that can brick phones, but from that will emerge better applications that push the envelope. The four strongest advantages that Android has are, off web application installs, background processes, an open source os, and tight integration with Google, thus giving us “free” push email. If the iPhone had these, then there would be no market for Android. That is a danger, because there is no technical barrier to Apple doing these things, only artificial contractual issues.

If Apple opened up, just a bit, I fear that it will kill Android a borning.

Well I looks like my quest to convert my Quickbooks for Windows files to my Mac have met with deflated ends. As it turns out, I most likely have “errors” in my Windows Files that prevent me from using the handy auto conversion feature. So it looks like that is I want to switch from Quickbooks for WIndows to Quickbooks for Mac, I’ll have to do it the hard way, which involves setting up Quickbooks for Mac, and manually entering in data.

I’ve done this before, and I’ve not liked it. A few years ago when I decided to try the ill-fated “Microsoft Small Business Accounting” package, I spent the better part of a year in pain and confusion. Both before and after that test I had used Quickbooks, but the transition away from and then back to Quickbooks was difficult, and in essence broke my consistency of data. I looks like I will have to go down that road again if I want to move completely to Mac.

On the bright side, the conversation back to Quickbooks for Windows from Quickbooks for Mac will most likely be an easy one, should I decide to do so.

It will be the first of the year before I can give a comprehensive review of Quickbooks 2009 for Mac, and even then I’ll want to use it for a few weeks just to make sure I’m honest about it. On the face of it, Quickbooks for Mac 2009 shows some nice cosmetic improvements over Quickbooks for Mac 2007, but the cosmetics seem to be all they have done. Quickbooks for Mac still lags WAY behind the same version year for Windows.

I’ve never really understood why Intuit seems to cripple it’s Mac Products. On the one hand it seems obvious that because Mac’s have a smaller market share, then few resources should be spent in developing for it. However, when you talk about feature and usability implantation, this argument does not hold. Most of the hard leg work in programing comes from the developing the underlying logic and code, which should be mostly interchangeable between PC and Mac. Unless of course Intuit has completely forked the development of Windows and Mac versions, in which case Intuit is showing astoundingly poor judgment.

I’ve considered using other accounting packages for Mac, but the simple fact is that Intuit has cornered the market in Bank Data downloads, and this is a huge time saver for me.

I know this is off topic for me, but I travel a lot, and this sort of thing bothers me. This is just one more reason I hate to fly. Here we have a TSA employee stealing $200,000 worth of stuff from people.

I’ve always felt a bit of fear when I fly since 9/11, not that someone is going to crash my plane into a building, but that some TSA lackey is going to steal my laptop that I had to put through checked baggage. I guess my fear was justified.

Now as a security professional, I know that 90% of all security is an illusion. I guess that is my real concern about the TSA, we pay our tax dollars to low wage employees to go though our stuff, violate our fourth amendment rights, all to maintain the lie that it somehow is going to keep us safe.

..and I take back the part about Water Boarding. You can never use someone else bad acts to justify your own bad acts.

It seems the next version of Windows, will be called “Windows 7″, which ends a 14 year run of calling Windows versions be either the year of their release or by catchy names which do not mean anything. It would appear that Microsoft has come out of it’s decade and a half comma, and started naming things the right way again.

Just to recap.  For those of you to young to remember, there was a world BEFORE Windows 95. In fact Microsoft long dominated the OS world way before August of 1995 when Windows 95 was realized. I think it’s fair to say that Microsoft started to pull away with MS-Dos 5.0 and Windows 3.0. Prior to 3.0 Windows was not that integrated an environments. While there were Programs designed to run inside Windows 2 and 2.11, these where less graphical environments rather than “shells” from which to run Dos programs. Starting in 1990 with the release of Windows 3.0 Microsoft pushed hard for programs that ran ONLY inside of Windows, and Microsoft refined it’s a package to incorporate the blooming “multimedia” craze (Windows 3.1) and the business Networking boom (Windows 3.11) . The MS-DOS/Windows marriage became so tight that by 1994 most PCs simply booted DOS and went straight into Windows by calling c:\windows\win.com from the autoexec.bat file. The typical PC user knew about DOS, but did almost everything inside of Windows.

With Windows 95 Microsoft changed direction. They combined MS-Dos and Windows into a single OS package, and gave it a fancy new “Explorer” shell. The really bizarre irony here is that from a technological standpoint the move from MS-Dos 6.22 & Windows 3.11 to Windows 95 was mostly cometic. It was not until Windows 98 that there was a genuine shift in the underpinnings of Windows. Yet these tremendous achievements made by Windows 98 over Windows 95 where mostly missed by the general public because they both had the same visual interface.

But Microsoft also started an odd marketing gimmick with Windows 95 that still persists to this day. Prior to Windows 95, software makers named there software reasonable things like “Printshop 2.0″, The “2.0″ being the operative clause, letting the user know exactly what version of the software they had. So if they were in a software store and saw a Box labeled “Printshop 3.0″ they knew it was a new version. After Microsoft’s Windows 95, other software markers started naming their software things like 95, 96, 97, etc, etc. I suppose this works well if you release a new version every year. But putting the YEAR in the software title may seem all neuvo, until you realize a couple of years later that your still trying to sell software that’s dated itself old in the title.

To even add MORE confusion, I saw some software makers trying to have it both ways, naming things like “Software 95 2.0″ or “Software 3.5 97″. Of course this was in the “tech-boom” of the late 1990s when there was more venture capital than sense, and you could get 3 or 4 million is startup money just with a catchy name.

For 5 years Microsoft Dated our OS. So if it was 200 and you ran unto someone using Windows 95, you knew they were not technology viable as a person. But the ever clever Microsoft group changed course yet again, and gave us Windows XP, but never really made clear what “XP” stood for. (It’s generally accepted that “Windows eXPerance” was the root of the marketing ploy). Then we moved to Windows Vista, which was an appropriately silly sounding name, for a silly OS.

I think alot of this naming foolishness came about as Microsoft began to elevate Steve Balmer’s roll in the company. Up until the late 1990s Microsoft had been run by technical people. Balmer’s background was not technical, but marketing (thou he had been with the company sense the early days). I think this really started to show with products like Windows ME, and Microsoft BOB, where technical substance was usurped by marketing venire. In fact I think you can trace a lot of Microsoft’s current problems back to the mid to late 90s when “marketing” became an issue for them. Windows 3.1, while it did have it’s problems and limitations, was a rather stable environment. The wasted vast amounts of treasure into marketing Windows 95, XP, and Vista. When the really technically superior OSes, Windows 98, 2000, and XP Service Pack 2, got little or any fanfare.

I’m hoping that with Windows 7, Microsoft returns to the track of low key, technically superior OS releases. If the name is anything to go on, they are on the right track.