First Full Day with the EVO

Waking up this morning I had my first twitch of disappointment. I run a lowpower FM radio station from my house, and the programing for that station is controlled via iTunes on a PowerMac. It’s highly scripted, but sometimes there are glitches in the playlists, stream download issues, etc. In the past I have simply used iTunes remote on my iPhone or iPad to pull up and start the next track in the playlist if something has stalled. I got kinda excited last night when I found an iTunes remote emulator, and sure enough it worked. This morning, for some reason it had stopped, and I spent a frustrating few minutes with it until I walked into the radio room and manually advised the program.

While this wasn’t a function of Android, it did highlight something I had not thought about. I have gotten used to doing things the “Apple way”. Success in this test means that Android can functionally replace my iPhone. But I have to keep in mind that there are many things not iPhone per-say, but they are build on the iPhone.

Case-in-point, my car has an iPhone doc with integration to the head-unit. That’s not going to work with my EVO. I have a bed side charger for my iPhone, again, not going to work with my EVO. I can see where these things might be replaceable, but it’s still infrastructure adjustments I have to take into consideration.

Battery. I unplugged my EVO at 7:30am this morning. After a day of moderate use, the phone’s battery died at 4:00pm. I did listen to about an hours worth of Podcasts during the day via the speaker. If I had a car dock that played podcasts via the head-unit while it charged the phone, it might have lasted the day. I was on the phone 33 minutes total. from 7:30am till 4:00pm.

The biggest frustration of the day came from RingCentral. We use RingCentral as our VoIP PBX. I could not check my voice mail either by the RC website or by the emailed attachments (they are WAV files). I had to “call” my voice mail and check it. How very antique. RingCentral claims they are working on an Android App, but I wont hold my breath.

This does pose a problem for me durning the test. I need my voicemail while on the go, but I don’t want to keep having to dial in to have to check it. Google voice with their speech-to-text is awesome beyond words. I can simply “read” a voicemail message. While it’s not 100% accurate, it is close enough for me to get the ideal of what the call is about. In the event the text to complete gibberish, I can still listen to the message. Compared to Google Voice, Ringcentral is lacking.

However, RC does offer me an 800 number (which is on all my published business material), and the phone tree features of RC are nice. Google really should consider something like this for their Google Apps project.

For some time we have been considering moving our ipPBX from a hosted solution to one we control with Asterisk. It’s quite a step, but it gives us more control over our communications infrastructure. This has been under consideration of some time, but we’ve not made any firm migration plans. The advantage of Asterisk with Android is that voicemail can be emailed in a Android friendly format and there are some transcription systems that integrate with Asterisk to get voicemails to the user as text. Also, and this one is big, there are several SIP VoIP clients in the Android Market. If a SIP VoIP Client could be made to work over 3G, then cell minutes be damned! Of course there are a thousand things to test on a pure wireless IP based voice link, and I have my doubts as to the real world feasibility with 3G, but it’s something I would love to try.

Now, back to RC, they do offer “digital lines” which are SIP Voice Connection, it might be worth it to try that with an Android SIP client. As you will see below, Cell “minutes” are a big deal because in my line of work I am on the phone a lot.

I’m trying to understand Sprint’s billing systems. I have a plan that gives me “any mobile” call free. Which means I can call any mobile phone and it not count towards my minutes. As of 5:00pm July 1 the Call Log on sprint says I’ve talked 53 minutes, which seems about right. The three categories are “Anytime”, “Any Mobile”, and “Nights and Weekends”. The number from those three add match with the total from the call log. 24, 23, and 6 respectively. If I’m reading the numbers right, Sprint correctly identified a ported land line number as a cell phone, kudos for Sprint.

I’m wondering how Google Voice will effect my “free Any Mobile” calls with Sprint. On my bill, the number called is just “NEWORLEANS,LA” which nicely hides my calls from Sprint, but I know that some of those calls where made to cell phones. hmmm. I’m wondering if I can get Sprint to classify the GV number as a mobile. Also my local GV number is by designation a Sprint number, perhaps if I turn off Caller ID forwarding in GV, Sprint will think those inbound calls are Mobile ones. I’ll do some testing.

I will say this, unless I get a VOIP over 3G solution in play quick, or get Sprint to accept GV calls as mobile numbers, I’ll burn through my 450 minutes quick. Realistically that’s only about 10 days with of voice for me.

The biggest thing I did today was work with the phone on a technical level. I have complete filesystem access, and have removed much of the Sprint bradding from the OS. There are development copies of the newer 2.2 Froyo Andriod build, but the best of them still do not have 100% working hardware on the EVO. I think I’ll wait. I suspect when HTC/Sprint release 2.2 officially, there will be a scramble to Root that, and it will be available soon after the official release.

The big reason for moving to 2.2 will be the system level wifi hot spot capabilities. Of course sprint offers that now for an additional $30 a month, but with the Android level access, I don;t think the carrier can discern Phone data traffic from connected computer data traffic, especially if all that traffic is run from a VPN connection at the phone level (something Android can do). I think that when the official HTC/Sprint 2.2 is relived they will have taken great pains to remove this feature, which of course the rooting and modding community will restore in short order.

I did get PDAnet working on the EVO. I had to use the USB rather then the Bluetooth DUN, but I think the problem was in my Macbooks Bluetooth stack rather than a failure on the part of anything on the phone.

I also played around with VPN. Privacy is very important to me and I like to encrypt as much of my data traffic as posable. PPTP VPN on Android works over Wifi, but for some reason I can’t it get to work over Sprints 3G. The VPN client will establish a connections but I can’t get data to route over it. I think this may have something to do with the way Sprint is doing its some of their internal network management. I’ll try other type of VPN tomorrow.

Coverage. Today was my first chance to get out and see what coverage was really going to be like in the area. Out in the Homesteads I got a curious icon in my single strength indicator. It was a small triangle over the bars. I’m 99% sure that was the roaming icon, but I can’t find any direct documentation.

I lost single completely in the State Park Lodge Basement during Rotary today. I had a single bar of single that would come and go, but I could never get data lock on.

If the triangle icon was indeed roaming, I can confirm that I was getting 3G data from a Verizon tower on my Sprint EVO. The Sprint sales rep has assured me that data roaming is included in the unlimited data package. I also inspected the the contacts I signed, there was absolutely no mention of any extra charges for data roaming, so we’ll see. I’m going to keep a close eye on my account.

So far my biggest problem is that I have to stop thinking in iPhone. Things operate just a little different with Android. I remember when I made the switch from PC to Mac three years ago. There was a bit of transition in learning everything, but after a few weeks I was fine. I’m hoping Android will be the same way.