ELECTRIC SHEEP

Dick Pountain/15 December 2010 11:45/Idealog 197

Regular readers will know that it's normal policy for successive columns to skip from subject to subject like a meth-head cricket with ADHD (that is, without any visible continuity) but last month's column, about abandoning the Palm platform, represents such a major life change that I feel obliged to follow it up immediately. It's 14 years to the day since I first mentioned Palm (actually then the US Robotics Pilot) in this column, and my address book, notes and appointments have persisted inside Palm products ever since. My leaving Palm for an Android phone plus Google cloud storage certainly struck a chord with other be-Palmed readers.

Richard, who is following the same path, emailed to tell me he needs to transfer all his old Palm archived appointments to Google, but Palm Desktop won't export them in any useful format. Within 24 hours another reader, Mike, had pointed us to a solution at
http://hepunx.rl.ac.uk/~adye/software/palm/palm2ical/, an app that exports them in iCal format. Mike also told me several other interesting things, including:

1) A jail-broken iPod Touch can run Palm apps via a third-party emulator called Style Tap. I'm glad I didn't know this as it might have kept me stuck in my groove.
2) While the Orange San Francisco phone I bought has a lovely AMOLED screen, ones on sale now are rumoured to have reverted to TFT which makes them somewhat less of a bargain.
3) Rooting the San Francisco to a non-Orange ROM is not something I want to get involved in just yet awhiles.

So how am I coping with Android? Actually I like it much better than expected. I use my phone mostly at home via Wi-Fi, which makes web browsing and downloading apps from the Market fast, easy and cheap. I'm pretty impressed by the stability and multi-tasking of Android 2.1. Most dying apps do so gracefully via a "bye-bye" dialogue and you can always get into Task Manager to kill them, unlike the Palm Treo which was forcing me to pull its battery and reboot about once a week towards the end. I haven't really explored third-party task managers that automatically shut down unused background apps yet, and still do a manual Kill All from time to time.

The quality of Android apps is extremely variable, since they're not vetted the way Apple's AppStore is, but since they take only seconds to download and install I just try 'em and chuck 'em till I find one I like. And there usually is one, eventually. My main requirements, beyond phone calls and web browsing, are for contacts, calendar, note-taking, document reading, photo viewing and music playing. Google's own apps for mail, contacts and calendar sync perfectly with their online counterparts without any fuss (I just love clicking the location for an appointment and being whisked straight into a Google map).

It took me quite a few rejections to find a plain text editor I can live with, Txtpad Lite, and the same for PDF viewers. I've actually ended up with three of the latter because no one does everything I want. Adobe's own is feeble, lacking both search function and bookmarks: only kept for reference. I paid for Documents To Go, part of which is PDF To Go which has both, but I also use a free one called ezPDF Reader whose UI is easier to use one-thumbed, and which remembers your document place when you switch away (unlike PDFTG which maddeningly returns to the cover page). That's essential for reading a manual while programming, but it's slower on pictures.

Did I just say programming? That's right, there's an excellent Ruby interpreter for Android called Ruboto which ran all my text-based Ruby apps unchanged, to my ecstatic amazement. It has a rudimentary integrated editor but I can write longer scripts in Txtpad and load them at the IRB prompt. Now I just need an Android-based graphical Ruby API, equivalent to Shoes under Windows. 

The built-in music player is plenty good enough for me, not merely sucking up all the MP3s from my laptop but automatically organising them far better, complete with track names I didn't even realise were in there (you can tell I'm not of the iPod generation). Ditto for photos and videos where the built-in apps suffice: I mostly use Flickr and a real camera anyway.

That just leaves reference data. I couldn't transfer dictionaries from my Palm and so had to pay for some new ones. The Oxford English cost me £12 and is excellent, with a better UI than the Palm version. I plumped for SlovoEd's language dictionaries since TrueTerm, which I've used for years, doesn't appear to have made the move to Android. I paid for $10 for SlovoEd's full Italian, and live with its free versions for French and German. Thanks to Orange's five-page home screen layout I can have these as icons all on one screen, for rapid one-thumb access. I'm training myself to like the optional CoolTek T+ keyboard layout with two characters per key which you select via a sidewise thumb slide - it's fast once you get the hang. All in all my Android experience so far has been deeply pleasurable, and I do indeed dream of Electric Sheep, being chased by back-flipping Toucans...