I am not sure what problem Google was trying to solve with Wave. Perhaps they invented a problem, which no one really has and then developed a solution for that invented problem. Either way I am declaring Google Wave useless for the majority of Internet users.
I decided to give big red a try and ordered up some Motorola Droids from Verizon Wireless.
iPhones are great, but as a techie it was time to try something new!
The phone was fast, I mean really fast. People have been comparing it to the iPhone 3Gs but I don’t have a 3Gs I only have a 3G. I will say the difference in speed between the 3G and the Droid is staggering!
It only took me about 15 minutes to get completely comfortable with the Droid’s UI and pull out keyboard and maybe another 10 minutes to fully customize the phone to my liking. At this point I decided it was time to setup my email account on the Droid.
This process was painless and simple. I quickly got the Droid connected my to Exchange 2007 server and it began syncing email, contacts and my calendar.
So far this was going very well, fast and functional! Or so I thought.
Upon completion of the sync with my Exchange 2007 server, I opened up the Email app on the Droid.
Wow was this ugly. Gray on Gray background made it hard notice a difference between read and unread messages(The picture below does not convey this well). There was no preview of the email body like on the iPhone, and I could not find a single setting to change any of this.
Fail. While I will say that the Droid does in fact send a reply email, you would never know by glancing at your inbox. There is no change to the message listed in your inbox, no reply arrow or “badge” showing you that something was done with this email. During a long work day dealing with many emails this gets very confusing.
Double Fail. First it fails for the same reason as the reply fails. No indication that you have forwarded the message is displayed in the inbox. However this goes one step beyond to be a double fail when dealing with attachments on the Droid. Exchange 2007/Droid users seem to be completely unable to forward emails with attachments from the phone properly. While the recipient does get an email, there is no message body, just an attachment message.eml. Now this would be ok if you could open the attachment, but it is junk on the receiving end.
As a techie I could not let this go, and began the hunt for fixes. First to the Android Market, where I downloaded a trial of Touchdown. This apparently was the end all be all application for Exchange users on the Droid. It however had the same issues with indicating a message had been replied to and thus was a no go for me especially at the price of $20. Touchdown had its other weaknesses but that will be for another post (maybe). This then brought me to alldroid.org. An Android development community. There I was greated by many other incredible tech savvy people, who were also not content with their Droids for various reasons. Surely there would be answers here…..
Well apparently Google does not love me as much as I love it, and forgot to send me a Google Wave invitation.That being the case, I am hoping one of my blog readers has an extra invitation they can spare.
I would really love to use the application and blog about it and would also love to give away any invitations I would get away to my readers in the future. Read the rest of this entry »
We knew good and well this thing was coming sometime in November, and now Verizon Wireless has made it official: the Motorola DROID will hit Big Red on November 6th for $199 on contract (after a $100 mail-in rebate). Naturally, the DROID itself is just the first of what could be many Android-laced phones coming to the carrier, and Verizon Wireless CMO John Stratton even stated that the phone “is wide open” — pretty big words from a company like VZW. Android 2.0 will be front and center, along with Visual Voicemail, a 3.7-inch display (854 x 480 resolution), 5 megapixel camera (with dual-LED flash), a bundled 16GB memory card and a beta version of Google Maps Navigation(!). For those wondering, yeah — the DROID is the first phone to offer that, which transforms Google Maps into a turn-by-turn routing system that’ll have your dedicated TomTom / Garmin trembling in fear. There’s also a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, 3G, WiFi, voice-activated search and over-the-air Amazon MP3 downloads. With all that, who needs the iPhone, right Ivan?
Continue reading Motorola DROID official on Verizon: $199 on contract, coming November 6th (video)
The logo you see on Google today is a bar code! The homepage of Google in USA and many other countries have this logo. Why did they do this? On this day in 1952 the first patent for the bar code was issued. Google wanted to recognize this so they replaced their whole logo with the bar code.
iPhone users can try decoding the Google logo by downloading a bar code scanner iPhone application (I believe there is one called Cardify). Android users can use the Barcode Scanner application to decode the logo. I went to DataSymbol.com, and used it to decode the bar code logo online. Of course, it was decoded as “Google“! For you geeks out there, the Bar code uses Code 128 encoding.