My Next Android?

What should my next Android be?

HTC One M8 
As much as I hate HTC for dropping further support on the One S, they still have the best hardware (IMHO) of all the Android manufacturers. As this is their flag ship product, they wont kill support for it soon. Also, there is the Google Play Edition of it, so support of future Android releases is secured.

Google Nexus 5

Plain google, good HW, maybe not as fancy as the M8 but solid. A lot cheaper (in both senses of the word). Good choice for the money, I'd say.

And I think I'd love the wireless charging.

1+ One
OnePlus seems to have fancy HW and a weird go-to-market approach: selling hardware by invitation only... Only make me want to have it. You won :)

HTC confirms One S will no longer receive Android updates

Crap, crap, crap. After only one year.
This has been out for about 2 weeks already, but - optimist as I am - I wanted to wait for HTC to backpedal on this.

They didn't... so there.
HTC confirms One S will no longer receive Android updates:

"We can confirm that the HTC One S will not receive further Android OS updates and will remain on the current version of Android and HTC Sense. We realize this news will be met with disappointment by some, but our customers should feel confident that we have designed the HTC One S to be optimized with our amazing camera and audio experiences."

Yeah, "confidence" is what I feel... right...

A weird one: RTM on my HTC

Earlier this week I noticed that the battery on my HTC One S drained really fast.
I check some settings and stats and found that the Remember the Milk app (RTM) seems to be the culprit.

1. GPS was on all the time (seen in power > history)
   even though I explicitly turned it off... it stayed on
2. the RTM app used more than one third of the power
   (and location alerts were disabled... so there should not have been any link to the GPS thingy above)
3. however, RTM was using GPS all the time, as can be seen in the details.

That was weird.

And I could not make this go away.

I was pretty sure that during the previous days, I rebooted the phone (just because for lack of power...)

So I posted a question to the RTM support forum and disabled the app for the time being.

You have to re-read the last half sentence to fully understand how this was bothering me:
I - totally dependent on RTM - disabled the app on my phone. Imagine that.

The RTM folks responded, I described the problem in more detail, and got the tip/request to 

1. uninstall RTM app (not simply disable)
2. reboot the phone
3. re-install RTM app from the play store.

I did as requested, and voilà the problem was gone.

RTM does not even show up any longer in the power statistic. (So nowhere near 34%).

And GPS is really only on when I need it (see history).

Should have thought of this myself: I mean, I'm in the business too long not to consider re-boot and re-install :)

Big thanks to the RTM team for their fast help

HTC Contacts and Google Maps

I don't like the HTC Locations service on HTC Android phones. And I don't know anyone who does.
I really do prefer Google Maps and Google Navigation.

Bummer is was that when you click/tap on the location of an event in the (HTC) Calendar, it always takes you to "locations" instead of Google Maps.

Turns out, there is an app for that :)
Aptly called Select Other Map for HTC and available in the Play Store.

And it does just that. It is only there to register Google Maps for the same intent/scheme as HTC did with locations.
Once installed, the next time you click on a location in the calender, the Android system will find two apps registered for the same action, and will ask you for your preference.

You can pick Location Picker (which you wont, because that's the whole point) or Select Other Map.

Choose this one and say Always (unless you just want to try this once).
And - voilà - Google Maps will open and search for the location from the event.

You can always change this back, by going to the Select Other Map app in Settings > Apps and click on Clear Defaults in the Select Other Map app.  This will undo the Always selection from above and you are free to go back to the cra**y HTC location picker.

Two random yet timely thoughts on Android

1.  I finally gave up (to wait for JB ever to be released by HTC for the S3 variety of the One S) and had my "old" HTC One S (the one with the S4 chip) repaired.  Got the phone back 20 minutes before we went on a  a marvelous week of vacation with the family in Nice, France. So, finally, when we came back it was time to migrate from One S to One S.
Thus I - again - ran into the issue of Back / Migration of Android.
Not an easy task.

First, there is the Android 4+ trick of using the Android dev kit (ADK) on the PC, connecting the phone via USB and running

adb backup –apk –shared –all

That was the easy part, especially since as an Android developer I of course have ADK on my PC:
The  adb restore to the other phone did not work for me, because it always stopped with an exception after a while.
When trying to root my phone to get Titanium Backup to run, I must have selected one wrong option - it only takes one - and totally erased my phone.
Good thing I had the adb backup files.

So...breath deeply... root the "new" phone... because this is pristine anyway, login with google account, go to Google Playstore on the web and click through all the apps to re-send them to the phone.
Run adb restore for the data only, to get all text messages and other data back.
Worked quite fine, most of the apps found their settings again.
Took me altogether like 5 hours or so.

Then, take the S3 variante - the one I just got rid of - and set it up for my wife... Moving from a Gingerbread Samsung Galaxy S (the "old" I9000 one) is harder, because adb backup does not work there.
Anyway, I pulled most of the data through USB file system mode. Register her account on the new phone, restore some select folders from the PC (like media, and beyond pod, ...) ... 2 hours and it was done.

This is probable the only realm where apple is still ahead... Migrating a phone through an iTunes or iCloud backup is really easy. As easy as it can be.

Google / Android: This is where you need to learn from Apple. You really have to.

2. Facebook last week announced their Facebook Home for Android.
Good thing. Instead of building their own phone, they just "skin" Android and potentially all hardware. Seems to be 4+ only, which is OK as well.
Not sure, however, if their premise is right: What do they mean, that I want "people" on my phone, not "apps"?
It will be a success, because Facebook junkies might use it. I personally rather have my widgets on my home screen, and not 100% Facebook. I don't even have any of the social/facebook/google+... widgets active on my home screen, so this part of Facebook home is not for me.

The chat heads (talk about a fit yet bad name) seem to be interesting; non intrusive / disruptive chat layers on top of the apps might actually work, especially if the combine SMS/text and facebook chat (and the other messaging services in the future maybe).

I'm not talking about the privacy aspect here. Facebook does have a worse track record than Google, so not sure I want them to have total access to my phone and thus contacts, location, texts, ... But that's a different story

It is, however, a wonderful testimonial for the power of Android. A truly modular and open architecture.

Repair while you wait

Since I'm still waiting for the Jelly Bean upgrade for my HTC One S (the "new" one I bought to replace the one with the broken glass, the one with the S3 processor) I did enough JB Testing on the "old" one (the one with the broken glass) ... I finally brought it in for repair ... hope to have it back soon, so I can go back to my "old" phone with the "new" Android version.

My, this sounds odd.
And only because ${expletive} HTC still did not release JB for some of the S3 processor versions on the One S... Arrrrrghksdfkjh

HTC One S JB Test Upgrade

So, since I broke my original HTC One S about 6 weeks ago, I replaced it with a new one... the broken one (broken glass) to be sent in for repair  for one of the other family members later. Lazy as I am, I did not send it in yet, so I have 2 HTC One S right now.

Two days ago the Jelly Beans upgrade for HTC One S Worldwide/European versions has been released. But mine did not pick up. So I checked on the "old" one, and - voila - Jelly Beans is available for it.

Both phones have CID  HTC_102, (you can check with with the CID Getter app), a version that is listed to be ready for the update. Still only one found the update.
So I did some digging around and found that the "new" one has the older CPU (S3) whereas the broken/old one seems to be equipped with the newer S4 chip. So there most be some other parameters to identify the update
version/file. As the discussion on XDA says, the S3 update wont be out for another 2-3 weeks...

Annoying, but still good news... Because this actually means that I can test the JB upgrade on the broken/old/S4 model.

Download takes a while (612MB), but then it installs smoothly.

So I now have 2-3 weeks to play around with it, before my "real" phone gets the benefit of Jelly Beans.
I guess the broken one wont get repaired for another 3 weeks...

No Jelly Beans yet

Ok, so it does not really look like October, does it ...

After the earlier report  about October, I was really ...optimistic 

IT conservations: Jelly Bean on its way: From The Verge : The Taiwan-based manufacturer also revealed that a Jelly Bean update for the HTC  One X  and  One S  will arrive in Oct...

Jelly Bean on its way

From The Verge:

The Taiwan-based manufacturer also revealed that a Jelly Bean update for the HTC One X and One S will arrive in October

hell yeah...

Look, What I just did to my HTC One S!

No, the Jelly Bean upgrade is still not here for HTC One S, but at least here in Europe we got the 4.0.4 upgrade on ICS.

Upgrade was totally smooth and flawless. And now, back to waiting for JB...

HTC One S

For almost exactly one and a half years my son was the owner of a Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini pro. To be precise, he had two of them, probably three - since we had the first replaced immediately. With all three of them, the Sony showed huge problems with charging the battery after a while. We already went through an external charger, which worked fine. So it was never a problem of the battery, or the USB cable.

So about a week ago, I decided to get myself a new phone and pass the HTC Desire Z on to my son.

At first I could not really make up my mind between

• HTC One S
• HTC One X
• Samsung Galaxy S III

So I want to a A1 store, where they had all three of them on display.  The S3 and the One X are of almost exactly the same size (in all three dimensions; or four if you include weight :) ). Although the display of the One S is significantly smaller, the whole body of it is only marginally smaller than those two.

Since I still don't like the Samsung skin, and I - quite frankly - love HTC Sense, the choice was only between the two HTCs.

Or in other words:

• Do I need 1280 HD on my phone? - No
• Do I need NFC? - No... not yet, not sure if ever.
• Do I need a 4.7 display instead of 4.3? - No
• Is the One S display sufficient ?  - Yes
• Do the One X features justify 100 EUR more? - No

There. I ended up with a HTC One S and I'm totally happy with it.

Android 4.0.x (Ice Cream Sandwich)  and dual core are just ... wow.

I'll continue to report on my love for this gadget in the weeks to come.

HTC got it

Kudos to HTC.

In Barcelona they announced that with each of their new Android smartphones - of the HTC One series - customers get 25GB of storage on DropBox.

They did not go for an HTC Cloud Storage, but decided to cooperate with DropBox. Good. Because DropBox has apps, users, APIs, ...

I wonder how the HTC internal IT guys fought this decision ("we can do this ourselves").

Good for you, HTC.

So long...

So long, Nokia, and thanks for all the fish handsets.
Had a great time and fun with Nokia handsets for the last 14 years or so ... But now I'm leaving.

I'm now proud owner of my own HTC Desire Z (not only the test equipment, thanks again Richie).

I Became Assimilated...

So, the (Android) Collective got me.
On Wednesday I got a HTC Desire Z to play around with...

Tomorrow I'll finally buy one.

Resistance has never been more futile.

--

btw: Thanks, Richie.
btw2: and that's about the most StarTrek references you'll ever get from me.
btw3: Thanks, max.