CalDAV for Android

I've been looking for this since my first Android last year, but at that time there was no CalDAV support for Android. So I had to use the Notify Active Sync solution my company provided. This basically allowed to sync the calendar (and email, ...) as ActiveSync (from the handset's point of view) to our corporate calendar/email/...

With the re-installation on my new HTC One S I found that there is a ("native") CalDAV sync for Android, and luckily our corporate calendar supports CalDAV.


With CalDav-Sync beta from the Google play store you create - as expected - an additional calendar and set up a new profile in "Accounts & sync".

You can change the sync interval, the range of events to sync (past and future) ...
There are also some kludges and fixes for weird calendar or phone behaviour, e.g.  that some Android phones seem to create events only as tentative.

The default mode is a one-way sync from server to phone only, but all you need to do is disable this option, and - voilà - you have a two way sync from server to phone and vice versa.
I have had this running for about a week now and it works like a charme... Although I have to admit that I did not try any synchronization conflicts yet.

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.

Thunderbird left alone

So it appears that the Mozilla Foundation decided to no longer support, i.e. fund, Thunderbird.

There will be only security updates and patches, and the community is of course free to continue developing Thunderbird.

I guess email - and thus Thunderbird - is not innovative enough for Mozilla, and in a way I can see that. but then again, I've been using Thunderbird even as my corporate email client for about 10 years now and never regretted it. Or even envied the Outlook users. Quite on the contrary.

At least since Lightning, the Calendar add-one, got mature. For a global search (indexed, of course) I find Thunderbird even superior. Ctrl-K is (after Ctrl-Shift-K and Ctrl-M) probably the most used short cut for me in Thunderbird.

Well, let's hope the community continues to support it - I'd hate to go back to Outlook.

Finally an SSD

In the last two weeks I enjoyed two BSODs on my ThinkPad T500 with Windows XP. Each took me about 15min to recover, i.e. from reboot to getting back into our corporate VPN and Thunderbird and Firefox running again. And guess what, I did not really have the time for this...

So I decided time was ripe for a solid state drive (SSD). Although XP does not optimally support SSDs (e.g. no TRIM), there is still a huge improvement.

So I bought a Corsair Series 3 Force 120GB for only 100 EUR...
and a cheep USB/SATA external enclosure, so I can connect both the old hard disk and the new SSD at the same time.
Also, since I'd have a spare 160GB hard disk after the swap, a USB box for this would serve me well.

Well, day #1: the enclosure I got for 9.90 EUR, the Fantec Alu-2503 with USB 3.0, was a crap. I tested it on two different computers with two different drives, but it would only show up as a USB device for about 10 seconds, and then only the bridge itself, but never the drive. Regardless what I did. I gave up then.

Day #2: Bought 9.23 EUR Revoltec enclosure with only USB 2.0 and this worked fine.
I kept the harddisk on the internal SATA port and the SSD on the USB.
With my Acronis DiskDirector I copied my XP partition from the hard disk to the SSD, copied the MBR and then ... tried to boot from the SSD.... failure.
Moved the SSD to the native SATA port, still nothing.

Problem was, I could not find my XP recovery/install CDs... So I had to work with my Win7 DVD which has a different boot mechanism and MBR... etc etc...
So I was fighting various BSODs, NTDETECT, BOOT.INI BOOTMGR and NTLDR error messages.
Swapping the SSD and HD on USB and internal every 20minutes ...

To cut a long story short: On Day #3 with a lot of partitioning tools (diskpart.exe, ...) and the help of the Ultimate Boot CD, I found the problem to be in the partition order with the service partition on the SSD... I manually edited BOOT.INI and voilà it finally worked.

And wow, this is amazingly fast. XP now boots to being fully usable in below 2 minutes instead of about 10. The CPU goes to 100% for about 30secs when everything starts up at once, and with an SSD services and applications really start up all at once.
Thunderbird, Firefox, Chrome, OpenOffice... they all start instantly.

WOW.
To quote a friend: "SSD FTW".

What-if...

What if RIM had bought Palm two years ago (instead of HP)?
Well,  we still might  have webOS still around and RIM in a significant position in the smartphone market with a winning OS.

Just a thought...

Dropbox to kill off public folders?

According to several articles like this (Dropbox to kill off public folders? | Internet & Media - CNET News)
or this (Dropbox Will Soon Be Done With Public Folders, But Existing Users Get To Keep Them)
Dropbox might get rid of public folders for new accounts.

So this is a good reason to register your account now.

Android v iOS

The three top areas where/why I think Android is superior to iOS:

#3  Notifications
Apple really has to fix them in iOS6... currently they are just laughable.

#2 Widgets
Yes, a lot of widgets are just noise, but many are really helpful, like tasks, calendar, clock, ... maybe messaging and/or email inbox even (although I don't use that)

and
<drumroll/>

#1 the Share Intent
This is what you usually see in an app as the "Sent to" or "Share" menu item or button.

Just take the example of Read-It-Later (or pocket as it is now called). On iOS you have to install a bookmark-let  and manually edit the URL (which cannot really be considered user friendly), and then it is still clumsy. On Android the application just declares that it is capable of receiving URLs and voila, it will be in the list. And it can be done from any application that allows to share.
Or Dropbox, or ...

This is really the thing I miss most on my iPad.
 

Firefox 13

So, yet another Firefox update.

Version 13 with the new homepage (featuring buttons to bookmarks, downloads, history, add-ons, sync and settings) and the new tab page looks  suspiciously chrome-y to me...

I don't think it will have a huge impact on me, but lets just see over the next weeks.

Google Acquires Mobile Productivity Company Quickoffice

Google Acquires Mobile Productivity Company Quickoffice | TechCrunch: "Google Acquires Mobile Productivity Company Quickoffice

So, will Quickoffice become the long-awaited mobile frontend for Google Docs Drive? The current mobile HTML version just s.cks... So any  proper client is welcome... And Quickoffice is probably the best mobile office pack out there.

Good.

Lenovo dumps the good old ThinkPad keyboard

Look at this... Lenovo decided to dump the good old (IBM) ThinkPad keyboard in its recently announced T-series upgrade.

There have always been three reasons for a ThinkPad (IBM or Lenovo)

1. they keyboard
2. the physical stability
3. the trackpoint

One less... too bad.

I really don't understand it - it cannot be the cost of production, because most ThinkPad users will gladly pay the higher cost and thus price for the classic keyboard. They already do anyway.

Or maybe it's a royalty/patent thingy with IBM... who knows.

Oh, Google...

Google not only just renamed their docs to Google Drive, a couple of weeks later they also released a new iOS app for faster access, more responsiveness on the suggestions, etc etc...

Why, oh Google, did you guys forget to rename Google Docs in this app ??

Why handset manufacturers love cloud storage

In the last couple of weeks, every new Smartphone seems to come with cloud storage attached, e.g. the 25GB you get with HTC - as announced in Barcelona earlier this year.
I think there are good reasons for the manufacturers to prefer cloud storage over SD slots/cards:

• A SD increases the cost of the device - not by a lot, but still.


• It imposes physical restrictions on the design, because the SD slot it obviously has to be accessible.


• Preferable not hidden behind the battery, otherwise you will get bad reviews


• The capacity of the SD card will for some weird reasons affect reviews, too. If you only include 8GB of SD storage, reviewers will tell their readers to get some other smartphone with 16GB... If you include a too large SD card it will drive up cost and price...


• Also, if a customer decides to replace his SD card with a larger one, the phone manufacturer will not see any revenue from it, but SanDisk and others will.

However, going for cloud storage

• will have no impact on the manufacturing cost


• will not impose any design restrictions


• and you can upsell your users to higher capacity and make mony from it.

So, no wonder they love cloud storage.

SwiftKey X Keyboard for Android

The other day I heard about SwiftKey X keyboard for Android (I think it was on All About Android) and since I was not really too happy with my default HTC keyboard (on my HTC Desire Z) I though I'd give the free trial a try.

Well, it quite convinced me. The auto-completion and prediction is quite good, since it takes the data from my own history... (SMS, twitter, facebook, ...) So I found it to really suggest the phrases as I use them... Even in mixed English/German environment.

Sure I had a new set of typos to surprise people, I hope I caught most of them...Let's say I had my fair share of damn you autocorrect moments.

Anyway, I really got used to the new prediction within a week or so, and should be back to my normal rate of typos... or hopefully less.

Yesterday - when the trial ended - I bought the full version.  $3.99 is really not a lot :)  I'd have bought the full version earlier, if I had remembered that I was running on the trial version... I did not see any limitations there.

So if you are unhappy with your current Android keyboard... give SwiftKey X a try.

I can really recommend this.

Finally 3.4

OpenOffice finally made it to 3.4
And - of course - it now has the Apache branding...

Get the details here.

Seems like minor changes only over 3.3, but let's see.

Finally some movement.

A Kindle on my mobile

Today was the first time that having the Kindle app on my (HTC Android)  mobile really came in handy.
I picked up my daughter from her English drama rehearsal,  which ran 45min 1 hour late and I had nothing to do. No podcast to listen to,  no gadgets with me except for my phone.
So I synced to my current reading position and continued to read my current book.
A bit cumbersome on 3.7" but better than nothing...

Why do I have to manually set the time on a Kindle?

Granted, I'm still spoiled by ye good olde Palm (Pilot).

So one thing that really annoys me is when the clock on my gadgets get totally out of sync.
Like 1hr 5min on my Kindle 3 - ok, the 1hr most probably stems from DST and not from an inaccurate clock, but still.

I expect my connected devices to get their time from the network (or from the PC, depending on how they are connected).

Why can Whispersync synchronize books and my position within this book, but not get the time from some source on the net? Or the PC when I connect the kindle via USB?

This is annoying.

To fix the time you have to go to Home > Settings > page 2 > Device Time > ...

Gimp 2.8 for Windows

Finally, the Windows installer version is available for GIMP 2.8 at GIMP - Downloads

Looking forward to the new single window mode...

Finally, Google Drive

The long rumored Google drive is finally here.

To keep it short: it is basically DropBox, just with some Google Docs integration... or rather, Google Docs is - once you sign up for Google Drive - replaced by it.

Therefore, in addition to DropBox you will get all your Google docs mirrored to your local folder as well. And you start with 5GB free.

"Real" Google Docs (like sheet, draw, ...) are represented as their own file type, e.g. .gsheet, .gdoc, .gslides ... and are only synchronized as a link to the web application, instead of a OpenDocument or Office file.
Well, at least some integration.

All other file types from Google Docs (like .pdf etc) are fully synced in their native format.

Those Instagrammers...

Weird bunch ... honestly.

Last week they were busy complaining that Android users started to ruin their community, because it was no longer iPhone-only... WTF ??
Now they all threaten to leave Instagram, because it has been acquired by Facebook.

I do understand the fear that a larger company like Facebook can ruin the smaller startup and the service... and we have seen that a lot of times, so it would not surprise anyone...

But we leave now? Give them a chance, and let's see how it turns out over the next couple of weeks.

Instagram for Android

Instagram finally became available on Android. And the Apple-Instagram-fanboys hate it...

I - however - love this... Have to try it out.

I'll probably give up Lightbox ... which was sort of the interim replacement app.