Thanks to a promotion of my operator, I had a very good deal on my first Android mobile phone. I have it for a few days now, and I must say, I’m pretty excited about it. iPhones are probably still more popular (read “hyped”) at the moment, but I’m sure Android phones will catch up soon. So I’m now the proud owner of a HTC Magic. It has Android 1.5 installed. (It’s a fairly old model, still need to look up if I can upgrade.)
The main reason why I wanted an Android phone, is because I’m using a lot of Google services. And it’s pretty easy to keep using them on the road with an Android phone. In the past, I’ve always been trying out different ways to sync my mobile phone (Nokia, Sony Ericsson) with my Google contacts and calendar, but all the applications out there didn’t really do the job for me. Because Android is developed by Google, this is no longer a problem. When you first switch on the phone, it asks for your Google login credentials, and voila, everything is in sync immediately. (Just be sure you’re on a Wifi network, it starts to download a whole lot of data.)
At work I have a few colleagues with Android phones, and Mr Capo was so kind to direct me to a few awesome applications. At the moment my favourite apps are:
- Barcode Scanner: you can scan products to find more info on the web, it also scans QR codes.
- FxCamera: some fun camera effects (Toy camera, Polaroid, …).
- Twitdroid: to keep up with the tweets of my peeps.
- Battery Indicator: gives you an exact percentage of the status of your battery.
- 3G Watchdog: to keep track of your data bandwidth.
- You also want to install some widgets to switch on/off your Wifi, Bleutooth, GPS and display brightness. Comes in handy for quick access.
- And for fun: Facebook, Android LightSaber, FingerPaint, Sketch-a-Etch, …
There are some apps I’ve installed, but which I haven’t used yet. Stuff like Layar, Evernote, Andrometer, …
Then, because I’m a fan of Flickr and Tumblr, I was looking for apps for these services. But I couldn’t find anything in the Marketplace! After some searching and researching on the web, I installed BucketUpload. This would allow to upload photos to Flickr. But, I didn’t get it working… I also discovered aTumble to easily upload stuff to Tumblr. But because it’s a paid application, it is not yet available in the Belgium Marketplace. Yes that’s right, it seems that Google is slow on rolling out the markets for selling applications. That totally sucks! Because I am willing to pay for this app. And what’s the point of a Marketplace, if you can’t buy anything? I found this page on Google Help explaining a bit more. Of course our neighbours are in an advantage again. In the Netherlands, Germany, France and the UK, you can buy apps through the Marketplace. But again, Belgium is not on the list. If your operator is not in this list, you will have to wait. How long? Who knows.
