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Whoops. That’s what happens when an ‘indestructible’ AMOLED screen meets a stone driveway. To be fair, it must have to meet it at just the wrong angle, because I’ve dropped it zillions of times before without so much as a scratch. Impressively, despite the cracks covering the entire screen, and one point where there was an actual hole going right through it, the touch screen and display still worked perfectly. What about fixing it though?
I’ve never come across any fans of Google’s Android Market. Personally I despise almost everything about it. To some extent this is understandable and was always going to be the case because Google’s goals in building and running it aren’t even similar to mine as a user. That’s fair enough – my requirements aren’t typical. The other side of it though, is that it’s just crap, however you look at it.
What follows is a non-comprehensive list of what I think is crap. Some of these things everybody must agree with, while others most people probably don’t care about.
Something that was bugging me about Android was the touch screen keyboard. I found it impossible to type anything with acceptable speed or accuracy. Unless you have child-sized fingertips, you’re relying on the dictionary guessing to figure out what word you mean, which is crap at the best of times, and useless if you’re not typing dictionary words. A side issue – I’ve noticed that if you *do* have child-sized fingers, it’s hard to get the touch screen to register at all, when you want it to. I don’t have child-sized fingers, of course, but my children do. When they want to press things, they have to hold their finger on the screen for a while, and sometimes it registers, sometimes it doesn’t. On the other hand, if they approach from behind and stab at the screen while you’re in the middle of doing something, it invariably registers straight away.
Anyway, before I got side-tracked by children’s fingers, I was going to say: But then I discovered the SlideType Keyboard!
Stuart Langridge passed on a great idea that hadn’t occurred to me – running an FTP server on an Android phone. Although my i7500 is pretty much permanently connected via USB when I’m in the house, on account of needing to be sure the battery will be charged when I leave the house, I don’t particularly want to have to mount the USB drive and manually transfer things. Apart from requiring ME to do the work, which defeats the whole object of machines, the computer I connect it to isn’t necessarily the one I want to transfer files to/from. Also, a card can only be mounted to one device at once, so by mounting it to the remote computer, you snatch it away from the Android device, which isn’t always ideal.
Stuart tracked down an Android application called On Air, which he seems mostly happy with. I gave it a quick whirl, and didn’t like it at all. Clearly we’re all different. What didn’t I like?
If you’re unlucky you’ll have heard of unboxing videos, where someone laboriously unpacks their latest gadget purchase, appreciatively describing each piece of cardboard and polystyrene in excruciating detail, and videoing the whole thing for the ‘benefit’ of the world. Frequently the gadget in question seems to be made by Apple, because who else but a purchaser of Apple products would do such a thing? Anyway, not to be outdone, here is my re-boxing post and photograph.