So I have been waiting for something to replace my T-Mobile Sidekick 3 (2.5 if you ask me) for probably close to a year. I was dis-satisfied with the browser, really dis-satisfied with the email capabilities and my battery had lost some of its charge-holding capabilities.
When I saw that T-Mobile was going to be the first carrier to release an Android-powered phone, I was really happy. As details of the dream first started coming out, I was even happier. When I watched the G-1 press release, I was ecstatic. Now that I have the phone, I have a shit-eating grin.
Sure, it will take some getting used to, but the ability to have *real* IMAP mail right out of the box is amazing. The integration with Google services has been a tiny bit frustrating, but not so bad over all. For example, I had to export my contacts from Outlook as CSV and import to GMail. But GMail decided to lop off mailing addresses for people, so I don’t have them in my phone. Not super important — I can re-populate those as I go.
One thing I found was that Google introduced an Outlook calendar sync daemon for Windows XP and Vista that works with Outlook ’03 and ’07. It basically just sits in ram and syncs your GMail calendar to your Outlook calendar, and vice versa. The nice thing about this? Now if I enter an appointment on my phone it will go to GMail and then end up in my Outlook — neat!
If only you could directly delete email from the “del” key on the keyboard!
I’ll do my best to post little tips and tricks and neat applications I find as I come across them. Until then, carry on with your bad phone!