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Christmas in Droidland
My Christmas present is a new Motorola Droid Phone from Verizon. (OK, I bought it for myself four days ago.) I did not want to rush into an Android based phone as there will be many more models coming out soon but as my car GPS died and as the Droid has GPS, I figured it to be a money saving decision.
It is a real geek phone, has some issues, and is a little rough until you learn your way around but I am starting to like it. One intermittent problem I had was that just after dialing a call the screen would go blank before I could put the speaker phone on. I would press a button to bring up the screen but it would immediately go blank again.
After failing to solve it by Googling, I called support where after much checking around on their end, they simply advised me to return the phone. So I Googled a bit more and this time I found the answer.
To save battery life the phone has a sensor in the upper left corner with the purpose of detecting when you raise it to the side of your face to talk. So if you place your hand over that corner when on a call, the sensor gets activated and turns of the screen.
Can you imagine that their phone support crew had no clue about something so disruptive and so basic??!! On a prior call regarding a different problem, I mentioned to a support person that this problem which he knew nothing about was common and he could find reference to it on Google. “Oh, they don’t allow us to Google or in any way search the internet, Sir”. Yikes!
Anyway, if any of my geek friends are curious about writing software for Andriod phones, the setup is relatively easy. Software is written in Java and there is an Eclipse development plug-in. But the trick to know is to NOT use the phone emulator to run your programs as it is so slow as to be unusable. Instead, you can just attach your phone to your development machine with the USB wire and run the app directly on your phone. If you are on Windows, you will need to install some drivers: Mac and Linux platforms do not. One your get this setup done the Change-Try-Change cycle is really fast and light weight, a prime requirement for me.
Anyone have a great idea for a killer phone app I can write?
If they touch our Social Security...