Cool, wasn't aware of that.

One benefit of not requiring iTunes is that you can easily provide a link to an application that the user can then install to their phone. I'm aware that you can do this for iOS devices too, but when you don't have iTunes those links are seriously annoying (and not always well identified).

It's a definite improvement over what most blogs would do in the past for Android apps, which was to include a QR code in their article that the user had to scan with a barcode reader app.

I have a tip for Android users. For a while now, I've been trying to figure out a way to get photos I take with my phone to sync to my desktop without having to plug into USB. I've always been a little surprised that this wasn't built into Android using something like Picasa or Google Desktop.

Well, after quite a bit of research today, I stumbled across an app called Dropin. You do have to give it your DropBox credentials (I'm always wary of giving a site credentials for another site), but once you do it works extremely well. It syncs all your photos and videos to DropBox and then to your PC.

Hopefully Google will eventually make a first party app or Gallery feature that will do something similar, but for now I'm finding this to be a pretty good way to do it.

Thanks...I've been looking for that and am already a Dropbox user, so this is perfect.

What do you Android guys think of this one. LINK

I am thinking of getting one with the 25 dollar a month plan. I don't really need the phone much. This sounds like a good deal to me I haven't seen any other data plan this cheap and I don't want a contract anyway.

The place I work at has deemed us unworthy of have Black Berries. (I need a new job ) We are supposed to have another way to get company email in the field but I would miss having a mobile way to get my personal email.

I pretty much use Gmail and Google Maps now.

Huh. Didn't know they had that. I always thought it was stupid that they didn't have an official mechanism for browsing and installing apps on the market that wasn't via your phone. Thanks. Much easier and nicer using that site!

To be honest, I probably wouldn't recommend that phone, purely due to the speed. It's 600Mhz, which is just a hair faster than the first round of Android phones from the beginning of '09. It'll be faster than most of those because of 2.2 (if it has the JIT), but it's still going to be slow.

The plans are good though...

That's what some of the comments say on the Virgin site but then some people come back saying that it's faster than that because it has multiple processors. What kind of processor speeds does something like the Nexus S (which I am thinking is the Cadillac of Android phones)have ?

The other one they offer is a Samsung http://www.virginmobileusa.com/cell-phones/samsung-intercept-phone.jsp

The downside to this one is it only has 2.1 and it sounds like Samsung never updates their stuff.

I originally thought I would want a physical keyboard but after using a horizontal sliding one like this phone i'm thinking the on screen would be better. Plus the phone is smaller without one. I haven't tried an on screen one though so I might hate that more
That's one thing that sucks with the Virgin Mobile stuff I have never seen working demo units anyplace.

The Virgin one has a relatively low power CPU (more-or-less equivalent to the original Motorola Droid), has pretty limited internal storage (which means you won't be able to have a lot of apps installed at once*), and has a low-res display. However, the plan is awfully cheap. I personally like Virgin Mobile for calls, but they used to try to screw you on the data. Assuming that the data plan isn't weirdly limited in some way, and as long as you know you're not getting anything near top-of-the-line specs on the phone, I think it sounds like a good deal. I'd actually been considering getting one for the wife (her current phone is a Virgin Mobile dumbphone), but she wouldn't know what to do with it.

* There are ways to get around the limited internal storage, though, where you can kind of automatically install and uninstall apps as you need them, keeping them on the SD card.

The Optimus is 600MHz vs 1GHz for the Nexus S. Unless I'm missing something, the Optimus has a normal ARM processor, single core, and just one of them.

The onscreen keyboard on the Optimus should be pretty much like any other Android phone. Play with another one and see how it works for you. I thought I'd hate the onscreen keyboards, too, but, other than every once in a while when I can't seem to type anything to save my life, I've been pretty pleased with the normal Android keyboard.

Well, the 3GS runs OS4.x and is "only" 600MHz too... though yes, it's a Cortex-A8 600MHz and not an ARM11 600MHz, which is a decent difference and further reinforces why it's stupid comparing clock rates between architectures even from the same vendor (eg: original 1GHz snapdragons vs the new 1GHz snapdragons)

That's true, and thanks for the input. Though, I'd point out that while it might be the speed of the 3GS, that phone is also nearing two years old now.


I'm right there with you, Bitt. I chose to get the G1 for two reasons: it did GMail better than the iPhone, and it had a physical keyboard. I insisted that I hated on-screen keyboards. I've changed my tune on the keyboard (Android still does GMail better than any other phone, though ).

The one caveat I'd have about the virtual keyboard on the Optimus (and the Intercept, now that I look at it), though, is that the 3.2" screen is smaller than average. That might make the keyboard pretty cramped. For comparison, the iPhone is 3.5" (the difference might not seem like much, but it is), the Nexus One is 3.7", and the Nexus S is 4".

One solution might be to buy a used phone and bring it to Virgin. Unfortunately, Virgin is an MVNO of Sprint here in the US, so it's CDMA, which might be tricky. Does anyone know if this would be possible? You might have to give Virgin a call to find out. Also unfortunate is that Sprint doesn't have the best selection of Android phones to begin with. I'm not sure which one I'd recommend if you were going with them, either...

*edit*
ps- A grammar question for you, Bitt: I actually looked this one up, but couldn't find much. If I'm ending a sentence with a measurement (like 4"), do I still put the period inside the quotes? It seems wrong to me, but that happens a great deal I also stumbled across some page that claimed there were instances in which you put a question mark outside a quote, but I'm not sure about that either...

Virgin does not do BYOD.

The " indicating inches is not a quotation mark, so: no, you do not put a period before it.

American standard usage is to put the final period inside quotation marks, but (I believe) British standard usage is to close the quotation mark then have a period. (But what of Canadians?) I often find myself doing it the British way. It just seems more natural to me, as a matter of grammar, although typographically it's prettier to have the period inside the quotation marks.

Okay Bitt, double or nothing: You want to end a sentence with a quotation of a sentence (e.g., Bob said, "you must be crazy."). In standard American usage, you'd have one period, inside the quotation mark. In British usage, what, two periods? And furthermore, if you want to have a footnote at the end of the sentence to say where you got the quote, where does that go?

AFAIK, British usage requires the punctuation inside the quotes. At least, that's how I was taught. Almost nobody does it that way, though. In particular I don't do it because it offends my mathematical/computer-programming/OCD-afflicted brain in that it's not nested correctly.

God I would hope so

I was watching some videos and I can't imagine how Swype with one finger would be faster than being able to use two thumbs. The Swype website has a video of a guy entering text pretty fast but two thumbs seems like it would be faster.

I also saw a video comparing the Optimus to the Intercept which is 800mhz and the Optimus was going a lot faster. The Intercept has 2.1 so that could be the reason but the guy recording the video also said the Optimus has a separate GPU and the Intercept does not.

Didn't Optimus used to be a crappy Radio Shack brand ?

Just one period. You always leave off the period of the quotation, the same as if the it were not at the end of the surrounding sentence, but American usage pulls the sentence-ending period back inside the quotation mark, because it's prettier. It's really just a typographical convention, not really a grammatical one.

My opinion is that a footnote indicator should immediately follow whatever it's referring to, and it might be referring either to the quotation or the sentence, so I don't know that there's a single answer there. If you're footnoting the quotation, and it's at the end of the sentence, and you're putting the period outside the quotation, I would put the footnote indicator on the same vertical as the period, if possible. Otherwise, I'd put it after the period, as that gap that would be created between the end of the sentence and the period is awkward and ugly.

The notion is that you don't have to be as precise. I personally find that normal typing is easier and faster.


There are some potential performance improvements with 2.2, but the biggest one, the JIT, is only available for Snapdragon CPUs, so that's not relevant here.

Doing some more research, it seems that the CPU in the Optimus does have some additional on-die cores for GPU, etc. So I guess you're right about that.

It's the same phone as the Optimus S, Optimus T, and Vertex, though, so maybe you could go to a Sprint, T-Mobile, or Verizon store (respectively) and play with one of their display models.

I gave Swype a good long trial period, but in the end I just didn't like it at all. Not only did I not find it faster in the long run, I found it far slower because it would frequently get words wrong, necessitating that I delete the word and try it again. For a while, I was trying to use it with a mix of typing and swiping, but then I just felt like I might as well type all the time.

Personally, I've found that SwiftKey is phenomenal. I prefer it to Swype because with Swype, you have to rely on the swipe mechanism to use the keyboard. With Swiftkey, it's basically just a very advanced version of the built-in keyboard, it just has FAR better predictive capabilities from the start, and learns your own patterns as you use it. Because of this, you are at the very least as fast as you would be with a standard typing keyboard, but in some cases I've tapped out 10-word sentences in about 12-14 screen presses.

The record is/was 37.28 seconds and that was with a Nokia N85 which has a regular phone keypad.

Ooh, over half as fast as morse!

I've long thought it would be cool to have a couple touch sensors on the sides of the phone I could use as morse paddles. Lots of folks can morse faster than I can type on a full sized keyboard.

Heh he he. So neatly twisted.

So I bought the Optimus V and it seems to move pretty fast to me.

I am still trying to figure out how to do everything but here's one dumb thing so far.

They had a email icon on the home screen I figure ok that must be Gmail. So I put it my login info and my email comes up but i'm thinking this really sucks for a os made by Google I would expect Gmail to work better on it.

Then I decide to go to the marketplace and see a Gmail app from Google. I installed that and it's much better !

It's odd that the thing didn't come with Gmail on there by default but whatever. Google maps wasn't on there either.