The problem is that Google customers are the people buying ads, not the people buying phones.

Matt, if I had an Android phone I'd test that issue out for you right now. It does sound annoying. In this respect I'm not sure Google is much different than Apple.

A while ago I went looking for the answer to Android's hands-free bluetooth dialing issue on the Droid. It's the main reason I didn't move off of my dumb-phone. I found google's bug tracking forum and signed on to follow the issue.
Occasionally I'd get emails when various tracking threads merged. The last one I got stated the issue was resolved in Froyo.

I ditched all the emails I got, but it shouldn't be hard to find that tracking forum again. Have you signed on there?

edit: yah, easy to find: http://code.google.com/p/android/
Good luck!

Confirmed. I see the same thing: "<Calendar name> hasn't responded".

And Stew's right; the Android bug tracker is definitely the place for this.

Added an event on the phone; turns up in Google Calendar as an invitation, to which I've not responded; (although you didn't ask) Google Calendar Sync puts it into Outlook as an unfilled meeting request.

Could this be the same issue?
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/...Summary%20Stars

I only read a few of the posts, but it seems to hint at problems with multiple google calendars.

It is the same issue. It's just unfortunate that the initial post was written so confusingly.

Thanks for confirming, guys. I actually called Nexus One support today (one of the benefits of having "the Google phone"), and the very nice gentleman on the other end unfortunately didn't have any answers for me. He acknowledged the problem, but of course couldn't do anything about it. He saw somewhere that apparently a Google employee confirmed there was a problem and that a team was working on it, but sadly that was back in late March.

I hadn't gone through the bug tracker because it felt like just as much of a black hole as the help forums. I was contributing to another bug thread about something in GMail. It was a thread that was started in 2008, and had no response whatsoever from anyone at Google, and dozens of people contributing to it. Then, all of a sudden, a Google employee went through about three dozen bugs and copied and pasted a message that said something like "this is a bug in the GMail app and therefore does not belong in the code forums." This outright dismissal, of course, only made everyone involved angrier as the first response in two years was a brush-off. Even if the discussion did belong elsewhere, it was still frustrating. We were then directed to the Google "help" forums, where that issue still exists with no response from Google.

Thanks again for checking, everyone. It helps at least knowing that it's affecting other users

As it's a problem in Android, the bug tracker is the appropriate place. In fact, you can probably find the bug in the actual open source Calendar application. It's probably somewhere in here.

Google even accepts patches.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/11/exclusive-sony-ericsson-to-introduce-android-3-0-gaming-platfor/

If thats true, I'll consider picking one of those up for my next Android experiment. That way even if it doesn't work out as a phone, I can still justify keeping it around for portable gaming.

Wonder if you have to look goofy holding it up to your ear. Remember that other phone/game thing a few years back?

Haha; the N-Gage. Was it really only seven years ago? I remember thinking at the time that it was kinda neat, if troubled. Now it looks sooooo dated.

The N-Gage was pretty much just a really chunky Nokia handset. The games didn't hook into anything special in there and people managed to make loaders that decrypted and ran the N-Gage games on other Nokia handsets.

The talking with a taco stuck to the side of your head in the first gen N-Gage really was an awful design. How did that ever get through product testing?

Hmm interesting. Maybe it will actually get some decent support since the gaming section of Sony is involved as well. The cell phone section along with Ericsson aren't known for giving you timely updates if they ever come at all.

There's only one question about this Sony handset... Why bother with Google/Android? IMO, that's only going to devalue Sony's brand and position.

You really want Sony Ericsson to homebrew their own phone OS? *shudder*

They've already got a lot of IP in mobile communications and gaming. Enough that spawning a new gaming platform is probably much more wasteful. I'm not saying that I have confidence that Sony could pull it off, I'm just saying that jumping on Android for this seems rather at odds with the rest of their business.

They need to go back to UIQ!

I'm not really sure how I feel about this news. I think it's fascinating, but I really don't know how well it'll work.

Sony is already working with Google for the Google TV setup. Having at least one good Sony phone with Android for integration makes sense. It's also easier for Sony to open a "Playstation Phone" games market to third party and independent developers using a modified Android SDK. This would allow widespread development without the costs of becoming a normal console developer, and also allow Sony to keep their internal SDK for proper Playstation consoles locked away. Even if a Playstation specific market didn't take hold, the device could still fallback to everything else in the Android market and still provide people with a reason to buy the device. The failure of the PSP Go probably has the Playstation division thinking about radical futures that take into account mobile phones and iPod Touch like devices eating into their handheld console market.

This on the other hand is proving Android is picking up momentum worldwide too, outselling the iPhone for the first half of this year (the iPhone downcycle).

http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/12/gartner-and-idc-agree-the-android-invasions-accelerating-aroun/

On the Sony "Playstation Phone", an interesting question is whether games for it will run on other Android phones, or whether they'll be providing some specific features (graphics libraries? UI controls?) that aren't available elsewhere. Wouldn't it be amazing if Sony ended up defining a standard gaming API that became widely adopted across the Android space? Unlikely, but amazing.

I've never understood this obsession with turning wifi, bt and gps off... from a system power point of view:

- There is just no point in turning bluetooth off. The power of bluetooth in standby is pretty much nothing (like, much less than 1/10th of cell standby power, the one that's quoted in hundreds of hours if you're not doing push mail). Remember bluetooth headsets can be on standby for literally weeks with tiny batteries.

- Wifi power is also very small, because it's just waking up to do a network scan "every now and then". At least on the iPhone, it'll only scan when the screen is on or there are live network connections, which instantly dwarfs the power required for the scan. Not sure on Android but I wouldn't be surprised if it works much the same.

- GPS is one thing which does truly suck power (can easily take almost half a watt, and will likely fire up the cellular radio for AGPS assistance too)... but do you run background GPS tasks on your phone?

If it were up to me I'd take the buttons away from the user, but I guess there are valid reasons to disable the radios beyond airplane mode... it's actually fairly likely that your location-based event system is burning more power than the subsystems would have taken had they been left on.

Aside from killing batteries is there any real reason for airplane mode to exist? Mythbusters looked into it and didn't find anything (IIRC). They're not exactly the FCC or the FAA, though.

I had issues with the Mythbusters tests, but your recollection is the opposite of their stated conclusion, which was that some aircraft instruments *can* be affected by RF interference from electronic devices. I'm not sure that a couple of cell phone users is truly an issue for modern aircraft instruments though. I mean, Virgin has WiFi available on their flights for goodness sake.

It's my belief (entirely uninformed belief) that the real reason they prohibit cell phone usage on a flight is the other thing stated in the Mythbusters conclusions: A cell phone that's up high in the air will connect to too many cell towers at the same time. If everyone who got onto airplanes was allowed to fire up up their cell phones, the cell networks would be overloaded by the sheer number of simultaneous cell tower handoffs happening.

I will concede that an airplane full of people using active radio transceivers is going to put out more a lot more RF interference than just a few cell phones would, so I'll give the FAA the benefit of the doubt, assuming that it's not the onesie-twosie cell phones they're prohibiting, but rather the hundreds-of-cell-phones-on-the-same-plane problem they're trying to prevent.

Wikipedia discusses it at length, too, it seems.

Hugo, I pretty much stopped using the profiles that turned off the radios.

I decided that I haven't really had battery issues with all the radios turned on before, so I might as well just leave them on all the time.

Tom: I just heard on a random internet video that even the Samsung app launcher is different. Apparently when you brought up that master list of apps, it had you scroll sideways? I just wanted to add this to the "that's not how it is on my phone" list.

In default Android it's a vertical scrolling list, which I think I like more.

The Samsung definitely was not something I'd want to use.

That seems odd to me. There are numerous GPS chips out there that run on 3.3V and suck less than 30mA, which I suppose equates to about 1/10th of a watt.

Uhhh... yeah.



tanstaafl.

One of the biggest reasons is that the testing for interference between every combination of instrument package and cell phone would be prohibitevly expensive. Each single test is outrageously expensive, then you add in the different combinations and it is mind boggling. The FAA requires stuff to be tested to be proven that it isn't going to interfere with the aircraft's systems. I can't really give any more details than that (it was a discussion on an internal news server and that was the only part I really understood).

The Wikipedia article goes into detail about that, too. It seems to say: "devices are banned until FAA can conclusively prove they won't kill anyone", rather than "devices are allowed until FAA conclusively proves they have killed someone". And yeah, I see how you can't really test all the devices with all the airplanes. That would be an interesting test matrix. As a QA guy, it makes me shudder to think about it.