My ZTE Blade with Android setup
I recently got my first smartphone. Previous phone was a Motorola V220 smartphone shot at ebay for like US$10. Before that one I had a simple C-something, also from Motorola, bought just a couple of years a go. Once I never thought I’d ever want a mobile because of tracking and privacy stuff, but once in with a digicamphone I quickly wanted more. Also, work was on the road, so I wanted a mobile computing device to assist. And what else is a smartphone? A mobile small form computer with mobile connection attached. Or vice versa? Anyways…
I bought the ‘box’ for being a mobile computing tool. Germany’s “Base” mobile provider offers a ZTE Blade for 12 Euros a month, including an internet flatrate and insurance. It’s an Android device, so being based on Linux which initally drew me there.
Being used to Debian based desktop operating system first thing that knocked me out of my path was that the Android market is open for applications from just everyone, so noone who looks at the software in the first place and hardly a way to do so oneself: Which piece is good and which is malware? — I resorted to have installed as little as possible, but added FDroid as an alternative market, for Free Software applications. It’s only a guess that those apps offered there might be no malware since open source anyways and likely descendants of yet known and trusted packages. (Using FDroid you even can install the F/LOSS Frozen Bubbles arcade game but I consider it a bad idea to give it a shot and check out its performance — it works as expected, adapted to the needs of a phone, and you’ll likely will waste hours ‘checking it out’, so, although you can install it, stay away from it unless you’ve got hours to waste.)
Having set up the Blade it’s now my digital multitool: internet browser, mail reader including push notifications, newspaper, still camera, camcorder, Video playback and ‘TV’, music box, podcasts retriever and picture gallery. I also use it as a remote control for my music server mpd which looks very slick. There’s also a notepad somewhere and a terminal to connect to my servers via ssh.
Here’s what I use:
# First of all the phone mobile computing device has a global auto-completion which makes entering text very easy. Also, it can learn new words.
# Then, I use the Hacker Keyboard, to get around the virtual keyboard rather quickly and have cursor keys etc at hand. Additionally, the Hacker Keyboard supports dealing with several languages: I’m used to text in English and in German, and switching languages in the Hacker Keyboard is just a space key swift away. It’s so easy, thus a true time saver.
# For mail I still use GMail, which includes push notification of new mail. Note, as the Google+ realname debate shows Google may lock you out off your Google account and therefore out of your GMail account too, so make sure you’ll have a backup of your GMail data somewhere. Actually getting to a newly arrived mail is as easy as pulling down the top status bar once the mail notification symbol shows up there.
# For web access I still use the phone’s default browser. It’s accessible from every ‘desktop’ where there is a hoveringmain menu bar with browser access in there as a shortcut. As a launcher page I use serchilo.net which beams you down whereever you actually want to go to. Serchilo is a tool where you can enter a search tool shortcut into an input field, followed by the actual search request. So, for example, g Stuttgart gives you all Google search results regarding Stuttgart while w Stuttgart gives you the wikipedia page on Stuttgart, gm Stuttgart jumps you to Goole Maps with Stuttgart centered, wa Stuttgart weather forecast shows the forecast for Stuttgart at Wolfram Alpha and dbt Stuttgart, Berlin tells you shortcut the shedules for the next couple of trains from Stuttgart to Berlin. As using trains is quite expensive in Germany, you can also try mfg Stuttgart, Berlin which gives you the shared rides for the same leg. — So, Serchilo is rather useful. Hence, I use it as my launcher page.
# Entering a lot of text into a web form field my be jumpy in that default browser — entry field moves out of sight sometimes when trying to put the cursor to another location within the same entry field — hence I started using the default notepad the Blade gets shipped with to pre-edit the text there and cut and paste it to the browser entry field once I’m done. Having used the notepad, I learned it’s good at what it shall do — taking notes — but not as good at reissuing it: The notes go somewhere but you don’t find them at the SD card. So once you collected an amount of noted during a holiday tour while you couldn’t access your blog or whatever you had in mind to put the notes finally into, once you’ve taken it into the notepad you’ve got to copy-paste them out there one by one. Also, lacking notepad files, there aren’t timestamps to the notes either. Additionally, to put a couple of hundred lines of text to the GMail client to send it somewhere else, I saw the phone become reeally laggy. That appears to be a shortcoming of the GMail client, not being maded for longer texts.
# Next, for news (feed) reading, I tried Google reader. A lot of people like it, but I don’t. At home, my server updates rawdog a couple of times daily, and that’s where I usually read news too. So, at home I access the web server to get my current news collection. Also, I could download it to the ‘phone’ and reload it from there later on the go.
# On podcasts, I enjoy Google Listen though. It does what it shall do and it’s not overly complex either. Nor much resources drawing either, for all what I can say.
# For photo/video taking, gallery and video playback I just use the default tools installed on the phone. Nothing special to see here, though. Though learned from an earlier digicam, the Blade’s one also sees more than a human does. So having crashed into a corner of a table or something looking at it through ‘the eye’ of the Blade might reveal whether or not you’ll get a bruise early. The cam saw mine very clearly when I almost broke my foot and I myself didn’t see as much of the bruises yet.
# For remote controlling the mpd music server, I’ve got the alternatives of Droid MPD Client and MPDroid. I prefer the latter over the first one, so that’s the one I use.
# Finally, to remotely connect to my server, I use Connect Bot. It’s a SSH client that might be usable for http tunneling too, but I didn’t try yet to really figure it out.
So, that’s it for now. What do you think? Suggestions? Remarks? Let me know, below in the comments.
