LostCarPark's Journal

I've been trying out various apps on my Android phone.

First off there's Eljay, a LiveJournal posting app. It'sa big improvement on posting from the website when on the move, as the LiveJournal site is a bit bloaty and slow to load, and I just don't trust it to not refresh when you're about to post and lose everything. Eljay will save your post as a draft on a regular basis so that if disaster happens it's easy to retrieve a recent version. It seems trip cover pretty much the full range of posting options.

Sadly out doesn't let me read my friends page or post comments, so it falls short of my dream LiveJournal app.

The other android add-on that I'm really enjoying is ShapeWriter, a really cool keyboard replacement utility. It gives you an onscreen keyboard, but instead of tapping out words, you trace the letters of a word in a single movement. This is remarkably efficient, as the keyboard recognises patterns, so even if you miss the exact letters, it can usually figure out what you meant.

I've been using both of these for this post, and with ShapeWriter I could see myself going for a touchscreen only phone, something never believed I'd say.

More fun android toys will here soon.

Edit: How embarrassing! I didn't notice that ShapeWriter managed to turn "of" in the title into "PhD". I suspect it works best on a device with a slightly bigger screen.

After getting increasingly frustrated with my Nokia, which seemed to be running on less and less memory, despite my moving everything I could to the SD card, I decided I wanted an Android phone. Unfortunately, I've been warned off the only one Vodafone do in Ireland, and I didn't reaally want to switch to Meteor for a Hero, so I decided to look on eBay.

I've really liked the HTC G1 because of its keyboard. New unlocked ones go for upwards of £300, which was outside my budget, but a I managed to snap up a second hand one for just over a hundred quid when you add postage, which is okay because it was mostly money I had in my PayPal account.

Once it arrived, it was down to the dodgy mobile phone shop to get it unlocked, after which it happily accepted my SIM.

So far I love it. Everything seems vvery tightly integrated compared to the Nokia. I hadn't realised how closely tied to Gmail it would be. As I was already syncing my contacts to Gmail, this suits me fine.

I will report back when I've had a little more time with it and let you all know how it goes.