There was a period of time from Thanksgiving to Christmas when I wasn’t contributing the same amount of literary/journalistic content that I usually do, and it wasn’t because of the holidays or anything. It was because my dad passed away.

My mom died when I was only seven, and my dad and I never had the best relationship, partially due to the fact that our communication skills are shit, partially due to the fact that he was doing clandestine government work throughout the cold war and was sort of limited in what he could even talk to me about.

I never knew much about my dad because he had top secret clearance and couldn’t tell us much about his day-to-day work in the bunkers of Aberdeen Proving Ground or his four-day stints at the Pentagon once a month. One time when I was a kid, I asked him what his job was like, and he said, “You know everything you read in science fiction stories? It’s all real, and that’s what I do.”

I believe my next question was something to the order of, “You work on jetpacks!?”

I had never even seen the above picture of him until yesterday, and it made me wish we could have made it to the level where we could speak to one another as gearheads, because this is goddamn cool. I’m dating the picture around ’76 by my dad’s appearance and by our family’s location at the time.

He was totally going for the “Meathead” look.

Rob Reiner...Not my father.

I believe machine in the picture above is a Commodore because I zoomed in on the placard on the left, and it looks like it says “CBM Termicare.” I’ll continue looking that one up.

But the real sci-fi shit my dad was working on was ARPANET. Long before the term “Internet” even existed, that was a major part of his job…check this out:

This article is from 1980…so this is in the period of time when it was still ARPANET, before it got turned into MILNET, when the packet-switched network was still a new concept, and there were only 100 something nodes in the entire Internet.

What he was researching is anybody’s guess, though. The only thing I know about this is that he once gave us a full-sized injection molded replica of an AK-47, and two smaller calibre replica handguns from his lab. Once he came back from one of his weekends at the Pentagon with a gasoline-soaked russian tank driver’s helmet. My stepmom says those monthly trips actually took him places like Cuba and Russia during the Cold War, and I know he went to Panama and Germany in the 80′s. I may never know exactly who he was watching.

He was a spy, after all…and an Internet espionage pioneer. Pretty cool. I just wish we could have talked more about his work when I had the chance.

Motorola just announced another new device, the MotoROI.

We’ve had the MotoRAZR, MotoROKR, MotoRIZR…but, MotoROI? what the fuck does that even mean?

I laughed when I first saw it because we commonly encounter ROI in venture capitalist blogs and such as “return on investment,” which would be kind of hilarious in Motorola’s case…it’s effectively investing everything in the Android platform, and this is what we get. Is that really what they’re going for here?

If his device ran Android 1.6, it would have been perfectly named MoTOROID!

*waiting for laughter*

…this might help…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toroid_(geometry)

see?

Toroid=Donut!

RDRR!!

Seriously though, I’m looking for what they’re going for in Korean. There’s a popular Korean site called “Roiworld” which has fashion games for little girls and shit. I’m having trouble because 저는 한국말 잘못 해요 and pretty much the only things I know in Korean end in a “da” or a “yo.”

Watch, it’s probably something stupid like KRAZR.

In my modest Facebook friend group, the holiday season turned 5 more of my friends into Android users.  Interestingly, it’s not because of my influence (I don’t think.)

I mean, I don’t push these things. Well…not hard at least.

I’m quite certain it’s more due to Android’s broad appeal, because none of these friends know each other, they all lead very different lifestyles,  they all got different phones, and yet they’re all very happy.

This pleases me because it illustrates the versatility of the platform and the appeal of the existent hardware.

Part of their happiness is probably gadget-related euphoria, but I have a feeling it isn’t much. I just wanted to share with you some of the fun posts I’ve seen from these people as I gear up for the 14 hour drive back to Baltimore from St. Louis and 8 hour flight to Vegas from Baltimore.

Droid phone in meeting = win

at 9:10am via Facebook for Android

· Comment · Like 2 people like this.

[comment] Yay!! Droids rock!!

at 10:18am

[comment] did you get one too?

at 10:32am

[comment] Hey I gotta droid too! By the way…..why did the Steelers lose to he browns?

at 11:56am

[comment] Well, I have a G1 from t-moble… it was the first android phone… i love it!!

at 11:59am

And then there’s…

I love my fiphone, (fake iphone) Tue at 10:27pm via MOTOBLUR™

One more announced how he got the Hero (but was having network-related SMS issues), one got the Eris, and another got his entire family MyTouch3Gs.   These are all what I’d call “regular people,” too, with non-techie jobs or hobbies. I like that non-fanboy types post excited messages about Android to each other. Happy New Year, everybody!

I’ll be at CES for Betanews again this year, and in addition to BN reporting and lending a hand on the Plan8 Podcast, I’ll be singling out Android goodies in my usual fashion.  To simultaneously whet your appetitie for next week, and help me remember the booths to visit, here are some of the Android drops I’ll be looking for in the miles of floorspace at CES:

1. Notion Ink  Android Tablet (with Pixel Qi “transflective” display and nvidia Tegra GPU)
2. Snapdragon-powered (1GHz) Devices (Passion/Nexus One/more)
3. Qualcomm’s newest mobile chipsets
4. LG Prada 3 or other devices from LG
5. MIPS/ Tensilica System-on-a-Chip for Android-powered audio devices
6. Rumored Dell Android Tablet, pretty much anything Android from Dell
7. Saygus Vphone - the CES Innovation award-winning 2-way video phone running Android
8. A ton more devices from HTC (Legend? All those from that supposed leaked roadmap) and Motorola (Backflip, Calgary, etc?)
9. Nvidia Tegra 2
10. More platform-defining apps, possibly from Google…but not necessarily.

"Drrrrrroooooid!"

(UPDATE: I originally wrote this for new Motorola Droid owners, but since I’ve answered many of these questions for other Android devices, I’ve changed it to be more far-reaching.)

For whatever reason, you bought the Motorola Droid a new Android phone; and you’re sitting there with no experience with the platform at all, no Earthly clue what can be done with your new phone, and a new two year contract saying you’ll hang onto it. You’ve heard people say how powerful it is, and how it’s comparable to the iPhone and blah blah blah. Let me just invite you to clear your mind of any preconceived notions, and fill it with these important things about Android that no one seems to talk about:

The Long Press is your most useful command

It seems like the most overlooked fact about Android: you can’t live without the long press.  And if you’re new to the touchable OS, it’s not really an intuitive command.  I mean, flip open an old RAZR,  hold down a key and see what happens.  But press and hold your finger on nearly anything in Android, and you get super important and useful results. Try it on the home screen and you get the “add to home screen” menu, which lets you put new app shortcuts, widgets, live folders, or change the wallpaper. If you want to get rid of the icons on your homescreen when you get your new device, just long press them and drag them to the trash can that appears on the bottom of your screen. Long press an email and you can open, delete, forward, reply/all, or mark as read; Long press a link in the browser, and you can open it in a new window, bookmark it, save it, share it or copy the URL. It is the single most useful command you have.

Long.
press.
everything.

The first place you must go is the “settings” menu

Find the menu button and push it, and then push “settings.” On the first Android phones, this was one of the most important things to do, so you could optimize performance and stretch out your battery life. It’s not quite as necessary to tweak the Droid in this way, because right out of the box you’ll find it is able to sustain a great deal of use without much lag and without battery slaughter. However, you absolutely must must must (impossible to overstress) familiarize yourself with the tweakability of Android 2.0 so if something bothers you, it can be changed.

I read an awful article today on Silicon Alley Insider about “The 10 Things we Love and Hate about the Droid, ” and most of their complaints could have been negated with conscientious use of the settings menu. You can turn haptic feedback off, you can adjust media and ringer volumes, you can turn off screen re-orientation, you can turn off screen auto-dimmer, and such. Most of their other complaints stemmed from the Droid’s differences from the iPhone. They concluded that it’s “not better than the iPhone.” Which is just retarded. It’s different, and you love your iPhone. Nobody fucking decides an interface or ecosystem is better right after switching to it.

After a few days of using your new Android phone, I highly suggest going to the settings menu, and then hitting “about phone,” and then “battery use.” It’s both eye-opening and hilarious. Chances are good that more than half of your battery power is consumed by the screen being on and a tiny fraction by the Android Operating System and apps. It makes for a strong argument in favor of electrophoretic displays (e-book/kindle screens.)

You don’t need iTunes, no, wait… FUCK iTUNES!

Harsh, yes…but anyone who tells you that Android is somehow inferior to iPhone OS because it “lacks sync” has obviously spent too much time with their iPods and iPhones. It amazes me that people actually believe the need to sync their devices is A POSITIVE THING?!?! If you have to take time to hook your computer up to your phone so all the files stay fresh and up-to-date, guess what…they are fundamentally out of sync. They are working in their own little worlds and must be strung together after the fact. That is an old way of doing things, and anyone who has owned a Palm Pilot or similar PDA will tell you, it is goddamn annoying and should be abolished.

Repeat after me:

Sync is not a positive feature.
The need for sync means incongruity is programmed into the device.

So if you’ve come to Android expecting an iPod, where your desktop and your handheld are in constant communion, you will be disappointed. Though there are ways to hook up the Droid with iTunes, I hope you will look at Android as a mobile portal to the Web and Web-based services, and not an extension of your lousy desktop and your pirated mp3s. Get used to this. Without network connectivity, most of your devices are probably pretty worthless, right? Your laptop can bear some heavy computational loads, and your workstation can do the serious powerlifting, but we don’t live in the supercomputer era of homebase power computing any more. Even the burliest teraflop setup would be considered crippled if it wasn’t connected to a larger-scale network. And our wimpy sub-1GHz mobile phone processors have helped this become a reality.

Besides, if you’re looking for music, Pandora (and to a lesser extent Slacker Radio) are the great equalizers. They’re free, “cloud-based,” and on Verizon, stream like magic. The network is, again, the power.

With all that being said, I’ll give you your next point.

Hook up with any email service (how-to)

My inbox receives my work email, gmail, aim/aol mail, yahoo mail, and windows live hotmail and so can yours. Here’s how you do it, in order of increasing difficulty.

Gmail: This is part of the device setup, and Gmail gets its own app. You’re walked through it, so this doesn’t even factor in, really.
Windows Live Hotmail: This is delightfully easy. Go to the email app, push the menu button, push “add account,” then type in your Live/Hotmail address and password, and you’re done.
Yahoo Mail: This is a bit more tricky. When you get to the “add account” part, you have to enter your Yahoo email name and password, but then hit “manual setup.” From here, (Incoming Server Settings) make the IMAP server “imap.mail.yahoo.com” and the Port is 143. In Outgoing Server Settings, set the SMTP Server to “smtp.mobile.mail.yahoo.com” and the Port to 587. Then, check “Require sign-in” and press Next.
AIM Mail This is almost identical to Yahoo, but just change the IMAP and SMTP server names to “imap.aim.com,” and “smtp.aim.com.” The ports are the same.
Others I highly encourage you to poke around, and try setting up connections to any Webmail accounts you have. And because the Droid is Exchange compatible, you can set up your work-related email accounts and calendars just as easily as you set up a Windows Live account. Just enter your username and password and it’s good to go.

Next: Apps in the “Verizon” directory in the Android Market and what’s so special about them.

Gizmodo got quite a scoop/rumor that the Barnes and Noble e-book reader will run Android?!!

Like that 90′s X Files T-shirt used to say…I want to believe.

But I’m not the type of person to say that something is going to happen because it’s extremely plausible. And believe me, it IS plausible. The Barnes and Noble e-reader made by Plastic Logic, hooked up to the AT&T wireless network, equipped with the B&N e-book store is debuting in just a couple of weeks and it looks like it’s going to be the Kindle’s best competition so far. You throw Android in that mess and give it the ability to install third party apps, you break down the device’s insular functionality that has kept many customers from jumping on board the e-reader train (i.e. “why would I buy a device that only does one thing?”)

I talked to Ericsson a couple of weeks ago, and they see a ton of potential in the e-reader market. They released their always-on wireless SoC for embedded systems and really emphasized its utility in the form factor. It seems like everybody in the industry has got e-book fever. Hell, I have been praying to the almighty Gods of capitalism for E Ink Co. to go IPO, but it’s still not a publicly traded company. (Those guys make the Vizplex imaging film used in literally EVERY e-reader product and I want in!)

But the non-early adopting, average run-of-the-mill consumer still hasn’t taken note of the technology, and they probably won’t for a couple of years.

This is another one of those reasons why this rumor clicks…it’s taking two tech industry hot topics and mashing them together into something that makes a lot of sense.

But the thing is, the Android experience would be nonexistent in the current generation of e-readers. I mean, shit….I have my doubts about the Archos PMP that debuted running Android today. But on an E Ink screen? Come on, those screens take like 2 seconds to refresh…there’s really no way yet to have animation on them. The “Android Experience” would consist of the framework for a menu screen and little else. Yes, it’s an open source platform suitable for embedded systems, but I have serious doubts about Android making an upfront appearance on an e-reader, even though the interoperability with the myriad Google services is a hugely tantalizing and exciting proposition (think about geotagged e-books…holy fuck.)

I’d also hate to have to ditch my Kindle 2 after only 6 months.

I’m coming from a casual/moderate open source user’s perspective with a question:

Are all serious FOSS advocates high strung ninnies?

In my career as a journalist, I’ve encountered more haywire open source reactionaries than I’d like to deal with, and I’ve really begun to regard the whole group as a bunch of paranoid freaks.

There’s this ideology that turns into a stouthearted set of beliefs that gets in the way of logical discourse. I liken it to political radicals who call everyone who isn’t throwing molotov cocktails at the police a “fascist sympathizer.”

What am I talking about here? If you’re an Android fan, you know Cyanogen. It’s a modded Android ROM which has basically been feeding the public all of Google’s software updates before Google has had a chance to officially release them to the public. Google has finally issued a cease and desist warning to Cyanogen’s developer –also going by the moniker Cyanogen– that he has to cut it out because he’s distributing stuff not included in the open source licensing. As Google said yesterday in its blog, “Unauthorized distribution of this software harms us just like it would any other business, even if it’s done with the best of intentions.”

Suddenly the open source reactionaries cry foul and mobilize a boycott of Android. To quote Phandroid’s article yesterday: “Google is basically moving the modding community from doing their work in the light to doing their work in the dark. Forget about getting ROMs on XDA-DEVS… Android builds are about to become torrents and warez.”

*sigh*

Can we please be civilized? I mean, you shouldn’t be surprised, Android has never been purely open source. Since it was first released last October, it has been a kind of hybrid licensing structure. There is the public development branch under the Apache 2.0 license and then stuff which is considered Google’s intellectual property which must be licensed out… I don’t know how minute the stuff that must be licensed is, and judging by the confusion of the community, the two may be too closely interwoven for many to discern where one ends and the other begins.

One commenter wrote: “The phones that are running Cyanogen’s ROMs ALREADY HAD THE GOOGLE APPS.”

However true this may have been in the past, in this case it is abundantly clear what the problem is. Cyanogen included the updated Android Market in his mod, which is fundamentally different from the app already on everybody’s phones, clearly crossing the line. In other words, the C&D is about Cyanogen distributing a closed-source app and not modding the Android platform.

What the community is getting upset over is that just because Google releases a free Android app, it does not mean it’s Free and Open Source. I’ve seen this throughout the message board commentary over the last few days. People assume that because YouTube, Gmail, Google Sync are not FOSS, that Android is now completely ruined.

The modding community is pissed because they now think this means they have access to basically none of Google’s awesome services, and HTC Sense and Motorola’s MOTOBLUR are illegal, and now they’re all abandoning the platform as tainted by corporate greed.

Now, I don’t know the ins and outs of the licensing structure, but it’s obvious that this reaction was way out of hand. I suggest we all sit down, pull the black bandannas off our faces and turn the talk about boycotts and protests into talk about what can and cannot be done with Android.

We don’t need Cyanogen to be a martyr for an insurrection.

The problem of widget disorganization in Android has been approaching for some time. Now that many of the most popular apps come with widgets, I’m really beginning to feel the clutter on my homescreen. With today’s release of the official Pandora app and yesterday’s release of the official Facebook app, I now have two more medium/large widgets to deal with, and some reorganization to consider.

Pandora Widget, with some 2nd wave ska

Fortunately, I can add up to 7 more homescreens with Open Home, but anyone who’s dealt with a pack-rat will tell you that giving a hoarder more space doesn’t solve any problems, it just makes them harder to tackle.

I wouldn’t call myself a “widget hoarder,” but let’s see. In my “Add to Home Screen > Widgets” folder, I currently have: Analog Clock, Calendar, Facebook, Music, Open Home Big Analog Clock, Open Home Music, Open Home Setting Widget, Open Home Weather, Pandora, Picture Frame, Search, Tiny Clock Widget 2, Twidget Lite, Voice Text, Voicemail+ Large/Small, Weather Large/Small/Tiny, Weather Channel WxWidget Large/Small.

Do I really need SIX different weather widgets and three clocks? Not really, but you sometimes need to compare to get the best looking widgets that also provide the best results, plus it’s really only three in multiple sizes. The WxWidget actually isn’t my cup of tea, though it’s a super popular and handy app with more in-depth updates and alerts, but the Weather Widget by Lock2 is 100% better looking and gets the job done (I believe it’s designed after HTC Sense’s weather widget). It’s free too, but I highly advise floating a donation their way if you’ve got some change to spare.

Before I can even begin to think about organizing anything, I have to have a deep philosophical “chicken or egg” discussion with myself: Do services gain homescreen position because I use them more, or do I use them more because they’re on my homescreen? My homescreen is usually a bit of both. I use the weather widget a lot mostly because it’s there, not because I always care about the weather. Shazam is an app icon I feel like I always need on my homescreen, but I don’t use it nearly as much as, say, the Google Search bar, which I have relegated to a secondary screen. But really, I’ve started to feel like I don’t need app shortcuts any more with the way things are going. Everything I use pretty much resides in the “side drawer.”

It’s times like this that I wish there was a Widget “snap to” program, or a position randomizer, where I could just hit a button and have the widgets fit to a grid on my screen and I could decide if I liked it or not.

New Facebook widget with Twidget Lite

Because I prefer an uncluttered layout, I’ve switched to a five-screen layout where each screen serves a different purpose. The main screen has weather and calendar, the “music screen” has the Mp3 player and Pandora, the “feed screen” has Twitter and Facebook, the “utility screen” which right now only has the settings widget, and the “Google screen” only has the search widget right now, but anticipates the arrival of new homescreen toys from Google.

It’ll get the job done for now, but more widgets=more processes which ultimately means slowness. It’s running acceptably now, but we’ll see how things get bogged down in the real world. This is something we need to think about as Android users, since the elegant use of widgets is helping to make Android both stand out above icon-based smartphone interfaces, and run more efficiently for the user.

Sure enough, after all the fuss thrown up over the state of the Android Market, it turns out that we could track sales all along, and Jtribe released a free app in the second week of August simply “Android Market Stats” that attempts to chart the progress of Android’s ecosystem, and in doing so, lends credence to the notion that the Android Market is pathetic.

We’ve been collecting data on the Android Market for the past 8 months and publishing it on androidstats.com. We have been able to watch the Android Market grow to it’s current size of just over 7000 apps and almost 3000 publishers, recording every movement made within the market…Considering all this, along with app price and days on sale within the market, we have been able to determine the monthly revenue from the (US only) Android Market to be closer to $1M USD.

Well…that’s even less than was predicted a couple of weeks ago.

But let’s not feel sad. The good news is that we don’t have to guess any more, we can use Jtribe’s statistics, which are gathered completely independently of Google. We may not be as prosperous as the iTunes app store yet, but at least we can revel in our open data.

Jtribe’s app lets you check the week’s biggest movers, check price changes that took place the previous day, or browse the market as you normally would.

It lets you filter the apps according to which ones are for pay and which ones are free, or you can check out all of them at once. You get a clear picture of who’s hot, and how much they’re making if they’re charging. In today’s top overall rankings, there’s actually only one paid app, a game called Brain Twister by The Game Boss, which was bought 150 times today.

UPDATE: I misunderstood what the numbers next to each app stood for.  As Chris from Froogloid informed me (see below)  these numbers do not correspond to number of times downloaded (which I thought seemed really really low)  but instead, are numerical rankings.  I have altered my post accordingly.  Thanks Chris, keep up the great work!

As someone remarked on the Techcrunch article I linked to the other day, Android is not a gaming platform*…and the Android Market Stats app shows it clearly. Today’s most popular game, CowPotato 3D by Froogloid (the guys who made the Keyring rewards card app) was downloaded 304 times, then SuperYatzy-free edition by Tommy Pedersen was the second most downloaded with 162.

Android Market Stats app by jtribe

All the data in the app is also available on Androidstats.com, where you can do the same comparison of free and paid apps.

Hopefully, the guys at Jtribe will get my pingback and let us know a little bit more about their methodology.

It’s a rather dull app, unless you’re a stats fan (which I am), so having the ability to track the Android Market’s progress is very exciting to me.

*see comments

I’m out of control.

I may open the first chapter of downloaders anonymous or something

Every day, I find myself dropping money in the Playstation Network, WiiWare, DSiWare, iTunes, Amazon (MP3, Video on Demand, Kindle), and of course, our beloved Android Market. So a time comes at the end of every month when I start pondering my downloads much more seriously and consider cutting back my spending.

I also start appreciating free services much more.

So since it’s the end of the month, and there’s been a ton of press about Google Books, and since I’m a Kindle user, all the forces have been pushing me to play with it.

Google Books has over a million free public domain books in PDF and ePUB formats, which is absolutely fantastic if you use any of the non-Kindle e-readers. If you use the Kindle, though, you’re pretty much screwed. You have to pay $1.09 for Amazon to convert each free .PDF file to an .AZW file. The recent addition of ePub just means there’s another format unsupported on the Kindle. I tried out the conversion to see what happens, and Amazon’s conversion rendered my “free” Google Books sideways. What a complete shamfuck!

Nope, Amazon does not render Google Books right!

Luckily, Google Books has been formatted as a mobile Web page for Android and iPhone, so I can still access the stuff for free if I’m really in need of a fix for classic literature. Though it’s not a dedicated app or anything, it’s still cool that it’s a fallback for Kindle users who are fortunate enough to have a high-quality mobile Webkit browser.

Google renders each book into chunks. The ones I checked out put nine book pages on a single mobile web site, and the text was formatted to an agreeable size. Instead of turning pages like you would on an e-reader, you just drag your finger up the page until you hit the bottom. Then you hit “next page,” and there you have it. I haven’t been able to get it to work without a Wi-Fi connection, though, so that is kind of a bitch.

However, you can get a free reader app like FBReader which lets you read ePub, download the books off of the Google page, and you’re pretty much set for reading even without a connection. I do wish there was a Kindle app for Android like there is for the iPhone, because I have zero intentions of reading a full book on my phone…the Kindle sync feature is really crucial. I’ve been trying to read Chuck Palahniuk’s Pygmy for like a month and it keeps giving me trouble. If you’ve read it, you know why. If not, I suggest you do. It’s real linguistic fun. If I had the ability to drag it over to my phone for some opportunistic reading, I would have been done by now.

Of course, if I finished that book sooner, I’d have bought more books and be that much poorer.