Ask NerdGirl: Bonus Questions Today! Underpowered Eris, Not Downloading, 2.2 and Bluetooth, Market Repetition, and iCal!

by n3rdg1rl Jun 1, 2010 7:00 AM – Leave your thoughts

Happy Memorial Day to my USA readers! I hope you got a day off to relax and enjoy some grilling! In celebration of the holiday (and the fact I missed a week) I have 5 questions lined up for your Android pleasure today!

Dave Russell

HEY GIRL… GOT THE UPDATE SAT MORNING, DID IT !! BUT I THINK I AM PISSED….. NO LIVE WALL PAPER !!! DOES THE ERIS NOT SUPPORT THIS ?

You are pissed, Dave! All caps and everything! Don’t worry, I was too. The coolest (most useless) feature of 2.1 I was excited about was the live wallpaper! There’s a Motorola Droid in my household and I was extremely jealous. Then our beloved Eris was getting 2.1! Yay! A pretty way to kill the battery faster! But it wouldn’t come to be.

Our Eris’ run on a 528 MHz Qualcomm ARM11 processor. That means at launch it was instantly obsolete compared to Motorola Droid’s under clocked 550 MHz Arm Cortex A8 processor. This small amount of power is enough to allow the Moto Droid to run the live wallpaper without lagging. Our little Eris’ just don’t have the strength.

If you are hell-bent on getting live wallpapers on your Eris, you can find ROMs that will run it if you choose to root your phone.

Hi,

Really love the nerdgirl advice and recommendations, so thank you. My problem is that I am unable to get any apps to install onto my HTC Desire using the barcode scanner, in fact I can only install apps by going through a quite protracted routine. Can you offer any advice or help please? I was able to download and install apps up until today (Friday 14^th May) but now for some reason all that happens is that once the barcode scans and I select the app to download I get a message saying that the app is downloading but never does, even after waiting for many hours. Please help.

Thanks,

Philip

I’ve seen this too, Philip. For me, after rebooting, it seems to work fine. Also, check to see how you’re connected. If you’re able to get on Wi-Fi, hook up to that and see if it will improve. Sometimes it won’t download because it doesn’t have a strong enough signal or you just have 1 bar where you are.

We’re all “hoping” that android addresses the bluetooth voice call problem in 2.2. But do we have any EVIDENCE that they’ve hear our cries? This is a huge problem for those of us who want to obey the law and drive safely while dialing our friends and family, not to mention leave our damned phones in our pockets/purses.

It looks like they did hear our cries! Android 2.2 does enable voice dialing over Bluetooth! It looks like it supports Bluetooth enabled car and desk docks as well! I find it very encouraging that developers of this platform are listening. THANK YOU! Here is a list of all the new goodies that are included in Android Froyo!

Nerd,

There are 50,000 android apps out there; 45,000 of them are tip calculators (am I the only one who knows how to use the regular, pre-installed calculator?) and twitter apps (I’m a virgin – never tweeted – and would like to remain so). There are many redundant apps out there. Any app review should include a list of apps that do the same thing. Will AndroidTapp have this in the future?

Droyid

When we review an app we are putting our full attention into that one app. Many times, if there is an app we feel is more capable of whatever the reviewed app is trying to do, we will link to it so people get the best experience with their phones. We don’t list all the similar apps because if you do a search on AndroidTapp, you can find a full list and overall rankings right there. So if you go to the app search box and type in “tip calculator” you get the 88 tip calculators that are listed in the Market. Same as if you search for “twitter.” You’ll get the 1,100 apps that are Twitter related. Once you bring up the list you can narrow down the searches by category, pricing, rating, and release date.

My company uses iCal server on Snow Leopard for the company’s public calendar. I use iCal on my mac to read and write to the calendar. I can use calDev to view my personal Google calendar data at the same time. I have not been able to figure out how to view the iCal calendar on my Droid phone or even in my Google calendar. I assume that if I can see it in my Google calendar then I could see it through Android.
The setup on my mac is to create an account with the following:

User Name: alan

Password: <my password>

Server Address: ourserver.company.com

Server Path: /principals/__uids__/<a really long set of characters that looks like a serial number>

Port: Auto

Use SSL: checked

The Google documentation says that all I need is a URL to an .ics calendar. Do you know how I can construct that URL?

Feel free to rephrase my question if you need to for clarity.

Thanks,
Alan

Well Alan, there are a few ways to do this. If you are running calDEV you should also have webDAV. That will allow you to host calendars. It can be rather complicated and if you are on a corporate network, your network administrator would have to set this up.

There’s also iCal Exchange. You can use the option in iCal to “Publish on a Web Server.” Using the link provided after you sign up for iCal Exchange you can host the calendar there. This will give you the link that you need to sync your calendar to Google.

Keep sending those questions to nerdgirl@androidtapp.com!

~n3rdg1rl

Tags: Android Advice, Android Bluetooth Driving Hands Free, Android Questions, Ask NerdGirl, Bluetooth Voice Dialer, Help with Android, iCal Calendar Setup for Android, Live Wallpaper Feature Missing in Android 2.1 Update, Redundant Android Apps

Categorised in: Android Advice, Ask NerdGirl