Ask NerdGirl: Resetting your Google, No Facebook Contacts, iTunes, Smaller Photos, and MyTouch Not OTA!

by n3rdg1rl Jun 29, 2010 12:00 PM – 5 Comments

Post #2 for today! Hope these will help make up for the missed days last week!

Hi NG,

Thanks for all your help so far, don’t stop fighting!

I had an issue recently with updates and downloads from the market just not starting. After plowing through a lengthy, angry Google forum post about the issue I finally figured that it was probably something to do with a little ‘help’ that Google gave me recently.

In the UK we have all, officially, been x@googlemail rather than @gmail. Oddly, @gmail seemed to work for me, I wonder if this was one of Google’s ‘mistakes’? Anyway, the issue was resolved recently and I received a message asking if I wanted to officially change to @gmail, which I duly did.

Then the market stopped working for me. I had a look at the phone settings and got a Sharp slap on the wrist telling me “there is already a Google account registered on this phone (WHY are you daring to fiddle with it!?)” and giving @googlemail.

How are you supposed to change your Google data on an android device? I doubt I did it right but some more digging and I ended up in ‘settings/applications/manage applications and deleted all the caches and saved data from what seemed the most likely Google services. I then had to set up my Google account on the phone again but (touch wood) everything seems to be working now. I did have to delete Gmail and Gmail storage too for it to work again.

Is there a little less brutal method of maintaining account settings? I imagine I am not the only person in the UK having this problem!

Cheers
Mike

The easy answer would be to factory restore your phone and just set it up again with the new email address. The problem with this is you lose all your apps and settings. Actually, I had to do this today because I made a very obvious mistake all by myself, so I know how annoying this can be. You can back up these things using the methods I talked about in this answer. Unfortunately, if you want to keep all of your information without having to restore it, your way is the only way to do it.

Okay here is the issue. I have the HTC hero. I recently upgraded to the android 2.0 or whatever it is, and I love it except for this one problem that nobody can help me with. I have been trying for the past 7 hours and there’s nobody that seems to know how to use this software. When I go to search my contacts for an individual in my phonebook that is attached to my phone, it wants to pull up Facebook contacts as well. I don’t need all of that. I just want to search what is in my assigned contacts. Okay. When I compose a message and I need to search for…hmmm…well let’s see, I want to search for Frank, it brings up my Facebook contacts as well. Frank is not on Facebook. He is in my contacts which I only want to see. How can I resolve this because it is really bugging me to death? I could do it before I upgraded. Now I can’t. If this is the issue, I want to downgrade and give this phone back. Please help me.

This is actually pretty easy to fix! Go to your People app. Click on Menu » View » uncheck Facebook and your Facebook contacts will go away. You can also check “Only contacts with phone number” so if you do have people in your Facebook with the phone number attached they will still show up.

Hey NerdGirl,

What do you recommend for organizing music on Android? I have the MotoDroid (2.1), and all my music is organized on iTunes (I have several iPods). Most of it is MP3s and unprotected AACs (audiobooks), but I understand that protected AACs won’t play (d@mn you, DRM!). Ideally, I’d like to sync iTunes playlists to the phone; how close can I get to that?

Thanks,
Ralph

You can get as close as actually doing it! For $3.99 you can get TuneSync which syncs your music and playlists over Wifi. Easy Phone Tunes (for iTunes) is a free option but again no protected tracks.

Hi n3rdg1rl,

I recently got a Droid Incredible, and I love its 8MP camera. But the problem with that is that the resulting photos are so huge in file size that it takes forever to upload them to some services, or the app will just time out during the process (i.e. Twicca, when uploading to twitpic). Of course, I could dial back the mega-pixels, but I generally want to keep a high-quality version that I can put onto my PC through USB.

So I was looking for an app that can resize the photos to a custom, smaller resolution. I tried Picsay free, but it only allows you to resize to an extremely tiny resolution, too small to be of any use in sharing. I know there’s Photoshop.com, but I’ve read that it runs constantly on the background as long as you have it installed, no matter what. Do you know of a simple (preferably free) app where I could just punch in a custom resolution for a photo and have a resized version created?

Thanks.

I use Image Resizer and it works pretty well for me. I like it mostly because it saves the resized file separately so you can make it as small as you want and still have the original quality one. Just so you know, anything that’s above 6 MP, unless you’re blowing them up bigger than 8” x 10” the human eye can’t tell the difference.

Hey Nerd Girl!

Hope you can answer my question. I’ve seen Sprint take the option of providing an Android Update as a downloadable package, and I saw that you posted an answer on:

http://www.androidtapp.com/ask-nerdgirl-mytouch-will-get-2-2-keep-gmail-contacts-away-echo-echo-confused-battery-and-we-might-have-a-convert/

Stating that rumor is the MyTouch will receive the update OTA. Unfortunately, I’m actually using the phone for ATT, so I don’t have the data package. I am almost always connected to WiFi.

Do you think there will be an option for me? Downloadable package from their website, or OTA thru Wifi?

Or should I just root and mod

Thanks,

Trevor

Most modding sites will put up a full version of the update that you can load without having to root. This is what they use to create the root file so they almost always have one available. It will update just as if it was an OTA, just through the computer. I would look into this before you decide to root.

Keep sending those questions to nerdgirl@androidtapp.com!

~n3rdg1rl

Tags: Android Advice, Ask NerdGirl, Help with Android, High Resolution Image Resize App, myTouch OTA Update, Removing Facebook Contacts, Resetting Android Phones, Smartphone Help, Sync iTunes

Categorised in: Android Advice, Ask NerdGirl

5 Comments

By Jeff on June 29, 2010 at 12:42 pm:

mSpot can also be used to sync iTunes playlists wirelessly:
http://www.droidsector.com/blog/2010/06/28/mspot-mini-review/

Reply
By Michael on June 29, 2010 at 12:54 pm:

Was your Image resizer link really supposed to redirect to letufindme?

Thanks, for your tips

Reply
By Louis on June 29, 2010 at 12:56 pm:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=159001

Taken from Google’s own FAQ on “Google Mail is becoming Gmail in the UK” (I’ve linked to it above):

“Android users: If you use an Android device and change your address, the following apps may not connect properly: Google Talk and Android Market. The current solution for this is to change back to @googlemail.com, or do a full reset of your Android device and use @gmail.com. We are working on resolving this issue as soon as possible.”

Reply
By Aaron on June 29, 2010 at 2:45 pm:

Hey, I have a Motorola Backflip running Android 1.5. Is there a way for me to only show contacts with Phone Numbers? I couldn’t find it the way you did it on the HTC Hero.

Reply
By hucker on June 30, 2010 at 8:39 am:

Wow, thank you for the Image Resizer app recommendation! It works perfectly, though the UI is a bit cumbersome to use. And I love how it integrates with Android’s intent system, so that I can call it right from the Photos app. Exactly what I was looking for.

Reply