The Tekommando Files: EVO much?

My amazing fiance and I have been discussing getting smart phones to replace our current phones when the contract allows us to do so without too many issues. Mine will not be replacement-eligible until March or so . . . but just yesterday, the Mighty UPS Lady™ brought right to our door a new Sprint EVO 4G.

Once J went to bed, I stayed up way too late and spent a couple of hours messing with the phone, downloading apps and getting my feet wet with the Android OS. My only other smart phone experience has been with Apple's iPhone and iPod touch running iOS.

Color me impressed. The gadget came with a USB A to micro-USB cable, a 110 VAC to micro-USB charger, a quick start guide and near-useless hardcopy documentation. It has an 8 gigabyte micro-SD card for downloaded apps, a customer-installable rechargeable battery and 512 megabytes of onboard flash memory. This is a big difference from iOS devices, which have no mini-SD slots and non-customer installable batteries.

Activation was painless, once we got the correct device number entered. Virtually every Sprint device we have has required a call to Sprint; this one was no exception.

Plusses:

• Frankly, the on-device Android Market is far more usable (to me) than the iOS App Store. The apps take up very little memory and seem to execute cleanly. Android Market apps download to and execute from the SD card.
• The connectivity to my Mac was excellent. While I could not browse the device with Snow Leopard's Bluetooth File Transfer utility, I could easily pair the EVO with my Mac, my own phone, Jameece's old phone and my Mac. I did not try USB connectivity with any computer system. I was able to get all of Jameece's contacts to the EVO as .vcf (vCard) files and all her photos as well. Very robust Bluetooth!
• While we don't have 4g network connectivity, the 3g works just fine.
• The file system looked very very very familiar to me. Apparently, and I did not know this before she got the phone, the Android OS looks like (and is!) a mobile version of Unix. Renowned for being rock-solid enough to be the foundation for Internet servers, Unix also underlies my favorite computer OS, Mac OS X.
• Just for grins, I checked the Android Market for "Pathfinder RPG" apps. There are a lot more useful, free RPG apps here than on the Apple App Store. This makes me happy. iOS 4.x users are not so fortunate.
• I loved the ringtone selection. A lot.
• Two words: Angry Birds.

Downsides:

• I still cannot see how to get mp3 music onto the thing. If an Android device is going to replace my iPod touch and phone, it needs to play my music. I'd love to see a sync app like iTunes . . . but I have the strangest feeling that the device will only sync music with an iCloud-style subscription store. Not. Amused. I'm sure I'll figure out how to do this when Teh Meece asks me to do so.

Verdict: I still want one.

Der Tekcömmandö Files: VNC and Me

With the goodly number of computers -- one per person, now -- in the house, I often need to go hither and yon to do my thing with them if they are not behaving normally. There's J's office machine (Beauty) in the bedroom, my Mac and two PC lappies (EYD and her dad) and Beast out here in the common room. Upon occasion, I need to do things to or with them on the network.

How do I control them all? Think Lord of the Rings: Sauron gave the various rings out to exercise control over humans, dwarves and elves and had the One ring to rule them all. In the case of the home network, all I need to do is hand each machine on it a ring of sorts -- a VNC (virtual networking computing) server program to install and install the One Ring -- a VNC client -- in my Mac. Kinda neat?

EYS thought so when I showed him how I can log into his system from my Mac. Since Beauty is a work machine, I did not touch it. Her work requires her to run a VNC server and I do not want to fsck with that without knowing the specifics.

It's nice to know that if I need to, I can access home desktop machines from anywhere there is a network connection. Of course this is no help when the network is down . . .

VNC also suffers when there are bandwidth issues. At Apple, I got to work with Apple Remote Desktop, a Mac-specific remote admin solution. Slick, sweet interface, real time scanning . . . and a network with enough bandwidth to not lag. Since Beast's primary network connection is with an early G-generation wireless card, and it looks to be a 802.11B link at best . . . I suspect that 11 Mbps WLAN coupled to the rather lame video capability of the MacBook is why the control feels as laggy as a frozen arthritic snail in molasses.