Calendar Event Custom alert time

I have been a detractor of iOS products for years with mixed (more negative than positive) experiences on early generations of iPod, iPhone and iPad. Gotta admit I became more mellow these days and actually think it might be possible to live in an iWorld without other OS. I mean, there are enough things to do on an iPad to occupy all 24 hours of a day in your life (if you have an electrical outlet nearby or an external battery :P) But then there are moments that reminded me I still need a non-iOS device to achieve some very simple goals, like setting a "3 week before" reminder of an event on the calendar (You can't do that with the builtin Calendar app of iOS8) which I had to perform with my Android phone.

Transferring Android Apps

This is one thing I like about Android: sometimes you have multiple devices but each of them has access to a different App store so you could get some Apps from one device but not the other. In this case you could still transfer your app from one device to another. Found this guide. ES File Manager is especially useful.

Samsung Galaxy Note Ice Cream Sandwich update

This is ironic: I have been waited for the official ICS release for G-Note since the beginning of the year, months before I bought the phone. I couldn't wait longer and pulled the trigger 2 months ago. Finally, AT&T and Samsung release the update last month. Yet, I'm still on the old version of Android. Why? As usual, OS upgrade almost always resulted in complaints about worsen battery life, for any smartphone I know of! Check out this post. It's scary but not TOO bad. I guess I'm going to take the plunge soon.

New phones on Olympic years

It seems that I'm replacing my phone about every four years. My previous phone was an iPhone that I bought around Beijing Olympics. I bought my new phone, the Samsung Galaxy Note, just before the London Olympics. My phone before the iPhone, a Sony Ericsson W800i, also lasted ~4 years. I don't think I'm qualified as a "gadget" guy that a lot of people think I am based on this frequency.

Anyway, the more interesting question is: why did I switch from iOS to Android? Well, updating a jailbroken iPhone was a tedious process and I only did it once so my iPhone was running iOS 3. I wasn't able to install any new App from the official or unofficial App Store anymore. I might run into the same issue with Android. Who knows? I'm like the people who vote for a candidate from a different party because of poor performance of the last one. You just hope it'll be better. 

So, what were my top priority action items after getting the phone?
1) Sync contact from iPhone to Google
Android is tightly coupled with your Google account (well, everybody has one, right?) Basically the address book and calendar on your phone ARE the ones in the "Cloud" associated with your Google account. All I needed to do is to open iTunes and sync the contacts to Google. I think not every contact went through but it seems to have taken care of the majority.

2) Sync Yahoo Calendars
iPhone's builtin Calendar app allows you to sync with many different provider that uses CalDAV, including Yahoo. Not so for Android. There are 3rd party app that is supposed to work but I'd rather not risk my money. The solution? Export my existing Yahoo Calendars and import to my Google Calendar and stop using them for good. Yeah, it's more like a workaround. (Google has cut off yet another source of traffic to Yahoo!)

3) Add music
This is easy: connect the phone to any computer using USB and simply copy the files to any directory on the memory of the phone. The phone will automatically scan for the new files.

4) Customize ringtone
Once I have music files on the phone, I could open my Contact list and simply assign one of those files as the ringtone for a particular contact. However, I might not like to use the beginning of a song as the ringtone, for example, I prefer the chorus part in the middle of a song. For this, I downloaded the free app Ringdroid and pick the part I like. Ringdroid saves it as a ringtone file. (I think internally Android OS uses a particular directory for ring tones. It's hidden to un-rooted phone like mine) I wonder why the app is not banned by the phone companies who wanted to squeeze more money out of people. Some are willing to pay $3+ for a ringtone.

5) Whatsapp
It relies on your Contact list/address book. The only thing I changed is its Notifications setting: I turned off "Contact Ringtone" so that it won't play the ringtone of the person who messaged me. I'm confused 'coz I thought I got a phone call.

6) Cangjie input
I downloaded this popular Chinese input method app. I could have made it my default input method because when I type English, it will try to translate and I could pick either the Chinese word or the English word I typed. So it works for both Chinese and English without toggling "modes" like the other Chinese input method app (Go Keyboard) Its prediction is pretty accurate too. However, the reason it is so accurate is that it has generated statistics from keystrokes collected from user. Yes, it did warn user about it. I don't want my keystrokes to be collected all the time so my default is still the Samsung one.

Here is the list of other free Apps I downloaded. I learned about them from my Android tablet experience.

• Color Note
• Blogger
• Apple Daily
• Discuss(香港討論區)
• Rhapsody
• XiiaLive Lite
• Pandora
• cBook
• SpeedCar
• AirPenguin
• Google Drive
• HKBN 2b

SlingPlayer is not free ($29.99) but I gotta take advantage of the big screen! In fact, the 5.3 screen is the reason I chose it over any other phone. The newer Samsung Galaxy S3 is supposed to have better spec (and running Android 4 aka Ice Cream Sandwich already) but I couldn't resist the BIG screen.

Android Apk Downloader

幾經辛苦，終於下載到香港討論區個apk(Android app installer)，全靠一個Chrome Extension: Apk Downloader(via呢個帖)

My Android 4.0 Experience

As I mentioned in my previous post about my Android tablet, my plan was to upgrade it to 4.0 after using it with 2.3 for a while. I found the post about Android 4.0 beta on the forum on Teclast's official website and there's a link to download the RAR file. Un-rar the file and it contains instructions as well as binaries for the upgrade.

So, what do I like about Android 4.0 (beta)? To be honest, this doesn't seem to be a "must-have" upgrade for the time being (However, I could imagine a few years down the road, new apps won't run on 2.3 anymore. Just like a lot of iOS app these days requires 3.1 or even 4.0 or above.) The browser seems smoother and supports tabbed browsing (it's harder to switch between opened "windows" in the 2.3 browser) In addition, it doesn't require another app to turn on Airplane mode like 2.3. It is part of the "Settings"

The biggest problem with this beta upgrade though, is that it doesn't include the Market (where we download Apps) The closest "replacement" for the Market is freewarelovers.com. I found quite a few APK (App installer files. Simply double click in File Manager and it will install the corresponding app) I got other APK by Googling. And here is what I have installed:
-Youtube
-Chinese News Online
-PalmBookReader: 直讀中文(cBook) for some reason doesn't work even though I found its APK. This is its replacement.
-Amazon Kindle
-Rhapsody: it is the official app for the music streaming service. At first, playback always fails after playing a few seconds of each track and will skip to the next one. The problem kinda went away after I checked the box Advanced Settings->Disable track pre-loading
-Pandora
-GoKeyboard: this is the input method that replaced "Baidu input" that came with the tablet originally on 2.3. Not an exact replacement though because it uses Cangjie (倉頡) instead of hand writing recognition.
-XiiaLive Lite
-Facebook

Hopefully Teclast will release an "official" non-beta Android 4.0 upgrade that includes the Market in the near future. In the mean time, I'll keep using the beta (unless there's an app I need so bad that I have to revert back to 2.3, which could be done by downloading the firmware from Teclast)

A few good Apps

Talking about Android Apps here, this is a followup to my previous post. I've tried many free Apps in the past 2 weeks, a lot of them are just so-so or simply doesn't work, here are a few useful ones:
1) BBC News Reader: an "unofficial" BBC News app that could download articles for offline viewing.
2) CNN News: another "unofficial" app that works offline
3) Chinese News Online (HK): this app offers many different Chinese newspapers.
4) MoboPlayer: this is for playing back video in MKV format, which the built-in movie player cannot handle.
5) XiiaLive Lite: this is for listening to free streaming radio from ShoutCast. To make it work, I have to change Settings->Advanced Users->Internal stream engine from 'Off' to 'On' though.

Finally, there are a few games I like:
- 麻將天下
- GoldMiner
- SpeedCar
- AirPenquin

一千港元樓下Android tablet使用報告

雖然不是Apple fans(對於此品牌過份及不合理地受歡迎簡直相當反感)不過一直以來卻是Apple iOS的用家。皆因在美國比Apple便宜很多很多，但功能夠用的電話及tablet，十分難找。回到香港情況很不同，一下機就看到由Twins做封面的E-Zone，介紹一千港元左右的7吋Android tablet。結果我買了最平，$899的Teclast P76ti，之後一期由官恩娜做封面的E-Zone正是用這部機示範升級Android 4.0。我已計劃升級至4.0，不過還是想使用2.3一段日子，將來可以作比較。

使用Android我是零經驗，一開始最不解的是最頂的Status bar，那些icons不是每個按下去都有用，每下載及安裝完App後出現的icons又不會自動消失，Googled才知可以把這個bar向下拉顯示icons代表的notifications，可按Clear清除 icons及notifications。另一個問題是輸入繁體中文，三個預裝的輸入法均找不到如何手寫並出繁體，想從Market安裝倉頡輸入法也找不到合適的。結果還是從預裝其中的Baidu輸入法入手，選取了常規設置中的簡繁轉換，即可手寫出繁體！（本文有一少半是在該tablet上手寫的）

尚未有解決辦法的問題還有一大堆，最嚴重的是battery life流失得頗快，不過幾小時已跌破15%出Notification，在Notification可打開Battery Usage，顯示75%用於Cell standby，問題是這是一部全無流動電話／上網功能的tablet，根本無需費電力於Cell radio之上，更麻煩的是除了該Notification無其他途徑打開Battery Usage！第一樣改的是關掉所有Mobile network的Data相關選項，下一步是嘗試幾個不同的App/widget，包括Juice Defender, NoBars, Battery Widget, Free Power Widget。Battery Widget能顯示Battery Usage頁；而Free Power Widget則可以將機轉至Airplane mode。雖然如此，電池還是流失得比期望中快，更令我失望的是Cell Standby維持在75%左右。

最後想提的問題是有些知名App，例如Rhapsody及QR Droid等，均無法在Market找到；即使裝了Market Enabler這個任用家選擇不同國家／電訊公司對應Market的App，還是找不到以上。裝了幾個免費QR Code Scanner都不能使用，可能和這部機只有一個前置鏡頭有關吧。

短短數天，也發掘了不少好App，讓我介紹／表揚下吧：
1)MapDroyd：可下載各地地圖，在機上離線(offline)使用。
2)ColorNote：簡單易用的寫note軟件。

至於Facebook, Yahoo Mail, GMail, Hotmail, Google Docs, YouTube, Amazon Kindle這些官方App，基本上都符合對那些公司的期望，沒有太多驚或喜。