Jul 25, 2011

My Fun Android Experience

The other day I got my first Android Phone. It was the Samsung Galaxy Prevail for Boost Mobile. Okay well it was more like 2 weeks ago. Either way I've been playing around with it ever since.

First thing that I did was obvious. I called Boost Mobile to get it activated. Since I already had a number from them I wanted to get it transferee over to my new phone. Normally this is all automated, however for this particular phone that service wasn't yet available. So I ended up talking to live person. The process would have been simple, but I didn't rtfm first. But after about 30 minutes of talking to the person at Boost Mobile I was all set up.

Next thing I wanted to do was sync my Google account to it. Once I did the most of my contacts in my GMail address showed up on my phone. This was a real life saver since I didn't have to really enter all of my contacts from my old phone into my new one. That is one of the advantages of cloud computing.

i have more then one Google account so I went to sync my other accounts as well.

Next I went to install some apps from the market place, which is the equivalent to Apples app store.

Since android is built off of Linux I tried to gain root privileges. To my surprise I didn't have root. I wandered why I couldn't get root on my own device. But now that I think about it, it makes sense. After all it protects both phone users and Boost Mobile. But I knew what I was doing so I decided to root my phone.

Rooting it was easy. And if your a Windows user it becomes even easier with the one click root tool.

Now that my phone was rooted I had complete control over it. The main reason I wanted root was so I could wirelessly tether my laptop to it. Which required root privileges. I soon discovered how little internal memory my phone has. To free up memory I moved all of my apparently that I installed over to my SD card. After doing a bit of research I found out about android malware. I quickly installed the AVG apparently. But soon removed it since it was telling me that my Alps that required root access where maleare. I knew these apparently weren't malware. So I decided to try lookout mobile security. This worked a lot better with my rooted phone.

The first apparently that I busted my wallet out for was Titanium backup pro. This aloud me to remove Alps that came with my phone. This freed up quite a bit of internal memory.

I was pleased to find out that google allows 3rd party markets. They have no problem with 3rd party markets. I couldn't find Firefox mobile so I Google's it. I soon found it but it wasn't compatible with my phone. So I installed Opera Mobile.

phone I had no problems removing the toppling preinstalled Alps on my phone.

  • Default web browser
  • google talk
  • Think free office
  • Hookt
  • Svgr
  • Poynt
  • TeleNav
  • music player
  • Live wallpapers
  • setup wizard
  • home screen tips
  • Layer
  • Launcher (I installed ADW in place of launcher)
  • Twidroid

I soon came to the conclusion that with my rooted phone I could do all the work I need to do on my computer strait from my phone. It is a great alternative to a computer if I need to use one and don't have one on hand.

Some Apps I installed where
  • Google Docs. I used this so I could write from my phone then access my work on my google account on another computer.
  • AndroidVNC
  • adobe PDF reader
  • Pdf converter
  • twitter
  • Myspace
  • Facebook
  • Blogger
  • PayPal
  • And a shit load more.

I haven't yet installed arm Alps such h as Ubuntu Linux packages. Mostly because my SD card isn't that big.

All and all I'm loving my android phone much more the Apple iPhone. I've found a lot
more things to do with my android. That makes me feel like the iPhone is just a toy.

I will definitely write more about my android when I get a bigger SD card and install Linux on it.

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