When my Hero was updated to Android 2.1 I was pleased to find that I now had the turn-by-turn navigation which I probably use a little bit more that CoPilot when I’m in the UK. Why? Well it just seems to be a bit snappier and easier to use – that said, when I was on holiday in Portugal this year I was glad to have my CoPilot as it stores the maps locally so I did not incur any data charges (£3/MB – no thank you Orange!).

So I should be fine with two SatNav applications … shouldn’t I? Well until I heard about Skobbler I was, and there’s always room for one more isn’t there, or is three a crowd?

Well mapping data is extremely expensive to licence and being into Open Source software I’ve be contributing (albeit in a small way) to a project called OpenStreetMap which aims to provide freely accessible maps of the world. I’ve only been updating and maintaining my town but it’s no mean feat I can tell you. Now, not withstanding the potential for roads being missing or not flagged as being one-way etc wouldn’t it be good if this freely accessible data could be used to produce a cheap (or even free) SatNav application. Enter Skobbler! It implements OpenStreetMap mapping data and this is probably what makes it free (on Android at least). So is it any good? Well, yes and no!

So that most important question is ”how is the navigation?”, well it’s ok – but …. when you approach a roundabout the voice prompt is always (and I mean always) ‘Take the First Exit’ – even when the graphic on the screen is clearly showing the route as being the second or third exit. This is a serious issue and needs to be resolved.

The only other issue I have with the application itself is that the roundabout helper icon in the bottom left corner of the screen  assumes that you are driving on the right, , which is frowned on in the UK.  This is a minor issue and easily fixed – once the developers know that there is an issue – bearing in mind that the developers appear to be German, it probably looks fine to them.

Well, it’s Open Source so all I need to do is to report the bug yes – well I have (see here) and hopefully these issues will be resolved in the not too distant future. On the subject of reporting bugs, this needs to be looked at by the people at Skobbler. Mapping bugs can be reported directly from the application but what about bugs in the application itself? Well I posted to the forum and was told (four days later) that they would investigate but it was not obvious that this was the right place to do this.

On the subject of the website, the experience is not great! It keeps switching to German, the Add Location functionality in the My Skobbler area just returns you to the Home Page and you have to register for the forum separately (your normal login does not provide access). I was also surprised to see the the site makes use of Google Maps, not Open Street Map! There may be a good technical reason for this but I can’t think of one off the top of my head!

So overall what do I think? Well it’s great to see someone making use of the Open Street Map data and providing a totally free SatNav application for both Android and iPhone. The couple of issues I’ve mentioned above should not detract from the fact that Skobbler is a pretty capable application – but it’s no match for Google Navigation (also free on Android 2.1+). That said, I’m not going to give up on it quite yet. I’m keen to see the product progress and will be looking out for an update to fix the roundabout issues.

Knowing that I would lose the broadband when the phone switched over I was prepared for a couple of days downtime but how was I going to cope? Well as it happened I have a HTC Hero phone and it was very recently upgraded to the official Android 2.1 release – and when I plug it in to my laptop I get a number of options including Charge Only, Mount as Disk Drive or Internet Sharing!

Surely not, it’s not going to be that easy surely. Well, yes it is actually! I connected the phone to my Laptop [running Ubuntu Lucid] via USB and selected the Internet Sharing option. Within a couple of seconds the network manager started pulsing and a notification popped up saying ‘Auto usb0 Connection Established’. So far so good – but could I really surf the internet?
I fired up Firefox and sure enough my homepage (Google) was displayed; but couldn’t this be a cached page? I duly logged into my GMail account and there is was! I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised – I mean, I’d not installed any additional Apps on the phone or any packages on the laptop; it just worked.

Now, I’ve not tried it on Windows yet (I boot into Vista/XP about once a month) so it may well be as seamless there too but the fact is that my humble HTC Hero running Android 2.1 has filled the gap in my broadband service. Ok, it’s not as fast as my TalkTalk connection was and I have a 500MB monthly limit but then it’s fast enough and I only really need to access my email and social networking and while I can do that on the phone itself I prefer the keyboard and screen of the laptop when I’m writing blog posts (like this one) and when I have a lot of email to get through (I’ve just got back from two weeks annual leave and don’t access it while I’m on holiday if I can help it!).

In the end we opted for the StatusNet engine which also powers the Identi.ca microblogging service. Its Open Source, can be installed locally and has a Twitter-like API which meant that we could integrate it with our internal systems like our CruiseControl.NET build server.

But that’s not the end of it – StatusNet is extendible as well. With a little knowledge of PHP and knowing which ‘hooks’ to use (or how to find them) it is possible to intercept most (if not all) of the important events in the world of statusnet, like posting a notice, and injecting your own logic.

Well it has come to pass that the company decided not only to implement an internal microblogging platform but to create a presence ‘out there’ as well. But the question is “how to do it in the most effective way?”, I mean there are loads of social networks out there and we don’t want to have to repost manually on multiple sites. Well the good thing is we don’t need to!

Using a service called PingFm it is possible to post to a vast number of services including microbloggers like Twitter and Identica as well as LinkedIn and even blogs like WordPress, all from a single application.

Now the crunch, getting users to post when they are up to is one thing, asking them to do it through two services (StatusNet and PingFm) is another thing altogether. But hope is at hand, StatusNet has a plugin architecture which allows new functionality to be added quite easily.The specifications for the plugin were pretty straightforward:

• Only certain users will have PingFM accounts and therefore they should be the only ones posting to the service
• Only posts with a specific group tag, e.g. !pingfm, should be forwarded to PingFM
• As much configuration as possible should be held in config files to allow it to be updated by users with no PHP knowledge
• The core StatusNet files should not be modified in any way, shape or form.

StatusNet uses an Inversion of Control architecture which is a bit different from the normal Event Driven Model I’m used to. Basically when an event is triggered the system will ‘say’: “Ok, this ‘hook’ has triggered – do any of you [modules/plugins] want to do anything while I’m at it?”. So that first thing to find out is “is there a suitable hook for what I’m trying to do, i.e. respond to the new post being added?”.

Now I had a bit of a problem finding the list of hooks because I was looking under the API documentation which is something else altogether! As soon as I looked at ‘Plugin Development’ I found this page on the StatusNet site. From there I went to the Hooks Reference page and quickly found the EndNoticeSave hook details. Excellent, not what?

What I really wanted was a sample plugin that I could use as a starting point, you know, something with all the correct signatures and basic metadata. Well there is a link from the Plugin Development page on the StatusNet site that takes you to details of just that, a Helper Plugin that I used as the basis for my own.

So next I really need to configure the system so that it sees my plugin. This is a simple matter of saving the file into a specific location,the \local folder under the StatusNet installation, with a filename in a standard format, basically suffixed with the word Plugin. A single line in the config.php file will alert the system to your plugins presence and away you go.

In my case I called the file PingFMPlugin.php and saved it into the appropriate folder. The following line was added to config.php and I was ready to go:

addPlugin('PingFm');

(note that this is the name of the file without the Plugin suffix (I ran into problems because I thought it was from the definition of the plugin with the file itself!).

By adding a simple bit of test code into the EndNoticeSave hook which saved the text into a file in my /tmp folder I was able to verify that my plugin was indeed running when a new post was added.

So there we are, I now have a development environment configured and I can start work on the plugin itself – which will be in Part 2 of this post which I’ll post in a couple of weeks or so.

Suffice to say that this morning I was greeted with a ‘You Have Exceeded Your Band Width’ limit email! Oops!
Well as I host the site on a reseller account it was simple to increase the bandwidth limit so normal service has been resumed.

I had been playing around with installing the Eclipse IDE (arguably the best Java IDE around) and the Android SDK on my previous Ubuntu installation and basically made a hash of it a few times. Having refined my process I’ve decided to write it down so that I don’t forget Following my clean installation of Ubuntu 10.04 I needed to get my development environment sorted out, and this meant installing Eclipse and the Android SDK and then wiring them both together.

When downloading the IDE I opted for the ‘Eclipse IDE for Java Developers’ because essentially Android is a set of libraries built on top of Java, so it seemed like a good place to start. Note that I’m using Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo) for my development.

The installation process for Eclipse is a simply case of extracting the downloaded archive into a suitable location, I’ve created a folder called Applications in my /home/dave directory and extracted the archive into it. Double clicking on the eclipse executable file kicked off the IDE which loaded quite quickly after prompting my for a workspace location – I just kept the default.

So that’s Eclipse sorted, now what about the Android SDK?

After downloading the SDK it too is installed by simply extracting into a suitable location, again I extracted it into my /home/dave/Applications folder. But we are not quite finished yet – we need to use the SDK Manager to download and install at least one Android development platform first (read the ‘SDK Readme.txt in the folder when you extracted the SDK for more details). This is a simple case on executing the [SDK Folder]/tools/android file either via the command line for by double-clicking it. The SDK and AVD Manager will now load and I simply selected the ‘Available Packages’ option, selected everything in the right-hand pane and clicked on ‘Install Selected’. After a length installation process I was done – this is my SDK/AVD Manager after the installation completed.

So that’s it, we’re there yes? Well no, not yet. In the Windows world we are used to installations detecting the presence of IDEs or vice-versa and everything just working once the installer finishes. Well Linux is not like that we need to so some additional configuration before we can get coding; in fact Eclipse/Android installation is pretty much the same on all platforms, so it’s not just an Linux thing.

The first thing to do is to install the Android ADT (Android Developer Tool) plugin into Eclipse – which you’ll be happy to hear is a semi-automatic process.

• Start Eclipse and select ‘Install New Software’ from the Help menu.
• Click the ‘Add’ button next to the “Work With” dropdown list
• Enter a suitable name for this resource, e.g. Android Developer Tools, and the following URL into the location: https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse
• Click Ok

Eclipse will now search for the ADT plugin and all things being equal will display a screen similar to this:

Select the ‘Developer Tools’ checkbox (which

will select the DDMS and Development Tools beneath it) and click next. After agreeing to the Licence Agreement (which of course you read first) click Finish and the installation will proceed.

You may get a security warning at this point because the packages are apparently unsigned but I just clicked OK to carry on. All things being equal you will be prompted to restart Eclipse and the installation process is then complete.

Selecting File | New you will see ‘Android Project’ displayed and clicking it will display the following window:

Now I’m still new to Android development so I’ll not inflict my poor knowledge of what you need to enter into this screen – you probably know better than me at the moment anyway

What I can say is that I managed to complete the obligatory ‘Hello World’ application from my copy of ‘Professional Android 2 Application Development’ book by Reto Meier so I must have it set up somewhere near right.

However, I’m a worlds away from a sysadmin who works in the command shell all the time – I like my GUIs and tend to tread around the command line like its a bad tempered dog. So without the good old Update Manager and not wanting to blow the whole installation away and start again, how do I upgrade my system to the recently released 10.04 Lucid Lynx?Now a lot of us already play around with apt-get on the command line instead of using the Synaptic Package Manager in the desktop. Not sure why I flip between the two – maybe just when I know the name of the package I need I find it more straightforward (and maybe quicker) to enter it into the command line.

The question is – how do I perform a distribution upgrade?

Well it would appear that I’m not the only one who is confused by the different apt-get options, in episode 86 of the ‘Going Linux Podcast’ Larry and Tom responded to a listener question along the same lines, and got it wrong! The error was pointed out by fellow podcaster Alan Pope (of the Ubuntu UK Podcast) who not only clarified which command should be used but also providing a detailed explanation of what each option does and when it should be used. Alan also posted on his blog, reproducing the letter in full so I’ll not regurgitate it here, but reading it I found that I was already using the wrong command to update my installed packages.

The confusion, I think, is that many users would assume that sudo apt-get dist-upgrade would upgrade the distribution – but it doesn’t, far far from it (as you will see if you read Alan’s post). In fact I should have been using this command instead of sudo apt-get upgrade which does not pull down and install any dependancies required by the upgraded packages, whereas dist-upgrade does.

In fact the correct command to upgrade to the next release is sudo do-release-upgrade – nothing to do with apt-get at all which apparently has problems working around certain ‘quirks’ in the upgrade process.

So for more details on the different apt-get options head over to Popey’s blog and enhance your Ubuntu/Command Line kung fu!

With my /home folder fully backed up onto an external HDD (and to my Amazon S3 account) I duly downloaded the .iso, burnt it to a cd and set about the installation.Booting from the cd I expected to be greeted with the usual options menu, from which I intended to select ‘Check Disk for Defects’ just to be sure that everything was going to be ok. However, the slash screen stayed up for somewhere between 5-10 minutes during which time my CD drive was spinning and my hard disk LED was flashing away – so I knew it was doing something – but what? There was nothing on screen that gave anything away and I just had to sit and wait. When the options menu was eventually displayed there was no ‘Check Disk for Defects’ option, just the option to run from the CD or to install to disk.

As I was doing a full installation I was a little concerned that my burnt disk may not be 100% – I really did not want to end up with a laptop with half an installation and problematic booting. Having said that – I could always boot into a live session using my 9.10 CD and download/reburn the CD so I just clicked the full install option.

After specifying the usual timezone and user details the installation was done in about 30 minutes.

Rebooting into my new installation was a pretty quick affair and while I’m not a fast boot/shutdown fiend I was impressed – more on that later. I was more concerned about how the new system would perform, would it recognise all my hardware (as all the previous versions had) and could I get on with the buttons being on the wrong side of the windows. This layout change had caused a lot of aggravation in the Ubuntu community so I was interested how it would affect my use of the system and whether it would have me editing files to put them back again.

After logging in the first thing I did was to connect to my WiFi which was straightforward as always – I did like the ‘throbbing’ icon in the notification panel while it was connecting, a small thing but it gives that polished feeling.

Clicking around the menus I took a look at the Ubuntu Software Centre and was pleased to see that it has also moved on. I feel that the biggest obstacle to Linux adoption is the locating and installation of software. I put me off in the past (back in the RedHat 8.0 days) and it has put friends of mine off quite recently. The good old ‘apt-get’ approach is fine if you know what you want to install and exactly what it is called but this is a barrier to entry for potential Windows converts who are used to downloading a setup.exe and just double clicking on it. Having a catalogue of applications which can be installed with a few clicks of the mouse is a very powerful and welcome recent addition to Ubuntu. I was please to see HomeBank listed as one of the featured applications although I was disappointed to see that it was not the latest version – so I installed from GetDeb instead.

The other new addition I wanted to look at was the new Ubuntu One Music Store which is built into the default music player, RhythmBox. Not that I wanted any music right now but it is nice to know that I don’t have to rely on iTunes in Windows. I searched around for a few of my favourite artists and was please to see that they were well presented with new and old albums being available for around a reasonable price of around £7.99.

This new feature has received a little bit of flack mainly for it’s use of MP3 files rather than an open standard like ogg of flac. Canonical fended off these criticisms by explaining that the 7digital (the partner company providing the actual music) were only able to provide music in the format the the recording labels would allow – and on the whole that is MP3. Add to this that unless you are using a suitably equipped computer playing ogg or flac files is not the easy. My iPod does not support them and neither does the stereo in my car. They both support MP3 though. While I can understand the gripes of the members of the community we have to remember that we live in the real world and if they are adamant that they want to use the open standard formats then the answer is simple – don’t use the Ubuntu One Music Store (or iTunes for that matter). RhythmBox will still work as it always did – if you liked it before then you’ll still like it, nothing has changed in that respect.

By this time I was getting a little bit frustrated when moving my mouse to the top right corner of the windows and not finding the usual minimise/maximise/close buttons but was, and in fact still am, prepared to stick with it for now and give it a go.

With all of my email in the cloud I did not have to worry about configuring an EMail client but was keen to give GWibber a try. While my Twitter experience is starting to lose it’s shine I do still use identica and we (well I) have recently implemented a statusnet instance at work for internal communication and GWibber is capable of pulling all three feeds into a single place. I had been using twhirl while running Ubuntu 9.10 but I like to try other applications from time to time just to see if there is anything better out there. GWibber has the benefit of not having to have a separate widget displayed on screen for each account making good use of the limited screen estate I have on the laptop.

I carried out various tests and was please to find that all my hardware seemed to be working with the exception of my card reader – but this never worked on any of the Ubuntu installations I have used. This is a small annoyance really as I can connect the camera via USB and Lucid is happy to mount it as a drive allowing me to manage my photos directly on the media card.

The next major tasks are to install and configure the Android SDK and a suitable IDE, probably Eclipse – although I’ll post about that separately.

I mentioned earlier that boot time is not really important to me – and it isn’t. However, shutdown time is. Why? Well I mainly use a laptop and when I shut it down it normally means that I’m about to change locations but even if I am just done for the day then I still want to put the thing away. Far too many times in the past when I’ve shut Windows down I’ve accidentally missed the ‘Shut Down and Install Updates’ message and have been sitting around waiting for it to actually power down – that is a pain I can live without. Shutting down Ubuntu 10.04 is completed well under 10 seconds, actually nearer to 5 seconds. As a test I restarted the system and reached the login screen in around 20 seconds. Forty seconds later, after logging in, I was able to open Firefox and surf the web – and that includes connecting to my WiFi..! I’m not a speed freak when it comes to boot times, but that’s quick.

So all in all I’m very happy with 10.04. Ok I’m still getting used to the buttons being moved but if I find that I really can’t get used to it then I’ll just move them back again. I’m still in the process of installing my favorite applications such as gPodder (for downloading my podcasts and transferring them to my iPod), HomeBank (for my finances) and DropBox (yes I know I could use Ubuntu One but at work we use DropBox and as it works on Linux and Windows I get the best of both worlds).

I’ve got a few things I want to look at over the next few months so hopefully I’ll be blogging a little bit more – mainly so that I can look back and remind myself what I did and how I did it in the future.

[Edit: From PC]

Ok now that I have uploaded the post I can see’ that there are a few minor issues. First of all it was not clear that when I ticked’Publish’ and then pressed ‘Save’ that this would only save the post locally, i.e. it would not actually be published. To achieve this I needed to long press the post in [what I now see is called] ‘Local Drafts’ and then select the ‘Upload to Blog’ option. Ok a simple thing but the absence of any Help made it an easy mistake to make.

Secondly the post came through as ‘Uncategorised’ which is not ideal and I do not recall seeing an option to set the Category – but will check shortly.

Besides that, I’m more than happy with the application. Now I can utilise the otherwise dead time, if I can come up with something to write about that is.

Yes you can ploy your route and yes the map will scroll across the screen as you drive but there are two major issues for me;

1. It doesn’t speak to you,
2. As you travel along your route, this is not reflected in the directions, indeed you have to click what amounts to a ‘Next’ button as you pass that point on the map. So not really hands free either then.
3. Google Maps are pulled down as required, i.e. as you drive along, which is great in one respect but if you want to use the service abroad then the Data Roaming costs (£3/MB) are prohibitive.

Disappointing, but I knew that there were other SatNav applications available which would overcome these issues and after a bit of research I opted for CoPilot Live for Android.

Now this decision was not taken lightly and frankly not easy to make, the reason? Negative comments in the Android Market saying that the application was crashing all the time and that the support was non-existent! Well my problem was that I had a trip to France in a few days and needed a SatNav with European maps on it. So taking into account that the application had a four star rating (as voted by users), that there were always going to be some people with bad experiences and that I had seen a number of good reviews (including a video review on YouTube and another for the iPhone) I bit the bullet and bought the Europe version prepared myself for either SavNav Heaven or SatNav Hell.

Unfortunately, things did not start well for me. I downloaded the application to the phone and then downloaded the CoPilot Central application which is used to manage the Maps etc. Unfortunately the application on runs on Windows – which is not my primary operating system so I rebooted into Windows 7 and performed the installation. After a confusing quarter of and hour or so I logged into my account and attempted to download my Maps – BANG!

CoPilot Central refused to download any maps, despite highlighting the ones I was allowed to download, preferring to display a Windows exception message instead! Great, I was £50+ out of pocket and had a SatNav with no maps and an application that refused to rectify the situation.

Now the Android Market has a refund policy which only last 24 hours, so I decided to contact Support and explain my problems and that if it was not resolved within 20 hours or so I would invoke the refund process. Well, The following morning (about 10 hours later) there was an email in my inbox with a link to download the maps directly and detailed instructions on how to install them using CoPilot Central (even in it’s hobbled state). I downloaded the Maps, followed the instructions and behold – a working SatNav. However, the safety camera option was now disabled! So another email to support and again a prompt, detailed response on how to download the safety camera database from their site and install it onto the phone. So all sorted then, but how would it perform during my trip to France?

Well, I have mixed news on that front;

A couple of miles from the Ferry Port in Poole CoPilot reported that it had lost it’s SatNav signal. Hardly it’s fault I thought and I was close enough to the port to follow the signs. While I was waiting to be loaded onto the ferry and with CoPilot still having no GPS signal I flicked over to Google Maps …. and it zeroed into my location within a couple of seconds! It certainly had a GPS signal and I then noticed that the icon in the notification area was confirming a GPS fix had been aquired. Switching back to CoPilot and it was still in the dark as it were. I exited CoPilot and restarted and within a minute it found me again – odd!

During the trip from Cherboug to Central Brittany CoPilot lost GPS about 8 or 9 times, all resolved with a restart of the application (not the phone). Frustrating yes but it did take me right to the end of my friends driveway which I would not have found that easily with printed directions.

Also when I selected the ‘Quick Stop’ option to add a petrol station to my route (the French seem to like hiding them away from us) I did expect it to pick the next one in the direction I was heading in – but it didn’t! Instead it routed me back the way I came for about 15km. Yes, I know; I could have just turned around again but I had placed myself in it’s hands and it duly took me to a petrol station which was not obvious from the main road (about 3-4km off the ‘motorway’) and then back on my way.

It is also worth noting that some of the safety cameras displayed on the map were not actually present on the side of the road – hopefully none the other way around

The next leg of my trip took my to Versailles (not a short hop at all) and CoPilot once again lost SatNav signal but only on two occasions – and once again took me right to the hotel I was staying at. I did notice that the display appeared to freeze a couple of times, the map then zoomed right out and then back in again for no apparent reason but I was still getting voice directions from the system so can’t really complain. Can’t say fairer than that really, a good direct route from A to B.

Finally I needed to drive from Versailles to Calais to catch the EuroTunnel to Folkstone and then onto my home in Devon. This time the CoPilot behaved itself flawlessly, never losing signal (except in the EuroTunnel of course), not freezing and apart from wishing I had configured it to avoid toll roads I was more than happy with it.

So am I happy with my purchase? Well I have to say, yes I am.

While I understand that some people have experienced problems with the software I also understand that unlike the TomTom and Garmin devices, the makers of CoPilot are not really in control of the operating environment. Ok it runs on Android and they say that they support the HTC Hero, but they can’t control what other software I install on the device or updates made to the ROM or the OS itself. Maybe these users have fallen foul of an unforeseeable conflict between two pieces of seemingly unrelated software (as a Developer I know how this can happen) or maybe not.

As for complaints about the Support being non-existent I can only reiterate my experiences; I had problems which were resolved promptly and without any fuss. These were not automated responses but a real life human being who understood my problem and my concerns.

I was disappointed that I could not select the ‘Navigate to Contact’ option (it is greyed out on the Android version but not on the iPhone version) but this is pretty trivial.

Complaints aside, I found the features of the software really good, in particular the use of ‘Lane Assist’-like captions to ensure that you are in the right lane; useful when you’re driving on the wrong side of the road with crazy French drivers trying to kill you! The Points of Interest are clickable and provide the option to simply navigate to the location or (where applicable) call the associated phone number right from the map view. Configuration options are numerous and some

I notice that CoPilot Central was updated recently but as I already have my maps downloaded I can’t really see if the issue I reported above has been fixed or not.

[Edit: 26/02/2010]

Further to raising the GPS signal loss with @copilotsupport on Twitter I received this response:

We need to have better GPS fix on navigation and not just a 2D fix as we’re having to do more GPS calculations than Gmaps would

So basically Copilot needs more satellite locks than GMaps does – makes sense I suppose but I will check this if I encounter the problem again as I have an app which shows me details of the satellites that the phone is currently locked on to.

The iPhone is the obvious choice for many but while it cannot be denied that it is a fantastic piece of kit but I really don’t like the fact that I’d be tied to iTunes, and therefore Windows/Mac! Add to that the fact that I’m probably goiung to want to write applications for the devise and that I don’t know Objective C the learning curve to develop even simple applications is going to be quite steep. Then there is the licence restrictions on the use the the SDK and conditions for deployment of applications to the App Store – from what I can make out you have to use a Mac, which I don’t have. All in all, the iPhone is not an option for me.

I turned my attention to the Android phones in general and the HTC Hero in particular. I liked the look of the phone itself and had heard a lot of good things about the device (along with a handful of problems it has to be said!). Android is an Open Source operating system which is based on the Linux kernel and this appeals to me as a Linux [Ubuntu] user. The SDK is essentially Java based with a little python thrown in (both of which I know), it can be used on Mac, Windows and Linux so I can develop and install applications directly to the phone.

The final factor in my decision to buy the HTC Hero was, trivially enough, that nobody else at work had or wanted one. There are a few Apple fan boys in the office along with a Blackberry or two – but no Androids, so I felt it was time to change that

So what is life like with the Hero? Well on the whole I’m loving it and it is by far the best phone I’ve ever owned although there are a few niggles that I’ve yet to sort out – some quite annoying.

The thing I hate about getting a new phone is having to enter all of my contacts but with the Hero I was pleased to find that after I’d entered my Google account details all of my Google contacts were already in my address book. I also had access to my GMail which was not something I had ever had on a phone before (yes I know … welcome to the noughties!). Weather forecasts were on my Home screen and then there was Google Maps to utilise the built-in GPS so I was pretty happy.

The touchscreen was quite snappy but had a little bit of a delay when swiping between home screens. Turns out that there was a firmware upgrade for this and once I’d installed that (pretty painless really) the phone was a joy to use.

Well it was not all sugar icing and cherries on top – there were some annoyances, some of which I’ve resolved or worked around and some are still on my To Do list.

I’d wanted to use the phone as a SatNav but frankly using Google Maps and the built in GPS just doesn’t cut it for me. Ok, Google Maps can route me from point A to point B and provide Turn By Turn directions in text form and also as a moving GPS overlay – but it doesn’t speak to me. Yeah, yeah big deal what should I expect for nothing?

Well there are other problems; as you drive along your route it does not update your position in the text version of the directions – why not? The phone knows where it is so why can’t Google Maps keep my position in the directions up to date? That’s a fail in my book. I also wanted the SatNav for a trip to France I had coming up – and with the cost of International [Roaming] Data Charges being in the order of £3/MB I was concerned about the cost of using Google Maps – which pulls the maps down over the air. I needed an alternative which placed the maps on the phone and did not rely on the mobile internet – at all! The answer was CoPilot which I purchased from the Android Market. I’m going to dedicate a post entirely to my CoPilot experiences but I can say that I am generally happy with the application – yes there were a few problems but I’m safely back from France and made everywhere I needed to.

The next concern was about my 500MB monthly data allowance be chewed up by applications like GMail and Facebook running in the background and constantly checking for updates. To that end I’ve configured Facebook and my Twitter client to check for updates only when I tell them to. Maybe this is defeating the object of this phone a little but to be honest, do I need to know about every incoming tweet? On the other hand I did want to keep up to date with my email so I’ve left GMail updating every 15 minutes. Maybe I’ll review these settings in a couple of months when I get a better handle on the data usage.

That but by no means least, I have a problem with the Wifi. I can detect and connect to my secure Wifi in the house no problem – but for some reason, when I switch the Wifi on the phone on the Internet connection becomes unstable. In a previous post I mentioned problems I had with the connection dropping and the development of a script which runs on my Ubuntu server in the garage that emails me when the external IP address changes. Well, within a few minutes of me turning the WiFi on and accessing the Android Market I was greeted with ‘Network Errors’ and started to get the IP Address Changed emails (obviously once the connection had re-established). The bug question is – why?

I’ve left the Wifi turned off for a couple of days and the connection appears to be stable. When I went to France recently – again no emails. So how can a phone on one side of the router cause the connection to drop on the other? I’ve read about the Hero not liking ‘N’ compatible routers but that doesn’t apply to me so I’m at a bit of a loss. I have no problem buying another router if that’s the problem but don’t want to throw my money at something that is not going to fix the problem.

Anyway, that’s enough rambling. I’m sure I’m going to have plenty more to say about this phone over the next few months, maybe even an application or two (there are some itches I’d like to scratch already).