Android and HTC EVO!

So its been awhile since the last post yet again. I think its time to stop apologizing all the time for not posting all the time.

But this post is going to be short because I am writing it all on my new cell phone, the HTC EVO from Sprint. You know how I was ranting about how the iPhone sucks and I wanted a Nexus One, well this phone is the result of waiting and still believing I don’t want the iPhone.

I was hoping that the Nexus One would have come to Sprint or Verizon, but they never did, so I read up on other Android devices coming out this year. The EVO stuck out to me so I figure I would get it instead of others like the Incredible or the Hero.

What I love most about this phone is not the actual phone app, but how the apps all integrate really well together. This is especially true for most if not all the Google apps and most social networking sites. It so easy too. All you do is login with your Google account!

The iPhone definitely needs to do more in integration and Android will only get better at the rest of the apps and stuff that iPhone does great.

I want a Nexus One

Recently, Google came out with a new way of marketing their Android cell phone OS. They began selling their own branded phone called the Nexus One. They had it made by HTC and as of right now the only carrier that will give it service is T-mobile.

Thing is I really want one. The iPhone was always going to be my next phone until this thing cam along. I knew Android was cool, but this cool! I mean its customizable! What phone really isn’t? The iPhone. In fact, I don’t really know why I haven’t seen the trap before. The trap is to get you to buy Apple, simply put. You get locked-in to buying stuff only from Apple.

The Nexus One also has sweet apps from Google for Google services I already use. I have an iPod touch and most of the apps on there are sweet but you know what I use to sync them to stuff on Google? Google Sync over Wi-fi. I had to do that because Apple doesn’t let you easily sync with Google’s services otherwise.

Oh and my final thought on this is that open source software of any kind is a preference of mine. That includes OSes. Now I don’t use an open source OS on my computer (stupid Windows XP), but I might someday dual boot.

Well I shall see if the Nexus One or another Android phone is in my future. I’ll make a decision in the coming weeks if not months. Here is to hoping…But the bigger sticker is…how is the T-mobile service in the Grand Rapids, MI area because thats where I need to use it most?

Wave of ideas

Yesterday. I finally received my invite to Google Wave! It’s a new Google service said to be “the way email would look like if it was invented today.” Which a pretty big saying, because email was invented about 40 years ago. So its actually a pretty ancient technology in the Internet age where daily new innovation is key to survival. Also, there seems to be a growing trend toward “cloud computing”, which is moving more an more toward web apps. I for one find the web the new desktop and look forward to the future were we no longer rely on saving to desktops and therefore allow us to access data anywhere around the world. Of course, the places you go will need Internet access, but in the future who knows how this will be available for everyone.

Anyway, I will be trying out Google Wave in the next few days and weeks and hopefully get using it quite a bit. Maybe even make blog posts from it. I can already tweet from it using the tweety-wave@appspot.com robot, which is pretty cool. So far I can tell that Wave is not a finished product and in no way is it ready for mass market use. Hence, the “preview” tag attached to it instead of beta. Soon I will try to do a post on what Google Wave is and a little bit of the ins and outs. As of now I cannot offer invites, which makes it less useful, but hope to get more friends and family on it soon.

Barcode it up

So yesterday if you visited Google at all today you saw the image below. It is a reminder to the birth of barcodes that began showed up around 60 years ago. It started out as a means to automate reading of products when checking out at stores.

Google celebrates the birth of barcodes

So wouldn’t it be cool if you could do your name in barcode? Well I do, so I used morovia.org to turn my name into a barcode too. So you can do it too, for the fun of it. It came up with this as a result:

I barcoded myself!

Maybe I might even make a bigger one and replace the Tetons at the top of the blog with a big barcode of the title of the blog. Wouldn’t that be somewhat sweet? We shall see.