As I said earlier the mobile phone coverage at my workplace is very poor despite being so close to the centre of Copenhagen. Here’s an example of just how poor it can be, 22% of the time I’ve had no coverage at all in a 6 hour period at work.
The mobile operator 3 Denmark that I’m with have released a speedtest based on Ookla to ‘show just how good their network is’, in their words.
I installed it and tried it out, here’s the results from my office at work. I should mention that I work a few km’s from the centre of Copenhagen but the coverage is useless. I’m usually on an edge network and sometimes my phone shows as roaming because the signal from Sweden is stronger. Some days when I go home I can see that I’ve had no signal for 20-30% of the day!
My app links to Google Maps navigation by sending the start and end points to Google Maps using ther following code.
String directions="http://maps.google.com/maps?saddr="+startlatitude+","+startlongitude+
"&daddr="+endLatitude+","+endLongitude;
Intent intent = new Intent(android.content.Intent.ACTION_VIEW);
intent.setData(Uri.parse(directions));
This works fine and launches Google Maps. However I had another intent that was launching without knowing the current location. I wanted Google Maps to get the location for me but couldn’t work out how to force Maps to use my location as the start point.
As it turns out the solution was obvious, if you dont send the start address parameter Maps assumes you mean from the current location so the code becomes this.
String directions="http://maps.google.com/maps?daddr="+endLatitude+","+endLongitude;
Intent intent = new Intent(android.content.Intent.ACTION_VIEW);
intent.setData(Uri.parse(directions));
This opens Google Maps with ‘My location’ listed as the start point so you have to then press the ‘Go’ button but saves me the effort of getting the location first.
I uploaded my test Android App to my website but found that the server was just treating the file as plain text so it just appeared in the browser as a regular page.
To force the app to download through a browser was very easy, just edit your .htaccess file to add the following line (assuming you use Apache of course).
AddType application/vnd.android.package-archive apk
Now the phone browser will force a file download so it can be installed by the app installer, easy.
After writing about this problem and seeing that the fix I thought worked didn’t really, I decided to return my Desire to 3 Denmark to be fixed.
It could well be that I could have fixed it myself but since the phone was under warranty I didn’t see the point.
It could take up to three weeks to fix but at least they lent me a phone to use in the meantime. It’s a Sony Xperia X8 mini and takes a bit of getting used to after using my Desire. Typing on a 2.6″ screen was very difficult but installing the Swype beta made life much better. I also did them a favour by upgrading the phone to Android 2.1 since it came with Android 1.6 installed.
At least I got to test my own App on the phone running 1.6 and it worked perfectly.
I ran into this issue months ago writing my Android app and it’s hard to believe it doesn’t catch everyone at some point. Basically if you set a ListPreserence to use interger-array then you have to retrieve the data as a string or you get a runtime crash.
Like many of the commenters I wasted many hours on this before I found the bug tracker. Again it’s the small details that need fixing as well as the big new features in 2.3 and 2.4.
See the bug report on Google Code.
It’s a minor issue but in the new Market the comments section uses yellow stars shown here.
After clicking on ‘More’ to view all the comments the display changes to green stars.
It’s small things like this that give the UI an inconsistent look. It may be a very minor issue and does not affect usability in any way but it’s the small stuff that needs fixing if they want to compete head on with Apple and iOS.
My Desire is 6 months old, not rooted and has Android 2.2 installed. Just recently the proximity sensor has issues, it seems that it only detects very bright light so is useless indoors (or in grey Danish winter).
Basically the sensor should detect when I make a call and hold the phone to my ear and then turn off the screen, it should turn back on when I remove it from my ear.
In reality as soon as I start a call the screen goes blank and it never turns back on. I’m unable to hang up the call or press any buttons during the call. Only after the call is ended by the other party does the screen turn back on, and then it takes about a minutes after the call ends to do this.
If I insert the charger, headphone jack or hold the phone to a very bright lamp the screen turns on so it seems to be a software issue as the sensor does work, it’s just the sensitivity is totally out of calibration.
I contacted HTC who suggested a hard reset, which I did, but the problem still exists so after the New Year I think I’ll have to send it for repair.
It’s a shame, I really like the phone but this issue makes it useless for phone calls right now.
The issue seems to affect a few people and there’s a thread on the HTC community forum.
Update – I found a stupidly easy fix. Just blow between the screen and the ear piece. It looks like there is no gap but it blows dust out of the sensor. HTC needs to seal the screen better to stop this.
The fix came from this tweet.
For some bizarre reason HTC disabled voice input on the Desire, fortunately the open nature of Android means it’s not that hard to install (once some very clever people have done the hard work :-) )
First install the Voice app from this site, http://nimbu.amorvi.com/2010/04/add-voice-search-to-htc-phones/.
Next install the high resolution keyboard from http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=624416 and follow the instructions.
It’s really simple to install, doesn’t require rooting of the phone and can be removed if you like. It’s great to see that it’s so simple to update a key component of Android without getting permission from Google or HTC first ;-). That’s one thing I love about Android, after all it’s my phone and I should be able to do what I like with it.
You can read the full story on Engadget or the Google page, but here’s a few screen shots taken from my HTC Desire.
If you don’t have the Android navigation app installed just download it from the market.
