Sandisk Memory Zone: Bleah.

I'm a firm believer in backing things up. In my four decades of messing around with computers, I've lost things and had problems because of it often enough that when I finally caved in and got myself a smartphone, my first thought was to figure out a way to back it up with a minimum of fuss, preferably into "the cloud" instead of filling up my already bursting-at-the-seams hard drive. As a Google Voice fan, I knew that my contact information was safely stored in Google Contacts, but what about pictures? Videos? Ringtones? I wanted that stuff to be backed up in the cloud so that I wouldn't have to worry about it.

When I bought my spacious new Sandisk MicroSD card, I found a little piece of paper in the package that claimed it was going to solve this problem for me. It was a QR code with a link to an Android app made by Sandisk which can back up your stuff to any of a number of cloud providers. It could do it on a schedule, so I could set it and forget it. And copying things back to my phone is as easy as copying anything using a phone. Sounded great! (Here's the link.)

What I found was an app that does what the hype says... but does it slowly, awkwardly, and unreliably. I had so much trouble with it that I finally quit using it, but only after it apparently lost some of the information I was trying to back up!

First of all, loading up the app in the first place is excruciatingly SLOW. Apparently the app thinks that every single time it is loaded, it needs to fully index not only the contents of your MicroSD card, but the entire contents of your phone's internal storage, and also all of the files on any cloud storage you've configured (!) This takes an incredibly long time. A better strategy might be to cache the information scanned from the user's resources the last time the app was used and let the user get started poking on things, and re-scan everything in the background. That's more complex to program (I ought to know, I write software for a living), but it would be a much better user experience than "click to launch, go to lunch because it will take that long to start up."

I would be willing (but not happy) to tolerate the long startup time, however, for an app that performed well on what I wanted it to do, which was back up certain kinds of files at night when I'm asleep and not using the phone. I set up my backup schedule, and found that it backed things up to my cloud storage as expected... sometimes. I never figured out exactly what the reason was that it would back things up sometimes and not other times, but I did learn early on that if the app crashed, there was no easy way to get the darn squirrel out of my notifications tray. I rebooted the whole phone many times just to clear the icon so things I wanted to be notified about were more visible.

It worked often enough, though, that I would have been OK with even that, as long as it backed up the stuff I want to keep fairly often without screwing any of it up. Obviously, this was too much to ask. This app attempts to reduce backing up and restoring to very simple steps - there are categories for your photos, music, videos, documents, and so forth, without having to navigate your phone's folder structure (which is one reason for all of that initial scanning). So no matter where the app finds a picture, for example, it winds up in the "Photos" bucket. Picture of your children? Photo! Ad for beer from your browser cache? Photo! Image file used internally by an app you use once a month? Photo! MP3 of your favorite song? Oh wait, that's "Music". 10-second ringtone you bought three years ago and forgot you had? Music! Alarm sound that came preloaded on your phone? Music! "Ding" sound from your instant messaging app which you could recover by reinstalling the app? Music! There is no way I could find to select or unselect specific folders or files from being scanned, so every image on my phone was backed up to "Photos", and every sound on my phone was backed up to "Music" (I did un-select "Documents" and "Apps" because I keep documents in Dropbox and back up Apps with Titanium Backup, but those are two other stories).

I could have lived with this... after all, as long as the stuff I did want backed up was safe, having a few extra files is a fair price to pay, right? Well, I found out about that price the hard way when something - and I'm pretty sure it's this very app that's supposed to save me from disasters like this - deleted all of the photos and audio files from the phone. Eek!

The app is supposed to be able to copy files from your cloud storage back to your local phone storage with no trouble - Photos to Photos, Music to Music, etc. However, the app seemed to have forgotten where my backup on my Box.net account was (the default folder which the app itself had created), so I opened up the folders on my computer and took a look. When I realized that the app had backed up all sorts of superfluous information, my heart sank... this was going to be quite a job! But I set to work, and was able to find my ringtones and notification tones fairly easily and get them back on my phone where I wanted them. Getting my photos back, though, was another matter.

Ultimately, I restored less than 300 pictures that I had intended to back up. To get to them, though, I had to delete 2,476 superfluous images! These included hundreds and hundreds of album covers from Google Music, dozens of images of the covers of books from my Logos Bible software, images of the spaces and board layouts from Words With Friends, images from articles I had saved in Pocket to read later, pictures I've posted on Facebook, pictures I've saved in Evernote, and tons of stuff which appears to be from my browser cache, including a number of advertising banners. I literally had almost ten times the amount of garbage backed up as useful stuff. What a ridiculous thing to have to wade through!

One time doing that was enough for me. I actually had looked around for a different app to use, but hadn't found anything yet at the time, which is the only reason I put up with this stinker of an app in the first place. The concept is excellent, but the execution is lousy. The app is slow, buggy, and unreliable. It deleted the stuff I wanted it to preserve, and then gave me a hard time when I tried to restore it. I quit using it entirely months ago, and only yesterday did I look around for another replacement app - and I may have found one in FolderSync. I've installed the "Lite" version, and I'm trying it out. It takes a little more doing to get it configured (you actually have to tell it what you want backed up! It doesn't back up every file you ever touched!!), but if it actually does what it's supposed to, I'll plunk down a couple bucks for the full version. This free Sandisk thing is a mess. I love their memory media... maybe they should sort of stick to that.

Google Plus

My first post on Google+ was made on July 1 at 9:06am. My boss had scored an account over the weekend, and was wondering if I was using it too. I actually hadn't heard of it until he told me; I had been a little bit out of the tech news loop because of a big project at work, but when I heard, certainly I was interested! He had "shared" something with me - at the time this was the only way to get an account - and so I was in. The post was a link, shared only with him, to this Mashable article about the then-upcoming Gmail update.

I was immediately hooked! This was like Facebook, minus all of the things about Facebook that constantly annoyed me! This was awesome! This was... this was... well, sort of empty. It was like arriving at a party at the newest, coolest venue in town, but nobody had arrived yet. The primary attraction of Facebook is that everybody is there. All your friends. Everyone you've ever met, it seems, is on Facebook. The only people on Google+ at the time were you and the person who shared something with you, and the other guy who you shared something with and talked into trying it out. All the coolness, but none of the people.

On those counts, things haven't changed too much 2½ months later. It's a little easier to get an invitation (in fact, if you need one, feel free to use one of mine), but so far the general public hasn't particularly seen a reason to jump ship on Facebook, or even bother to try out another social networking service. And heck, after Google Wave in 2009 and Google Buzz in 2010, who could blame anyone for not jumping on a Google social networking site right away? I think Google is getting it right this time, though. The interface is Facebook-like enough that it's not too hard to understand what's happening, but it's different enough in good ways that the experience is much nicer. I have several friends who actually have jumped ship on Facebook for G+ (although I doubt most people will completely abandon Facebook any time soon... too much history there). I'm not deleting my Facebook account, but I'd love to go all-Google+. Problem is that there are a few things that are making that difficult at the moment... and there are a few more things that, should they happen, would make a move to G+ almost a no-brainer for me. Keep in mind that G+ is really still officially "in wide beta-testing" which means that the public has access, but it's not to be considered a complete product yet. It's entirely possible that some of the things I'm going to mention are in the works. I think it's probable that a few of them are on the drawing board. Let's see how prescient I am!

I'm so impatient about the lack of an API for programmers. At this writing Google has released a very minimal, first-iteration API limited to only reading public profile information and public posts. I can't wait for the release of something more substantial; I use TweetDeck for posting to Facebook and Twitter, and I would love to be able to use it (or Hootsuite, or whatever) to post to all three. Right now it seems the only way to post to G+ is using the Web interface or one of the mobile apps. I have a mobile phone, but it's a Java-only "messaging" phone, a free feature phone from several years ago; it doesn't run Android or iOS.

That leads me to another thing I'd like to see: better SMS support. I have G+ set up to forward status updates from several of my friends to me vis text message, but I can't respond to those messages via text, and I can't send posts of my own via text. I text posts into Twitter and Facebook several times a day most days; I'd love to be able to do the same with Google Plus. Even just sending new posts that way to a default bunch of circles that I specify ahead of time would be useful. I'll be getting an Android phone when my contract runs out on this phone, and at that point I'll install the G+ app, but even then I could see SMS as an easier way of firing off a quick post than starting up an app. And with SMS posting, I can actually cross-post to several services very easily, just by sending to multiple recipients.

I'd like to see RSS feeds made available for posts. You can already use third-party hacks like this one to pull down a feed of your public posts (or roll your own using the API that was just released), but it would be nice to be able to create "private" feeds based on your circles (something you can do with calendars in Google Calendar). I'm using the hack I linked to above to cross-post my public G+ posts to Facebook by running the feed through Feedburner and Twitterfeed. It would be SO awesome, instead, to just share a post with a "Facebook" circle or a "Twitter" circle and immediately shoot the post out via a custom RSS feed!


Part of the talk when G+ was first launched was about incorporating it with other Google properties... Picasa was of course a launch-day incorporation, but what about other properties? Here are my two favorite no-brainer Google properties to incorporate into Google Plus:

Google Reader. G+'s "Sparks" functionality mirrors some of the functionality of Reader; how difficult would it be for G+ to represent your Reader feeds or lists as Sparks? Or, coming from the other direction, wouldn't it be cool for Reader users to be able to easily do a one-click share to G+?

Blogger. Many G+ users are very nearly using G+ as a blogging platform anyway; why not optionally integrate Blogger blogs into Plus so that there's none of this post-the-blog-entry-then-share-it-on-plus nonsense. Just magically allow the blog post to show up on Plus when it is posted to Blogger. An added bonus: combine blog comments and G+ comments so that if I post a comment on a Blogger/G+ entry in Blogger, the comment also shows up in G+, and vice versa. I would LOVE to automatically have more comments on my blogs because comments flowed in from Plus users! Another bonus integration: automatically (but optionally) convert a blog to a Spark, so when you see a blog post from someone you like (say, a friend of yours reshared it) you could follow that blog without having to circle the blogger.

There's a lot of potential in Google Plus! I hope to see some of this stuff happen in the near term. If Google suddenly today rolled out all of the things I've mentioned in this post, for me it would be like knocking the walls out and letting the sunshine in. I really would love to be able to use Plus as my social networking hub and flow information out from there. With these kinds of adjustments, it could happen.

Cell Phones

I have long been a cell-phone conscientious objector. There are a number of reasons for this... there is the "people got along for decades without cell phones, what makes them such a necessity now?" argument. There's the argument that they're too darn expensive, and I stand by that one, although you can pretty easily find plain talk service these days for something like $10/month... as long as you're not interested in text messaging, data access, or any of the other things people do with their phones these days. But deep down, I know my main reason for not being interested in cell phones is that I just don't really like phone calls. I mean, I like talking to friends... I really do, and if you can manage to get me on the phone, you may have trouble getting rid of me! But I don't like two things about phone calls: placing the phone call, and receiving the phone call. And clearly, one or the other is necessary in order for a phone call to take place! The idea of calling someone when I don't know whether they're busy, angry, sleeping, or they just don't want to talk to me, fills me with an irrational dread. And the sound of the phone ringing still strikes a little bit of fear in my heart... who is it? What do they want? Will they try to make me do something I don't want to do? Will I have trouble getting them to let me end the call? Will I have to hang up on someone? The proliferation of Caller ID has mitigated this quite a bit, of course, but old attitudes die hard.

We probably still wouldn't have a cell phone at my house if it weren't for one person. That person's name is Hannah, and 2 and a half years ago, my wife was pregnant with her and insisted that her water could break in some remote place (unlikely, since she rarely goes anyplace without me anyway, especially when she's pregnant) and if she didn't have a cell phone, she wouldn't be able to reach help. "I'll only use it for emergencies!" she said, and I didn't believe her for a second (and I was right). I got her the free RAZR from AT&T (since they do our phone service anyway) and she was off to the races. I got her the smallest number of minutes and text messages possible, and with the rollover minutes and the fact that texting was godawful difficult on the RAZR, she never went over either.

Our 2-year contract went by and expired, and she had beat her RAZR all to heck. The corner of the metal button plate was bent up, and one section of it was actually missing. To this day neither of us really knows how that all happened, but it was clear that the RAZR was on its last legs. She was wanting a newer styled phone anyway... the whole flip-phone thing was so 2005!... so we picked her up a green LG Neon phone, one with a slide-out keyboard. The keyboard makes it much easier to send texts and Yahoo IMs (which count as texts), which means that now she's on a $100 plan with unlimited data & texts instead of the inexpensive low-minutes, low-texts plan we had before. That's the cell phone racket... hook you with a low base service cost, and then nickel and dime you to death with "extra" services that they know you really want!

Her new phone was the first phone I've really played with that actually had anything approaching usable Internet access (we never used data on the RAZR), and I have to say, now that mobile-enabled sites are so prevalent, it's hard not to make the decision to pick up a phone I can use to look up movie times any time and anywhere I want or write a quick email on the bus on the way home. I'm not sure I'd be happy with a phone like hers that is designed for texting and lighter Web access... to get me to carry around a snake in my pocket, it's darn well going to have to be a smartphone that I can use to look at virtually any Web site I want (my wife's phone on AT&T has trouble with some sites... for example, it can't load the mobile version of meebo). I'm not interested in an iPhone; in addition to being phoneophobic, I'm allergic to products made by Apple. :) Plus, the iPhone App Store doesn't have a dialer app for Google Voice any more, which basically makes it a deal-breaker for me... I love Google Voice!

The only dialer apps for Google Voice are for Android and Blackberry. I'm not too hip to the keyboard-below-the-screen layout of most of the Blackberry phones, so that would leave me with either a Blackberry Storm or an Android phone, and since I'm a big fan of Google products in general, it's very nearly a no-brainer to pick an Android phone. I've been waiting and waiting for something Android to come to AT&T, but I keep being disappointed... and since I'm not particularly getting that good of a deal with my land line/DSL/cell phone bundle, I don't see any reason to be loyal to our carrier, so that gives me options.

Until the first of the year, I was getting very interested in the Droid. Although I've heard that it's a little heavy compared to other smart phones, I like the idea of the slide-out keyboard (that's the big thing I like about my wife's phone). But then very late last December I started hearing about the new Google Phone, the Nexus One. Just the mere idea of the phone being a real Google phone sounded pretty cool to me, and it has some features that the Droid doesn't have (speech-to-text for all data entry boxes, for example), but as I began comparing things, it sounds like between the two, the Droid may just be the phone for me. There's that keyboard, for one thing. And most of the software differences will wind up on the Droid anyway when the new version of the Android OS gets pushed out to it. I actually dig the Droid Eris as well (pictured at the top of this blog post), but it doesn't have the slide-out keyboard.

Will I buy myself a Droid? Given unlimited funds, I probably would head to the Verizon store today and pick one up. I'll need to make sure I have the money to afford the $199 cost of the phone and also support my service plan (sheesh, it's like putting a kid through college!). If I suddenly had the funds to afford a phone, would I ever actually turn the ringer on? I don't know... I suspect the answer would be "rarely." If I felt the need to have a phone for talk, I would go for something much cheaper and not do the data stuff at all, but if I get a phone, for me it will be more like buying a tiny wireless computer/MP3 Player that unfortunately has a ringer on it than buying a telephone with Web access. Of course I'll use it for calls, but you'll be more likely to find me using Rhapsody, Google Maps, twitdroid or Evernote than Google Voice. Maybe the cell phone price wars that seem to be heating up will change that (or maybe not), but for now, you'll have to send me an email and I'll get it when I get home!


FURTHER READING: Here's an interesting Nexus One vs. Droid vs. iPhone shootout you can use to compare apples with (non-)apples a little bit...

MORE FURTHER READING: Wireless plans from Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint compared