Android Phone (& Development)

As I introduced several weeks ago, actually before enjoying a two weeks vacation that preceded a period of huge workload and social demands ;-) I have become a convert to Android. It was tough at the beginning to move from Symbian, first the 6120 and afterwards the superb N95, to Android. Actually I still miss the N95 Carl Zeiss lens camera, but the HTC Magic, thanks to Android, is such a versatile device that I usually forget about taking pictures :-/

The point is that I barely used the device that I borrowed from my work for the vacation in the US, mainly because I purchased a T-Mobile pre-paid card that you must know has no data plan, so you can not use it to connect to the Internet from the device. I should have bought a AT&T pre-paid that does have the service. I purchased the SIM in a small bazaar in Broadway, so no complains ;-)
But after been back of this awesome travel around the north-east of the US it was my birthday and I was given an HTC Magic. Nice present!

From that time I started to investigate it and I must say that I'm impressed on how fast is evolving all the stuff related with Android. Thousands of applications just do what you need to do and one of the most interesting things, most of them are for free and not under the strict control of an omnipotent Apple. Of course you have premium versions of some of them, but you have a broad selection of Open Source applications that you may contribute to improve. One of the first things I did is change Gmail client by K-9 client for my IMAP account... and it was so straightforward and well integrated that I almost forgot about Gmail. One of the things I have not found solution yet is a Open Source application to store encrypted notes and sync them with a service in the cloud. Anyhow I will continue trying. One of my dreams is to have a Truecrypt driver for on-the-fly encryption of the microSD. It would be nice to be able to encrypt the information in the microSD and just to unplug it, put it in an adapter connected to a PC and access the sensitive information easily.

In any case the next step is to install a "hacked" build of Android on my HTC. It is a bit tricky but from my early investigations I must say that does not seem impossible. Just hope to have some time in brief to invest some effort and who knows, maybe get an Android build of cupcake supporting STK Menu, feature not included by Vodafone!!