Moving to Android (mobile)

I’ve been using SonyEricsson mobile phones ever since the launch of the P800 some years ago – all with the Symbian OS. Until a few days ago that is. Now I’m on Android. I’m still in the process of finding my way around Android, but I’ll try to post some of the tips and tricks of running Android here. This first post covers the very basics.

The Phone

My Android phone is the HTC Hero. It seems well build and solid – and the case seem to be crammed full with just about any imaginable feature available in a mobile phone. The only exception seems to be an FM radio, but frankly I doubt I’ll miss it much. I didn’t really use it on my most recent P1i.

The phone has a MicroSD card (easily accessible) and included with the phone was a 2Gb card. It is a regular MicroSD card. The Hero supports MicroSDHC cards, which are available in sizes up to 16Gb currently (but the format should support up to 128Gb).

TODO: It seems it would be worth while to get hold of a SDHC card (Class 6) to replace the included card. Android uses the MicroSD card as swap storage and faster memory card ought to result in faster performance on the phone…

Moving contacts

I’ve been using mobical for years to backup my contacts. I don’t think Andriod and mobical work together, so moving contacts over was a slight detour, but it worked almost without any pains. As a part of setting up the Andriod phone, you tie it to a Google Account. I’ve tied it to my personal Gmail box on my on Google Apps domain – as it works just fine.

To get contacts to the phone I logged into mobical and exported all contacts in a single VCF-file (it Contained a Vcard for every contact). Then I logged in to my Gmail Webmail and choose contacts in the left side menu and imported the file.

It went surprisingly well. Most of the overlapping contacts was merged with out any issues and a few duplicates had to be merged (or removed) by hand. A few minutes after updating the webmail contacts, they were automatically synced to the phone.

TIP: If you like the phone to pop-up an image of the caller, you can add images to contacts in the webinterface. Use Facebook, Linkedin or regular image search on Google to find suitable images for your contacts. For companies (main number) I usually pick their logo as contact image.