Saturday, October 23, 2010

Why don't the phone companies allow cheaper roaming for data?

I was travelling abroad recently. What I love about Blackberry and hated about Android, was that with BB, I pay my phone company an extra $10 per month and they automatically allow me to roam all over the world with great data access.

For Android, the best my carrier would do, was kindly offer to charge me $15/MB - which basically means I need to be paranoid about data....

Why can't carriers do something similar to BB - charge me $10 per month and allow me worldwide roaming. They would actually make more money and I would actually use my Android phone when I was abroad.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Great article on how to specify whether you need some hardware for an app

Love this article! Android has done it just right. Let me tell the OS what features I need and which ones are nice to have. Then let me dynamically detect what is available on the phone and degrade gracefully!

http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/10/five-steps-to-future-hardware-happiness.html

A

Friday, October 1, 2010

Installing the new Google CarHome and StreetView on CyanogenMod (CM6)

Warning: Geeky entry - if you don't use CyanogenMod on your Android phone, please ignore


Have CyanogenMod 6.0 on my NexusOne. Heard about the new release of Google's CarHome app and decided I needed to have it. Tried installing it from the Android market, but got a signature failure. Searched around the web, but couldn't find instructions. Was impatient, so decided I needed to do this for myself.

Remembered seeing an earlier post on how to get Google Voice Search on CM6, so pretty much copied the instructions for that, along with this great post by Diane Hackborn on getting the package name from an apk, to create the following command sequence:

adb pull /system/app/ ~/Desktop/app/
adb remount
adb shell
cd /system/app
rm -f CarHomeGoogle.apk
pm uninstall com.google.android.carhome
rm -f  Street.apk
pm uninstall com.google.android.street

You can create appropriate instructions if you don't have adb and just have Terminal.....