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Wednesday 5 August 2009

HTC Magic as a default phone - day three

W00t! I found the way of enabling predictive text feature for Polish language! In fact, it was dead simple - just a matter of changing system locale/language to Polish. :) Strangely, keyboard language selection box hasn't Polski option to choose, which was putting me off earlier. But now I have double checked this and prediction works fine in my native language, despite the lack of the option - well, these are some odd quirks of using non-official ROM firmware. Anyway, I wonder whether that discovery is going to convert me to on-screen keyboard now? I guess not, but hopefully typing text will get painful. Time will tell, and I will tell here later what time said.

I tend to forget things quickly. Hence the reason I use calendar and todo/tasks features a lot. However, I also tend to forget the fact that I've actually set the entry in calendar or task list, so I like to see the upcoming events directly on the home screen of the device. Nokia E71 is great in doing this. HTC Magic, unfortunately, is exactly the opposite. Putting my on-screen keyboard issues aside, lack of robust PIM features in Android is the second main annoyance-generator for me.

The bitching list goes on:
  1. Built-in calendar widget for the homescreen is pretty much useless, and has no customization facilities, whatsoever. Therefore, I need to open Calendar app anytime I remind myself there might be sth waiting for my attention out there.
  2. Calendar application itself isn't too friendly to use, imvho at least. Day view displays all-day events on top of the view, which is good, but individual entries are too small to hit them with finger easily, also there's a weird bug that prevents displaying all-day event labels when there's a lot of them at once. Agenda view, on the other hand, displays entries that are very large (good for fingers) but in two-line-per-entry manner (bad for readability).
  3. Another little annoyance is while creating an event, Every Word Of The Event Title Gets Capitalised and there's no way to turn this thing off. Sorry, but the world doesn't finish in the USA.
  4. There is no built-in todo/tasks application. Yes, I can install some 3rd party apps to achieve that, but that's not exactly what I'm looking for. It should be there already, with useful (repeat: useful) homescreen widget built-in, and ready for action out of the box. Ideally synchronising with Google Tasks on-the-fly. (To be fair, knowing that Google Tasks have quite recently matured from Labs, I strongly believe integration with Tasks is imminent in future versions of Android.)
  5. There's no support for SyncML synchronisation, but I guess I should rather expect that from the Google-oriented device.
On the other hand, auto-sync with Google Calendar is quite neat and if you're heavy Google webapps user like I am, that should keep you reasonably happy, forgiving somewhat imperfect Calendar app on the phone.

Short update this time, as I wasn't able to write much more today. In the next instalment of my little experiment I'm planning to cover internet usage on Magic, and this is a thing that Magic particularly excels at, so there is going to be a lot of good things to say! :)

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