Week old Desire, comments, thoughts, questions!

[Zarch]

Had my Desire nearly a week after having an iPhone 3G for around a year.

Main usage for me is SMS, browsing footy scores/sites, facebook, email from googlemail account, notes and iPod functionality to name a few.

I've spent the last week trialing a few things and installed the following to replace/replicate iPhone functionality.

Handcent for SMS. Neat iPhone style conversations etc and finally you can use your Google groups for SMS. Hurrah!
3D Gallery. Great for looking at pictures taken and uploading to Picasa. (i just use the Picasa website in the browser for viewing, very good)
MixZing. Found this to the be best music player so far. I Sync my playlists/tracks etc from MediaMonkey on the PC and MixZing picks them up with Album Art etc.
Notes. Quick freebie from the Marketplace.
Astro File Manager. Great app for browsing content of your SD card and ability to rename etc
MyTracks. GPS tracking app for tracking running, cycling etc.
Barcode Scanner. Good for scanning those square barcodes for installing apps.

Facebook app. The basic part of it is really really fast, but its a pain that to add comments etc it goes to the webpage/browser. The iPhone app has far more functionality.
I was a bit confused by the version control and updrades though as from new I had Facebook 112 and Facebook for HTC V1 installed on the phone. But at no point did it ask to be upgraded, but in the marketplace there is v1.2 of Facebook available, which i have since installed. Should i expect auto-updates?

Not a heavy user of the iPhone, especially during the day whilst i work, so I appreciated the way that Juice Defender app turns off 3G and WiFi when the screen goes off. This appears to have helped my battery usage. Yes, i still charge up every night, but my "pick up and check" style is aided by Juice Defender. Definitely worth the

 

[Zarch]

Just dowloaded SkyFire browser.

Looks like it might have solved the 2 browser issues I've got with included toggle switches in the settings.

"Keep Screen On"
set the screen to never time out

"Show Status Bar"
Notifications, network, battery etc

Hopefully after a few days I should be able to report these gripes as "fixed"
Think i've still got an issue with "pop-up" type pages though.

 

[Deleted User]

Facebook app. The basic part of it is really really fast, but its a pain that to add comments etc it goes to the webpage/browser. The iPhone app has far more functionality.

Try an update, I don't need to go into the browser to do this.

O2 Simplicity for iPhone
I put the SIM in and it works fine for voice/data, but i'm having troubles with the free openzone/cloud wi-fi that I used to get on my iPhone. I've txt Wifi to 2121 to get my wifi connection reset, but still struggling. I assume that the cloud/openzone connectivity know that i'm not on an iPhone (MAC address probably). Has anyone managed to fool it to allow this wifi connectivity?

You need to phone O2 to get them to reset the MAC address. You won't be able to bypass their security, not a chance. I have had to do this myself but have yet to try it out again as it takes an hour to do the reset and I didn't want to sit in MDs for that long

 

[Zarch]

Facebook app. The basic part of it is really really fast, but its a pain that to add comments etc it goes to the webpage/browser. The iPhone app has far more functionality.
I was a bit confused by the version control and updrades though as from new I had Facebook 112 and Facebook for HTC V1 installed on the phone. But at no point did it ask to be upgraded, but in the marketplace there is v1.2 of Facebook available, which i have since installed. Should i expect auto-updates?

Gave the phone a reboot today for another reason, but the latest version of Facebook (v1.2) now appears to be working much better and doesn't go to the web version etc. (except for friend requests)

 

[Zarch]

Video Player
I've had no problems with converting a few files to m4v through Handbrake using standard iPhone settings, but with video width set to 800 to match the Desire. A std-def avi worked fine and a smaller 720p mkv worked (921MB), but when i tried a 2hr 40min 720p mkv, which came in at a whopping 3.2GB i get the error message "Cannot play video. Sorry, this video cannot be played". Is there a logfile somewhere that tells me what the problem is with the player/file?

Got to the bottom of this, Its all down to the bitrate of the video. For the video that wouldn't work, i'd left the bitrate as per the source file, quite high at around 2600kbps, hence the 3gb filesize even after processing.

I re-encoded it again in Handbrake with a bitrate of 1024kbps, but left every other setting the same. This worked no problem at all.

So there must be some limitation within the Desire or Android to the max specification of video files than can be played.

Any shed any light of these max settings?