UK User New to Android

[joshjgordon]

So, I used to have an iPhone 3G which drowned a few months ago(not as Baileys proof as you might expect) and my contract is just about up with O2. I was thinking about getting a Nexus One instead of another iPhone, but have a few questions that should be very simple to those who have Android but not the easiest to search for having never used it.

The Nexus One has a lot of voice activated stuff, I assume it comes with headphones in the box, do the headphones have a mic and buttons similar to the iphone? (pressing once to skip track / answer phone / hang up phone, long hold to activate voice controls)?

I have head some complaints online about the native Media Library app. Is it really all that bad? With it being android I expect there to be alternatives available on the Market, are there? Any recommendations?

One thing that annoyed me about the iPhone was the alarm function only being able to use the ringtones, on Android can you select a music track as the alarm? or a playlist?

Can you set a track to be the ringtone?

How do you get media onto the phone? Drag and drop files to the file system? Is there an iTunes like application for managing everything on the phone? (hopefully much lighter then iTunes. 4Gb Ram and 2.66 Dual Core and it still managed to bring my system to a halt every time I opened it)

One last little thing, I have several email accounts all directed to my main Gmail account, from which I can receive and send email on behalf of all accounts. Can I take advantage of this on Android? Send an email from ym main account as if it were from one of the others? Gmail on the web lets me, but the iPhone email client did not.

Cheers for any help in advance, and hopefully me questions are not that daft.

J

 

[joshjgordon]

Oh, and one more thing. On the iPhone you had to convert videos to some daft format to allow them to play, do you have to do anything similar to Android / N1?

 

[dephyre]

The Nexus One has a lot of voice activated stuff, I assume it comes with headphones in the box, do the headphones have a mic and buttons similar to the iphone? (pressing once to skip track / answer phone / hang up phone, long hold to activate voice controls)?

A very similar set are included with the N1, another user mentioned you can even use the same ones supplied from you iPhone if you like. The 'long press' does not activate the voice function, but brings up the library instead.

I have head some complaints online about the native Media Library app. Is it really all that bad? With it being android I expect there to be alternatives available on the Market, are there? Any recommendations?

Not 'bad' just quite ugly, there are quite a few replacements on the market place but I can't attest to their aesthetics. Maybe another user can fill us both in.

One thing that annoyed me about the iPhone was the alarm function only being able to use the ringtones, on Android can you select a music track as the alarm? or a playlist?

This you cannot do. But I believe if you make a folder structured /media/audio/alarms on your card and put your desired mp3/ogg files there you can use those.

Can you set a track to be the ringtone?

Yep, easily done.

How do you get media onto the phone? Drag and drop files to the file system? Is there an iTunes like application for managing everything on the phone? (hopefully much lighter then iTunes. 4Gb Ram and 2.66 Dual Core and it still managed to bring my system to a halt every time I opened it)

Drag and drop will work. Quite a few users on this forum prefer 'double twist' which replicates iTunes functionality and that's available on OSX/Win.

One last little thing, I have several email accounts all directed to my main Gmail account, from which I can receive and send email on behalf of all accounts. Can I take advantage of this on Android? Send an email from ym main account as if it were from one of the others? Gmail on the web lets me, but the iPhone email client did not.

Hm, I can't do this from the dedicated gmail application, no 'send from' option there. Nor can you do it from gmail.com [on the phone]. But you can add those accounts to the email application, though you'll have to set-up those POP/IMAP settings again.

Maybe some other users know of a slightly more elegant solution to this.

Oh, and one more thing. On the iPhone you had to convert videos to some daft format to allow them to play, do you have to do anything similar to Android / N1?

I've converted most of my videos using handbrake to the iPhone format.

There is an application that claims to play Divx/Xvid formats on the make though I have not tried it.

 

[thecrazing]

Ringdroid can make notifications and alarms, yes. And there are plenty of alarm apps.