Desi app stores?

The biggies are gonna roll out Desi app stores. And that seems to means Nokia and RIM. Apple gets mentioned in the piece, but their response leaves us with the feeling that they have no such plans. Sony Ericsson gets a passing mention. Google, no word...It basically seems to mean that Indian developers will be allowed to put up apps - it probably wont mean anything more than that.

What is big idea of a desi app store when the global version can do the trick? It is as great an idea as having an India specific social network. But there are already apps like Cab Lite in which Indian operators are present, so it does not prevent people from making "worldwide" apps too. In any case, this is good news for teams like ours.

And it is a good thing to create markets for apps. One, it will prove to many of the naysayers that the Indian IT market has no talent. It will also be an answer to the many who doubt Indias technical expertise. Also, it lets people do stuff that may be "too small" or in the "blind spot" of phone companies. The good thing about apps is that it allows users to customise their phone. In a nation with a multitude of languages, this is the best way to customise. But if that needs to happen, apps have be made available to phones with a much lower budget...

But there is a lot of potential out there...

Plox Lite

If you have ever played tower defence, this is a familiar game, but on a phone it seemed to be doubly exciting. After Trap, this is another game that I was completely addicted to for a while.
Worth a try...

Music Lite

This is not a multi-touch application, but does its job well for a single touch app. Its a nice musical keyboard with an option for a piano and a keyboard (with the full extended version avaiable for a payment).
Clearly worth it, if you are into this sort of thing!

Trap!

Heres a game I was completely addicted to. Trap is the name and what you are supposed to do is trap those floating balls using lines that go end to end. If any ball meets any unfinished line, then you lose a life. There are various bonuses, special balls and stuff to keep you occupied for a long long time. It does not seem so great when you start, but as you play, like any good game, it is supremely addictive.

Zebra paint!

A stunningly simple painting application - really loved by kids. Choose the colour with your finger, touch the relevant spot on the screen - thats it. Choose from a range of pre loaded pictures and a whole range of colours on the palette. Keeps kids busy for a while...

Android 1.5 sneak peek

Take a sneak peek at Next gen Android...
For the full list of features, go here...

Power Manager

The power manager app is a nifty app that lets your conserve battery power. It shows battery life in percent, battery status and automatically lets you conserve power if you are running low. Nice...

Tub Thumper

What are you waiting for? Beat those drums - lightly, with your touch ;)

Ding!

Now, doesnt that Ring a bell? Choose from desk bell, gong and cow bell. Cute, we thought :)

Steels a steal!!

We took a look at Chomp SMS that changes the SMS interface of the G1. If there is an SMS program, can a browser be far behind?

Actually there are more than a few browsers available on the G1. Other than the default browser (with which I was neither impressed nor unhappy), we tried out the Steel. The Steel practically makes the slide-out keyboard redundant. On touching the address bar, the virtual keyboard pops up and you can enter the address of any site.

Once you click a link, rather, touch a link, the superbly intuitive thumb level controls take over. (See pic.) You can chose to either copy, share, open, enlarge or magnify depending on where you have "touched".

The copy, paste option particularly impressed me, because otherwise the copy, paste function takes a little while getting used to. So, right now, Steel is what we are using. Got to try out the Opera too sometime...

Software is king!

The most popular

First up, we decided to try some of the more popular apps. Those which exploit the full features of the phone or which bring out the whole point of the Android phone. Two of them qualified right away. Chomp SMS and Labyrinth.

If you ever end up buying the phone, Chomp SMS will probably be the first on your list. It converts whatever format the G1 had for SMS into a iPhone similar format. Cute, fast and works very well. It even recreates a virtual keyboard for you that vibrates for every alphabet you touch.In one word - unmissable! This is one app that has got a lot of publicity and we were keen to see how it worked and we were very happy with it. (Of course, it does not let you forward and therein lies a secret.)

Perhaps it was done this way. The original SMS format for the phone is, well, just about ok. Chomp SMS gives it a dash of panache. Perhaps it was done to prove a point. That software is king in this phone. Do whatever you like. (or as that popular Honda ditty used to go - Hate Something, Change Something.)

Whoever has heard of accelerometer has probably heard of Labyrinth as well. Now, having realized that a statement like that is an overstatement, let me retract that. The best way to tryout the accelerometer functionality is to try out Labyrinth. It involves moving a steel coloured ball through a maze of holes into a specific hole using your hands to tilt and shift the phone and hence the ball. When the ball falls into any hole, you get a tactile response (neatly done) that is almost spooky the first few times.

And while it is not easy, it is real fun. Steady, slow hands do the trick. And the first 8 levels are free, post which you can download the entire 800 levels. Freemium model? Absolutely.

More later...

On starting

Remember that you need an active data connection on your SIM card to boot up this phone - not sure how it will be when it is launched in India - but for now this is required. Second, you need a google account to get started. One google account per phone is how it is supposed to work, but you can check mails of any google account (for instance, if a friend wants to check etc.).

Without this basic step, you will be stuck. So, get a google account and an active data connection - which you can later deactivate once you have the phone up and running...

Apps and more

It took us a while to figure out (dumb us) after surfing the Market website trying to figure out how to download apps to the phone, that the App Market existed as an icon on the phone itself! And having found that after a bit of stupidity, we kept searching for games only to find it listed separately.

The app market is sort of a vicious circle. There are two ways of listing - one is by popularity (downloads) and the other by date. The "popularity" ensures that you see apps which are most downloaded and hence they get downloaded more often. Sure thats a crib for newer developers but the only way you can overcome it is if you decided to try out the newer apps sorted by "date".

GPRS, GPRS BSNL

Finally, after tons of effort, we got BSNL running on the Gphone. The call center had no clue and made me run on wild geese chases. But finally, I tinkered with the manual settings and managed to get it running both on the Gphone as well as an older Nokia.

What are the settings?

On this page, there is a link that gives manual settings for devices. The South Zone link is here...

Take a look at it carefully and configure it as they say. If it works, great. If it does not tinker. I mean, if your number is a Category A, try the B settings and vice versa. Right now, my phone is working on a combination of these settings...All the best

Update: https is not working yet. Have to figure out why that is so.

First things first...

First, we had to lay our hands on a T1 developer phone. Having done that, it was a challenge getting it to work on the local networks. BSNL gave us so much trouble - you can get more if you talk to a wall. So we gave up on BSNL and switched to Airtel. So, Airtel it is for now. Now, a word on Airtels GPRS services - fast, blazing fast. We loved it. Customer service while way better than BSNL, could do with improvement. But that is as far as Indian cellphone networks go...

Coming back to the Gphone, this phone is nice - best of all it is open source. And it will develop its own set of fans. And why not. Just that the battery could be better than what it is today - especially when the GPRS is always on. And since then, we have been at it. Downloading apps, trying them out. Remember that this phone is not yet launched in India, but a phone like this has trememdous potential. It is not yet launched in India and that should happen anytime...

The app market is a treat. There are hundreds and thousands of apps for you to chose from. Games, Recipes, Finance and what have you. And the phone reaffirms something - Software is king in this phone. Don't like something? Go ahead and customise it, change it, the way you would want it. And that is unlike any cellphone by and large - though by now most cellphones are going the open source way and the applications way. 

So, join us on the Android journey...As they say, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Boot up

The phone does take a little long time to boot up. Not sure if this is because this is a dev phone. But beyond the boot up screen, it requires a data connection for it to be configured over the next steps. So, that was an important lesson for us. A longer story on how we did it, next...

The phone is here...