Be Excellent To Each Other

More stuff.

AK Notepad - Looks a bit more like the iPhone notepad, allows you to set reminders and share your notes with other people (email or text)
Andoku - Sudoku game with a few varieties (X-Sudoku and Hyper Sudoku)
Gameboid Lite - Gameboy Advance emulator. Seems ok from what I've tried, it's got savestate support, but you can't load states in the Lite version - haven't checked to see if it supports normal battery saving yet
Gensoid Lite - Megadrive emulator by the same author, again seems to work ok, but I'll assume it has the same savestate restrictions
Mathdoku - Sudoku with a maths element (a bit like killer sudoku, where there are shapes with a number and the numbers in there have to reach that total, but in this case there's a mathematical symbol as well, so it's not just the sum of the numbers)
Nesoid Lite - NES emulator. Same Author. Has light gun support if you used to play Duck Hunt with the gun pressed up against the tv.
Snesoid Lite - SNES emulator. Same Author. Pilotwings on your phone
TrafficSyncUK - Traffic incidents from the UK in map or list form, seems to have far more incidents than MapWeasel, which I used to use. However, it seems to insist I have my GPS turned on for it to get any updates which seems to make no sense at all.

CrystalLight (which I mentioned last time) is shit. Bubble Defence (with free teeny-tiny ad-supported version) is like Boons Tower Defence, and so is good.
Mystique is a first-person survival horror-type game. It's a bit too dark, but it's a good waste of 30 minutes.

I will try TrafficSyncUK.

Well, it's the first day of the (proper ) football season, which means it's the moment you've all been waiting for...

The Android Live Football Scores Application Pro Face-Off!!!111

So far, we have three contenders:

Scoreboard - Pointlessly installed on my G1 for most of the summer, its day of glory has finally arrived, and I go and install some alternatives to see if I can find anything better.
Covers events rather than sports (although everything is categorized by sport), so it seems to be missing things you'd expect to see. Depending on your choice of sport, you'll either find everything down to the kids playing in the park, or maybe just one or two options. Anyway, this is all about football, and there's plenty of it. You can select your favourite events which will be displayed when you open the App. Everything down to League 2 is available for England, as well as the League and FA cups.
A quick look at today's fixtures shows that Stoke are playing Unknown Unknown, who will also welcome West Ham today. Seeing as Man Utd are also playing Unknown Unknown tomorrow, it looks like they're having some slight issues with the newly promoted teams (incidentally, the Championship fixtures don't have this problem with any of the newly promoted/relegated teams, so hopefully it will be sorted soon).
Fixtures are shown by day and the days can be scrolled by flicking the screen left and right (is there a technical term for that?).
Last, but not least, you can put a widget on your desktop (is that the right word?) which allows you to setup your favourite team(s), so you can get their score updates on your desktop without having to go into the App.
You can have notifications off, kick off and full time updates, with added half time and goal updates.

Soccer Live Scores - Purely football (not soccer, thanks very much) related and appears to have pretty much every league in the universe. Options are pretty limited though to filtering which leagues you want to see (by country) and whether you want to just display live games or all games (it seems to show the last couple of days results). No widget though, so that's not a good sign.

SportsTap - Horrifyingly American, football can be found under the Futbol option (it might be a giveaway that the options before it are NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, NCAA and Auto). A much more limited choice of leagues, but should cover all the ones anyone is likely to care about (sorry Belgium, oh, and Wales). So, it's a little more long-winded than Soccer Live Scores (choose sport, choose league, rather than just having your filtered results there), but... it has a widget! (Oh, I should probably mention at this point that choosing the English league just shows today's premiership fixtures. There are dates at the top to view future fixtures, but it looks limited to top flight football only, this appears to be the case for all the available leagues). Anyway, back to the widget... Unfortunately, the favourite team section doesn't extend any further than the American sports listed at the start of the review, so, for the purposes of this test, the widget is completely pointless.

So, in conclusion, looks like Scoreboard might be the way to go whether you're just interested in one team, or the results from the whole league.

Exciting Live review update!

Scoreboard has the Chelsea Hull score and claims to be about 2 minutes behind what Sky Sports is showing live. There are no fancy options though, apart from being able to see what the half time score was.

Soccer Live Scores has the score, and, impressively, claims to be about 5 minutes ahead of Sky Sports. Now I've stood in the bar at Edgbaston and been able to see the cricket on the tv at the same time as it's happening live, and while there's a slight delay, it's closer to 5 seconds than 5 minutes. Clicking on the match tells me who scored and when and yellow (and presumably red) cards.

Sports Tap just tells me the score and that we're in the second half. However, clicking on the match shows scorers, bookings, substitutions and team line-ups, so that's quite impressive if you're into all that. Doesn't seem to give any indication of how much of the match is left anywhere though.

So, if you just care about the score and how long is left, Scoreboard still seems to be the favourite. If you want more in-depth match info, Sports Tap looks nice (although Premiership only). If you want to know what's going to happen before it actually does, Soccer Live Scores would seem to be the obvious choice. Probably best used near a bookies

Edit - A goal. Time for a real test.
Soccer Live Scores was first with the goal, although it it had claimed to have been in the 90th minute for a good 5 minutes before it was scored.
Scoreboard was second a minute or so later and Sports Tap still didn't have it when I gave up.

The Sky Sports Live Score Centre thingy is pretty good on the iPhone.

Take your iPhone back to the iPhone thread.

*searches for Sky Sports Live Center*

Sorry, I was in the middle of something when I typed up that post. That's what I meant to suggest.

Did I really just type "center"?

I worry about me sometimes.

You typed it twice.

Well the second one was deliberate.
I've got to go out now, we can carry on this later if you like.

Well, there we go then.

Soccer Live Scores was good for finding out how shit we were with minimal delay
Scoreboard was good at reminding me how shit we were when I didn't want to be reminded.
Sports Tap was good for telling me exactly who was responsible for how shit we were.

Sky Sports told me that we won again and that we're still second.

http://www.i4u.com/article26382.html Ouch:

Bugger

Dicks.
I got an update yesterday, acutally. I wonder what that was...

I'll shout a T-mobile a bit.

Tried out a few apps to see what does the following things best;


Twitter - Twidroid is the best app but has no widget so Peep is still useful. Until very soon when Twidroid gets a widget.

Facebook - don't let your browser take you to x.facebook.com as it's shit. use m.facebook.com instead. Best app is Babbler so far. Has a widget.

RSS shite - tried PureRSS (was okay but occasionally fails a bit), BlueRSS (decent), FeedR (good as it doesn't fuck about with needing feed URLs, has a good search on it), Greed (for your Google Reader feeds). Greed/BlueRSS are the best options.

Hello.

I have spent all day battling with Sipdroid and I cannot get the fucking thing working with Sipgate with or without PBXes! I am very pissed off there is no working SIP/VOIP client for Android yet, what the fuck is taking people so long, especially Skype who have a fully functioning app on iPhone already!?

Other than that I would like to recommend:
Robo Defense - Hellishly addictive!
AK Notepad - Good notepad app
Taskiller - close background apps and free up memory
Snap Photo Pro - gives lots more functionality to the camera for a mere 60p
Quickpedia - Best Wikipedia App
Vegetarian Dining Guide - For the hippies, locate nearest veggie eateries near you via GPS
Flixster Movie App - same as the veggie app but for cinemas
Sky Map - Ace!
Toggle Settings - Best settings widget to turn shit on/off quickly
0870 - route 0870 numbers through their local number automatically, to save you dollar!
ScummVM - Hells yes!
Keeeper - Good passwords manager

Other than the SIP/VOIP thing fucking me in the head, Android is brilliant! I have never been interested in phones before, making do with a bog standard Sony Ericsson candybar for the last 3 1/2 years, but this thing can do all sorts of fun things - I loves it!

I thought that was rubbish last time I tried it - I didn't think there were any films on in Leicester Square, for instance.
I shall try it again, though.

Flixster is great on the iPhone, and it must be the same data source.

Cor, the Spotify app is good.
If you pay £10 for the gold subscription you basically get spotify for your phone. It's got a very simplified (but very nice) interface, but all the information is still there.
Music is surprisingly good quality, and plays quite fast over 3G, too. You can specify tracks to be stored offline for when you are out of signal, too (these will be downloaded over wifi, or 3G if you tell it to). It even recognises the 'play/stop' button on the G1 headphone wire.
So far, I'm loving it, and would heartily recommend paying £10 to at least give it a try.
The iPhone version comes with less of a recommendation, as you can't have it playing music while you do something else on the phone, which is a shame (nothing they can do about that, of course).

So yes, Spotify on mobile. Pretty damned good.

I didn't realise it'd been approved on the iPhone. And, as expect, it has a whopping 2-star rating with people saying "WTF PREIMUIM ONLYY!?!>"

This sounds extremely useful, but what do people think to giving all of your security information to an app like this? Any iPhone users using this app already?

http://www.cnet.com/8301-19736_1-10347586-251.html

In spite of earlier rumours, it seems that the Donut update will be coming out for the G1 after all. Apparently it started to come out in the US on October the 1st, but not sure when it's coming out over here. I've seen one post that suggests the upgrades will start today, and another that says Vodafone are getting it on the 19th.

Whoo. What's in this one that I care about?

Er, apparently the major fix is that the phone no longer crashes after calling 911

Otherwise, the market has been rejigged, there's something that shows you just what's causing the battery to drain so quickly (although I don't think it actually improves battery life), wifi now supports WPA2, and there's some VPN stuff.

Yeah, I'm not entirely sure what the Americans made of that one.

Anyway, there's a bit of info here

According to more forum heresay, T-Mobile have no scheduled updates for the G1, so while it's out in the US, it doesn't look like it'll be coming out here anytime soon.

Get an iPhone.

BURN HIM

Truth hurts, huh?

I'll get an iPhone, if they ever stop being a fucking rip off.

If I bought a separate phone, portable games machine, MP3 player, eBook reader and netbook it'd come to a lot more than the price of an iPhone.

I don't care it's still a rip off:

iPod Touch 32GB: £200

iPhone 32GB: £540

Rip off, see.

I don't really see the point of having a web browser etc that can't connect to a mobile data connection - it's the time I use it most. I'd go as far to say that the iPod Touch is a bit pointless. It wouldn't suit my needs at all.

but most 'smartphones' offer all that you just stated..

That's not my point. My point is that the price difference in no way relates to the actual differences between the devices, it is purely a product of the current market conditions. I don't think iPhones are always going to be able to maintain these prices, hence I'll buy one when they stop being a fucking rip off.

I know the iPhone users disagree, but when Vodaphone and Orange launch the iPhone the prices should come down..

I guess that depends entirely upon what % of the current price of an iPhone is O2's markup.

There's no point having all those features if they're annoying to use. The iPhone is the only phone I've ever enjoyed browsing the web from, all others have been more like a chore - what's the point?

I know we iPhone users sound evangelical, but it's because they're fucking brilliant at what they do. If I'd have bought a lemon I might not have admitted to it, but why would I be upgrading to the new one next month?

Anyway, this discussion is always tedious as people who have them love them and people who don't don't. I have nothing against people who use other phones, obv, and my 'get an iPhone' comment was a variation on the 'get a 360' jokes we've been doing lately.

I'm not buying 2 phones

(like that myp?)

O2 don't make a huge amount of money from the iPhone; Apple take a substantial cut of the upfront and monthly fees.

But anyway, even I (raving iPhone fanboy that I am) think we shouldn't skank up the Android thread with more of the same old iPhone debate.

Agreed.

have you tried any other phon in the last two years, to comapre the iphone too?

Aye. G1, some Samsung thing, LG something or other. I like to play with other people's phones when they let me, just to reaffirm I've made the right choice.

Fair enough... The LG was bloody aweful I used to have one..

My Nokia is quite good..

I don't think there's anything wrong with the browser on the G1 though, although it does have the annoying habit of occasionally forgetting what windows you had open.

I don't like the G1, entirely because I can't get my hands around it well enough to hold it comfortably and still use it effectively. The bottom section with the buttons gets in the way, and I find the recessed flip-out keyboard incredibly fiddly. It's a good phone, but not for me.

Try a HTC Magic.

Getting impatient?

Copy this file to the root of your sdcard and rename it to update.zip
Power off your phone
Turn the phone back on while holding down the home button. This should put the phone into recovery mode (you'll see a triangle with an exclamation mark in it).
Press alt+L to see the options
Press alt+S to flash the update
When it's finished, press home + back to reboot the phone.

Try not to panic as your takes what seems like forever to reboot.

Now, what's new..?

Edit - I should probably point out that although this worked fine on my non-rooted G1,you could obviously kill your phone if this goes wrong, so please don't blame me if it does.