See this post to replicate the update of my phone to Gingerbread (2.3) -- it addresses most of the gripes I give below.
System
What's running?
Settings --> Applications --> Running services shows the what, footprint and how long applications.
WispService is part of the AT&T ware that I want to kill. It is related to the AT&T Hot Spots application. I also killed the default Music Player service.
As much as I like the live wallpaper concept, none of the choices really grab me, so I'm going to pick a pic of my own. And maybe save some battery life.
AT&T apps
I'd eventually like to get the AT&T apps uninstalled, but I'm going to wait and root the thing later. Looks like I'll have to manually kill these often until I just uninstall them. Or just install LauncherPro and hide them.
Launchers
LauncherPro (free)
While somewhat worried about all of the authorization I had to give the app, it allowed me to ignore a lot of the AT&T bloatware. Seems to allow me to do the extra customization I crave. Looks like I will have to pony up a small amount of money to be able to resize widgets, but I've not found the ones that are helpful to me (other than a calendar that is already properly sized for my needs) so this isn't a deal breaker.
Folders
I'm getting enough apps now that I want to consolidate using folders. Here's how to rename them - it was not intuitive for me.
Input methods
Text
I tried Swype for a while, but I'm backing out for now. Also, I want to use the voice entry option, so the Android keyboard is for me for now.
Voice
Looks like I'll have to wait for/root to 2.2 to get full voice capabilities, but there's still voice search.
Storage
I've not shelled out for a micro SD card yet, but I expect I will soon. In any case, if you want to listen to media (or, I suspect, do anything that uses the stock SD card) while you're charging, you'll need to make sure you've disabled mass storage mode. See this article for instructions on doing so. If you run into issues, make sure you've disabled this option in any apps that have it (Winamp, for example).
Tunes
Custom Ringtones: default
There appears to be much debate online about the best way to do it. There are free and pay apps, and some approaches that appear to require you to root. Here's how I did it without rooting or apps:
- Connect the phone to your computer in Mass Storage mode
- Create the following directories at the top level (root) of the drive: ringtones, notifications
- Drag files into the appropriate directory
- Disconnect the phone from the computer
- On the phone, open Settings --> Sound and display
- Modify notifications and ringtones by selecting Notification ringtone and Voice call ringtone, respectively
I did not need to limit the file size terribly -- one of the files is 498K. And I used mp3 and m4a files -- both seemed to work. For work I need to have a third party installed for contact management, so I cannot assign custom ringtones to my work or Gmail contacts (those two groups comprise all of my contacts). I did create a test contact on the phone and could assign a custom ringtone to it.
Still trying to figure out why some songs appear and some don't -- maybe filesize or some other attribute.
Still trying to figure out why some songs appear and some don't -- maybe filesize or some other attribute.
AllShare
AllShare is a way to control your media player server from the phone -- it is pre-installed on the Captivate.
I'll just say that AllShare is possibly the worst documented program I've ever come across. I found some stuff on Samsung's website, but it didn't come up on a Google search. Maybe Samsung is letting their site(s) be crawled or they're not adding appropriate tags.
In any case, I'm trying to figure out how to get AllShare to work. My Windows PC appears to be blocking the port/service that I need to get this to work.
MediaTomb on Ubuntu allowed me to connect just fine but I'm having issues playing mp3s.
Looks like there is no support for mp3s (!?) in AllShare: here are the supported file types (persisting here in case the Samsung post gets moved):
3GP
MPG
MP4
AVI
WMV
MKV
FLV
I know my phone supports the mp3 format since I can play those via Winamp, but whatever....
I can't believe that in 2011 there is still no very simple media solution that lets me store a bunch of songs on a junky server and play them from my phone from anywhere in the house. Couldn't the Google 411 or Translate team have kicked this out in a couple of days before starting on their more complicated respective projects? Windows has an ok way to do this between my Xbox and my PC, but I don't want to listen to songs on my TV. I don't know how long upnp has been around, but it seems like it hasn't really gone anywhere. Maybe it is a much more difficult problem to solve than I'm thinking.
Google Listen and Google Reader
Since I'm an avid podcast listener, the first thing I needed to do was to get some sort of syncable system going.
I was using Winamp to handle my podcasts, but I wasn't feeling it (see below). Google Listen gives me what I've been looking for -- a cloud-based tool that lets me handle all of my podcasts on all of my devices in one place (Google Reader).
Listen's search was missing a lot of my favorites, but I was able to subscribe via Reader using those podcasts' rss URLs. The only problem was that I had to drag subscriptions from the root directory to Listen Subscriptions manually after adding them through Reader.
Listen appears to be streaming instead of downloading until you put an episode in the queue (maybe?) or download it, so I may have to plan ahead and store podcasts when I'm going to be on a plane or otherwise out of wireless range (not sure how well streaming will do on 3G...). To download an episode, navigate to that episode and click the menu button (leftmost button on the phone, not on the screen) and select Download.
My main beef with Listen is that the button on my headphones skips to the next track instead of pause/resume. It will also kick off tunes (not podcasts) in the media player so sometimes I have two pieces of media playing at once. Listen will start playing when I unplug the headset as well.
Update March 3, 2011: I don't know if it was a Listen update or moving to Gingerbread, but my headphone button now pauses and resumes podcasts in Listen. Using the button no longer launches a music player or skips to the next podcast. Yay!
Winamp
I'm going to give Winamp a shot since I used to rely on Winamp back in the early 2000s. Wireless sync with Android devices is nice, although since it appears to be driven from the computer, I still need to run it through the computer. I'd prefer to pull syncing from the Captivate, otherwise I might as well connect it to the computer.
As expected, wireless sync is slow for songs, so I'm concentrating on doing it all via USB for now. Coming from an 8G iPhone, I'm quite impressed by the default storage on this thing.
Streaming media
I don't use Pandora much, but I put that on. No Public Radio streaming app yet, but it looks to be coming.
Social
I'm surprised I can't use the (official) Twitter app to create a widget from a Twitter list -- by default the widget shows everything in my feed. Looks like there are third party apps to address this, which means I'll probably abandon the official Twitter app all together.
Neither Seesmic nor Twicca seemed to do what I want. So I'll just wait for a client that will default to a list when I open it. Also, LauncherPro won't allow me to resize the widget unless I upgrade. This is one case where the AT&T app kind of hits the spot (Daily Briefing).
Twicca did let me create a home screen link that lets me get to a list, but not not as a widget, which is what I'd prefer.
