All Your Base Are Belong To Google: i.e. Android Chaos

[dilettante]

Looking at paring back my cellphone bills I was interested in the Chit-Chat thread Can you recommend a bare bones cell phone?


After that thread I went looking at my own last year of actual usage vs. billings and was forced to admit that some form of prepaid service (while traditionally considered "ghetto") actually made sense. The downside is most prepaid carriers offer a truly awful spread of phone options.

I found one I think I can live with, after quickly realizing I'd have to give up the real "tricorder" option that WinMo 6.x offered for something more... limited. Like Phone 7 (ack, ptui! - if you can find it) or more likely Android. In my case an Android phone that's WiFi capable to limit the expense of cellular data.


I placed the order, grabbed the manual online, and started reading in anticipation. One of the first issues you'll face is importing your contacts.

Egad, this looks awful. The docs only offer you the option of "creating a vCard for every contact, getting it onto a microSD card, shoving that into the phone, and manually importing each vCard." There had to be something better.

Checked Outlook where I have all my phone contacts sync'ed already. Nope, no clean "dump all contacts to vCards" in there. Then I looked online and found:

How To: Sync Android With Microsoft Outlook

It isn't pretty.

There's a little secret to buying an Android phone, one that you may not learn until it's too late: Google really wants you to use Gmail, Google Contacts, and Google Calendar.

And it goes downhill from there.

Clearly there's a market for a better tool, and hopefully not some Android crapplet with winking Konami Kanata Cat icons.

And people have whinged for years about Microsoft lock-in! I know this won't matter to the teeming hordes who dangle "phone charms" from the lanyard loop and treat their 'tainment phones as pacifiers, but for serious users? Come on!

Android Chaos? I'm thinking Android Apocalypse.