I ran 2.78 miles in a little over 28 minutes (10:14) pace. I’d like to get that pace down under 10. Now it’s on to the last week. 30 minute runs are next.

I alluded to this in my last post. I’m kind of bored with the distance runs. One weekend day a week will be devoted to sprinting and other fast interval training runs. And I’ll just do 2 days a week of distance. My goal is to work myself up to 40 minutes at a 10 minute per mile pace. I think I’m going to simply add 2 minutes a week until I reach 40, then work on my pace. Hopefully the sprinting will take care of some of it.

I didn’t know what to expect regarding the ease of reading on the small G1 screen. I’m half-way through a light read, and the screen size is not an issue at all for me. Neither is the mechanics of the app.

There were some e-book readers on the market already, like Aldiko, but the book selection stunk. Kindle has a huge selection of books, and ordering (and getting them on the device) could not be any easier.

I give this one two thumbs up. I will definitely be reading more books on my G1.

But there are still bugs:

• The gmail app still opens up to deleted e-mails, instead of the inbox.
• If the phone goes to sleep while sending an e-mail, sometimes the e-mail will be stuck in a sending state. It’s not in drafts either, so I have to rewrite and resend.
• The camera is horrible, but I can live with it. I put this as a bug because it’s so bad that it could not be working as they originally wanted it to.

Those are my only real annoyances. Quite an improvement from what I’ve written about before.

And I still have a wishlist:

• Integrate Gmail’s tasks with Android’s calendar.
• Let the mobile version of Picasa show more than 100 pictures per album.
• Integrate Google Bookmarks. This one has me completely baffled. Google Bookmarks should sync with Android’s bookmarks, and be available as an extension on Chrome. Seems like a no brainer, but it seems like Google is abandoning their Bookmarks. Will it be a casualty like Google Notebook?
• Allow Android browser to edit Google Docs. I’m not sure what’s technically involved, but this one is another stunner.
• The native Gmail app should be able to save attachments. Luckily there are apps available to do this.

This is also a smaller list than it was in the past! Is Google listening to me!? If so, please hire me. Oh but please let me work from home. I like the East Coast. But you do have an office in NYC right? Who am I talking to?

Now on to my apps reviews! To conserve space, I had to remove a lot of apps I didn’t use often or were there just for show. I ran into the out of space message too many times. It was time to make some cuts! $ indicates paid.

Google Maps: It’s listed as an app, so I’ll mention it. This could not be better. I love the new “labs” feature that has an arrow that points to the direction you’re facing. Turn by turn navigation is great. It’s very easy to punch up a location and get directions to there. I don’t know anyone who uses Latitude of Buzz besides my wife. So they are never used.

Advanced Task Killer: Kills apps that run in the background when you don’t want them to, which saves battery. Works like a charm.

AK Notepad: Decent note app. I hardly use it though. I prefer a pen and paper. Sorry. But it’s a keeper in case my pen ever runs out of ink.

Aldiko: Nice e-book reader. I just have to find good books to read. The free public domain offerings don’t cut it for me. I like modern fiction and non-fiction. So I have to find e-pub books to buy to really give this a true test.

AndFTP: I’m sure this will come in handy one day as I have 3 websites that I maintain. I kicked the tires. It works well. I just haven’t used it for real yet.

AnyCut: Uninstalled. I’m pretty sure earlier versions of Android didn’t have the shortcut making ability it does now. Now most handy shortcuts can be made my long pressing on the home screen. All the ones I need anyway.

aTrackDog: Uninstalled. Same fate as AnyCut. This was a great app for a long time to find apps with updates, but the Market app is now better at identifying apps that have updates.

Beelicious: Good app for saving bookmarks to Delicious. Works well. This would not be needed if Android would snyc with Google Bookmarks. E-mailing myself bookmarks I want to read on my PC later was becoming a chore. Dear Google, you are forcing me to use another service!

BistoMath: Great tip calculator. A keeper.

Bookmark Manager: Does the job of allowing you to rearrange the order of your browser bookmarks. Mark this down as another head-scratcher as to why this isn’t part of Android.

C25K: Awesome app to let you follow the couch to 5k running program. It worked wonders for me. I completed the program with help from this app. I fell off the wagon so hard, that I’ll need it again once the weather gets nicer!

Countdown Alarm: Pretty useful.

$ Car Locator: You mark your spot where you park your car, then help you find your car with a radar like map. I bought this app and haven’t used it yet. I know I will though. I had been using Google’s My Maps Editor to perform this function, but it was clunky to use and a space hog.

CardioTrainer: Another beauty for running training. It tracks your running route through GPS, gives you audible messaging on your pace and distance while letting music play in the background. When your done, you see how far you ran, the pace, and the map overlay. You can then save the routes to their website. Again, this will come in handy when I get back on track this upcoming spring!

Car Mode: The simplest yet most useful app. When enabled, it turns on speaker mode for all incoming and outgoing calls for hands free talking. I’ll never ever use an ear piece. Ever.

Compass: Pretty much a show and tell for me. It doesn’t take up a lot of room, so I’ll leave it.

$ Documents to Go: Word and Excel editor. Pretty handy. I got it on sale. I used it a few times, so it was money well spent.

Facebook: Pretty lame for a native app. It takes up a lot of room. I’m debating uninstalling it and just use their online interface. I am holding out for an update–but not holding my breath.

Google Finance: I don’t play the markets so this may come off my phone soon.

Foursquare: I wanted to see what this was all about. It probably stay on my phone long.

Google Sky Map: Show and tell. I can’t wait for a nice clear night to use this to identify all the stars and planets. This might come off soon…

Karl’s Mortgage Calculator: I’m a big fan of this and his site http://www.drcalculator.com/mortgage/. This will come in handy when I go to buy a new car soon.

Live Scores: Beats both Google’s Scoreboard and SportsTap, which I’ve tried and uninstalled.

NYC Bus and Subway Map: Will come in handy when and if I go into NYC. Doesn’t take up much space.

Pandora: Love this app. Matches and plays the music I want to hear. Beats both last.fm and imeem, which I’ve tries and uninstalled.

$ PhoneMyPC: Part show and tell. Part I will need it one day, but don’t know when. I wrote a while back that the G1 needs a gotomypc type app. The name alone should tell you. It allows you to remotely access your computer from your phone. It’s a little rough around the edges, but it works.

Qik: Allows you to livestream video from the phone. I used it once for my mother to see my son. But there was a long delay. This may come off the phone soon.

$ Scan2PDF: Bought and used once. It uses the camera to snap a pic and output it into PDF, which you can e-mail. It might come in handy one day.

Seesmic: Really nice free Twitter app that allows management of multiple accounts. Very well done. I’ve gone up and back, and even paid for twitter apps. All uninstalled in favor of this.

Shazam: Very cool for identifying music. It listens and tells you what song you’re listening to.

ShopSavvy: Never used. You can scan a barcode, then it bring us the best deals in the area using GPS. I actually tried it once in Lowes, and felt like a jerk trying to scan a finishing nailer’s barcode for a good 10 minutes. I think that fiasco was more of a result of the lousy camera, not the app.

The Weather Channel: It is what it is.

Toggle Settings: Love this app. Lets you set up profiles for one click setting changes. For example, work (mute phone, turn off wifi), home (turn on wifi and ringer), etc.

Google Voice: I’m not ready to abandon my cell number in favor of this and let this run everything. But I do selectively give out my Google Voice number, which comes in handy. I like the service and the app, I’m just not ready to go all in yet.

T-Mobile’s Visual Voicemail: Love this app, but does not work when WiFi is on. I don’t know why as that is an annoyance. But I live seeing the voice mail, and being able to click play and delete it without having to dial in to voicemail.

tCalendarWidget: Nice little widget app that displays the date in a small icon on your homescreen. So simple but very nice. Yet another headscratcher why it isn’t built in. The default calendar widget it big and clunky and lacks options.

$ Where’s My Droid: Lets you send a coded text message to your phone if you misplace it. It will then trigger the phone to ring at a high volume. It’ll turn the ringer on if it’s off. Luckily I haven’t misplaces my phone to use it.

Other apps that I tried but landed in the uninstalled heap:

Google Scoreboard – too clunky, sporadic updates.

SportsTap – battery hog

Google Goggles – extreme show and tell. No real use.

$ I Tweet! – Seesmic is better.

$ Keyguard Disabler – ok, but not needed.

$ Any Clip Pro – Good idea, I just never needed it.

$ Quickoffice – Documents to Go is far superior. I think the developer abandoned this app.

$ aHome – fluff

Realty Browser (Layar) – Big time show and tell. I like the augmented reality trend, but it failed to impress me too much.

T-Mobile My Account – I never needed this.

1Cast Video News – Never seemed to have up-to-date news.

Yelp – I like Yelp, but didn’t need the app.

twitdroid – Sessmic is better.

TV.com – not a lot of good content other than previews.

USA Today – likes the app, removed to save room. I use Google News webpage.

Google Places Directory – Would be a home run if the categories were accurate. It finds areas of interest using GPS. The problem is if you go into shopping, it will give you grocery and convenience stores. There are other mis-categorized business listings.

Amazon.com – not needed. Removed to save space. If I want to buy something, I’ll use my pc.

Where – Pretty cool app, just too big to justify keeping.

Evernote – Very nice but goes against my KISS standard for note taking apps.

Phew. Very long winded. I think that’s it. You can see I paid for a lot of apps I ended up uninstalling. None of them were too expensive, so there are no regrets.

I should note that after the cupcake update, I noted that GPS was still slow to locate my position. Well after a reboot, it’s now much faster than it was before. And pretty consistent too. Finally.

The new maps is supposed to help an issue with Latitude updating. I STILL need to hit refresh for it to accurately update my location. I’m not sure what this was supposed to fix, but Latitude is still not working right for me. Good thing I have no real use for it as no one I know uses it. But it would be nice to brag about the feature if it worked right.

I’ll have to test out the search by voice option. I’m not too confident in the results as the search by voice feature fails to understand a word I say. Must be the NYC accent…

I’ll also have to give the transit and walking directions a real try. My first attempt at getting me to my house to NYC was a fail. It had me taking a real wacky route. I suppose if I was somewhere unfamiliar, any route wouldn’t seem wacky if it get me to where I needed to go. I was happy to see that driving directions from my office to home were spot on. Driving directions is really what I need most.

That sums up my frustration with this phone. Since the problems aren’t consistent, there is never a consensus. This is a major headache since the causes of the problems are hard to isolate and identify. Also this makes it impossible to avoid the problems.

My phone recently started to randomly shut itself off. Luckily it does not shut down when it is in use, but in sleep mode. Still, it would stink to miss an important call because the phone just decided to turn itself off. I searched and people are having varying levels of the same issue. Not one person (including me) can identify any conclusive repro steps. I called T-Mobile, and they are sending me a new battery. Based on my experience with it, and reading others’, I really doubt it’s the battery. But I’ll give it a shot.

Here are some other sporadic issues/problems:

• GPS doesn’t always “hone in” quickly on maps. But it does after a reboot.
• Compass, which had worked, suddenly is flipped (north is south and south is north)
• Battery charge percentage not accurately displayed. After charging for hours, it appears like it’s not fully charged. But then after a reboot, it’s at 100%.
• Camera crashes / loses “connection” to SD card. Fixes after reboot of phone.

I touched on a similar point about marketing complex products. Perhaps troubleshooting complex products has the same challenges.

Does the iPhone have these annoyances? I’m satisfied enough with the G1 to get my money’s worth out of it and honor my service commitment. I’ll have to see over time if future generations of Android phones have these kinks worked out. If not, Apple here I come. By that time I’m sure I’ll be tired of a work in progress (if Android isn’t perfected by then). There is something to be said about Jobs’ insistence on excellence.

Also, I’m surprised how many Google loving Microsoft hating people put up with bugs—when they are quick to call out Microsoft for their bugs.

Well done Google.

First. The app Scoreboard has a number of issues. I’ll put this in with G1 bugs since it’s a native Google app. First the updating is sporadic again (it used to be like this, they updated it, but now it’s broken again). Also, the view of the day’s scores is all messed up. It’s not very useful at all in this state.

Second. In the Market under “my downloads,” all my installed apps are showing a status of “free” (or “purchased”) when they should be listed as “installed.” Also there are no alerts when the apps have an updated build to download. I read on the t-mobile forum that you should just “simply reinstall” all the apps. C’mon. I have over 40 of them. A few I updated, and they show right. I hope there is a fix on their end before I have to go in and reinstall all of them.

All in all I love the improvements. I guess there will be a constant ironing of issues. I’m going to keep updating this post as I find more bugs.

I found a list of every improvement on T-Mobile’s message board:
http://forums.t-mobile.com/tmbl/board/message?board.id=Android_MR&thread.id=3

I copied and pasted all of the improvements below, and added my comments in bold, italic, & red.

User interface refinements

• System-wide:
• Refinement of all core UI elements
• Animated window transitions (off by default)
• Accelerometer-based application rotations

I didn’t think this would make such a difference. But I’m loving these improvements.

• UI polish for:
• In-call experience
• Contacts, Call log, and Favorites
• SMS & MMS
• Browser
• Gmail
• Calendar
• Email
• Camera & Gallery
• Application management

Like my last comment, these seemingly small tweaks make for a much better user experience.

Performance improvements

• Faster Camera start-up and image capture
• Much faster acquisition of GPS location (powered by SUPL AGPS)
• Smoother page scrolling in Browser
• Speedier GMail conversation list scrolling

I don’t see one single improvement in performance. GPS is still painfully slow to locate. The camera start up is much SLOWER if at all possible–but it does snap pictures faster if there is adequate lighting (still slow with low light). I don’t notice any difference in browser or GMail scrolling, although I never noticed them as being an issue for me (that’s good I guess).

New features

• On-screen soft keyboard:
• Works in both portrait and landscape orientation
• Support for user installation of 3rd party keyboards
• User dictionary for custom words

I don’t understand the craze. It’s ok, but my fat thumbs hit the wrong keys. I like the built in keyboard much better. It’s not that much extra time to slide the built in keyboard open to use.

• Home screen:
• Widgets: Bundled home screen widgets include: analog clock, calendar, music player, picture frame, and search
• Live folders

I like the Calendar widget, but it doesn’t have any customization features. The music player widget is nice too. All in all these make the phone that much more complete and easy to use/customize.

• Camera & Gallery:
• Video recording
• Video playback (MPEG-4 & 3GP formats)

This is a welcome addition. Like the camera, the video takes long to boot up, which is ok. I don’t know if it’s my phone or not, but sound recording is horrible. Not only on this app, but other sound recording apps as well.

• Bluetooth:
• Stereo Bluetooth support (A2DP and AVCRP profiles)
• Auto-pairingImproved handsfree experience

I haven’t messed with Bluetooth yet.

• Browser:
• Updated with latest Webkit browser & Squirrelfish Javascript engines
• Copy ‘n paste in browser
• Search within a page
• User-selectable text-encoding
• UI changes include:
• Unified Go and Search box
• Tabbed bookmarks/history/most-visited screen

I can’t seem to figure out how to use the copy and paste. The bookmark improvements are nice–all it needs now is a way to better sort and/or label.

• Contacts
• Shows user picture for Favorites
• Specific date/time stamp for events in call log
• One-touch access to a contact card from call log event

The one touch access is a major improvement. Now I can save incoming call to contacts much easier than before.

• System
• New Linux kernel (version 2.6.27)
• SD card filesystem auto-checking and repair
• SIM Application Toolkit 1.0

I’ll take their word for it. I don’t know how to tell if this stuff improved the phone or not.

• Google applications
• View Google Talk friends’ status in Contacts, MMS, GMail, and Email applications
• Batch actions such as archive, delete, and label on Gmail messages
• Upload videos to YouTube
• Upload photos on Picasa

They had an app to upload to Picasa before, but it’s nice now that it’s built in. Like that you can upload straight to YouTube. I did a quick test and YouTube uploading is quick and painless. The improvements to the GMail app are great.

Some of the bugs/annoyances I’ve posted about are getting addressed in an upcoming “cupcake” update (should be next week):

Here’s a list of new features and improvements:
http://forums.t-mobile.com/

I love to see they are fixing the camera. Right now, it’s borderline useless unless you like blurry messes as pictures.

GPS too. I’m glad that was addressed. It was too unreliable.

I can do without the on screen keyboard. My fat fingers prefer the slide out.

I’m psyched about video feature. That’s a welcome addition that I have not heard about in the rumor mill.

I’m sad to see no mention of improvements to battery life. At least the short battery life has enforced some discipline in me to carry around a charger or have them accessible where I go. I haven’t been stuck with a dead phone yet–which used to happen to me too often before.

Hopefully this time around, my wife doesn’t get the update days before me–and proceed to rub it in the entire time.

Here is a video: