Verizon Droid - Any chance for an extender?

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by stuckless

I can't verify for certain... but this appears to be the case for a friend of mine. He and his wife are using a google shared calendar, and it appears to sync with his phone.

Originally Posted by gplasky

Sync to a Google calendar or an Outlook calendar (thru Google calendar) on your Droid.

Sync Motorola Droid Calendar (Gmail) with Outlook Calendar

Thanks -- I think I found that sync tool earlier & then by setting the sharing options for Google Calendar, it looks like the same calendar can be used by two people. Well, that shoots down one reason not to spend the money...

Originally Posted by stuckless

I hope you get an android phone... maybe you can flex your sagetv muscle to have a native client built, in house

I don't know how much pull I would have... other people at SageTV aren't using Verizon and/or Android-based phones.

- Andy

[Slipshod]

Originally Posted by Opus4

Thanks -- I think I found that sync tool earlier & then by setting the sharing options for Google Calendar, it looks like the same calendar can be used by two people. Well, that shoots down one reason not to spend the money...

I don't know how much pull I would have... other people at SageTV aren't using Verizon and/or Android-based phones.

- Andy

Andy, I know what you means about it being the first tempting smartphone. I have been holding out for years, and this one finally made me break down and buy it. And one for the wife. And we're both extremely happy even though we're paying another $60/month for data service on both lines. Though I do try not to think about that too much... Between dropping my minutes and my new corp discount at work it's not toooo much more expensive, but still...

Regarding calendars, if you both have Google Accounts you don't even need a sync app: just share your calendars with each other. The calendar on the phone *is* your google calendar, and you can control which of your subscribed Google Calendars displays. Right now my phone shows me a merged view of the "US Holidays", "wife@gmail.com", and "me@gmail.com" calendars. You only need the sync tool if you use an outside calendar like Outlook that you want to sync.


Frankly, Sage should be taking a real serious look at making a placeshifter client for both the iPhone and Android markets. There are an awful lot of us with either phone OS who would be eager to pay for an app... You could even charge seperately from the regular placeshifter licenses and I'd still buy at least one copy.

Even my wife agrees this is something your product should have. Smartphones are getting exceedingly common in the "Geeky enough to build their own DVR" demographic.

[Opus4]

Thanks for the info, but... I was firmly on the fence, leaning towards jumping off onto the Droid side, until I found out today that you can't do hands-free voice dialing on the thing using a bluetooth headset. Motorola & Google both have discussions about how the bluetooth headset's button does nothing when you press it to initiate a call (you can answer & hang up just fine, according to what I read). The comments seem to indicate that no android based phone can initiate voice dialing this way; it has to be started on the phone. Maybe this isn't true, but it looked to be confirmed by Motorola & Google. I'll have to decide how critical this is, considering I do all my dialing in the car currently via my headset, so I'm back firmly on the fence again for the time being.

I think the car dock makes it feasible to press one button to start dialing & then continue via voice; that's still better than what it takes to adjust the radio. I'm sure using a smartphone in the car will change how a lot of things are done in terms of phone & music usage while driving, just like PVR usage changes TV viewing.

And, I think I might be indecisive.

- Andy

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by Opus4

And, I think I might be indecisive.

But you're not sure?

Speaking as someone with neither an iPhone nor a Droid, I'd prefer to see effort directed toward a mobile Java client that would run on a variety of phones, rather than one or two platform-specific clients.

[evilpenguin]

Or better yet, a web based client that could run in Flash on any device that supports it.

[Humanzee]

I put a Parrot MKi9100 hands free in my wife's car. It does voice activated dialing, streaming bluetooth stereo, can play mp3 from USB, has 1/8 inch headphone jack and an ipod cable. It also has line out so that you can use the Aux in feature of your car stereo, if you have it. Works perfectly with my G1 and the wife's myTouch. Kind of a pain to install but well worth it once all set up.

In general I think bluetooth is a bit flaky regardless of phone. There is certainly some room for improvement with the bluetooth stuff for Android, I.e. the media buttons on BT headphones don't always behave as expected, but I had the same issues on Win Mobile etc.

To get back on topic, I too would probably fork over some cash for another place shifter license that I could use on my mobile. I dunno about making it specialy dedicated to the mobile platforms because they are evolving so fast, but I would buy another PS/extender license as needed.

[Slipshod]

Originally Posted by Opus4

Maybe this isn't true, but it looked to be confirmed by Motorola & Google. I'll have to decide how critical this is, considering I do all my dialing in the car currently via my headset, so I'm back firmly on the fence again for the time being.

Looks like it's true. I didn't know about it until you mentioned it because as a general rule I don't call in the car (and I'm not in one long enough each day for it to really matter).

If you have a bluetooth device that does it's own voice-dialing (many of the in-car kits do this, headsets generally don't), that works fine.

I think the car dock makes it feasible to press one button to start dialing & then continue via voice; that's still better than what it takes to adjust the radio. I'm sure using a smartphone in the car will change how a lot of things are done in terms of phone & music usage while driving, just like PVR usage changes TV viewing.

Yeah, the car dock would make that pretty easy. Not an excuse for not supporting it via BT though. Looks like it's climbing rapidly in the feature table, and Verizon seems to be getting a decent chunk of returns because of it. Hopefully Big Red will smack the Google Guys around and convince them that this is BASIC phone functionality in 2009.

And, I think I might be indecisive.

I have artfully turned that trait into a reputation with my wife for thoroughly researching thing.

[Slipshod]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Or better yet, a web based client that could run in Flash on any device that supports it.

That would really piss off the iPhone users, and annoy the Droid users until Feb 2010.

[Fuzzy]

really feb-'10 isn't that far off.. more importantly, that's when my birthday is and when I was planning on joining my wife in droidness... so I'd be okay with that...

[vikingisson]

Another vote for an Android client of some kind. I have the Magic in Canada. I'd like it for bedtime streaming, combined with the excellent sleep timer app I could stream and have the client close at the set time.
A little history, I haven't had a cell phone of any kind for many years, it simply wasn't worth the money when I've been doing fine with SIP/WiFI/Voice Mail. Android finally made things interesting again. The providers are still insane and too expensive but this OS is simply too much fun to pass up. I'm sure the iphone is great too, but I'm not in their target market at all. Great designers but the rules and lockin don't appeal to me in the least.

A Sage client would be useful indeed. transcoding for video might be tricky but once done it could work on the iphone and others. Right now it works well over UPNP but that's another service I'd rather not run on the server. These little smart devices and other larger but smallish devices are getting more and more common so perhaps time to look again at client apps.

[Fonceur]

What I had in mind was something like the attached image. Where the second tab would display the appropriate listview, the third allow to control a client/extender and the fourth would be for configuration. It would rely on SageTCPServer running on the SageTV Server, as I've already done that for 3 Home Automation software packages...

Hopefully, I'll be able to get rid of those tabs once I get more familiar with the Android development and move more stuff to sub-menus... I just started that project today, so no, it doesn't connect to the server yet or do anything useful, but it's not "photoshoped" either...

[vikingisson]

^that's what I'm talking about.
Great start. Like you said, I don't often see apps with tabs like that but that could work too. I tried the webserver thing and that isn't going to be very useful. Keep up the good work and let us know how it goes, I'm sure there are lots of interested users around here.

[Slipshod]

Public Service Announcement for Droid users:

I successfully forced an upgrade to Android 2.0.1 and rooted my Droid this afternoon by following these ridiculously easy directions:

1. Update to Android 2.0.1 (either through the coming OTA update, or via the directions at http://alldroid.org/viewtopic.php?f=210&t=568 )

2. Use the exact same directions from the link in step #1 with this linked file to root the phone:
http://alldroid.org/download/file.ph...36223750d4ee2e


Now it gets interesting...

[Opus4]

We finally fell off the fence & got two droids. Our email is all set up and our calendars & shopping lists are all synced.

I still hope they will fix the bluetooth call initiation problem, but the rest of the phone seems to work quite well and the voice navigation was fun to play with... even though I knew where I was going.

Now to find some good apps...

- Andy

[Fuzzy]

iLighter.... and there is a great Quagmire soundboard... can't thing of anything better than those two...

[stuckless]

I played with the Locations app... it was pretty nice. (I think someone mentioned it earlier, but it's worth mentioning twice )

[vikingisson]

Originally Posted by Opus4

Now to find some good apps...

- Andy

hrmm, so far I don't see any sagetv client apps yet.
hint hint...

congrats on hitting the dark side of smartphones. I leapfrogged from dumb phone 7 years ago to no cell phone and only now got back in the game with Android. Love it.

[brewston]

Just got an android phone too. I spoke with one of the phone geeks at work - whilst android has Java, its not J2ME - so he said you can't just drop jar files in there and expect them to run (recall that the placeshifter GUI is controlled by miniclient.jar) Thats before you start looking at video rendering which would require a recompile of mplayer.

I'm not saying its impossible, but I think it requires a little effort on Sage's part for an official placeshifter version

Tim

[Protoman]

Fonceur: That will be an AWESOME app! I can't wait to start trying it out.

Since, this thread seems to be hijacked already I would just like to add... The Weather Channel, Fox News Widget, FaceBook App, AndOrb (Orb) and Shazam are my favorite apps, especially AndOrb for watching my media on my phone.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by brewston

Just got an android phone too. I spoke with one of the phone geeks at work - whilst android has Java, its not J2ME - so he said you can't just drop jar files in there and expect them to run (recall that the placeshifter GUI is controlled by miniclient.jar) Thats before you start looking at video rendering which would require a recompile of mplayer.

I'm not saying its impossible, but I think it requires a little effort on Sage's part for an official placeshifter version

Yeah... I don't any android developer thinks the android system is a j2me system. Google has just hijacked the java language and ide tools for the purposes of building android apps. Similar to how they hijacked the language and ide tools for gwt. Pretty clever actually.

getting a native client working will be more of a reverse engineering of the protocols.... followed by frustration, and then ultimately, just building a native client and using the streaming apis of the web server