Galaxy Nexus for debugging

I did get the Samsung phone to work with Eclipse for testing Android apps, but not with Samsung's driver.  For some reason Windows 7 x64 just kept insisting there's no compatible driver in the package.  I used the Universal Naked Driver 0.72 by 1wayjonny from XDA Developers.  It's just amazing how much the community can provide!

AVD emulator

I've started to play with NPM distributed toolkit for SFDC mobile development.  Most of the quirks have been ironed out in a day, but AVD is still kind of a pain.  I've got HXAM running - it's actually easier to set it up on Windows 7 with no need for the extra patch for Mountain Lion.  So Atom based emulator is pretty snappy, but I still couldn't get the RAM to go beyond 768 MB.  There are a bunch of references out there advising manually editing the config files for AVDs, but none worked for me so far.  Will have to take a good look at Genymotion later I guess.

Setting up Galaxy S3 with Hotmail

You'd think that's an easy task in 2013.  The truth: not so much.  The native Android mail app did add it easily (using POP3 I assume) but the app never received a single new message since setup.  I tried adjust every setting that seems relevant and nothing made any difference.  So it's time to crowd source online.  It didn't take long for me to find this post by John Law.  That seems to make sense, but my dear wife doesn't want to sync contacts from Hotmail.  I thought since it's about the underlying sync protocol - using ActiveSync - so why not just set up the email account with that option.  So I did.  On the email setup screen select Other (I think Corporate works too), enter account credentials, then click "Manual Setup".  From the choices select "Microsoft ActiveSync".  Information then actually gets filled in automatically for you: server is m.hotmail.com as mentioned by John Law, and username is an awkward \her_name@hotmail.com, which I left alone, since I have no clue on what the domain can be.  After that just follow along with the Next buttons, and everything started working once it's done!

A side note is that the Hotmail account was not long ago migrated to outlook.com (as required).  Maybe that change resulted in some underlying shift, which broke the old scheme.

"Will work for Droid X"

Damn, I was almost going to pimp myself out on the street with a sign like that. That's how hard to get one of those these days. Droid X went on sale since July 15th and I wonder how many have actually got it? I figured it's not a "new" smartphone anymore so it shouldn't be that hard to pick up one. Well, not so fast, Bob. I first put in an order on Amazon Wireless on Aug. 25th, since they priced it $20 below Verizon. Boy was I surprised to see the estimated delivery date: Oct. 8th.

There's no way I can wait that long. So I went to talk to a Verizon store, hoping to get one quickly from the source. The friendly guy there said their shipping date is much closer, but... still at Sep. 10th. Droid 2 and HTC Incredible are definitely in better shape, available the same day.

I guess depending on who you're asking, Verizon/Motorola has either never learned from Apple's lesson, or just taken a page right out of Apple's playbook. In any case, I'm definitely not the only drooling customer out there.

With this piece of empirical evidence, now it's pretty easy to see the strength of the Android platform.