Android Crash and Burn

So, today, I was catching up on my web-development news, and saw that Google reader had an android version of Google reader that came out. So, I was trying to update that at the exact same time I got a phone call.

Now, my phone’s been running slow for a while now. I have it full to the top with all sorts of useful apps.

Well, the phone must have decided enough’s enough. It slowed down right to a crawl. I told it to power off, as many times this helps a little.

It never restarted.

Plus, I start getting tons of error emails from my webserver. So, I work on figuring out why my webserver is freaking out, while watching my phone reboot, over and over and over again. This means I am freaking out. My phone’s been bricked! Turns out the server thing was something trivial. I tweaked the logging code so it is more self evident why it’s going nuts, and finished up my work day.

I tried to reboot the phone, I tried to soft-reset the phone. I ended up hard-resetting the phone. This sucks.

Well, it had been getting pretty slow as of late.

The phone comes back up with a clean slate and just doesn’t want to work. I set it up on my WiFi.  It can’t seem to connect to anything, no authentication to my Google account, nothing. I cross my eyes and reboot the phone. It comes up and seems to work better now.

I delete all the crap apps off my desktop that Sprint put on there. (Why can’t I DELETE these dumb things off my phone? I don’t have room for them on my device!)

I open up the Marketplace app, and to my immense joy, it remembers all my installed apps! So, I get to installing all my ‘necessary’ apps. The ones that make my phone useful to me.

  • Google Maps (update)
  • Street View for Google Maps
  • Google Reader (what I was trying to install when this all started)
  • Square
  • iTriage Mobile Health
  • Handcent SMS
  • Lookout Mobile Security
  • Where’s My Droid
  • First Aid
  • Twitter
  • Radar Now!
  • Google Voice (totally killer app for the android)
  • MomentFlash
  • PdaNet
  • SMS Backup
  • Wifi Analyzer
  • Barcode Scanner
  • Facebook for Android
  • The Weather Channel (update, I wish I could uninstall this)
  • Compass

The amazing thing is that it took only 20-30 minutes for all my contacts to be back on the phone, my core applications that I use every day re-installed, and my life back. Sure, I have some more time getting things tweaked just right, like the background screen. But that’s trivial. I don’t feel like I am missing my right arm or something, just a finger or two. This is how setting up a new phone (or rebuilding a crashed one) ought to work. Automagically.

Google Android is a flipping awesome OS as far as I am concerned.

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