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
- 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.
