Database Users

Personal Homepage in PIE improved!

Sure, you can have your homepage point to google or MSN or some other site.
Wouldn't it great if you could have your own homepage where you can set your own links? Well, hell yeah. Better having to go to favourites > link... etc.
This lady created a HTM page that you can edit and set your own links.
For example on my own page I have links to google.ca, my yahoo email, HoFo, the two social groups I run, my bank's website. All the moment that PIE starts.
Excellent share...
It is easy to setup and you really do not need any HTML experience.
Cheers!
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2004/03/03/83349.aspx

Amazing, it's only 2 weeks ago that I was looking for something exactly like this, as it's a bit of a pain using the favourites in pie. Thanks for the link.

Bit of a pain to edit.
I use Google Bookmarks as my home page. It loads quickly and means I can access my favourites (with tags!) from anywhere. Editing it is even more easily done on my PC.
http://www.google.com/bookmarks/

Although it is good that people are coming out with more options.
You cannot compare a 2k file that pops up instantly when you start off PIE with 10-15 of your favourite links.
Going to Google Bookmarks is not as easy specially if you have tons of bookmarks. Not bad when using a Laptop but not as easy when using a PPC.
But hey, to which is own, right?

check http://mobilust.net/bookmarks via mobile. easy to signup and save you bookmarks. i use it . still needs to be improved but at least designed for mobiles.

I checked it out, promising, but if you don't mind having a small, unknown company knowing all your bookmarks.

no. i wouldn't put my bank accoutn details there lol

[APP] [REQ] GSpace Mobile

I'm quite sure many of you would have used this either on Firefox or Symbian, or something along the line.
This would be a great app to port over to Android to make use of the gmail accounts space for whatever you can think of.
currently to access that on my Android phone i've have to do it the long way via sending email to myself
but on a PC or any other platform with plugins that can directly access the Gspace, i can simply drag and drop files into the Gspace file manager.
I personally not that great at programing, i can script just fine, but programing a full app is a bit beyond me.
So, It'll be great if some Developer have spare time to make this great app, i'll donate / buy it off Android Market if it ever becomes available.

yes i'm aware there's dropbox, but using one's own gmail account offers way more space than dropbox
personally i feel it's better when everything is integrated into 1 account (reason why i like Android OS/phones)
it'll be even better if it can pickup the account username (email)/password from Android OS system settings > Accounts & Sync

Nice idea. Well, dropbox can have more space, but it's true that an all integrated solution would be cool. personally I would probably use both dropbox and this, even more online free storage

Sounds like a good idea.

How many people have linked their phone to live?

I've only owned this phone 10 days now and I've always had a live account to sync my contacts from previous winmo phones. Few days ago I went to check my live account and low and behold the phone get intergrated to you live account. You go into your live account and hover over Windows Live then a drop down box will show up. You select devices and then a page pops up with your phone there. You click on Find your phone.. then the wow starts.. You can map where your phone's current location is with Map it. Ring it to ring your phone so you can track it down. Lock it so no one can use the phone... Then Erase it if there's no way in hell your getting it back. Pretty cool functions to have for a just in case. Nobody at the ATT store knew anything about it. Oh you also get a 25Gb Skydrive. You need to download Windows Live Essentials 2011 to access the Skydrive from your computer.

I am guessing pretty much everyone has it linked. It is one of the first steps in the wizard.

Hmm I guess but the 3 ATT employees I talked to didn't. shrug and didn't even know about those features.

I am an avid player of the Xbox 360 so of course I connected my account info to the phone. The best part is having my entire contact list backed up online and being able to map the location of the phone for free.

I'm syncing my contacts to Google Contacts, but otherwise it's the same.
I do have to say, though, I'm very disappointed in the lack of Skydrive integration overall. For example, your Office docs can't be saved straight to skydrive, and the only way to get OneNote docs from skydrive is through th web browser. Once they're on your phone you can update them and they sync, but the method is pretty much weak. Skydrive should be fully integrated so that ALL documents you create, including folders, sync 1:1 to your skydrive account.
In fairness, Skydrive *itself* is still fragmented. For example, docs you sync with WLE 2011 (using Mesh) can't be edited directly in the browser and are located in a separate location from your main skydrive account and files. That's also lame.
Skydrive needs to become a SINGLE, unified storage area, where documents can be saved to/from PC, WP7 or from the browser, and all editable in the browser, on the PC, or on the phone.
I'm sure we'll get there, but it's frustrating that they didn't have it ready by launch.

[Q] Newbie resources?

So I just got my Atrix from ATT, coming from WinMo 6.5 (Tilt2), and am a bit lost.
There used to be guides and such for people upgrading, but I've hopped on the train so late I'm having trouble finding a good one!
So feel free to point me towards better resources or useful threads on here especially from the perspective of WinMo to modern Android.
But for now, first question: what is the best way sync Outlook and my new phone?? I've got Outlook 2010 and have been building an address book in it since my MPx220! I know I could export/import a .csv but am far more interested in actual sync, with contacts and calendar at the minimum. Preferably free, but if not OK (as long as it works). So far I've tried MyPhoneExplorer but it can't see the phone via USB. Trying www.soocial.com now, looks interesting...

Is it ever gonna finish inspecting my 16GB card? Can't find a progress indicator anywhere...

I know it's not helping but just wanted to say that I'm exactly in the same boat with you. I used Windows Mobile since around 2004 (with mpx 220, tilt, and tilt2) and I'm kind of clueless about this whole android thing
Oh and I could not find a way to directly sync my outlook contacts with atrix either. Also, if you go with the .csv route, it does not sync some fields, for example Work2 phone.

fincan said:
Oh and I could not find a way to directly sync my outlook contacts with atrix either. Also, if you go with the .csv route, it does not sync some fields, for example Work2 phone.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Def. try www.soocial.com It's free (as long as you're less than 250 contacts) and it's *ongoing* Sync like we're used to.
Goofy thing is, Google is said to make a calendar sync (outlook --> google), why don't they have their own for contacts??

Well, so far I'm a touch underwhelmed. Coming from the WinMo world I'm used to many things being customizable, often in the program, if not maybe in the registry or easily swapped out for other software.
I'm noticing a lot of dumb choices and a lot of things that don't give me obvious options.
Let's call it a Universal Inbox but it won't have your Gmail! There's a way around, you setup instead as regular IMAP email and use that app or end up using both email apps... grr! Better 3rd party alternative?
No 'file as' in contacts or ability to customize much of anything about how it looks, what it shows...
Friggin 'security lock timer' setting is disabled when using fingerprint!
Oh, and scanning my SD card *never finished*! After a couple hours (during which I couldn't install anything from the marketplace--though it gave me NO error to let me know why it was ignoring me pressing install!) I yanked the card. Maybe if I clear it out first?
Of course it's much (MUCH) better than my POS Tilt2, but I'm not quite convinced it's worth it, yet.

Your card scanning issue is not normal. IT STINKS! Something from the school of the united nations
Sent from my MB860 using XDA Premium App

I came from windows also. Companion Link is the only software to give you a true live sync between outlook and google calender and contacts that I have found. It wasn't free but I don't remember how much. It syncs your desktop outlook to your online google account which is automatically synced to your device.
Sent from my MB860 using XDA Premium App

For the contacts things you can always setup your gmail account as an exchange account in outlook and sync it that way, but then again it would be the same as syncing with gmail itself.
As for an outlook sync that isn't third party, there is no way to do it other than having an exchange account.

I found and downloaded a program called My Phone Explorer, it says it can sync outlook contacts & calendars if you install it's companion software to your PC. I did not have a chance to try it out yet, I'll update this thread once I try it.
Also, did you guys find out how to set custom ring tones? Like copying wav, mp3, ogg etc. files from my old phone to this and make them show up on the ringtone selections?

sdlopez83 said:
Your card scanning issue is not normal. IT STINKS! Something from the school of the united nations
Sent from my MB860 using XDA Premium App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It had been in my Tilt 2 and had about 10gig of various files, some WM6.5 stuff (.cabs, apps, etc) and media. I formatted it and put back in the phone (couldn't do anything with it while it was scanning) and it was fine.
Marketplace didn't actually do anything when I hit install until the card was happy.

So far I'm pretty impressed with Android but not so much with this phone. The combination of not-latest OS with updates being locked to ATT/Moto's discretion worries me as the Tilt2 I'm coming from was absolutely crippled by the crap ATT OS version available (though at least it wasn't impossible to flash it!).
My other big problem is that while this phone is supposedly lightning fast, but how does that make any difference in actual use, since this dual-core CPU and nVidia chipset are a small part of a big and diverse market, for which the Nexus S and all the similar Samsungs set the baseline? Example, I noticed I can't play at decent framerate a 720p h.264 media file (.torrent downloaded Top Gear, 1.5GB on class 6 microSD), even in QQview--which can't seem to access the SD card directly (it only sees the ~11GB internal which is called SDcard), by the way. So what good does this extra speed do if there are no apps to take advantage of it? And how many others are going to have troubles accessing my new 32GB microSD because they only see the internal?
I'm also fairly annoyed by the lack of customization in the settings. At worst every damn thing in WinMo was customizable via registry. I usually find a setting each day in Android which I should have easy control over but don't. Example: notifications being the same volume for texts/emails as BS systems sounds I haven't figured any way to turn off... again a missing setting that's almost there: I noticed within text messaging and email I can set specific sounds (including silent) but for the overall system one there's no silent option (which would be overridden by the selected ones above)... Maybe there's some apps that do some of what I want, but having to pay or sideload are both kinda foreign concepts to me, especially for small system hacks!
But on the other hand it's very responsive, does seem to play 720p Xvid torrent downloads OK (though I haven't watched one all the way through), and the voice features are great.
One other annoyance is that while BT links to my car automagically it doesn't link to my Panasonic handsets at home unless I turn BT off and back on for some reason...
So given how much I paid (premiere, non-contract) I'm leaning towards return. Wish the damn ATT-bands Nexus S was out!!

but, more importantly did you get the critic references?

[Q] Does email reside on the tablet?

I have been trying to figure out email as it runs on Honeycomb (prior to purchase, but this is an interesting question I hope). What I want to do is ditch my computer running windows Live Mail, where all the emails are saved to my computer, and replace with a slinky new tranformer. I realise that a tablet is mostly an online tool, but it has heaps of memory, and I travel too much and still need to access old emails.
But, I cant seem to locate good information regards how the email app operates. Or how others such as K-9 work. So the question is; Do the emails reside on the tablet, can I place into folders, backup locally etc more or less as I do on my PC?

To my knowledge the stock app stores them as entries in an SQL database. You can backup the whole lot, but probably not individually.
sassafras

Having set up my personal e-mail on my TF I've not been able to setup new folders with the default client, I can't find any option to do this. Also it appears as though a copy of your e-mails is downloaded onto the TF and stays on the server unless you enable the option to delete a message only when you delete it from the Inbox. It'll also only download the first 25 messages the first time round, you'll need to hit the 'load more conversations' button if you want to get more to display.
As for your existing e-mails I'm guessing that they are stored locally on your computer and are no longer available 'in the cloud', is that right? If so that will be a bit tricky to get them transferred over to your TF. If those messages are still in the cloud however you shouldn't run into any problems setting up your account on your TF.

By default POP3 email servers should keep the emails on the server (until it is too old by server's auto-delete definition) and you should be able to download your old emails on your transformer (unless you deleted them from your email app on PC, which will cause it to tell the server to delete it too). There's a reason why I started using Exchange instead of POP3.

So am I alone in wanting offline email, archiving etc? Really the only person desperate to replace notebook with tablet, but needing solid productivity from email?

alhart345 said:
So am I alone in wanting offline email, archiving etc? Really the only person desperate to replace notebook with tablet, but needing solid productivity from email?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Why do you need to archive your emails? If you need to back the lot of them up, you can. Using a root explorer, you can browse to the /data/data folder on the device and copy the email client folders located within (I believe com.android.email and com.google.android.gmail) to whichever storage medium you like.
Unfortunately you cannot back up or copy individual emails.
sassafras

I run a business, when visiting customers, vendors or travelling I am often without internet access or it is too slow to be good for much. But I need to access old emails regularly, and email is the central tool for managing my workload. So I sort my old emails by activity in folders locally on my notebook and often refer in meetings to past actions, prices etc. Pretty typical business/corporate action. I may be asking too much of a tablet at this stage, seems most people use it to augment their PC, not replace.

I think storing much locally goes against how Google and Apple view tablet devices. They view storage as a cloud based resource. So emails and documents are stored on their (or your ISPs) servers and accessed from the mobile device. This ensures that your data is constantly backed up and accessible from any device you have, phone, tablet, netbook, etc.
The downside is that this data is in the cloud so access assumes that you have a connection.

alhart345 said:
I run a business, when visiting customers, vendors or travelling I am often without internet access or it is too slow to be good for much. But I need to access old emails regularly, and email is the central tool for managing my workload. So I sort my old emails by activity in folders locally on my notebook and often refer in meetings to past actions, prices etc. Pretty typical business/corporate action. I may be asking too much of a tablet at this stage, seems most people use it to augment their PC, not replace.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I suspect that part of your problem is that you are using your email folders as a "CRM" database, whereas you'd probably be better off if you could actually move to a true CRM solution. This may be easier said than done if the data volumes (i.e. your email "database" is large) but will probably provide a much better solution in the long run.
Regards,
Dave

I haven't used the stock Android email app since Android 2.0 and my OG Droid, but I'm rather sure that the GMail app will only locally store the most recent emails, either by date or by number, not sure which. My personal email only goes up until the 23rd before it has to 'load conversations', which I believe is grabbing them from the network.
There is a degree of offline email with these recent conversations, as I've typed up emails off-network and they send as soon as I hit Wifi (or 3G in the phone's case). But nothing like the Outlook-level of Offline email. There is GMail offline for PC, so it is possible Google will bring it to tabs eventually...who knows.

alhart345 said:
I run a business, when visiting customers, vendors or travelling I am often without internet access or it is too slow to be good for much. But I need to access old emails regularly, and email is the central tool for managing my workload. So I sort my old emails by activity in folders locally on my notebook and often refer in meetings to past actions, prices etc. Pretty typical business/corporate action. I may be asking too much of a tablet at this stage, seems most people use it to augment their PC, not replace.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't use the tablet for work that much, but I understand your situation. eMail is actually a pretty lousy tool for what you're doing. A good practice is to just delete mails as soon as they get to you, get read and the information is used. But, of course, there are times when you will need to keep some of the information a mail came with, but not the email itself. The reason is that email *is not always available*. You either store it on the servers or you store it locally. Being on the servers makes you dependant on an internet connection. Having them locally makes it more prone to database corruption, and simple things such as search, backup and restore are more complex (before I get bashed, I didn't say difficult or impossible, just complex).
I'm used to a Microsoft ecosystem for personal productivity which means that I have outlook and onenote. What I do is:
emails with attachments, where I need to keep the attachment for future reference: I save the attachment and delete the email
emails with information: I drag the email to Onenote and delete the email.
In a PC/Tablet environment there is no reason why you can't do something similar, although it might not be as streamlined as how Microsoft designed their own products.
But, what I picture you being able to use is:
- Mails with attachments - save them to dropbox or get some other PC-Android folder syncing solution. Get rid of the email.
- Mails with information - Save them to evernote or catchnotes and they automatically get synced to your tablet. I think the premium version of Evernote has offline access (i.e. local storage of notes) and Catch does it anyway.
Evernote has a nice feature where you can mail stuff to your evernote account and it will show up.
As you can see it involves that you change a bit how you work and manage information, but if you make this step you can be more productive.

Hi Ferparedes, thanks for the response, took me a while to get back to it. It may be possible to use a notetaker to do this, but I am pondering the steps needed to integrate as you suggest. I take about 100 emails a day, covering say 50 customers and 1-5 new projects per customer, plus ongoing business - folder structure is 3 and 4 deep. I guess, suck it and see is the final result. If working on the TF is so satisfying for everything else, then a way will be found...
Thanks again for the input.

Well, then again it could be that a tablet is not the best tool for your needs, right?
Sent from my Transformer TF101 using Tapatalk

For everything else, it is just right. But the email thing is a show stopper for me. I shall have to curb enthusiasm and wait for the software to come up. Or a windows tab

alhart345 said:
For everything else, it is just right. But the email thing is a show stopper for me. I shall have to curb enthusiasm and wait for the software to come up. Or a windows tab
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Windows tablets have been around for ages, no?

alhart345 said:
For everything else, it is just right. But the email thing is a show stopper for me. I shall have to curb enthusiasm and wait for the software to come up. Or a windows tab
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Windows 8 tablets should appear in spring 2012.

alhart345 said:
For everything else, it is just right. But the email thing is a show stopper for me. I shall have to curb enthusiasm and wait for the software to come up. Or a windows tab
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It seems like the easy solution is to get internet access on the go. Why not just get a 3g hotspot from your provider? Or, if you have an android phone, set up the mobile access point?

if my experience can help...
Avoiding complex configuration setting up a mail server at home, I've the following config:
- the home pc access my accounts (isp, yahoo, gmail) through pop protocol, with accounts configured to leave messages on the server 15 days
- tablet has same accounts configured with imap access
This way all mails are anyway downloaded and backedup on my local pc, while still being accessible from the tablet.
Of course some diligence is required: if erasing a mail from the tablet while having the pc in standby, the mail will never be available on the pc (but I suppose this is not a big deal: mail has been read and judged to be erased).
My 2 cents