I've been using the Milna application on my phone for a couple of days. This is a "social networking" application with a bit of a twist - it is location based and, requires that you post what you want to do. Users near you (the distance is configurable, but you'd want to keep it really near you) can join in and, together you'd have a blast. Good fun really ! You don't necessarily have to be on any specific network or, be "friends" with anyone. Just make a wish and perhaps you'd have folks joining in. They need to be using the app though. So, you should ideally keep pointing out the website to them.

And, as I was thinking, the app could be a good fit to organize a flash mob ;) or, a party or, a jamming session. Or, anything that can have you making new acquaintances and perhaps striking up a friendship. Runa pointed out the small concern that it might also be used for stalking, but I guess that is something the app developers have already thought about. The app (or, if there is a custom web service ever) can also be used as private instances. Think of a private Milna server/instance for your team and you could perhaps have a "Chatter" like thing going.

For me the current downside is the lack of users near me using the app. That needs to change.

Just a note to say that the app does seem to work. Both for scanning ISBNs and creating a ToRead as well as adding books to the Read shelf on Goodreads.com

I've been using a Nexus S since end January 2011. In no particular order here are some observations.

• Contrary to expectations the battery life is around 2-3 days for my usage pattern (infrequent WiFi, nearly no bluetooth and no GPS etc)
• The screen is a smudge magnet that is beyond description. The tiniest bit of smudge material creates a layer of unsightly swipes
• The screen area is good for the Kindle App. With the black background white text setting I can actually read books pretty nicely and that is a high usage pattern.
• The display is good and pretty rich if a color rich wallpaper is used.
• The only video I have is Eben Moglen's FOSDEM 2011 keynote and it plays pretty well (I had converted it anyway, read more here)
• Angry Birds, Paper Toss and Alchemy work well :) (as much I installed them for illicit entertainment)
• Touchdown works. Yay !
• The YouTube player is sometimes iffy on high resolution videos
• The TED app makes it easy to listen to a well curated talk list
• The actual physical phone hardware lends itself to a good grip once you can get over the lightness of it all
• The hot spot thing works nicely too. Didn't have more than two devices to try it out with though.The phone tends to heat up slightly.
• The stock browser is a bit of a bore and so I ended up installing and using Opera Mini (although I also installed Opera Mobile)
• The stock Android 2.3 UI is a bit of a vanilla one. In fact I quite liked the tweaks in the UI provided by LG (albeit on 2.2) with the pull down bar allowing one to quickly connect to a GPRS or, move into a Silent mode etc. In fact I am looking for suggestions on alternative launchers.
• The phone doesn't have too many external buttons (there's a power on/off and the volume switch) and that is a bit of a gotcha. When it comes to having to unlock each time to do stuff.
• I haven't had the call drop issue yet.
• Haven't used the phone to record a video and the rear camera works pretty decently (haven't used the flash on it). The front camera, as expected is heavily grainy

The Indian Android Developer Contest folks have put up the criteria for judging an app. I gave it a quick read and ended up wondering whether the following would have been a better alternative.

• Usability - whether the app does what it claims to do
• Security - whether the app is inherently insecure
• Fault Tolerance - whether the app fails gracefully or, just decides to rampantly go awry
• Service Tolerance - whether the app, if backed with a custom service, can handle high transactional loads
• Geolocation awareness - whether the app, if required, can handle geo-location gracefully
• Content Freshness - whether the app does collect and collate relevant content that is local (depends on the point above)
• Platform Consumption - whether the app makes best and optimal use of the API provided by the underlying platform
• Hardware Tolerance - whether the app factors in difference in hardware specifications across handsets with compatible OS
• Feature Completeness - whether the app has differentiating features from other apps in same category
• Consumer building - whether the app devels take time to build a community of users/consumers using social media and market feedback means

I'd also have fancied the names of the judges to be made available.

The folks at Taazza suggested that I might like to use their app. Unfortunately, that specific version seemed to have some issues with the phones and moving the app to the SD card. So, once I did provide that feedback they were nice to email a couple of us with a preview release which is also scheduled to hit the Android Market. Since the premise is to provide specifically local content, the only way to give it a spin was to get local at a couple of places (Hadapsar, Magarpatta, KalyaniNagar, Koregaon Park, MG Road, Moledina Road were my places) and see how it goes.

I like the app and, I'd recommend it as a fun one to have around.

It is light and fast, has a clean interface that allows some interesting things like providing news about deals with when they expire (that's fun to keep track of), weather information and, some reasonably detailed listing about Places (restaurants, movies/theatres and so forth). I specifically like the way it handles the City News via aggregation. For me that's a nice way to read news around and about Pune. And it does a seriously good job with that which can be tested by changing the location. The deals/information can be shared using email/Facebook/Twitter and, orders can be placed via Web or, a print-ready coupon. The means to select additional cities to read news items about is also a plus.

Having said all of that there's a couple of things I'd like the app to improve in the coming versions:

• handle the slight stutter when changing between tabs or, scrolling quickly. The app visibly stalls and stutters for a slight moment before reloading the content
• in the landscape orientation the scrolling requires some work - it just is a bit slow
• in the landscape orientation (why would an app like this require a landscape ? :)), the content reflow is a bit awkward
• geolocation - this is currently what I'd like to get fixed. The app seems to save a location and each time one has to re-locate oneself to get local (or, hyper local) information. I'd have wanted an automatic re-location and hence a refresh of the content. So, basically I would want to activate the app, or, navigate to the app and I'd like it to use an existing and active data connection to geo-locate me and figure out the content to fetch and display.
• content -> activity. In other words, I know that I can get the contact numbers of a movie theatre with the app. But, how do I make bookings ? For a restaurant, a contact number might be enough to call up and make a reservation, I guess that doesn't work out nicely for theatres and movies/plexes etc
• more content is required and that is probably going to be cyclically linked to more usage

In short, good job but there's more to be done. And, the page probably requires some means to put in feature requests and rankings :)

I've been using a LG P500 for a while now. The phone is a couple of firsts for me - a first time shift from being a longtime user of Symbian phones, a first time user of a touch phone and, a first time user of an Android device (this comes with Android 2.2)

The phone specifications can be read at this page and it would be obvious at a first glance that it isn't beefy. I would agree. Games aren't the strong point of the phone. I'm not too particularly fond of games but I gave them a shot just to check how the hardware behaves. There are a few other bits too - the tiny power/screen lock button on the top, the lack of a flash, the latency of the camera between clicking to shoot and actually storing the picture and, the slightly cluttered up application screen. However, these are more than made up for by the balance of the phone. How an instrument feels on the hand is very important to me - this one is snug and evenly balanced and, even though I shifted from the all metal feel of an e71, this one doesn't feel tackily plasticky. I like the interface and, although it took me a while to figure out how to prevent applications running in the background from slurping up data on a GPRS data connection, I blame the sparse manual for that rather than the phone UI. Having heard horror stories about the Android battery life, I was prepared to be disappointed. However, so far, squeezing out 20+ hours on a single charge and full day usage hasn't been too tough. Either I am a lucky sort or, the battery is performing better in the initial stages. 

Which brings us to the thing that bothers the hell out of me. I've always maintained that the Ovi Store was a misery. Well, the Android marketplace seems to be a misery of a different sort - too many applications and not enough information about the ratings and what they mean. And, the AppAdvisor provided by LG is equally flawed when suggesting any applications. For the record, the current lot of extra applications I've downloaded and used frequently include the Status.Net application, Amazon Kindle Application (which is much nicer than what I expected and allows me to get ahead with me reading by handling reflows nicely), Evernote, Google Finance, Google Translate, Skype, Opera Mini, Foursquare, TED Mobile (clunky but functional), A Good Reader (I'm not too overjoyed with this but it serves the purpose) and, Mundu IM (a shout-out to the Mundu IM team here - they helped me re-use the same license I had for the Symbian phone). Oh yeah ! I used the Barcode Scanner application for a bit. It is a fun app - doesn't work for everything but works nicely when it does. Google Goggles was fun too (for a day or, so). Coming back, it needs some explanation as how the ratings work and, what it means for the functionality of the application. A quick example could be that SMS Backup works nicely but SMS Backup+ failed to get going. And, the latter is fairly highly rated on the marketplace.

The synchronization with the Google Account(s) is both a plus and a downside. While it allows authentication to be quickly used, the fact that the phone call-in system cannot re-use the Google Contacts to display incoming caller identification and details is a bit of a bore. This has meant that I've had to do away with my workflow of not picking up the call of anyone whose number isn't on my call log and, thereafter keep adding the details in. Either there is some setting I'm missing or, it is supposed to act in this quirky and annoying fashion. The manual doesn't help too.

In two of my recent device purchases I've been tickled funny with the main set of keys - the slider switch in the Kindle (which I still think is the single weakest point of the design) and, the Home/Back keys on the LG-P500. Set on a single sliver of metal, the key has this feeling of running the risk of coming unstuck.

All I need now is the availability of the RSA Soft Token for Android and together with Touchdown I might be able to get more use out of the phone. Bottom-line, it is a decent phone with no big surprises or, achievements. The UI looks more like the stock Android and, it might actually be a good value for money purchase. On a side note, I quite like the keyboard functionality especially when used with XT9 enabled. It learns pretty quickly and suggests fairly accurately. No Indic rendering on the stock browser. Which is a bit of a let-down.

With my phone hardware refresh cycle coming up I am looking out for an Android device.

Currently I am using an e71 and while it has been an excellent handset - rugged (it has survived falls from around three and a half feet on to concrete and emerged without a scratch, has fallen with the screen hitting the floor and didn't even blink and once it has dropped from my pocket on to gravel and bounced about a bit), good battery life (although I've read about folks talking about the battery life it hasn't caused my much grief) and, nicely balanced it is beginning to be a bit long in the tooth. That and the atrocity that is the Ovi app store convinces me to not have a Symbian device.

The predominant use of the handset has been in:

• checking email (both corp and Gmail)
• synchronizing calendars (both corp and personal)
• browsing (mainly using Opera Mobile)
• IM (Mundu IM provides me enough to get online and they responded to the issue I had - big yay ! there)
• shell login (putty works nicely)
• social networking (primarily Gravity and sometimes Snaptu)
• miscellaneous stuff (viz. Skype, Podcasts, Internet Radio, bit of photography and some bookmarking)

So, while I need to keep the above in mind, I am kind of looking forward to moving to a touch-screen based experience rather than menu based one. And, I need a better set of apps (and perhaps a better App Store).

Which brings us to the meat of this post - what are the Android devices that are coming up in the next 4 months which I should be looking forward to ? And, they should be Android 2.2 based (not the 2.1 or, lesser upgrade to 2.2 path for me). Of course once I've decided on a device the next step would be to figure whether there is an RSA soft token available for it. The lack of it could be the reason to choose another path.