Windows and Mac, same behaviour seen on multiple machines.



My phone it set to manual, my wife's it set to auto. Whenever I had connected either one to a new iTunes install it always wants to delete everything. One unwise button click or key press and it would all be gone (if I remember rightly the "yes delete everything" is even the default button in the dialog).

Last time I actually tried moving my iTunes library it was even more painful. So much so that at the moment I have an image of my old laptop running in VMWare just so I can put off migrating my iTunes library...


I would agree with that completely about the software update side of things. It drove me mad that there was no way* on WinMo to backup everything and restore it after a firmware update. That iTunes can even do it across different device models is kind of magical.

* sure there were some third party backups apps, but in my experience they didn't always work so well

That is my experience also. Just swapping out system drives makes iTunes want to delete my entire iPod Touch. I ended up having to get iGadget (from Purple Ghost) to try to grab my stuff off the iPod so iTunes didn't delete it. Only problem is it doesn't grab photos.

I guess it wouldn't be bad, but I haven't found any way to redownload what you've purchased. It would seriously piss me off if I swapped system drives and iTunes wiped my iPod and didn't give me the chance to redownload what I bought from their store. That is why I like Steam and Direct2Drive (and Impulse, though I use it less). No matter what I do to my computer, I have the chance to redownload and reinstall the stuff that I purchased.

I should add, when I do copy the folders over, the other key thing to do is make sure the new system is activated in iTunes with the same Apple ID. Otherwise iTunes will want to delete things. Last time I copied everything from the desktop to the laptop, both my iPhone and iPad just kept syncing as if nothing had happened. When I got back home, I used rsync to pull back the changes to the desktop.

Copy Trans Photo.

Grr...it looks like Froyo is being pushed out way in advance of when they said it would (like three days instead of three weeks!), but after about a half day it appears that it's limited to review units, which makes no sense whatsoever. What, do they need more press on it? They just had a major event to showcase it!

Grr!

On xda-developers you'll find link to the upgrade-file. Just download it and install if you're on stock ROM.

Stig

Because press getting something before everybody else is unusual and doesn't happen anywhere else right? Might as well roll it out to a small group first to get some initial feedback and testing before pushing it out to everybody.

Yeah, just about five minutes after I posted that the upgrade was available. About five minutes after that I had it installed


Not sure what your point is. Did I say it didn't? I was complaining that they were doing it this way, not saying that it doesn't happen. So what do you mean?


True, but it's not like they were planning on pulling the update if it had a bad reaction. It just seemed like this was how they were staggering the release, but it's annoying to stagger it starting with the press.

Besides, every prior release has been released on the side like this. The community finds a way around this, so they might as well do a better job with the release anyway.

Whatever, I don't care at this point. I have it, initial impressions tell me it's great, and I LOVE the hotspot functionality.

How's Flash? Does it rock your world? Take some time off Farmville and let us know about it.

[edit]Less antagonism[/edit]

Members of the press shouldn't have to update their own phones. They should be given a phone with the update already installed on it, wrapped in gold leaf with a few one-hundred dollar bills cushioning the package.

Looking through the xda-developers forum, I'm glad that empegbbs isn't like that. So many whiny impatient people that appear to have the complete inability to read or use the search function. Sifting out the dross to get the actual useful posts is hard. Too many people just make stuff up as well and claim it as verified information.

Froyo isn't even out yet properly and there are already petitions everywhere trying to force the various manufacturers to jump straight to Froyo.

Sorry, I was a bit antagonistic myself. Apologies.


Yeah, I really don't like that place. I'm not sure why that thread needed to be thousands of posts long. Fortunately most people were linking directly to where you needed to go to get the update.

And good luck to them on those petitions. Nothing more productive than an online petition

Sadly, I've actually had to socialize this evening (we threw a little party), so I haven't had ANY time to play with my phone. I really should have shirked my hosting responsibilities to go play with an OS update

And if I ever start playing Farmville, please end my life.

*edit*
I might have missed something, but I just tried viewing something in flash, and it said I didn't have it installed. I wonder if there's something I have to do, or if the release that everyone grabbed today doesn't actually include it...

*edit again*
Ah, it's actually a download from the market. I'll let you know how well it works when I've played with it tomorrow.

Couldn't agree more. Seems like most of them are just kids fortunate enough to have a Nexus One...

Stig

Very awesome, thanks!

Flash seems to work well.

There's an option in the browser to turn plugins on or off or on-demand, which works basically like FlashBlock, except that once you click on a Flash applet, it turns them all on for that page, not just the one you clicked. I don't know what would happen if there were other plugins for a page: whether it would just activate the one plugin needed to run the applet you clicked on, or if it would turn them all on.

I played around with it for a bit, and everything seems to function properly, even though there are occasional UI issues due to the creators of the applets not providing for a touchscreen UI. Videos, games, and animations all seem to work fine.

Battery usage doesn't seem outrageous at all. I didn't play with it long enough to see how quickly it would drain the battery, but I did note that it didn't get even remotely as hot as I have seen it get with other applications, and I never saw any performance issues. It seems like they've actually done a decent job of optimizing the code.

The install is huge, though: over 12MB, and it's not flagged as SDCard-installable. As such, I've deleted it for now, because I have way too many apps installed, and I was already getting quite low on space.

This, I think, is one of the few areas I outright blame Google for. There is no excuse for not demanding a larger amount of space for applications. The G1 had an embarrassingly small amount of space for apps, which was one of the things that prompted me to root it.

2.2 does help with that, but it requires the developers to make their apps installable to the SD card, and I haven't seen any in my own list.

Yeah, that was definitely a poor design decision.

I haven't looked at the devkit yet to see what's required to enable the SD-able flag.

What's the largest flash capacity available on an Android phone excluding SD? I think their first mistake was requiring SD expansion at all. It's rather pointless on some devices since you need to remove the battery to swap cards. I can see its uses for data storage, but installing apps on SD is really only a replacement for built-in NVRAM. It's like using a DVDRW instead of a hard drive (ignoring read/write speed). I don't know if there's ever a situation in which I'd want to remove my SD card and lose access to a number of apps in the process.

I'm reading on various blogs covering performance that Flash enabled is slowing down any page that has any flash content, both in load time as well as scrolling speed.

Some tests out there have head-to-head-to-head comparisons with Flash off (or on-demand) of the Nexus One with Froyo versus iPhone 3GS versus some other HTC phone (probably with 2.1). It's interesting that while watching the Froyo Nexus go faster on page loads, for the most part, I didn't hear anyone mention that the Nexus one is equipped with a 1GHz processor and the 3GS only 600MHz. Froyo seems like a nice improvement in speed for some applications on the Nexus, but I think it's bringing it up to par rather than screaming to the bleeding edge.

It's going to be interesting (and much more relevant) to see comparisons against the next iPhone this summer.

The Samsung Gallery has 8GB, but that's pretty unusual.

I have a feeling you may have the situation backwards. Until 2.2 (excluding rooted phones), all apps have been installed in internal memory.

Your comparison is poor. If there were no speed difference between DVD-RW and a hard drive, why wouldn't you want to use them? It allows easy upgrades and the ability to swap out data if you're not able to upgrade enough. As opposed to a device that only has soldered-on memory, where, when it's full, you get to delete stuff. (And I'm pretty sure that hard drives are not soldered to motherboards these days.)

BTW, I don't think I implied that you'eve ver been able to install apps to SD. That's brand new and, like I mentioned about the Nav, only half-baked. Maybe because I used the word "required" - I didn't mean that it was required for app storage, I just meant in terms of a hardware spec that the devices came with little NVRAM and advertised they could be expanded via SD. I suspect Android doesn't spell out that requirement itself, it's just something these manufacturers are used to doing.

My comparison was just one of having to swap in and out rather than having everything installed at once. Even on the 8GB device, how much capacity can be used for apps? I was pretty sure there were some other limitations on these devices.

Having a swappable SD slot is certainly very nice, if it's in a convenient, hopefully externally accessible, location. Great for data, such as pictures, etc. But internally it's really just a swappable HD equivalent. How often will you want to swap your HD? Usually only when upgrading. You certainly don't want to be doing that to move from one set of apps to another.

So with all prior Android revs, not being able to put apps on SD was an extreme letdown because there was really no point to upgrading the SD storage. If the solution weren't half-baked and requiring specific apps support, you could just treat it like HDs on a computer and slap in a 32 or 64GB card and simply just leave it in there as if it were internal memory. Most people however will want to upgrade their phones before they will need to upgrade the storage, so Apple's solution isn't really much of a down side.

It's just another area where I think Google just played along with existing (HTC) hardware norms which were originally defined and pushed by newer WinMo specs. Shit, at least they don't store applications and data in bloody SDRAM like all WinMo devices used to do. People wonder why WinMo didn't go anywhere. Hint: everything about it sucks. It wasn't/isn't even as good as the Newton was back in 1997 in many respects.

Anyway, the benefit of removable storage isn't as a replacement for fixed storage. It makes a wonderful compliment, but in the case of the Android phones, it's really to make up for an otherwise lacking hardware spec (at least on the NVRAM side).

As far as I know, the specs between the internal memory and the external memory should be similar. Other than prior versions of Android having a stupid limitation against installing to SD, I can't see what your problem is. It allows upgradability at the expense of … the fact that if you remove the card your data goes away? Shocking.

Problems:

1. You can't install apps to SD cards. 2.2 will allow this. 2.2 hasn't been released yet.
2. Once 2.2 is out, you still can't install apps to SD cards. Apps have to opt-in and specifically support this.
3. The location of the SD slot on many phones makes the SD expansion suited ONLY for permanent app installation. See #1 and #2

The way I saw it, the SD card makes it up to the customer how much storage they want on their phone. They can buy the phone with 4GB, but upgrade to 32GB if they want. The problem is, of course, that 32GB cards are ridiculously expensive and hard to find, so you automatically limit most people to 4, 8, and 16GB capacities.

I would be more upset about it if I used my phone to listen to music or watch video, but I use my Zune HD for that, so I don't really care about the SD card stuff.

Another advantage of the card is that when I changed phones, all I did was pop the card out of the old phone and into the new one, and all my apps had their data right there. I didn't lose my save game for Robo Defense, for example.

But that wasn't your argument.


None of those problems have any relevance to your initial claim. I'm asking you why installing apps to SD is inferior to installing them to builtin storage.

1. "You can't" is irrelevant to why it would be bad if you could.
2. See #1
3. Suitability for a purpose is not a reason for its unsuitability. Quite the opposite, most would argue.

Completely out of the current conversation here, but I think this was brought up somewhere else in this super-long thread:

Apparently voice-activated dialing now works over bluetooth in 2.2.

I never made that claim. In fact, I specifically called out that using SD for storing apps, as a permanently installed alternative to NVRAM, was about its only good use. However that use is currently not possible.






Given that it's not possible, and given the stupid location of many SD slots, the SD card option on many of these phones has been totally useless. Again, because the inability to quickly swap cards makes them rather pointless for swapping data, like pictures from the camera, etc.

Once SD can be fully utilized as real built-in storage, it will be a fine alternative to soldered NVRAM and gives you the option (also as I've previously mentioned) of upgrading your storage capacity without upgrading to a new handset. However, I also mentioned that at the rate most phones are replaced, this isn't much of a concern. Someone will probably upgrade to a new phone in step with the release of larger capacity SD cards and/or the ability of the old phone to actually use those cards.

So, having had real built-in storage right from the start would have benefitted customers using Android handsets for over a year now. And for many would have benefitted them for 6 months to possibly another year - how long is going to take Froyo to get onto current handsets? How long will it take to revise every application installed already?

Oh, whoops. I totally misinterpreted what you wrote.