My first 24 hours (or so) on Droid X

I got my Droid X yesterday and, although I started researching the implications of a move from BlackBerry to Android over a week ago, I've figured out a lot in the last 24 hours and I want to share with everybody what I've done.

My old setup:

• I used Outlook 2007 for all my work mail, contacts, calendar and notes.
• My work email uses generic web hosting (BlueHost.com, no Exchange server involved) and I accessed it via IMAP using Outlook on my laptop and using the built-in email client on my BlackBerry
• I used BlackBerry Desktop Manager 6.0 to sync Outlook contacts and calendar to my BlackBerry Storm

My new setup is a little more complicated....

Calendar: I’m using Google Calendar Sync to keep my Outlook 2007 and Google Calendars in sync and then I use the standard Calendar app on the Droid X, which reads the Google Calendar. As an additional precaution, I publish my Outlook calendar to iCal Exchange (it’s a free WebDAV server) and I’ve also subscribed to that calendar in Google Calendar.

Email: I don’t try to sync my email. Instead, I kept my work email where it was and I use Outlook on my laptop and the K-9 Mail app on my phone. I also set up GMAIL to pull in my email from my web host using POP3 (but keeping a copy on the server) as a backup option. I’m using K-9 since it has better IMAP support than the native email client on the Droid X (technically, I could use either).

Contacts: I've not found a sync option that works yet. I exported my contacts from Outlook (don’t pay attention to the Google instructions: you’ll want to use the "Comma Separated Values (DOS)" option, not the "Windows" option to get all the contact fields) and then I imported them into GMAIL using their standard import function. The Droid contact list syncs with GMAIL, so any future contact changes will need to be manually synced between Outlook and Gmail until I find an application that I know works (there are no free ones that do this reliably, as far as I can tell).

Tasks: I was rarely using this in Outlook, so I won’t use it any longer.

Notes: I exported my Outlook notes to a CSV file and then I imported them into ResophNotes, a fee Windows application. ResophNotes syncs with SimpleNote, a free, secure web application and there are several Android apps that sync with SimpleNote. I (almost) randomly chose AndroNoter and it seems to work fine.

The biggest hiccup in this process was when the Google Calendar Sync application got stuck synchronizing for many hours and I had to kill it, uninstall it and then re-install it. It seems to be working OK now, but I will probably exit it before I hibernate my computer and try to remember to turn it back on when I wake my computer back up.

On a non-office note, I've also tried out a few different apps...

For Twitter, I first added my Twitter account to "My Accounts" on my Droid X, but I don't really understand what that does and I wanted a real Twitter client. (I used ÜberTwitter on my BlackBerry and it was awesome, but they don't have an Android version.) I tried out "Twitter for Android" and Tweetcaster, before settling on Touiteur, which seems to work pretty well.

For Facebook, I'm using the official Facebook app and it's better than the BlackBerry version.

The other notable apps I've installed through the Market are:

• Yelp
• Battery Widget
• FlickrFree for Android
• IMDb Movies & TV
• Google Translate
• Google Earth
• Poynt
• WorldMate (yay! although, it's not yet as cool as the BlackBerry version)
• Barcode Scanner (love it)
• Google Sky Map
• Pandora Radio

I've played with some of the above very little, so I'm not yet prepared to review them.

Droid

I've suffered with the first generation BlackBerry Storm since last year, so it wasn't that hard of a decision for me to leave BB behind and switch to Android. I ordered the Droid X last week, and though it's been on backorder, I received notification that it shipped today and I should have it in my hands by Wednesday. It'll be a vast improvement over my old phone, but I am dismayed at the lack of a utility to keep my new phone in sync with Outlook. If my company used Exchange or Google Apps, this wouldn't be an issue, but we don't use either.

My research has led me to one conclusion. I must stop using Outlook and move everything (mail, contacts, calendar and notes) to Google. I've been an Outlook user since before it was Outlook (when it was the mail client that came with Windows 95) and I have almost 1300 contacts, over 1700 appointments on my calendar and over 4GB of mail in PST files (although about half of that is offline copies of my IMAP mail), so choosing to abandon Outlook was not an easy decision, but I don't see any other good solution. Android phones were designed to work with Google and Google and MS do not like to play together.

Of course, I don't have this all worked out yet. Since there is no "Google Notes", I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my Outlook notes yet. And since half of my archived mail is in PST files, I'll have to figure out how I'll get those archives into gmail. I'll probably be happier in the long run, but it all looks pretty daunting to me right now.

If anyone has any suggestions, please comment here and let me know.

Outlook 2007 - Still Craptastic after a year

You can read my original post on this subject here.

A year and a service pack later and I'm still having problems with Outlook. The latest bug is one that's plagued me since Outlook 2007 came out. I sort my Inbox by the Received date with the most recent emails at the top. When I have several unread emails in my Inbox, I like to open the oldest one first, read it in a separate window, act on it by deleting it or moving it to another folder (or ignoring it) and then automatically moving to the email directly above the email I just read. In previous versions of Outlook, this always worked flawlessly, even if the option for it is named based on the assumption that everyone sorts their Inbox in the exact opposite order that I do. In Outlook 2007, the option is found by going to Tools, Options, Preferences tab, E-mail Options button and it's the select box at the top of the dialog: "After moving or deleting an open item:"; I set the option to "open the previous item" (which should be worded as, "open the item above").

The bug is that if you receive a new email while you are reading an older email, Outlook 2007 forgets where you are in your Inbox and as soon as you delete or move the email you're reading, it jumps past the "previous" item (the one immediately above it) and instead opens up the email you just received. I don't want to read that email yet and, worse, this behavior sometimes tricks me into believing that I've gone through all the items in my Inbox after I've read the email that just came in and nothing else is opened automatically.

I did a Google search and could find no mention of this problem anywhere. So, I'm posting it here in the hope that someone at MS has a search alert setup for Outlook 2007, will see this post, acknowledge that it's a bug and fix it. Come on, MS, this worked for years and now it's broke.

Revisiting to my original list from last year:

• ICS problem that was affecting Google Calendar - Either MS fixed the problem or Google Calendar worked around it, but it's working OK now.
  
• If I shut it down and then hibernate my computer too soon after the shutdown, when I start it up again, it tells me that it "failed to shutdown correctly" and I have to wait several minutes for a fruitless and pointless error check to complete before I can use Outlook again. - This occurs much less in recent weeks. I think it was addressed by a patch that dealt with plugins or addins that didn't release all their threads (or something like that).
  
• It crashes randomly - for the last crash, all I did was close a Note window and boom. - I still get random crashes, but not as many as I used to.
  
• It's terribly slow - much slower to start up, much slower to deliver mail. - Still terribly slow.
  
• I can't delete bad nicknames because the MS article that explains how to do this is wrong and I can't figure out where the new nickname file is stored. - MS finally documented that the new nickname file name for Outlook 2007. I think it's outlook.nk2, but I'm too tired to search for this now, but I deleted the file and I no longer have this problem or the next one.
  
• Because I can't delete bad nicknames, it has this annoying habit of not sending some emails - they get stuck in the Outbox because the email address is invalid but there is no visible warning to me that they're there.

Microsoft Outlook 2007: Craptastic

I've used every version of Outlook since it wasn't even Outlook (in 1995 or 96, it was Windows Messaging) and it's generally gotten better with each new release. No more.

I upgraded to Outlook 2007 recently because the previous version of Outlook was not correctly interpreting the time for appointment requests that were sent from my coworkers (who use Macs and iCalendar). They'd book a meeting with me for 10am and it would show up on my calendar at 4am instead. Also, the new version of Outlook promised calendar sharing without Microsoft Exchange (we're a small company so we use our ISP's POP3 mail instead of a dedicated email server).

Initially, Outlook 2007's calendar sharing feature worked fine. I could tell it to publish my calendar to our internet web server and I could then use Google Calendar to view that calendar when I worked at a client without my laptop. But then, after a few weeks, I realized that when I viewed my calendar on Google Calendar, it was sorely out-of-date. At first, I thought it was a problem with Google Calendar but I later figured out that it was a problem with the icalendar file (.ics file) produced by Outlook 2007; for some unknown reason, the file produced by Outlook 2007 is now produced in an invalid format that can't be parsed by Google Calendar or any other third-party ics validator (the UID field is broken into two lines which is a violation of the icalendar spec).

So, my primary reason for upgrading Outlook 2007, to take advantage of the calendar sharing features) is no longer working. Add to that, Outlook 2007 has several annoying habits:

• If I shut it down and then hibernate my computer too soon after the shutdown, when I start it up again, it tells me that it "failed to shutdown correctly" and I have to wait several minutes for a fruitless and pointless error check to complete before I can use Outlook again.
• It crashes randomly - for the last crash, all I did was close a Note window and boom.
• It's terribly slow - much slower to start up, much slower to deliver mail.
• I can't delete bad nicknames because the MS article that explains how to do this is wrong and I can't figure out where the new nickname file is stored.
• Because I can't delete bad nicknames, it has this annoying habit of not sending some emails - they get stuck in the Outbox because the email address is invalid but there is no visible warning to me that they're there.

I'm just hoping that Microsoft hurries up and delivers a service pack that fixes these problems soon.