Oh, Google…

I hate it that I love you.

I have been using Google Apps for Domains for my dollmont.net mail for years. My mail, calendar, contacts–basically, my life, are all right there. It made going to Android a no-brainer. Google syncs with all of that beautifully.

Except when it doesn’t.

Living in Ho Chi Minh City means having to carry a map with you everywhere. Google Maps works surprisingly well, and I use it all the time. The one problem I’ve had is that “My Maps” on my computer doesn’t sync with Maps on Android, because Maps on Android doesn’t support syncing with accounts from Google Apps for Domains. So I started looking for a solution.

One idea is that you can add another Google account to GMail and link it to your Apps for Domains account. This works, and it’s how I got access to Google Buzz (which also doesn’t support Apps accounts). It’s a little bit of hoop-jumping because you either have two email accounts to check or you have to set up the GMail account to forward all mail to your Apps account.

Even though this setup works properly with things like Buzz, it still doesn’t work right with Maps. I was still unable to view My Maps on my Milestone. Google says that you simply need to add the GMail account under Accounts & Sync in setup, but this never worked for me.

Today, I took the radical step of factory resetting my phone and adding the GMail account as the primary account and the Apps account as the secondary. Lo and behold, My Maps now works! I can view all my saved points and, what’s even better, I can plot routes on my laptop, save them to My Maps, and view them on my phone! Wonderful!

If only I had a calendar…

It turns out that Android 2.x only supports calendar syncing to the primary account. In this case, that’s now my placeholder GMail account and not my Apps account, which is where all the calendar data is stored. Right now, I’m setting up calendar sharing between the two accounts so that the GMail account will ‘see’ the events in the Apps account, and I hope that works.

There are times when I wish their motto was “Don’t be frustrating” instead of “Don’t be evil”.

A new Milestone

For me, the iPhone vs. other debate ended when I walked into a TMobile store and put hands on the G1. I picked it up and never really looked back. I loved that phone. Friends with iPhones would show off their latest and greatest app, and I would just smile. The G1 did everything I needed it to do, and more. It was a great phone.

I speak of it in the past tense because I recently picked up a Motorola Milestone. For those of you who don’t know, the Milestone is the international (or GSM) version of the Motorola Droid. I had a number of choices of Android phones here but chose the Milestone because of it’s excellent design and superb hardware keyboard.

Smartphones really change the way you work. I use my phone as a biff, a simple way to tell me when new mail has arrived. Oddly, even if I’m on my laptop, I grab my phone to check new mail. It’s simply much faster to pre-process the inbox from the phone. I just tap the messages that need to be archived and hit ‘archive’. I tap the messages that are obvious crap and hit ‘delete’. It takes seconds to pare everything down to just what I need to read. And because I use GMail, the changes I make to my inbox on my phone are almost immediately reflected on my laptop. Efficient mail handling.

Viet Nam is a bit different when it comes to phones and service. Here, you tend to purchase the phone you like then head off to a provider to get a SIM card. Some providers offer discounts on certain phones. Some providers, like VietTel, have exclusives on certain phones, like the iPhone. Since you have to buy the iPhone at VietTel, it’s assumed you’ll get service there. But you can really get service anywhere.

Part of the reason for this is that there’s no CDMA here–it’s all GSM. Phones inter operate between networks. Pull out your SIM card, drop it in a different phone, and you’re good to go. Don’t like the service you’re getting from MobiPhone? Go get a VietTel SIM. A side effect of this, of course, is that people’s numbers sometimes change numerous times. Some people have multiple SIM cards. There are phones here with multiple SIM card slots. It can get very confusing.

Back to the Milestone. This is an excellent phone. It’s currently running the 2.1 version of Android, and I’m eagerly awaiting the update to 2.2. The phone is blazingly fast and very responsive. Currently, I only use EDGE data because I can almost always find good wifi when I need to connect to the net from the phone. The only issue I’ve had is that the phone sometimes decides to spontaneously reboot. It almost always happens overnight, and typically happens every 3 to 4 days. I’m hoping the 2.2 update fixes this problem.