I finally broke down and replaced my long in the tooth Palm Treo 650 with a T-Mobile G1 (a.k.a. HTC Dream). The only major complaint I had with the Treo was stability. It used to like to reboot itself about once each day...

So far I'm mostly working on replicating all the functionality that my Treo had. Almost everything on the G1 meets or exceeds the capabilities of the software I had on my Treo. Some software has both improvements and regressions compared to the Treo, but overall I'm pretty happy so far.

Cyanogen 4.1.999

I only ran the stock firmware long enough to install the Cyanogen firmware, so I can't talk about all specific details that are different from the stock firmware.

There are some interesting improvements behind the scenes, though. The Cyanogen firmware uses compcache and Con Kolivas' BFS process scheduler. I'm already a heavy user of compcache on my laptop, and I've been testing the BFS scheduler as well.

I've really only had one issue so far with the 4.1.999 firmware. Every once in a while all the icons disappear from the launcher and the phone has to be rebooted to get them back. It seems to be a known issue with the experimental firmware. I doubled the size of the compcache swap space and I didn't see the problem for a few days. I can only assume that the race condition is less likely when the phone is more responsive.

Neat Things I'd Like To Do With Android

I would like to get rsync and cron running on it. I think it would be very nice to have automated wireless backups that are always likely to be in my pocket. I'm hoping to be able to do it without having to rely on having Debian on my SD card.

OpenVPN might be interesting, but I don't currently have a real need for it. A few years ago this would have been a top priority for me, though.

android, cyanogen, g1, t-mobile, k-9 mail, chatteremailThe single most disappointing application that came installed on my T-Mobile G1 was the default email application. The very first thing I noticed was the horrendous IMAP support. I have a very well organized mail account. I might have a have dozen or so folders at the top of my folder hierarchy. The Android email application just flattens out all of my 100+ sub folders out into a huge, difficult to navigate list.

K-9 Mail

My search for a better mail app lead me to K-9 Mail. K-9 is a fork of the stock Android email application with quite a few improvements.

K-9 still flattens out my folder list but lets me choose which folders I would like to display and sync. Fortunately, I really only want quick access to five or six folders while I'm on the go.

Push Email

The beta release of K-9 supports the IMAP IDLE feature. This allows it to stay connected to the IMAP server so that it can instantly be notified when a new message arrives. This is much better for me than waiting up to 5 minutes to see a new message arrive.

Improved Message List

K-9's message list view is a huge improvement over the stock mail client. The view is much more condensed and looks like it fits about twice as many messages on the screen at the same time.

So far there is only one ChatterEmail feature that I miss. It had a summary view that displayed emails from multiple mailboxes on one screen in chronological order. Each message was color coded so that you could very easily tell which account each message belonged to. I saw a few mentions of ChatterEmail in the K-9 issue tracker, so I know I'm not the only one who misses this feature.

See also:

• My New Android Phone and Cyanogenmod 4.1.999
• Android, K-9 Mail, and IMAP IDLE (Push Email)
• Dirt Cheap Extended Battery for the T-Mobile G1/HTC Dream
• Converting the Nook Color to a Full Blown Android Tablet is Stupid Easy
• Official CyanogenMod Release for the Nook Color Has Working Video Playback
• Displaying Conky on an Old Android Phone