A “smartphone” without applications isn’t a SMART phone, its just a phone.  I know I’ve complained about the lack of the Android Market in South Africa.  Apparently the guy at Google in South Africa who’s responsible for the Android Market has said that it’s coming soon. (I didn’t get a response to my email to him asking him for a comment, but that’s what I’ve been told by another local Android fan)

My favourite so far is Handango, but here’s my list of markets.  Worst of the pack (so bad I didn’t include them, were AndroidFreeware.mobi and AndroidFreeware.net – no “on device” experience, and a lot of really bad applications.)

Handango –

Handango has been around for years.  I’ve used them for apps on my old Palm pilot, Windows Mobile phone and now on my Android phone.  Their Android selection isn’t huge, but they have some fun games, apps, and tools.  If you go to http://handango.com from your device you’ll be prompted to install “InHand” – their Android application for browsing through their store and downloading apps.  They even have some EA games in their catalogue.

Rating: 4/5 – Good, but really not as good as Android Market – no way to be informed of updates to an application that you’ve downloaded already.

MobiHand –

I hadn’t heard of them until I started looking for alternative App stores. MobiHand seem to have a pretty extensive collection of applications for many devices.  They have a really well trimmed down mobile site at http://mobihand.com which you can use easily from your Android device.  My only complaint about the online store on the Android devices is that when the list of apps is too long and they start to split them into pages, the links to swap from one page to another are so incredibly small that it’s virtually impossible to click them without zooming in 3 or 4 times.

Rating: 3/5 – It’s good, has a start in the “on phone” experience for browsing for apps, but it’s not a happy experience and could use a few more apps.

Handmark –

Yet another new store to me, Handmark seem to have made a really clean site.  Their software selection seems a little less impressive than both MobiHand and Handango.  That could be because both their mobile and full website seem quite tough to use to find applications.   It looks good, but just seems to require too many clicks to get there.  However, they seem to be the only app store that is selling some of the great EA games like The Sims 3, Spore, Sim City and a bunch of others.

Rating: 2/5 – Not a great search or “on device” experience, but the EA games are a big plus.

Google Search –

Thanks to Google, I found my a great app for Geocaching, which had just been released for Android.  It’s called CacheMate.   I also found GeoBeagle, which is a free app.  That’s how I found Twitli – a really nice Twitter application.

Rating: 1/5 – You can get some nice things here, but it’s a lot of work.

Open Market –

I’ve written about this before – you can get to it at Open Market.  It’s great, but is missing a load of apps. Doesn’t do paid apps, and I still haven’t heard back from them about the app I wrote and submitted to them a few days ago.  Until it gets more fully fledged, it’s not going to be a real contender, but you can download it on your phone at http://tr.im/nX6E. 

Rating: 1/5 – because it’s just South African, has no paid apps, doesn’t let you register as an app developer or downloader.

I have the plain HTC Magic (i.e. not the “with Google” version), and have been learning how to type with it.  My first complaint was that the keyboard in portrait mode, the standard QWERTY keyboard became a little small to work with.  Especially if you have slightly wider fingers or not too accurate hand-eye-coordination.  So one of my first missions was to investigate the alternative keyboards.

From my initial reading, I’d not seen much that gave me great hope for any better keyboards in portrait mode.  One of the guys in our offices recently got a Samsung Omnia and was showing how he’d swapped to an “XT9” keyboard in portrait, and I wished that Android had been clever enough to do the same.  With little hope I clicked on the little “cog” and went through the following steps:

Click the “Setup” cog< /td>	Touch Input Settings	Click Keyboard Types
Keyboard Types List	Click “Compact QWERTY”	Enter Text

The result is a slightly fatter keyed QWERTY keyboard.  It’s not one I’m used to using so this didn’t quite work out too well for me.  Looking at the other option in the list of keyboard types (“Phone Keypad”) I just assumed it would be a quick way to enter numbers.  Boy was I wrong.  I followed the same steps as above, and chose “Phone Keypad” and came back to my browser and found this:

I now had a phone keypad just like the physical pad I used to have on my old iMate SP3.  The little “XT9”/”ABC” button on the left swaps between T9 predictive text and standard multiple-push ABC style entry.  To make things even cooler, if I tilt the phone on it’s side, it doesn’t stick with this keyboard but rather swaps to the standard QWERTY layout again because there is now enough space to use bigger keys, as follows:

Now I can have the best of both worlds.  Of course my fingers still sometimes make mistakes, but that’s where the clever “auto correct” type feature kicks in and saves the day.  For example, if I’m typing an SMS and I want to start with “Hello” but by mistake I miss the “h” and press “g” to start with, the following happens:

It actually lists alternative words that use keys near to the ones that I pressed, and selects the one it thinks is the most likely correction.  If I press “space”, it will automatically choose the word highlighted in green.  This is really useful and, as Leo Laporte said in an episode of TWIT (referring to the iPhone’s auto-correct feature) “as long as you trust in Steve, it will all work out” (slightly paraphrased). 

There are times when it’s not so great, as in the first time I typed in “Er” where it helpfully substituted the word “We”.  I didn’t realise that it thought I’d made a spelling mistake, so I happily sent off a rather cryptic sentence via Google Talk.  But that’s where Android have been really smart.  If I type in a word that the phone doesn’t recognise, I just have to tap on the word in the list of suggestions and it adds it to it’s dictionary and will use the new word in future.

I think the reason that the “T9” style keyboard is called “XT9” is because they’ve extended the standard “T9” to allow for similar mis-pressed keys.  So that the same ability that the landscape keyboard has to recover gracefully from my badly pressed keys extends to the “T9” keyboard too.

By mistake I also found out that doing a “long press” on a key gives you an “options” menu as follows:

For people who have to write Afrikaans stuff often, the ability to write é or ö at will could be great in the standard keyboard and when using the “ABC” mode of the “Phone Keypad”, it can be a nice time saver sometimes.

I recently started getting some spam from my “contact us” page on my site.  I’d set it up “cleverly” so that it doesn’t try to send the mail to/from the addresses entered into the form since I’d seen online contact forms being used for “evil”.  Unfortunately I’d not taking into account the possibility that someone might use the form to send me spam.

Since I’d completely ignored that fact, I had not bothered to do any kind of captcha or other check to see that there it was a human that was sending the mails.  To be honest, part of the reason was that I’d imagined that making a Captcha work well would require WAY too much effort and I just wasn’t up to the task at the time.

Now that I was getting spam, I needed to make a plan and make one quickly before I was swamped by the mail.  Fortunately I remembered reading about ReCaptcha.  Basically they’re scanning books and words that are partly recognised get used in their captcha images.  Then when people enter the values for the captcha’s they’re helping ReCaptcha improve their OCR quality.

I headed on over to their site and was AMAZED at how many plugins and code “modules” they’d built.  Just take a look at the ReCaptcha Resources – When it comes to languages they have PHP, ASP.Net, Classic ASP, Python, Perl, Ruby, Java, JSP, and Coldfusion support.  And they have plugins for Wordpress, MediaWiki, phpBB, Movable Type, Drupal, Symfony, Typo3, NucleusCMS, vBulletin, and Joomla.  That’s excluding the fact that they have an API that you could interact with directly.

On to the ASP.Net.  It’s REALLY easy.  You reference their DLL, then register a tag for their control on the page you want it to be placed on as follows:

<%@ Register TagPrefix="recaptcha" Namespace="Recaptcha" Assembly="Recaptcha" %>

Then you sign up for an API Key, and place the Captcha control in place as follows:

<recaptcha:RecaptchaControl
  ID="recaptcha"
  runat="server"
  PublicKey=""           
  PrivateKey=""
  />

Then finally you just put in a bit of code on the submission of the form that checks:

if (Page.Valid())

If it’s not valid, then the user entered the wrong captcha.

Three simple steps, and super quick to implement… Now my Contact page has a Captcha on it   I love it when things just work, and work simply.

I’m one of *those* geeks!  Yes, the ones who want the latest technology and become all obsessive about getting it.  The ones who make the lives of those around them miserable when waiting because they keep saying “When I get my X I’ll do Y” or “I just read that there’s now an awesome app for device X”.

Back in the day (4, or so years ago) I was a Vodacom customer, but I swapped to MTN to get the iMate SP3.  I then stuck with MTN at my next upgrade to get the HTC TyTn.  So when it came time for my upgrade this year, I looked around and found nothing really cool in South Africa.  But there was hope for the iPhone and with the possibility of one of our networks releasing an Android based phone.

Last month MTN released the HTC Dream, and there were rumours that Vodacom were going to release the HTC Magic.  Last week (on around the 12th of May) a number of local news sources reported that Vodacom was indeed going to be launching the HTC Magic and while most of them just repeated a press release, a few offered extra info like MyBroadband’s “Vodacom to launch Google G2 phone”.  They mentioned that it would be available next week (aka from the 18th of May).

Long story short, I spent over 3 hrs waiting on hold to speak to someone from Vodacom Direct only to find out that they knew nothing about the phone.  Neither did any of the 4 Vodashop’s that I tried to contact.  Everyone kept saying “It will be out mid June” despite the fact that there had been the press release and articles and even despite the fact that a Vodacom brochure outside each of the Vodashop’s had an ad for the phone saying “Launching May 2009”.

I was ready to write a really peeved post about how terrible Vodacom’s communications were (Did you know? They even got the phone number for Vodacom Direct wrong in their press release!) until a Vodacom representative (vodacom3g) replied to a post on the MyBroadband forums saying:

They are in the warehouse but we’re busy updating the firmware. (Otherwise you all bitch and moan again! )
So speak to your local shop (they all order their own stock). I’d venture it should be in the shops in the next few days.

[Link to post]

Soon after that they responded to a few other questions.  Suddenly I knew why there was a delay (although it didn’t explain why the various channels I’d tried earlier hadn’t known) and I was happy with the reason.

Hopefully the phones will have started shipping out to my local Vodashop in the next day or two and I’ll finally get my hands on one of these babies within the next week.