Importing contacts in CSV format into Gmail / Android

Importing contacts from a Blackberry CSV file require the following fields to be renamed

Company Name = Company
Work Phone = Business Phone

Field names that worked for me:

First Name,Last Name,Company,Business Phone,Mobile Phone

Vodafone Drivexone

Someone else believes in driving gamification:
http://www.androidiani.com/il-meglio-della-settimana-android/vodafone-drivexone-la-recensione-209962

Set lockscreen wallpaper with Muzei

This was tricky as it seems not to be documented anywhere.

It's possible to set the wallpaper of the lockscreen using Muzei, but it's not really intuitive:

Go in the screen settings.

Set BOTH wallpapers (home and lockscreen)

Select Live Wallpaper

Select Muzei.

Now the lockscreen wallpaper will be set along the home screen one.

Battery thief framed by app: all details inside

Following up from a battery draining problem, I've found a tool (BetterBatteryStats) that profiles battery usage in grater detail than the Android stock battery tool:

http://www.howtogeek.com/139592/how-to-find-the-root-cause-of-your-android-battery-problems/

Here is the profile of a full day plagued by anomalous battery consumption:

BetterBatteryStats has found RILJ to be the prime suspect:

It seems to be a known behavior as said here:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=31352333

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1878692
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=31352333



I've followed the instruction and disabled Google geolocalization:

After some time running, RILJ is still top in battery usage, but it's weight is comparable to other processes, and battery consumption is a reasonable 1%/h

All went fine for some days, when after sending an SMS and receiving a call, the issue surfaced again.

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=17383

I tried disabling "increase volume when in pocket".

My phone is running fine since then.

Who's stealing my battery?

My Galaxy S2 Plus always had a problem with battery consumption.

This is a normal daytime battery usage:

Then, sometimes out of the blue, battery usage increases drastically:

I still haven't found out the root cause.

I even upgraded to Android 4.2.2, with no luck: the issue still persists.

Here is the usage breakdown: what's causing Android to use more juice than the phone and the screen, usually the most power hungry subsystems?

I used CPU Spy, but it doesn't seem to be an issue of deep sleep.

Android Activity Recognition Battery Usage

I'm using an amazing android app called AutomateIt.
It's kind of a scheduler on steroids: it can execute actions based on triggers like time, position, connection status.
The latest release added support for "activity recognition": the phone should be able to tell if you're walking, driving, or standing still.
I defined a rule that turns on Bluetooth while I'm driving, so I can use my car hands free system.
It actually works, but at what price?
Here are the effect on a Samsung Galaxy S2 Plus.
This a night with an activity recognition rule defined: check the last hours in the graph: battery depletes at a rate of 1% every 4 hours.

Here is a night without any activity recognition: a 1% of battery juice lasts for 5 hours.

It seems that using activity recognition shorten you battery running time by 20%.

Torque Logging Tutorial

Select "Settings" from the main screen menu.

 Select "Data Logging & Upload"

 Touch "Select what to log"

 Using "Add PID to log" select which values you want to collect

 Back to the previous screen, scroll down to select "Also log selected sensors"

 Connect to the car, go to the "Realtime Information" screen and select "Start Logging"

 When you trip is over, select "Stop Logging" and go to the Map View screen.
Use "Select recorded trip" to load your previous log file.

Then select "Send trip file.."
Select CSV, and copy the file.

Comparison of GPS performance across different Android devices

I had the chance to test GPS on a Galaxy Mini 2 and a Galaxy S2 Plus.
The test was done in the same place, one phone after the other.
Both phones didn't have any data connection, cellular of Wi-Fi, so positioning was done using only plain GPS.
Here is the Galaxy Mini 2.
Locking took 60 seconds with 5 satellites.

The Galaxy S2 Plus got its lock in 3 seconds with 16 satellites.

Note that on both phones, compass was way off.

Using Torque with the Yaris Hybrid

Being a geek inside, I just feel uncomfortable without some kind of a "perfmon" of a given system.
The Yaris Hybrid, with its HSD engine, is an interesting system that deserve to be observed.
Modern (2001+) cars, have a data bus where performance data are collected and broadcasted for diagnostic purposes.
This bus (the CAN bus) can be accessed through an ODB-II port.
To collect and display these data you'll need:

• an android phone
• an OBD-II bluetooth adapter
• Torque, an android app that can collect, record and display engine data from the car data bus.

I bought this adapter from amazon .

The OBD-II connector is located under the steering wheel, near the motor hood knob.

I plugged the adapter into the OBD-II port

I paired the adapter with the phone using bluetooth.

PriusChat has a thread about the PIDs needed to collect data from an HSD3 engine: http://priuschat.com/threads/geniii-prius-custom-pids-for-torque-app.98693/
Download the Prius3 PIDs .csv file
Put the .csv file into the .torque/extendedpids directory on your android phone.
Run Torque and select:
Settings / Manage extra PIDs / Add predefined set
Select the .csv filename you just copied.

Now, with the engine on, data begins to flow on the "Realtime Information" Torque screen:

Seeing data in realtime is fun, but the real game is collecting it for offline study.

To configure logging, go into the settings menu:

Settings / Data Logging & Upload / Select what to log
and add some PIDs like

• Engine RPM
• State of Charge
• Batt Pack Current Val

Note: you'll have to scroll down to the Trip Recording section and check "Also log selected sensors". If this option is not selected, the log file will contain only GPS data and no engine data.

You can start and stop logging from the Realtime Information screen, using the menu.

Once you have collected a trip log, you can view it from the "Map View" screen.

Attack of the QWERTY Androids

Android phones with full QWERTY physical keyboards are virtually non-existent.
Samsung has one low-spec phone targeted at the young chat addicted, HTC has none, the last Motorola is the years-old Droid.
No interesting phones in sight either.
As more and more businesses are ditching Blackberry as Yahoo in http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2409780,00.asp, someone in charge will finally realize that doing serious email work on a touch keyboard is false promise.
Will we see more QWERTY Android phones in the near future?

The Mobile Browser Syndrome

Ever since I've become acquainted with browsing the web on my Android phone, I've began showing the following unvoluntary behavior: while browsing a web site on my desktop PC, I just double click the text column, expecting it to zoom full screen, as it happens on a mobile browser.
I've come to the idea that it wouldn't be bad.
And it seems I'm not the only one.
What browser will be the first one to actually implement it?
I'd bet on IE, as probably it'll use the same code base for the desktop and the tablet version in Windows 8.

Motorola Defy wireless performance

Following my previous post, I've done some testing on my phone wi-fi performance compared to a full-blown PC.
Setup is the same as in the previous post, even the phone location is the same as the previous laptop location.
Data transfer was between the Defy and the desktop PC, wire-connected at gigabit speed to the Netgear WNDR3800.

Speed	MB/s
2.4Ghz@54Mbs	2.5
2.4Ghz@130Mbs	2.6
2.4Ghz@300Mbs	2.6
5Ghz@300Mbs	---

So, while the Defy supports 801.11n, it takes no advantage of it.
The 5Ghz network is not even recognised and the 300Mbs connection was not very reliable, I had to retry a couple of times before getting a full transfer.

The zip lockscreen

Look at this Android lockscreen:

it may be stylish and minimalist, but do you think that your grandma could understand that she need to touch the circle and drag it around?
This is a geek oriented lockscreen, not one targeted at the mass market.

The iphone lockscreen is lightyears ahead:

I've seen children unlocking the phone the first time they've seen it without anyone telling them how.

I think Android needs an equally strong UI metaphor to appeal to a broad user base.
What can you use to convey the sliding action?
Take a look at this (badly) photoshopped (actually GIMPed) proof-of-concept:

I bet even the most techno-phobic can understand that he needs to pull and slide the zip.

Note: at the first try I've used the image of a zip from a blue jeans, but the risk of a two-way joke was too high, and that's not the spirit of this post.

Playo Android

This could be an interesting piece of hardware: an android phone, minus the phone, with HDMI output and USB ports.
If, as they say, it will be sold for less than 200€, and it won't have a locked firmware, it could become the ultimate living room geek toy.
It has a full keyboard, while others don't, and by installing a full linux distribution on it (like some android phones) you could have your own miniserver.
I assume that, given its phone roots, power consumption is still as little as a phone.

Sending commands to your PC from your Android phone.

You'll need: ConnectBot (free on the android market) on the phone, linux on the pc (I've used Ubuntu, but any will do).
First, make sure ssh is enabled PC side. If you PC has a public internet address you'll be able to send commands to it from the other side of the globe, otherwise, as my own setup, you can use the home wi-fi to control it from other rooms.
On the phone, using ConnectBot generate an RSA key pair.
Be sure to check "load at startup".
Then export the public key to your PC (by means of copy/paste via email for example).
On the PC, in your home dir of create a file named .ssh/authorized_keys as follows:

command="sudo shutdown -h now" ssh-rsa AAAAxxxxxc2EAAAADAQABAAAAgQDbTVtZxxxxRz+8EINWYbYvsD/dla30xxxx8LJiQrzgoLmFdTmM7FW+X//dmijMli8xxxx4yWVq/UTeGSDpc/drT4H3Csj7SSLnDksjxxxZqAZwTIncxxxxwu9VL5O6fqnxOWBh2+efnZV3+e2tbiGhqQ== username

You can put any command as you wish as the first token, and you'll need to paste your public key after ssh-rsa.
Create a new ConnectBot connection on the phone. Be sure to select public key authentication using the key you've generated before.
You can even create a shortcut on the phone desktop referring to the connection. This way with a single click on the phone you can issue commands on the pc.