Androids And iPhones

I’m very happy with my newish Android phone. I got an HTC Incredible (ridiculous name) on Verizon, and all seems well, apart from a couple of things.

Firstly, when I upgraded to Android 2.2 (“Jamba Juice” or something), it all worked OK except that the earpiece didn’t work any more. I could talk and be heard, but I couldn’t hear anything when I held it to my ear. Switching on the speakerphone worked, but that’s not viable. I called the tech support, and after a backup and factory reset, the problem was still there. Verizon sent me a replacement unit, along with a Fedex envelope,

I now have a problem with the SD card. It showed a message that it was mounted read-only, and many applications use it. In fact, many won’t work at all without it, a fact I discovered when I tried to use the otherwise excellent Laputa ebook reader while at the gym.

I was looking forward to another Lovecraft short story, but instead I was forced to read SF Weekly, where I found an article about an iPhone app which warns you when your gonads are being zapped by the lethal radiation that all mobile devices emit. The article did mention the lack of evidence that the “radiation” does any harm at all, but that doesn’t stop the app developer (who is charging a hefty $9.99 for the Blackberry version) saying, “I think there’s a smoking gun there already”. I was lucky to spot the article, sandwiched as it was between hydroponics equipment ads and strip club Fleet Week Special Event flyers. I could have read the other magazines, Car and Driver and Sports Illustrated, but no.

The SD card issue is annoying, but there seem to be several things to try to fix it, including reformatting, deleting a couple of files and some other bits and pieces. We’ll see.

Cassie’s iPhone 3G is driving her mad. First she updated it to iOS 4, which made it slow to a crawl. The emergency bugfix update to iOS 4.01 seemed to make it a bit less sluggish, but now it drops nearly every call. She makes a call, and after 2 seconds it drops. She receives a call, it drops. It’s pretty pathetic, and we don’t know if it’s Apple’s fault or AT&T’s. Only tedious tech support calls will tell.

Update: Popping the mini-SD card out, plugging into my Ubuntu laptop with an SD card adapter, copying what I wanted to keep and formatting it at FAT16 with Gnome Partition Editor seemed to do the trick.