Welp, decided to take TA up on his offer and buy his old EVO 4G. (Thanks TA!) So I am joining the twenty-first century and will soon be carrying a tiny computer in my pocket that will have roughly the power of that Pentium 3 I got right before college.
So now I'm looking at things I need to ensure an enjoyable Android experience. Brent already named SNESoid, and Ziiro mentioned Swype; these will probably be among the first things I install.
Stross just threw out a good app list too (Spartacus IDE and the Rhythm File Manager both sound like good picks), and of course there's every "essential apps" list on the Internet. Maybe I will finally find out just what exactly it is that made those birds so angry.
Syncing is an issue. At present I've got a primary desktop, a relatively-seldom-used laptop, an HTPC, and a work computer. I'd like to be able to get a good password wallet going, keep my litany of secure passwords stored under one secure password. And I suppose discussing specific apps for this does itself raise security issues as giving a list of ways I might store my passwords creates a smaller list of targets, but I've always found that robust, well-understood security methods are much better than security through obscurity anyway.
On Web passwords: well, there's Firefox Sync. It comes with the advantage that the data is encrypted client-side, so even though it's stored in the cloud it's gibberish without a private key.
That said, the private key is effectively just one more password (albeit a secure one), and if I ever lose my phone it's a question of (1) how quickly I notice my phone is gone and (2) how quickly I can get to another computer with the key stored on it and change my password and then all my other passwords. Which, granted, is a set of problems I will probably have if I lose my phone no matter WHAT locker's running on it.
I've also heard some good things about
Roboform, which seems to be more fully-featured and less browser-specific.
There's also the potentially-more-secure possibility of not syncing this shit in the cloud at all and just running a different, discrete password locker on each of my devices (really just primarily desktop and phone). This would be more tedious and time-consuming and introduce an additional potential point of failure, but on the other hand I'm a lot less worried about someone stealing my desktop than my phone, and if a service like Sync or Roboform was compromised and my master password changed I'd still have a way to access my password list. And if I ever needed a login on another computer, I could just whip out my phone and type out whichever pass I needed.
Any site that'll offer two-factor authentication I'll probably opt into, though if it's done by text that of course brings us back to the question of what if I lose my phone. (And does it really count as two-factor if my stored passwords are on the same device I receive texts on?)
Not that I'm losing phones all the time or anything; so far the only times I've ever misplaced my phone it's turned up in either the couch or my car. And that's a shitty little free just-a-phone phone; I find it hard to believe I'd be any more careless with an IMPORTANT phone. But, you know, just planning for failure conditions here.
As far as other stuff to sync: well, I suppose mainly it'd be mail and RSS.
I don't really use Gmail, and don't need to add it; all my various and sundry mail accounts support IMAP. (That said, is there a good mail app anyone can recommend? Hell, what about for desktop Linux while I'm on the subject? I've been using Thunderbird for a decade but it's no longer under active development; it Does What I Need It To but I'm keeping an eye out for clients that aren't feature-frozen-forever.) Guess that means I'll probably want a password wallet that supports a standalone mail app, not just my browser.
RSS -- guess I'll probably just go with Google Reader, unless anyone knows of any better solution. I don't much care for the Web interface; does anyone know of a good frontend that'll sync with it? (Or with anything else?) That goes for desktop Linux too. And I realize there's a good possibility that I'll wind up parking my RSS and my E-Mail in the same client.
My main objection to Gmail and Google Reader is probably Google itself. Google presents a bit of a conundrum in that it's got robust security options and some real versatility in the way of features, but (1) it's a huge target (again, insofar as "security through obscurity" is a valid argument, which it only sort-of is) and (2) Google collects data from everybody, everywhere, all the time and is itself one of the major privacy threats in this modern world. I can probably safely bite the bullet and start using Google Reader since it's not exactly a secret what blogs I read anyway, but I don't want to be tethered to Google for everything I do, even if I am running Google's OS and browser.
Other stuff? Emulators (NES, Genesis)? What other neat and/or useful shit should I put on this thing now that I'll be carrying a little Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy around in my pocket?
Also: Any good utilities for transferring contacts from one phone to another? I'm guessing Sprint's probably willing to do that for me and may not charge for it, but if there's a handy Bluetooth-based address book utility I can use instead, that would come with the advantage of doing it myself (and having a backup on my desktop in case my phone ever got lost or fried).
