2011-09-21 From iPhone to Android

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< On the forums, there are powerusers who manage to fill up their phone with apps. Apparently, the Gio isn't meant for those people. If you're one of those, you want to be ''rooting'' your Samsung Gio. It's a process similar to jailbreaking your iPhone, but since the Android phone manufacturers aren't as tight-assed, it's not really as invasive and/or complicated as the typical iPhone jailbreaking. See also [http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1111414 the xda-developers forum for instructions on jailbreaking the Samsung Galaxy Gio].

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> On the forums, there are powerusers who manage to fill up their phone with apps. Apparently, the Gio isn't meant for those people. If you're one of those, you want to be ''rooting'' your Samsung Gio. That way, you can delete some of Samsung's stock apps. It's a process similar to jailbreaking your iPhone, but since the Android phone manufacturers aren't as tight-assed, it's not really as invasive and/or complicated as the typical iPhone jailbreaking. See also [http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1111414 the xda-developers forum for instructions on jailbreaking the Samsung Galaxy Gio].


This is part 7 of my series where I document going from an iPhone to Android 2.3, running on the Samsung Galaxy Gio.

From version 2.2, Android offers the HotSpot functionality. There's another way, namely using the phone as a 3G modem via USB. This is called tethering, and OS X supports this out-of-the-box, just follow the instructions on TodayOnTech.

Another thing I bumped into, is the lack of audiobook support. doubleTwist doesn't really sync this properly. So, you copy them manually, which is not really a big deal for me. However the default media player will list these as music, which it most definitely isn't. The Android blog has a solution for this, creating a zero-length .nomedia file in your SD-card its /Audiobooks directory. Clumsy, in my opinion. The mediaplayer could look at the ID3-tags of the MP3 files, and see that they're marked as 'spoken word' or 'audio book'.

Another missing thing of the stock music player is the lack of control from the lock screen. From a locked iPhone, you can doubleclick the home button and the player buttons will pop up if music is playing. There are a number of Android apps that simulate this, for instance bTunes, mixZing and Lithiumplayer.

Perhaps a solution is to use iTuneMyWalkman, if doubleTwist continues to bug me, then I'll try this solution.

Rooting

On the forums, there are powerusers who manage to fill up their phone with apps. Apparently, the Gio isn't meant for those people. If you're one of those, you want to be rooting your Samsung Gio. That way, you can delete some of Samsung's stock apps. It's a process similar to jailbreaking your iPhone, but since the Android phone manufacturers aren't as tight-assed, it's not really as invasive and/or complicated as the typical iPhone jailbreaking. See also the xda-developers forum for instructions on jailbreaking the Samsung Galaxy Gio.