Another 15 minutes

An Android phone will scan your entire memory card for music and images and display them as available media in the players and albums, but maybe you don’t want to show all media but only specific folders. There is a solution for this. To hide media in a specific folder from the player apps do this:

1. Windows: Open notepad and save an empty file as filename “.nomedia”. Linux: In a terminal window create a file called “.nomedia” by typing “touch .nomedia”.
2. Connect your Android phone by USB and copy the file into all folders you wish to hide from the media scan.
3. Done.

The media (music, images and movies) contained in this folder will now be ignored and not show up in your MP3 or movie player on the phone. To access and play them you can use a file manager, like Astro File Manager.

I have had my HTC Desire Android phone for a while now and I have a few recommendations for free, good, useful, nice and fun apps & games for your phone. In Sweden we only have free apps in the market so far, so these recommendations are only based on free apps. Here’s my list so far…

Android applications:

• Astro File manager. A useful file manager app so you can browse your files and folders.
• Transdroid. Monitor and control your uTorrent client at home on your mobile phone.
• MixZing Media Player. Pretty good media player for you music.
• Ringdroid. Create ringtones from your favorite songs.
• Weather widgets (yr.no). Weather widget and clock from yr.no.
• Swedish dictionary.
• Scandinavian keyboard.
• Handcent SMS. Very nice SMS application, can be modified to look any way you want.
• WordPress. Manage your WordPress blogs from your mobile phone.
• Layar Reality Browser. A fun augmented reality browser.
• Köp & sälj på Tradera. An ebay-like app for Swedish Tradera (eBay).
• aDyno. An app for your car, it can measure 0-100 times, laptimes, g-forces, show graphs and record data.
• Advanced Task Killer. Kill applications that are running in the background.
• Trafikinfo. Show’s traffic information on maps, roadworks and other notes (Sweden).
• Bambuser. Stream video in real-time from your mobile phone.
• Google Maps.
• Yr.no. Weather application from yr.no.
• Remote RDP Lite. Remote desktop application.
• Twitter.
• Shazam. Application that identifies songs by listening to them.
• 3G Watchdog. Monitors your data traffic.
• Google Goggles. Google image search.
• Mix Megapol. Stream from MIX Megapol radio station (Sweden).
• SMS-Biljetter. Manage yall our SMS-tickets in Sweden with this app.
• Cinema. Movie player.
• Compass.
• AFT Supernytt. Aftonbladet news (Sweden).
• IDG.se. IT news from idg.se.
• Prisjakt. Compare product prices and read reviews (Sweden).
• Week Number Widget. Displays the current week number.
• tv.nu. TV-guide (Sweden).
• Nimbuzz IM & Voice. MSN, ICQ, Facebook chat and more with one app.

Android games:

• Jewels. You probably know it, classic game.
• Bistro cook. Cook the right ingridients to serve a complete dish.
• Air Control. Direct airplanes to the right runway, very nice.
• SuperYatzy Free. Yes, Yatzy.
• Robo Defense Free. Your avarage tower defense game for the phone.

Yesterday I got my new mobile phone, an HTC Desire. It’s just amazing, such a great interface and super fast with so much capabilities. I think it’s better than Iphone in so many ways, i love Android and what HTC has done with it. There are a few glitches with some widgets, but nothing major so far. I will have great fun with this phone and with can do so much, no limit with seems. Top notch! I’m on a horse.

Ever since I noticed that TouchFlo 3D (also known as Manila) got updated on newer phones, but not on my HTC Touch HD, I have been thinking of doing it myself with one of the multiple custom ROMs available for this phone, made by enthusiasts of the Windows Mobile community. The newer versions of Manila has alot more nice functions and much better looks that I want, my phone comes with version 1.3 so it’s pretty basic. The procedure seemed a bit complicated though, and I didn’t want to risk my warranty on the phone. But after e-mailing HTC asking whether or not the HTC Touch HD (Blackstone) would ever get an upgrade to Windows Mobile 6.5 and newest version of Manila and they replied…

- We currently have no knowledge of any planned updates for the HD. It is unlikely to be updated to 6.5 or beyond as Microsoft have made some hardware restrictions on devices that can use 6.5 that the HD does not meet.

… I decided to go ahead with my plans, since I know that many people use Windows Mobile 6.5 and later versions of Manila on their Touch HD’s and it runs just fine. I’m gonna go for Dutty’s “Leo” ROM with Windows Mobile 6.5 and Manila 2.5, since Dutty seems to be the most popular and skilled ROM cook out there, and here’s a step-by-step guide on how I did it.

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Recently I noticed that the camera in my HTC Touch HD showed I had only 59 photos left until my memory card would be full, which was strange because I had only used about 3.5 Gb out of the 8 Gb available. This seems to be a bug on the phone when approaching about half of the capacity of your memory card, for most users this might happen when the amounr of free space is closing down to 4 Gb, a patch for it should be available from HTC sooner or later I guess. After searching some information about this problem I stumbled upon some ideas that might fix the problem, one being to connect the phone to your computer with USB cable in disk mode and do a normal defrag of the drive. In my case this did not work. Another idea was to save more files to the card so the amount of free space would be less than 4 Gb, thus forcing the decive to recognize the 4 more gigabytes that are available. This worked better and here’s how I did it…

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Here is a small collection of applications I recommend and find either very cool or useful for your HTC Touch HD or any other Windows Mobile phone. These applications will unlock hidden powers inside your phone and make it even more user friendly better looking. So here’s my list, in no particular order…

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On April 7th HTC released a new ROM version for the HTC Touch HD for Europe (English (Pan Europe and UK), Italian, Dutch, French, Finnish, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish). The fixes are:

1. Updated the Connection Setup Database.
2. Improved emergency call connections while using Airplane Mode.
3. The GPS position updating speed has been enhanced.
4. A Title bar display flicker in TouchFLO 3D has been corrected.
5. Fixed multiple browsing issues.

I will try to backup all my data and then upgrade to this new 1.56.413.0 version, from the current 1.14.413.0 version and update this post with the results. I hope some bugs are fixed in the mp3-player also.

Update: I have now installed the update. The update itself with without problems, but I encountered several problems with this new ROM.

1. Memory card kept getting disconnected after scanning for music, and couldn’t be mounted again until a reboot. Memory card was not available and not found.
   
2. Phone hanged during media synchronization, had to remove the battery, I hope it was a one time deal.
3. WIFI was not available in the communication manager, worked after a hard reset.
4. Phone was very slow after Windows Update attempt, had to reboot.

I did a hard reset of the phone, clearing the memory and doing the first setup once again. I also deleted all my music from the memory card (deleted the Music folder) and transferred it again with Windows Media Player. For now it seems to be working, the memory card is still there.

The contacts synced with no problem, along with the contact images, but you have to re-create the favorite-list manually.

It’s a shame HTC have these difficulties with ROM updates and bugs, I never experienced this with Nokia phones. I hope this is working like it should now, and that the most annoying bugs of the previous version being fixed along with the improvements they listed. But so far I am not impressed, it took me several hours to get it working somewhat satisfactory.

Update #2: I’m glad to see that the annoying bug with the TouchFLO 3D music player not being able to scroll through large playlists is now fixed. And also there were no problems for me to sync my music with Windows Media Player, I didn’t even have to reboot for the playlist to update and all songs worked, at last!