Lotus, Sound, and Life

Tripp Black's Blog

Android Joins the Traveler

Tripp Black  October 2 2010 11:15:41 PM
From reading Ed Brill's blog today (www.edbrill.com), it appears the Android e-mail client is coming in November (2010) and is only a month or so away. Since IBM built their Android e-mail client from scratch using SyncML, it should be good to go at a time where Android and their Telcos will be pressed to remove one of the two existing e-mail clients for the wonderful toy - the one that mirrors the iPhones "Exchange" ActiveSync Lotus Traveler-based e-mail, contacts, and calendaring. M$ is suing (blogs.technet.com) for it's implementation of mail sync and group calendaring.

Great time for some IBM commercials trumpeting their Android e-mail client, the Lotus Traveler server, and the other phones the Lotus Traveler server supports "natively".

As a fan of the Android, I love the open platform that, from my view, has mostly been liberated from software maker and Telco strong-armed restrictions that has hampered my beloved iPhone . . .

- Installing apps is restricted to Apple's iTunes marketplace (unless you jail-break) for the obvious reason.
- Jail-breaking works but isn't allowed (thanks to the "open" community that figures out how).
- I can only Skype text due to a restrictions place on Skype.
- I cannot view/run Adobe Flash on my Apple iPhone, thanks to two vendors fighting.
- I cannot use my iPhone to connect to two Traveler-based accounts. This is, at least, just a feature, software limitation. Like my old BlackBerry I used, you can only have one BES account.
- Since I'm on an older iPhone, I cannot talk on the phone and look-up a coworker or client contact because it's not multi-tasking (not local - but via Global contacts via my data plan). That will come to me though when I upgrade to either a new iPhone or Android. :-)

And then there are the AT&T service issues:
- Phone calls never arrive, but the voice mail does.
- The phone call does arrive, but the voice mail takes several minutes to hours to arrive to the phone.
(Since a Treo, a BlackBerry, and multiple iPhones all display both of these issues, this is clearly an AT&T issue which they've never admitted when we complained and we' just live with to use the iPhones. Thankfully the latter seems to happen a lot less over the last year.)

It's about time to upgrade our phones at work again . . .
Unfortunately, we still have other iPhones and are currently locked into AT&T obviously as Apple's sole US provider. I was leaning to the Android. However, I did not realize that loading apps on the Android was restricted to AT&T's marketplace. Not nice, again.

So, it looks like the arena is as fluid as ever with the old stalwarts still trying to bully the other players in the sandbox . We're watching, we're tired of thumbs pressing on us, and we'll be buying . . .