After spending a week in France completely dependent on my modded [[android/Nexus_One]] for my Internet use, I have gained some insights into the future of mobile computing.

Besides niggles with the Google N1 device itself, the real “mobile Web” party poopers are unsurprisingly the network operators.

Screen blanks out on a call and I can’t get the hang up button, therefore charged for unused call time. :/

Device should detect voice mail and hangup to avoid expense. I can’t be the only one who does not care for voice mail.

Does not rotate on the home screen. I’m concluding that Android’s screen rotation is quite a UI mistake, compared to say Apple’s design.

Can’t figure out how to make incoming SMSes vibrate. After searching I find this seems to be a general gripe about Android 2.1. Oh, found the answer http://twitter.com/kaihendry/status/10142417024

The answer swipe is a bit awkward. Is there a button I can press instead I wonder.

I forgot my USB cable. So it made it impossible to share some new music from my Swedish friends. There must be an easier way to peer to peer.

Same goes for side loading applications. It’s not obvious how to share apps and that just sucks. There are plenty of cases where you want to peer since operators suck.

The photo picker for example with the Buzz integrated Google maps does not work. Crap. The buzz uploader does not give any progress status.

Progress status and resumable uploads is a must for crappy mobile connections.

How long was a call? How much was a call? No idea. This MUST be fixed. I must know how much I am spending.

Acquiring location and policy control is a bit all over the place on Android. For example the news & weather widget has it’s own little preference for “Use my location”. I need an easy central [[policy_control|Why_policies]]. I also want to control granularity and see transaction logs, since I don’t want the weather man to know exactly where I am. I want to feel in control.

I just wanted to mention, is it just me or is the http://touch.facebook.com/ seriously broken? When people comment on pictures I can’t seem to followup on the notifications. I mean, this is not hard people.

Finally, I have a 715GBP T-mobile bill to figure out after this week. I kept getting redirected to http://www.t-zones.co.uk if I enabled roaming so Internet did not even work. I also had something like 50 Euro Internet booster messages. I find this very confusing as I did call up T-mobile UK before departing to France to inform them I was travelling and to make sure what the price per meg was. They said over the phone it was 1.50GBP.

So did I do 400M of traffic from my phone from France? NO, Internet did not work even. I had to use 2EUR an hour WIFI from UCPA which was also pitifully unreliable and only worked in one room. :(

Avoid T-mobile. Make careful preparations if you need the Internet like myself. I think I will buy a PAYG Orange or SFR SIM next time in France.

I am also saddened to see no operator create some sort of Android app to help track expenses. It need not be a Java app. Just a usable Web one, unlike https://www.t-mobile.co.uk/service/your-account on a mobile.