Using a smartphone – III
So, now that I’ve got an HTC Desire, what’s important as I set it up?
Obviously, I’ll work out how to sync things to my computers (a home desktop and work laptop). However, I want to describe two things that I hope will keep it a tool serving me, not my master.
Firstly, the ‘scenes’ feature of an HTC.
My phone has seven ‘panels’, in which I can drop in links to programs/apps, shortcuts to files/contacts and even application widgets. Together, they are considered a ‘scene’. Better than that, it has the ability to store different scenes. At the moment, I’ve got a home and a work scene. The home scene includes a front panel with links to mail, people/contacts, messages (SMS), Bible software (I’ll write another post about this), to do list, cardio trainer (for my bike rides) and foursquare. Other panels are for social networking (Facebook, Twitter, blog reader), SMS messages, diary, games and Friend Stream (an HTC thing that combines Facebook and Twitter. I’m not sure about this yet).
My work scene has on the home panel my diary, Bible app, to do list and people/contacts. Other panels have my work email and fuller diary widget. I can’t get to my Facebook or Twitter or games without more of a deliberate choice. I know myself, and know that I need to do this to prevent procrastinating.
Over time, I imagine these different scenes will settle down as I stop adding apps and get on with life. I plan to tweak the ‘home’ scene for when I’m on holiday, with more restricted access to email, Facebook and SMS etc.
Secondly, while it’s great to have a big data plan so I don’t have to worry about downloading too much, I still want to be in control of when I get notified about things. It’s great that my phone can be always on, always connected, always tethered, but I don’t want it to run my life. So, I’ve had to play with how it set up my email. I’ve got three email accounts – one for home, one for work and a Gmail one for putting into websites and all other stuff. My phone came with two email apps, one called Mail and one GMail.
The Mail app was like any email client that I could set up with multiple accounts and it would download mail when I started the app. The GMail app was, not surprisingly for an Android phone, more tightly integrated with GMail online. In particular, if I read an email on my phone, it would be marked read online and vice versa. Truly integrated. The problem I found was that it would notify me everytime I got an email. I’ve since discovered that turning off the ‘sync with Gmail’ feature refers to the automatic syncing of email, not the link between my phone and the website. Perfect.
Now, what about my other email addresses? Well, both my work and home ones are managed through Google domain apps. Which means the web interface for these emails is identical to Gmail and, even better, the Gmail app can access them in the same way.
So now all my email is accessible on my phone. I refresh when I hit refresh, and my phone already knows if I’ve read it online.