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Migrating your SMS, Call logs, and APNs from your old Android Phone to your new Nexus One

I just upgraded my HTC Hero Android phone to the new Nexus One (N1) from Google. First impressions are really great, and there are plenty of in depth reviews out there so I won’t cover that part. On the other hand, what I wanted to do was to transfer all my SMS text messages, the call logs and the access points (APNs) from the Hero to my new N1. Unfortunately, Google has upgraded the format of Android’s SMS storage as the Hero is running Android 1.5 while the N1 one is on v.2.1, so just creating a backup on the Hero and restoring the messages on the N1 was not possible without some tweaks. So far, this has been tested only for HTC Hero to Nexus One, but I’m sure other < v.2.0 Android phones can use the same process.

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How to Order Google’s Nexus One Smart Phone if You Live Outside the US, UK, HK, or Singapore

As we all know, Google launched its first smart phone on January 5th, 2010. Luckily for people living in the US, UK, Hong Kong or Singapore, you can order it directly from Google from their web store. For the rest of us, we are either forced to wait for a change in their shipping policy or work our way around this. In a global Internet world, anything is possible. Here is the easy guide how to get the phone to your own doorsteps within a few days, I’m waiting for mine to arrive as I’m writing this.

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How to Boost Performance of the HTC Hero and Make the UI Lightning Fast

The new HTC Hero, crowned the best Android based smart phone on the market so far, has been getting quite some attention in the press lately. Unfortunately, many of the initial in-depth reviews and early adopters were complaining about occasional sluggishness of the UI. Otherwise, the verdicts were great for the HTC Hero and it has really been catching up on the iPhone user experience wise with the bonus of multi tasking and running apps in the background.

Anyway, below I’ve summarized a few simple tweaks that you can do to minimize the reported unwanted performance issues and enjoy the new HTC Sense UI even more.

UPDATE 2009-Nov-09: Thanks to a very active and bright open source & HTC Hero hacking community, this post has been heavily shortened linking to new boosting methods resulting in amazing speed improvements.

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Improve Battery Life for the Android Based HTC Hero Smart Phone

It is easy to say that I’m a very satisfied owner of the HTC Hero since a couple of weeks. Overall, the smart phone is great and having the ability to run apps and processes in background gives it a clear edge over the iPhone. On the other hand, there are several areas where the Apple experience is just so much smoother. Without going into details I hope the rumoured couple of Android updates still this year will help ease these early misses.

Regardless,there is one thing a smart phone just has to offer and that is getting through a full day or 2 without having to recharge the battery. This is an area where the HTC Hero is struggling a bit. I often end up having to give it some more juice during the afternoon or early evening with the default factory settings. That is fine for a laptop but not acceptable for a smart phone.

To solve this I’ve been fiddling with the settings quite a while to maximize the battery life and below is a short summary of how I’ve managed to get through a heavy usage day without having to recharge the phone. One of the not so secret ingredients to a long battery life is to minimize active network connections – that is also where I focus my tweaking effort below.

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