Gamaze

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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Mattias android, Mobile, Tutorials android, backup, migrate, restore, SMS

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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Mattias Mobile, Tutorials android, Google, nexus one, order, 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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Mattias Mobile, Tutorials android, battery life, HTC Hero, Mobile

I recently switched my Samsung NC10 netbook for an HP Mini 2140 HD to be able to really use it as my main laptop. The only really restricting factor with the NC10 has been the screen resolution as I find the Intel Atom based netbooks perfectly fine for basic work such as email, Internet, and even heavy MS Office usage (I still use my Mac Mini for sporadic photo and video editing). Therefore, when the HP Mini 2140 HD edition with a bright but glossy 1366×768 screen resolution was finally available a couple of months back I did not hesitate to upgrade. The NC10 was a great device itself but limited to the “standard netbook” 1024×600 resolution – just a little too much scrolling for my taste.

As I got the HP Mini 2140 with XP Home edition and a 160GB HDD I had 2 things I wanted to fix to get the most out of it. Upgrading the HDD to an SSD to significantly improve performance and battery life as well as upgrade it to XP Pro for some features I needed (remote access, advanced file sharing, etc.). This is usually an easy task but with the HP Mini 2140 it required some extra work as Windows XP installations does not recognize the SATA HDD/SSD drive by default so  I decided to document the steps in this post.

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Mattias Netbook, Tutorials HP 2140, installation, Netbook, SATA, SSD, XP