Prepare for Trasition

In preparing for the pending arrival of the phone, I've been doing some research. I've been getting recommendations for apps to be loaded on it from friends and also been looking at a couple of other options from the media.

The recommendations for a Twitter client have been either Seesmic or Hootsuite. I'll probably end up trying several until I settle on one that I really like. One of the things that I wish Twitter did was to extend the API so that clients could push back the posts that have already been read. That way, when I've already read something on my phone, the client that's built in to my IM on my computer won't assume that they're all new just because I haven't read them there yet. But that's a rant for another time.

I've already mentioned that I listen to Leo Laporte quite regularly. One of the people that he has on his show This Week In Google is Lifehacker founder Gina Trapani who is a major advocate of the Android platform. In a recent episode, she mentioned a site named AppBrain which is essentially an Android app discovery site. It has another neat feature in that if you know someone's user name and they've signed up through AppBrain, you're able to look at the applications that they have installed on their Android phone. One of the best ways to find things that you have a good chance of liking is people's recommendations. AppBrain gives you the opportunity to take a look at what people are actually using, not just rating or saying is "awesome".

On the media side of things, I've been very concerned about how to handle music and podcasts on the phone. My job is one in which I sit at my desk and largely just work on my computer. A large part of my human interaction is accomplished through instant messaging. Also, I have some loud cube-neighbors. As such, I spend a good part of my day with my head phones on listening to podcasts (hence all the Leo references). I needed something to manage podcasts so that I wouldn't have to be manually downloading each episode each time. That gets to be a pain. In looking around, I found a program named doubleTwist. The more that I read about the program, the more I like it. It's essentially iTunes for everyone else. It handles iPods or iPhones like iTunes, but it has built-in compatibility with a plethora of other devices as well from other mp3 players to Blackberries to (wait for it) Android devices. It automatically handles moving music from your PC or Mac to your phone. It has a built-in Amazon MP3 store for finding and purchasing new music. It has a built-in Android app store. It has support for downloading and syncing podcasts. If it works as advertised, it's exactly what I want for a media manager for my new phone. I'll be providing a review of the program once I get the phone and get everything set up and installed. But for now, it makes me feel a lot better knowing that there is a solution out there that at least has the hope of providing me the functionality that I need.

Thursday is almost here...