The T-Mobile MyTouch

The MyTouch (aka HTC Magic) has gotten mediocre reviews (see for example here and here.) I don't agree. If Google integration serves your needs, I think it's a great phone. It's small, light, fast, the Android store has lots of great apps, and I *love* the fact that you can replace the battery. (Sorry Steve.) If you're looking for Exchange integration, you probably want to look elsewhere. There are a few fixable annoyances that I wanted to write about.

1. The lack of a headphone jack. The Mytouch comes with an enhanced mini usb port and no built-in headphone jack. The adapter supplied with the phone supports a 3.5mm plug, but if you have a headset with a 2.5mm plug you're out of luck as far as T-Mobile is concerned. The good news is that the folks at PCH Cables sell this, which works fine. Best of all, it's less than $9 including USPS first-class shipping.

2. On the subject of accessories, I've never understood why cellular providers don't have a full complement of accessories available when phones are released. You have new buyers ready to buy more stuff, and it's not there. The good news: the Android Central Store has a lot of reasonably priced accessories, including a battery for 60% of T-Mobile's price.

3. The Android auto-complete feature is awful. Turn it off immediately. Go to settings | locale and text | Android keyboard |Auto-complete . You're welcome.

4. You need to get your contact information into the phone. See my post about how to do this by importing to Google contacts.

The criticisms in the reviews are pretty shallow. Yes, T-Mobile could have shipped the phone with more than 4gb on the SDHC card, but it's *replaceable*. You can upgrade if you need more space. Yes, Exchange integration is poor but it's a Google phone. Yes, for many the G1 was a disappointing phone but this isn't a G1. Yes there are only 6000 apps instead of 50,000, but what matters is whether the app you need is there.

Most importantly, all indications are that there will be be numerous Android phones coming to market over the next 12 months. The apps will follow.

In my mind the legitimate criticism of Android is the lack of multi-touch. Since the phone is multi-touch capable (you can install multi-touch on a rooted G1 or MyTouch), the guess is that Apple is somehow preventing Google from shipping with multi-touch enabled. But then again, maybe not.

I think this is a great phone.

Importing Data into Google Contacts

I bought a T-mobile Mytouch, released in early August. It's a great phone, and since it's an android phone, it's natural to want everything working with gmail, google calendar, and google contacts. For years I'd been using Ecco Pro as my contact manager and calendar. I switched to Google calendar a few years ago, and I decided it was now time to move my contact data from Ecco to Google.

You can import appropriately formatted contact information into Google contacts. The problem is figuring out the appropriate format. You can export from contacts to see what google produces, but if you try to put your information in that format and it fails to import, you have only a cryptic error message. For some reason my attempts to mimic Google's format didn't work and I was stuck with trial and error.

In the hope that it will be helpful to someone else, here is a CSV format that works. First, the fields (the following is all one line):

Name,Family Name,Given Name,Phone 1 – Value,Phone 1 – Type,Phone 2 – Value,Phone 2 – Type,Phone 3 – Value,Phone 3 – Type,Phone 4 – Value,Phone 4 – Type,Phone 5 – Value,Phone 5 – Type,E-mail 1 – Value,Organization 1 – Name,Address 1 – Formatted,Address 2 – Formatted,Notes

The sample data looks like this (again, this is all one line):

John Smith,Smith,John,12345,Work,12345,Home,12345,Work Fax,12345,Mobile,12345,New Type,joe@joe.com,Joe's bar and grill,123 any st Anytown IL 01234,Company address 456 any St. anytown IL ,"Put notes in quotes. This way, you can use commas. Can you ""double delimit?"" Yes."

This will create a record with 5 phone numbers (one of type "new type") and notes including quotes. I hope this example helps someone attempting a bulk import of contact information.