Very VERY angry

[GJSmith]

But not with my Vox ...... WTF is with Android.
I have been on the internet and using computers from when we used 1200 baud modems. My first computer was the first colour Mac with the ground breaking 40MB hard drive. Ya you read right MB she was a monster. Could not imagine a bigger one LOL.
I worked main frames for 15 years did early Linux and Dos I have been using computers for a long time but I have never seen anything like this.
I can not find files that are downloaded and then when I do WITH Astro I can not easily move them to where I want them. If I want to move it to the extsd damn well do it don't give me a non functioning button. Why can't we drag and drop not use these stupid menus.
Don't get me started about APPbrain or what ever the hell it is called, I click on install app and it takes me back to the page that says to find the app.
I am ususlly a calm person... very calm..... I would love to rip someone a new one right now.
I would be happy to waste 200 bucks and take a damn baseball bat to this stupid thing

[pokee]

Yeah...I hear you. I, for one, really limit what I do on any hand-held device, due to my overwhelming frustration. For me, it's the typing. I am an EXTREMELY fast keyboard typist and my brain thinks as quickly as I type now (not sure if I am complimenting or insulting myself - lol!) - so when I cannot communicate quickly on a device, I want to throw it out the window. This is why I rarely text or send emails via my phone.

I think when it comes to moving files around, you should connect it to your PC via USB and do it that way. It doesn't look like you can do anything quickly on these things.

IMO - any mobile device (tablet/phone/ereader/ipod) should involve quick commands and easy access and pure entertainment. We should be using the big guns for anything more complicated. But...that's just me!

[Reader Paradice]

I think when it comes to moving files around, you should connect it to your PC via USB and do it that way. It doesn't look like you can do anything quickly on these things.
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+ 1

[cypherslock]

I find ES file manager easier to work with. I download from my dropbox, move it over to my external card...done. I wish they'd hurry up and fix youtube/netflix though.

[Haesslich]

Just a few things to note:

1) Almost any link you follow online, if it's not for pirated software, takes you to the official Android Market since Google REALLY wants you to buy your software, and wants to make sure that other app stores aren't competing with them too badly. Unless you're buying in the market application itself (eg: Amazon App Store), you're probably going to end up at Google's market soon enough.

2) If a browser's following the Android standards, it'll be saving to the Downloads folder, where you'd expect files to be. Astro -says- it has Drag and Drop, but I've yet to figure out how that works.

3) Drag and drops works fine... with the right shell/application. Such shells don't exist in Android at the moment, or at least I can't figure out how Astro is 'drag and drop' without opening up two panels and then navigating between the proper folders so I can drag from panel #1 to drop into panel #2. I don't see people complaining about this issue when using BASH or csh very much in Linux... but then again, most people don't seem to go outside of the GUI, which itself can be an issue if your login doesn't have read-write access to where you want to drag-and-drop the file.

[SensualPoet]

Originally Posted by Haesslich

1) Almost any link you follow online, if it's not for pirated software, takes you to the official Android Market since Google REALLY wants you to buy your software, and wants to make sure that other app stores aren't competing with them too badly. Unless you're buying in the market application itself (eg: Amazon App Store), you're probably going to end up at Google's market soon enough.

I suppose the challenge for those of us with a Kobo Vox is that it does not have access to the Amazon App Market or Google Android Market. So we'll be looking for alternatives and there are certainly tons of free apps out there.

Sometimes it is not always clear that a free app isn't, in fact, free (cf: Repligo). I suppose it's probably good advice for anyone downloading outside of the sanctioned Kobo GetJar site that, if they find something that looks promising, they take the extra step of going directly to the developer site to confirm they have the latest version AND that it's free. Or, if it's worth paying for, buying it direct from the developer.

[Anjohl]

Originally Posted by SensualPoet

I suppose the challenge for those of us with a Kobo Vox is that it does not have access to the Amazon App Market or Google Android Market. So we'll be looking for alternatives and there are certainly tons of free apps out there.

Sometimes it is not always clear that a free app isn't, in fact, free (cf: Repligo). I suppose it's probably good advice for anyone downloading outside of the sanctioned Kobo GetJar site that, if they find something that looks promising, they take the extra step of going directly to the developer site to confirm they have the latest version AND that it's free. Or, if it's worth paying for, buying it direct from the developer.

Frustratingly, sometimes a developer only uses the Android market. I have an android hone, so I don't have any moral issues with buying on the phone and using on the vox.

[GJSmith]

Take Yahoo mobile mail for instance. I think it is free. it does not indicate otherwise but they want you to go to the google market to get it. Why would Yahoo want you going to google.
I guess the explosion of tablets into what has been a phone arena means this will take time to reshuffle.

[hieronymos]

GJSmith, you can always come into the sticky thread, help us make a recovery and find a way to dual-boot Ubuntu :-)
Me too, I had huge problems getting accustomed to Android. Some choices of embedded design are still a huge mystery to me, i.e. why everyone never publishes their drivers or why the warranties are so stupidly formulated (as if clicking "continue" in Windows 7 would void your warranty).

Android is a pure consumation platform for now. The Eee Transformer basically still can't be used. More than 2-fingers-multitouch is quite useless without support for gestures.
As for Google, they have a very hard job - between all the GPL and Apache, they still have to promise T-Mobile that this telephone will stay locked and it's owner enslaved to the company forever. On the other hand, they have that strange idea of quality control which keeps us from the market.
However, just getting the market installed isn't the end of the story. The market will still lock us out of most of the apps because there is not GPS, 3G and whatnots. Since developers also choose what they want to access with their apps, that means you can't for example install the official Last.fm (!). It just wouldn't show up.
When I installed the Market on a x86 port, it was quite an disappointment.

[taming]

Originally Posted by GJSmith

Take Yahoo mobile mail for instance. I think it is free. it does not indicate otherwise but they want you to go to the google market to get it.

You can get it here from Handango. Legit and all!

Out of the box, depending on what you're expecting from Android, it can be really frustrating. For me, my first Android phone was also my first smartphone. I had no idea of its capabilities and I learnt along the way. That said, I have friends who picked up Android expecting something a lot different, and they got really frustrated and pissed off straight away.

Originally Posted by GJSmith

I can not find files that are downloaded and then when I do WITH Astro I can not easily move them to where I want them. If I want to move it to the extsd damn well do it don't give me a non functioning button. Why can't we drag and drop not use these stupid menus.

Android was not designed to have a file manager available to users. By default, Android does not come with a file manager. If you want to manage files, you plug it into a computer and do it the old fashioned way. (Or you use something like Explorer or Root Explorer by Speed Software, which I prefer over Astro.)

In a way, this is because Android isn't a content creation platform, it's for content consumption. So the idea is that you don't need to worry about files. Apps should be taking care of your files for you. They can access your files, they can modify your files, and you don't have to go searching through all the device's directories.

There's also the fact that the Android team has tried to simplify things so that Android devices are easy to get started with. Ditching a file manager and having apps take care of all the file interactions was one of the earlier design decisions they made, I believe.

I think there's also the possible issue of not trusting the user to manage the files and directories. My current job is in consumer electronics, and I cannot tell you the number of times a customer has called up asking for advice on how to get Windows booting again after having deleted a system file or two.

Requiring root access and not having a file manager built-in sidesteps that entire problem. In some cases, just the lack of a file manager is fine by itself, because without root access, a user can still access and modify stored user data for apps.

Originally Posted by GJSmith

Take Yahoo mobile mail for instance. I think it is free. it does not indicate otherwise but they want you to go to the google market to get it. Why would Yahoo want you going to google.

The Google market is the primary Android market. It's the one built into every Android phone and most Android tablets. GetJar, AppBrain, Amazon and all the others were app markets built after the original Android market.

It's not that Yahoo wants you to go to Google. It's more that if Yahoo wants anyone to know about and use their app, they need to have it in the Android Market. Yahoo doesn't have its own Android market, and neither does Microsoft, but they both have official Ymail and Hotmail apps in the Android Market.

It also comes back to apps managing files on the user's behalf. Rather than downloading the APK and sideloading it (then using a file manager to open it), or rather than downloading the APK on the phone (then using a file manager to open it), the centralised Market takes care of all that for the user.

And yes, the Yahoo Mail app is free. It's not a paid app. The majority of apps in the Android Market are free. Some rely on advertising, some rely on users buying versions with newer features, some rely on users buying new content from within the app (like comiXology), but a lot of them are just plain old free.


Holy crap, I'm sorry that post was so long. Just wanted to try to explain some of the design decisions as fully as possible.

[Terisa de morgan]

Originally Posted by Haesslich

I don't see people complaining about this issue when using BASH or csh very much in Linux...

You've lost me here. Are you telling that you need two terms (not windows) in linux shell to drag/drop file? If that's you're telling, what has happened with my friend "mv"?

[Haesslich]

Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan

You've lost me here. Are you telling that you need two terms (not windows) in linux shell to drag/drop file? If that's you're telling, what has happened with my friend "mv"?

Nope. Just saying that not having drag-and-drop isn't an automatic 'fail' for an OS. If the shell doesn't support it, then it doesn't support it. If the file manager's clunky, it's not the OS's fault - it's the file manager UI designer. Windows Explorer runs atop Windows, and incorporates the file manager in the UI, rather than having it separate as it in in Android.

People don't beat on command line shells for not having drag-and-drop (at least, most people don't).

[GJSmith]

Thanks Taming

Originally Posted by taming

You can get it here from Handango. Legit and all!

[GJSmith]

OK I see where your coming from and thanks for being so long and thorough. Having never had a smart phone I had not thought about that being the development platform and yes it is right that 90 percent would just want the app to work.

Originally Posted by cyvros

Out of the box, depending on what you're expecting from Android, it can be really frustrating. For me, my first Android phone was also my first smartphone. I had no idea of its capabilities and I learnt along the way. That said, I have friends who picked up Android expecting something a lot different, and they got really frustrated and pissed off straight away.



Android was not designed to have a file manager available to users. By default, Android does not come with a file manager. If you want to manage files, you plug it into a computer and do it the old fashioned way. (Or you use something like Explorer or Root Explorer by Speed Software, which I prefer over Astro.)

In a way, this is because Android isn't a content creation platform, it's for content consumption. So the idea is that you don't need to worry about files. Apps should be taking care of your files for you. They can access your files, they can modify your files, and you don't have to go searching through all the device's directories.

There's also the fact that the Android team has tried to simplify things so that Android devices are easy to get started with. Ditching a file manager and having apps take care of all the file interactions was one of the earlier design decisions they made, I believe.

I think there's also the possible issue of not trusting the user to manage the files and directories. My current job is in consumer electronics, and I cannot tell you the number of times a customer has called up asking for advice on how to get Windows booting again after having deleted a system file or two.

Requiring root access and not having a file manager built-in sidesteps that entire problem. In some cases, just the lack of a file manager is fine by itself, because without root access, a user can still access and modify stored user data for apps.



The Google market is the primary Android market. It's the one built into every Android phone and most Android tablets. GetJar, AppBrain, Amazon and all the others were app markets built after the original Android market.

It's not that Yahoo wants you to go to Google. It's more that if Yahoo wants anyone to know about and use their app, they need to have it in the Android Market. Yahoo doesn't have its own Android market, and neither does Microsoft, but they both have official Ymail and Hotmail apps in the Android Market.

It also comes back to apps managing files on the user's behalf. Rather than downloading the APK and sideloading it (then using a file manager to open it), or rather than downloading the APK on the phone (then using a file manager to open it), the centralised Market takes care of all that for the user.

And yes, the Yahoo Mail app is free. It's not a paid app. The majority of apps in the Android Market are free. Some rely on advertising, some rely on users buying versions with newer features, some rely on users buying new content from within the app (like comiXology), but a lot of them are just plain old free.


Holy crap, I'm sorry that post was so long. Just wanted to try to explain some of the design decisions as fully as possible.