[plug] phone synchronisation

[Fred Janon]

I feel sorry for all the people who went to that "unconference". I went last year, left after 30 mins and heard from someone else that he did the same thing this year. It's more like a "get me really confused now" conference than anything else. Ah, buzzwords and hype...
It's quite simple to buy an Android phone (Telstra sells some, hundreds out there, which doesn't make it easier to pick one), get a Gmail account and sync them over 3G or WiFi. No need to think about the 'cloud'. Google services are just a big powerful service over the 'innernet'.
Personally I don't give a toss if the Big Googgly has my info, apart from my credit cards... I am not that important that anyone would care! ;)
Fred

--- On Tue, 1/4/11, home at oranges.id.au <home at oranges.id.au> wrote:

From: home at oranges.id.au <home at oranges.id.au>
Subject: Re: [plug] phone synchronisation
To: plug at plug.org.au
Date: Tuesday, January 4, 2011, 5:05 PM

On 4 January 2011 16:46, James Bromberger <james at rcpt.to> wrote:
> I have Thunderbird, with the Lightning Plugin, and the Google Celendar
> provider. Hence my calendar is actually a Google calendar, which there
> by works with my Thunderbird, and natively with my Android phone. I read
> my mail via IMAP from my server using Thunderbird on the desktop, and
> the native IMAP client in the Android. The contacts list in the phone is
> synchronised to my (not very used) GMail account.
>
> Android is very much a "cloud phone"; most/all services work neatly with
> online sync, not so much with personal workstation sync - through I've
> not tried.

I hang my head in shame to have not even thought of the cloud. Oh how
old and local machine oriented I have become. I even attended the
Cloud Unconference a few weeks ago in the CBD, but clearly nothing
sank in (:

Okay, deep breath, nagging Google's-got-my-information fears blithely
brushed aside, that sounds like a pretty interesting option...
especially because it's based on Android (probably the highest scoring
combination of Free and functional?), and conceptually simple enough
that I can already imagine it working.

Talk to me about this Android phone. Do I need to use direct web
access to synchronise it? Or can I just WiFi at home and use it merely
as a phone elsewhere?

Tell me more about Android phones... how many are there, what do they
cost etc? Any chance of NextG?


> I think turning the question around is perhaps easier - can you get
> Thunderbird to sync from the same cloud data providers that Android
> would support? With calendaring (Lightning), the answer is pretty much
> "yes". YMMV. Happy to discuss/show on Tuesday (next week) at the AGM.

I wish. Tuesday nights are SAGE-AU and PLUG meeting absences for me
due to other commitments.

-- 
Gregory Orange
_______________________________________________
PLUG discussion list: plug at plug.org.au
http://www.plug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/plug
Committee e-mail: committee at plug.linux.org.au
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.plug.org.au/pipermail/plug/attachments/20110104/fcfb682b/attachment.html>