It is really irritating when a problem goes unresolved for years and it involves an expensive Smartphone used daily. That’s the story with The Galaxy Nexus Android phone and Exchange Services. Do a Google search of  ‘android exchange services draining battery’ and you will see complaints going back years on the subject. My personal experience is as follows;

• I have two mobile devices that both use ActiveSync to connect to corporate mail on an Exchange 2010 server. One is an iPad and the other is the Galaxy Nexus.
• The iPad operates flawlessly, no issues whatsoever. My corporate mail syncs perfectly whether on wi-fi or cellular.
• The Galaxy Nexus operated fairly well until the OTA update to 4.2.2. Prior to the update I had several instances where I had to do the “delete the corporate account and recreate it routine” to get the mail to sync, it just stops syncing. Since the update only the first sync works, after that the Exchange Services basically goes into “let’s eat the battery mode” and runs constantly draining the battery to zero in several hours, all while NOT delivering any mail.

I am comfortable with technology, so I’m not afraid of doing the research and working on fixes to solve the problem. I’ve googled the issue extensively and have tried all of the obvious suggestions, up to and including a full factory reset (which is not fun and is particularly not fun when it was for nothing since it does not solve the problem).

I am now to the point where I will not purchase another Android device and I will recommend to anyone asking to avoid Android like the plague.  Google has known about this issue for years, they obviously made it much worse with the 4.2.2 update, and there is no progress at all in any of the forums about a solution, just more and more customer complaints. They don’t deserve my business when they put out a crap product like that.

UPDATE: Check out the Touchdown Mail Client for Android to solve this problem permanently. It’s not free, but it works flawlessly and the battery drain issue goes away.

Time for a rant. Why is it that we, the consumers, have to suffer with this ridiculous HDMI copy protection DRM crap that causes interoperability issues with certain hardware?

Perfect example is my Roku XR box and Vizio TV.  Once the TV goes to standby, the Roku and Vizio will not handshake properly and I get the infamous green screen instead of video.  The only solution that works for me is literally unplugging the HDMI cable from the Roku and re-inserting it. That is completely absurd and makes the box useless to me. I am not the only one, the Roku forums are full of complaints going back years and yet the problem still exists.

I blame Hollywood for this HDMI crap but the specific hardware/software implementation on the Roku, or the Vizio, is their issue – I don’t know which party is to blame but they don’t play well together.  Don’t waste your hard earned money on the Roku, you’ll regret it.

If you’ve seen the ‘Could not complete the operation. One or more parameter values are invalid.’ error in Outlook, then you can appreciate it when I refer to it as Outlook Hell!

Apparently, there are a ton of reasons one might get this error. If you google around, you will find all sorts of solutions (which may or may not work for your specific case).

I was seeing this error in Outlook 2003 (no exchange server involved) whenever I did anything with notes. Tried all the recommended solutions with no success until I came across a post here that actually worked for me!

• Tools>options>other tab, then advanced options and unselect “when viewing notes, show time and date”

Thank you so much to Microsoft for giving us one error message that applies to hundreds of possible conditions.