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.

Thinkbook by bitolithic is the killer application for iPad in my book.  It has helped me organize my notes and keep track of todo’s in a way that feels comfortable to me, mainly because it is so flexible (todo’s can be put right in the notes, yet an overall ‘Dashboard’ can be created to give a consolidated view of all of those todo’s – very neat and powerful).

Some of the main features of Thinkbook include;

• Plenty of note types: text notes, todos, questions and projects. Notebooks and pages behave like notes too so you move them around however you like using the slider.
• Use special finder notes to create dashboards. This feature is powerful, let’s you organize your todo’s basically any way you like, yet you can still get a view that consolidates them.
• The slider, a brand new way to make new notes and rearrange, move, copy and delete existing ones.
• Tag everything you can see. They’re inherited, tag a notebook with ‘work’ and every note in it will be treated as work.
• Fast search for text and tags.
• Dropbox integration. Backup and restore to Dropbox, export and import notes, pages, notebooks and projects as text, work on them on your PC, then import them back into ThinkBook.
• Easily email notes, pages or books.

The only thing missing for me is a desktop counterpart.  If bitolithic would just come up with a PC and Apple desktop version, I believe they would have a hit application on their hands. I highly recommend Thinkbook to all iPad users.

For $5 the Scanner Radio application available at Blackberry App World is cheap fun! It allows you to listen in to over 2,500 police and fire scanners, railroad communications, and weather radio broadcasts from around the world using your BlackBerry®.

A lot of the radio dialog uses 10 codes, a kind of shorthand you’ve likely heard used on TV shows involving police or fire. A reference to the meanings of these 10 codes can be found at the link here.

Here in Orange County, we’re able to pick up the Orange County Fire radio calls countywide. Unfortunately, police and CHP calls aren’t possible since those are encrypted channels.

The app has a free 7 day trial, so no reason not to give it a try. To get a sense of what will be available to you on your  BlackBerry®, head over to Radio Reference and listen in to those channels that interest you. Both the app and the online Radio Reference site are a great way to get a taste of radio scanning without the expense of actually buying a scanner!