TuneTribe are giving away 10,000 free album downloads from a selection of over 100, including Alexandra Burke, Michael Jackson and Mark Ronson – all worth around a fiver.

To get your free album:

1. Choose your album from the selection in the free download offer
2. Register at TuneTribe
3. At the checkout add the code TUNE

It might be free but the fact that you have to register means that you are likely to get marketing emails.

Update: If you tried the above link to TuneTribe you’ll find that, erm, it probably didn’t work. They knew they were running this offer but didn’t plan on how many people tried to access it. Their site crashed horribly and even today, after the offer has finished, their site is still down. The moral of this story – planning! Now they just have a bad reputation.

I can see the attraction of a tablet PC (which, no matter how they try and dress it up, is all the iPad is) but all Apple have done is dress theirs up with their funky phone OS and a quality touch screen.

None-the-less, because of the drum banging and ceremony that goes with an Apple launch, BBC feel the need to allow people to submit their comments. My favourite is this…

Apple never just produces ‘gadgets’; they engineer solutions that people can see fitting into their lives eventually.

It’s that last word… eventually. What he’s trying to say is that Apple find solutions to problems that don’t currently exist. Whoever could accuse Apple customers of being vain, purchasing style over price and function?

Having said that, I quite like this comment…

You can just hear the money being poured into the Apple bank account as the brainless tech sheep of this generation rush out to by this fantastically overpriced netbook.

<snigger>  The worst comment award though must go to..

Finally stupid netbooks will disappear. But if you’re going to carry around a 10-inch so-called pad why not just buy a Macbook with more power, to do work, play DVDs and all that added functionality?

Yea, those stupid netbooks. Good case against them. Erm. But, yea, if you’re going to carry around a 10-inch computer, why not just buy a much, much bulkier 13-inch Macbook at not far off twice the price of an iPad<snort>?  Stupid consumers eh? And there they are buying 10-inch £200 Netbooks. What are they thinking?

WordPress have announced the release of the WordPress for Android App.

According to WordPress…

The initial release has focused on giving you the ability to manage your blog while on the go.

Features include the ability to:

• Configure and manage multiple blogs
• Comment moderation including the ability to reply to comments
• Create and Edit Posts including categories, tags and photos
• Create and Edit Pages
• Get notified of new comments in the Android notification bar

I was using wpToGo, which had a more restricted set of abilities, but this taken over by WordPress and modified to this new plugin. I replaced it last night and, indeed, it is a much better and powerful tool, allowing me to view my posts and create new ones (amongst many other things) in a very easy fashion.

If you administer a WordPress blog, this is highly recommended.

As I said I would, I’m selling my Nokia N95 to one of the many “we’ll buy your old mobile” sites¹.

However, first, I had to remove all my personal data from it. There is an option in the settings to reset it to factory settings but that leaves the data behind.

After some searching I found the answer. So, here’s what to do…

1. Connect your Nokia to your PC and format the removable drive (FAT32 flavour)
2. Disconnect and type in the following on the phone – *#7370#
3. It will prompt you for a lock code. If you’ve not changed this, the default is 12345.
4. It will now reset and start prompting for country, date and time, etc.

And it’s done. Bye bye Nokia – you promised so much but ended up a disappointment.

1. the one that would give me the most money! [↩]

Before I bought my Hero, research highlighted a few things that I suspect (and, indeed, looking at forums I know this is the case) many first-time users won’t realise at the time of purchase. What I’m not so sure about is where the dividing line is between T-Mobile, HTC and Android, so some of this information may only be relevant to one of these. Or a combination.

So, in no order what-so-ever, here’s my list of what you need to know.

Which version of Android?

The HTC Hero comes with version 1.5 of Android. There is a 1.6, but HTC have decided to not release this, instead waiting for the recent 2.1 version (which the Nexus One comes with). I believe the upgrade to 2.1 is due in the next few months. Once HTC release this, you will need to wait for your network provider to create their own version.

Bluetooth is Flaky

The hardware is fine, but the software is only part implemented. And by “part” I mean the ability to connect to a headset works, but sending files doesn’t. I believe version 2 of Android rectifies this, although I could be wrong!

The Manual

Well, I don’t know how it is with other Hero providers, but the T-Mobile version comes with a Quick Start paper sheet and that’s it. There’s no manual. After perusing the SD card that T-Mobile provided, I came across it! However, unless I missed something, I didn’t find any mention of this elsewhere. Just head to the PDF reader app and it should be listed!

PC Software

Again, nothing is provided, but it can be found on the included SD card. Having said that, I’d just head to the HTC website and download the latest version.

The only software that’s provided is a combination driver and sync application. The latter lets you synchronise contacts, etc, with popular PC programs. Personally, I don’t use it as all of my mails, contacts, etc, are online.

With the driver installed you can connect your Hero to your PC and view it as a removable drive¹. You can then browse the content of the SD card where photos, videos and music are stored by default. This means you can use applications such as Windows Media Player and Picasa to synchronise and import automatically.

Backups

With the aforementioned lack of software, an obvious omission is the ability to back the handset up. Of course, much of the data is automatically synchronised online, especially if you make use of the Google services. In my case this includes mail, calendars and contacts. Music and photos I mentioned before you can synchronise from your PC – however, items such as installed applications, SMS’ and even dictionary additions are not backed up.

ASTRO is an excellent free file manager that just happens to also have the ability to backup your applications. And it’s free. There is also an SMS Backup App as well. In both cases, these save the data to your SD card, so you still need to remember to regularly copy this data away.

Of course, this still doesn’t cover everything anyway.

The best solution, if you’re willing to put your hands in your pockets is the MyBackup Pro app, which costs $4.99 (approx. £3.13). This not only allows scheduled backup to your SD card but also an option of backing up to their own online servers as well ((although the option to backup apps is only available when storing to SD card). A 30 day trial is available.

Connection

There are just 2 connections – a headphone jack on the top and a USB connector on the bottom.

The USB appears to be proprietary, but it’s not – a standard mini USB cable will connect to it. If you connect a USB cable to your PC, it will trickle charge it as well as provide the data connection. However, in the box you are provided with just this one cable PLUS a mains socket which this cable plugs into, doubling it as a mains charger. This provides a much quicker method of charging the phone.

The headphone socket needs just one thing saying about it – there is a know bug where plugging in headphones won’t cause the phone to switch off its own speakers and divert sound to the headphones. This can be worked around by an application called toggleheadset – there is a separate one for Android 1.5 and another for 1.6.

Managing Applications

Unlike, oh I don’t know, the iPhone, you can run multiple applications on Android. However, the method of managing these are not obvious.

Some Apps will have an “exit” option which will cause them cleanly end when selected. Most, however, will continue running, particularly if have to use the “Home” or “Back” button to exit from them.

If you press and hold the Home button it will  display up to 6 recently used applications. You can then select and switch between them.

To “kill” or uninstall applications you need to go into the “Manage Applications” option in Settings. This is slow to launch so isn’t really a good method of quickly handling apps. Needless to say there are applications available to assist, including the previously mentioned ASTRO.

WiFi and Standby

After a pre-determined amount of time your phone will enter “standby”, which is when your screen blanks and any security activated. When this happens, by default, your WiFi will turn off. This is for power saving reasons.

You can override this via the Advanced Menu within WiFi options. Or you can use a free app named Wi-Fi Lock to toggle the options from the front screen.

The On-screen Keyboard

You can switch between different keyboard types, including traditional numeric phone keypad styles. The typing is, okay, but an improved keyboard is included in Android 2.1. Meantime, there are (paid) apps available to make improvements until you’re able to upgrade.

Personally, I’d suggest using the keyboard calibration facility as soon as you can – it made an immediate, and very marked, improvement with my sausage fingered typing.

Linking Accounts

When you first starting using the phone, you’ll be asked for account details to link your phone. I don’t think any are necessary but, at least, a Google account is very handy. Why buy a Google branded phone otherwise?

When I did this it automatically connected to all my Google services and started downloading my contacts. Very, very handy.

You can also link Facebook and Flickr accounts (but no Picasa?). Any friends with these accounts can then be connected so when you bring up their contact details it will also display Facebook status’, photos, etc. You can also use their Facebook profile photo as their display picture.

Anything Else

I don’t realise this at the time but have since read about on Wikipedia…

• A lack of standards-based iCalendar/CalDAV functionality in the Android calendar client. Currently, the Android calendar is restricted to synchronisation with Google Calendar service.
• The Android does not support animated .gif files. It only shows the first frame.
• Because of potential security issues, Android does not officially allow applications to be installed on, nor run from, an SD card. In the case of the Hero this limits you to the 288 MB of system RAM. Several unsupported modifications exist, to give the user this capability, but they’re a bit scary!

And that, I think, is it. For the time being anyway.

As I’m new to all this, I may have got bits wrong but, I’ll be honest, it’s not always clear what the situation is with many things and you have to do some digging around forums to get an answer. So I’ll blame them

1. to do this you also have to go to the information bar (the strip along the top) and select an option to “mount” it [↩]