In case you had any doubts, I am still very excited about my Android phone.

I spent much of my time over the holidays getting familiar with the SDK, writing a little app to try and automatically detect and activate some Wifi networks.

It's been a great exercise: I've learned how to use the Eclipse IDE, brushed up on my Java, learned to use the adb tool to debug and explore the phone's OS, built a basic user interface, written a background service, added a small SQLite database, written a receiver that listens for system events and explored the Android source code in search of answers to questions the SDK docs don't cover.

Lots of fun! My app almost works, too.

I'll probably add some support for geo-location to it, to record where the networks are, and if I really go nuts maybe I'll teach it to then interface with Google Maps to plot the data visually.

I quite like the SDK. It's well thought out and easy to use. And when it falls short, there's always the source to the phone itself...

I've also done a lot of "normal" playing with the phone, installing all sorts of little apps on it. Things like a flashlight, a compass, an alarm clock, a replacement for the built in camera, basic photo editor, a notepad and a drawing app, a better music player, a replacement for the default (inadequate) SMS notifications, a barcode scanner, an SSH client, ...

This phone really is an amazingly powerful little computer. It can do things I've never been able to do with a computer before, and yet it fits in my pocket.

And it's Open Source, which mean's it's truly mine.

I love it! :-)

This is of course exactly what The Company probably wanted to happen when they gave us the phone. They wanted us to hack on it and blog about it. But it's so awesome, that I'm more than happy to comply!