Apps

So it’s been two weeks since dipping my toe into Android and the Nokia 6.1, so I’ll share my journey thus far.

I am very much impressed with the physical build quality of the Nokia 6.1, the solid aluminum unibody construction gives this phone a serious flagship feel. The fit & finish of the phone is incredible along with the anodized accents on the edges.

TheNewNokia6_hardware-phone

Haven’t run into any issues with the telephone making or receiving calls, the volume and clarity is fine. The only issue I did have was getting it to communicate with my ’17 MINI F55 to “read” incoming “texts.” But I finally did get that figured out with a few setting changes and an app. Setting change was to set the Bluetooth to “AAC,” that along with using Pulse for messaging and ReadItToMe for “text-to-voice” and things are operating OK. Still not as flawlessly with my old HP X3 Elite (Windows Phone 10), but it’ll do.

One huge gain is using my Vector Smartwatch with the Android app. It works much better that the Windows Phone version ever did, and provides better connectivity and features. So that’s a huge plus for me.

“The App Gap” I was in denial when major companies starting pulling out from WP and because of my devotion, felt I wasn’t missing out on anything. The apps that we never had or taken away from us on the Windows Phone platform are really nice to have on the Android, like “Tap-to-Pay (using any dang card you want),” “Bank of America,” “Amazon Alexa, Amazon Prime Music!”

androidone

Android just delivered a new app named “Files Go,” and this is a cleaning app for duplicate files, photos, and does a good job cleaning temporary files and cleaning up memory. Even though I have an SD card, this helps keeping the phones built in storage space trim.

While I’m mostly using Microsoft apps e.g., Microsoft Launcher and all the other apps I haven’t delved into using “Assistants” full blast yet. Just fooling around so far, Google Assist looks promising versus Cortana. But I’ll have to put both through the paces.

Love Edge and Bing on this phone. Waze on the WP was crap; Waze on Android is sprite and has more features.

The only thing I’ve yet to try out extensively is the camera, just played around but haven’t performed any real “photography” tasks to date. I’ll report back when I do.

So… quite a few weeks ago I had made a comment on Windows Central asking about a software app for Windows 10. My request was to find out if anyone knew of an app that could act as a dashboard for the few collective apps I wanted to view all at once. So picture this… I wanted my various mailboxes (Outlook 2016), Todoist, Skype (SMS messaging), and maybe Word to all come up in the same window, or at the very least the same time with “one” launch.

There was only one suggestion for an app called “Rocket Dock,” but that didn’t quite solve my dilemma after having looked at it. Then I remembered from the “olden days,” using “Batch Files,” a small script you can write that will perform a group of actions with one click. I delved into that for a while realizing this wasn’t the answer in today’s world either. Could have worked if I stayed with it, just too damn archaic.

Well, I’ve found the closest damn thing to perfect I can. I was on one of my favorite websites “TheAwesomer.com” and saw an ad for the app “Mailbird” I checked it out because the discount was quite deep for a “Lifetime Pro” account. So I played with it quite a bit before deciding a day later it would be worth it.

So what does this ONE application Mailbird do for me? It displays all of what I need in one window!

eMail – multiple accounts – in my case five
A “Unified” account to see all
All and any of my existing folders for email organization are all there as well
Attachments
Contacts imported from any of those mail accounts
Google Calendar (GC)– (NO Office 365 Outlook integration)
Slack
Todoist
Twitter
WhatsApp – (NO Skype integration)
And a LOT, lot more!

Now, in order to get this application to near perfection, it took a lot of trial and tribulation on my part. Mostly because I don’t do much of anything in Google at all. I have Gmail and Google Voice, but never really used any of the other functions of Google e.g., Calendar, Tasks, etc. So there’s a bit of tweaking to get things where they need to be. Spent a good part of the whole day blowing crap up to turn around to later fix or make right. But that’s ONLY because I’m a bit anal.

So to bring everything into this one portal I employed a few tools;

IFTTT – (If This Than That) to have certain Todoist tasks populate Google Calendar (remember I don’t use GC)
gSyncit – So that events created in my Outlook Calendar (OC) can synch 2-ways with Google Calendar – meaning the IFTTT Todoist applets can populate GC with my todo’s and those get picked up into my OC

Now the only thing is, this is on my desktop at home, so no mobile app version of Mailbird and of course no installing this great tool at work. But all-in-all… that’s O.K. because the home office is where the bulk of my work is done anyway. Took a bit of work, but overall I’m quite happy with this setup as it brings just about everything I wanted together under one roof… er… window!