Adding the good bits from Nokia to an Android

Rating: Our adventures with the Motorola Defy

Given that as a mobile phone handset OS, Android is not only supposed to be ‘Open’, it’s also supposed to be free. Hence it follows that you shouldn’t have to pay anything to customise your Android phone. Having been a self-confessed Nokia fan for years, this particular hack has grown familiar with Nokia’s best handset features as well as its worst. It therefore struck us as a useful exercise to try to add all the best Nokia bits to our recently acquired Motorola Defy which it appears to lack. So far we’re doing quite well.The most obvious flaw with Motorola’s Android handsets is the lack of support for what Nokia calls ‘Profiles’. At the touch of an icon you should be able to put your mobile phone into ‘meeting’ or ‘silent’ mode.

Initially, we just couldn’t find a sensible way of doing this with the Dext or Defy. The sledgehammer we used to break the nut was to put the handset into ‘flight’ mode using one of the standard supplied widgets.

That wasn’t very satisfactory. So we searched the Android Market for a suitable solution. The catch is that the word ‘profile’ brings up too many apps which have absolutely nothing to do with managing a handset’s profile.

Then, by sheer fluke, we actually searched on ‘profile’ plus ‘manager’ and found that there was indeed a very good app which does exactly as it says on the tin and is free to boot. The one we picked comes from Cube Innovations.

If you use a Android market search site like Cyrket, you’ll find that there are actually quite a few profile manager apps around.

When You install Cube’s Profile Manager, our only complaint is that it doesn’t automatically put an icon on one of your start screens so you can select the app easily. Just a suggestion.

Our next task will be to find the equivalent of Nokia’s ‘Send a Business Card ‘ facility. This basically lets you text a telephone address entry to one of your mates so they don’t have to key it in manually.

With the Motorola Defy, you can ‘share’ a contact but the only option is to send the information as an MMS message rather than a plain text.

The other missing facility is that if you text entries between Nokia handsets, they are automatically recognised and you can save them directly into your addressbook.

Anyone know of a good Android app that handles texting sddressbook entries, then?