HTC One V

The HTC One V Android phone was recently added to the list of devices I am called upon to provide technical support for, and this weekend I had the chance to have a good play with it (i.e. its owner found it to be acting up and I had to help).

This is not meant to be a full review but rather a couple of observations, and a record of some “features” that lacked adequate documentation. Overall I found it to be a nicely put together piece of hardware with good ergonomics. On the software side the “pattern swipe unlock” requires less brain power to use than PIN, and gestures to switch between tabs in the web browser made multitasking on the web as easy as multitasking between apps.

On the negative side, the keyboard was awful. I have written entire blog posts on my iPhone keyboard of similar dimensions, yet could not enter a simple web search correctly first time on this one. A few Android users have recommend installing Swype, but that’s not available from the official App Store. It also turns out to be completely unnecessary as the HTC One comes with a built-in “trace keyboard” hidden away behind Settings -> Language and Keyboard -> HTC Sense Input -> Trace Keyboard which, in just a few minutes of testing, seemed much more useable.

General impressions aside, the reason I was called upon was because events added to the calendar application were not being synchronised to Google calendar on the web. This seemed odd, since synchronisation to Google’s services is supposed to be Android’s forte. The problem was that all new events were defaulting to a calendar called PC Sync, that was not synchronised anywhere, and no where did it seem possible to either change that default, or remove that calendar from the phone. Searching the web revealed only other people complaining of the same problem, and no solution—the cause though appears to be that HTC have replaced the default calendar application with one of their own that has this inexplicable and inexcusable “feature”. Fortunately there is now a workaround available—download the official Google calendar app from the App Store!

Val Thorens

Fresh snow every day made for an awesome ski holiday, albeit we are now completely spoiled for future trips! The constant snow fall did mean poor visibility every day except the last, but the snow was so soft there was plenty to ski anyway.

The last day did gift us with photogenic blue skies and bright sunshine, which was just the icing on the cake as we explored off-piste areas with untracked waist-deep powder.

Val Thorens, at 2300m, is the highest ski resort in Europe. Part of the Three Valleys ski area, it also had a good party atmosphere—this was definitely a fun holiday. Low visibility and high winds meant we did not make it over to Meribel and the rest of the Three Valleys, but with snow this awesome we did not feel we missed out on anything!