So after my initial rant, I’ve actually grown to love Android. Even though I’m a big fan of storing things in the cloud and Google’s products in general, it still took two days for me to really begin to feel comfortable switching to the new OS.

My problems with the calendar mysteriously vanished. I didn’t change anything, but now I can see all my events. Hopefully it behaves itself from now on.

The Gmail app is nice although I‘m turning off data synch as it is chewing through my bandwidth in the background. RSS is still so-so, but I’ll stumble across a decent app for it soon I’m sure (I want one like Google’s “Listen” app that will download new items only when you’re connected to WiFi and will allow offline reading).

I take back what I said about using Google Contacts as a contact manager. It seems a lot more fully-featured since I last used it, and in the long run will be more convenient for me.

The hardware is still both gorgeous and adequate for my processing requirements. I’m actually rapidly growing used to the touch screen keyboard, although I have ordered a $10 capacitative stylus for when I want more precision.

Now that I have installed some power-user apps, the phone feels much less like the “party calculator” I described yesterday.

Now that I’ve made up for my little rant yesterday, I’d like to recommend my favourite apps so far. Search their names on Android Marketplace and they’ll be near the top of the list.

Recommended apps

Net counter
Monitors your wireless and mobile network usage. I’m referring to this a lot to ensure that none of my apps are sending me over my data quota with their background synching.

Buzz Off
Allows you to set your phone to silent mode for a specific amount of time – i.e. set it to silent for 2.5 hours while you watch a movie, without worrying about remembering to turn it back on afterwards.

Locale
Changes various settings on your phone based on the time of day, day of the week, and your geographical location. I’m using it to automatically switch my phone to a quiet profile while I’m at work, and then back to a louder one for home. However the GPS synch may be too much for my data limit, I’m keeping an eye on it, and may have to switch to an app that does not do location-based actions.

Barcode Scanner
Allows you to scan and Google any barcode, for me the value is scanning books and bookstores and then automatically pulling up reviews from the net.

Quickipedia
Browse a version of Wikipedia optimised for your phone. I like it just for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy factor. Don’t seem to be able to turn images off, though, so unless I’m at a WiFi hotpot I’ll probably not use this much.

Pure Calendar
Embeds my Google Calendar on a user-definable portion of one of my three Home screens. Nice way to quickly preview my agenda.

Twidroid
Twitter app with the usual features. I’m using the free version, may update to paid later if it seems worth it. Will shorten URLs and post photos to picture hosting places like Twitpic, Yfrog etc.

Act 1 Video
Flawless video playback – highly recommend for use alongside Videora – a free piece of software that will convert most video formats to ones optimised for view on your Android device.

Listen
A Google Labs product, Listen allows you to search and subscribe to podcasts matching your search terms, and you can set it to download new podcasts only when you have WiFi access. I might ACTUALLY get up to date with my podcasts now! I hope they keep developing this product further; it’s a very nifty app.

Facebook
It’s an app, but, uh… not with a particularly amazing name. Optimises Facebook browsing for mobile with simple UI. Fine for basic status checking and updating.

Do you use Android? Got any tips/favourite apps? :D