Many, many, many hours of work has been done since this post was posted.

The results are mostly good.  As it stands now, I’ve basically got all of the core functionality I had on the Touch Pro – plus more, obviously.  And a nice consequence of this work is that much of the processes I’ve used in the past are now somewhat simplified.

In particular, I’m quite stoked about the uber-quick WebDAV access and client-less access to the intranet.  That last one needs some security work, but it’s there and it’s a beaut.  I’m yet to test streaming from the Home Audio streaming zones, but that’ll likely happen in 1 hour or less (once I go out for lunch).

I also made some useability improvements to the fileserv, which is what allows me to send links and files to the phone.  Google has a Firefox and Chrome extension that allows you to do this, but I prefer to roll my own solutions.  Additionally, this one doesn’t require any special software that somebody isn’t likely to already have.

Truthfully the fileserv stuff has had a “todo – enhanced security” line item for some time now.  That’s not resolved yet, but I imagine I’ll be using this facility more going forward and that alone may prompt me to get all this security stuff nailed down.

So what’s not working?

Mail isn’t 100%.  I worked with the developer of my server software to iron out one bug, and that was great, but as it stands now the native Android Mail client is missing some core functionality (ability to set trash/sent folders is the biggest, and the ability to filter IMAP folders) so I’m using the k9mail client instead.  Unforunately that client isn’t doing two-phase deletions/moves properly.  So for now I’ve got to use both clients.  A bummer for now, but hopefully it will get resolved soon.

What’s changed?

My particular brand of push notifications have changed.  You may or may not know that certain events (types of mail, surveillance) generate notifications on the phone.  In the WinMo world these notifications were delivered via SMS. Some would automagically (courtesy of PushEffect) tell Outlook Mobile to connect and sync my mail.  That last little bit simulated push email, and while I have no such facility now (but may again play with IMAP IDLE) it’s sort of a moot point now; both Mail and k9mail are so fast to sync folders that I now do the process manually, which is really no more effort than opening Outlook Mobile to read the mail I just got notified about.  I could probably spend some time in the future to replicate the sync functionality on Android, to operate in the same manner it did in WinMo.  Chances are that that won’t happen any time soon though.

So anyway, the notifications were delivered by SMS, by way of an Email-to-Text gateway supplied by my mobile carrier.  And they being the gougers they are, they decided that I had to pay for the privilege of getting these missives directly instead of having their own servers cache them and send me stupid “you have mail, reply R to read” SMS messages in their stead.  That always bothered me, and while I took some baby steps in the past month or so to get around that in Windows Mobile, I now utilize a GMail account in Android to get around it completely.

Both methods offer quick delivery of said notifications.  The GMail method has no length restrictions, which is good, while the SMS method had no data usage, which was good.  But with 6GB of data allotment each month, data usage isn’t really a concern.  What is a concern is roaming data.  With data-based notifications I simply won’t get any notifications at all if data is off due to roaming.  So I’ve got to think about this one.

Nevertheless, being able to get of the monthly charge is a  Good Thing(tm).  Worst case?  I switch back to SMS-based notifications while out of the country, and use a little hack to deliver the essence of the message without the direct-email-to-text feature.

So that’s that for now.  I feel that a Part 3 will be coming soon.  Stay tuned.