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As pretty as it looks, I'm feeling a little disappointed in the potential productivity of my first Android device.

I have had only one previous smartphone, which was a Blackberry with paltry specs of 600Mhz CPU. Even so, I find this a lot faster for common tasks and apps.
On Blackberry, pretty much all the common messengers and social networking tools are made by RIM, for RIM's OS, on RIM's hardware. Because of this and the unified messages inbox, everything is so perfectly integrated and I really miss this!
On Android, all these apps are done by different developers.
On top of that, a lot of the apps I've tried are really flakey.
Here's what I've tried so far:
Facebook: Great when it works, even provides notifications! But most of the time I get an authorisation failure error when logging in which doesn't go away until I uninstall the app and download it again.

Windows Live Messenger: Worked great first time, haven't been able to sign in again since then, it just hangs after entering the login details.

Yahoo Messenger: No issues, does exactly what you'd expect.

Everything else works to a certain degree, but various niggles and lack of a standard UI is irritating.

So rather than trawl through the thousands of apps, I need somewhere or someone to tell me which ones are worth using .

Also, is there a decent photo viewing app? Not sure why but the tablet seems to really struggle viewing photos, it renders them really badly and takes several seconds for each picture to display normally. It's similar to what my old 200Mhz Palm did, but possibly even worse!

Might try out IM+ when I get home, that seems like an easy way of making things tidier. Are there any other all-in-ones I could look into?

Friendcaster is good for Facebook.

The Facebook client is woeful to be honest and Facebook don't seem particularly interested in fixing it. Neve had the problem you mention with it though.

For photos, Just Pictures is quite good but the default gallery is usually good, works well on my old HTC desire running ICS.

Can't comment on IM solutions.

Oh boy cantisque, you make me feel really dissapointed - are things really so "Extremely" bad?
It may not be fair to compare specific services with the Blackberry - as you say - that is a dedicated device.
Surely one of the main attractions with android is the adventure, you just need a little patience and I am sure that supermods for the Extreme will be abounding in no time. Anyway, the way that "Storage Options" knock out new models so quickly (watch their web-site as if they stay true to form the Extreme specifications will evolve as time goes on.) you may want to trade in and get the next model.

Trashcooky wrote:Oh boy cantisque, you make me feel really dissapointed - are things really so "Extremely" bad?

I don't think it's so much a problem with the Extreme, as much as my high expectations of Android which is supposed to be a cutting-edge OS .

Trashcooky wrote:It may not be fair to compare specific services with the Blackberry - as you say - that is a dedicated device.

It also has a hard keyboard, which I find to be a million times more comfortable . But yeah, it's not quite the same to compare, Blackberry is a lot more closed. There are very few apps besides RIM's own ones that are worth downloading.

Trashcooky wrote:Surely one of the main attractions with android is the adventure, you just need a little patience and I am sure that supermods for the Extreme will be abounding in no time.

I'm not the adventurous sort . Like I say, I'm used to the app just working ... And not having much choice about which ones I use.

Also thanks for the suggestions, neilleeds! I'll check them out when I get back .

Does anyone know of any decent RSS sync and podcast manager? For RSS, since it will only be using WiFi, I'd like one that syncs entire articles and images and caches them to disk, as opposed to just downloading snippets.
Same with the podcasts (videos too would be nice!).

Any other useful apps you can recommend will also be appreciated .

I use Newsrob for Google Reader but there is an official and other unofficial Google Reader clients. That is assuming you use Reader of course. For tablet use you might find Google Currents to be good.

Beyondpod is decent for podcasts also the built in music app might support podcasts.

Not sure if the stock app for photos on the Extreme is 3D Galley (I am betting it is) - I would disable it by renaming the app (in /system/app) from a .apk to .orig (or .old - what ever you want) this will keep the app on the system, but it will never run and you will not be able to use it, also you could delete it to get more space. That app is not very good and a huge drain on resources and battery. Replace it with Quickpic from Play Shop is my recommendation (there are other photo/video apps, but this one is lightweight but powerful)

The default photo viewer on the Extreme is just called Gallery. It lists square thumbnails of folders you have images in a tiled arrangement. It's very basic yet the performance is really bad.

I tried Fish Bowl and although it was really pretty and fun to drag and rotate your photos all over each other, the performance was even worse.

cantisque wrote:The default photo viewer on the Extreme is just called Gallery. It lists square thumbnails of folders you have images in a tiled arrangement. It's very basic yet the performance is really bad.

Yes that is it, it will be named in /system/app as Gallery3D.apk (It's one of the 1st apps I delete when I get an new device and root it.)

EDIT: On the 1st gen Scroll with the slower processor it was a really really bad app to try to use.

P.S. That app seems to want the power of 2 jet engines to run, but goes slower than a tortoise. LOL

Charlie wrote:
P.S. That app seems to want the power of 2 jet engines to run, but goes slower than a tortoise. LOL

Runs pretty well on my desire but I would agree there are faster alternatives.

Try facebook via the web browser as alternative to the facebook app.. Make sure you check out google+ and of course all the numerous twitter clients available in the play store...

Google Talk aka GTalk aka Talk is a really good IM, esp if you know loads of people with google accounts... Gtalk is not shipped on the extreme, I'm guessing for the same licensing issues as those that surround the Google play store.. Snag is Gtalk is not available in the play store, has anybody installed the ICS/latest version of Gtalk onto the extreme yet? If so how? Would be great to know this...