This week has been hectic at work and hectic at home. When there weren’t too many things to be done, there were hugely important little things that needed to be addressed.
This ain’t either one of those! 🙂
Like a lot of other geeks and music freaks, I’ve been fiddling with Spotify. I’ll post a full review of Spotify sometime this weekend – along with a more complete review of Google+. But I saw some things when I installed Spotify that made me address a long-standing challenge I have with Android. Specifically, Spotify allows you to sync your music to your mobile devices based upon the host names that your mobile devices present to your WiFi infrastructure. But Android doesn’t provide useful names for your phone.
In fact, the name that most Android phones provide is positively hideous. It usually takes the form of Android + <hexadecimal character string>. And when you have three or more Android phones connecting to your WiFi router, this kind of naming is impossible to manage. Like most folks, I prefer seeing a name that is customer-selected.
So I began the great Google quest. I found out where the odd name comes from. I also found a means of changing that name via a command shell and rot privileges. I even found an app that will change the name – but it is only effective until the next reboot of the phone. Finally, I realized that I could change the name on my home network by updating the DHCP tables on the router itself.
So I can affect the change that I desire (see above). But it sure would be nice if Google (and the Android community) would update the core OS to allow for customer-selected host names. That way, the platform will be even more manageable for the average user.
-Roo