Android and Exchange Support

One of the biggest complaints about Android (and the G1) is the lack of Microsoft Exchange email support. If you aren't afraid to run alpha software, you might try this (download the exchange.apk).

This is the WebDav support put together by the K-9 Mail team. It now has the feature that I wanted most: sending via WebDav (since I can't send via SMTP to my work account). Of course, it also supports reading mail as well.

This build also includes support for self-signed certificates (and certificates with mismatched hostnames).

You should check it out if you have the inclination.
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Android irritation

Against my better judgement, I became an early adopter of the T-Mobile G1. There are some really good points, and some really irritating points. Hit the link for my thoughts.
First, the good. 3G, nice! It has a full keyboard, which is nice, but I think I could still type faster on my BlackBerry Pearl. The Web Browser is great.

Now, the irritations:

The email client (not Gmail) is a crying shame. Performance is terrible. Won't allow self-signed certificates for SSL/TLS connections*. It CRASHES when you open iCal (*.ics) or vCard (*.vcf) files. For "the rest of us" who don't want to send all our mail to be indexed by the all-encompassing Google, this application is actually insultingly bad.

I mistakenly updated to RC30, so I cannot get root on my device. Now, I don't need that, except for the fact that I'd like to have a VPN client, and there aren't any available. This is especially irritating, since I know how to configure Linux to establish the VPN connection, but since I don't have root on the device, no dice. Please someone jailbreak RC30.

* Good news on the email front: the K-9 Mail project has started to replace the default email client, and with some modest changes is already much better than the built-in client. One change of note (coded by yours truly, currently in beta) is that the K-9 Mail client can accept self-signed certificates, and certificates that have mis-matched hostnames (it pops up a dialog asking if you want to accept the key or not).
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