One of the essential functionalities of my smartphone is to keep me informed about upcoming meetings and things to do throughout the day. On Symbian a good solution for the idle screen has existed for years right out of the box for showing the next couple of upcoming actions. On Android, however, it doesn't seem that there is anything with the same functionality right out of the box.
But there are tons of calendar widget applications that can be installed so I took some time to install a number of them and give them a try. Obviously widgets that request access to resources other than the calendar, especially access to the network, were excluded from the beginning. After some trial and error, I settled for the "Android Agenda Widget". Configurable in the extreme (!) it does exactly what I want, i.e. it shows me at least the next 4 upcoming actions in a font size that is not too small to be unreadable but also not too big and hence only showing the beginning of the text. Almost perfect 🙂
So this was part 7 of my excursion into Android. By now I've pretty much got the pieces together for life after Nokia has closed its books on openness and freedom for customers and have gone to a closed garden ecosystem. Now it's HTCs, Samsung's or someone else's job to build an Android based device with a good camera with xenon flash and a software company to offer a mapping and navigation application that works with offline maps and around the globe.