Re: syncing my life (orgmode :)) to a mobile (android) device..cant find a holistic reliable way..how do you guys manage to do it?

[Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk>]

On Saturday,  5 Dec 2015 at 09:10, Xebar Saram wrote:

[...]

> all this is great yet i travel alot to conferences and meeting and do rely
> on a mobile device (in my case a android nexus 6) in many situations. I
> check my emails on it as much as i do on my PC, look at upcoming and
> schedule appointments, look at timed TODOS, add new contacts i meet and
> collect info on the go (web links, food recipes etc).
>
> Out of all the things i do only email (via offlineimap and mu4e) seems to
> be able to Sync correctly.

Yes, this is probably a valid summary of the current state of the art
re: org and Android devices.

> So my question is (sorry for the long intro :)) what do orgmode users (who
> also are heavy mobile users) do? do they give up on contacts and
> calendaring on the mobile? maintain 2 separate databases? what tools do
> people use to overcome this issue?
>
> I once had a nokia n900 which ran basically Debian linux, and thus emacs
> could be run naively , these days it seems like all are android devices. I
> still haven't found a gui friendly way to run emacs there.

I have two different working environments, depending on which mobile
device I use:

Case 1: if I use an Android device (nexus 4 or 7), I rely on mobileorg
heavily to synchronise my calendar.  I have mobileorg suck in any
events I create in Google calendar and export all org events to
Google.  This works quite well.  However, creating notes etc. on the
mobile device in this case is not ideal as mobileorg is not a full
implementation of org (and, to be fair, it wasn't intended to be).

Although there is an emacs distribution for Android, I've never really
managed to get it working satisfactorily, with or without a bluetooth
keyboard.  Android is a crippled Linux unfortunately... (in my opinion).

In the end, I primarily use my nexus devices as phones (really?) and for
facebook (as one must).

Case 2: this is my preferred mobile solution.  I have an OpenPandora
palmtop computer [1] running the full Debian testing distribution with
Emacs and the org from git, not to mention gnus, LaTeX, Libreoffice,
Octave, ...  The Pandora has WiFi and bluetooth but not 3/4G
connectivity.  I use my phone to tether the Pandora to the 'net when I
need to connect outside a WiFi zone.  In this case, the Pandora and my
other systems are fully synchronised using unison.  Finally, the Pandora
has 2 full SD slots which allow me to walk around with 128 GB of disk
space.

I bought my Pandora specifically because I wanted a full org mobile
experience!  I am awaiting the release of the Pyra, the upgrade of the
Pandora, very eagerly indeed!

Oh, and the Pandora has a fantastic audio system :-)

Sorry if I have come across as an advert for the Pandora but I am
obviously a satisfied customer.

HTH,
eric


Footnotes: 
[1]  https://boards.openpandora.org/pandora/pandoramain.html/

-- 
: Eric S Fraga (0xFFFCF67D), Emacs 25.0.50.2, Org release_8.3.2-363-g5c13a6