The other day I was stuck in Houston traffic attempting to make it back to the UH campus on time for my Terry Scholar meeting. It was necessary to make it their on time because I was the only one who had the Agenda PDF on my flash drive as well as online on DropBox. Suddenly, I remembered that my new 3G Android phone could probably retrieve it from the Internet and email it. Or could I?

I navigated over to DropBox’s snazzy iPhone optimized interface and attempted to download the PDF file. I clicked it. Downloading…
Bork, Unsupported file type!
"Cannot download. The content being downloaded is not supported on the phone."

What? I knew that PDFs can’t be read on the Android unless you send it to your Gmail address and use “Preview;” however, WHY can I not just download it, attach it to an email, and send it? Is the Android G1 supposed to just a nerd phone with no business use at all?

By tinkering a bit more, you can eventually download PDF’s, but you need to have an application like “JetCet PDF” which “registers” and thus “supports” the file type. On the subject of JetCet PDF, the application is in extreme alpha. The application either crashes on me when I attempt to open a PDF or it opens it with garbage as most of the English text.

I later found out that Gmail on the Android will only allow you to attach and send pictures. Again, what? I guess you could use a file manager app to change the extension of a filename from Agenda.pdf to Agenda.pdf.jpg, send it, and make sure the recipient knows to change the file extension or risk viewing gobbledygook.

Google, I want to be able to download any file I want and attach any file I want!

Conclusion: I temporarily changed my DropBox password so that the president could download the Agenda and print it off.