Keinu, web developer blog

I have just received a new toy, after those long labour hours I have been doing last days, better say weeks, no, better say month I treated myself with an HTC Desire, one of the best mobile phones so far.
This phone will replace my yet working phone and be used as an mp3 player since mine was stolen few month ago. I decided not to download a single mp3  and use Spotify instead.

I was a bit disappointed about the installation since it’s a Honky version its of course in English but has some nasty Chinese writing options nagging me. And no way to uninstall those embedded apps. Im getting used to it but once i will have my Desire rooted I might be able to get rid of it.

It’s overall a perfect phone the screen definition its amazing, AMOLED 480×800. The HTC Sense UI just smooth and slick. Even though I can’t compare it with a native Android phone since here in Australia, everybody has an IPhone, and i’m the only one I know with such an operation system as a phone.

In the other hand there is major issue with this OS, a shameful issue:

There is no way to configure a proxy alongside the wi-fi connection, in other words no way to configure a proxy system wise ( http_proxy ). What a shame for an so called enterprise ready handset.  In our office we need to go through a proxy if we want to access the Internet, so do heaps of companies. So at work there is no way i can connect my phone to the network.

Google hasn’t added this feature on the latest Android version 2.2 and is not ready to implement it in further release. Even more lame, the Android 1.5 ad 1.6 have this feature enabled.

After spending hours reading boards, I couldn’t find a suitable solution.

Anyway, I’m stubborn and patient and wanted to have Spotify working, so I can sync my offline music at home. I went for a Premium account on Spotify,  managed to get Spotify installed on  my phone (couldn’t find it in the app market, maybe because I’m not using a European IP).

But guess what? No proxy setting on the app!
I went browsing on the phone’s SD card, and opened a file named settings on Spotify’s folder.

I found some interesting infos there :

{“autologin_username”:”myusername”,
“proxy_pass”:”",”realtime_clock_delta”:-4}

This is a nice JSON data with some config settings.

I went to my work’s computer to find this Spotify’s setting file, and since I’m using the same network I copied over some directives :

{“autologin_username”:”myusername”,
“proxy”:”myproxyhost:port@https”,
“proxy_mode”:2,
“proxy_pass”:”some crypted chars here”,
“realtime_clock_delta”:-4}

Unplugged the usb cable, opened Spotify, et voila! Spotify is connecting through the company’s proxy !