More Android fun and frustration

Ever since I bought a bike, I've been taking rides through the city when the weather is nice: it's a great way to burn off a few beers' worth of calories, while also getting some sun and seeing some parts of the city that I wouldn't otherwise see. Although there are many streets that are a bit dangerous on a bike, Munich is extremely bike-friendly, and there's almost always a pleasant, safe, and scenic route to get just about anywhere.

Android now has an awesome Navigation system that gives turn-by-turn directions. It's theoretically got biking directions (although that's not available here in Munich yet). So, I figure, an obviously great implementation of this tool would be the following:

1) Go to Google Maps and cross-reference it with the Munich bike path map (http://maps.muenchen.de/radlstadtplan_2009/radlstadtplan_2009.html?str=Marienpl.&num=8)

2) Plan out a nice scenic route for the day that utilized bike paths as much as possible, and goes through one or two parks, monuments, or whatever.

3) Export the route in Google Maps via one of the many methods available

4) Pop it into the nav system, pop in one of my headphones, and go!

Instead, there's virtually no integration, which means that I either have to memorize my route (or else keep popping out my phone and double-check my location on the way), or else utilize the default Navigation routes, which always go through the dangerous, ugly, car-priority streets.

Off the top of my head, I can think of many applications for this tie-in:

--When going to your friend's new place, he can send you a route of the best way to get there.

--You're going to a picnic in the park, and you want to send your friends the best route to the closest parking lot.

--You want to publish some of the best walks or bike rides in your favorite cities.

--You found a great shortcut in town and want to share it with all your friends who regularly have to drive through the same area.

Or whatever. What confuses me is that this functionality has got to be really, really easy for Google to build in; the hard part is figuring out the route, and that part's already done! The Nav software only needs to shout out the directions - shouldn't that be easy?

Anybody else find this to be a maddening lack of obvious, simple functionality?

Android in the enterprise

One of the main reasons I bought my new phone was that it natively supports Exchange, but the sad thing is that there is not currently a single Android phone on the market that any corporate security department worth their salt would allow.
Corporations don't care about the devices per se - what they care about is the potentially valuable inside information that may be on that device. If a thief / corporate spy / whatever gets access to the phone, the data on it needs to be protected. To that end, the _minimum_ requirements to allow a phone to hold corporate data would be:

1) PIN or password protection that can reasonably expected to not be broken. Logical requirements for that are:

--PIN / password existence and complexity enforcement

--After a predefined number of failed attempts, the device either self-wipes or permanently locks.

2) Ability to remotely issue a remote wipe (in case an employee quits on bad terms / is fired but he doesn't know it yet / whatever)

3) Encryption of all data on the device, so that if it physically falls into the wrong hands, the thief(s) won't be able to access the data, even if given a long time to do so.

The new FroYo build is supposedly able to do all of these, except for the data encryption. If you were in charge of security for your enterprise, would you allow users to use a device with no encryption?

Blackberrys have supported all these for a long, long time. iPhone 3G supports it (although apparently not all that well), pretty much any new Windows Mobile smartphone supports it. There is currently no single Android model that supports it (AFAIK).

I find this really strange. Considering that plenty of enterprises would love to bring Android devices into the fold, it's weird that nobody yet makes a handset with hardware encryption. I still have no idea why this is.