For example, thanks to you hint about input methods, I found that there are dozens of alternative keyboard on the market. I have yet to find one that does French correctly, but at least that is a clue that anything can be customized – which means that the system could potentially be told to do what I want, given know how and resources. This is very encouraging.

As I said, I’ll be back in a about month with an article describing my experience after hopefully enough time to be really familiar with that system.

To fix your auto-correct woes, go to Settings > Locale and text > User dictionary and add your email address, or even just the username portion.

I completely agree with your scrolling comments. On the G1, I do have the option of “Alt+scroll” to directly to the top or bottom of a list, but I don’t think you can do that with the softkeyboard.

To kick off a manual sync go to Settings > Data synchronization, hit menu, Sync Now

I get the concerns with being tied to google, but I’m okay with it, so I haven’t investigated 3rd party options too heavily, but the K-9 mail client is open source and under heavy development, and there are other Jabber/XMPP options out there.

If you install the development environment on your PC, you can run adb and logcat to get much more detailed information of what’s going on on the phone.

Regarding contacts sorting, on the G1, I can just start typing, either a first or last name, and the contacts are filtered, the same for the application screen. I guess this option isn’t available on the G2 either…

Have you downloaded to the new Google Maps from the Market? It includes on-foot and public transportation direction options, but still is missing the terrain layer. It is a good sign that Google Maps is being updated more rapidly and independently of the rest of the OS, I hope the other Google apps head in that direction.

To get accent characters long-press on the base letter, you’ll get a screen to select the accent characters, this works on both the hard and soft keyboards. As I don’t speak french (or any language that uses lot of accent marks), I’m not sure how annoying that would be, but it’s better than nothing. It does look like some additional “Input Methods” have been made available on the Market, including handwriting recognition. But I have a full keyboard, so the soft keyboard only gets used for 1-4 word text entry. Anything more and I’ll use the full keyboard.