Lotus Traveler on the Kindle Fire

I was a little late in the game to try to get Lotus Traveler to work on the Kindle Fire since I only purchased the tablet in the middle of March of this year (2012).  I didn't even bother to check whether Lotus Traveler on the Amazon Kindle Fire was even supported or not.  Only after purchasing the device did I find out that the official word from IBM was that it was not supported.  I really wanted a smaller format, easy to carry tablet for my upcoming travels (I already have the first edition iPad) and being an Amazon Prime customer, the Kindle Fire made a lot of sense to buy.   After purchasing the device I was disappointed to find, as were other Traveler users apparently, that the Kindle Fire does not fully support Lotus Traveler.  When you do install Lotus Traveler, the only icon that does appear is the Server Traveler icon with all of the settings for the application.  The other icons including the Mail and Calendar ones were nowhere to be found.

So I searched the web for answers and was happy to find a posting by Bryce Morgan with a work around.  He installed the Claystone Launcher, a third party application, that allows you to manage your applications on the tablet.  I successfully installed Claystone Launcher, but, once I tried to load it, it appeared to hang.  After several attempts I gave up on Claystone Launcher and went on the search for another app and found “Apps Box”.  Apps Box did what Bryce Morgan had said would be possible: the Mail and Calendar icons now appeared inside the application manager.  Within a few clicks I was then able to select the Traveler icons to be on the front page of the application.  So now, to load Mail or Calendar, I first open up Apps Box and then I just simply click on the Lotus Traveler application that I want loaded.  One extra click is not too much of a hassle at all.

Lotus Traveler works well on the Kindle Fire, but here is one quirk:
When composing or replying to an email, the mail addresses do not show up in the To, CC or BCC fields.  The fields appear to be blank even when they are not.  However, when you click on those fields (give each one focus) the email addresses do actually show up, so you can double check that you have the correct addresses in the field that way.

The other thing I wanted to mention was that the first week I used the Kindle Fire a strange problem occured.  All the Lotus Traveler data I had synchronized/downloaded suddenly got erased from the device.  I got the following message: As a result of an update local data has been removed.  I was forced to sync all of my data again, twice.  I verified with our system administrator that there were no updates to Traveler when this happened.  We also had no security settings in place for Traveler yet for our devices (although now security is in place for all users) so security enforcement should not have caused data to be erased.  I can say that in both instances when the data was removed I had used the tablet until it shutdown on its own from lack of battery.  I didn’t recharge it until we got to a different hotel (different WiFi maybe) and when I tried to access Mail I got the above message that the data was erased.

I checked the tablet’s Traveler log and the only 2 entries that stood out were as follows:
SEVERE Your SD card needs to be mounted.  Initial sync is not complete.
As a result of an update local data has been removed

Also, the version of Lotus Traveler we were running at the time was 8.5.3.1 on Linux.
The first log entry appears to be a fairly common one since I’ve seen the same one on my HTC G2 Android phone with Traveler.  The second one does not appear anywhere else and Googling it didn’t yield any results.  So I can only assume it is not all that common.  I’m not all that concerned about the problem since it is already nearing the end of April and I have not had the data being suddenly erased problem for almost a month now.  I just thought another Kindle Fire might find my experience useful.