making a plain text request

JSON only with a CIQ 1.4.x device.  Maybe you could use a proxy to turn it into JSON

Hmm that's bad. I guess if I would write an android app to function as a proxy I had to start it manually every time I would want to make a request?

I think the idea is to use a web service to proxy your request. e.g. Google App Engine is free for reasonable amounts of bandwidth. 

A proxy web service.  I was looking into MS Azure a while back to reduce the amount of data returned in a request.

Thanks, but Google app engine and Microsoft azure don't seem to be the right way for me.

Well, I can't think of another way to do it.

Even if you could make a plain text request, what would you do with the data? You'd have to write the code to parse the XML manually, which would take resources on the watch (CPU cycles and memory for the code), as well as wasting your time re-inventing the wheel. 

If you write your own proxy, you should be able to convert the XML data to JSON, which means you can write less code for the watch and leverage the CIQ functionality which will automatically parse the JSON into a Monkey C object you can work with.

I'm not sure why you'd be willing to write an android app to do this, but not a web service....

Anyway, good luck with your app!

Well, the only other approach is to only support devices that have CIQ 3.0.0 or greater.  This isn;'t something that will be backported to CIQ1 and CIQ2 devices,

Well I wrote the entire code (xml parser, etc) already in the simulator and it worked well! Parsing the example file I linked takes around two seconds which I think is really ok. It is probably a bugt hat the simulator didn't crash when I simulated the app on a ciq 1 device.

Yeah that sounds like a bug worth reporting.