Good question, don't have an android phone myself, but I'll look into it. I have an update as well that i'll post soon that adds a status monitor for the pool to let you know if it's up or down.

And thanks for the donation! 

The mining difficulty went up across the network at 05/09/11 @ 4:17:24pm EST (the same day slush happened to restore the pool). You might have noticed a drop in bitcoins generated because of that. See https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty

Great points! All good reasons to not just go for the highest g/hash pool. Hoping around pools and then saying/thinking one makes more after a couple days is the worst way to pick a pool.

P.S. The only real difference is the fee charged by the pool. Slush charges 2% versus Deepbit which charges 3%. So over the long run, you'll make more with slush.

It won't be more profitable. It all has to do with probabilities. Over time, everything will average out.

500 g/hash is somewhat more likely to make payouts more consistently over short durations. Each block requires a random amount of time to solve. So at 200 g/hash, you might solve one block in 40 minutes, or it might take you 2 hours. That means in one day you could have as many as many as 36 solved blocks, or as few as 12.

When your doing 500g/hash, you'll be solving blocks quicker, which means probabilistically, you should approach the average quicker.

In either case either pool could win or lose the random lotto, and vastly out or underperform the average for any span of time, it's just increasingly unlikely the faster you go, and the longer you're at it.  (hence why pooling is more consistant than solo mining).

Testing out one pool for a couple of days, and switching won't tell you anything, because you might randomly outperform or underperform the average on those time scales, regardless of the pool.

I think the point that was trying to be made was that in 48 hours you might get unlucky and get a poor payout. With slush running at 180GHs that possible unluckiness is going to be exacerbated compared to deepbit. The longer you stay on slush (or any pool), the closer to the average probable payout you will get. (It's also possible that in 48 hours you get lucky, and then the longer you stay in the pool the less the payout).

Deepbit running at 560GHs is going to get you to a more stable payout quicker than slush. But it's going to cost you 3% versus slush's 2%. So, you'll always earn more in the long run on slush than deepbit. 

All things being equal, slush has some great features that deepbit doesn't, which is why competition is great. I really like a lot of slush's stats and graphs, and I also like that slush has a self signed SSL cert that I can use when accessing my account.

Downtime always occurs. Amazon EC2 was out for 24 hours recently, and they have gobs of people and resources. It'll happen to deepbit eventually, so it's no reason to jump ship.

Hi all. Just created this little adobe air app that displays your current stats for slush's pool. It updates itself every minute so you don't have to refresh the web page all the time. It's open source... just right click on the window when it's running and click "View Source".

You can download it at:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8428240/SlushReporter.air

( if you don't have air installed, first you need to download that at http://get.adobe.com/air )