Hello again
Hard pressed by my colleague Wesley I have to write a new blog post - he demands it.
So this time I will write a little about my experience with my HTC magic which uses the Android phone OS. Most things about it I really like.
The bad things first:
The screen gets very easily scratched, and I normally take good care of my phones. My previous nokia ones didn’t have many scratches after several years. The Magic got a big scratch after just 14 days, and it still gets little scratches easily. The new HTC Hero should be better in that area(and also have more RAM)
You cannot do bluetooth filetransfer right now (actually a little embarrassing)
The music player is a little basic and doesn’t have any “Wow effects”
The good:
I really like the open nature of the OS and a lot of free apps exists in Android market, and because the SDK is freally available and the multi handset vendor support I will think that we will get a lot of clever apps more than the iphone has - after some time
The iphone of course have better 3d graphics support, so they will be running games a lot better and are quite successful in the gaming market.
The UI is quite smooth and android has a 3 “virtual desktop” concept which works quite good. You can add widgets as you like on them and shortcuts to applications. That is quite nice, so your primary “desktop” doesn’t get too crowded.
My favorite apps are:
Locale (+plugins) Locale is an app which changes settings/sends sms/tweets/etc. etc. when some conditions you set yourself happens. eg. it can set the ringtones/volume/notification depending on where you are. It can find out where you are by mobile cell/wifi or gps(gps in a phone is really nice)
Astrid is a todo list. Which actually can cooperate with locale, so it can remind of things on your today depending on where you are. So when drive by the supermarket it can notify you that you have to buy milk - or whatever :-)
Astro is just a good filemanager which also features tools like Application manager/backup, SD card usage info, and a Process manager(the funny thing about android is that many applications cannot be closed. So they just run in the background if needed or are suspended - but still running)
Barcode scanner is a barcode scanner(works really good) which can also look up thing you have scanned…google product search etc.
Ear is an app for defining profiles and switching between them. I missed profiles comming from a nokia phone where I actually used them
Layar is an “augmented reality” application. You point the camera in some direction, and you can then choose several layers which can be overlayed into the picture. examples are restaurants, gas station and a lot of more. Wikipedia pages about some attraction is also available. As the magic has an compass build-in it knows where you are pointing the camera(this actually also works in google maps)
Lookup incomming caller can use several services to lookup incomming calls. In Denmark it uses 118.dk and it works fine
My Tracks is an google app which are tracking where you are. You can save routes(and save them to google maps actually) and tell it if you where walking,bicycling or driving. It show average speed, average speed while in movement, and draw a nice graph :-) Really nice. I am trying using it next time a I am Running(exercising)
Newsrob is an newsreader with google reader support - so that is nice
Sambaexplorer for connecting to smb shares(windows networking)
Simple last.fm scrobbler adding scrobbling to last.fm to the built-in music player
Sipdroid. I am using ip telephony at home. This is an app making it possible for me to have my home with me wherever I am. I am using it against pbxes.org(it is their home company iptel which have developed the app) because they have patched their sip server so the phone doesn’t use so much power(ex. it is using tcp for SIP signaling which has a lot longer time-to-live and therefor is saving battery power at the client side). You can use it against your own asterisk, but doesn’t as well as using pbxes.org(and you can connect pbxes.org to your home asterisk if you like)
squeezecontrol is an app which can control logitech squeezebox/transporter streaming players. If you one of them. This is a must have
Twidroid is the best twitter app
Wikitude is also an “augmented reality” app
So I really like HTC magic/android. When using wifi/bluetooth and autosyncing your google account it uses the power on the battery quite fast. It can be like one day only capacity when using it a lot
And by the way. The exchange sync is working really well now. After the newest firmware update from htc. I am happy about it, but the easely scratched screen I am not happy about. That is not good enough for a phone in that price range!
Right now I am looking forward to Nokia N900 (I have the earlier N810 internet tabblet) It looks like a really nice device - and it also runs linux and the apps actually runs under linux and not under some homemade google java - and it has 3d graphics acceleration :-)
See you soon…probably for a short Mac OSX Snow Leopard review(or maybe a review og my new Sennheiser MM200 stereo(a2dp) bluetooth headset)
Now Wesley....is it good enough or should I have proofreading it for small children?