My phone can't write titles.

August 17, 2010

Hi there. I just got a new phone today and I'm checking out how it works. It's an HTC Incredible. I'm liking Android a lot; as my first Android phone, it's been interesting seeing how phone technology has advanced since I bought my Blackberry forever ago.

Most recent blog posts from Kyle Stepp...

The ESPI AWARDS 2017

Something for Jerec, Suskie, and Genj

Everyone Likes Lists: Final Fantasy

Most recent blog posts from Kyle Stepp...
The ESPI AWARDS 2017 Something for Jerec, Suskie, and Genj Everyone Likes Lists: Final Fantasy

Feedback

jiggs - August 17, 2010 (09:00 PM)
really want an EVO. its hard to find them. :( :(

espiga - August 17, 2010 (09:40 PM)
My Blackberry was on the verge of death, so I had to get one fast, lest I'd be stuck without a phone.

I wanted to get a Droid X, but there was a waiting list about 15 people long, and the Verizon dealer said they were only getting 2-4 units per week... Needless to say, there was a waiting list. <_<

fleinn - August 18, 2010 (11:29 AM)
Just make sure you get one with a reasonably good battery-life. I.e., if you turn off 3g, you should have at least two days standby - otherwise you're going to have to save battery during the day, and drain it completely if you're working a little bit. Android does seem interesting, though.

Other possibilities: Palm - they have a couple of new models coming out that work really well, and is actually worth the money. Will obviously never have as good support for user-software and core customisation as Android. But still, a complete and good product built with care only the Palm team can produce - specially when it comes to specific mobile-oriented navigation and multitasking. Such as integrated gestures with sweeps, things like that, replacing the fiddling around on the "taskbar" icon. This is brilliant on WebOS (WM truly is horrible compared to this). It also features the typical social network application integration out of the box, and it looks very sleek. The third-party support is also very good through "Mojo", a very portable and good platform in terms of keeping the mobile oriented outlook while keeping the development process limited - and it has a very large potential as a commercial platform. Even if it might of course suffer the same fate as UIQ in the long term, because it's geared at the serious users (who don't buy animated gifs for 3 euro a piece).

Maemo is another option, if you're willing to fiddle around a little bit, and wait perhaps a year or so until the models finally come out. Basically, it's based on the ARM-debian branch, so you can compile a very large amount of apps found in the Ubuntu depositories on your own if you want, or just download the pre-built packages. And that's not possible to do on other platforms (even though for example WebOS (palm pre) and Android phones are also built on linux). It looks a bit like the netbook remix of Ubuntu. The negative point with it is that to really get any kind of finger-friendly application control (note: it has the same fiddling around as in Windows Mobile), you will have to build it yourself, or customise the gnome-desktop. This isn't for the casual user, but the potential is of course monstrous.

If that's out of the budget-range, getting your hand on one of the g900/700 uiq phones might be an idea. They're actually very good phones, but suffer from lack of support from SonyEricsson (who in the end cancelled their UIQ/smartphone line of phones altogether, going for the walkman phones instead). On the other hand, the 3rd party support was fantastic all the way up to the end, and you still have applications on it that actually make use of touch-screen as a tool, rather than just a lazy input-method. They apparently go for a song if you can find one right now, though, so well worth the money. Specially in terms of battery life and connectivity options. You also.. of course.. know exactly what you're getting. No hype here. :D There's.. also the fact that a lot of the apps are mature - no strange bugs or hangs that didn't get ironed out throughout the pdf-viewers, message applications, and so on.

Of course - always think about what you're using the phone for. There's absolutely no point whatsoever in buying a smartphone if you will never use it as an organiser/web-browser, and see real use in downloading ebooks and spending some time with the scummvm emulator, view videos, use the phone as a modem/hub transfer device, and that kind of thing. There's also no keyboard on a lot of these smartphones (there's.. the palm pre with the full keyboard - good. Some WM phones with the same - although support for it is sporadic, since not all WM phones have keyboards - this is a problem, because the input isn't specified as a generic input device. So suddenly you can end up with a field that can't be used with the keyboard, that kind of thing - not good).

So if you actually are using your phone just as a modem with the laptop, read e-mail, transfer the odd file around, etc. Then you don't need a smartphone. And you can buy a ridiculously good phone with a lithium polymer battery, that lasts a week on normal use for the same or much less money. That's something to consider as well.

Smartphones of different kinds are maturing, though, like Linux/debian variants are as well. So it's definitively something to consider - getting a phone with a fairly large screen, for example, to use as a small PC. But don't expect for a second that something you expect really should work simply will - these devices are mostly built for particular tasks, and are not as customisable as "advertised".. And going beyond what you get sometimes require a horrendous amount of hacking. That's why Blackberry was so successful for the things it did well, even though the hardware and software was nowhere near what the competition had, even when it launched. It did a few things, and it did them perfectly fine every time.

Another thing to think about is opengl acceleration in menus. WM has trouble with this - many models skip past the GLU contexts because of implementation quirks in the drivers. And lots of programs - java, even programs that use the expensive sdk, just don't implement them. And this causes the sluggish interfaces that.. you know, people just accept. WebOS will not have this problem in the interfaces, at least. I don't know how big of an issue this is with Android, since it implements a more common Opengl es context for use with the different buffers, and so on. So overlay programs can actually do acceleration without owning the view context, and... ...sorry.

So if you want my opinion, be sure to check out a WebOS phone (the palm pre and pixi things) before settling on Android. Maybe even consider a throwaway uiq phone. And think about how you're going to use the thing - if you require cut/paste and a pdf-viewer that runs at nominal speeds, this should guide the purchase. If you just want to browse the web, pick a few pictures on facebook, surf news, and so on - get a cell-phone and install Opera mini 5. :p

sashanan - August 18, 2010 (09:58 PM)
*looks at this entry model Nokia*

It does phone calls, and it supports texting. It does absolutely nothing else.

fleinn - August 19, 2010 (12:48 AM)
..if it has java-support, it can do a lot of things. You can also use it as a gprs-modem with your laptop.

You can't use it to directly touch-tap the number of lovers you've had to an advertisement bot on Face-book, though. Ner, ner, ner.

espiga - August 19, 2010 (07:07 AM)
That's all wonderful advice. However, there's a bit of a problem: I had already bought the phone, haha. I made that first post with it!

fleinn - August 19, 2010 (11:00 AM)
..Just in case you try to make a call one day, the phone locks up on you, and you feel the need to go back to the store to ask about different models :D

Any impressions so far? The android phone I tried out wasn't a finished product - ..how did they solve the menu-screens and the task-switching (sending e-mail while opening other programs, that kind of thing - does the scrolling/opengl contexts suffer when the bus is occupied with file-operations..)..?

..oh, and Opera has a mobile version for android, with the new finger-touch selections, and all good things. Very good product. Should be worth trying out.

espiga - August 20, 2010 (06:28 PM)
The touch screen is pretty intuitive and is able to handle pretty much anything you'd expect the touch screen to be sensitive to. The "desktop" has several pages you can switch between with a finger swipe, and icons from your application list can be copied to the desktop by simply holding your finger on them. Applications like the web browser (though it's not the Opera one you mentioned, it's just a proprietary one) can be zoomed in/out by "pinching" the screen, as is common these days.

Android ver 2.1 (Froyo), which my phone is running, is lightning-fast. The biggest complaint people had with earlier versions was that it was kind of laggy, so this version improves speed a lot.

Also, for any app that people need that wasn't already on the phone, there's an Android marketplace, on which you can get a variety of free (and not so free) apps, similar to the iPhone store. Unlike the iPhone store, however, the Android market isn't controlled by Nazis.

But so far, I'm really liking the phone over my Blackberry. It does everything I've expected it to do, and a little bit that I wasn't expecting. For example, it's got a built-in wifi receiver, so in wifi hotspots, I can connect to the network using my phone and thus can rely on the speed of wifi as opposed to the 3G network's generally-quick-but-not-always-quick-enough speed.

Oh yeah, and to answer your question about switching tasks, it's as easy as hitting a home screen to go back and load up whatever task you want. If you don't manually close the task itself, then when you load that task back up, it'll be right where you left it.

jiggs - August 20, 2010 (09:06 PM)
actually Froyo is Android ver. 2.2 also the big deal with this update is the ability to run Flash unlike iPhoney nad runs faster like you mentioned.

Feedback
	jiggs - August 17, 2010 (09:00 PM) really want an EVO. its hard to find them. :( :(
	espiga - August 17, 2010 (09:40 PM) My Blackberry was on the verge of death, so I had to get one fast, lest I'd be stuck without a phone. I wanted to get a Droid X, but there was a waiting list about 15 people long, and the Verizon dealer said they were only getting 2-4 units per week... Needless to say, there was a waiting list. <_<
	fleinn - August 18, 2010 (11:29 AM) Just make sure you get one with a reasonably good battery-life. I.e., if you turn off 3g, you should have at least two days standby - otherwise you're going to have to save battery during the day, and drain it completely if you're working a little bit. Android does seem interesting, though. Other possibilities: Palm - they have a couple of new models coming out that work really well, and is actually worth the money. Will obviously never have as good support for user-software and core customisation as Android. But still, a complete and good product built with care only the Palm team can produce - specially when it comes to specific mobile-oriented navigation and multitasking. Such as integrated gestures with sweeps, things like that, replacing the fiddling around on the "taskbar" icon. This is brilliant on WebOS (WM truly is horrible compared to this). It also features the typical social network application integration out of the box, and it looks very sleek. The third-party support is also very good through "Mojo", a very portable and good platform in terms of keeping the mobile oriented outlook while keeping the development process limited - and it has a very large potential as a commercial platform. Even if it might of course suffer the same fate as UIQ in the long term, because it's geared at the serious users (who don't buy animated gifs for 3 euro a piece). Maemo is another option, if you're willing to fiddle around a little bit, and wait perhaps a year or so until the models finally come out. Basically, it's based on the ARM-debian branch, so you can compile a very large amount of apps found in the Ubuntu depositories on your own if you want, or just download the pre-built packages. And that's not possible to do on other platforms (even though for example WebOS (palm pre) and Android phones are also built on linux). It looks a bit like the netbook remix of Ubuntu. The negative point with it is that to really get any kind of finger-friendly application control (note: it has the same fiddling around as in Windows Mobile), you will have to build it yourself, or customise the gnome-desktop. This isn't for the casual user, but the potential is of course monstrous. If that's out of the budget-range, getting your hand on one of the g900/700 uiq phones might be an idea. They're actually very good phones, but suffer from lack of support from SonyEricsson (who in the end cancelled their UIQ/smartphone line of phones altogether, going for the walkman phones instead). On the other hand, the 3rd party support was fantastic all the way up to the end, and you still have applications on it that actually make use of touch-screen as a tool, rather than just a lazy input-method. They apparently go for a song if you can find one right now, though, so well worth the money. Specially in terms of battery life and connectivity options. You also.. of course.. know exactly what you're getting. No hype here. :D There's.. also the fact that a lot of the apps are mature - no strange bugs or hangs that didn't get ironed out throughout the pdf-viewers, message applications, and so on. Of course - always think about what you're using the phone for. There's absolutely no point whatsoever in buying a smartphone if you will never use it as an organiser/web-browser, and see real use in downloading ebooks and spending some time with the scummvm emulator, view videos, use the phone as a modem/hub transfer device, and that kind of thing. There's also no keyboard on a lot of these smartphones (there's.. the palm pre with the full keyboard - good. Some WM phones with the same - although support for it is sporadic, since not all WM phones have keyboards - this is a problem, because the input isn't specified as a generic input device. So suddenly you can end up with a field that can't be used with the keyboard, that kind of thing - not good). So if you actually are using your phone just as a modem with the laptop, read e-mail, transfer the odd file around, etc. Then you don't need a smartphone. And you can buy a ridiculously good phone with a lithium polymer battery, that lasts a week on normal use for the same or much less money. That's something to consider as well. Smartphones of different kinds are maturing, though, like Linux/debian variants are as well. So it's definitively something to consider - getting a phone with a fairly large screen, for example, to use as a small PC. But don't expect for a second that something you expect really should work simply will - these devices are mostly built for particular tasks, and are not as customisable as "advertised".. And going beyond what you get sometimes require a horrendous amount of hacking. That's why Blackberry was so successful for the things it did well, even though the hardware and software was nowhere near what the competition had, even when it launched. It did a few things, and it did them perfectly fine every time. Another thing to think about is opengl acceleration in menus. WM has trouble with this - many models skip past the GLU contexts because of implementation quirks in the drivers. And lots of programs - java, even programs that use the expensive sdk, just don't implement them. And this causes the sluggish interfaces that.. you know, people just accept. WebOS will not have this problem in the interfaces, at least. I don't know how big of an issue this is with Android, since it implements a more common Opengl es context for use with the different buffers, and so on. So overlay programs can actually do acceleration without owning the view context, and... ...sorry. So if you want my opinion, be sure to check out a WebOS phone (the palm pre and pixi things) before settling on Android. Maybe even consider a throwaway uiq phone. And think about how you're going to use the thing - if you require cut/paste and a pdf-viewer that runs at nominal speeds, this should guide the purchase. If you just want to browse the web, pick a few pictures on facebook, surf news, and so on - get a cell-phone and install Opera mini 5. :p
	sashanan - August 18, 2010 (09:58 PM) looks at this entry model Nokia It does phone calls, and it supports texting. It does absolutely nothing else.
	fleinn - August 19, 2010 (12:48 AM) ..if it has java-support, it can do a lot of things. You can also use it as a gprs-modem with your laptop. You can't use it to directly touch-tap the number of lovers you've had to an advertisement bot on Face-book, though. Ner, ner, ner.
	espiga - August 19, 2010 (07:07 AM) That's all wonderful advice. However, there's a bit of a problem: I had already bought the phone, haha. I made that first post with it!
	fleinn - August 19, 2010 (11:00 AM) ..Just in case you try to make a call one day, the phone locks up on you, and you feel the need to go back to the store to ask about different models :D Any impressions so far? The android phone I tried out wasn't a finished product - ..how did they solve the menu-screens and the task-switching (sending e-mail while opening other programs, that kind of thing - does the scrolling/opengl contexts suffer when the bus is occupied with file-operations..)..? ..oh, and Opera has a mobile version for android, with the new finger-touch selections, and all good things. Very good product. Should be worth trying out.
	espiga - August 20, 2010 (06:28 PM) The touch screen is pretty intuitive and is able to handle pretty much anything you'd expect the touch screen to be sensitive to. The "desktop" has several pages you can switch between with a finger swipe, and icons from your application list can be copied to the desktop by simply holding your finger on them. Applications like the web browser (though it's not the Opera one you mentioned, it's just a proprietary one) can be zoomed in/out by "pinching" the screen, as is common these days. Android ver 2.1 (Froyo), which my phone is running, is lightning-fast. The biggest complaint people had with earlier versions was that it was kind of laggy, so this version improves speed a lot. Also, for any app that people need that wasn't already on the phone, there's an Android marketplace, on which you can get a variety of free (and not so free) apps, similar to the iPhone store. Unlike the iPhone store, however, the Android market isn't controlled by Nazis. But so far, I'm really liking the phone over my Blackberry. It does everything I've expected it to do, and a little bit that I wasn't expecting. For example, it's got a built-in wifi receiver, so in wifi hotspots, I can connect to the network using my phone and thus can rely on the speed of wifi as opposed to the 3G network's generally-quick-but-not-always-quick-enough speed. Oh yeah, and to answer your question about switching tasks, it's as easy as hitting a home screen to go back and load up whatever task you want. If you don't manually close the task itself, then when you load that task back up, it'll be right where you left it.
	jiggs - August 20, 2010 (09:06 PM) actually Froyo is Android ver. 2.2 also the big deal with this update is the ability to run Flash unlike iPhoney nad runs faster like you mentioned.

© 1998-2024 HonestGamers
None of the material contained within this site may be reproduced in any conceivable fashion without permission from the author(s) of said material. This site is not sponsored or endorsed by Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Microsoft, or any other such party. Opinions expressed on this site do not necessarily represent the opinion of site staff or sponsors.