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by Martin Fowler.
Original Post: Android
Feed Title: Martin Fowler's Bliki
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Feed Description: A cross between a blog and wiki of my partly-formed ideas on software development
One of the side benefits of speaking at the Google IO conference
last month was that I got a new phone - the HTC Magic android phone
that Google gave to all attendees. I was actually in the market for
changing my phone to something like this, so it came at a good
time. Here's my impressions after carrying it around for a month or
so.
My previous phone was a Nokia E61. I liked the E61 as a phone,
but found it's web browser to be slow and unreliable and it that,
together with the relatively small screen, was beginning to bug me -
hence the desire for something else. Naturally I considered an
iPhone, but although the company phone plan that I use is AT&T, it
isn't possible to use the iPhone on it and I didn't fancy the hassle
of sorting out a new phone plan. I tried a Blackberry storm for a
few days, but (how about this for irony) the email was no good for
me. Blackberries copy every email that comes into the email account,
so it doesn't work well for an IMAP account with server-side filters
- which is how I use my gmail account.
The short statement is that I do like the htc magic android.
The Good
Physically the device works very well for me. It's small,
light, and fits well in my hand. The screen is bright, making web
browsing is much nicer than with the Nokia.
Battery life seems reasonable, a day or two with my usual usage.
The app market seems to have a fair few useful things, I've
downloaded a bunch of little apps which have seemed handy.
Video play works well. I've watched some TED videos
and transcoded some other video using Handbrake which played
well on the screen.
I like that I can upgrade the memory using a micro-SD
card. It came with 2GB, and I'm upgrading to 8GB since it's
pretty cheap.
I use gmail and Google calendar and the phone syncs nicely
with those.
The phone charges via a mini-USB
connection. One less charger to have to carry around.
I read one of the prags's
books using an ebook reader and it worked pretty well.
The Bad
My biggest irritant so far is that it makes it hard to
browse local HTML pages. It doesn't support file://
URLs. This is a big issue for me as I often copy static HTML
files to my phone for reference purposes. There is a work-around,
but it's kludgy.
Like every other calendar app on the planet, Google calendar
suffers from TimeZoneUncertainty. This is a big issue
with a phone that you want to change time zone as you travel.
I miss the Nokia's keyboard when typing. The soft keyboard
just doesn't work as well.
While the touch navigation works pretty well, I'm sure I'd
prefer the iPhone's multi-touch gestures.
The Uncertain
I haven't tried writing an app for it. I'd like to
experiment, but I'm not allowing myself any such fun until I get
the book finished.
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