New phone, new platform
February 24th, 2011, 12:32am by Kelvin
I got an HTC Shift 4G last week to replace my dying Palm Pre. Granted, it’s not the most cutting edge phone out there, and in fact, Engadget didn’t deem it worthy of a review. But there’s a lot to like. Like my Matrix live wallpaper!
First of all, let’s get the descriptions out of the way, for those of you who have not seen it. It’s an Android 2.2 handset with a slide out landscape keyboard and a screen the size of an iPhone’s. I like the keyboard for longform writing (this post for instance), but I’m also finding the on-screen keyboard incredibly useful for pounding out short responses. There’s a certain amount of activation energy involved in sliding out the keyboard, but once it’s out, I do love typing on it. The keys are spaced out farther than I’m used to, but they have a perfect amount of resistance. In retrospect, the Pre’s keys are too stiff for me, and my fingers would get tired when typing a lot. I do miss the ability to delete a whole word though (by holding option and backspace). That’s genius. I also make use of Graffiti and voice input on occasion (Serena freaked out when I sent her an sms to tell her I witnessed an accident on the freeway 🙂 ).
This Word Press app is pretty limited compared to webOS’s Poster, so I am making additional comments from my computer. This brings us to the strength of Android– apps and lots of them. For every Poster and DrPodder, which have better features on webOS, there are tons of apps that blow away their webOS counterparts. Apps on Android in general are more responsive, better looking, and are more better maintained, especially the first party titles like Yelp, which supports logins, check-ins, Monacle (their augmented reality app), writing reviews, and all the social networking features that the Elites use. The webOS version was released in the first month, never updated, and looks exactly like their mobile site.
Notifications on Android are nearly as good as webOS– you can’t interact with them (like pause music) or clear them individually, but they are 90% of the way there. I do like that the mini icons don’t take up extra screen real estate like they do on webOS.
It goes without saying that webOS has better multitasking out of the box. Not only the UI, but the fact that Android actively manages background tasks as memory and processor loads require means that you never know when a background app will have been closed or not. Also, Android has made some pretty arbitrary choices as to what can occur in the background. Music playback continues uninterrupted, but videos stop when backgrounded. That’s fine, but then all media (including music) streaming from a browser (either via Flash or clicking on a media file) pauses in the background. Not only that, but file won’t even continue to download, so if you have slow connection, you can’t pause and then do something else while you fill the buffer. Luckily, Android has background task scheduling so you can automate tasks without having apps running continuously (for things like scheduled Twitter/facebook/email checks).
Anyway, those are some initial thoughts so far. With today’s announcement that Sprint won’t have the Shift’s Windows Phone 7 counterpart out until March 20, it looks like I’m going to stick with the Shift and Android, for now. Hopefully, in a year, there will be some better options to consider from HP, Nokia, and of course, Apple.
February 24th, 2011 at 11:36 am
One thing I miss about my Pre: The ability of apps like Open Table to add events to the calendar
One thing I don’t miss about my Pre: Lack of an Agenda view making calendar events virtually useless
February 24th, 2011 at 12:39 pm
Re: size and battery life. The Shift is a little big (an ounce bigger than the Pre and iPhone), but I can love with it. Battery life has been a godsend. I charge it overnight and that’s it.
February 25th, 2011 at 12:22 pm
One thing I miss about my Pre: Previewing emails (sender, subject) from the notification
One thing I don’t miss about my Pre: The phone locking up for 4 seconds whenever an email was being received
February 25th, 2011 at 6:19 pm
BTW, this seems like a nice perk– buy a phone through Best Buy before 2/26 (tomorrow), and you get enrolled in their Buy Back program for free. This gives you the opportunity to sell back your phone at a fraction of it’s retail value ($550 for my Shift). That should pay for my next phone if I upgrade in a year ($220).
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Misc/Buy-Back-Program/pcmcat230000050010.c?id=pcmcat230000050010&DCMP=rdr2161
March 8th, 2011 at 12:51 am
This is one awesome thing about Android that I just discovered– 3rd party apps like Yelp can be set as the default app for yelp web links (exactly how Youtube links optionally launch the youtube app on a variety of platforms and the same for Google Maps links). Haven’t noticed other apps yet that takes advantage of this extensibility, but I always wished that Flickr links would launch Flickr Mundo on my Pre.