g1white
I’ve been playing with the HTC G1 using the Google Android OS. The phone has been fun – or I should more accurately say the applications have been fun. It’s very easy to search and find some great (and horrible) applications right on the phone. I like the scanner feature, although I find don’t use it so much. I mostly use it to scan the little squares in Cyrket: http://www.cyrket.com/ (a web based market place) so I can easily download the applications I found.
The specific phone features I like include: its width, the sliding qwerty keyboard, GPS, direction sensing/gyroscope and miniSD card.
imate-pda2
I’m being pretty stingy about what I like about it because I’m comparing it in my head to the imate PDA2 that I was using before this. I felt the imate was getting too slow and I’d broken the screen for a second time ($$$$!!!), so I thought I would switch to a cheaper, fully supported phone – no one knows what an imate is! And since I despise Apple and all their proprietary stuff, the G1 was the only alternative (‘imate” is NOT an apple product!). One of the things that I liked about it was that I’d be able to easily access all my Google stuff: calendar, email, and contacts. I was able to get to them all on the imate with a 3rd party program, so it was neat that I didn’t have to mess with that anymore.
The features of the G1 that are similar to the imate that I like include: wifi, bluetooth, phone length, SD card (the imate’s is not mini), speaker phone, navigation buttons, camera.
imate: galloping rabbits
G1: Pinata Penny
The things I miss about the imate: graffiti, it’s thinness, precise screen use (albiet with a stylus), camera (it worked better than the G1, although the picture quality is not that great), physical memo button (although I just found a program that will let me repurpose the G1’s camera button to what ever I want), navagation buttons (answer, hang up phone, navigation “wheel”, calendar), longer battery life, infared keyboard, and infared remote control.
[I just spend 20 mins creating a rather comprehensive chart of each of the phones’ features… I decided at the last minute that no one else but me would be interested in that… So, if you have a deep desire to see it, I’ll email it to you!]
I often get defensive when people are all: “wow, the iPhone/G1 can do this great thing!” And I say, “yeah, my 2003 imate could do that…” This G1 has no personality to me. It is just a phone. All of my other pda’s have had personality – NAMES. I kind of miss that feeling. I was so devastated when I broke Klaus’s screen for the SECOND time, but if I drop this thing it’s no big deal…
In other news, I’ve been using Google Voice for a couple months. Outside of a few settings tweaking and an occasional need for rebooting of the mobile GV app, things have been going pretty well. I’ve been waiting to cancel my unlimited txts from Tmobile to make sure everything comes through well. In almost all cases they do. There have been two instances when I have had to reboot the GV app because the program has locked up. I had also set up one of my Tmobile favorites as the google voice number that most often gets used by my phone. That’s helped cut down on my “anytime” minutes, meaning I can keep the cheapest data/phone package. On the down side it takes quite a while for txts and calls to arrive/leave to/from my phone and in conversations there is a lag. But I like being able to send/get txts from the internet and set special voicemails for special people! I should see if there’s an application for windows mobile 2003… 😀 Oh, and the voicemail transcription thing is sort of a waste – its rarly acurate enough for me to get the full message, although with one screen-button push the real message is immediatly played, so I don’t have to wait for the voicemail to answer and then give me menu options…
ANNNDDDD… I did something kind of stupid. I was trying to get some money out of Tmobile because I didn’t change one of my favorites to the google number fast enough and I got a big charge on my bill last month. I thought I could talk them into it but… Man, I’m embarassed about this … I named the favorite “Google Voice” and the guy I was chatting with was all “you tried to switch it to Google Voice …?” ummm…. I thought – totally chagrined… “yeah”. His response was dissappointing, but a bit heartening at the same time. I decided to come right out and ask him (I printed our chat out, so I’ve got it all exact!) “so, I have to change it?” and he responded “Google services are not supported with myFaves, and they should not be used.” I know from past experience that cell phone companies are very careful and sticklers for leagal-ese, so if it was stricktly prohibited, then he would have said “will not be supported…” instead, he said “should not be used” which is clearly not “no, we’ll charge you regular for it” … So, I interpreted that to mean that basically they can’t do anything about it if I leave it and I’ll still get them for free. So, I’m gonna keep it there for a while and see what happens. (I didn’t get a refund, though.)
But what if I can’t keep it? The Tmobile coverage is a little bit less than what I got from AT&T, but they acknowledge my educator status and give me a 15% discount… or I could hack the G1 and go to another phone company… So, I’ve been thinking about switching back to the imate. I have to remind myself that there were other problems with that, besides breaking it twice! I had to sync through GooSync to get all my google stuff in the phone (on the plus side, I bought a lifetime membership, so it’s still good!), the A2DP bluetooth headset I had wasn’t *completely* supported by the software (controling the media player AND answering calls – it’d play music and change the volume, but I couldn’t change the songs. The headset works perfectly with the G1, tho!), fewer free applications, harder to develop applications (not that I’ve made any for the android yet…), no GPS (although I believe there were programs I could have bought that would have made it GPS-ish), no sync capability with windows mobile device center (I know, I know, I got vista… O.o) so the documents that I made on Klaus would not sync with the files on my new PC desktop – I had to run the old PC and then email the docs to myself (using google docs through the internet SUCKED then), and all the programs had to run on windows mobile 2003, which was already pretty dated when I got the phone in 2006.
Sometimes I daydream about super-hacking the imate – wiping its hard drive and installing a new camera and a laser beam or something crazy like that. But I do think I will try to fix the screen myself this time (seen some for $30 online!) and just have it handy.