So, I got my HTC Desire yesterday and I've spent a day and a half thrashing it. Here's my first impressions:
GOOD:* The user interface is mostly very smooth. It mostly feels gorgeous to use. I've never owned a touch-screen phone before, and have only played with friends' phones. But using the touchscreen to scroll up and down is beautiful, and easy to understand. To give you an idea of what this means to me, on my current phone, a Nokia 6120c, to see a link someone has posted on Twitter, I have to:1) Use the Gravity Twitter app to send the link to the Instapaper link-saving service.
2) Close down Gravity (because the Nokia has very little RAM indeed)
3) Open up the Opera Mini browser (version 4, because v5 is not as good IMO)
4) Click on my bookmark to take me to Instaaper
5) Click on the link I want to visitOn the Desire, I just click on the link in Twidroid (the Twitter client I'm checking out), and it opens. This is so much easier. Of course, if the browser that comes built-in to the Nokia didn't suck, I wouldnt' have to go to so much effort, but it does and I do.
* I can change the home page! One of my big problems with Apple is their culture of locking down their phones to stop you changing all sorts of things. I can see their point - they don't want people mucking around with their phone, breaking it and then blaming Apple. It's their business, they can run it how they want, but I feel very wary of that. The Desire's home page came with a pretty background, a calendar/clock/weather app taking up the top half of the page, and four pre-loaded icons linking to services, presumably put there by Telstra as one of the icons was for Bigpond. After reading this article about some top Android apps at Lifehacker, I wanted to try out Slidescreen. I searched for it in the Marketplace (Android's equivalent of the App Store), found it easily, installed it with a click or two and fired it up. And I love it. Now, my home page has: 1) My latest unread emails in Gmail2) My upcoming events from Google Calendar3) My newest items in Google Reader4) My latest few Facebook updates5) The latest reply to me on Twitter 6) The time, date, battery level, latest temperature and weather forecast.This suits me perfectly. You might not want things set up this way of course (and if you don't like using Google services things won't be as simple). But the point remains that I totally changed the way the front screen of my phone works, and it was simple. * The 5MP camera is very good for a camera phone. I've taken a few pictures, posted them here and shared them other social networks and I've had several spontaneous comments about the good quality of the photos. I've done two side-by-side tests of the Desire's camera with my Nokia 6120c - click here to see those tests, or click here to see the other photos I've taken with the Desire. * I love having Foursquare with GPS.BAD:* You can't take a screenshot. Well you can, but to run the apps that will let you take a screenshot, you have to get root access to your phone, commonly called "rooting" the phone. Um. I'm not sure of the legal situation, but this may well void your warranty, so I'm not going to do it until after my obligation to review the phone for Tesltra is over (On Saturday May 22). But seriously, no screenhots? That's just silly. How am I supposed to review a phone when I can't easily take a screenshot to show you what an app looks like, or how the user interface is set up?
* Battery life is appalling so far. I took the phone out for 5 1/2 hours yesterday, wth GPS on but WiFi off. Even with a 20-minute charge in the middle of my trip out, the battery died before I got home. I've seen a suggestion that the battery life may improve after a few times being fully discharged and fully charged again, so I'll keep an eye on that, but there's no guarantees.
* There is no way to edit video on the phone so far. The Qik app is supposed to be able to let you do that, but the app didn't work in the way this blog post from Qik said it would. One of the things I want to test on the phone is its potential as a tool for mobile journalism. Without a video editor that lets you trim clips, splice them together and add titles (at the bare minimum) the phone is not much use for mobile video journalism. I don't know if this is a limitation of the phone, or just that no-one has got around to writing the right app. * I can't uninstall the pre-loaded Facebook app, which I want to do, because the app sucks.You can't pass on links other people have posted, and the "enter" button to add a comment is placed far too close to the top of the touch-screen keypad. I've already posted four half-typed comments by accident. So I'm just using Facebook through the internet browser and ignoring the app. But I should be able to get it off my phone entirely. So. Any questions? Anything you'd like to know about the phone? Let me know in the comments.
GOOD:* The user interface is mostly very smooth. It mostly feels gorgeous to use. I've never owned a touch-screen phone before, and have only played with friends' phones. But using the touchscreen to scroll up and down is beautiful, and easy to understand. To give you an idea of what this means to me, on my current phone, a Nokia 6120c, to see a link someone has posted on Twitter, I have to:1) Use the Gravity Twitter app to send the link to the Instapaper link-saving service.
2) Close down Gravity (because the Nokia has very little RAM indeed)
3) Open up the Opera Mini browser (version 4, because v5 is not as good IMO)
4) Click on my bookmark to take me to Instaaper
5) Click on the link I want to visitOn the Desire, I just click on the link in Twidroid (the Twitter client I'm checking out), and it opens. This is so much easier. Of course, if the browser that comes built-in to the Nokia didn't suck, I wouldnt' have to go to so much effort, but it does and I do.
* I can change the home page! One of my big problems with Apple is their culture of locking down their phones to stop you changing all sorts of things. I can see their point - they don't want people mucking around with their phone, breaking it and then blaming Apple. It's their business, they can run it how they want, but I feel very wary of that. The Desire's home page came with a pretty background, a calendar/clock/weather app taking up the top half of the page, and four pre-loaded icons linking to services, presumably put there by Telstra as one of the icons was for Bigpond. After reading this article about some top Android apps at Lifehacker, I wanted to try out Slidescreen. I searched for it in the Marketplace (Android's equivalent of the App Store), found it easily, installed it with a click or two and fired it up. And I love it. Now, my home page has: 1) My latest unread emails in Gmail2) My upcoming events from Google Calendar3) My newest items in Google Reader4) My latest few Facebook updates5) The latest reply to me on Twitter 6) The time, date, battery level, latest temperature and weather forecast.This suits me perfectly. You might not want things set up this way of course (and if you don't like using Google services things won't be as simple). But the point remains that I totally changed the way the front screen of my phone works, and it was simple. * The 5MP camera is very good for a camera phone. I've taken a few pictures, posted them here and shared them other social networks and I've had several spontaneous comments about the good quality of the photos. I've done two side-by-side tests of the Desire's camera with my Nokia 6120c - click here to see those tests, or click here to see the other photos I've taken with the Desire. * I love having Foursquare with GPS.BAD:* You can't take a screenshot. Well you can, but to run the apps that will let you take a screenshot, you have to get root access to your phone, commonly called "rooting" the phone. Um. I'm not sure of the legal situation, but this may well void your warranty, so I'm not going to do it until after my obligation to review the phone for Tesltra is over (On Saturday May 22). But seriously, no screenhots? That's just silly. How am I supposed to review a phone when I can't easily take a screenshot to show you what an app looks like, or how the user interface is set up?
* Battery life is appalling so far. I took the phone out for 5 1/2 hours yesterday, wth GPS on but WiFi off. Even with a 20-minute charge in the middle of my trip out, the battery died before I got home. I've seen a suggestion that the battery life may improve after a few times being fully discharged and fully charged again, so I'll keep an eye on that, but there's no guarantees.
* There is no way to edit video on the phone so far. The Qik app is supposed to be able to let you do that, but the app didn't work in the way this blog post from Qik said it would. One of the things I want to test on the phone is its potential as a tool for mobile journalism. Without a video editor that lets you trim clips, splice them together and add titles (at the bare minimum) the phone is not much use for mobile video journalism. I don't know if this is a limitation of the phone, or just that no-one has got around to writing the right app. * I can't uninstall the pre-loaded Facebook app, which I want to do, because the app sucks.You can't pass on links other people have posted, and the "enter" button to add a comment is placed far too close to the top of the touch-screen keypad. I've already posted four half-typed comments by accident. So I'm just using Facebook through the internet browser and ignoring the app. But I should be able to get it off my phone entirely. So. Any questions? Anything you'd like to know about the phone? Let me know in the comments.
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