So, I don't remember what happened Monday much with the phone. It was fine, I think I played some Robo Defense, which is a decent Tower Defense game, which is one of the few games I think works well on a touch screen. I couldn't care less about actiony, twitchy games because I think they're abysmal on the iPhone/Android devices. On screen digital movement pad? You've got to be kidding me. Maybe I'll play those games if I feel the need to hate myself. They don't work. If I want to game, I have a DS and PSP that can play games better than the iPhone ever could. Even nicer, those devices don't die after an hour.
One thing I did do Monday night though was install a new keyboard. I guess it's the HTC Sense implementation of the keyboard, which is supposed to be better. To get it, I did something so magical and revolutionary that not even the iPad can do it: I downloaded a file. Even better, a .zip file. Even better, I was able to extract it into a directory on my phone, run it, and install an application right there. Take that, iTunes.
What makes this amazing is that even though I thought the keyboard was just ok, I was able to research additional keyboards and installed one. You're kidding yourself if your Apple-red kool-aid stained lips say such nonsense as "Well the stock Apple keyboard is so good, they don't need to improve it" or some other BS. Lies, all of them. It gets the job done, but it could be better. But it's Apple, so they make it a point to not make it better than their initial implementation. But hey, that's why the iPhone has been the same since inception. Unless you count their aggravation module. Some of you will know this as Voice Control. If anyone has actually used Voice Control to do anything but raise your blood pressure, please let me know. I found it worthless, slow, and just a jarring experience that should be hidden away as an embarrassment, not a feature. Trying to play songs using voice control is ridiculous. Voice on the Android is still better, and the results you get back actually could be used to do more than one thing. But I'm sure OS4 will not improve on it because you can't sell the same turd twice, I guess.
Anyway, I'm still figuring out how to do music better on this thing. Rhythmbox isn't playing very nicely. Banshee is ok, but the playlists don't seem to stick very well and it's not that easy to add a playlist to the device and put songs in it from a playlist on the machine.
One thing that does work well is when you're in a song you can add it to a playlist. Existing, new, whichever you want. That's certainly an improvement and I wished the iPhone did that over and over again. What good is an on-the-go playlist if you can't just keep adding songs you're already listening to?
Bad news on the Bluetooth front. Seems that Nissans especially have an issue with Bluetooth from the Android systems. It's something jacked up in their bluetooths I guess. It can't be TOO crazy, since every other phone seems to have figured it out, but come on guys, get with the friggin program. Luckily I rarely talk on the phone, so this isn't as big a deal as it could have been. All the other positives of this phone outweigh this significant negative, thankfully. I still couldn't go back to the iphone. But I really would like it fixed. Please. This mars an otherwise great product.
In other bad news, I'm starting to regret my decision to go AT&T. Yes I know that I did it enough reasons to make it very reasonable to stick with AT&T, but dear god their network in downtown Columbus is utter shite. My phone got severely drained in the hockey rink because it could barely hold on to a signal. With the iPhone, sometimes I wouldn't even get one in the building, so I suppose it's on par there. If I did get bars, at one point I even was on GPRS or something (since it had a G, not 3G). I haven't had that since my old old blackberry. And it's not even just 3G chugging along sometimes at a whopping 70 kbps. (yes, little b - bits), it's EDGE as well. If I switch to edge, hello 7kbps. I'm not exaggerating, that's how slow it can go downtown.
This is Columbus. Downtown. Not NYC, NY. Not San Francisco, CA. Not Central City, NE but a smallish city with not a ton of people living in it. Even the more populous suburbs cruise at 1500-2000kbps. Downtown is just a disaster. What do they have, a single router for all of us to go through? Usually I have full bars, so it's not a tower issue as far as distance is concerned, it's just that the bandwidth is shot.
I know Verizon is more expensive, but maybe next year I'll try that or Sprint unless AT&T actually upgrades their network. I don't like destroying my battery and taking 6 minutes to download 1MB. I'm downloading a wallpaper skin right now and I know it's not very large, but minutes later it's still going.
Other than all that, I'm doing great with this thing. Just have to get the iPhone 3GS up onto ebay so I can recoup my purchase price. The Nexus is still a beautiful phone and it's nice to have something with 2010 sensibilities instead of an OS that's holding on to what it innovated back in 2006.
No comments:
Post a Comment