Wednesday, November 18, 2009

On Why I Love My New Phone

I broke up with my iPhone on November 6 and immediately hopped back in the saddle with a comparable device. Oh, Droid! I love you, I do. I am most pleased by the functioning service. I didn’t think SERVICE was asking so much of a phone. AT&T did not concur that prorating my bill to reflect all the times my phone said NO SERVICE was necessary to keeping me happy. So I took my huge monthly bill and signed it over to Verizon.

Here’s what I love about the Droid:
Get up and Google - I’ve been using Google’s many features - Gmail, calendar, pages, docs, BLOGGER! so the Android platform made perfect sense for me. Within minutes of being powered up my Droid had downloaded my contacts, complete with photos pinched from Facebook and Gmail.

Processor Speed - I don’t know what’s running this thing but, boy, is it ever fast.

Speed of the 3G. I'm a careful (read: suspicious) consumer. I assumed "world's fastest 3G network" was a crock or at least overrated. I was wrong. I didn’t even think it possible to run Pandora on a 3G -assumed I needed WIFI. Now a little bird tells me that the 4G, the next generation, will be even faster than WIFI. Way!

Useful apps. Like the Weather Channel which allows me to upload several locations and gives me a little screenshot of each one on the home page. I like knowing where the sun is shining and who it’s shining on. That way I know who to call and complain about the weather in Chicago.

Talking navigator. Need I say more? TNav got me from Los Gatos back into SF without incident (and I ALWAYS get lost in SF). And it didn’t make me feel badly when I missed an exit off 101. It just calmly told me to how to correct my error. Here an App-on-App would be kind of funny -like setting the voice to a certain accent, or adding on different emotional attitudes (such as passive aggressive where the phone just stops giving you directions but mutters in a barely audible volume). Let’s face it, most of us aren’t used to a calm, competent navigator.

Here’s what I miss:
Visual voicemail. Even if you upgrade for paid visual VM there’s an unacceptable delay between when the caller leaves a message and when you are alerted of it. AT&T/iPhone's Visual VM merits uberprops for novel technology.

The iPod. Just a little. On account of being generally sick of my iTunes collection and wooed by Pandora.

SplashShopper. When I first got the iPhone I spent a few months toting my old Treo just so I could continue using SS (which now exists for iPhone). Well, I’m double fisting again. Only SS doesn’t even work so well with my first generation iPhone. I’m waiting impatiently for the good folks at SplashData to scribble code for Android.

That’s it.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Good sharing.If you need the permanent sim unlock code for GSM phones at reasonable cost visit the site MobileUnlockSolutions.com and unlock it with given easy step by step unlocking instructions.This is the fast and permanent unlocking method.

Unknown said...

:-)