My first smartphone

I’m not really a “fancy phone” guy. Actually, some years ago I used to hate mobile phones. Luckily, things have changed, and to make a long story short, I bought a (second hand) HTC Hero after thinking of buying an Android phone for months.

My first impression is fairly good: even though it’s the first decent Android phone and quite old now, I find it very nice to use and quite customisable (which is great, considering all the applications and widgets available for the platform). And even when using an old version of Android (1.5) I don’t find it slow. At least not enough to be irritating.

However, there are several annoyances and things I found out that I figured I’d share:

• It doesn’t automatically import SMS from the SIM card, let alone use the SIM card as the SMS storage. I find that really silly, but to be honest it doesn’t bother me that much. You can of course import your backed-up SMS using some utilities (I haven’t bothered).

• It took me a good deal of effort to import my contacts from the old phone. I tried some app called vCardIO, which sounded awesome but it didn’t work for me. The final solution was using a utility called “Import Contacts” that doesn’t seem to be in the Android Market (?). I had exported my contacts using gammu/wammu, but I had just in case removed the X-GAMMU-* lines from it. I don’t know if it had anything to do.

• I found the default mail application to be kind of sucky, so I looked around and found K-9 Mail. I’m quite happy with it.

• The default browser is some sort of bad joke, but luckily there’s Opera Mini. Opera Mini 5 totally rocks, especially with Opera Link.

• android
• hero
• htc
• mini
• opera
• phones
• smartphone

Proprietary vs open: a new hope

There is something that has been bothering me for quite a long time now: while I realise that Sony is often evil and proprietary (I mean, come on, memory stick? the horrible, horrible PS2 memory “cards”? the draconian sharing terms for the online PS3 network?), there is something that attracts me to their products. I own a PlayStation 2, a Sony Ericsson phone, and I may even buy a PlayStation Portable.

The PlayStation 2, well, it had all the games I wanted to play when I bought it (the Prince of Persia series, ProEvolution soccer, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus and God of War), it was cheaper than the alternatives and it had a ridiculous amount of second hand games and websites with reviews. The phone I bought mostly because of a recommendation, but actually I find other brands stupid and confusing, so I really like it and my next phone might be another Sony Ericsson. The PlayStation Portable… well, the DS is awesome in many ways, I realise that, but again the games I want to play (God of War, Patapon, LocoRoco, Echochrome, Katamari Damacy) are all for PSP.

There’s something similar with Apple. Some of their products (most? all?) look awesome, and I’m sure they’re awesome in many ways… but I can’t stand that they’re so closed in their own world. So far I haven’t bought anything from them, and when I read certain news I’m really happy that I haven’t. That’s more or less why it bothers me that the iPhone is so successful and that no vendor seemed to be able to do anything about it… until I saw the HTC Hero.

I haven’t used it myself (only played with it a bit and seen some videos), but it looks seriously good. According to these videos it’s still a bit rough around the edges compared to the iPhone, but it has more functionality, the same kind of app store (only open) and based on Android. I’m not sure what else I could ask for. Ah, yes: a couple of models more so they can polish it further :-) So I wonder if the Android platform, through HTC Hero and similar phones, will allow me and others to escape Sony (and Apple) on the phone arena.

Now, I only have to find some “open” portable console that will allow me to play PSP games ;-P

• apple
• evil
• hero
• htc
• proprietary
• ps2
• psp
• sony