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

Opera Mini 4.2 (beta)

I have to say I’m impressed with Opera Mini. It’s a very good product that not only is innovative, but also is damn hard to get working decently in a plethora of ill-designed, ill-implemented, crashing-and-burning-at-any-error, incompatible phones. But somehow these guys bring the Internet to everyone that has a mobile phone that supports Java (a pretty low requirement these days)… and that lives in a country where mobile phone operators don’t charge your ass for connecting to the Internet of course (and then again, Opera Mini heavily compresses the pages so you only download a fraction of the original).

And the experience, taking into account the limited interface, is pretty good. And they add features and improvements in every release (namely, they brought back “skins”, added notes to the list of supported Link data types, and probably other things I haven’t noticed). What else can I say?

The other day I wanted to go and buy some board game. I had gone to BoardGameGeek (awesome website BTW) and had made a list of the games that looked interesting. So I go to the shop, and of course most of them weren’t there… but there was some other game that looked interesting but I hadn’t seen before: Primordial Soup. Having Opera Mini in my phone, I could very easily check the rating and some basic information for that game, which helped me decide if I should buy it. Not only that, but thanks to Link I had the list of games I wanted to buy in my bookmarks (I had added them from my Desktop computer), so I could even compare the ratings for that game and the ones I wanted to buy to start with. How awesome is that?

Go Opera Mini team!

• 4.2
• beta
• boardgamegeek
• boarg
• games
• mini
• opera
• operamini