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1. 

   rob-nz
   Member

   Just thought I'd drop in with my impressions after a week with my new HTC Magic Android "Google Experience" phone.

   I don't know what Ben's post text limit is, so bear with me, I may need to serialise.

   First, let me preface by mentioning my previous smartphones to set the scene for some meaningful comparisons.

   After a number of trouble-free years with my old simple (but bullet-proof) Nokia 3310, I was given a Sony Ericsson P800 by VF and told 'Use it! Show it to people!". I was immediately blown away by the screen real estate and flexibility of this gorgeous little machine. Having used a Palm M500 PDA previously, I had no trouble with the stylus and Graffiti-like touch screen and the little 3 axis jog side wheel made navigation of the UIQ 2 interface a one-handed breeze. It was a little light on RAM and the insane price of 256 Mb Sony Memory sticks was a real PITA, but I loved that phone - until I drowned it at Omana. Dang!

   I was given a P900 as a replacement, which while more powerful, was a step backward in case aesthetics. The P900 served me well though, with the addition of Opera and Datviz Roadsync for Exchange Activesync and a few games and utilities I had a pretty useful unit - and not a bad phone.

   After that, I was drafted into an OCS pilot and told to use Winmo 6. They gave me an HP IPAQ 512 Voice Messenger, which isn't a bad phone, but frankly Winmo sucks bigtime compared to what I'd been used to.

   So to today. This is the first time in over 10 years I've actually been in the market to buy a phone, as opposed to getting given one. I must be losing my charm! :-)

   I've tossed up between Android and Apple for a while and eventually came down on the side of Android for the following reasons:
   1) Flexibility. I feel that the Android platform, while still fairly raw, offers a huge amount of potential in terms of flexibility and scope for innovation.

   2) Openness. There have been apps pulled from the Android Market under carrier pressure (notably Wifi Tether), but in that case you just go to the developer site or another repository. No big deal.

   3) Hardware choice. There are 5 major hardware vendors (so far) in the OHA which hopefully will result in better features and price competition.

   4) It's new and different and deserves supporting. Shallow I know, but hey, why be a follower!

   Oh yeah, and my daughter pointed out that in shows like Dr Who, if eveyone is using the same technology it is easier for evil aliens to take over your brain. (Only one interface to program) :-)

   Next: The Hardware question

   Posted 7 months ago #
2. 

   rob-nz
   Member

   Rocking the 'Droid Part 2: The Hardware Question

   Having chosen the OS, the next question to be decided was what handset to buy.

   The choices were:

   1) Go with the Vodafone HTC Magic "Google Experience" phone.

   2) Look for a parallel imported HTC magic without the branding.

   3) Wait for one of the other new Android handsets that should be here soon.

   This was a bit of a dilemma, on the one hand I can get the Vodafone Magic on a discounted corporate plan pretty cheaply. On the other, I could wait and get a higher spec handset with nice things like more internal RAM and Flash Storage, as well as OLED screens and better cameras.

   In the end I chose the cheap option and went with the Vodafone Magic, because the cash outlay was lower and my plan is up for renewal anyway.

   When the next renewal rolls around, there should be a whole lot more choice and the technologies will be more mature.

   Next: Playing with Magic

   Posted 7 months ago #
3. 

   Ben
   Big Kahuna

   Top stuff Rob. I'll be really interested to know how the Magic works as a "lifer". My brief week-or-so play with it was enough to only scratch the surface.

   Follow me on Twitter

   Posted 7 months ago #
4. 

   parsley
   Member

   I've looked at the Magic as a possible replacement for my ageing WinMo 5 phone. The one thing I don't like about it is the lack of physical keyboard. As my current phone's been getting older the touch screen occasionally loses calibration and it's a pain in the arse to recalibrate when you can't use the UI!

   Be interested to see your opinion.

   Posted 7 months ago #
5. 

   Anonymous
   Inactive

   Posted by unregistered user:

   I have had my magic since day one. Can't remember what life was like without it, simply amazing. Only downside is weak battery (compared to my old mobile) but I understand that in the use of more features of course you will drain it faster, and the boot time is really slow.

   Posted 7 months ago #
6. 

   rob-nz
   Member

   Rocking the 'Droid Part 3: Playing with Magic

   In re-reading the above, I realised that I had omitted another important hardware consideration that lead me to chose the HTC Magic, namely that in pure cellular radio terms, it's better suited to the Vodafone 3G network than the iPhone.

   Read Ben's explanation elsewhere on this site for the nuts 'n bolts, but essentially out where we live having both 2100 and 900 Mhz bands is a big plus. (Although that said, at home I'm normally on Wifi anyway.)

   Ok, to first impressions.

   My phone arrived at the office friday before last as I was literally on my way out the door for a 5 hour drive and a week's holiday down country.

   I barely had time to bin the HP Winmo (well, not really! It aint mine!) and poke in the SIM and battery. (I love it that Li-PO batteries can come pre-charged!)

   The phone fired up and I went through the basic setup then paired up my old Motorola Bluetooth handsfree while still in the carpark.

   I set up my POP3 mail while at the traffic lights and was tracking my location on Google Maps while inching up Khyber Pass.

   So far no dramas and very easy and intuitive.

   I have to say, the integration of the magnetometer compass and Streetview is pretty cool!

   Anyway, I didn't really get a chance to look at the Magic in detail until the next day.

   Firstly, this really is a well made and elegant phone. The pictures don't really do it justice, but it's slim and light and fits comfortably in the hand.

   For a southpaw like me, the button placement might be a trifle better if it were reversed, but hey, I'm used to rightist opression. I have the black phone with silver buttons. I imagine that the silver will wear off over time so that may detract from the long term attractiveness, but it's not something I'm going to lose sleep over.

   The Magic seems to take a little while to boot, but is pretty snappy once started.

   The initial Home screen is fairly sparse, but functional.

   Sliding left and right through the 3 Home screens (or more accurately, across the extended home screen to both sides) is pretty smooth and it's easy to tap up the app menu and add whatever shortcut you want from the installed apps to the Home screens.

   Posted 7 months ago #
7. 

   rob-nz
   Member

   Rocking the 'Droid Part 4: Playing with Magic ctd.

   The initial software load of the Vodafone Magic is fairly light, with the inevitable Google stuff, a shortcut to Vodafone Live and the functional bits like Mail, Calendar, Camera, Contacts etc.

   The browser seems snappy enough, although the autozoom could be improved.

   Rotating the unit to bring up landscape mode is pretty quick, quicker in fact than some of the guys iphone 3G here at work.

   The landscape keyboard is fairly closely spaced, but seems to work ok. I like the auto-suggest feature that builds up alternatives across the top of the keyboard as you type.

   Cut and paste and so on work well, the trackball helping with fine grained selection here, particularly one-handed.

   The phone settings screen is in the applications list and is functional enough, but it seemed a bit clunky to have to go hunting whenever I wanted to turn on/off the GPS or bluetooth or wifi.

   Naturally, the first thing on the agenda after looking through the onboard apps was to fire up the Android Market and see if there was anything useful lurking there.

   Unfortunately paid apps aren't available here yet, but there seems to be plenty of free stuff and trialware.

   The Market is nowhere near as slick as the iTunes store, but there is a functional search. it is pretty basic though and might get a bit crowded as more apps are published. I hear Global search is a feature slated for Android 2.0, so maybe it will include the Market.

   The first thing I went looking for was an Exchange Activesync client. (Yeah, I know, I was on holiday! What can I say, Email rules my life.)

   There are 3 of them on the Market as trialware so I stuck with what I know and pulled down the Roadsync for Android Beta. Within 5 minutes I had my inbox, calendar and contacts synced. Nice!

   Posted 7 months ago #
8. 

   Anonymous
   Inactive

   Posted by unregistered user:

   I'm southpaw too and have no problems with reaching most things (I do have big hands I guess).

   I love having emails and IM messages notifications just like text messages. I never use a computer for my email now. (To read at least).

   Its still early days for android, it will be interesting to see it mature.

   Posted 7 months ago #
9. 

   rob-nz
   Member

   Rocking the 'Droid Part 5: Playing with Magic ctd.

   Speaking of text, one neat feature of Androad messaging is that it threads your texts by sender. I don't know if other phones do this now, but I like the way it makes text conversations flow in context.

   I'm not a twitterer, so haven't pursued that part of it and haven't set up any IM yet either, although the client is there.

   Back to the Market!

   My next downloads were somewhat prompted by my two teenagers, who also wanted to play, so I ended up with iSpider (Creepy!) and various accelerometer triggered weaponry, like AK47 and Shotgun. The nostalgic geek in me also wanted good 'ol Lunar Lander.

   Doom 1 installs fine, but was obviously written for a G1, with hardware keyboard, as was Asteroids. Dammit!

   More practically, I found the answer to my gripe about toggling wifi, bluetooth etc in some nifty little apps that can just sit on the desktop.

   By now, I was wanting to organise things a bit better, so I arranged shortcuts to fun stuff on one side desktop, tools and utilities the other, and placed the important frequently accessed stuff for telephony and messaging on the center desktop, with the Google search widget.

   Tools now include:
   The aforementioned toggles for GPS, Wifi and Bluetooth

   G-Mon wifi scanner - GPS integrated and exports kml files for GE! Woohoo! :-)

   Telnet Client

   File Explorer for the SD Card

   Task Manager

   My Tracks (GPS)

   Flashlight

   Posted 7 months ago #
10. 

    Anonymous
    Inactive

    Posted by unregistered user:

    The 2d barcode scanners are cool, use them in conjunction with http://www.cyrket,com to browse the market and install apps.

    Posted 7 months ago #
11. 

    rob-nz
    Member

    Rocking the 'Droid Part 6: Playing with Magic ctd.

    True, and you can also share contacts with another handset by scanning the barcodes associated with each contact using the camera and the bc software.

    On my left (Fun stuff) homescreen I have some games and stuff like Spirit Level, one of the many analog compass apps, Weather Bug and Metal detector.

    That's right folks! Lost your keys on the sofa? No problem!
    Just take out your Magic, run up the app and quickly locate those pesky critters....if they are on top and right in front of you.

    It hasn't got much in the way of range, but it's a fun party piece and shows just how deep into the hardware the SDK will let application developers go.

    The Weatherbug app brings up an interesting feature of the Android operating system, the notification area. The app itself is very like the Vista gadget version, except it isn't a Widget in this case.

    What it does do is install a background process into the notification bar which stays there when you switch screens out of the app so you can get basic weather stats while other apps are running and can be accessed.

    The Notification area is a great feature, new email alerts and informational data from running apps pop up seamlessly in the background and are easily acessed by dragging down the bar like a window blind.

    So far I've been pretty pleased with app performance, the Task maanger app shows cpu, memory and networks stats and all seem within reasonble parameters.

    Mind you, I haven't done anything to really stretch it, I'll get to trying some video and stuff later.

    Next: Synch and Play

    Posted 7 months ago #
12. 

    rob-nz
    Member

    Rocking the 'Droid Part 7: Synch and Play

    Well, the time came when pretending to shoot the kids with a fake pump action shotgun was starting to get kind of old, so I decided to take a look at getting some music onto this thing.

    Connect up the usb and Vista installs a drive as per normal, but to access the sd card you have to tap the notification bar and select the USB icon then mount the card.

    The file layout is pretty straightforward and you could just copy music files straight on to the card, but I decided to give Media Monkey Lite a go instead.

    This is a great piece of software and had no trouble synching songs, playlists and album art over.

    It doesn't however do video files, so I had a look at Doubletwist as well. This is currently in free Beta.

    Doubletwist seems to work OK, but currently has the drawback that it doesn't have it's own music library yet. You have to piggyback off an iTunes or WM library. This apparently will be addressed in a later version.

    For now, I think I'll stick with Media Monkey.

    The Android media player app itself is nothing special, but works OK. I'm hoping that when we get the paid apps, there will be something better on the Market.

    Posted 7 months ago #
13. 

    Ben
    Big Kahuna

    Do you listen to many podcasts Rob? Woud be interested to know if the media player (or any third party apps) support resuming of podcasts and/or audiobooks, and if those resume points are remembered across syncs and power cycles like on the iPhone.

    Posted 7 months ago #
14. 

    rob-nz
    Member

    I'll need to check. The info says it supports aac, aac+ and aac-lc, but I haven't tried .m4b files yet.

    The default player is not very complex, but does resume in the middle of a song.

    There seem to be a number of requests on various forums for this, so I suspect it won't be long until someone develops something.

    Posted 7 months ago #
15. 

    Ben
    Big Kahuna

    Yep I tried using a demo Nokia E71 for listening to audio for a while.

    It works fine for music, but for podcasts you really want to be able to stop, do something else (even listen to other music), then have the file resume at the previous position later.

    So far, Apple are the only ones I know of who have nailed this completely. The podcast facility in the iPods and iPhones is just gorgeous. The Zune does OK. Everyone else doesn't even appear to bother with resuming.

    Posted 7 months ago #

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