Smartphones
It'll soon be time for me to get a new phone, and it's clear that the smartphone market is now mature enough for it to be the obvious choice. This is what I'm currently thinking; I'd be interested in your thoughts too.
iPhone
This is the 800lb gorilla, but I'm not convinced it's for me. I don't share Apple's love of locking everything down, I use multitasking all the time even on my semi-smart s60 phone now, I can't be arsed learning Objective-C.
Palm Pre
I was really stoked for this when it was announced but my enthusiasm has waned. People have reported that they're fragile and cheap-feeling, the OS is supposed to be very slow, and the development environment rather limiting.
Maemo / N900
Interesting, but: resistive touchscreen, must be used in landscape orientation much of the time, and the N800 tablet I had was the only gadget I ever got annoyed with enough to sell.
Android
So by a process of elimination this must be it. A reasonable degree of openness, quite a nice UI, choice of phones, development environment I can easily see myself using.
I am not even considering Windows Mobile or Blackberry for hopefully obvious reasons.
This then leads on to the next question: which Android phone? Although for most of the year there have only been a couple available, it seems like there's a real rush of launches and announcements now. I probably don't want any of the models that are available right now as they all have comparatively slow ARM 11 cores - but I'm not sure if this is meaningful or whether I'm just picking up on what the blogs are telling me to think.
A lot comes down to whether I want a keyboard or not. If I do then the Motorola Droid certainly has the right specs, but it really looks weird to me, and that gold accent? Ugh. If I don't then the field is a bit wider - the current-gen HTC Hero is quite tempting but if I can wait for something with no release date yet the Sony Ericsson Xperia X3 looks very nice, even if their UI enhancements look a little overblown.
So, do I need a keyboard or not? Do you have a smartphone with or without a keyboard? What do you think of it? My only experience is with T9 / predictive text phones.
iPhone
This is the 800lb gorilla, but I'm not convinced it's for me. I don't share Apple's love of locking everything down, I use multitasking all the time even on my semi-smart s60 phone now, I can't be arsed learning Objective-C.
Palm Pre
I was really stoked for this when it was announced but my enthusiasm has waned. People have reported that they're fragile and cheap-feeling, the OS is supposed to be very slow, and the development environment rather limiting.
Maemo / N900
Interesting, but: resistive touchscreen, must be used in landscape orientation much of the time, and the N800 tablet I had was the only gadget I ever got annoyed with enough to sell.
Android
So by a process of elimination this must be it. A reasonable degree of openness, quite a nice UI, choice of phones, development environment I can easily see myself using.
I am not even considering Windows Mobile or Blackberry for hopefully obvious reasons.
This then leads on to the next question: which Android phone? Although for most of the year there have only been a couple available, it seems like there's a real rush of launches and announcements now. I probably don't want any of the models that are available right now as they all have comparatively slow ARM 11 cores - but I'm not sure if this is meaningful or whether I'm just picking up on what the blogs are telling me to think.
A lot comes down to whether I want a keyboard or not. If I do then the Motorola Droid certainly has the right specs, but it really looks weird to me, and that gold accent? Ugh. If I don't then the field is a bit wider - the current-gen HTC Hero is quite tempting but if I can wait for something with no release date yet the Sony Ericsson Xperia X3 looks very nice, even if their UI enhancements look a little overblown.
So, do I need a keyboard or not? Do you have a smartphone with or without a keyboard? What do you think of it? My only experience is with T9 / predictive text phones.
no subject
As regards the HDD I said I'd take off you, should I send you £5 or so via paypal so you can just post it via Royal Snail?
Any way we can avoid that? I have quite an allergy to wrapping parcels. Yeah, I'm weird, sorry. I can hand it to someone who can hand it to you, or if it's not that important a thing I can give it to David F instead.
no subject