The Android experience

by therider

We finally went for the droid. Both our 2g and 3g iPhones became unusably slow over the years of iOS updates, so I figured we could try something different from the app-happy world. Heard that Sprint still has decent customer service. They basically ride over Verizon’s airwaves where their own coverage is spotty. Sounded like a win-win, given the deals they had. So last week I made the jump for a pair of HTC EVO 4G awesomeness.

Over a week of HTC ownership, I learnt to appreciate a few fine features that trump the iPhone by a fair margin.

1. When you zoom in a long article page to make the font bigger, the paragraphs get automatically adjusted so that you are looking at larger text yet don’t have to horizontally scroll back and forth. An enormous thumbs up.

2. The phone is basically a handy usb storage device. Expandable, too. Can you believe how much pain it is to delete a bunch of photos from the iPhone, say a few hundred of them ? If you can’t go to a mounted directory and run a rm command, just fuggetaboutit.

3. Swype: Blazing fast data input, not even a comparison with iPhone.

4. Built-in camera clicks-on-focus when you touch and hold a part of the screen to bring the subject at the location in focus. On the iPhone you have to touch to autofocus and then click the shutter icon.

5. Widgets, apart from usual apps just make sense for some applications. The unobtrusive notification mechanism is just cool.

6. And oh yeah, no $99 membership to just put my own app on the phone.

I don’t think I can ever go back.