My wife got me a new phone for our 1 year anniversary. She got me a Samsung Moment which is an Android Phone.
Let me say. I love this thing. It’s basically a small computer that can make phone calls. Probably in that order of functionality too, as I have trouble answering calls.
It has a slide out keyboard, which is good as I get to use the whole screen to view instead of half of it being tied up with a touch screen key pad. There are two issues with the keyboard. The shift key is one key too high – it needs to be switched with the ‘fn‘ key and there is no real tab key to tab through form fields. There is a little optical pointer thingy, but I’ve not figured that thing out yet. I am typing this post on my phone if that is any indication of the keyboard usefulness.
The phone syncs up with my google account. This is pretty good as I heavily use google services. I had my old phone contacts copied to my new phone. I had to merge a bunch of duplicates as the phone contacts synced into my email contacts. But know I have about everyone I’ve ever contacted in the last 3-4 years on my phone. (No jokes about making it into two digit numbers please)
The signal reception seems to be fairly poor. I think my old phone was a good reception phone, so I may notice the step down more than some.
Text messaging is a blast on this thing. Adding photos is a bit cumbersome, but I quickly adapted. I just installed Handsent SMS which made texting even nicer.
The web browser is quite good. About as good as I could expect. Flash doesn’t work on it, but I’ve only been to one website where that’s a problem rather than a good thing – breaking all the ads. A few big sites like facebook detect that I am on a touch screen phone and give me a different version of the site.
YouTube videos work great on this phone. I kinda feel a bit like Neo in the Matrix, being able to learn how to do anything on the fly. Heh, tonight our waitress was Turkish, so my wife and I looked up turkey on wikipedia.com right there in the restaurant.
The Android Market is quite functional. After an initial hiccup with it refusing to download apps that a phone reset and a few hours trolling some forums to find a fix, I haven’t had a problem since. There are a ton of free and paid apps to be found. I’ve downloaded ssh and vnc clients which allow me to connect to my computers and run them from my phone. I have a couple of contraction timers – for when the baby is ready to come. There is a lot of sudoko games – a lot!
I think my favorite thing is ASE which allows me to program the phone right from the phone. My first script allows me to take a photo of a barcode on a book and look it up on LibraryThing.com and see if I have it already or add it to my library.
I think you can expect more posts about my new phone in the near future. Probably much to my wife’s chagrin.
