So, it’s good-bye to my trusty and slightly crumbling Nokia 3100 (recently a source of amusement and pity amongst my peers)…
Hello HTC Desire…
It could so easily have been hello iPhone. I do have iPod Touch which I enjoy using. But fundamentally as a Flash/ActionScript/Flex/AIR developer it made no sense at all to get a smartphone on which Flash has been nobbled.
(My own brief comment and observation on the iPhone/Flash debacle : It looks to me that both companies have incompatible business strategies with regard to delivery of RIAs on mobile devices. Discussion outside of the these strategies is in my opinion a deflection. It was disappointing to read Steve Job’s thoughts on Flash, which to my mind are ill-informed and based on half truths – out of character in those regards. It was also disappointing to watch Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen’s response in interview with the Wall Street Journal where, in my humble opinion, he was far from convincing and by the end was sounding more like a parroting politician. Disappointing too that past quality and performance issues with Flash player gave Apple an easy ammunition to exaggerate and exploit. As an avid Apple Mac and Adobe Creative Suite user I hope the two companies can return to a professional relationship which doesn’t leave customers of both companies, like myself, out in the cold.)
So back to the HTC Desire, some first impressions…
The good
- It looks good, feels good
- Nice bright responsive screen
- Call quality is good
- Better quality camera than I expected
- The main reason for getting this device – Flash based apps are allowed!
The not so good (compared with my iPod Touch experience)
- There are too many buttons. I find myself pressing the wrong one most of the time. Sometimes a button press is required. Sometimes not. The whole thing is less intuitive than the iPod Touch with it’s single button.
- It seems all too easy to initiate a call at random while scrolling through the contact list.
- Text selection/cursor positioning is awful
- There is no out of the box easy way of syncing Address book, Calendar, tunes, photos etc with my Macs. Looks like I need to purchase Missing Sync. That said, I did previously purchase Mobile Me to keep my Mac / Mac Book Pro and iPod Touch all in sync.
- The Mail application is crap. I use a self-signed SSL certificate on my mail server, so I immediately hit the problem of a silent fail when trying to add connection details to the mail application. The hack in the forum thread worked in fixing it, i.e. turning off my router’s WAN connection, while inputting the connection details. Also it doesn’t list the mail folders on the server – all I get is the inbox. Apple’s Mail app by comparison is a doddle and reflects the structure of my mail account.
Fingers crossed for Android 2.2.
Anyway, looking forward to setting up some kind of tether to share the data connection with my MBP and more importantly getting something running in AIR for Android on there.