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My first Android phone

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The day finally came this past week when I was finally released from Nokia based hell on Earth.

On Tuesday September, 14th was the day of my release. I can only liken the feeling to the one a convict whose just served 40 years in a Turkish prison. Ok perhaps that’s a bit dramatic, but it’s really not far off.

The release from my hell started on Sunday morning with a call to Vodafone to effect a promised early end to my old contract, some 11 months early.  Once the delivery date of my Samsung Galaxy S (I-9000) was confirmed for Tuesday morning, that gave me to a couple days to research the available apps and query friends with similar devices.

I was given a site called AppBrain.  It’s a great site to search and browse the Android appstore.  By the time my phone arrived I’d already queued up about 80 apps I wanted to install.  Once it arrive it was just a matter of loading the AppBrain app first then start the install of all my queued up apps.

If you’d like to see what I have installed on my Android phone, CLICK HERE.  It’s quite a collection.

Some of the immediate most useful apps (for me) would have to be:

logmein LogMeIn Ignition ($29.99 USD)

WysePocketCloud Wyse PocketCloud RDP/VNC/View ($14.99 USD)

ConnectBotConnectBot (SSH client, supports tunnels too) *FREE*

QuickOfficeQuickOffice Connect Suite ($9.99 USD)

wordpressWordPress Editor *FREE*

There are heaps of other apps I’ve found useful as well, loads of Amateur Radio and other network admin type apps.

Ok, enough of the chit chat.  What do I really think of this device.   The first thing I noticed was the striking similarity to Apple iPhone packaging that Samsung wrongly chose.  Why on earth would they want to emulate Apple?!?!  But that’s a small issue.   Over all I have no real complaints (yet) about the device.  The only thing I have to wonder is why the USB port is right smack on the top of the phone.  While this is useful if my phone is sitting in my cup holder in the car and plugged in, the cord comes out the top so it’s a bit tidy, but if you have to have the phone plugged in while talking on it, well, then you look like a prat.  One thing that could possibly make this a bit better is to provide a USB cable with a 90 degree bend so it goes along the top of the phone rather than just sticking straight up.

The battery life hasn’t yet impressed me at all, but I’ve really been beating the phone hard getting apps installed and playing on it so I can’t yet consider this to be a real problem.  I’ll wait until the “new phone” syndrome wears off in a few weeks time and see how I manage with it.

One issue I’ve run into so far and I’m not sure if it’s a problem with the phone or my Parrot Hands free kit in the car.  The phone pairs fine, but as all my contacts in the phone are from an Exchange server they don’t seem to sync with the Parrot.  I’ve logged a support case with Parrot to find out why this is.  Others I know with the same hands free but different Android based phones running Android 2.2 (Froyo), and their phones sync fine.  So, while this is very annoying I’m hopeful it’s a short term one.

Some people have reported this phone to be slow, however I’ve not yet seen this.  I’ve loaded a ton of apps on it, and the only time I’ve found it to slow down when I had about 30 apps running and trying to do a couple of installs at one time.  But I don’t consider that to be a problem, frankly it was just me being abusive of the hardware.

So, my overall view of this device is it’s amazing, as simple as that.  Mind you though, coming off that Nokia N97 rubbish pretty much anything would be amazing to me.  I’ll be sticking the N97 up on EBay, I was going to burn it, however seeing how much people are paying for them, I might as well cash in and get some of the money too.

I’m sure I’ll be posting more about this device and my experiences as time goes on.  Watch this space.

BTW, the first half of this posting was composed on the phone using the WordPress app.  I switched to the PC to make editing and spell checking and linking of images easier.