i stumbled into work yesterday morning to find a Tyvek envelope with FedEx written all over it. 2-4 days: my arse - i ordered this thing 8 days ago and it was shipped 2 days later. LIES, i tells you. i should have been more excited and tried to tear into it with my teeth but an all-nighter in the office on Saturday night meant that i'd had to sleep through Sunday and i was still paying for it on Monday morning so my customary beer-mug full of coffee had to come first.
inside was another, padded envelope (overpackaging, much?), protecting a smallish white box with the requisite warranties and whatnot, cables and, presented neatly on top just begging me to grab it and arc it up was my brand new HTC Desire, fresh off the production line from their factory in Taiwan. in one of their many disjointed attacks on the telecommunications world, Google contracted HTC to build them a phone of their own. their Android OS was taking on an appearance in the marketplace of a scitzophrenic monster with more faces than a thai demon with 3 or 4 different revisions floating around on a dozen or so devices from something like 5 different manufacturers and they wanted to put out a device that Did It Right, and so the Google Nexus One was born. it was, for all extents and purposes, pretty fucking awesome. a clear, bright touchscreen with a decently-high resolution, 1GHz (not that the Hertz-rating means anything in consumer electronics anymore, not since the IBM PowerPC 601 chip first came out, or the AMD x2 Dual Core processors later) processor called "Snapdragon", half a gig of RAM and the usual Alphabetti-Spaghetti-Soup of communication-related acronyms - WiFi, GPRS, EDGE, WCDMA, GPS, BT, etc etc etc. HTC are pretty used to this by now - it was only a couple of years ago they started making phones with their own name on them - before that they built shit for other people to slap a badge on and call theirs.
now, however, they're getting agressive in the marketplace and went "we've got the designs, we've got the kit, why the hell now make own OWN version? so they did and called it the Desire. there were a few changes - the N1 has dual-microphones, one to listen to you and the other to listen to, and thereby cancel out, the rest of the world, as well as a series of electrode connectors on the base so that you can just drop it into a cradle for charging instead of always having to plug it into a cable. the Desire, on the other hand, has a little extra memory and no Google branding on it. oh, and that cradle sells for ~AUD$80 and can, therefore, go and fuck itself. the N1 was also, at time of ordering, AUD$100 more expensive, so guess which way i went on THAT decision? i like Google and their (increasingly rickety) "Don't Be Evil" motto, but not $100-much.
with due consideration of the specs out of the way and my massive mug of coffee cooling quietly across my desk, i plugged in my new toy to get some charge into the branded Lithium-Ion battery while i backed up the contacts and so on from the beat-up old Blackberry Pearl 8120 i've been cruising around with for the last year or so, got my SIM into it quicksmart and turned it on, watching with glee as the splash screen came up accompanied by a bright, loud, happy chirp and the notably paradoxic message "quietly brilliant".
this is how it begins...
gone are the days when you turn on your new phone and the most you have to do before you can actually make a fucking call is set the time. now it's a full-on customisation. a few things struck me straight away: one of the first questions it asked me was whether or not i wanted to connect to mobile internet. no rude assumptions here - not everyone has a data plan, you know, and PAYG 3G Data is ridiculously expensive in some places so let's be polite and ask. i like this, as i have no Data Plan. do i want to connect to a WiFi network? yes, yes i would thanks, and would you believe it - it connects to the office's Server Engineer Only (No noobs!) 802.11g network and associated ADSL line quicker than i can write out the actions. NICE!
a couple of screen taps and i'm staring at the big, fuck-off clock and the shiny, gay-as-a-summers-day background you'll see in any of the advertising material. i didn't even have to set the time. the network is synched with time-servers around the work and will be FAR more accurate than me so it just uses that. i don't have to tell it where i am, either. it's worked it out so there's no need to bother me. would i care to take a tutorial on how to use the onscreen keyboard? i think i'll be fine. my new phone is on, juiced and begging to be touched and stroked. it's a touchscreen - that's what it's fucking for. it's like a little kitten sitting in the palm of my hand with its chin raised and an expression that screams
"i'm EVER so cute so PLEASE pet me!"
so i do. and i feel dirty, but if indecently assaulting electronics is wrong then i don't want to be right...
it's a phone... but is it?
i feel a bit off calling these things "phones". in as much as a phone is a device with which you "call" other phones, enabling communication across great distances and perhaps even send and receive text messages, the Desire is indeed a phone. but then, my laptop does the same thing. is it a phone? if it looks like a duck walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's a duck, right? now my old Nokia 5500 Sport (which to this day refuses to die and lurks in my "Handy Odds & Sods" drawer (what Michael McIntyre would call a "Man Drawer")) is a phone. it makes and receives calls and text messages, can even take photos and be convinced, with some coaxing and cajoling, to send pictures over the cellular network. it has a calculator and a calendar and a couple of games, but at the end of the day its primary purpose in this world is to enable me to communicate with people. the Desire and its ilk - dating back to the old Compaq iPaq's (yes, before HP ate them alive), phone-enabled Palm Pilots, Windows Mobiles and, of course, the iPhone - are not, by this definition, phones. what i'd just started covering in my grubby fingerprints is, in fact, a small computer which also condescends to make phone calls. let's face it - Moore's Law has been rolling uninhibited for nearly 40 years now, and so what i carry around in my pocket has enough processing power to happily negotiate Apollo 11's landing on the fucking moon. i say this with no ego or immodesty - electrickery has just evolved so far that the device i use to call my mum has 1152 times the RAM of the first computer my dad bought when i was six, and 728 times the onboard storage of the old single-sided floppy disks we booted it from. oh, and it costs less than a third what that old Apple Macintosh 512k did (if you disregard 24 years of inflation). gods-bless progress.
but i digress. see, i'm old enough that i remember when phones were these things with big-arse bases, actual bells that rang when a call was coming in (hence the whole idea of a telephone "ringing" they had Fucking Bells Which Fucking Rang) and you weren't to touch because even looking at the damn thing cost money. but then, i also remember when the Internet was brand new and the only good sites on the thing were porn, porn, the Gillian Andreson Testosterone Brigade, porn and a couple of Star Trek vs Star Wars fansites., when spam was a disgusting ham-analogue and you got your knowledge of the world around you from these wads of dead-tree we called "books". yes, i am a fucking dinosaur. when i got my first mobile phone i thought it was the most amazing thing ever, and would keep pulling it out of my pocket and looking at it in case the magic smoke escaped and it'd disappear up its own existence. now i'm looking at a block of aluminium, plastic and glass that is better connected to the world than the Alienware behemoth of a laptop i'm typing on. it's not the future, because i have it right here and now. it is, however, a sign of things to come, and an idea about how we're all going to become a whole lot more interconnected. it's not a phone, it's a "smartphone", which basically means what i've already described: it's a mini-computer that also makes calls. let's just leave it at that and not go into the marketing-speak of "superphones" lest we reach the point where the "uberphone" marshalls its forces and marches on the Rhineland on its way to invading all of Europe and the destruction of all lesser-phones.
but wait, someone's already doing that - they're called Apple.
ok, enough of the phosophising and reminiscing about simpler times, tell us about the fucking phone!
so what's the first thing a geek does when he gets his hands on a new piece of equipment? they start rummaging around in its guts and see what it'll do of course, so i got stuck in wrist-deep looking for its cervix to see if i could make it sing. i have to admit that i was, and in fact had been, underwhelmed by the configurable options. i'd read many a review before i spent my own money on this thing and all the professional reviews (you know - the ones who never have to pay for their own fucking toys) had ejaculated paragraphs about how the HTC Sense interface was customisable and so on. after digging around for a while i came to realise that what they meant was "you can move icons around and stuff". sure, the are 7 screens you can fill with app-launchers and widgets-various, but really all that comes down to is that you're playing jenga with icons until you come up with a combination you can navigate easily. of course, we're talking about people who've been conditioned by Apple's "Thou Shalt Not Touch" iPhone Walled Garden (which i'll discuss more later) that actually having some control over their own goddamn phone must have come as such a shock that they needed to take a little while to lie down and change their underwear. that said, the HTC Sense overlay on Android is pretty damn sweet. i've played around with the basic Android Home Screen and it's alright, but Sense takes a lot of the pain out of the configuration, and adds some of its own magic to the experience. there's a widget for just about anything you want to access quickly - i now have the the big-arse clock displaying along with the current weather, various buttons to turn on/off my wireless functions that drain a LOT of the power, my Google Calendar (synched seamlessly to and from my online account), basic controls for the music player (which keeps playing when i do something else, but pauses when a call comes in. take THAT iPhone 2G/3G bitches!), a Speed Dial launcher with my most-commonly called peeps on it, an overview of my gmail inbox (again, mirrored from my online account) and a screen dedicated to my SMS inbox. it's a work in progress - things will come and go and get rearranged until it's all where i want it.
one of the little features of the HTC Sense widgets is that the weather view changes with the forecast - when it's cloudy outside you get clouds float across the screen when you unlock it. if it's rainy you get raindrops as if it were a windscreen, complete with windscreen wipers that push them away. it's cute, and if i thought it drained too much of the battery i'd kill them in an instant, but i've only had it for 2 days so far and while i know it's probably going to be like the little nasal giggle you thought was adorable when you first got together with your partner and gets old after a year or so, i'll leave it on there until it does... or something better comes along. that's what the Market is for.
the Market - wherein our intrepid adventurer braves Secksi-Time apps, "clever" sound effects and micropayments in search of useful doohickeys that enrich the Android-phone-owning experience...
you've got to have an App Store these days. Apple did it when they brought out the iPhone and it worked pretty fucking well for them, so now where Apple goes the rest of the market follows like a floppy-eared puppy-dog, snuffling around in Steve Jobs' leavings, looking for any money he couldn't be bothered bending over to pick up as it flows like autumn-leaves from his overflowing pockets. that said, it was a ridiculously smart move. until they came up with it, any time you wanted to add functionality to your portable device, be it a Portable Media Player, PDA or phone, you needed to plug it into a computer, juggle the various synchronisation tools and file formats, run the installer and Plug & Pray, and that's after digging through hundreds of virus-ridden websites looking for the app that MIGHT do what you want it to do and MIGHT work on the specific model device you'd dropped your hard-earned on... i did with my old Palm Vx (and Palm III before that) for years, and various Nokia phones after that and i'm here to tell you that it was a fucking Nightmare, so Apple said "Hell - let's do away with the PC altogether? It's internet-connected, why not have everything go straight to the phone? Do not pass the Start Button, do not collect 200 viruses?" and lo, the people were amazed because when they were using their phone and realised that what was missing from their lives was an App that made fart-noises or mimicked drinking a beer when you tilted the handheld, they could indeed have it, and have it in the time it took to type "flatulence" into their onscreen keyboard.
the Android Market works under the same principle, just with a few less body-odor-related Apps and a slightly-lower quality control. Google famously do not censor the Market, but i'm pleased to say that the quality doesn't seem to have suffered too much. there's a robust peer-review function where users can comment and rate the apps, and this pushes shittier apps lower and lower and better apps higher and higher. there are also filters you can use to show only Paid or Free Apps. i, i will take this opportunity to admit, am something of a Freetard. it's not that i WON'T pay for things, it's just... i have to really want it, and there are enough apps around that do what i want that have been written for fun, practice, uni assignments, publicity or just good old-fashioned benevolence that i've not been stuck looking at the One True App that Jesus de Christo from Barcelona wants 5 Euros for the priviledge of using (until your new OS is incompatible or your switch platforms, or the Market-Gods choose to take the App away from you because they favor it no longer). it's a fairly painless experience to use and download from, and being a Google product it has a fantastic search-function.
don't ask me what the Fart Apps are like - i have am yet to become so tired of life that i've been driven to downloading any. i emit enough noxous odors as it is without electonic assistance, thanks for asking.
that will have to do for this evening. in our next thilling adventure i will explore such delights as Call Quality, Typing On Keys That Don't Bounce (aka - what it would be like to live on the Enterprise-D in Star Trek), Generally Living With The Thing And How It's Changed My Day-To-Day Habits and the hate-filled tirade that is Why I Now Fucking Hate Apple...
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