by request:: An Informal Review of the HTC Desire (Part 2)...

i've had a couple more days to play with my new toy, and after several nights of disinterest and distraction-fuelled demotivation i'm left with little excuse not to sit down and talk about it, so here we go again...

the thing that sits in my hand...
hardware + software = product: of course they have to work together. look at Motorola in recent years - have you ever been walking down the street and seen a mind-blowingly beautiful girl walking arm in arm with a bloke who looks like a Neanderthal who was dropped on his head one time too many as a child and thought to yourself

"no, seriously, how the hell did that happen?"

that was the Motorola RAZR. brilliant piece of hardware. it was no thicker than my Nokia at the time, but was still a dual-screen clamshell. the keypad was responsive and elegant, the screen bright and easy to read. the software, on the other hand, felt like it had been thrown together as an afterthought. it was unintuitive, slow and bordering on sadistic. it was a Rocky & Bullwinkle phone - designed and built by separate teams who were patently unaware of each others existence and thereby never compared notes.

i'm pleased to announce that in the last week the hardware on the Desire has felt, in a word: solid. it has a heft to it that means it doesn't feel like it's going to fall to pieces in your hand, the rubberised back-plate has a soft, tactile texture that doesn't seem like it's going to squirm out of your hand like a wet fish, whereas the textured aluminium frame around the screen complements it nicely. the glass screen has, thus far, managed to resist scratches, although i need to wipe it down with a microfibre cloth every once in a while to remove the residue from my greasy fingers. this is to be expected - you're designed to touch the thing and you can't spell "wog" without "greasy" - it comes with my genetic heritage.

it's worth noting that the camera is fairly decent. i've seen the shots that the iPhone takes and it makes me wonder why people bother. the 5MP shooter on the back of the Desire is well and truly good enough for Government work. the tiny CCD's in these things will never be as good as their full-sized counterparts in DSLR's, but then that's not what you expected, is it? it's a happy-snap camera and should be treated as such, but having the facility to take a quick shot of someone to add to their entry in your phone book is cute...

i'm liking having the small row of actual buttons along the bottom of the face, if only because it gives me access to the functions they provide at any time without taking up valuable screen real-estate. the screen is Beautiful to look at - photos are clear and crisp, although you do get banding in graduated colours. oh well, i'll survive. the thing is that it's 3.7" diagonal leaves very little space, and fingers are only so small and real estate gets eaten up QUICKLY. i was perplexed for quite some time about the point of the little optical track-ball (of which i liked the addition. the less moving parts the better) until i needed to quickly go back in a text message i was writing. it gives you access to granular cursor movement which is near-on impossible with my finger. in general, it's a well put together little gadget, and the design decisions HTC have made have mostly been for the win.

there are a couple of niggling flaws that have irritated me and made me wonder why, when they've come THIS close to awesome, why HTC didn't put in just a little bit more effort. for starters, i now have Yet Another USB Cable to lug around. i'm not sure at this point in time whether this is another standard, of if HTC have just decided to fuck me for no good reason, but in a world where i have enough Mini-USB cables to just leave one everywhere i go on a regular basis why i now need one with a slightly different end. at least they provided it with a mains-to-USB converter, but still. then you plug it into the phone and notice that there's a 2mm gap between the moulding of the cable and the phone. it looks like it's not plugged in properly, but no - the light's on and a forceful push doesn't yield any further movement, so it MUST be right.

while we're talking about power, the battery life is also a bit of a bone of contention which no one's managed to come up with a decent answer to as yet. there isn't a smartphone on the market that i'm aware of that doesn't need to be charged more often than i need to eat. it DOES nicely get through the day tho - if i take it off the charge first thing Monday morning i reckon i could get to half-way through Wednesday before it ran out of juice, which isn't bad in the overall scheme of things, but still. i do miss the days of my old Nokia 3210 which would last a week between charges with moderate use. perhaps i should invest in a small solar charger...

the back plate has received its fair share of scorn on the intertubes - i didn't mind overly much, but then i'm used to having to take the back of my phone to mess with batteries and the like. what bugs me is that if this same company built an almost-identical phone where you could change the Micro SD card on the fly, why the fuck do i have to take the battery out to do it on this one? i understand that i will Rarely If Ever change said card, but... my Blackberry could do it. the Nexus One can do it. how hard can it be, people?

apart from that, i'm pretty happy with it. i've been carrying it around in the pocket of my hoodie a lot of the time and it seems to have suffered not a jot from the occasional knock and bump against things. that said, i'm also yet to drop it so i'll just have to wait and see what the results of THAT little misadventure are when it happens.

ok, so it's pretty and all, but what's it like to USE? 
well built hardware, intelligently thought out software, strong integration, these things are wonderful and all, but if it doesn't fit into daily life then all you've got is a very expensive toy which you pretend to use and inevitably sits on the shelf or in a drawer somewhere being of less use to you than tits on a bull.

for starters, it's quick and easy to check. i've spent a fair bit of time fiddling and customising and so on, but it's the work of something like 3 seconds to pull it out of my pocket, unlock the screen, glance across the icons to see if i've received any messages, flick over to my calendar, flick it back to the main screen, lock it and return it to my pocket. i consider this to be fairly reasonable, especially since in that time i've managed to visually confirm the following:

the time
missed calls
SMS/MMS messages
emails
my next calendar appointment/reminder
received Gtalk messages

that's a fair bit of information available at a glance.

when i walk in the house, or into the office, or arrive at various friends' places, the wifi automatically connects and synchronises to the various online resources i use. i have, at time of writing, not shelled out or a 3G data plan, and while i'm in no rush to do so i expect it's not far around the corner just for the sheer convenience (and because i can claim it off my tax - this is something of a motivator).

i've found that i pull it out in those brief tens of seconds where i'm waiting for something. i've installed a couple of newsfeeds (Slashdot and Engadget being primary) which update themselves and then sit quietly in the background, so instead of staring out into the distance when i'm waiting for the kettle to boil i can quickly flick through a couple or articles. i use a portal-app which connects to Skype, so i can now use my phone as a Skype Handset. if i want to have a video call i just chat while i power up my laptop, log into Skype-proper hang up and redial. it's just another way that i manage to make myself more connectible to people who it'd be FAR too expensive to call over the cellular network.

i have NOT, however, installed any games. there's one game that came pre-installed and which i can't seem to remove and about half of the people i've handed the phone to so they can have a look at the latest hotness (it'll be yesterday's news in another week or so - such is the nature of technology - but for the time being few people in Australia have had a real chance to play with Android so there's a lot of curiosity) will find it inside of a couple of minutes and have a play. frankly, if i wanted to play games on the go i'd give Nintendo money for a DS. i come under the category (more or less) of a "hardcore" gamer, rather than a "casual" gamer. i want immersion (and preferably explosions and gunfire or at least limbs flying off and blood splattering the landscape), so little games that fill in 5 minutes at a time are of little interest to me. there are things to read, information to assimilate, news to be updated on. i like to be connected and informed - this is what is important to me and so i have configured my phone to provide this in a dense, easily accessible format.

one other UI element that bears mentioning is the integration that Google have provided within Android. when i first started setting the phone up i imported my old contacts into the phone's database, connected the mail client to gmail and logged into Facebook through the provided application. Android is smart enough to realise that you may well have a lot of the same people across these various contact lists, and so it gives you the option to link them together into one meta-record. THIS, is too fucking cool for words, since now all i have to do is look someone up in the contacts list and get access to their phone number, any address they've emailed me from, ever (and that includes the online records in my gmail - i type in Julia and i get not just my friend here in Canberra, but a recruitment agent in London i've not had any contact with in over a year. this is seriously fucking awesome), as well as giving me their latest Facebook status, right there in their contact listing. if i want to know more i can click on that and it brings up Facebook so that i can comment on it, or see what else is going on. it's stuff like this that gives me a big, geeky hard-on, and it gets even better when i show that to iPhone users who proceed to lose their fucking minds with jealousy and say things like "Holy Shit... I can't do that!" 

so has the Desire fit nicely into my life? yes, yes it has. for me it's an Enabler. for example, now when i make a batch of pikelets i can quickly and easily take a photo and share the moment with my girlfriend (who lives on the other side of the country) cheaply, and easily, without finding my camera, taking the shot, having to down-res it so that it won't take 5 minutes to send and receive... hey, look at me in a silly pose! i'll send her a copy! click, send. done. being 3700km away from each other for several months is painful, but now we send photos of ourselves back and forth on our smartphones and it doesn't seem so far.

so has the Desire made my life easier? yes, yes it has. has it done this any better than alternative products in the marketplace? possibly, possibly not - not having an arsenal of different phones that i've been able to test has made that particular question difficult to assess, but i'll say this much: i couldn't have done it as well or as easily, or wrapped it around my finger so nicely if i'd bought a fucking iPhone...


on why i hate Apple...
half my life ago when i was a young lad, my first ever job with at the Apple Centre in Perth, Western Australia. those were the days when every Apple product was a beige desktop with the rainbow Apple logo, laptops and portable devices were a matte black, Microsoft was The Enemy and Bill Gates was the Great Satan. it was one plucky little fruit company (another in a long line of technology startups that started in a couple of uni students' garages) against the Evil Empire. i was decidedly uncool amongst my friends because i Had A Mac, so while they were playing the Tie Fighter: Defender of the Empire and Mechwarrior i was playing Ambrosia shareware games and drooling over whatever Bungie were bringing out next. i loved my Mac - we'd never had an IBM-PC in the house and i had no idea what the fuck to do with DOS. working in the Apple Centre was a dream-come-true, and not just because they let me buy stuff at cost+5%. i'm sure i must have spent as much as i earned on kit and it's only because my folks subsidised my technology purchases (on the proviso that dad got all the good kit and i got the leftovers at least 50% of the time) that i had any cash left over at all.

the PowerMac 7500/100 i bought for $3000 had 16MB of RAM when i got it (i gradually upgraded it over the years with second-hand parts i traded customers for) and a 1GB Hard Drive. it lasted me for about 5 years of constant modding, upgrading and fiddling around before the motherboard finally gave up the ghost and it refused to boot and by this time i'd moved out of home and learned this little thing i call "fiscal reality" (which more or less comes down to the fact that you only earn so much and you can't keep begging your folks for cash so that you can have cool toys AND eat) so when i needed to replace it so that i'd have something to do my uni assignments on i bit the bullet and decided that it was time to learn how to do things in Windows so i got a friend to help me select parts and we built my first PC by hand. it was a learning experience, but a worthy one. there weren't a lot of Mac-specialist jobs going, i knew i'd be graduating in a year or two and i'd need to have some Windows skills or i'd have a hard time earning money. that, and i wanted to play games and up until that point games were something that happened to other people - people who had Windows PC's. Windows 2000 wasn't the prettiest User Experience on the planet, especially when Mac OS X first started showing off its glossy face to the world, but it certainly didn't lack options for fiddling and i learned fast

so the years passed and i became a Windows God while Gil Amelio got the boot as Apple CEO and Steve Jobs came back in from the cold (where he'd helped build a failed tech startup called NeXT and a wildly successful animation studio you may have heard of called Pixar) to be the "Interim" CEO and we started to see the various multi-coloured iMacs appearing in the world and i'd occasionally wander into an Apple Store somewhere and ponder whether i could afford to pick up one of these nifty lampshade iMacs or one of the new PowerBooks that were coming out in brushed aluminium (i couldn't).

then came the iPod, and it was awesome - all the portable MP3 players on the market had been gelded with minuscule amounts of storage, shite battery lives and zero audio quality. the only decent one i could find on the internet had small hard drive (a couple of gig from memory) and was made by a French company called Archos. i wanted one as desperately as a 13 year old boy who just hit puberty and has suddenly worked out the recreational use for breasts, but there were no Australian resellers and getting one in from the US was ridiculously expensive. then, suddenly, the iPod was EVERYWHERE. i was happy enough with my old Sony MP3 Discman so it was a while before i did some research and realised that the iPod was a fraud. sure, it was the greatest thing since the application of knives to bread except for one thing: it had one important flaw which was iTunes - the only way to get music on and off the thing, which meant that when i went over a friend's place i COULDN'T just give them a couple of songs by a new band to check out, and they couldn't return the favor. to make matters worse, when i installed iTunes to muck around with it i found to my digust that it had gone and rearranged and renamed all of my music and i couldn't find anything anymore. iTunes meant Control - and the entity in control was not me. this didn't seem to bother the average punter. they wanted their music on the go. they wanted it to be made easy for them, and Apple provided, not by making it easier for them to learn and become smarter, but by enabling them to be ignorant.

don't get me wrong - i'm an Egalitarian at heart. you shouldn't have to be a member of the technorati to be able to use a computer. it's just that i'm also a Darwinian with a firm belief that we should be striving to move forward as a species. giving the less educated/savvy/interested the tools to enable them to participate in the Great Technological Revolution of the Information Age is fantastic. REMOVING THE ABILITY OF TO STRIVE FOR MORE, on the other hand, is contrary to my guiding beliefs.

THEN, Apple released the iPhone, which took this philosophy of Control to all new heights. here was a device with so much potential, half of which Apple wouldn't let you access. take Bluetooth, for example. it's a short-range communication protocol allowing devices to connect wirelessly and (vaguely) securely. on my Desire i can use it to connect to my computer to transfer small files quickly and easily, or connect to my car's handsfree kit, or beam photos back and forth from my friend's phones. on the iPhone you can only collect to headsets. sometimes. when it feels like it. Apple say they're "ensuring a positive end-user experience". what they're doing is ensuring that you can only use the device the way THEY can you may. it's like you're renting the device from them, rather than buying it. imagine buying a car and being told you're only allowed to drive it between the hours of 1PM and 11PM, and do to otherwise would void your warranty? or if you pulled up to a petrol station and weren't allowed to put in petrol because you drive a Ford and the station will only sell fuel to BMW's? what the fuck?

then the iPad came out and any enthusiasm i may have had for those arseholes had finally evaporated into nothingness. it's a device that i've been waiting to be built for years - a small, light tablet that i can carry around and use as a portable life-extender. to be able to quickly whip it out at a cafe and read the news, or upload photos from my camera on the fly... but it doesn't even have a fucking card reader. what the fuck is the point? for the same price i can have a little ASUS EeePC that takes a minute or so to boot up, but on which i can do everything i need, AS WELL AS type at a rate of 1200 words and hour. it's a toy that the media can whip up a frenzy about, which could have been so useful, and has instead been limited to being a bright shiny toy that you don't even own properly because the only way to get your media onto it is over the internet or from fucking iTunes. it's the Christian-Communist mentality that says "do what we say the way we say it or we will cast you from the Garden". yes, i just called Apple Communists. get over it. prove i'm wrong. the point is that it COULD have been incredible. i look at it and can't help but wonder when the adult version is coming out. the version with all the features, the things they could have added at the cost of a couple of dollars extra, but they didn't include them. it's not because they had to cut costs, or because it was technically infeasible - they Specifically Decided Not To, because this they wanted to nerf their own product.

and the world praised them for it and flocked to hand over their money, because here's yet another unchallenging product from the company renouned for making shiny, pretty toys. they treat us like we're fucking children and in return we love them for it. gods-bless us.

at the end of the day what offends me most is that they are willfully limiting our ability to learn and grow. the whole "hacker" movement was driven by a curiosity to know what was going on behind the curtain, to reveal the Wizard and find out what the wheels and levers did, and then to recombine them to make them do something no one had ever thought to do before. it's Innovation, and Apple is intentionally stifling it, as if to say "how dare you look under the bonnet and see how we do what we do? how dare you have the conceit to second-guess us and think you might be able to do it better?" if Apple sold a car it would come with the bonnet sealed shut, and this offends me. it locks people into a single ecosystem that's even more closed than the Microsoft/Intel monopoly of the mid-90's and prevents people from having the opportunity to play and grow.

technology is and has always been a tool for us to improve our lives. we bend it to our will, not the other way around. it should be a framework that gives us options, rather than limiting is in how we are permitted to use it.

that's my underlying problem with the Fruit Company from Cupertino - they've gone from being the company that gave us a Second Way to manipulate information and become a Totalitarian state, determined to kill off outside innovation and keep the common people in a constant state of consumerism, baying for the next shiny bauble, rather than encouraging people to move forward and create. they are the embodiment of the divide between the creative and technical elite and the seething masses. it's a betrayal of the ideal that when the geek inenherited the earth we'd bring everyone with us rather than encouraging them to keep quiet... and i may be naive and i may be idealistic and i might be completely fucking wrong about the ability of my fellow man to cast off the shackles of ignorance and move forward into the light... but then if that's wrong i don't want to be right.

and that's why i hate Apple.

so where do we go from here? 
so i have this phone and it's buzzed a few times while i lie in bed listening to Incubus, writing this and... you know what? it makes and receives phone calls. it allows me to write and read SMS messages. and emails. and receive Skype calls, and share photos and read the news, find True or Magnetic North and even tell me what street i'm standing on. once was the time it would take me at least 5 different devices to do all that and now it's all wrapped into a nice, neat little package. that's pretty fucking cool. has it become integral to my continued existence as a human being?

we're not talking about a cure for cancer here, or a viable solution for world hunger, or a system of living that overthrows the corporate-masculine-oligarchy. it's a fucking phone. a mini computer that condescends to make calls. that said, it's a bloody awesome tool which i'm finding extremely entertaining and unbelievably useful. there's more mucking around to be had before i'll feel like i'm done. for example, i want to find a way to set it so that when it connects to particular wireless networks certain applications stop or start, so that when i get home it automatically logs me onto Skype and makes me available to receive calls, but disconnects at all other times. that would be useful, and the voice recognition protocols are pretty haphazard for anyone who doesn't have an american accent.

still at the end of the day i bought a Desire because i wanted one, and it's about as good as these devices are going to get for the next month or two so i'm pretty happy with that. if i had to make the choice again i would, which is about as high-praise as you can give to a piece of consumer tech, isn't it?

by request:: An Informal Review of the HTC Desire (Part 1)...

i can haz a present!
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.

Tyvek is a bizarre substance you don't see often in this country. it's aquaphobic like plastic, tears like rip-stop nylon and cuts like paper and like most of the freakishly awesome materials in this world it's trademarked by Dupont. one of my more colourful friends used to make it into origami wallets.

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...