Being a gadget freak/fiend I have always liked to [if possible] have the most shiny piece of kit to use for whatever this gadget is meant for, be it gardening, DIY, watching tele or my favourite [and I’d say 90% of the population seemingly] mobile phones.
'My Fist Mobile' by Fisher Price
I remember my first mobile phone bought for me by my parents in 1999 it was a Motorola c520 on pay as you go with One2One it had rubber buttons and an antenna this was my induction into owning a phone – I wont romanticise it too much because it was a pretty pants phone. I had friends get snooty about the fact that it was PAYG and called it a Giro phone because sometimes I could not get credit onto it [blown on nights out on the town, as you do when you are 23].
This prompted me to take up the offer of a contract phone with One2One soon after I was the proud owner of a Nokia 3210 the must have handset around the time – so I was in with the in crowd, and so the story goes wait twelve months upgrade phone, wait twelve months upgrade phone.
I absolutely loved the Nokia interface so easy to use and understand ‘predictive text’ was an excellent feature which made texting a lot more productive – this was the main reason for me to keep upgrading to another Nokia handset, I remember checking out friends phones such as Siemens which were unintuitive and basically didn’t make any sense at all this is what kept me on the Nokia bandwagon I strayed once or twice a memorable one was the Siemens sl45 which was a pretty cool piece of kit the main reason I went for this handset was that you could play music on it – nine years ago this was almost unheard of and was considered cutting edge, also you could programme your own ringtones into it JOY. Needless to say I couldn’t really get on with the Siemens interface but I had to have it just for the cool feature.
Soon after my Siemens contract expired and lesson learned from this I was straight back to Nokia and more specifically onto their smart phones range using the Symbian operating system which at the time was the platform of choice for Nokia. Features such as email clients on the handset and internal phone storage so you could store more than one number per person in your phonebook, you could also store addresses postal/email.
Pretty standard stuff nowadays but at the time I thought that ‘this was it’ in mobile technology and I did love my Nokia handsets, but then I heard about something called Android a new operating system for mobile phones I thought that this may have just been a fad and something quickly developed and put out there to contend with the iPhone, I had another twelve months to go on my Nokia N95 contract so I would have to wait and see what came of it.
Well back in November 2009 my contract was up and I was on the hunt for my new Nokia handset – well not really because in the preceding two years Apple brought out the iPhone and this really shook up the mobile phone market, there was a time when if you had a Smartphone your were viewed as a geek/nerd but then apple made it cool, as they do with all their products.
At this time my wife got an iPhone and signed up for a twenty-four month contract *how long* with 02 I really did think the iPhone was for me but I had already bought myself an iPod Touch the year before since my 4G iPod was on its way out – the iPod Touch had all the features that an iPhone had apart from the phone part and the twenty-four month contract part *shudder* so I didn’t really se the point in getting an iPhone.
I had seen the HTC Magic in the Vodafone shops a while back and knew that it used the Android operating system but I was on the lookout for the ‘next big thing’ in the mobile market, well to cut a long story short it turns out that it wasn’t available at the time I wanted it so as a fallback I went with the HTC Magic on a really good eighteen month contract.
So now we get into the actual reason for this post, I got my HTC Magic – loved it [apart from the white casing – PIMP! Phone as my wife calls it] the now familiar home screen with shortcuts on it to your favourite applications right there on the screen no need to go hunting for them in menus if you used it that much you could put it on the home screen.
The standard apps the phone comes with were all awesome – a web browser, Google Maps! With GPS this was absolutely awesome!
Also the feature rich phonebook a now common part of any phone was directly linked to Googlemail meaning all my contacts were on one place, it was always a pain when I got a new phone – transferring all the contacts from one place to the other. Now they are all linked to my Googlemail account so when I do get a new Android phone all I need to do is log in with my Googlemail account details and all my contacts are synced to the handset simple!
So over the next day or so I started to fill up the phone with all sorts of applications from the Android market the vast majority of which were free. This was really but I noticed the phone was really slow when closing applications down and it started to ‘hang’ I decided to give it a while to see if I could get on with it but I really couldn’t so I started to investigate what was wrong with it.
Well this is where it all went a bit right for me, I started looking into how I can speed up the phone. Android being open source means there is an absolutely massive community out there. I started looking into getting custom software on my handset for this I had to get root access to the device [my phone] this involved around six weeks of researching forum threads and many failed attempts and late nights researching this on the internet. I think my wife thought I was having an affair because of all the time I was spending researching ‘ROOT’
Eventually after some pretty scary moments [OMG!! OMG!! phone not working what shall I do posts] I managed to get root access to the phone and start playing around with loading custom software onto the handset.
Now I have a über fast phone which can do a lot more than make phone calls, but even better than that I have discovered a whole new world – twitter clients on my phone mean I can follow people and get notifications in real-time rather than having to go through my phones web browser to access twitter mobile and see if there have been any messages. I am now a twitter fiend/addict and can’t get enough of it.
The forums I went to, to get all the information are a great source of information so I can continually upgrade my phone – good example of this I have had people complaining that I am mumbling on the phone or talking really quietly this wasn’t the case it was just the microphone was set low – to correct this I went to the forums and found this was a known issue I downloaded the files and patched my phone now no complaints at all.
It is this versatility and ability to change as I see fit features of the phone which would normally be locked out to a standard user.
Also there is an application to turn your phone into a mobile WiFi hotspot this is awesome you can surf the internet on your WiFi enabled laptop with out the need to by a wireless data plan.
Needles to say my next phone will defiantly be another HTC Android device.
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