All posts tagged with "Mobile Phones"
My top 5 Android apps
I have had an Android phone for almost 2 years now and I must say, I prefer Android over iOS (the iPhone OS). I have an iPod Touch for all that stuff, and while it's nice and shiny and has a far better range of apps available for it, Android is still my favourite mobile device OS.
And so, here is a list of some of my favourite apps:
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Twidroyd
My phone (HTC Wildfire) has a smaller screen than a lot of Android devices, and as such a lot of the mainstream Android apps either don't work or simply aren't available for it. The official Twitter app for Android is one of these - it works, but the smaller screen means half the options are cut off and it makes it very difficult to use. For this reason, I chose Twidroyd - I used to use it before Android got an official Twitter app and I really liked it. Twidroyd has all the functionality of the official app and more - you can integrate Identica, use multiple accounts, use bit.ly API keys, upload to a variety of picture and video hosts, 'mute' especially noisy tweeters and more. Some of those features (namely multiple accounts) requires the paid-for version, but the free (ad-supported) version has more than enough features for the obsessive tweeter :)
Edit: Twidroyd is no longer available after being replaced by Ubersocial. I wouldn't really recommend Ubersocial as it's rather too full of ads for my liking. The official Twitter client is much better :)
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Android System Info
This is more of a geeky one - if you want to find out a load of info about your phone, like what sort of features the processor has or what versions of OpenGL it supports, this app will tell you. I mainly use it to keep track of how much space I'm using - the bar charts on the front page will tell you all that and more. It also comes with a task manager, app manager (like Android's built in one, but this gives you more at-a-glance info - like how much space is being used by caches - than the Android one) and access to the system logs.
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Google Maps (Navigation)
Ok, I know this comes on most (if not all) Android phones, but they don't always have the most recent version - the one that has the free turn-by-turn navigation app bundled in it. Before this, I paid a monthly fee for a really rather nice GPS app - definitely rivalled the dedicated units in shops. Google's Navigation app isn't quite as nice as that, but it does the job very well for a free application and I'm much happier using that than buying a full GPS unit or paying a monthly fee.
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Dropbox
The Dropbox app for Android isn't as good as the one for iOS, and is definitely nowhere near as good as the PC/Mac clients, but I find it very useful to share photos from my phone. My last phone had an accessible SD card slot, where I could take the card out and read all the pics on it - this one doesn't, so if I want to grab the photos I need to pretty much take the phone apart. Not very convenient. This way, I can upload my pics straight to dropbox and they sync to my computer automatically. Lovely!
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Wifi Hotspot
Not sure if this one is downloadable, or if there is a similar downloadable app - this one came with the 2.2 (Froyo) update to my phone, courtesy of HTC. It allows me to broadcast my phone's 3G connection over wifi so that I can use my laptop even if there's no connection handy. Great idea for when I'm out and about and don't have to pay extortionate rates for hotel wifi :D It can be locked down with WPA and WPA2 security as well as only allowing a certain number of devices to connect.
Other things I haven't included here but use every day are: Facebook, Internet, Weather and Gmail, but those are all built-in apps (apart from Facebook, which is nothing special in terms of the app) so I'm sure most people already know about them :P
Anyone got any other favourite Android apps? Always open to try new things - and if they don't work on my Wildfire, I have a rooted G1 that things will definitely work on :D
HTC Wildfire - a review
So, I have been looking for a new phone and was thinking about getting the iPhone 4 or the HTC Desire. I was quite fond of my previous HTC, the T-Mobile branded G1 (aka HTC Dream), but it was crashing a lot. I ended up with an HTC Wildfire (that's it over there on the left. Pic of box taken with phone. Wheee).
Now, the Wildfire was not a choice as such - I went into the shop to see what deals I could get on plans, I wanted to go for the cheapest plan I could and see what phones came with it, if any. In the end I stayed with my current network (T-Mobile) as they had the best deal on cheap contracts, it seems. They offered me a variety of basic phones, but there were only two Android ones - the T-Mobile Pulse, which looked very nice but had a rather old version of Android on it (older than the version I had on the G1) and while I thought it looked great, I did want something a bit more futureproof. The other Android was the Wildfire, a new addition that had just come out, running Android 2.1 via HTC Sense. I went for it.
I was immediately disappointed by the phone. I expected it to be more or less the same as what I'd been used to; as it was a free phone I hadn't had a chance to try it in-store and kind of regretted that - it wasn't at all the same. For a start, I noticed the lower resolution. The G1 had a 320×480px widescreen (16:9) resolution (the same as the original iPhone's) on a 3.2" screen running at 180dpi. The Wildfire has the same 3.2" screen, but it's a 4:3 resolution of 240×320 (dunno how many dpi, but it's less than the G1), which is about 2/3 what I had before. The colours were not the same either - the Wildfire boasts the same 16-bit colours as the G1 but does not deliver them. I get patchy, dithered colours reminiscent of the old 256 colour system.
No matter, I told myself; I can get used to a smaller screen. It's only then, of course, that I realised that the Android Market wasn't showing me a lot of the apps I used to have installed. I searched for them - nothing. I learned why - a lot of Android apps require the default screen resolution of 320×480, which most of the phones have. The Market won't show items that won't fit on your screen, and even those that do say they'll fit on your screen end up looking very squashed, for the most part.
Then there's HTC Sense, which is HTC's UI on top of Android. Now I'd never been hot on the vanilla Android design, but it was ok and I got used to it. I thought HTC Sense would be a great addition to Android, finally some shininess! ... er, well, not really. The awkward colours mean that it doesn't really work for one, and secondly I'm not sure who designed the HTC Sense UI but it's like HTC took every app on Android and uglified it. Not a fan at all, and I immediately reverted to vanilla Android Home instead of the Sense display. It's a shame, because they have done some rather nice tweaks to some of the apps (the rest, I really wish they'd left alone) but with the ugly interface, I'm really not inclined to use them. That and a lot of the apps are useless anyway - one is "download Navigon" and is nothing more than an advert for a navigation app. Even if you do download Navigon, it doesn't go away. You can't delete it or hide it. Grrr.
One thing I LOVE LOVE LOVE is the fact that I can add my Facebook, Twitter and Flickr contacts, and link them to my phone contacts so that if the person has an updated email/phone number on one of those accounts, it'll update it on my phone. But the problem with that is, once you add those items, Mr Wildfire thinks you will want to be automatically updated of people's statuses/etc when they call you or you call them. Er, no thanks. I'll check my Facebook et al when I feel like it. Oh and note to Mr Wildfire: I set a contact's default number for a reason. I want that number to show up first when I type their name into the recipient field; I don't expect you to list all their numbers in numerical order. That inevitably means I will send things to the wrong numbers, since all landline numbers here start with 01 or 02 and mobiles start 07. That means if I have my friend Bob Jones with a number of 01234 567890 and his mobile number of 07123 567890, when I start typing "Bob" into my recipients, it'll autofill the first number in numerical order - the landline number beginning 01, even though the mobile number is set as his default number. Do not want. Also, I would have thought it would prioritise 'Mobile' numbers over 'Home'/'Work' when texting, as it is more likely I will want to text another mobile than a landline... Eh. Oh, and that's another thing - when you're making a call, it seems the proximity sensor isn't working properly, as my ear pressed a load of stuff on the screen - cut off the call, muted me, etc etc. Hmmm.
And you know the one thing I really wanted on Android - the indication light that flashes different colours depending on what I've received? Ah yes, the Wildfire might as well not have one. It only flashes green (or orange when charging), it doesn't have a multi-colour LED like the G1 and the more expensive phones. Wah :( It also turns itself off after 5 minutes, so if you happen to be in a meeting or some other place where you can't look at your phone every 5 minutes, you'll miss a notification.
But it's not all bad! Honest! I have had the phone a week now and I've actually grown to love HTC Sense's home screen. Still not so hot on the apps (ugly) but the home screen actually fits in much better on the phone than the vanilla Android one. My complaint now is that it eats a lot more battery power :P I got 3 days' battery on vanilla Home, I get a day and a half on Sense, which has more funky widgets and has 7 screens to put them on instead of just 3. The on-screen keyboard took a bit of getting used to, but the predictive text - while largely a rip off of the iPhone's - makes it much easier to use than the version on the G1 (which I hardly used in favour of the slide-out one). I also love the look of this phone - even though I would have preferred it in white (and there IS a white version! It just wasn't available at the store I went to :( ), the grey/black combo looks sleek and professional. It fits snugly in my pocket, unlike the G1 which was a bit too big.
All in all, I have actually grown very fond of this phone and despite the screen resolution/colours and ugly apps (apart from the weather app. That has gorgeous graphics), I'm really glad I got it. I got a cheap contract, and got a cheap (ish. It's not cheap on its own, but compared to the other smart phones) phone with it. For the price I'm paying, I could have expected something that wasn't a smartphone at all, or something that is but was nowhere near the quality of the G1. But I didn't get that, I got something which - yes, it's not as good as the G1, but I'd say it's about 90% the smartphone the G1 was. It may have less of a screen resolution and less colours, but it has almost 4 times the memory and storage space I had on the last phone, as well as an LED flash and brightness sensor. Ok, so the former I don't really use (other than as a torch/flashlight :P ) but I actually really like the latter. The G1 never really did go bright enough... You'd get a bit of sun and that was it - screen was invisible. I've not had any sun yet to try the Wildfire on, but it certainly seems to be able to go much brighter than the G1.
But yes, I'm actually very happy with it now :)