Cellphones! Your experiences~~

Started by Adaru, March 27, 2009, 02:26:09 PM

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Acco

Wind uses Roger's 2G network, but provides their own 3G on the AWS/1700 band, which is not compatible with 90% of the phones out there.

The biggest difference is the lack of contracts.

Kithop

Forget if I replied in here or not or if my post got moved or anything.. :p

I've got an HTC Dream through Rogers; I had to give my old iPhone back to my previous employer when I left, and decided to give an Android phone a whirl.  I love the hardware keyboard, and the first thing I did was replace/update the stock firmware. :p

I actually just recently flashed it up to the latest experimental Cyanogenmod 5.0.7, which is a backport of the latest Android 2.1 from the Nexus One, minus some of the space-and-processor-hogging features like Live Wallpapers and the new Launcher.  The previous 4.x series was a hybrid of 1.6 and 2.0 (the latest Rogers firmware is still based on the relatively ancient 1.5) and still decent, but this is faster and better.  Since the Dream (G1 in most other countries) is relatively old hardware, it does suffer from a slower (528MHz) processor and lack of RAM and internal flash ROM, but since Cyanogenmod supports both swap and application installation direct to the microSD card, it's still very usable.

It's got your standard 3.5G data, 802.11b/g WiFi, GPS, compass, accelerometer/tilt sensor, Bluetooth (with A2DP), microSDHC support, etc. etc. and can run both Market and unsupported apps (i.e. the equivalent of a 'jailbroken' iPhone).  The nice thing about it is that Google actually supports guys like Cyanogen in making their custom firmwares and tweaks (even if Rogers locks down the SPL bootloaders in newer Android phones in an attempt to prevent you from using them *fistshake*) - HTC and Rogers said they wouldn't be porting Android 2.1 back to the Dream because 'it wasn't capable'... Cyanogen did it himself and just axed the few intensive features that wouldn't fit.

I was initially set on the Nokia N900 w/ Maemo, but since they never released a version compatible with Rogers' 3G network, I went Android instead.  While I wish my phone were a bit faster, hardware wise, the ecosystem is amazing and I'm eagerly awaiting whatever upgrade to the Nexus One comes out next, with a hardware keyboard.  If they remake the Nexus One w/ said keyboard, even, I'd be all over it. :P  Hate soft keyboards.

That, and I'm just waiting for Google to get their licensing/regulation/whatever in place to allow the new Navigation sub-app of Maps working in Canada.  Mmn turn-by-turn GPS, for free (minus data charges for loading maps on the fly).

All in all, I love my phone so much more than the old iPhone, and can wholeheartedly recommend Android-based phones (especially the unlocked, unrestricted Google Nexus One if you can handle the software keyboard) over Apple's locked-in, censored ecosystem.

Silvermink

I'd love to see more Android phones with hardware keyboards. I like to pretend the software keyboard on my iPhone is sufficient, but... well, it drives me nuts a lot of the time, though their lousy spellchecker (seriously, it substitutes "it's" for "its". wtf?) doesn't help.

Kithop

Yeah, I know. >.<  "Its" is grammatically correct sometimes (possessive; "It's" = "it is"), so why would you autocorrect it the same way all the time? :/

Hell, autocorrect in general just pisses me off - especially if you're using a hardware keyboard, too! X.x  My typing is not that bad.

Silvermink

#34
I find autocorrect generally useful on the iPhone mostly because the keyboard doesn't lend itself well to especially-high accuracy, but it makes some really boneheaded correction decisions sometimes.

I'm also annoyed that it tries to correct my profanity. I can see not putting those words in the spelling dictionary such that other words might be corrected to them, but c'mon - I wasn't trying to type "ducking". :P

Or, as this (hilarious) video would have it, "sips off, you ducking yanker!"


Acco

HAHAHA. Thanks for the video, mink. :D

Tai


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