So it happened – after almost a year spent with Nokia N900 as a default phone, I have now switched to Android in the form of HTC Desire Z. Being long-standing user and fan of Maemo (since N8x0), immediate switch to whole new platform naturally brings incentive for direct comparison, so here it is.
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I have been using Nokia N900 as a primary mobile phone for nearly a year now and I am quite happy with it. However, quite recently I’ve also bought the best value-for-money Android 2.1 device you can currenly get, which is Orange San Francisco aka ZTE Blade. I won’t go in too much details about the phone itself, as anyone could easily look it up, but if you’re after joining Android world cheaply, yet without much (any?) compromise in hardware area, then ZTE Blade is definitely way to go. Anyway, I have never intended new phone to replace my N900 because of lack of hardware qwerty keyboard which I’m very addicted to, nonetheless I gave it a shot and put my main SIM card into it for few days. That experience made me cry and I’m just about to tell you why…
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If I was ever trying to find the right way of describing differences between Nokia E71 and HTC Magic, I’d say that E71 is like loving, caring and hard-working but not-so-beautiful wife, while Magic is hot and sexy wamp, ready to please you in any way you want, but not care about you much after that.
It’s been a while since last update, as I wasn’t able to write new posts recently. My Android & me experiment has officially ended today, and I switched back to Nokia E71. However, to be honest, I haven’t done that without a hesitation. HTC Magic has something magic, something that don’t let the user off easily. Anyway, I’ve been still using Magic as a default phone over past few days and I have few points to note before concluding my experiment.
W00t! I found the way of enabling predictive text feature for Polish language! In fact, it was dead simple – just a matter of changing system locale/language to Polish. :) Strangely, keyboard language selection box hasn’t Polski option to choose, which was putting me off earlier. But now I have double checked this and prediction works fine in my native language, despite the lack of the option – well, these are some odd quirks of using non-official ROM firmware. Anyway, I wonder whether that discovery is going to convert me to on-screen keyboard now? I guess not, but hopefully typing text will get painful. Time will tell, and I will tell here later what time said.
Yet another day with HTC Magic as my default mobile phone, as I must admit I’m starting to get used to it. Even battery was behaving rather well overnight this time (99% to just 90%). Overall, Magic is very pleasant device, and quite frankly I really enjoy using it on daily basis. It has very nice look & feel, clean, crisp and sensitive, yet not over-sensitive, touch screen, and generally that is a quite appealing piece of hardware. However, there’s one thing I really really hate. Text input. Oh, yes…
Magic did wake me up this morning. Good. What I wasn’t very impressed about was the battery charge level. From 99% at 11:30pm the night before it went all the way down to 79% in less than 8 hours later, with auto-sync feature turned off (!). What was it doing all night? Don’t know, but apparently not sleeping. I need to review the idea of applications like Facebook and/or Twitter clients running constantly in background. However, quite fortunate thing about the power supply in HTC Magic is that re-charging the battery is actually quite fast.
I am a huge fan of mobile phones with full QWERTY keyboards. It all started with HTC Wizard back in 2005, then HTC Hermes, HTC Kaiser, then I’ve fallen in love with Blackberry-style form factor and followed with Samsung i780 to finally end up with excellent Nokia E71. I’ve been using E71 for more than a year now, and all my true fans know already that me sticking to a single mobile for more than a quarter must mean that I have a swine flu or something. Basically, Nokia E71 – despite some very annoying issues – is the best mobile phone I’ve been using so far. Really.
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