Thursday, May 30, 2013

HTC One

I've changed from iPhone 4S to HTC One, an Android phone.

It's more beautiful than the iPhone (who'd have thunked that?), and the bigger screen is a current-day necessity. It's a good pocket ereader. The hardware is state of the art, just lovely.*


I must say though, I don't quite understand the enthusiasm with which some people, like Apple connoisseurs Andy Ihnatko and Guy Kawasaki, have taken to Android. They quote many reasons, but they all seem trivial to me. As an OS it still feels a little awkward and buggy to me. (And confusing: not two devices work the same.) A typical example: in the notifications list, two notifications from the very first time I opened it are stuck. They do not disappear like the others when I clear the list.
Another example: I googled for the "best podcast app for Android", and got the clear candidate. But it's not very good. The buttons are too small, and the time line hardly visible.
(Not that the iOS podcast apps are great. It's odd, you'd think that would be an easy interface to make, but instead Apple's own app, for example, has the whole middle of the screen, over 70%, doing nothing, and has the controls crammed together, too small, at the top and the bottom. Just brain-dead decisions. But that's not normal, on the whole I have much more fun with iOS apps.)


*OK, it is more than state of the art, it's overkill. Who has eyes resolving four hundred and seventy pixels per inch?! I can just barely tell the difference between 200 and 300. 

4 comments:

ttl said...

Is Android able to sync contacts with your Mac, or how does that work?

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Amazingly, it took them pretty painlessly over bluetooth from my iPhone. (Which had gotten many of them from my Mac, a bit redundantly since I only had phone numbers for like 2% of them.)

ttl said...

You didn't fully answer my question though:

From now on, when you update your contacts in your Mac, do they get synced to the HTC? And vice versa, do the changes to the contact data in you HTC get synced to your Mac? (I assume there must be a way.)

... a bit redundantly since I only had phone numbers for like 2% of them.

I'm not sure what you mean by redundancy here. I find that the email addresses and physical addresses are just as important on the go as the phone number.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

OK, granted. It's just that I never mails from my phone. And not even often from my iPad.

There may be an app which can sync contacts to my Mac, I haven't looked into it. I guess if I used the Gmail app, it would be automatic.