Android Operating System Review
This year I can finally upgrade from my Blackberry Bold 9000. A phone which on the whole is not really that bad. No it doesn’t have the greatest CPU or the most RAM or the best camera to mention a few things, but remember that this phone has been around for a few years now and things have progressed quite rapidly.
There were a few phones of choice for me to upgrade to, but to keep this from getting too long, the simple short answer is that I have gone with an android phone – the Red Bull Mobile HD phone to be specific. The phone is made by Huawei (you know those guys who make most of the USB modems? Yes, them…) and the model is the U8800 IDEOS X5.
As far as some of the new phones go, this one isn’t going to completely rock your world – the pricing might, but not the phone. The main specs… 480 x 800 3.8” TFT touchscreen, 512MB of RAM, 6GB HDD (bumped up by RBM from the 4GB normally offered),5 megapixel rear camera for 720p video recording and an 800MHz CPU – nothing huge, but certainly enough. But this is not about the phone, but rather the Android Operating System.
My phone is running version 2.2.1 and at first glance seems to be pretty good. If you have used any Android device, it won’t take you long to figure out how to navigate through all the apps and settings. As a previous non-user, I must say it didn’t take me long to figure it all out (although some might say I am a bit of a techie, which helps a bit). I have used Symbian, windows (albeit the older versions) and iOS (briefly) as well as RIM; I would say that Android holds its own against the best of these, and trumps others (I’m trying not to take too much of a dig at any of these…) My phone runs smoothly while does all that you would expect a Smartphone to do. It has restarted itself once or twice, but I think that is more of a device issue than software. My wife also enjoys using the phone, or rather I should say, playing angry birds on the phone…
As it stands (now 3 weeks in) I only have one issue and that is that there is no native way which I can sync with Outlook via USB cable. I really don’t want to leave all my contacts and calendar on a Google account (which I had to create to access the market). You can get third party software but that requires you to buy the desktop software while the phone app is free – sneaky sneaky. The other option is to use windows exchange server, but then you have to have an exchange server: anyone with their personal exchange server? I didn’t think so. I am looking into using Linux’s version of exchange server, and will write an update when I get to getting it to work – if I can.
Overall I am very happy with my choice; RIM was great, simple and just worked and for anyone looking for that I would say go Blackberry, but if you want to do a bit more and be able to make it more personal, iOS or Android are the way to go. I only wish I could upgrade to version 3…
