New Phone

So.

Farewell then, LG Prada. Hello to the HTC Desire S.

I tried and tried and tried to fix/recharge the old Prada phone, but with great regret I ended up making the difficult decision to upgrade. That Prada phone had been my constant companion for a good few years now, and I had resisted upgrading simply because I liked it so much. It was scratched, it was battered, the Prada logo had flaked off and it had become a shadow of its previous minimalistic elegance, but it would text and call with no problems, and take the odd photo.

To be clear, I'm not an early adopter. I'm a very late one who tends to see consumer tech developments as marketing gimmicks designed to fleece the unwary. I generally refuse to update my tech unless there's a clear advantage to doing so.

Having had some experience of the Android operating system with that generic 7" tablet my mother had given me (see here), I liked the way I could easily shunt things between my PC and the device using just a USB cable, and figured that a smaller-still Android advice with which I could also text people and phone would be a cool plan.

Some Googling and calculations on the basis of my current mobile phone usage later, I wandered into O2 on the way home from work. Getting the new phone cost a small amount, and I bolted on some data-transfer to my tariff as well, so I now have an easy to use phone/Android device to fiddle with and play chess on.

What's in the Box

There was the phone, some earphones, a quickstart guide, and a charger thingy. No manual, case, strap, software disk to help syncing with PC or fine-weave polishing cloth (I was clearly spoilt by the Prada package). I found the manual in a pdf file in the folder /sdcard/User Manual/, once I'd installed a file browser.

I mean, FFS, who sells a device without a bl00dy file browser? They put a mirror app on it, so I can see my face in the phone, and a torch app, but no file browser!

Android Market

It came with the Android Market on it, and Google know who I am now thanks to my Blogger account (which runs parallel to my Livejournal one), so downloading apps is a bit easier that downloading .apk files and moving them across.

I downloaded the following:

• A file browser. Actually, two: Astro (which has adverts on it) and ES File Explorer
• Chess.com, but I'll go for Shredder later
• Google Sky
• Amazon Kindle
• Opera browser

I stuck to free apps because the Android Market doesn't let you use PayPal, you have to give Google your credit card details. I do not trust them with my credit card details, and so paid-for apps will remain unbought for the time being. Hopefully the still-forthcoming Amazon Appstore will make life a bit easier.

Siranui recommended a few useful-sounding things: an app-killer for freeing up memory, and a 'turn off and on again' thing for quickly disabling wifi etc to save battery.

Will see how it goes. I have discovered that it should be possible to develop HTML/Javascript/CSS apps for it easily enough, so it's looking like an interesting thing.