I went out on opening day and picked up a shiny new T-Mobile myTouch (android) phone. This is quite a step up from the TracFone I have been using for a few years now:

The TracFone is an older Motorola model with no usable keyboard, but that’s okay, since it really doesn’t do much more than make/receive phone calls.

The myTouch, on the other hand is a beautiful piece of modern technology. The back is that slightly rubberized matte finish, obviously I chose the black model, but it does come in white and red also.

I am very happy with the myTouch so far and have no real strong complaints. The virtual keyboard takes a little getting used to but its really not bad once you get the hang of it. It has a nice feature that tells you which key you have pressed before actually committing to it so you can change if its the wrong one. It sounds like it gets in your way, but it doesn’t. The password entry fields are the most annoying though. You get the normal password hiding except for the last character you typed, which is nice, but if you have a strong password it’s kind of a pain since you have to keep switching from numbers to letters and back.

There is a noticeable delay reorienting the phone between portrait view and landscape view, but it is nothing unlivable. This may be present on the G1 and even the iPhone for all I know.

The applications I have tried out have been pretty responsive and useful. The App Store is not quite as friendly as I would like, though other than screen shots of the apps, I am not quite sure what could be done to make it better. It’s hard to find what you want unless it’s popular or you know exactly what it’s called. I will have to do some App reviews later, but my favorite so far is the Last.fm app since I have been scrobbling to Last.fm for a while now, my “station” has most of my music in it. The down-side is that it’s pretty stream-intensive so it really only works well in a 3G area or on a wireless network.

Web browsing is a bit odd, but nothing all that different from what I experienced playing with an iPhone. You have to work with the tiny screen somehow and Android does a good job of keeping the navigation fairly intuitive and smooth.

The camera (3.2MP) works well and the auto-focus locks on fast; however, the lack of a flash is a bit of a bummer. Here is a picture I took with it. It was taken in the morning so that lighting is not the best.

The video is also decent, though to me it’s more of a frill as I would not expect high quality video from a phone. It could come in handy some time.

The sound quality is good from both the earpiece and the speaker. You could actually use the built in speaker to listen to music or other audio content if there is not too much ambient noise, but the headphones that come with the unit suck — I really don’t like in-ear headphones anyway. A short adapter cable (about 3in) is provided to convert normal headphone connectors to the mini-usb required by the phone, and it works great. It even has a pause/play button built in that ties to the default music player. If you get a charging stand, it also has a normal headphone jack so you can use it while it’s being charged. The charging stand does not seem to allow USB synching though, which seems odd to me.

I am using the default music player which seems fine to me as I would not be using this for an MP3 player all that often; it does everything I feel is necessary. You can list the songs/artists/albums pick what you want and play them, pause them, etc. and even go off and do other activities with the music player running in the background.

I have some app ideas already coming together and I am working my way through the “Hello, Android” book, so expect more Android posts and maybe an App or two here pretty soon.

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Tags: Android, Google