Went to Android myself and going to challenge a few things:
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Originally Posted by rambo47
[ 4” Super AMOLED Screen. Wow! Spectacular display. It looks like a small plasma tv in your hand. Even compared to the EVO the Epic display is killer. Bright, crisp, and vibrant. As I’ve gotten older my BlackBerry screen has gone from being perfectly fine as far as size to just ok. That big beautiful screen on the Epic is very alluring.
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I had the Desire and the screen, although smaller, was also quite brilliant. Until I went outside. Then, even here in overcast England, it was basically unusable. Even a week in, I smile to myself when I walkl down the street and look at my 9700 screen and it looks just as good as if I were in a dark room.
AND I don't have to constantly wipe greasy fingermarks off it.
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Originally Posted by rambo47
Widgets. These are cool and fun, but few of them make the user more productive. The best of them seem to be weather widgets and the Google Search box. Often they are for more closely monitoring your phone or your twitter account. They may not be geared towards productivity but they’re a big part of the Android user experience.
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Widgets....incredibly over-hyped. If I want to know the weather, I'll look outside. Or at a push, I'll have a favourite in my browser straight to the forecast. I certainly don't need battery and data used up with constant weather updates.
Twitter and Facebook widgets? I am a huge fan of Twitter. And found that a widget that showed me, at most, six or seven tweets was totally useless. All it ended up being was a shortcut to the ful app, so I removed it and just kept a shortcut icon. Ditto email and Facebook widgets.
There wasn't a widget that I found useful. Not one.
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Originally Posted by rambo47
Live Wallpapers. Very slick. The Epic’s 1 GHz Hummingbird processor enables this kind of functionality without the system taking too big a performance hit. Basic animated backgrounds, but when tied in to the Android system they can update to reflect the time of day. Bright at mid day, they darken as the day goes on, finally reflecting the same scene but at night. Combined with a live weather widget you can get some very cool effects.
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I simply could not believe that the new version of Android had had development time and money spent putting in animated wallpapers and NOT in sorting out the, basically awful, PIM applications. I thought it was a simply idiotic feature.
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Originally Posted by rambo47
GMail Integration. Set up a GMail account and you’re instantly backed up. Enter a contact in GMail on a pc and it’s instantly on your Epic. Same with the calendar. Very tight integration.
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I actually got Gmail working really well. Contacts and calendar syncing was great for me, I ditched the Gmail app and installed a third party email client and accessed Gmail via IMAP and got real push email. Can't complain about that, but then really.....if they get anything right, it ought to be that!
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Originally Posted by rambo47
Apps, Apps, and More Apps. Rivaled only by Apple’s developer community, Android is like Palm was back in the day. You could find ANYthing for Palm, and today it’s that way with Android. Free apps, paid apps, it’s all there. And the marketplace app in Android is full of reviews, screenshots, and descriptions.
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Problem is, apps are unregulated and unmonitored and I guarantee that within six months, as Android's user base increases, so will the desire by *some* to steal info, make money, etc. Security is going to be a MAJOR issue and the six months it takes for updates to cycle from Google -> Manufacturer -> Network -> User will not help this.
Agree with you on battery life - less than a day. Those huge screens and 1GHz chips just suck power.
Contacts - you have to sort them and use them how Google want you to. Android isn't made for PIM users.
Swipe to unlock - incredibly easy to work out if you simply look at the greasy fingermarks on the screens!