Well, I took the plunge again. After 2+ years of faithful service I retired my old friend. My BlackBerry Curve 8320. Good bye my old trusty friend. I am now the proud new owner of a myTouch 3G Slide (MTS) on the T-Mobile network. All I can say is, wow! After having the phone over the weekend (I upgraded on Wednesday of last week) I can now say it is just awesome. This is a FAST smartphone.
But it's not all glitz and glory. There are some rough patches with this Android phone, but first the glitz. As a phone it's awesome. It makes and takes calls flawlessly. It holds the network and has not even so much as hinted at dropping a call, even when driving through some areas my BlackBerry would sometimes grumble about. And the web browser is phenomonal. I can surf to sites my old BlackBerry could NEVER render.
But ... there are some issues that I need to come clean about. First, the Bluetooth is spotty. The audio connection on my side is choppy and difficult to hear, although the callers haven't yet complained. And the call control button on my Plantronics Voyager 510 seems useless on my MTS phone. For incoming calls it seems OK, but for outgoing calls I can't seem to make the call button activate the onboard 'genius mode' to engage speech to action.
But several sources on the web indicate this is a problem with the Android 2.1 OS. Hopefully this will be fixed in the forthcoming Android 2.2. And while we're on the subject, 2.2 is rumored to be between 3 - 7 times faster than 2.1 on the same hardware. Now that'll make you go hmmm.
The other good news is T-Mobile appears to be in the process of upgrading Phoenix to the new HSPA+ standard. This wireless standard promises to deliver near 4G speeds, and the MTS phone supports it.
All in all this phone is beyond my expectations. It's faster than I believed. But it does require a bit of time to customize for personal use. The beautiful thing for me is the Android Market. I have added several key items to enhance my phone, and thus far all the programs I've selected have been free. While there are a lot of paid apps, most of the nes I needed were higher rated in free versions.
However there is one app I will gladly pay for ... an app to let me use the Windows RDP protocol from my Android phone to control Windows Servers remotely. Now that's what I call progress.
I'll post again as I get further into this new smartphone.
Welcome to 2010 ...
