Sunday, September 27, 2009

Age old dilemna

How often does this happen? To me, it just sums up the problems you can have choosing between devices and platforms. The HTC Hero is a very good little device and there are quite a few things on it that I think are handled in a much better way than on the iPhone, for example, and at the same time there are quite a number of things that the iPhone does much better too.

Without going into a huge amount of detail just yet, as I will try and do a fuller Hero review later this week let me say this instead…the Hero is a much nicer device to use on a daily basis as it has better battery life, is more compact, has buttons that make navigating about a doddle, a better camera (note lack of “much” in there), a wipe clean easy screen, is super speedy, a great in built notification system, a much better Gmail native application than you can get on the iPhone, a super duper homescreen customisation set up and some decent apps. Yet, I still find myself, when I pick up the iPhone and use some of the iPhone apps thinking…..”the apps on this thing are on the whole waaaaaayyyyyy better”. It also feels a lot more solid and you forget what it is like to have a device that has the apparant advantage of replaceable batteries but with the downside trade-off of a bit of all round sqeakiness. I hate pressing down on the back and feeling it flex, makes me shudder.

I have enjoyed, so far, using the Hero and am still finding little apps that are useful but I could not say yet that it is doing enough to stop me wanting the iPhone 3GS in 3 months time over it. An ideal situation would be the iPhone apps in the Hero shell. I would say however that in my view the Hero and the Android o/s is already in front of current Symbian, Win Mob and BlackBerry devices in terms of ease of use. I can’t see myself going back to any of those phones in the near future nor I can see the Palm Pre being any better.

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