Digitalwerks

At my last job I had a company phone, a Blackberry Pearl, which I enjoyed using quite a bit.  It was small, well laid out, had a decent screen and the keyboard was suprisingly useful, even though it was not a full sized QWERTY like the larger Blackberries.  Just getting email on to your phone is a killer app, and the massive success of Blackberry attests to that rather clearly.  Heck, look at how tenaciously Obama is clinging to his “Crack”berry.

Alas, I am no longer with my old company, so I had to rush out and get a new phone.  

The Pearl had limitations of course.  Its relatively tiny screen was not really designed for multimedia, nor was the software for video and/or audio very effective.  Third party software in general was lacking, and what stuff there was often cost far too much, imo.  Ultimately the software I found myself using the most was the Opera mini-browser and Viigo, an RSS feed reader.

The fact that my most used apps were about web surfing really speaks to how having a smart phone, even the Pearl, changed my habits.  I really, really like having access to the web no matter where I am.  Sick?  Addicted?  Maybe, but once you have that instant always-on experience, the prospect of going without it is rather horrifying.  So needless to say, as the reality of handing over the phone back to the company sunk in, I rapidly began to consider my options to replace it.

iPhone?  Nah, I’m too much of an Apple skeptic to jump on that bandwagon at this point, no matter how good it is.  Plus it’s pretty expensive and I’m trying to economize.

Another Blackberry?  Possible, but the really interesting Blackberrys right now are the Storm and the Bold, and they are still pretty damn expensive.

My mind very quickly went to the G1 Android phone from T-Mobile.  I was a pretty easy mark for this, as the openness and intense focus on the web, plus a QWERTY keyboard and a decent screen for video was all very compelling.  Not to mention I found a deal for it at a very good price, $149 with a monthly charge of around $60.

So, how’s it been?  Generally it’s been very good.  Certainly far from perfect, and I cannot compare it to the iPhone (or the soon to be released Palm Pre), but I’ve enjoyed it a lot.  3G is spotty where I am in San Diego, wifi has also proven to be sporadic, the build is probably not super great, and the fact that it can’t actually edit Google Docs is maddening.  But the interface is slick, I’m loving the apps I’ve found on the Android Market, and it really does provide a far better web experience than the Pearl did, which is the real key decisive factor for me.  And the tight connection to the Google apps is very, very effective.

I had great plans to blog with it from the show floor at CES.  It proved capable of it, which is a pretty amazing fact when you think about it.  The ability to take pictures (of low quality to be sure), create text and upload it all to one’s blog all on the move is very, very cool to me.

Overall, I’m definitely a convert and am excited to see how the Android platform develops in the future.  And it will develop, as the openness at the heart of Android is precisely the approach more consumer electronics will have to take in the future.