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Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 11:09 am
i wouldn't call it an epiphany, exactly
So there comes a time in everyone's life when they look up from the picnic table during break and realize they are using their telephone to edit a story in googledocs. And despite this, it still takes a few seconds to work out why this feels so right yet is so very, very wrong.
Yes. I went there. I don't just casually browse the web or read fanfic--no, my tiny phone with it's tiny, tiny keyboard is now a place to write porn. And let me say, I am getting awfully quick with my thumbs.
G1 Phone, A Two Week Whirlwind Romance
So in continuation of my initial assessment here:
Networking
Bluetooth: while John II and Arthur the phone are yet to find a way to live together, testing has shown the bluetooth option works fine.
G3: Not mindbogglingly fast, but in general faster than dialup. Tends to work best under the same conditions a regular cell would work best--away from interference, outside buildings, etc.
Wireless Networking: See, when I was still drooling blindly over my phone earlier, I didn't actually notice the section called Wi-Fi. Then abruptly, while trying to talk Arthur into taking it like a man already with the bluetooth, I noted the word Wi-Fi and a greyed out checkmark. When I checked it, it found my network and I found meaning in life.
This allows one's phone to connect to any wireless hotspot or perhaps one's home network when one just cannot make oneself reach the entire three feet to get one's laptop when one wants to check one's email.
To say this will open new and exciting vistas in laziness is a tragic understatement of epic proportions. It can only get better when they just implant these directly into our brains.
Websurfing
I've come to appreciate any website that has a Mobile version or is Mobile friendly.
With the screen horizontal, I can pretty easily reading my LJ Flist and my Dreamwidth reading page without horizontal scrolling, though I lose the right sidebar to squishiness and the header links and nav bar are a little jumbled. When you touch the screen, there are two options to magnify or reduce the site, but so far, I only do that when I need to get to a link that's smaller than the size of my smallest thumbnail. However, the screen also has the optoin of outlining links in orange and jumping between them using the keyboard, but my phone is charging so I can't remember how that happens, I just know it does every time.
Using the tiny scrollbar on the right side of the phone when it's horizontal, I can scroll fairly easily with my thumb.
Frames are not friendly; well-written CSS div's are excellent; pages created specifically for Mobile are the best. I'm wondering if core2 could add the option of creating a Mobile-related alternate layout of the Recent, Entry, and Reading Pages; if I shift my sidebar to the top of my Reading Page and do some spacing for the resolution of a smaller screen, it would basically be perfect for reading purposes.
Phone Design
Granted, I didn't really think I'd like the design with the trackball, the call, hangup, home and back buttons set below the screen on their own little island. Then I started using applications and websurfing and got over myself at the convenience.
The phone stays in portrait mode until you slide the screen up to reveal the keyboard, at which time it shifts horizontal. The keyboard is very small, but I want to point out something that never occurred to me in regard to capitalization and the shift key until I started using this, which only requires me to tap a tiny upward pointing arrow, then tap my letter of choice, to capitalize it.
Why, for the love of God, do we still have to do simultaneous shift key-letter to capitalize on regular keyboards? Why can't we do it like this? My pinkies would be so happy. Well, my left pinkie anyway; my right never really did get that entire "shift key" thing.
Touchscreen hasn't given me any real problems so far, and the pullout screen for applications at the bottom and the pull out screen for notifications of email, phone calls, messages, or certain social networking applications at the top both work wonderfully. There's also a menu button that gives more specific current-screen-related options.
Google Taking Over the World
This being a google thing, obviously google made integration of the phone and Android with its own products pretty much seamless, and I would say addictively so. So far, google, gmail, and googledocs all default to a mobile version of their webpages when I surf in, and all are almost ridiculously easy to use as well as easy to read, magnify, and sadly enough, add text to a certain story involving a bathtub and a tragic misunderstanding of the definition of manservant. Pretty much all functionality that exists when you'd surf in on your computer is available on your phone with clever use of the menu button for various screen commands.
The phone comes with a link to a Mobile-friendly youtube in the pull out application screen and in the browser under bookmarks are links to Mobile-friendly pages for facebook, my space, cnn, bbc, amazon--and I can't remember the others. Also in the application pull-out screen is a link to Android Market, where you can go and marvel at applications to integrate MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter into your phone. This will allow you to skip having to go the website altogether by instead using the notification pull-out screen to update you on whatever the hell people do on MySpace and Facebook. In Twitter, it just pings every damn time someone you are following Tweets.
There's also a link to setup your Yahoo IM, AIM, and Windows Messanger, though the GTalk showing here is already set up by way of when you set up your gmail. There's also Email, where you can add in other email accounts so they, too, can save you the long, tedious seconds it could take you to open a browser window and to your email homepage.
Text Messaging
I actually enjoy this now that I have a keyboard to use. New feature, at least to me, is that all your messages are threaded by person, not in a jumble in your inbox. When I click on Messaging, it opens to show the names of everyone I've ever messaged that hasn't been deleted and all of our messages to each other in order and pretty much exactly like gmail visually.
Using My Phone as a Phone
Okay, this I haven't done much of. My total number of actual phone calls made and received is about twelve. Keep in mind that when you first login to gmail and android and google take over your life, your contact list in gmail will be ported into your phone if certain things are true and your phone contact list with associated gmail will also shift to your gmail account, again, under certain conditions. Mine didn't on the first part but did on the second, and it was weird and confusing.
Yes. I went there. I don't just casually browse the web or read fanfic--no, my tiny phone with it's tiny, tiny keyboard is now a place to write porn. And let me say, I am getting awfully quick with my thumbs.
So in continuation of my initial assessment here:
Networking
Bluetooth: while John II and Arthur the phone are yet to find a way to live together, testing has shown the bluetooth option works fine.
G3: Not mindbogglingly fast, but in general faster than dialup. Tends to work best under the same conditions a regular cell would work best--away from interference, outside buildings, etc.
Wireless Networking: See, when I was still drooling blindly over my phone earlier, I didn't actually notice the section called Wi-Fi. Then abruptly, while trying to talk Arthur into taking it like a man already with the bluetooth, I noted the word Wi-Fi and a greyed out checkmark. When I checked it, it found my network and I found meaning in life.
This allows one's phone to connect to any wireless hotspot or perhaps one's home network when one just cannot make oneself reach the entire three feet to get one's laptop when one wants to check one's email.
To say this will open new and exciting vistas in laziness is a tragic understatement of epic proportions. It can only get better when they just implant these directly into our brains.
Websurfing
I've come to appreciate any website that has a Mobile version or is Mobile friendly.
With the screen horizontal, I can pretty easily reading my LJ Flist and my Dreamwidth reading page without horizontal scrolling, though I lose the right sidebar to squishiness and the header links and nav bar are a little jumbled. When you touch the screen, there are two options to magnify or reduce the site, but so far, I only do that when I need to get to a link that's smaller than the size of my smallest thumbnail. However, the screen also has the optoin of outlining links in orange and jumping between them using the keyboard, but my phone is charging so I can't remember how that happens, I just know it does every time.
Using the tiny scrollbar on the right side of the phone when it's horizontal, I can scroll fairly easily with my thumb.
Frames are not friendly; well-written CSS div's are excellent; pages created specifically for Mobile are the best. I'm wondering if core2 could add the option of creating a Mobile-related alternate layout of the Recent, Entry, and Reading Pages; if I shift my sidebar to the top of my Reading Page and do some spacing for the resolution of a smaller screen, it would basically be perfect for reading purposes.
Phone Design
Granted, I didn't really think I'd like the design with the trackball, the call, hangup, home and back buttons set below the screen on their own little island. Then I started using applications and websurfing and got over myself at the convenience.
The phone stays in portrait mode until you slide the screen up to reveal the keyboard, at which time it shifts horizontal. The keyboard is very small, but I want to point out something that never occurred to me in regard to capitalization and the shift key until I started using this, which only requires me to tap a tiny upward pointing arrow, then tap my letter of choice, to capitalize it.
Why, for the love of God, do we still have to do simultaneous shift key-letter to capitalize on regular keyboards? Why can't we do it like this? My pinkies would be so happy. Well, my left pinkie anyway; my right never really did get that entire "shift key" thing.
Touchscreen hasn't given me any real problems so far, and the pullout screen for applications at the bottom and the pull out screen for notifications of email, phone calls, messages, or certain social networking applications at the top both work wonderfully. There's also a menu button that gives more specific current-screen-related options.
Google Taking Over the World
This being a google thing, obviously google made integration of the phone and Android with its own products pretty much seamless, and I would say addictively so. So far, google, gmail, and googledocs all default to a mobile version of their webpages when I surf in, and all are almost ridiculously easy to use as well as easy to read, magnify, and sadly enough, add text to a certain story involving a bathtub and a tragic misunderstanding of the definition of manservant. Pretty much all functionality that exists when you'd surf in on your computer is available on your phone with clever use of the menu button for various screen commands.
The phone comes with a link to a Mobile-friendly youtube in the pull out application screen and in the browser under bookmarks are links to Mobile-friendly pages for facebook, my space, cnn, bbc, amazon--and I can't remember the others. Also in the application pull-out screen is a link to Android Market, where you can go and marvel at applications to integrate MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter into your phone. This will allow you to skip having to go the website altogether by instead using the notification pull-out screen to update you on whatever the hell people do on MySpace and Facebook. In Twitter, it just pings every damn time someone you are following Tweets.
There's also a link to setup your Yahoo IM, AIM, and Windows Messanger, though the GTalk showing here is already set up by way of when you set up your gmail. There's also Email, where you can add in other email accounts so they, too, can save you the long, tedious seconds it could take you to open a browser window and to your email homepage.
Text Messaging
I actually enjoy this now that I have a keyboard to use. New feature, at least to me, is that all your messages are threaded by person, not in a jumble in your inbox. When I click on Messaging, it opens to show the names of everyone I've ever messaged that hasn't been deleted and all of our messages to each other in order and pretty much exactly like gmail visually.
Using My Phone as a Phone
Okay, this I haven't done much of. My total number of actual phone calls made and received is about twelve. Keep in mind that when you first login to gmail and android and google take over your life, your contact list in gmail will be ported into your phone if certain things are true and your phone contact list with associated gmail will also shift to your gmail account, again, under certain conditions. Mine didn't on the first part but did on the second, and it was weird and confusing.
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