Hi All,
Last week friday I switched to the HOX after being with the iPhone since the very first one.
I thought I would take a few moments and reflect on my thoughts and share them here for anyone interested.
Lets start with the good stuff.
The phone design and screen are just incredible.
The screen looks just amazing and like the icons are floating on top of it.
It totally blows the Retina display out of the water especially with the 4.7" sized screen vs 3.5" on my iPhone.
Being able to customize everything and having a actual file structure just rocks.
The user interface even though being way more complicated when delving a little deeper is way better then what I heard and experienced when looking at Android a couple of years ago at various stores.
However since I always jailbroke my iPhones I'm very used to going deeper then just skin deep.
The speed and animations are very responsive and at the same level as iOS and this wasn't always the case in the past but there are no stutters or lag at all with ICS.
Some little design quirks that I have irritating this far are the buttons on the HOX specifically the power and volume buttons are very touchy and I always seem to activate the volume levels when grabbing the phone and the top one gets pushed when just looking at it funny or touch it lightly.
Having a back button is awesome and way undersold on the Android phones.
The battery live is okay not great but not as bad as I thought it would be and needs a little more consideration on how you use the phone and features vs the iPhone 4.
But it does last me through the day mostly when I'm not playing with it all the time which is hard on a new phone.
Some of the things that irritate the crap out of me are not the fault of the design but mostly with At&t and HTC's.
Starting with OTA updates, I've been trying to update to ICS 4.0.4 since I got the phone and nothing.
For an update that has been out for 3 weeks that is inexcusable to say it in a nice way.
Syncing and backup / restore is an utter joke and could and should be easy as pie nowadays but isn't.
For HTC not having a sync client for Mac is unbelievable.
So having grown tired of waiting on the OTA update I decided to do it manually and booted into my windows 7 partition, installed the sync manager and backed everything up and started the update.
I understood that it would wipe the phone and stuff but hey I synced and backed it up before so no big deal I'll just do a restore when done.
Well no it did not work, I had to set up my phone again like I did when I first got it.
Yes the Google stuff and apps no problem but everything else not so much.
I had to enter all my settings again including all my email accounts wallpaper and anything else you can think of.
I mean WTF are they thinking? this should be a no brainer, I should be able to attach my phone and restore to get everything back the way it was.
People on how bloated iTunes is and that everything has to go through it but at least it works.
Anyway I will never do that again and hope that HTC, At&t and google get their act together to fix that simple stuff.
The other thing which is small and probably can be fixed and I just have not figured it out yet is that every time I download a app it wants to put a shortcut on my home screens somewhere and I don't like that.
If I want an icon shortcut there I will put it there, isn't that the reason you have a app drawer.
Anyway other than that I love the phone and OS and highly recommend the phone.
If you like me are coming from the iPhone my advice is simple.
Do not compare the two on how things were done on your old phone but look at it as the new device and way of doing things it is.
If you only look for bad things then that is all you will find.
Sorry for the lengthy post and I hope that it will help someone.
If you have any pointers or tips please let me hear them.
Oh I'll attach a pic of my Home screen too.
Thanks,
Dukeblue91
Last week friday I switched to the HOX after being with the iPhone since the very first one.
I thought I would take a few moments and reflect on my thoughts and share them here for anyone interested.
Lets start with the good stuff.
The phone design and screen are just incredible.
The screen looks just amazing and like the icons are floating on top of it.
It totally blows the Retina display out of the water especially with the 4.7" sized screen vs 3.5" on my iPhone.
Being able to customize everything and having a actual file structure just rocks.
The user interface even though being way more complicated when delving a little deeper is way better then what I heard and experienced when looking at Android a couple of years ago at various stores.
However since I always jailbroke my iPhones I'm very used to going deeper then just skin deep.
The speed and animations are very responsive and at the same level as iOS and this wasn't always the case in the past but there are no stutters or lag at all with ICS.
Some little design quirks that I have irritating this far are the buttons on the HOX specifically the power and volume buttons are very touchy and I always seem to activate the volume levels when grabbing the phone and the top one gets pushed when just looking at it funny or touch it lightly.
Having a back button is awesome and way undersold on the Android phones.
The battery live is okay not great but not as bad as I thought it would be and needs a little more consideration on how you use the phone and features vs the iPhone 4.
But it does last me through the day mostly when I'm not playing with it all the time which is hard on a new phone.
Some of the things that irritate the crap out of me are not the fault of the design but mostly with At&t and HTC's.
Starting with OTA updates, I've been trying to update to ICS 4.0.4 since I got the phone and nothing.
For an update that has been out for 3 weeks that is inexcusable to say it in a nice way.
Syncing and backup / restore is an utter joke and could and should be easy as pie nowadays but isn't.
For HTC not having a sync client for Mac is unbelievable.
So having grown tired of waiting on the OTA update I decided to do it manually and booted into my windows 7 partition, installed the sync manager and backed everything up and started the update.
I understood that it would wipe the phone and stuff but hey I synced and backed it up before so no big deal I'll just do a restore when done.
Well no it did not work, I had to set up my phone again like I did when I first got it.
Yes the Google stuff and apps no problem but everything else not so much.
I had to enter all my settings again including all my email accounts wallpaper and anything else you can think of.
I mean WTF are they thinking? this should be a no brainer, I should be able to attach my phone and restore to get everything back the way it was.
People on how bloated iTunes is and that everything has to go through it but at least it works.
Anyway I will never do that again and hope that HTC, At&t and google get their act together to fix that simple stuff.
The other thing which is small and probably can be fixed and I just have not figured it out yet is that every time I download a app it wants to put a shortcut on my home screens somewhere and I don't like that.
If I want an icon shortcut there I will put it there, isn't that the reason you have a app drawer.
Anyway other than that I love the phone and OS and highly recommend the phone.
If you like me are coming from the iPhone my advice is simple.
Do not compare the two on how things were done on your old phone but look at it as the new device and way of doing things it is.
If you only look for bad things then that is all you will find.
Sorry for the lengthy post and I hope that it will help someone.
If you have any pointers or tips please let me hear them.
Oh I'll attach a pic of my Home screen too.
Thanks,
Dukeblue91