Stex Toys

So it was once again the end of my 12 month contract and time to see what new shiny toy I could get my hands on. After two BlackBerrys (Pearl 8100, Bold 9000) I thought maybe it was time to join the touch generation, but not the usual iPhone route. Nope, I’ve had my eye on the Android platform for a while now, Google’s purpose built mobile platform that stands out for being open source, and with a market place now full of some really cool apps it’s a rich and engaging community.
o2 are toting the Samsung Galaxy I7500 at their latest Android based hand set, a lovely looking device with an OLED screen for that vivid look, and lower power consumption, so it was this I picked up on an 18 month contract (o2 no longer do 12 months) at £35 a month, plenty of calls and texts and the all important unlimited internet! On top of that I paid just over ninety quid for the device, which is pretty reasonable for a modern day smartphone.

So, what’s it like? Well take a look (Sorry for slightly skewed angle, I was using a desk stand for the camera and couldn’t quite get it parallel to the desk.)

The home screen of this OS 1.5 Cupcake based device has three panes, to the left you see my central default pane. The icons will be as you would expect from other touch based devices giving me quick access to my most used apps such as twitter, facebook, GMail and the browser. But also note the widgets for the calendar and BBC News, those are live updating panes that I can have displayed in amongst the usual application shortcuts. Very nice indeed!

Also, see that switches app icon in the top right? That right there is a very nice shortcut into the power draining features for quick and easy access to the screen shown on the right where they can be turned on and off with a simple press. That’s an example of some of the clever things built in to the phone, however this being an open source platform it’s really encouraged app developers to spend some time and they’ve come up with plenty of fantastic solutions, many of which are completely free, far more in fact than I expected.

Take for example the XBOX Live tracker on the left here that I’ve setup with a few of my live buddies for testing. This gives me both an overview and notifications of my friends activities even when I’m not on the XBOX, perfect! Now I should miss out less on fun when I spot someone has booted up LEFT4DEAD and can go jump right on in. Some of the other free yet brilliant finds so far are Andro Wall, which will scour Flickr for set search terms to find replacement wallpaper for your home screens, which use a single wide shot that slides in parallax with the icons. Compare Everywhere, one of many barcode and search application that are proving popular on the iPhone also. Then there’s the augmented reality app LAYER, which upon firing up displays a live video feed of your surroundings and lays over the top say all Pizza places in 3 miles of your current location. As you hold the phone up infront of you and pan around, you can see the location markers of any results from Google Places right in your view. OK so that’s pretty geeky, but also really cool, the future is here.

Then there’s the apps you don’t mind spending a few dollars on, such as DoggCatcher over there, a podcast management suite which can download, organise, and playback both audio and video podcasts, whilst also providing access to an text based entries within the same feeds. Really nice. And shares many of the features I had become accustomed to on the brilliant BlackBerry app, PodTrapper.

All in all things are looking pretty good on Android, the OS 1.6 is out now and hopefully will be made available to me via o2 or Samsung soon, and 2.0 is already on the horizon, bringing some of the next gen controls you would expect such as multi-touch. For a good read on that head on over to Android Bloke where some of the exciting feature are highlighted.

It’s still pretty new to me, but so far I’m real excited to have such an emergent OS in my hands and have high expectations for the coming 18 months!