PeterKellner.net

A Little History

Let me start off by saying that the HTC EVO has raised my expectations of what to expect from a smart phone.  About two years ago, I switched to one of the first Android phones that came out.  It had a very clunky keyboard slideout, it was very heavy, the interface was awkward and overall it was just not a good user experience.  Even things like GMail did not work well.  You could not do basic things like go from one email to the next without returning to the inbox first.

Fast Forward 18 months.  I have a Palm Pre which I’m pretty happy with.  It has a nice keyboard, nice email client for Microsoft Exchange, and though not many apps, it’s a pretty nice phone.  It is pretty slow though.  For example, sometimes a call comes in and the UI is so slow you can’t get it to actually answer the phone before it goes to voice mail.

Last Month, I took the plunge and bought the HTC EVO.  I knew it did not have a keyboard, but I was hoping I could get use to that (not the first time I’ve been wrong).  I did install a 3rd party application called SlideIT that did help some but still was not good enough.  I made a huge number of mistakes in emails I sent out, practically to the point that I was about to put a message in my email signature saying “Sent using my Mobile SlideIT keyboard, pardon the mistakes”.  I did not do that because somehow, as a technology guy, that just seemed wrong.

For the past couple years, I’ve had the T-Mobile Dash Windows Mobile phone.  It’s been a nice phone but not great.  It’s broken a couple times, crashes too often, requires me to carry an extra battery around just to get through the day and gives me an inadequate browsing experience based on the IE4 browser it is running.  It also only has Edge so it’s pretty slow.  On the plus side, it does a great job with Exchange and IMAP email which is 90% of what I do with it so I’m pretty happy.  The keyboard works, the form factor is good and, not to mention, it works very well as a phone.

I’ve been envious of my friends with their 3G IPhones.  They can browse any where on the internet they want at reasonable speeds, seems that anything they want they tell me there is an app for that, they say the lack of a keyboard is not much of a problem (they lie), and the fact that it does crash and it is not a very good phone, also doesn’t seem to bother them.