Sunday, September 9, 2012

From Windows Phone To Android

A few weeks back I started to get notifications about my current contract being and up and that I was due a phone upgrade. With this I began the great task of finding a new phone.

My old phone.
I had been using a first generation windows phone(Samsung Omnia 7) for the past 18 months.before getting that phone I was pretty much a smart phone virgin. I loved the phone. The 4inch AMOLED screen was amazing looking and the UI was fast and very responsive. For these reasons I initially decided to upgrade to a newer generation of windows phone. I waiting in the vein hope that the Lumia 900 would be announced for release in Europe. As we all.know this did not come to pass and it still hasn't.

After a while I started eyeing possible android smartphones to buy. Most notably the HTC One X. There was a lot of talk at the time of tegra 3 powered devices(transformer prime comes to mind) and I had heard that the hsdpa+ version of the device had tegra 3 on board. That was defiantly one of the major factors of my decision to go android. After getting the One X the first thing you notice is the giant beautiful 4.7inch screen. Once you turn it on the screen just looks like its painted on. That's helped by the great pixel density.

All the hardware stuff aside. The One X uses HTC Sense UI. Initially I was having problems with it constantly crashing an a loading popup appearing almost every time I hit the home button. However after HTC released an update for sense 4 all those problems were solved.

HTC One X
I didn't like sense very much. I found things like apps too difficult to find. This could probably be attributed to me never owning an android phone before.

The sheer amount of apps available to download from the play store was amazing. Some apps like the Facebook and Twitter apps ran and worked than their windows phone counterparts.

The development environment for android is pretty bad and horrible to set up. It has gotten better recently however and hopefully Google will improve it even more in the future.

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