[PLUG-TALK] Need phone advice

Daniel Pittman daniel at rimspace.net
Sat Jan 15 08:09:23 UTC 2011


On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 23:52, Russell Senior <russell at personaltelco.net> wrote:
>>>>>> "John" == John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> writes:
>
> John> Looking at the Nexus S makes me drool a bit also. I have a
> John> couple of questions:
>
> John> 1) To use this phone do I have to switch from AT&T to T-Mobile?
>
> I think you can use EDGE (the 2G data service) with AT&T, but not 3G.
> Just talking or connecting to wifi would work regardless of carrier.
> For me, switching carriers was part of the appeal. ;-)

The disparate bands used for 3G services in the USA are a real pain in
the neck.  Not that Australia was that much better, since one of the
companies started up with 850/2100 (like AT&T) rather than the
900/2100 that everyone else had used to that point.

[...]

> John> 3) Can you add RAM, e.g., a microSD?
>
> No.  But it has 16G of storage on it, and I haven't used, really, any of
> that, except to install a few apps.  PDX Transit Finder is kind of cool.

At the moment there isn't actually that much other than loading media
on the phone that can really benefit from large storage on the Android
devices, though.  Most stuff is small, and large devices like this are
fairly new, so that will probably stick for a couple more years.

> John> 4) Google says it doesn't have a QWERTY keyboard. Doesn't
> John> Android offer you a choice? I mean, it's not like I'd do touch
> John> typing on it, but with QWERTY at least I know where the letters
> John> are.
>
> It doesn't have a physical keyboard.  The onscreen one is QWERTY.

...and, better than that, you can replace it with another keyboard
package if you want.  I ended up using ShapeWriter, and other folks
swear by Swipe, so there are alternatives around.

On the other hand, I bought the T-Mobile G2 rather than the Nexus S
because they are pretty much cost-equivalent, T-Mobile coverage was
satisfactory to me, and it did have a very, very nice hardware
keyboard built in.

I wasn't sure it would be worth it, but figured it was worth the
experiment, and found that it made a huge difference to usability:
with the built-in keyboard the whole thing was slow and annoying;
upgrading to ShapeWriter finally made it possible to enter more than a
few words without starting to get grumpy.

Using the hardware keyboard I am pretty happy using the phone to do
email, which was really not very practical without.  Ditto, ssh.  So,
for me the keyboard has turned out to be a huge win.

(I would absolutely recommend the G2 keyboard compared to the other
current generation hardware keyboards I have seen, FWIW.)

Regards,
    Daniel
-- 
✉ Daniel Pittman <daniel at rimspace.net>
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