Here’s my home theater setup – a 1.6 GHz Intel Pentium Dual-Core (Core 2 Duo with a lower FSB), 2GB RAM, NVidia GeForce 8400 GS, Blu-Ray player, Mac OS X 10.6 and Windows 7 Home Premium hooked up to the very nice 32″ Vizio LCD HDTV. It does an amazing job at what it does, and I’ve got no complaints with the setup. I do wish, however, that Apple would implement Blu-Ray playback…
We certainly live in a strange world these days.
Almost immediately after publicly going on the record that Google would not be designing and marketing their own Android Phone, and would instead leave it up to third party hardware manufacturers to adapt Android into the marketplace, it leaks basically all around the universe that – surprise! – this is exactly what Google went ahead and did. I won’t bore you with the details, which you’ve assuredly read at at least ten other places – but this thing is pretty much supposed to be the second coming of Jesus Christ himself, baring gifts of untold beauty to the human world. Only, it kind of sucks, because here’s Jesus and he’s kind of drunkenly stumbling around and he looks like he’s on some sort of drugs and his presents are only the crappy fruit cakes made by that creepy lady in the office.
Seriously, has anybody even looked at this thing? Are we looking at the same phone here, people? Early reports of the phone described it as something “like an iPhone on beautifying steroids”. Huh? What? I’m looking at this thing, but I just don’t see it. If by “beautiful” you mean “cheap”, than yeah, I can see where you’re coming from. There’s certainly nothing appealing about plastic made to look like brushed metal. And the trackball – Jesus Christ, have you ever used a trackball on the G1 or a similar device? This is a touch screen phone, which makes it redundant right off the bat – but besides that, from a usability standpoint, it’s almost impossible to use. It’s that bad.
The other big news here is that it features what appears to be a beta build of Android 2.1. Let’s all remember here that there’s only one Android phone on the face of the planet that currently has Android 2.0, and that phones that are only a year old or newer *coughG1coughMyTouchcough* have had no upgrade announcements made about them. So basically I hope you enjoy the OS that comes with your Android device, because it seems like the manufacturers are in no hurry to upgrade your brand new phone with the latest and greatest. Hope you enjoy being outdated mere months after making your purchase.
All in all, call me unimpressed. There’s nothing here that’s new. I heard rumors that this thing may have a 1GHz Snapdragon ARM CPU hidden inside, which is nice and all, but would require a freaking nuclear power plant as a battery to run efficiently for any extended span of time, so expect it to be under-clocked. Also don’t get me wrong here – I’m not against Android – what Android does offer is usually presented in a rather impressive way, and as a platform it’s certainly miles and miles ahead of Windows Mobile, not to mention against Palm’s often ignored Web OS. Next to most of it’s competitors, Android is looking good. I just wish it would look great.
So I’ve been reading a lot of technology blogs and journals lately, and it’s really given me the yearning to get some of my ideas and opinions out there. Also there’s a lot of other things I want to say, even if it doesn’t quite relate to technology, that I want to say. So I revived my old blog, The Book of Brian. More coming soon! 