skulDOUGery

About six months ago, my wife started complaining that her Palm TX was acting wierd.  Battery sometimes would die very quickly and other strange things.  My Palm TX was still working fine although compared to my friends iPhone, it was really showing its age.  This all got me thinkning, we probably would only get another year at best with our Palm TXs and what would we replace them with?

We are avid Linux users, (even my 8 year old son prefers Linux to Windows), and we really didn’t like the idea of how closed the iPhone was.  I suggested that we consider iPhones but my wife freaked out.  She was not going to use an Apple product.  I figured if I could get her to Best Buy and have her hold an iPhone in her hands she would come around.  In the meantime, I started researching what it would take to use an iPhone in an all-Linux household.  The results were not encouraging.  It seemed that everytime someone made some progress using an iPhone with Linux, Apple came along and ‘corrected’ the ‘mistake’.  My enthusiasm for the iPhone was quickly waning.

Well, last week, my wife handed me her Palm TX and asked me if I could get the sound to work.  The audio played out of the headphones ok , but she was not getting any audio out of the built in speaker.  Since she used the built in alarm clock as her bedside alarm clock to wake her up, she had been oversleeping all week.  I played around with it for a while and then sadly announced that I thought it was not a setting but that it was physically broken.  I explained that I could set her up some computer speakers that would work, since she could still get sound out of the headphones, but what concerned her more was that the TX was breaking and she didn’t know what we would use after it broke.  My wife uses her Palm TX for everything and was rather dejected.

I thought, “Now is my chance!” and suggested that we go by Best Buy and let her play with an iPhone.  She reluctantly consented and we were off.  Boy was I wrong.  After about three minutes of holding an iPhone in her hand and playing with it, she exclaimed “I hate it!”.  She couldn’t put her finger on exactly what she didn’t like, she just didn’t like the iPhone.

I had also been looking off and on at the T-Mobile G1 and Google Android, but I wasn’t sure.  I loved that it ran on Linux, and that, as opposed to the iPhone, was an open platform.  I just wasn’t sure whether I would like it.  I suggested we swing by the T-Mobile store at the mall and take a look.  She agreed and we were, once again, off.

Once she had the G1 in her hands it was amazing.  Her whole face lit up and her eyes were sparkling.  She was in another world the whole time she held it, surfing the web, reading her blog, and exploring Android.  As for me, I like it every bit as much as the iPhone, probably even more.  We each got one and have had a week so far to play with them.  They are great.  My wife is even installing her own applications, something she has never really done before.

I hope to post some reviews of the applications and the phone in the future.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 1st, 2009 at 2:17 pm by doug and is filed under Android, T-Mobile G1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.