Archive for April, 2009

Okay I won’t bother you with 5km long blog posts. Just the cold hard reality: my iPhone is dead. And since I work for Google, we got an Android G1 for X-mas. Unlocked and developer enabled. So as you can imagine, these phones are sorta delicate.

And of course, it’s dead too.

I swear do you – I didn’t do any fancy shit on it for a while, ever since I had the “cupcake” build. I only installed some apps through the app store, that was it. For some reason the phone crashes all the time, freezes. It is in fact super-bizarre.

Apple and Google. You should kinda step away from making phones. Or in Google’s case, you should at least step away making the OS – as you didn’t make the G1. And actually the phone is made by HTC. And they, in turn, intended to run Windows Mobile on it. And to be fair at least Windows Mobile runs on the machine, quiet stable.

For Apple… you kinda have to figure out the thing with the rain. Imagine the guy who has a breakdown with his car in the middle of nowhere, tries to fix it, can’t do it. He pulls his freaking iPhone 3G to call the service. And he does so in LIGHT rain. Not a super big mega thunderstorm. So he’s on the phone for a moment, say, a minute. He puts the phone back in his pocket. On the next day he wants to call his wife. But he can’t hear her – because the LIGHT rain broke the earpiece. For the love of Joseph – seriously, fix this, or stop making the iPhone. Practically everyone who owns a 3G in the WORLD is affected by this hardware bug. Everyone. Yeap, including me. Which is why the iPhone broke.

So. I’m seriously fed up with the touch phone shit of those two companies. Because I kinda need a phone right now (for reasons I can’t say here in the moment), I had a look at what’s out there.

And I found something.

THIS is the LG KP500 – otherwise simply known as the LG Cookie. It is basically a lower priced smartphone with a touch screen. Not multi touch though. The screen is 240×400. The user interface is Flash based. The phone can run all sorts of Java applications without issues. It comes with a lot of useful things, including a 3 MP camera (which is quite good actually).

The main screen has two desktops. That’s right – TWO desktops. You swipe, and a 3D cube appears, flipping the faces of the cube and switching to the appropriate Desktop. The first one holds your gadgets, like clock, calendar etc, if you wish to have that there. The second one holds your speed dials. You can arrange everything in the way you want, or just shake the device and they order themselves. Yeap, accelerometer. That means that for text you can rotate the keyboard in certain apps. Like iPhone.

The touch screen is VERY responsive and almost everything does something when you touch it. There’s a hint of the iPhone UI with the transitions and everything… but it is still its own thing.

Everything else is pretty standard… Photo app, video recorder app, browser (full HTML), alarm clock, calendar… etc. You can edit photos, has some very cool effects built-in.

The only things it lacks are WiFi, GPS, and 3G. So if you can live with that, THIS is for you.

It is priced at 139 Euro for pre-pay (but I put in my contract card! Ha! Bought at o2 and I have iPhone plan, still). And for that price, that really is as good as it gets.

LG knows its shit. The other two don’t. Or that’s my impression now.