So I just got a new phone, an HTC Hero, and I thought I would start an Android-related blog. "Travels with Marvin" is, of course, a reference to Marvin, the Paranoid Android from Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. For some background on me, I'm a programmer who does mostly java-based web development at the moment, though I have an interest in Python and similar high-level dynamic languages.
This phone is my first smartphone; I got it right when it came out and jumped into the thick of things by taking a week's vacation to New York, where it came in very handy for navigation and the like. Still, it's taken some getting used to, and there are a bunch of rough edges in the Android world generally which I found somewhat surprising. I enjoy reading this sort of thing on other people's blogs, so I thought I might as well record some impressions about the phone and the Android experience generally.
As a side note, I don't have an iPhone and am not likely to get one in the near future. I'm not an Apple hater, in fact I first learned to program seriously on a Mac Classic, but I have a real love-hate relationship with them, and as a developer I can't endorse the sorts of shenanigans they have been pulling with their app store. iPhones themselves seem like wonderful devices, but they aren't for me. Enough said about that, but I probably won't spend a lot of time comparing Android and iPhone functionality.
Likewise, while the Pre looks pretty awesome and I was really close to buying one when I went with the Hero, I don't have one to compare. It seems like the Pre has a very interesting development community (for a hacker), but I was a little put off by some of the reviews I read about the Pre hardware (especially the battery life), and while I really do hope Palm becomes a major player in the smartphone market when the time came I went with Android instead.
Well, I reckon that will do for an introduction. Onwards.
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