Good Afternoon readers,

Topic of discussion for today: smartphones – especially the G2 Touch from HTC and T-Mobile supporting the Android operating system.

Everyone seems to have an iphone. It’s the phone to have because it’s fast, has a touchscreen and “has an application for everything”. Though this all comes at a hefty price, and I’m not personally an Apple fan, it does do what it says on the box. In comparison to stories about the original set of Ipods, the iPhone does appear to be fairly robust and doesn’t keep you waiting when you are running multiple applications.

I decided that I was a step above this market and decided to buy the Google Phone. In fact not just the Google Phone, but the brand new sparkling G2.

I was set to fall in love with this phone. It had so much potential and the G1 had had some really good reviews from the people that had had it for the previous year or so. The new G2 is lighter and slimmer as it lost its slide out keyboard, it boasted the Android operating system. It has many applications available which are all generally free. It has a lot of features to be amazed by.

Sadly, they don’t work.

I’ve been told by Google fanatics that this is because google were “rushing it off the line” and so there are still some bugs to fix.

Let’s start with the Bluetooth technology.
To say it’s not finished in this particular circumstance is a huge understatement. It just doesn’t work. In fact, it breaks things. I connected it to my car stereo and tried to play some music through it. Within a minute my entire radio console had frozen and could not be reset without turning off the engine, and my phone would not turn its bluetooth off.

It is however quite happy to connect on the basis it is doing phone calls only. This is brilliant for me. But (and this is a big but) you are very likely to confuse it when the connection between the phone and the radio/headset is dropped. It might not work this out and if you try to call somebody you will not hear anything that’s going on. Even if the bluetooth is turned off it can still miraculously believe that it is connected to a headset.

A reset of the phone is then required to fix this issue. A bit too late when someone is getting annoyed trying to call you.

Media
The mp3 player is very slow to open and can crash causing unknown errors in the operating system. The same can be said for the internet browser.

Simplicity – an alarm clock
Now I’m going to give you a scenario. You’ve decided because of the phone’s very well inbuilt features of setting times for an alarm clock that you’re going to leave it to get you up in the morning. And let’s say you want to get up at 8am. Well the phone has a tick button that enables it to be clever enough to work out from your GPS location what your timezone is and reset the time accordingly. Imagine my surprise when I wake up 4 hours late because my GPS location (reading South of London) has decided I’m in Peru and my alarm didn’t go off. Very helpful.

I believe I couldn’t fly…
I’m now going to go back to the speed and processing power of this nifty device. Opening your text messages can also cause the operating system to crash. If you do manage to open up the message panel, it seems to assign the wrong contact name to each selection of messages. Give it a minute! It’ll correct itself (or change to another incorrect name – one of them).

I don’t like Apple Products. Ipod? Got a Creative Zen thanks. Mac? I can build a real computer and design it around myself. Yet when it comes down to smartphones, HTC (creators of the G-series phones) just do not seem to be able to get it right (the MDAs were shocking) and so I would actually recommend an iPhone when someone asked. Or maybe a Nokia…