The lovely pippa doing one of her favourite things – tugging! These are the first pics i took using the new flickr app for Android.  It has its own camera which lets you add various effects to the pictures you take before you then upload to flickr.  It’s pretty good actually!

Taken on my new phone Samsung Galaxy S2 using the ‘Camera 360′ camera software.

New phone time!  I was certain that i was going to wait for the new Blackberry Torch or maybe iPhone 5,  i’ve had android phones before (Hero (great) and Milestone (hated it)) but didn’t think i’d go back to one.  Then i read up on the new S2 and i was sold.  It arrived a couple of days ago and i’m just blown away by the speed of the thing!

Initial impressions – unbelievably light. In one way that’s a good thing because it helps cancel out the physical size of it. Huge and heavy might have felt a bit cumbersome.  On the other hand, it’s hard to believe this is a premium device. It’s plastic and the back cover is wafer thin.  Looking at it you wouldn’t think it was a £500 + phone.  That is until you switch it on!

Stock Camera

The screen is wonderful. A 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus display. Videos look amazing on it and if you’re a camera freak like me then it’s brilliant for shooting photographs and video. Photo’s by the way are 8 megapixel and video is 1080 full HD.  I’m going to start using it in place of my point and shoot camera to see how i get on.  I’ll miss the zoom but i’m interested to see how well it does.

Touchwiz is pretty funky (Samsung’s equivalent of HTC’s Sense). I think HTC has some nicer widgets but Samsung’s aren’t to be sniffed at either.  Besides which you can customise the hell out of your homes creens via the marketplace anyway.  The phone is very responsive and no matter how many apps i open it never seems to lag!  I can’t get my head around that because i’m so used to using task managers to end tasks to free up memory and speed up the phone a bit.

I’ve done one test video and i’m pleasantly surprised with the results.  It’s no HD camcorder replacement but for a phone it’s pretty darn impressive!  I really like the camera too, it’s quite advanced and there’s plenty of tweakery to be done in there.  There’s an action mode which i assumed was for sports shots but it’s not.  Instead it takes several pictures of a moving subject and blends them into one picture.  Very clever.  Here’s a sample video i did this afternoon:

I updated the firmware last night which i think has fixed the screens auto brightness behaving erratically but the wifi signal seems weak and GPS takes a while to lock on.  I’ll update after a bit more tinkering.

Well i handed my beloved HTC Hero over to the hubby and i got myself a Motorola Milestone. I must say i haven’t taken to it as quickly as i did my Hero. It feels very much like a work-in-progress device unlike the Hero which felt fabulously polished. I love the screen on the Milestone, it’s bigger and better than the Hero (and in fact most phones). It feels very solid and it looks geeky. It’s a brilliant portable internet device.

But as a phone, it’s crap.

There is built in noise cancellation and it’s a pain in the ass. You have to hold it really close to your mouth or else the person on the other end can’t hear you. The problem with this is your cheek then brushes against the screen pressing either the mute or the hold icon. The screen should switch itself off but it doesn’t always unless you hold your phone at an EXACT angle and at an EXACT distance away from your face in preferable lighting conditions ….. WHAT THE FUCK!?

So as i say, it’s a shit phone. Interestingly though if you use something like Fring or Skype, the noise cancellation switches off and you can use the phone normally. Sadly there is nothing in the settings that lets you switch off the noise cancellation yourself, It really is a pity because there have been thousands of complaints about it. But Motorola don’t seem to do ‘listening to the customers’.

I carry around a Samsung Soul with me and i use that for the phone and my Milestone for texting and internetting on the go. And as an internet device it is amazing. The big screen is wonderful and it’s nice and snappy. It’s saving me having to go and switch my main pc on a lot. I can facebook, tweet, post to wordpress, shop on amazon, have my fave news feeds delivered to me, play on google earth, play games, email and what not without going near my pc. Fabulous! It’s a great time saver.

Now the main reason i went with this (because i was very happy with my Hero as i said) was for the physical keyboard. Well, imagine my disappointment when it turns out the physical keyboard isn’t great! Ok it’s not shite but the keys are so flat that you keep hitting the wrong one or press two at once. It’s much faster to type on the virtual keyboard. But what it is handy for is if your in the car (as a passenger of course) or on the bus, it’s a lot easier to use the physical keyboard when you’re shaking all over the shop.

The camera is also important to me because i’m always taking snaps and don’t always have a main camera with me. It’s not brilliant but it was ok for a phone – until that is i updated it to Android 2.1 which has added more camera features and a shed load of noise to the images. Lord knows why and i hope they fix it. Mind you that said, the ladybird macro photo just below this post was taken with this phone and i don’t suppose it’s that bad?

So i don’t regret having it because having a portable internet device is very important to me and i believe this is the best one. It’s a shame about the phone, keyboard and camera but you can’t have everything. However it has made my mind up that i’ll probably never have another Motorola device but will definitely be going back to HTC -something like the Supersonic (EVO) or whatever they have coming out after that because i’ll probably keep me Milestone for a while yet.

Well, i finally made a decision and upgraded my phone. I couldn’t decide between a Blackberry Storm, an iPhone or HTC Hero. I was initially drawn to Blackberry Storm because i have a Blackberry Bold which is the best phone i’ve ever owned. I’ve never had a phone with such a strong signal and clear calls.

I decided against iPhone because i couldn’t get on with the keyboard (i was practising on my iPod touch) and *oo controversy* i actually think it’s starting to look a little dated! I have a feeling they will give it a cosmetic makeover though next year.

Anyhoo, what i ended up with was this, a HTC Hero!

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