Well, after last month’s discussions (here and here) I went out last week and bought a HTC Desire, running Android 2.2, for quite a lot of money.
It is one of the worst investments I have ever made. My concern was to get a phone that would integrate reasonably well with my employers’ Exchange server, and it simply doesn’t – refuses to synchronize the calendar, probably because the free memory has all been eaten by my contacts which take up 100 MB and are still not completely synced. It contains a 4 GB card, but it seems impossible to transfer data or software onto it from the phone.
It also declines to synchronize notes from Outlook, and I understand you can’t actually search email. But since it apparently can only store 48 hours of email on it, that’s not such a loss.
And it keeps trying to sync my carefully tended contacts database with my gmail account, where it will be borrowed by chaos. I actually typed ‘corroded’ there, and it changed the word to ‘borrowed’ after I typed it. I really hate the touchscreen interface, particularly the way you have to make sure it hasn’t substituted another word for the one you thought you had typed, every bloody time you tap the space bar.
So I have a very expensive brick, as the shop won’t take it back (is that legal?) and I doubt that familiarity will help me get over the fundamental problem which is that the damn thing doesn’t do what I need it to do.
This was actually my second attempt to try Android. I won an auction for one on eBay towards the end of my holiday; in what I now recognise as a sign from Fate, it never arrived and I have had to raise a formal complaint against the seller, who seems to think that I should pay the price for his inability to deliver it as promised. That of course is not Google’s or HTC’s fault. But I wish I had just stuck with Blackberry now.
Anyone want a new phone? Barely used, would suit anyone with nimble fingers and no Outlook account. It does do some things well – very nice Facebook interface and not bad for reading documents in PDF or other common formats. But I’ve had enough.
I believe this. Pretty much all Lewis’s writing has a strong didactic element, so there was no need for him to start from the moral: it was sure to enter the work soon enough.