Cragnet

Yesterday I made the drastic decision to get rid of all of my phones except the following: n900 - I am still interested to see how this develops E63 - a nice cheap phone that is being used as my work phone 5800XM - I am keeping this as a sat nav I am getting rid of the following because I want a nexus one and an ipad later this year but here is a summary why: HTC Magic - Great android starter phone but limited on specification HTC Hero - Compared to the magic this is a breath of fresh air with the sense ui but HTCs lack of Android OS updates has shocked me. The magic is already on 1.6 whereas the Hero is 1.5 and newer applications I want to use are on android 2. HTC will update the Hero in march 2010 to Android 2 but my fears of not rolling out frequent updates where correct and as such I am abandoning non Google based Android handsets. I am of the opinion HTC either want people to upgrade to their new HTC Desire or Legend to use Android 2. Whilst this is their prerogative they ha

Due to delays in the n900 and the lack of software both in this and the Palm Pre application catalog I decided to purchase a HTC Hero. There was some hesitation wondering if I could easily transfer my original HTC Magic software over where kind soles on Twitter indicated this should be easy. I opted to get the sim free version from carphone warehouse. Setting the phone up took a couple of hours as I had over 100 applications to reinstall. Thankfully from entering my Google credentials the app market recognised what I had purchased and allowed me to download and reinstall the apps again. Overall I am happy with the phone and find it a lot more responsive than the magic. This is no doubt helped by the additional RAM available for the Hero. The other difference is the application installation space is smaller than the magic. However the changes that HTC have done to Android including built-in exchange support and the sense UI make this one hell of a phone. Also the multi touch on the brow

The HTC Magic has been driving me mad today. It has taken me over 5 minutes to write a tweet to the extent I ended up slapping the phone through frustration . Although this calmed my nerves I ended up looking at cooked roms for the phone hoping it would speed it up. After advise from people on twitter I downloaded a recovery image to put phone into a mode where I could back it up to SD. I also used the Astro file manager to back up my apps as well to SD. Then using Linux ( Ubuntu 8.10) I re flashed the phone and went upon my way restoring it. The Asto File manager was bad in that it would allow me to bulk select all apps for backup, but I had to individually restore the apps back onto the phone. Further even though I had restore the apps individually the market application would not acknowledge this. This means I would not be notified of any application upgrades unless I reinstalled the application via the market place. This, coupled with the phones failure to sync agai