Monday, January 3, 2011

Crash and Burn-Android dies hard.

Well, my Android experiment crashed HARD today.

The kids were out on the town with their Grandma, celebrating the last day of winter break, when I realized that half the kitchen was a total dead zone for the mytouch. The kitchen is where I live. Every minute of every day. The Blackberry connected over UMA, (and the fact that I KNOW that is a testament to the fact that I listen when my husband talks.) Yay me!

Well, anyway, I was considering some snack foods as MissAngelBaby and I are alone for dinner and I see no need to add to the dish pile, when I got a picture of a beautiful ball of chocolate bread dough via MMS. And couldn't respond. And couldn't find signal. And felt my heart beating faster and faster...What if there's an accident? What if the kids need me? What if I want to bake -forget that I swore off it for New Years- and the babies can't get a hold of me? What if...

Three seconds later I had my Blackberry gutted and was forcing the battery door off of the mytouch. I should have waited, because the battery was dead on the blackberry and it evidently needed a little coaxing to restart... some of the applications were expressing their displeasure and needed to reconfigure their software. At this point I'm REALLY panicking... I was at the very least, without a phone for FIFTEEN WHOLE MINUTES! Do you KNOW what can happen in fifteen minutes? Considering the gash on my kid's chin took all of a half a second, I'm fairly sure the world could actually END in fifteen minutes.

I'm breathing again. Slowly. Everyone is okay. I got the obligatory "We're on our way now" text without a bump.
 
I really did hate the mytouch, though, and to be fair, it wasn't totally its fault. It's a nice phone. In order to encourage you to "play" with it, T-mobile didn't include much in the way of instructions. The blackberry comes with a manual that rivals the Bible in wordiness. That's a really comfortable place for me...following the manual.

I like instructions. Hence, my cooking addiction.

Instructions.

I HATED not having a key board. And one of the big reasons I wanted to try the Android was the Angry Birds game, which caused my phone to give me a giant black screen of death five times. I want to kill pigs, dammit. They're such smug little suckers. That game works better on a newer version of Android.

The amount of applications available to the mytouch is simply astounding. I went to download a twitter app and found that there were no less than seven. SEVEN just for twitter. My favorite was the tweetdeck, which combines your facebook and and twitter accounts, and you can slide between the two screens. I'm ashamed to say I spent several minutes sliding screens back and forth going "ooohhh" Yeah, that's super nice. Loved it.

I couldn't figure out how to access the camera. And to add insult to injury, my three year old had picked up the interloper and in two seconds was taking pictures. I know, she's smarter than me, I'm okay with that.

I could literally have spent DAYS in the Android market place. Days on end. For years. I predict much less nagging at my husband as I watch him slide his screens around.  It's a pleasant distraction. Really freaking cool, but the phone itself isn't a great fit for my personality. I want a phone that functions easily as a phone. Maybe it was lack of habit, but I had a mental breakdown every time I went to answer that thing.

And it had a TRACK BALL. I gave that crap up for lent years ago...only to find myself more likely to use the track ball than the touch screen out of habit. The 9700 has the track pad, which is nice and doesn't gum up.

So, the moral of the story is, do some research before you buy a phone and blame the phone for not working for you. There was no way I was going to be able to give the mytouch a fair shake, and I really did know in advance that I have to be able to connect over the UMA here. When you are a professional mommy, you need to be able to be accessed at all times. It's more important than being a doctor- they can always call another doctor, but you are the only mommy the kids get. So accessibility is key, and I have managed to insert myself and entire family in the middle of nowhere, yet still right in the middle of a small town. It's the best of both worlds, unless you are talking cell phone coverage. But again, I know that, so who's to blame? Is it the phone? No, it's me, the willfully uneducated consumer, who got bored with Old Faithful.

Sometimes, you shouldn't cheat on what works.

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