Despite getting a webOS phone, Palm Pixi Plus, in early March, only half a year later I again jumped into another boat, Android this time, after getting more and more frustrated with the webOS device.
After three days use of Huawei C8650, I realized why HP halted the development on webOS — Android is fast, easy-to-use, and most important of all, it’s more open than webOS.
One of the most important aspect of webOS was its UI. The introduction of card-based applications, innovative user interaction with the mobile phone, including gesture area and swipe-to-delete, are something to be missed after switching to Android. But those features, when in webOS, didn’t make that much sense since the system is slow enough to run only one application, not to mention two or three: what would application cards be of use then? Running multiple applications is reasonable when you already have adequate hardware to support it.
These couple days with an Android phone are really nice, despite that my roommates has criticized the low resolution of my device, which I at first rejected but eventually conceded the truth. Once having gotten rid of the default system which contains numerous carrier-provided (i.e. useless) applications and substituting with a capable system, I am able to exploit the capability of Android, and Google behind it.
The contact book has extensive support for Chinese, ordering and categorizing people’s names by pinyin automatically, and full names entered in Gmail can be split into given name and family name automatically: an easy example of Chinese language processing which has been studied thoroughly but no one ever used it publicly by default before.
And obviously, the dedicated Gmail client is way better than the E-mail client in webOS, which was already good enough.
The only real difficulty I have encountered, is that I am unable to connect to my device from my Gentoo laptop via adb. I am still not sure of the reason behind this, more strangely, it can be recognized under Window$ 7 in the same machine, and Gentoo could recognize my roommate’s Moto Defy. Should I be able to solve this (hopefully), I’ll post again here.