HTC One S - first impressions, about 48 hours in...
So, I had to get a new cell phone, even though I would have preferred not to. My trusty old T-Mobile/HTC myTouch 3G Slide just ran out of storage (largely due to updates to built-in apps - the built-in versions are in ROM, but when you apply an update, it takes up internal storage), and I was just out of things I could reasonably delete. Really a bummer - I didn't want to spend money on a new phone right now, and I like the myTouch 3G Slide, it's really the best phone I've ever had (aside from the anemic internal storage capacity of about 190 meg...).
I've known for a long time this day would come sooner or later, and I had an upgrade plan mapped out - I fully intended that the next phone I got would be an HTC myTouch 4G Slide - pretty much the same phone I already had, except with more internal storage, and 4G-capable. Sadly, I was about 3 months too late in pulling the trigger on that upgrade. The myTouch 4G Slide is now discontinued. The supposed replacement for that phone, the myTouch Q, is manufactured by LG (not HTC), and by all reports is pretty horrible. And I'd gotten sufficiently used to the HTC Sense user interface that my preference was to not move away from it. So there was no way I was going there. And aside from that, I just could not find a reasonable phone with a hardware keyboard (which had previously been on my "must have" feature list). I realized I was going to have to give that up - not by choice, but my hand was forced.
After doing a lot of phone comparisons, what I ended up with was an HTC One S. If you want to skip the whole rest of this post and get right to the punch line - technologically, this is a very nice phone. But it does have some user interface and ergonomic weaknesses that are going to take me some time to get used to. I wish I could have had most of the One S functionality, in the "old" myTouch Slide package...
The biggest issue I had with the phone at purchase time (and the biggest issue I still have now, 48 hours later) is the lack of a hardware slide-out keyboard. I understand that including a keyboard makes the phone bigger and heavier, but I would have been OK with that. Now, I will admit, much of my keyboard preference is because I've never found any of the touch-screen software keyboards to be sufficiently useable. The "raw" Android on-screen keyboard is not easy to use. The Swype software keyboard included with the myTouch 3G was good for some things (like messaging), but weak when it came to entering random, "non dictionary word" data (like userids, passwords, and web URLs) because it really wouldn't let you enter things character-by-character - you had to hunt-and-peck the indivdual characters into a type-ahead buffer, and nothing would happen in the app until you'd typed ahead a whole word and accepted it, at which point Swype would pass the input to the app - and then, things that you'd type into Swype via the hunt-and-peck method would get entered into Swype's dictionary, which is frequently not a sensible thing to do. Plus, for typing things like URLs, the "raw" Android keyboard included a ".com" button (which would literally enter ".com" - or ".net", ".org", etc.) with a single button press, which is a huge time-saver, and the Swype keyboard did not include such a button. So, in general, the hardware keyboard was the only input method I could really stand most of the time. Thankfully, the on-screen keyboard provided by the HTC One S seems to be the "best of both worlds" - it includes Swype-like functionality (which really does speed up things like text messaging), and also lets you hunt-and-peck like the Android keyboard without doing anything weird in the process. I may be able to get used to this; time will tell. Though I still can't imagine how one can usefully use something like ConnectBot (SSH client) with an on-screen keyboard - haven't tried it yet, though.
The other thing that's going to take some getting used to, is the form factor. This is a *big* phone, comparatively speaking. Oh, it is indeed very thin and light. But it's very long, and very wide. To my tastes, the size of the handset is less of what I'd expect from a phone, and approaching what I'd expect from a full-blown tablet. It does have a very large screen, which is nice. But this comes at an ergonomic cost. The cost is, it's very difficult (if not impossible) for me to operate this phone with one hand. The first Android phone I had (an HTC G1) was sort of a "candy bar" form factor - the screen was sort of small, but it was easy to hold securely in one hand and operate it; something like the G2 or G2x would probably be similar. The myTouch 3G Slide was a little wider - I could still operate it with one hand, though there was always some trepidation about whether it was going to slip out of my hand while I was using it, so it made me a little nervous sometimes. This one, it's so large that it's absolutely impossible for me to hold it securely with one hand and do anything non-trivial with it. Why would I care about that? One of my typical use cases is being out and about somewhere, carrying a bag or something, and I get a text message. With the old phone, I would be able to get the phone out, unlock the screen, read the text message, and usually could reply (using the Swype keyboard) without much trouble, even under those conditions. This phone absolutely requires (for me, anyway) two hands just to unlock the screen, and one-handed text entry doesn't seem to be possible - or at least, I haven't figured out how to do it yet. I have to use one hand to hold the phone, and the other to enter text via the on-screen keyboard. Which means that to respond to a text message - or, really, even just to read it - I have to come to a complete stop, and put down whatever I might be carrying, in order to do so. Some might argue that this isn't necessarily a bad thing - that there's probably nothing more annoying than being near someone who's reading and/or writing stuff on his phone while walking, and who is not paying enough attention to where he's going or what's going on in the vicinity. I would not necessarily disagree - but this still bugs me. I guess I'll have to get used to not being able to text and walk at the same time (or, will have to adjust my behavior such that I'm not always carrying something with me when I'm out and about)...
It's taking me a little while to get used to the Android 4.0 way of doing things. In particular, the lack of a "Menu" soft-key is the biggest change I'm getting used to right now. It took me a while to notice that when an app had a button in it that looked like "..." turned on it's side (three dots stacked vertically), that that's actually the "Menu" key. I have not yet run into any apps that I use that don't work with the Android 4.0 menu style (i.e., that are hard-wired to expect that there's a "Menu" soft-key). Hopefully, I won't...
This phone has an updated version of the HTC Sense user interface. It's similar enough to be familiar, but different enough that (at least at first) it does leave one with the impression that "Everything You Know Is Wrong"... I think I'm over most of that at this point. One thing that's still really bumming me out, though, is that the myTouch 3G's "myModes" feature is gone. This would allow you to create sets of screen backgrounds, sound profiles, ring tones, etc., and use them as a group. For instance, I had one "mode" for when I was at work (with a more muted screen background, a more "professional" ring tone, etc.), and one for when I was not at work (with a more whimiscal screen background, really loud and obnoxious Doctor Who theme ringtone, etc...). And I could seamlessly switch back and forth between "modes" with just a few screen taps. If it's possible to do this with the new HTC Sense UI (or just as a native feature of Android 4.0), I haven't figured out how yet. But I got a sharp reminder of how much I used this feature when I got a phone call this morning (at work), and the theme from Doctor Who came blaring out of the phone at high volume... :-)
The HTC One S definitely does have more internal storage - it has about 2 gigabytes of internal storage available (as opposed to about 190 meg of internal storage in the myTouch 3G Slide). So I don't think I'm going to run out of storage on this phone for a while. Though (annoyingly enough), it's already trying. One of the first things the phone wanted to do when I set it up, was to download updates to a lot of the useless crapware that T-Mobile ships with this phone. One of the things it wanted to update was a Disney game that I don't even want, and will never play. But I accepted the update because I didn't want it whining at me every day about how there are pending updates I need to apply. This particular game update was *48 MEGABYTES*. For one app. (And that was the "compressed" size, for downloading - I don't even know how much storage it takes up when it's uncompressed and installed, I suspect it's at least 60 megabytes.) To give you a sense of perspective, 48 megabytes would be about 25% of the *total* internal storage on my previous phone. For one app - a game that I'll never actually play. Now, like I said, the new phone has about 10x the internal storage of the old phone, so this is not stopping me from doing anything right now. But it's still an annoying waste of resources. I wish the carriers wouldn't load their phones up with all this crapware that you can't delete...
The phone also has about 10 gigabytes of flash memory that pretends to be an SD card. But it's not *actually* an SD card, it's built into the phone. You can't actually put an SD card into this phone, you're stuck with what comes built-in. Some people may find this annoying, especially if they take a whole lot of pictures and videos using the phone. Personally, it's not a problem for me. My old phone had a 2 gigabyte microSD card, that I never even came close to outgrowing (even after moving all possible applications from internal storage to the SD card).
Oh, yeah, and that reminds me of one other thing. When I got the phone, I told them to not even bother doing anything to set it up, because I still needed to back up all the data from my old phone and transfer over the stuff I wanted to save - I told them to just hand me the new phone still in the box, and once I was ready, I'd move the SIM card from my old phone to the new one and everything would be good to go. They told me, in effect, "Sorry, no can do". The HTC One S uses a microSIM card (not the normal, "standard" SIM card), so they actually had change the SIM on my account and activate the new phone in the store. This wasn't too annoying at the time - but it could turn out to be annoying later. I've always kept my old GSM phones around because, if somewhere down the line, I would somehow break my phone, I could always pull out the SIM and put it into one of my older phones - even if data access didn't work, I'd still be able to send and receive phone calls and SMS messages. Well, I have no other phones that use a microSIM card, and my old "standard" SIM (that would fit any of my previous phones) has now been deactivated. So now it becomes a pain in the butt to reactivate the old SIM if I should have to temporarily switch to a different phone, and then deactivate it again and reactivate the microSIM when switching back. (This is the nice thing about standards, there are so many to choose from...)
So, there are some complaints. There are some (mostly...) good things, too.
This phone is a lot faster than my old one. Though it's kind of silly - they waste a lot of the speed in many contexts by doing things like goofy window animations that I haven't yet been able to find a way to turn off. It uses a dual core, 1.5 GHz processor, which is way more horsepower than the old phone. (Though it is funny - the only thing on my phone I can use to tell me the detailed processor specs, is the Kindle app... You'd think that'd be in "Settings -> About" somewhere, but it's not.) So if I want to run something like Angry Birds, it'll be really fast. ;-)
This phone is also 4G-capable. When I moved from the G1 to the myTouch 3G Slide, and thus moved from EDGE data service to 3G data service, I didn't see much of a difference at all. I mentioned that at the time, and people thought I was a little crazy, but everything appeared to me to be pretty much the same speed. Now I have 4G data ... and, now I can see a difference. Data seems to be substantially faster now. I wonder how much of the (lack of) performance I saw on 3G was just because the CPU on the myTouch 3G Slide was the bottleneck.
I'm still figuring this phone out, but these are my first impressions. I think that this phone will be a net win for me - though the ergonomic issues may take some time for me to get used to. I still really wish I could have had the myTouch 4G Slide, or a 4G-capable G2 or G2x (not even sure either of those phones can do 4G), just because of the physical size of those phones in comparison to the HTC One S. But, sadly, none of those was an option for me. So, given what I had avaiable to choose from, this seems like a decent choice.
I've known for a long time this day would come sooner or later, and I had an upgrade plan mapped out - I fully intended that the next phone I got would be an HTC myTouch 4G Slide - pretty much the same phone I already had, except with more internal storage, and 4G-capable. Sadly, I was about 3 months too late in pulling the trigger on that upgrade. The myTouch 4G Slide is now discontinued. The supposed replacement for that phone, the myTouch Q, is manufactured by LG (not HTC), and by all reports is pretty horrible. And I'd gotten sufficiently used to the HTC Sense user interface that my preference was to not move away from it. So there was no way I was going there. And aside from that, I just could not find a reasonable phone with a hardware keyboard (which had previously been on my "must have" feature list). I realized I was going to have to give that up - not by choice, but my hand was forced.
After doing a lot of phone comparisons, what I ended up with was an HTC One S. If you want to skip the whole rest of this post and get right to the punch line - technologically, this is a very nice phone. But it does have some user interface and ergonomic weaknesses that are going to take me some time to get used to. I wish I could have had most of the One S functionality, in the "old" myTouch Slide package...
The biggest issue I had with the phone at purchase time (and the biggest issue I still have now, 48 hours later) is the lack of a hardware slide-out keyboard. I understand that including a keyboard makes the phone bigger and heavier, but I would have been OK with that. Now, I will admit, much of my keyboard preference is because I've never found any of the touch-screen software keyboards to be sufficiently useable. The "raw" Android on-screen keyboard is not easy to use. The Swype software keyboard included with the myTouch 3G was good for some things (like messaging), but weak when it came to entering random, "non dictionary word" data (like userids, passwords, and web URLs) because it really wouldn't let you enter things character-by-character - you had to hunt-and-peck the indivdual characters into a type-ahead buffer, and nothing would happen in the app until you'd typed ahead a whole word and accepted it, at which point Swype would pass the input to the app - and then, things that you'd type into Swype via the hunt-and-peck method would get entered into Swype's dictionary, which is frequently not a sensible thing to do. Plus, for typing things like URLs, the "raw" Android keyboard included a ".com" button (which would literally enter ".com" - or ".net", ".org", etc.) with a single button press, which is a huge time-saver, and the Swype keyboard did not include such a button. So, in general, the hardware keyboard was the only input method I could really stand most of the time. Thankfully, the on-screen keyboard provided by the HTC One S seems to be the "best of both worlds" - it includes Swype-like functionality (which really does speed up things like text messaging), and also lets you hunt-and-peck like the Android keyboard without doing anything weird in the process. I may be able to get used to this; time will tell. Though I still can't imagine how one can usefully use something like ConnectBot (SSH client) with an on-screen keyboard - haven't tried it yet, though.
The other thing that's going to take some getting used to, is the form factor. This is a *big* phone, comparatively speaking. Oh, it is indeed very thin and light. But it's very long, and very wide. To my tastes, the size of the handset is less of what I'd expect from a phone, and approaching what I'd expect from a full-blown tablet. It does have a very large screen, which is nice. But this comes at an ergonomic cost. The cost is, it's very difficult (if not impossible) for me to operate this phone with one hand. The first Android phone I had (an HTC G1) was sort of a "candy bar" form factor - the screen was sort of small, but it was easy to hold securely in one hand and operate it; something like the G2 or G2x would probably be similar. The myTouch 3G Slide was a little wider - I could still operate it with one hand, though there was always some trepidation about whether it was going to slip out of my hand while I was using it, so it made me a little nervous sometimes. This one, it's so large that it's absolutely impossible for me to hold it securely with one hand and do anything non-trivial with it. Why would I care about that? One of my typical use cases is being out and about somewhere, carrying a bag or something, and I get a text message. With the old phone, I would be able to get the phone out, unlock the screen, read the text message, and usually could reply (using the Swype keyboard) without much trouble, even under those conditions. This phone absolutely requires (for me, anyway) two hands just to unlock the screen, and one-handed text entry doesn't seem to be possible - or at least, I haven't figured out how to do it yet. I have to use one hand to hold the phone, and the other to enter text via the on-screen keyboard. Which means that to respond to a text message - or, really, even just to read it - I have to come to a complete stop, and put down whatever I might be carrying, in order to do so. Some might argue that this isn't necessarily a bad thing - that there's probably nothing more annoying than being near someone who's reading and/or writing stuff on his phone while walking, and who is not paying enough attention to where he's going or what's going on in the vicinity. I would not necessarily disagree - but this still bugs me. I guess I'll have to get used to not being able to text and walk at the same time (or, will have to adjust my behavior such that I'm not always carrying something with me when I'm out and about)...
It's taking me a little while to get used to the Android 4.0 way of doing things. In particular, the lack of a "Menu" soft-key is the biggest change I'm getting used to right now. It took me a while to notice that when an app had a button in it that looked like "..." turned on it's side (three dots stacked vertically), that that's actually the "Menu" key. I have not yet run into any apps that I use that don't work with the Android 4.0 menu style (i.e., that are hard-wired to expect that there's a "Menu" soft-key). Hopefully, I won't...
This phone has an updated version of the HTC Sense user interface. It's similar enough to be familiar, but different enough that (at least at first) it does leave one with the impression that "Everything You Know Is Wrong"... I think I'm over most of that at this point. One thing that's still really bumming me out, though, is that the myTouch 3G's "myModes" feature is gone. This would allow you to create sets of screen backgrounds, sound profiles, ring tones, etc., and use them as a group. For instance, I had one "mode" for when I was at work (with a more muted screen background, a more "professional" ring tone, etc.), and one for when I was not at work (with a more whimiscal screen background, really loud and obnoxious Doctor Who theme ringtone, etc...). And I could seamlessly switch back and forth between "modes" with just a few screen taps. If it's possible to do this with the new HTC Sense UI (or just as a native feature of Android 4.0), I haven't figured out how yet. But I got a sharp reminder of how much I used this feature when I got a phone call this morning (at work), and the theme from Doctor Who came blaring out of the phone at high volume... :-)
The HTC One S definitely does have more internal storage - it has about 2 gigabytes of internal storage available (as opposed to about 190 meg of internal storage in the myTouch 3G Slide). So I don't think I'm going to run out of storage on this phone for a while. Though (annoyingly enough), it's already trying. One of the first things the phone wanted to do when I set it up, was to download updates to a lot of the useless crapware that T-Mobile ships with this phone. One of the things it wanted to update was a Disney game that I don't even want, and will never play. But I accepted the update because I didn't want it whining at me every day about how there are pending updates I need to apply. This particular game update was *48 MEGABYTES*. For one app. (And that was the "compressed" size, for downloading - I don't even know how much storage it takes up when it's uncompressed and installed, I suspect it's at least 60 megabytes.) To give you a sense of perspective, 48 megabytes would be about 25% of the *total* internal storage on my previous phone. For one app - a game that I'll never actually play. Now, like I said, the new phone has about 10x the internal storage of the old phone, so this is not stopping me from doing anything right now. But it's still an annoying waste of resources. I wish the carriers wouldn't load their phones up with all this crapware that you can't delete...
The phone also has about 10 gigabytes of flash memory that pretends to be an SD card. But it's not *actually* an SD card, it's built into the phone. You can't actually put an SD card into this phone, you're stuck with what comes built-in. Some people may find this annoying, especially if they take a whole lot of pictures and videos using the phone. Personally, it's not a problem for me. My old phone had a 2 gigabyte microSD card, that I never even came close to outgrowing (even after moving all possible applications from internal storage to the SD card).
Oh, yeah, and that reminds me of one other thing. When I got the phone, I told them to not even bother doing anything to set it up, because I still needed to back up all the data from my old phone and transfer over the stuff I wanted to save - I told them to just hand me the new phone still in the box, and once I was ready, I'd move the SIM card from my old phone to the new one and everything would be good to go. They told me, in effect, "Sorry, no can do". The HTC One S uses a microSIM card (not the normal, "standard" SIM card), so they actually had change the SIM on my account and activate the new phone in the store. This wasn't too annoying at the time - but it could turn out to be annoying later. I've always kept my old GSM phones around because, if somewhere down the line, I would somehow break my phone, I could always pull out the SIM and put it into one of my older phones - even if data access didn't work, I'd still be able to send and receive phone calls and SMS messages. Well, I have no other phones that use a microSIM card, and my old "standard" SIM (that would fit any of my previous phones) has now been deactivated. So now it becomes a pain in the butt to reactivate the old SIM if I should have to temporarily switch to a different phone, and then deactivate it again and reactivate the microSIM when switching back. (This is the nice thing about standards, there are so many to choose from...)
So, there are some complaints. There are some (mostly...) good things, too.
This phone is a lot faster than my old one. Though it's kind of silly - they waste a lot of the speed in many contexts by doing things like goofy window animations that I haven't yet been able to find a way to turn off. It uses a dual core, 1.5 GHz processor, which is way more horsepower than the old phone. (Though it is funny - the only thing on my phone I can use to tell me the detailed processor specs, is the Kindle app... You'd think that'd be in "Settings -> About" somewhere, but it's not.) So if I want to run something like Angry Birds, it'll be really fast. ;-)
This phone is also 4G-capable. When I moved from the G1 to the myTouch 3G Slide, and thus moved from EDGE data service to 3G data service, I didn't see much of a difference at all. I mentioned that at the time, and people thought I was a little crazy, but everything appeared to me to be pretty much the same speed. Now I have 4G data ... and, now I can see a difference. Data seems to be substantially faster now. I wonder how much of the (lack of) performance I saw on 3G was just because the CPU on the myTouch 3G Slide was the bottleneck.
I'm still figuring this phone out, but these are my first impressions. I think that this phone will be a net win for me - though the ergonomic issues may take some time for me to get used to. I still really wish I could have had the myTouch 4G Slide, or a 4G-capable G2 or G2x (not even sure either of those phones can do 4G), just because of the physical size of those phones in comparison to the HTC One S. But, sadly, none of those was an option for me. So, given what I had avaiable to choose from, this seems like a decent choice.