Two weeks ago, I got my first “smart phone” , and I decided to name it “Smarty”
Smarty is the Google’s phone, Nexus One which I fell in love with since the first moment I saw it online.
It’s an unlocked one, -lucky me- and of course it’s rooted too, then Ahmed got to update it with the latest Android flavor “Android 2.2 FROYO” , he got to do all the job, as I kept watching and staring at it for a while.
When I decided to get a smart phone, I chose android, which is operated on many devices, giving you good options to choose the hardware you like.
I went for Nexus One because it’s Google’s phone, and we believed that it would be better supported by Google for android with its updates and releases, turned out to be true Al hamdulellah.
I love it, more than iPhone actually (I got to compare as we have an iphone too) , so allow me to take you in a quick tour with Smarty
I don’t think I should go through the whole specifications for the phone as you can check it on their
website, cause I want to tell you more about what I like/dislike about it.
The notification bar in the top of the screen, is more than enough to look at and know if there’s any new on your phone.
Simply you can control the notifications of every single application on the phone, mail, sms, twitter, facebook, prayer times …. their updates too.
It’s so cool cause that way you’ll never miss a thing .. and personally I love the way it slides up and down to take a quick glance on it…
Turning the wifi, bluetooth, GPS, synchronizations, screen brightness on/off, can be done in one touch from the power settings control widget that makes things really easy for you, so you won’t get to go to settings every single time you want change their status, isn’t that really cool?
What makes Android so powerful, is the multitasking function, yes, you are able to check your mail, while you hear music and browsing the internet then go back to whatever other application you’ve been using.
By holding the home button for a sec. you’ll get a list of the latest 8 applications you’ve been using, so you can switch between them easily.
One of the things I truly love about the phone, is that there’s a widget almost for every installed application, it’s really useful with “Twitter, Facebook, Google Calendar, Weather…..etc.” so you can customize it however you like it to be.
An interesting option to unlock your phone, is the unlock pattern, you create a pattern of 4 linked dots to unlock the phone, it’s a nicer way than the traditional pin codes or passwords.
(UPDATE)
and if you don’t want any secure pattern/pincode for unlocking the screen, the default unlock screen is an elegant one that you’ll love
Slide the left bar, to unlock the screen, slide the right one to turn the sound off (Silent mode) … nice, huh?
———
The menu is a list of all the applications existing on the phone, It’s a little dull, what I don’t like more about it, that it’s not a customizable one, applications are listed in an alphabetical order, that means to get to an application unluckily starts with a “Y”, you’ll slide it all to reach it.
Yet, there are 5 home screens, where you can customize them with shortcuts for your favorite apps so you don’t get to go through this every time, and also adding widgets to it.
Customizing the home screens is really easy, you can hold an app to make a shortcut for it on the home screen, or touch and hold the screen in order to add a widget, change the wall paper, or even better, hold the menu button to view all the 5 screens to make it easier for you to decide which one is empty, or have a space for more shortcuts and widgets.
Also there’re some cool interactive backgrounds for the home screens .. you can see the different in the background color, when it’s morning and at night
Tracking with GPS is a real unique experience, was my first time to try it with Smarty, there’s a car navigator that can help you get to an unknown destination, although the maps for Egypt aren’t yet accurate and comprehensive, but it did help us amazingly once we were trying to avoid traffic jam in Alexandria.
It’s also great when it recognizes where I’m quite accurately, and updates my info and some applications needing the location i.e. Weather forecasts
It took me a while till I got how would I be able to move all my contacts from my old phone to Smarty, thanks to Google
SyncML it was a piece of cake, I got to synchronize the contacts to my Google contacts, and synch them back to Smarty.
The best thing about contacts here, is the join feature, I’ve a contact number, mail, address, it would automatically join it with the person’s facebook, twiiter account – in case the names are identical – or I can join them myself.
So for most of my contacts, I’ve their facebook status, their latest tweets, even their profile pictures are always in synch , and for me … this is really cool
It’s this little ball in the bottom of the phone, I can’t figure what’s the big deal or use from it, except for the notification lights. which isn’t an important thing actually, so I don’t like it at all.
In a really HQ , I can watch any
YouTube video, any time and it’s really amusing.
From quite a long time, I was asked to join the huge
request from arabic users to Google, in order to make Android supports arabic, I did it, though I’ve never expected that this is a real problem for arabic users.
This is how arabic is shown on Smarty
Can you imagine the effort I make to read a tweet, mail or anything in arabic !!
Luckily by Google releasing Froyo source code, some developer finally created an
image for it to support Arabic, I’ve not installed it yet, but I’ll keep you updated when I do.
I’ve found some applications on Android Market that provides an arabic keyboard, so It’s not easy to read, but you can write in arabic, that pleased me actually,
although people who read what I wrote in arabic from Smarty may not get to see it as good as it should be, I believe this will be fixed soon.
However Acrobat reader (generally pdf readers) previews arabic perfectly, which is great indeed.
(UPDATE)
- Camera and Gallery
A 5 mega Pixels one, with flash and auto focus, a good camera for a mobile phone, the great thing in the photo gallery is the sharing option, in a touch of a finger you can share your photo wherever and however you may like to do.
That was some things from here and there about the phone, and I’m digging more and more and willing to learn so much about Android Development, so please wish me luck.
I’ll write another post soon, about my favorite applications, and some cool shortcuts for Smarty.
