A couple of days with the HTC Incredible now, and I'm getting somewhat used to it.
The UI does take some getting used to, but the "home page with side panels" approach is making sense now, and I've done a little customization.
Naturally, I grabbed a few apps for it. First morning out at a client site with the new phone, I needed a sonic screwdriver (a fictional tool for fixing fictional problems; we were confronting a machine with an attitude problem, which seemed to call for a fictional solution). There's an app for that! Then, of course, I need fiddly stuff like a text editor, and a shopping list (trying OI Shopping List, which may or may not prove to be a satisfactory replacement for the old shopping list program on my Palm), and a scientific calculator that speaks RPN, and all that other stuff.
As a phone, it's not quite up to the Chocolate it replaces; I'm seeing slightly less coverage (morning walkies had extremely spotty coverage with the Chocolate, and has almost no coverage with the Incredible). Also, I'm rather concerned about how long it'll run on a charge; it seems to be good for just about one day of playing with it, wandering in and out of coverage, and so on; when the Chocolate was new, it was good for about a week of standby plus a couple of hours of talking on one charge, and the Palm, with its aging battery, is still good for a week's typical use on one charge. So, I'm thinking I might want a Minty Boost or similar... just in case.
The ergonomics are pretty decent, for something with no physical keypad. The Sinister Death Grip covers the USB connector. There's nothing around the edges that can be inadvertently pushed by pocket clutter to start MP3s playing or any such nonsense. One problem, though: the volume control buttons are along the top of the left edge, right where they get pushed inadvertently when one holds the device in landscape mode, for typing, reading, or photography.
Fishing it out of a packet while it's ringing is a bit of a nuisance, as it's necessary not to hit the wrong spot on the touchscreen while doing so. Eventually, it's supposed to replace the Palm and move to the shirt pocket, wherefrom the fishing will be less problematic.
Apparently there's even a built-in FM radio, which uses the earphone cable as an antenna. I haven't tried that yet.
I still need to figure out how to migrate a bunch of stuff off the Palm: memos, of course, and a contact list that really needs to get merged with the cellphone contacts, my Thunderbird address book, and the LDAP address collection I set up a while back but never got Thunderbird to play nice with. So, some manual labor involved there.
...And this thing has how many VAX equivalents under the hood? And still manages to run all day on that little bitty battery? I'd file this under "barely distinguishable from magic" (and thus, of course, not quite sufficiently advanced).
No, I haven't rooted it. This is a communication appliance, not a plaything, and reliability takes precedence over hackability. Having my work number out of order due to incautious tinkering would not be acceptable.
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