Several months have passed and if I wasn’t keeping track I would have thought it had been longer. My transition from iPhone/Rogers to Android/Wind came together in an abrupt fashion. The move consumed my thoughts for days and then it happened and that was it. The dust has long since settled and I’m still happily using my Wind device and loving Android.
I have been told that my previous posts didn’t have any jubilation over Android, almost as if there was some hesitancy but I can say that I really do love Android, maybe not to the way I loved the iPhone because there are the occasional hiccups that make me shake my head and wonder how green the grass was beyond that fence.
It didn’t take as long as I thought but I am completely used to my Android device. My muscle memory has stopped trying to click on the home button, and as I continue to use Android going forward I may love it the same way I did the phone from Cupertino.
Battery Life
This is more a problem with the LG Optimus 2X than Android but one leads to the other so a hardware problem affects my enjoyment of Android. I have a charger at home, at work and in the car in order to keep my phone fully powered. If I know I’m going to be away from an outlet for a long period of time I charge a spare battery and take that with me. It’s a minor inconvenience but it’s something I have had to deal with while on Android.
I will say that battery life has improved significantly over the last few months due to the Cyanogenmod 7 nightly builds I put on the phone. As I use the multiple batteries I have I find they are getting better life but it’s a marginal increase. These improvements are minor but going from a 50% charge by noon to a 75% charge by noon is good but I am still a ways off from going a few days without plugging in.
Force Close
Facebooooook (
)! Or maybe Android 2.3.7! Or maybe my CyanogenMod is to blame but either way it’s always with the Force Close for the Facebook application. It feels like a daily occurrence. It is a minor annoyance to click a button on the phone, wait a few seconds and click on the application but it’s one of the few small problems I have that make me wish for the functional and slick iOS feel.
Potpourri
I can’t stop saying it but I miss the polish and integration of iOS, even after months of using Android I still like the feel of iOS. However, I will open up a setting that was previously disabled to me on iOS, or enable my phone to do something that non-jailbroken iPhone’s couldn’t do and feel in awe of the device.
I feel that CyanogenMod is something that makes my Android device better. I am not restricted to LG releasing a new version of Android 2.3 after months of delays, I don’t have to wait and wonder if Ice Cream Sandwich will be released for my device because CyanogenMod will make something that will run on my phone, provide more options than I would have otherwise and release builds faster than LG can release new phones.
Having a functional phone that allows you to do what you want when you want, free of corporate application approval policies, is a beautiful thing and giving up a bit of polish is a small price to pay for that.
Wind has been treating me fine. There are times where I’m surprised to be within the Wind Home network, and others the signal can’t penetrate. I don’t have to rely on my phone within tall buildings downtown so the times I am without a signal are few and far between.
There was a period where I wasn’t connected to the data network so this made surfing the Internet outside a WiFi connection difficult. This was due to the APN not being set, or not being configured correctly. My phone had the correct APN data for the Wind network but it wouldn’t connect.
After going a few weeks without mobile data usage I decided to look into it further. I cleared the APN data, re-entered it, added values and removed them, all to no avail. Then after another round of testing and fumbling with the settings it worked. I wasn’t going to ask any questions, so I left things as they were and went from using 0K on the mobile network to as high as 22MB a week later ().
All in all I’m still happy on Wind and happier on Android. I love the possibilities with Android, the realization that anything is possible, and when I look at a 50% decrease in my phone bill I’m all the happier I made this transition.
