Monday, November 30, 2009

HTC Passion (Dragon) may be due out on Verizon pre-xmas

So it's allegedly coming (could be fake) and here are some specs. So let's line them up with their distinguishing features.
  • Motorola Milestone - Android 2.0, Keyboard, Led Flash, good feedback from users.  €500
  • Acer Liquid - Android 1.6, No Keyboard, No Led Flash, released (dec 7th) - pre-release reviews positive, but no real-world feeback. No official statement from Acer on Android 2.0 support. €380
  • HTC Passion - (stupid name - Dragon was much better), Android 2.0, No Keyboard, HTC Sense UI nice,  HTC good with ROM updates. Price unknown, unreleased - so no feedback at all.
So if the price of the HTC Passion was reasonable in Europe this would look like a bit of a winner. But it would be a close thing with the Liquid. Once Dec 7th comes we will get some real-world feedback which is really necessary given the lack of rep Acer has in the phone market and hopefully some support statement on Android 2.0 from Acer. Lack of Android 2.0 in phones being released is really a deal-breaker - all the new apps are going to target it (multitouch support at the OS level).


posted by Fergal @ 9:41 AM   4 comments

4 Comments:

At 5:21 PM, Blogger John said...

I have a droid and would definitely recommend getting one with a keyboard. Much nicer than using the onscreen keyboard methinks.

cheers,
jr

 
At 5:25 PM, Blogger John said...

Oh yeah, and..E500 - that is f'in expensive. I paid less than $250 (incl tax) for the droid. Not sure that I'd pay $750 for a phone (based on xe.com). Even $500 would be a hard sell (I think without a contract the droid is $599, but I got a 2 year contract).

 
At 6:00 PM, Blogger Fergal said...

Hi John,

I'm jealous. Yeah lot of people liking the keyboard - which given my mucky fingers would probably be a good idea. Unfortunately droid / milestone not yet available under contract in Ireland - and I've no plans to move - it will be eventually. So any thing else to say about droid - the good, the bad...

 
At 6:40 PM, Blogger John said...

Hmm,
I'll start with the bad I guess. Its certainly not a camera even though its 5MP. The flash is not very good. The battery lasts a bit less time than I would like - only about a day per charge but I assume that's pretty normal for smart phones - this is my first so I'm not 100% sure. I usually turn off gps, wireless, and syncing (email, facebook, twitter) to preserve battery when not using them.

Not being able to use the internet and talk on the phone is a bit of a pain (rarely), but that's because of Verizon, not droid afaik. Also, I haven't found yet how to manually lock the screen..it auto locks after about 15 sec, but I need to find out how to lock manually.

I've read that the voice quality is better than iphone, but I don't have an iphone to compare. I wasn't overwhelmed by the voice quality, but the signal strength in San Bruno is crap compared to TMobile. Quite the opposite here in the office though - Verizon is much better here (in SF - changed jobs since we talked last).

The good. I like having a keyboard. The screen is quite good to read stuff from (considering dimensions). Using the gmaps navigation is cool - pretty much identical to a dedicated in car nav. The voice search is really cool.

I know I have a longer list under the bad, but so far I'm pretty happy with it.

One other bad thing is that I worry much more about breaking this phone than previous ones :)

 

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