Off Topic With Ashley

I have an angst. I bought my brand new phone with the full intention of learning to write software for it, but through full fault of my own I haven’t made nearly enough time and I’ve done almost nothing toward that goal.

The actual problem I have is that the handset I bought is already out of date, with little to no hope of it ever actually being updated. Blithely I bought the new toy specifically because it was new. I was blind to the actual politics of the industry I was buying into, not realising that by buying a phone from HTC I doubly excluding myself from ever getting real software support and purchasing a device full of digital restrictions and locks. I’ve been more than critical of the iPhone for it’s crippled economy, but it turns out the HTC Desire and its ilk aren’t that much better.

I would like to say that I’m more than happy with the device, but I’m not. Again showing my ignorance I bought myself the 3G version that runs on the common frequencies that Optus, Three, Vodafone etc operate on, but the one entry missing from the list is Telstra’s NextG network which ironically is the only one the Australian HTC Desire can operate on. I’ve been having pathetic verging on abysmal service from Three and I’m led to believe that Optus (and by extension Virgin) are all shit too. So the remaining choices are slim, and I’m not fond of Vodafone after their staff refused to sell me a SIM card without hardware to go with it.

So that leaves me pining to sign on with the monopolist of the Australian telecommunications industry.

So I’ve a dud phone, dud carrier, and zero upgrade path. I’m seriously looking at “down”grading to the nearly identical Nexus One.

It’s really more of a developer’s phone; It’s straight from Google, it gets updates, it can be rooted without bricking itself. The NextG capable version will happily run on any Australian network so I can still use my old SIM until I get myself one from Telstra.

I really haven’t done my research in that regard, but I’m dead serious about ditching the current handset at least. I haven’t costed Telstra yet though, so it may be the stumbling block in the plan. At the moment I’ve pre-paid $150.00 for 12 gig of data for the year, so I can imagine I’m likely to see a massive price hike on top of that. I’m going to try and get myself a data sim since it’s working out brilliantly for me so far (I highly recommend Sipdroid for an integrated VoIP solution), so it will be interesting to see how well that works out. Hardware-wise, nobody else seems to be complaining about the shortcomings I blogged about previously, so I’m pretty sure I don’t care any more.

In any case, I’m really not satisfied with the Three and HTC Desire combination at all, so if anyone wants to place a bid on an unlocked HTC desire get in touch.