HTC to produce exclusive Facebook smartphone, bitch Talk of a Facebook phone resurfaced today amid familiar rumours that the Zuckerberg-owned firm has joined forces with phone-maker HTC to produce an Android handset heavily customised for social networkers. The jointly-developed smartphone is expected to launch in Q3 2012 at the earliest, unnamed "industry sources" say, …
Already hugely annoyed after both the FB and Twitter programs on my phone decided to munge all their data into my phone book contacts, without asking, and with no way to undo. I should have listened to my brain and continued to use their respective mobile websites instead of trying out the native Android programs that single fateful time.
Having said that, I was tempted by the HTC Chachaaahacchccaahhaa. Well, I was tempted until I read the review on here saying it was total pants. I'm done with these massive touchscreen devices with no physical buttons. Messaging and e-mailing is so much easier on my work Blackberry, plus way better battery life than the 1-2 days I get from my HTC Desire (when it spends most of the day sat in my jacket pocket). If I could stick Android (well CyanogenMod) on a Blackberry then that would be immense.
I have a chacha. It was fine until I did an over-the-wire upgrade. After that the phone would crash any time I tried to dial a number.
Not the first time I've had utterly shit software from HTC.
Rooted the phone - put on cyanogenmod! It works now! I can dial! Let this be a lesson. HTC phones always work with Cyanogenmod - but are unlikely to work on the stock software that comes with the phone.
If you're willing to invest around 4-8 hours rooting your phone then buy HTC. Otherwise - don't.
I have an HTC Desire which has a Facebook app baked in. It must eat up 5MB of space at least. If that weren't bad enough it's out of date and semi functional so if I want a working Facebook I need to download another Facebook which masks out the first but does not recover the space it uses up.
The phone also has a crappy Twitter client baked in and some other crapware. Unlike regular crapware you cannot remove it.
I wish phone manufacturers would get it through their thick heads that this value add shit should not be baked into the firmware. By all means preinstall but allow people to uninstall it if they don't need it.
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Barclays PingIt won't work on rooted phones apparently. Quite a useful app for paying people you owe money to. Well phone users in Kenya seem to like the idea of phone based money transfer - which is where the idea gained popularity before it came here - and we're all tech-aware people here, embracing new ways aren't we?
Reason being for not allowing it on rooted handsets is there is a risk perceived with rooted phones and perhaps possible extra support costs.
The risk being that even though the published modded/rooted source and firmware are available, you have to take the supplier of these word for it that the firmware was produced from the source. Ideally you want to believe them (and probably can for some rooted vendors) but the risk is there.
I can see the sense in this policy, given that in the past some freeware sites have been hijacked with malware (always check the MD5 checksums) and the concerns over security on smart phones (perhaps some hysteria but still...) Indeed Barclays offer internet security apps to those who wish to use PingIt.
As a former HTC Windows Phone user, I can honestly say that the only REALLY well done part was it's Facebook integration. Great for a personal phone but on my business device, it wasn't really great during meetings getting updates telling me that "Scott has just had his scrotum pierced".
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