A while back I wrote a blog post about my Android phone (click here to read that post).
Recently I got the update from Android 1.5 "Cupcake" to 2.1 "Eclair".
I had been waiting for this update for almost 6 months. During this time, as I was checking online, waiting for news of the release of the update, I realized that there was a whole community of people online talking about Android and the different updates.
Now that I've had the upgrade for a few weeks, here are a few thoughts about it:
- With this update, it is as if I have a whole new phone. The interface is much better.
- I now have the apps that I was missing before - Kindle reader and Tweetdeck, and I think Tweetdeck for Android is actually better than the one for iPhone/iPod.
- My phone is slower now. It seems that my phone doesn't have the resources to handle this new software very well. Lately it has been taking a really long time to access my contacts list, which can be a pain in a jam. If anyone has any suggestions about how to fix this, I would love to hear them.
- The battery life is shorter now, and some of the apps that I couldn't get on 1.5 use a lot of resources, as does the Android software itself. Also, because Android allows multitasking, when you have multiple apps running, it runs down the battery. One helpful thing though is that Android 2.1 has a task manager which you can use to turn off programs that run in the background, and also set programs to automatically turn off after a certain amount of time if they are running idly in the background.
All in all, I'm really satisfied with Android Eclair - and I have no plan to buy a new phone any time soon.
Try to kill the task killer :) I read that this slows the phone down. That's an Android 2.1 issue though. If you have the chance, update to 2.2 or higher!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the suggestion. What I found is that the task killer is a built in part of the Eclair 2.1 Android OS, so I can't delete it - and the phone still runs slow when it is not open.
ReplyDeleteI found this forum that seems to match the problem I have: https://supportforums.motorola.com/message/286645 - so I decided to try a factory reset. It has been about half an hour and the phone is still syncing the contacts and emails and such from the internet, but already the phone is running a million times better. In the past few days it got to the point of being unbearable and unusable.
It seems to me that the cache needed to be cleared - hence the reason why my main problem was with the contact list.
Regarding Android 2.2 - it seems according to this - http://blogs.computerworld.com/16310/android_22_upgrade_list - that Cliq will never receive 2.2, and is doomed to eventually become obsolete. Oh well, such is technology!