Reviewed by Shaun
Pros: Great everyday web experience. Great selection of apps. Solid platform.
Cons: No capture screenshot feature, poor flash support
Cons: No capture screenshot feature, poor flash support
Lucky for me, I mistakenly went swimming with my G1. As a result, I got the G2 (HTC Desire Z). While it’s not considered the best Android phone on the market, it’s not too shabby. As compared to the G1, it’s light years ahead. It really is. Can you believe the processor is only 800mhz? Is this 2005?
I'm still really surprised there isn't an easy way to take screenshots. I took my screenshots with the DDMS utitlity found within Android SDK (or you can root it).
Flash worked fine for most things I needed. The browser rendered flash-intensive sites perfectly, but once I began interacting with them, I found bugs: Most of the touch and scroll stuff was borked. Trying to touch a flash-based button with your finger is nearly impossible - offset by a whole finger! My own site utilizes flash for microphone input so I was disappointed when I tried recording from the phone and it didn't work; neither does audio sampling/mixing.
Other then that, the phone is awesome - not many complaints here. As the basic user experience is a hell of a lot more responsive (thanks to JIT), I was curious to see how the G2 compares to the notebook benchmarks in our database. I focused on web benchmarks because the web is decentralized; enabling us to compare performance across platforms. I also decided not to run the mobile version of the benchmarks because I wanted to run the same benchmarks as I did on the notebooks. I used the stock Android browser; Firefox got similar results (but no Flash):
As you can see, when it comes to the intensive web, this phone ain't gonna cut it.
I really want to see real-time audio mixing in on these Android devices (in HTML5) . Is it feasible? Supposedly yes, but for the most part, the HTML5 audio experiments don't work. Not for the stock Android browser anyway. Firefox worked a little better: I was able to get basic (generated) HTML5 audio to work consistently, but anything more sophisticated doesn't work (e.g. filters, mixing etc...).
Here’s some HTML5 audio experimenting links for anyone that’s interested:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Audio_Data_API
http://acko.net/blog/javascript-audio-synthesis-with-html-5
http://www.julianwong.net/blog/2010/09/a-play-with-html5-audio-mixer-with-canvas/
http://www.phoboslab.org/files/html5audio/
http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/pocket_full_of_html5/#presets/colormunch.js
http://vocamus.net/dave/?p=1092
http://www.codebase.es/riffwave/
http://www.jplayer.org/
I'm also looking into flashing with Cyanogenmod 7 (Android 2.3++), both for my phone and my wife's Nook. I'll update this post if I do anything with it.
I'm still really surprised there isn't an easy way to take screenshots. I took my screenshots with the DDMS utitlity found within Android SDK (or you can root it).
Flash worked fine for most things I needed. The browser rendered flash-intensive sites perfectly, but once I began interacting with them, I found bugs: Most of the touch and scroll stuff was borked. Trying to touch a flash-based button with your finger is nearly impossible - offset by a whole finger! My own site utilizes flash for microphone input so I was disappointed when I tried recording from the phone and it didn't work; neither does audio sampling/mixing.
Other then that, the phone is awesome - not many complaints here. As the basic user experience is a hell of a lot more responsive (thanks to JIT), I was curious to see how the G2 compares to the notebook benchmarks in our database. I focused on web benchmarks because the web is decentralized; enabling us to compare performance across platforms. I also decided not to run the mobile version of the benchmarks because I wanted to run the same benchmarks as I did on the notebooks. I used the stock Android browser; Firefox got similar results (but no Flash):
As you can see, when it comes to the intensive web, this phone ain't gonna cut it.
I really want to see real-time audio mixing in on these Android devices (in HTML5) . Is it feasible? Supposedly yes, but for the most part, the HTML5 audio experiments don't work. Not for the stock Android browser anyway. Firefox worked a little better: I was able to get basic (generated) HTML5 audio to work consistently, but anything more sophisticated doesn't work (e.g. filters, mixing etc...).
Here’s some HTML5 audio experimenting links for anyone that’s interested:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Audio_Data_API
http://acko.net/blog/javascript-audio-synthesis-with-html-5
http://www.julianwong.net/blog/2010/09/a-play-with-html5-audio-mixer-with-canvas/
http://www.phoboslab.org/files/html5audio/
http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/pocket_full_of_html5/#presets/colormunch.js
http://vocamus.net/dave/?p=1092
http://www.codebase.es/riffwave/
http://www.jplayer.org/
I'm also looking into flashing with Cyanogenmod 7 (Android 2.3++), both for my phone and my wife's Nook. I'll update this post if I do anything with it.
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