Thursday, June 07, 2012

More on my new phone

So I am still pretty much in geek-love with my phone (HTC One X). But there has been something about it that has been annoying me and I have only just worked out what it is. I'm not sure quite how to phrase this, but using the phone for passive computing tasks is amazing, better (mostly) than using a proper computer. Reading stuff on the internet, listening to music, watching videos, playing games, and so forth, all an awesome experience. But, anything that involves active interaction is frustrating to the point of impossible - writing an email, doing some coding, in fact, getting any work done at all. This is kind of obvious given the input methods.

To put it another way, the device is perfect for consumption, but terrible for creation. This bother me because, for me, using a computer has always been a creative experience; the whole point is to make things. For me, the phone is much more like a TV then a computer in terms of interaction, and that makes me sad.

It is an amazingly powerful device, and seems to me that I ought to be productive with it, but the only useful thing I've done with it is testing Firefox. I suppose in a way, it's good, it means I don't need to get too attached to another expensive gadget.

2 comments:

Evan said...

I have an Android phone, a Droid X2 (sadly stuck at 2.3.4 and locked down). Anyway, have you tried the voice-to-text feature? I compose all emails and texts, except if the surrounding environment precludes it, using my voice. It's _so_ much easier than trying to use the keyboard. And the accuracy is very high, with only slight adjustments made from my normal speech.

Nick Cameron. said...

I haven't really tried the speach-to-text thing, I should give it a go