My Android Phone and Switch From Sprint to T-Mobile

I really like my MyTouch. I knew I was going to get an Android phone and hoped that one would come out for Sprint. I kept waiting and waiting. I have been with Sprint for about ten years. I read an article about how the next Android phone would probably be for T-Mobile. The article quoted Sprint relics speaking about their problem with Google's vision and nonsense and blaming their failure to produce an Android phone on Google's poor quality OS. I became angry and decided to go with T-Mobile.

For one thing, T-Mobile is German, which I love. Going with a non-US carrier was a plus. Also a plus was that they have been the most Google-friendly US carrier and some suggested that they deserved some patronage because of that. I agreed. Once I switched, however, it became clear that some of the best reasons for switching were simply due to T-Mobile's superior online offerings. They have free online backup, a much better, more interactive website, than Sprint, a user forum. These things lend themselves to a much more user-friendly and Googly environment than Sprint's. Sprint's website is crap. They have login after login that must be navigated in order to use picture mail. They charge for online backup. If your phone is screwed, so is your data. No SIM card for Spring phones. Sorry! Want to get your personal data out of a Sprint phone? Go to the store.

I read that Sprint wanted to customize (read: ruin) Android and make it into some overly commercialized mess, just like their other interfaces. T-Mobile, on the other hand, has released honest-to-goodness Google phones, phones that are pleasant to use and flexible and customizable to a great degree.

So, that's my switch. Now the phone.

I had to mess with my phone a lot to grasp what its limitations are. The first thing I did was power it on and download app after app from the Android market. Then my phone became slow. I became depressed! Then I deleted all of the apps. Then I reinstalled a bunch.

After repeating these steps many times in a very unscientific exercise, I finally started getting the hang of some things. Here are some bullet points:

• GPS drains the battery.
• Some apps stay resident even though you wouldn't think so. Install Task Manager, look at Process View, and see which ones aren't terminating when you close the interface.
• There isn't a whole lot of RAM to play with so a couple unwanted resident apps using up 15MB of RAM each can really slow things down.

App-wise:

• BrightKite is great.
• Locale is great.
• All of the Google apps are wonderful on the MyTouch.
• Where is great.
• Task Manager is great.
• Sharing with barcodes is awesome!

The main things I learned are that it's possible to install a whole lot of apps on the MyTouch and still have a speedy, responsive interface. You just need to pay attention to which ones you install.

Task Manager also monitors the CPU of running processes. Some things, like the process monitors themselves, use a lot of CPU as well as a fair amount of RAM. I thought I could leave them running as services but decided that it wasn't worth it.

When I was running tests, comparing the interface speed while an app is installed with the interface speed after I uninstall the app, I realized that some apps stay in memory even after you uninstall them.

Sorry for the scattered ideas. I'm not publishing this to a magazine or anything.