New phone!

So, I've been totally craving an Android phone ever since Google had the first apps contest - after much waiting and lusting, I finally gave in a bought an HTC Desire. The deciding factor was the ability to sync with Exchange, which (after jumping through some corporate hoops, of course) will give me the ability to drop my Blackberry and only carry one mobile device with me. The idea of playing with a (relatively) open platform was incredibly tempting, plus the devices were starting to get to the point where they were about able to compete with the iPhone on sexiness.

After getting it, I'm falling in love with it pretty quickly. The thing is more like a little computer than a phone - the number of apps it's got, the ability to actually multitask and (for example) listen to music while I study flashcards is pretty nice. I really like the multiple workspaces, which fits my Unix geek heritage nicely (the first time I saw CDE in 1998, I thought to myself "why doesn't every computer have multiple workspaces?") - the only problem is that I feel this compulsion to put _something_ in every workspace, so I've been poking around at what's out there and trying to accept the fact that I may not have every workspace filled up.

Other things that I like are the predictive text - I don't think I'll ever be able to type as fast on this thing as I can on my BB, but with the predictive / correcting text I'm getting reasonably close. Maybe when Swype comes out for real, I'll be able to pick up some speed.

Overall my biggest complaint is that now, for at least a while, I'm going to be terrified that my phone will get lost, stolen, or destroyed.

The bad things:

• The screen is tough to see in direct sunlight, which was not a problem with my Blackberry. The various widgets, while cool, aren't entirely perfect - for example, there's a "social" widget that combines Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr(?) into one monolithic stream - very cool, except that a lot of the Facebook pieces seem to lose authentication, or for whatever reason just choke - so, for example, I might see that a friend has posted a new photo album, but when I want to look at it, I get the message that there are no photos. Weird.
• I think that since this is a new phone, and the shiny newest version of Android, some of the apps in the market don't work right - some have oddball issues, some just flat out don't work. For instance, I got a flashcards program that looked really promising, but couldn't find any of the cards I tried to upload (which made it rather useless). It had many users and not one complaint about that issue, which makes me figure it's a specific problem to my hardware.
• I can't find a nice, clean-looking media player - the one that ships with it is craptacular in terms of interface, so I wanted something a little different. Tried Mixzing, which I really liked but for some reason kept playing the same songs over and over (again, I think it's that whole new phone/OS thing), finally settled on Tunewiki, which is pretty good but at the same time not what I want - truth be told, what I really want is something that looks and feels like an iPod.
• My biggest gripe - no VOIP apps. Well, there is sipDroid, but that's only useful if you've got similarly geeky friends with SIP phones, or if your Skype friends don't mind accepting calls from unknown users. No Skype app, and no VOIP hooks for Google Voice. Since Google bought Gizmo5, I can only assume that this is in the works, but so far no joy. Man, it would be nice to have a way for folks in the U.S. to reach me without dialing a long-distance number.

Other than that, loving it - this will definitely keep me geeking out for a while.