On Satuday, I went to the Wind Mobile store and signed up for service. $15 Chat plan with $20 data add-on, for a total bill of about $40 per month after taxes and such. It’s no contract (and I chose to prepay for it to have cost certainty), so I also had to shell out for a new phone; $160 (-$20 MIR=$140) for an Android phone!

This is by far the cheapest Android phone you can get without contract. The closest is the HTC Legend, where you have to shell out $350 to get. In fact, it is this affordable phone that really accelerated my desire to break free from Rogers in the last month. Being an Android phone, it runs the OS created by Google, and features Google integration and the Android market. Even though I bought my E71 only a short year ago, moving to Android seems like a big leap forward. There was nothing wrong with my E71 as a smartphone per se, I can use data to its full capability; but the Symbian OS feels outdated due to lack of developer support, even though Nokia is still the premier smartphone company in the world (they have 38% of the world market)!

With the Android, it was a snap getting setup. I had already synced my contacts on my E71 with Google Contacts, so it was a matter of entering my Google Account information onto my phone and all my email, calendar, contacts, maps, etc were synced! Then I just had to figure out which applications I needed on my phone and to grab them for the marketplace.

Actually, I spent basically all of Sunday doing this, and it was a frustrating experience. There is no desktop web presence for the Android market; if you wanted to a weather app, you had to pick one of the 100s of weather apps by navigating through your phone! In the end I used a third-party site, AppBrain to find apps that would be useful for me.

And after all this time doodling around with the phone on the weekend, I still haven’t tried any of the “phone” capabilities! All I’ve played around with are its “computer” capabilities. I actually activated the phone with a temporary number because I’m not sure whether I would have reception problems on the nascent Wind network, so I will need to try things out in the next few days!

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: android, google, windmobile