I'm seeing far too many "omg, my phone is on its way" and not enough "I have received my phone and this is what it is like" posts in this thread - can some owners please tear themselves away from their new phones and give us a few comments, please?
I've been trying to give random updates and stuff but yeah, i guess i could say more. My summation of my experiences:
The screen
so sharp it's even received comments from people who don't care about technology. The colours are excellent, really showing great accuracy when looking at photos.
The response rate is great but still not perfect (though it's the best i've ever used), text still goes very slighly blurry when scrolling, but this is just a pitfall of digital panels i think, i just miss CRT responsiveness.
Finally, it deals well in sunlight but not brilliantly, you can see the screen just about and it is usable as a phone, but for games and stuff i wouldn't advise it this was on a brilliantly sunny day in Richmond park in the middle of a field, on the train/walking down the highstreet it was much better due to the sunlight being less direct.
The video and camera have a great mode where it drops the quality of the image in order to push up the contrast, this works much better in sunny conditions than i expected, making it more than viable for outdoor use.
The Battery
Very good, it compares well to my old Blackberry Bold. To put it into perspective i'll just list how i used it and how well the battery lasted. Between 8am and 2pm i used the phone for:
15 mins phonecalls
15 mins of angry birds
20 mins of internet browsing
1hr 30mins of satnav
1hr 30mins of flac playback at maximum volume
At 2pm the battery was at exactly 50% charge. Keep in mind for a whole 1hr30 it was acting at satnav without a car charger, the screen was on for this entire period and it was playing flac back through my car stereo at full volume. Imo this is very good. After this it easily made it through to the evening with light use.
The camera/Video:
Very good, especially the video. Both are capable of capturing good images in dark locations thanks to the powerful LED 'flash' (or rather, just a bright light). The camera does not deal with motion well on its default settings, however i haven't tinkered so this may improve, it's also not quite as responsive as a real camera, often taking around a second to capture an image. The face recognition is brilliant, the blink detection, not so much. I haven't even tried anti-shake yet. Here's a sample:
Click Me
As you can see, when not zoomed in on it's perfectly acceptable, however it does suffer if you try to zoom in on a particular object. Keep in mind both of the girls were moving when this was taken, so there is a slight blur due to me just using standard settings.
My one complaint is that the flash is just too plain bright. Most of my photos in the club were just of people wincing due to the light. But hey ho, it's that or it'd be too dark.
Media Playback
It has trouble with flac ID tags, for some reason it is unable to read the track number. This was quickly sorted with poweramp.
The sound quality through the headphone jack is excellent though the volume doesn't go quite as high as i'd hoped. With earbuds it's capable of going louder than your average person would require, however when hooked up to a car stereo/portable speaker a bit more oomph would be nice, but by no means necessary.
The speakers are sufficient. Nothing special but nothing awful, you could easily watch a film using them.
Video playback is bulletproof. It's played everything i've thrown at it (although it does suffer issues with subtitles at present, often unable to show them, i'm yet to find a solution but i'm sure a 3rd party player will surface). A 720p mkv plays without even a hint of slowdown and there's plenty of CPU headroom for 1080p too.
Software
This is my first android phone so i know little about what to expect. Everything is smooth, everything works, everything looks pretty. I'm able to have some fancy dynamic 3D windmills turning away in the background while tinkering without it even showing a hint of slowdown. It handles all apps i've thrown at it without the CPU coming close to maxing out.
The GPS works flawlessly.
The hubs are... alright i guess. I've downloaded a game through one, it worked, nothing special but nothing to complain about.
The default keyboard is rubbish, however a quick download of the ginergerbread keyboard has rectified this. I didn't get along with 'swype', though i can see some people liking it.
Voice recognition is surprisingly good. The vlingo app that you bring up by double tapping the home key is pretty damn good, however it doesn't understand postcodes when using satnav. Can't win em all.
Kies is not my sort of thing so i've not given it much of a chance. I hate software that 'syncs' media with devices so i enabled USB debug and transferred across in mass storage mode. It recognised all of the media i've copied across without issue.
Gaming
SNES emulation is flawless as expected. Popular games like angry birds look excellent thanks to the vivid colours and sharp display.
PS1 emulation was rather buggy so i gave up on it. Audio stutter etc. I'm not sure whether this is due to the phone of the emulators, again this is my first Android so i don't know what to expect.
As you'd expect, anything that was coded specifically for android (as in non emulated stuff) works flawlessly, barely having any impact on the hardware. Nova T for example showed no signs of stressing the hardware.
Does it, y'know, make phonecalls and stuff?
In a word, yes.
The sound quality in phonecalls is very good, far better than my old Bold 9000. It's got plenty of headroom for volume so i can't see me ever not being able to hear in noisy conditions.
Interacting with a contact is done well. Every concievable way of contacting them is listed in their 'profile' in your contacts menu. Every method of communication is listed in their profile, so it's nice to have one place to go to if you want to contact someone.
The caller history is fine, but a bit flawed. You're only able to view each activity in a time ordered list so you can't, for example, group by caller. I'm sure a 3rd party app could fix this though.
As previously stated, the default keyboard is naff, i recommend the gingerbread keyboard as a free replacement.
Signal strength is good, i've never been in a place where i know i should have signal where it's let me down.
It doesn't seem to heat up! I've not made many long calls, but i guess thanks to the screen technology it doesn't seem to warm up, or rather doesn't anywhere near as quickly as other phones i've owned.
