HTC Desire advice?

[ciphergoth]

On Sunday night I actually had a dream about buying the HTC Desire. On Monday morning, eating my breakfast, I heard an ominous clicking noise that told me my hard drive was about to die. Putting these together, and with BiCon on the way, I finally stopped resisting temptation and went and bought one.

So, those of you who already have them - any advice? What applications should I be installing? What games do I need? How do I play videos copied to the memory card? Anything else I should know?

Looking forward to seeing lots of you at BiCon!

Update: I would have thought this was obvious, but: since I've just bought the phone this isn't a thread for advocating which phone to buy. Just had to screen one comment that had no purpose but to say I should have bought a different one!

Comments

[pir.livejournal.com]

http://docs.google.com/View?id=dc3vdjtr_0fqd6p6c3

Welcome to Android!

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

The ASTRO app allows you to browse stuff from your drive and play around with it, I've not played video much myself.

Suggested apps:
Astro: Useful file manager
Advanced Task Killer: Android is pretty good at managing memory, but this stops stuff if you need to.
ColorNote: Nice little app for quick notes
Jewels: Ubiquitous game
Meebo IM: All your IM in one

[sweetcyanide.livejournal.com]

Desires are awesome, have had mine a couple of months and I still love it :-)

For videos, something like doubletwist is good. Or you'll need a file explore (es explorer is a good one) and then you can select the file to play with the inbuilt video player. They will all need to be in mpeg 4, but I think there's a few players out there now that do other formats.

I couldn't like without Swype- I think you still have to have to download from the web rather that the market, but it makes it so much easier to to type!

For a newsreader, newsrob is good. Twicca is the best app I've found for twitter. I use the kindle and last fm apps lots too. Launcher pro is the best home screen replacement I've found.

Evernote is brilliant for note taking, and the gtasks app is useful if you use google tasks.

Have lots of fun! :-)

[andrewducker]

K9 - a fork of the original mail client that supports IMAP IDLE/Push.
Google Gesture Search
Google Maps
Flixster movie app - does Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB, plus local movie times
Wapedia - Wikipedia reader.
Spotify (if you're willing to pay £10/month for music)
Facebook app
3G Watchdog - keeps track of your download/upload usage.
xbmc remote (if you use xbmc to watch tv)
barcode scanner - vital for downloading things from web pages that have one of those cool 2D barcodes.
LJBeetle occasionally for LJ posting
Delicious plugin for the browser
Quick Save plugin for the browser to allow me to save items to ReadItLater (which I can then read in Firefox when I get home)

Edit - and seconding Swype. It's a keyboard replacement, and you have to get onto the beta list to get access to it. But it's vastly superior to the built-in keyboard.

[simont]

I don't have an Android phone myself, but on general principles if someone asks about Android games I have to plug the Android port of my puzzle collection :-)

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

> I heard an ominous clicking noise that told me my hard drive was about to die.

This happened to me a few minutes ago. Waaaaaah.

(Luckily it was just my media external drive so nothing that is important, and it is all backed up)

[purplerabbits.livejournal.com]

Am sorry, have no advice, cos am ded of envy...

[lovingboth]

How much, where from and will you be letting people have a play at BiCon? :)

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

I suppose if I didn't have a netbook, I might consider a smart phone.

How much was it? Did you get it locked to a network? Which one?

[xanna.livejournal.com]

I see simont has already plugged his Portable Puzzles. It's the first thing I install anywhere and I couldn't live without it.

TopSETgame also for puzzly goodness.

Connectbot is a terminal

Aldiko is a great ebook reader, that I also couldn't live without.

myPlayer for BBC iplayer, streaming, but also downloading, and live streaming TV.

They messed with the brightness stuff in the last Android upgrade, so now my Hero needs Dimmer, which takes the brightness to below the lowest you can set manually.

I second what people have said about Astro.

Those are all free.

Have fun in the store.

[self-etcetera.livejournal.com]

I've been really happy with my Desire, found it occasionally needs to be switched off to clear some errors. Apps that I like are google sky map, colour note and goals to do (based on GTD system).

[ephermata.livejournal.com]

Congrats on the new phone!

I've enjoyed Layar and the game "Zombies, Run!" Layar overlays points of interest on your vision, such as geo-located tweets or locations of recent muggings. Zombies, Run! asks you to actually physically run from zombies that chase you as you go from point A to point B.

Layar review:
http://gizmodo.com/5292748/layar-first-mobile-augmented-reality-browser-is-your-real-life-hud

Zombies, Run review:
http://www.androidapps.com/t/zombies-run

[shadowdaddy.livejournal.com]

The budget app I've been using is in the market and at www.financisto.com

[http://users.livejournal.com/_lj_sucks_/]

Obviously my calculator (http://www.appbrain.com/app/com.ath0.rpn) :-)

[skullculture.livejournal.com]

Google Sky Map. Choice of Broadsides. I also second Layar, Connectbot and Aldiko.