No phone is. Here are a few of the things the Desire does wrong.
It's difficult to press the sleep button without also activating the volume rocker, cos they're just around the corner of the case from each other.
There's no physical shutter button for the camera, so you have to be quite precise in touching the onscreen button without moving the phone.
Downloading updates to apps from Market generates a classic Catch-22. The phone checks and notifies on each boot, then tries to download the update for you, but cannot do so until you agree to the permissions. You can't agree to the permissions because the phone is trying to download the update. Fail. (There is a way out - cancel each download manually after notification, authorise, then restart.)
The autocorrect doesn't try to correct multiple hits on the same key, nor mis-hits on space or full stop. It does save words to the dictionary at the drop of a hat. Since the start of this post I've inadvertently saved tthe, appps and sleepp. Don't know if it's possible to un-save them again.
Touching a point within an editable block of text usually doesn't take the cursor to that point. It puts it somewhere else - sometimes close, sometimes not - and you have to arrow to the bit you wanted to edit. You can't press and hold the arrow keys, so this involves lots of tapping. You can't press and hold to paste in a desired location - well, you can try, but you may or may not get the right spot.
The reaction to a long press on an editable block of text is unpredictable. Sometimes you get selection sliders, sometimes not (just "select word" or "select all"). No selection sliders makes copying or deleting a large block of text very cumbersome (or, if you prefer, "like playing tiddlywinks with sesame seeds," as I recently described this in conversation). Of course, it only becomes a problem if you're trying to do something silly like write a blog on your phone.
As previously discussed, it eats battery. I still haven't managed to get a spare - it got too late to ship before I leave.
As you'd expect, the browser doesn't play nice with some web pages. It struggles with text boxes (just will not size them to the screen, and sometimes the text you're editing vanishes under the keyboard) and doesn't properly display the 2degrees account page (a bit ironic, that). It handles popups with varying results. I can't currently upload photos directly to Blogger, though I'm not sure if that's due to the popups or to Picasa Web not supporting mobile uploads. I'm getting around that by uploading photos to Twitpic and embedding those in blog posts (sorry, Twitter followers, for any random photos appearing in my stream).
And it's enormous. There are acres of screen space, but I won't pretend it's not a little cumbersome.
For the cursor positioning problem, can you not drag the cursor to where you want it to be? And if you want to ship a battery to me to pass on to you, let me know, I can give you the address to use. And is there not an option from the built-in Gallery app to upload photos to Picasa? Certainly the standard one does that, though it is entirely possible that HTC has replaced it with something less useful.
ReplyDeleteNo, dragging doesn't do anything when the cursor has decided to be miles from your finger. That most often happens near line ends, when, I assume, Touch Input is struggling to interpret the location of the key press. A long press sometimes (not always) forces the cursor to the right place.
ReplyDeleteThe Picasa option in Gallery previously wouldn't do anything except offer to authenticate a different account, but is working now that I try it again. Possibly I've changed some setting in the meantime.