iPhone Free Week – Day 1 & 2: HTC Tattoo, It’s Small & Slow

Welcome to my experiences with HTC Tattoo over the past two days.

I started using the HTC Tattoo yesterday morning as part of my “iPhone Free Week” Experiment and I have used it almost for two full days now.

The top 3 noteworthy things about the HTC Tattoo so far:

1. It’s small and doesn’t weigh much.
2. It’s kinda sluggish.
3. It has a small screen with terrible resistive technology.

And the above three points compared to my iPhone 3GS, where the iPhone is:

1. Bigger and weighs more.
2. Faster and rarely sluggish at all.
3. Acceptable screen size with great capacitive technology.

My HTC Tattoo didn’t come with a manual (and I didn’t bother downloading one from the net… who reads a manual anyway? :D) – but I haven’t even needed it yet. When I first turned it on and after it booted up (took longer than the iPhone does, didn’t expect that, but no big deal) – it showed me how to remove the cover and install the sim card, pretty cool.

Other things I like about the HTC Tattoo/Android:

• Easy access to Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.
• Links your contacts from the address book to your Facebook friends, including profile picture, birthday and updates.
• In the “About phone”-menu, there’s an option to show what parts of the phone used how much power since the last recharge.
• A “top menu” with icons that shows notifications, which you can drag down and see more information about them.
• When you’ve selected a contact, it will display if you have unread messages from that person, like  e-mails.

Battery

Usually I don’t care much about stand by times etc., I always charge my phone overnight anyway, so it’s full and ready to go for the next day. I also often have my iPhone docked, so it recharges at the computer.

But the HTC Tattoo really needs to have a power outlet nearby. I started Monday morning with battery at 100%. After a day worth of use, it was down to 10%. I went to bed with the battery level at 10% (and disabled automatic e-mail checking every 30 minutes before I went to sleep). When I woke up, the phone had turned off. So it used the last 10% overnight, doing nothing else than just standing by, waiting to wake me up at 7am (which it didn’t…).

Here’s a run-down of what I approximately used the HTC Tattoo for yesterday, which ate around 90% of the battery:

• Played with it a little bit to get an understanding of Android.
• Shot around 5 pictures and recorded 2 minutes worth of video.
• Auto-checking e-mail every 30 minutes.
• 45 minutes worth of phone calls, all of them using my bluetooth headset.
• 2 hours worth of music playback (mp3), using the mini-jack output.

Basically, if you’re doing more than I did yesterday, you will need to recharge during the day.

The battery in HTC Tattoo is 1100 mAh and the iPhone 3GS is 1219 mAh (slightly more capacity than the iPhone 3G).

That’s all for today folks, I’ll be back in a day or two with more updates on my HTC Tattoo process.

Oh, by the way, I actually recorded some video of it as well, but it turned out to be useless. The digital camera didn’t pick up my voice properly and you couldn’t really see the screen of the Tattoo either, so I dumped it.

Instead, enjoy the pictures:

HTC Tattoo programs

HTC Tattoo battery statistics

HTC Tattoo bookmarks

HTC Tattoo camera

HTC Tattoo lock screen