Baseball Superstars 2011 is the Android Baseball game for players who want to customize how they play, you can play season by season as a single batter or pitcher, play only the cleanup batter, no matter who it is, only the closing or starting pitcher, play everyone! let the computer handle base running, pick your favorite team members and only play them, how ever you want to set it up, you can do it in Baseball Stars 2011.
One of the games best settings is a speed setting that allows you to speed up or slow down the game, having a hard time hitting 100mph fastballs? slow it down, feel like the game is taking too long, or have less time to play? speed things up! The Graphics are cartoony, but good (the new version Baseball Superstars II has Anime graphics, but seems to only be on iOS right now), It looks good on a 10.1″ Notion Ink Adam tablet display as well as my 4.3″ HTC Evo screen.
I do have a few issues, but none prevent me from playing the game, and what game has ever been absolutely perfect for every person? I play mostly in the “My League” mode, which allows you to create a batter or pitcher and follow their career.
- You can hit a pop fly to the batter’s box – something which the catcher will never miss, until your batting score gets over 920.
- The fielders all play like all stars when your batting score is low – 40′ long dives to catch a line drive, never dropping a catch…
- I’ve noticed that the opposing teams actually get worse the more you play – the better your character’s skills the worse your opponents play against you.
- Many games seem rigged – depending on how well you play, the computer will do everything it can to make the team it wants win, if you are batting, all of your teammates will never score, unless you hit the hit that brings them home, or the computer will keep the game close (like 2-2) but in the 7th, 8th, or 9th inning will score 5-10 runs! after you hit a 2 or 3 run homer to take the lead! even if you are ranked #1 and playing the 10th place team. The only real way to control every game is to be the pitcher and pitch the whole game without a sub (in My League, in season play, just play all the pitchers!).
- It is very easy (when you first install the game) to make a new batter and do the HR mode and score Gpoints until you’re swimming in them, and then upgrade your player to max stats before even playing their first game. (between 60k and 70k Gpoints should do it).
- If you swing before the pitcher releases the ball (the swing window starts right before the ball is let loose), you cannot swing again, you are stuck in the swing position until the ump calls it a strike.
- Unless you have perfect timing and hit a homerun, it seems to be impossible to hit pitches in the corners of the strike zone, or any pitch outside the strike zone, even if you move in the batters box so you are closer (outside pitches)/farther (inside pitches) from the pitch.
- Also the game does not take into account when you have maxed a stat out and still awards you points that just disappear. (fame included, once you hit 999 fame, you’ll get another 999 fame before long but the counter never goes over 999…).
- You are the team, in every mode. Don’t expect your team to play good, ever, unless you are controlling them. I tried playing an entire season as just the batters, all of the batters, and finished in 4th for the season and lost in the second round of the finals (top 4 teams play first to 4 wins moves on to the next team, so 4th place would have to beat 3, 2, and 1st place to win all of it (12 wins!)). Again this goes back to fixed games, I lost one game while playing all the batters in Season mode, made me really upset, I was up 8 – 0 in the 4th inning, the computer got 20 runs between the 5th inning and the 8th inning, I actually caught up and took the lead at 24-23 in the 9th (I scored a few in the 4th-8th too, not all of those were in the 9th!), then they still beat me 28-24 in the bottom of the 9th, this was one of those times where my team was more than 4 positions above in the rankings.
- Even with a 900+ running skill, I still cannot steal home after a sacrifice fly to the wall, I cannot beat a bunt to first most times (10-15% success rate on the bunt), and I cannot steal 2nd base more than once every 15-20 attempts.
- The coach keeps asking me to bunt when I hit 50 homers per season and have an 800+ batting average and bat in the cleanup position (even in the 9th inning when we are losing by one and the runner is on first with 1 or 0 outs).
- All of the walls are the exact same distance (324′ will get you a homer anywhere in the park and all teams play in the same stadium).
- If you hit the foul pole you can get a homer, but the distance the ball traveled is shorter the higher up you hit the pole… The shortest homer I’ve gotten was 276′ at the top of the pole and 304 at the bottom of the pole…
- All of the computer controlled players know if the ball will be caught for an out, none of the base runners move, not even to go halfway. So later in the game when your stats are really high, the fielders may start to drop the ball, then throw to the base where the runner never tried to go to and get him out instead of you.
- Not a lot of information in game, I mean it tells you how to hit a ball, and how to pitch a ball, but not a lot else on how the unique Baseball Stars system works. So I went to the Dev website for more info, nothing there. So I tried to join their forums and post a question, there is NO SIGN UP/REGISTRATION LINK!
- It would have be nice to see you “total” stats, ie. battering average cumulative over all your seasons, total HR’s and so on, but it does not seem to be an option in game.
- Also, something I did (a skill I earned maybe) gave me the ability to increase my defense score by tapping up while batting!?!? I still cannot find any info on exactly what those skill mods do…
- Last thing! The on screen D-pad is at least twice the size it needs to be, taking up almost half the screen. Not too annoying on a phone, but on a Tablet it can make it awkward to play to game.
All in all, I have spent a good 100 hours playing this game and I still suck, although I’ve learned how to win, a lot. My batter consistently gets a .800+ batting average, and my pitcher can pitch perfect games about 1 out of every 3 times and the other games only allow 1 or 2 hits the entire game. I still enjoy playing, I have achieved 4 girlfriends for 1 batter, that was fun, but nothing happens after you “win” the girls… you cannot even go see them again.
Marketplace direct DL links
| Free Version | Paid Version | |
first impressions with the Sprint HTC Evo 4G cell phone. Note to readers, there is no 4G in the state I live in, South Carolina (unless it bleeds over the border from North Carolina), and according to the maps, there are no current plans to add 4G to my state, so I have not gotten a chance to even test it, although I drove through Charlotte, NC 3 times now and keep forgetting to stop somewhere and see what happens when I turn 4G on and do a speed test. Ok, the very first thing I noticed after turning onthe phone was a notification asking me what application I wanted to use for this request (I later determined it was asking about what to do when I pressed the home screen) and I was presented with two choices, HTC Sense and (I forgot the name and cannot seem to get it to come back up) the default android home screen, then when I selected the HTC Sense UI I got to see the Weather animation as it loaded the default widget layout.
many installed apps later I have noticed some interesting things about my new HTC Evo 4G:
1. the battery does drain quickly; however it is at the same speed or slower than the drain on my HTC Touch, so I am not upset about this, especially since the battery is the same size and the Evo is much more powerful. this is a good thing (for those comparing to the iPhone you have to understand the iPhone uses a much more expensive battery technology, Lithium Polymer, which is more efficient as well)as it means that the power usage has been regulated a lot better in the Evo allowing a more powerful device to do more things with the same amount of power. until HTC switches to Lithium Polymer batteries this is the best we will get without using bigger batteries (of which I will be buying a 3500mAh battery for my Evo ASAP, or at least as soon as it becomes comercially available, and probably I will wait till it goes on sale because of low sales volume!) I can get a good 10-13 hours of life out of it, if I am not using it constantly the entire time, I think the most I have gotten so far was 15 hours and had 30% battery life left (did not charge over night one night), but I forgot to check the usage and uptime on the phone before the battery died on me while using it. The good news is the phone will automatically shutdown when the battery reaches extremely low levels (between 2% and 4% remaining), so you do not have to worry about damaging the battery by draining it dry.
2. some devices cannot charge the Evo any better than they can charge an iPad. plugged into my laptop while powered off, to charge my cell phone it took over 6 hours, but when plugged into the wall outlet it took 2 hours and 15 minutes. Also, one time I was using an app that required wifi and gps, I also had auto-brightness on, was plugged into the laptop via usb, and used my phone for about 2 hours constant with those settings. Well, the battery went from 33% when I started to 28% when I stopped, so the phone can actually use more power than some USB ports can provide!
3. the charge light changing from orange to green does not mean the battery is full. I have noticed that unplugging the phone and turning the display on (or powering the phone on) within 10 minutes of the light changing to green, the Evo will display 91% or 92% battery charge!?! I have noticed someplaces stating that you need to continue to charge the battery for approximately 2 hours to obtain 100% battery life, after the charge light changes to green.
4. 3 times now the Evo has not given me a keyboard when I touched a place that required me to type, and sometimes exiting out of the app and returning did not fix the issue. Additionally in the game Robo Defense when returning to th egame after reading a text message, the game stated that it successfully restored the game, but the play/pause and fast forward buttons would not appear, and while I could scroll left to right, I could not scroll up and down. The menu button worked however and I was able to “save and quit” then when I returned to the game, all was working again. I believe these issues to be related.
5. one time today in fact, when I turned the display on my background was there, and the notification bar was at the top of the screen, but I never got an unlock bar to slide down. multiple attempts never provided the bar, I finally had to remove the battery from the phone to power it off, then it worked just fine.
6. I have installed an app called “my lookout” that is an antivirus, anti-spyware (apps only), backup manager, and remote phone locator (vey cool , you can make it blast out a siren if your phone was stolen) application. when this is scanning an app I have installed (or upgraded) the phone runs at about 30% performance of normal, not sure if this is a good trade off, since I don’t install apps from places other than the android market.
7. the phone does not do a very good job determining if you need the “web” application (the one with the “@” symbol and the “.com” button.
8. if you speak clearly and not too fast, the voice to text feature works perfectly as long as all the words are in the spell checker (this includes user defined words).
9. the HTC sense UI does NOT rotate into landscape mode, something I do not understand, as my HTC Touch used the first version of HTC Sense UI and it worked great in landscape mode, infact I went at least the last 9 months without ever switching it into portrait mode.
10. the dumbest thing about the phone is the search button on the bottom right hand corner of the screen, this is a touch sensitive button, like the rest of the buttons on the bottom of the screen, and I hit it by accident at least 8 times a day. this initiates a voice search (most of the time) of the phone, no matter what else you are doing, pulling you out of any app to do so. A friend of mine who also bought the Evo told me he has never had this problem, he also told me he never uses his phone in landscape mode.
Next up, “Let’s talk about th eEvo 4G camera…”
Welcome back to part 3, glad to have you here, I’ve been a little distracted the last few days and apologize for not getting this done sooner. So, here are some first impressions with the Sprint HTC Evo 4G cell phone. I am completely in love with my Evo, despite any flaws I may complain about on here, I just need to get used to touching the screen softer (my previous phone the HTC Touch, has a resistive screen and requires a moderate amount of pressure to sense your touches), as my finger hurts if I use it too much at this time…
Note to readers, there is no 4G in the state I live in, South Carolina (unless it bleeds over the border from North Carolina), and according to the maps, there are no current plans to add 4G to my state, so I have not gotten a chance to even test it, although I drove through Charlotte, NC 3 times now and keep forgetting to stop somewhere and see what happens when I turn 4G on and do a speed test.
Ok, the very first thing I noticed after turning onthe phone was a notification asking me what application I wanted to use for this request (I later determined it was asking about what to do when I pressed the home screen) and I was presented with two choices, HTC Sense and (I forgot the name and cannot seem to get it to come back up) the default android home screen, then when I selected the HTC Sense UI I got to see the Weather animation as it loaded the default widget layout.
many installed apps later I have noticed some interesting things about my new HTC Evo 4G:
1. the battery does drain quickly; however it is at the same speed or slower than the drain on my HTC Touch, so I am not upset about this, especially since the battery is only 15% larger and the Evo is much more powerful with a display almost twice the size. This IS a good thing (for those comparing to the iPhone you have to understand the iPhone uses a much more expensive battery technology, Lithium Polymer, which is more efficient as well and can also blow up if it gets too hot) as it means that the power usage has been regulated a lot better in the Evo allowing a more powerful device to do more things with the not that much more power. This is the best we will get without using bigger batteries (of which I will be buying a 3500mAh battery for my Evo ASAP, or at least as soon as it becomes comercially available, and probably I will wait till it goes on sale because of low sales volume!) I can get a good 10-13 hours of life out of it, if I am not using it constantly the entire time, I think the most I have gotten so far was 15 hours and had 30% battery life left (did not charge over night one night), but I forgot to check the usage and uptime on the phone before the battery died on me while using it. The good news is the phone will automatically shutdown when the battery reaches extremely low levels (between 2% and 4% remaining), so you do not have to worry about damaging the battery by draining it dry.
2. Some devices cannot charge the Evo any better than they can charge an iPad. plugged into my laptop while powered off, to charge my cell phone it took over 6 hours, but when plugged into the wall outlet it took 2 hours and 15 minutes. Also, one time I was using an app that required wifi and gps, I also had auto-brightness on, was plugged into the laptop via usb, and used my phone for about 2 hours constant with those settings. Well, the battery went from 33% when I started to 28% when I stopped, so the phone can actually use more power than some USB ports can provide!
3. The charge light changing from orange to green does not mean the battery is full. I have noticed that unplugging the phone and turning the display on (or powering the phone on) within 10 minutes of the light changing to green, the Evo will display 91% or 92% battery charge!?! I have noticed someplaces stating that you need to continue to charge the battery for approximately 2 hours to obtain 100% battery life, after the charge light changes to green.
4. 3 times now the Evo has not given me a keyboard when I touched a place that required me to type, and sometimes exiting out of the app and returning did not fix the issue. Additionally in the game RoboDefense when returning to the game after reading a text message, the game stated that it successfully restored the game, but the play/pause and fast forward buttons would not appear, and while I could scroll left to right, I could not scroll up and down. The menu button worked however and I was able to “save and quit” then when I returned to the game, all was working again. I believe these issues to all be related to one another.
5. One time, actually while I was writing all this over the weekend, when I turned the display on, my background was there, and the notification bar was at the top of the screen, but I never got an unlock bar to slide down. Multiple attempts never provided the bar, I finally had to remove the battery from the phone to power it off, then it worked just fine.
6. I have installed an app called “My Lookout” that is an antivirus, anti-spyware (apps only), backup manager, and remote phone locator (vey cool, you can make it blast out a siren if your phone was stolen) application. When this is scanning an app I have installed (or upgraded) the phone runs at about 20% performance of normal (I checked with the app System Panel and the CPU is only running at 54%, so I do not know why it is doing this, maybe it is maxing out the IO capabilities of the flash memory), not sure if this is a good trade off, since I don’t install apps from places other than the android market.
7. The phone does not do a very good job determining if you need the “web” keyboard (the one with the “@” symbol and the “.com” button) or the standard keyboard, it also fails to automatically show the #’s keyboard when you click on phone number fields. I have gotten entry into the SWYPE keyboard beta, and while it does not have a “web keyboard” (or at least I have not seen it), it is absolutely fantastic, I LOVE IT, and will never get rid of it!! I can type almost twice as fast on my phone with it!
8. If you speak clearly and not too fast, the voice to text feature works perfectly as long as all the words are in the spell checker (this includes user defined words thankfully).
9. The HTC sense UI does NOT rotate into landscape mode, something I do not understand, as my HTC Touch, which uses the first version of HTC Sense UI, works great in landscape mode, in fact I went at least the last 9 months without ever switching it into portrait mode.
10. The dumbest thing about the phone is the search button on the bottom right hand corner of the screen, this is a touch sensitive button, like the rest of the buttons on the bottom of the screen, and I hit it by accident at least 8 times a day. This initiates a search everything screen in some apps and a Voice-to-Text search most of the time, no matter what else you are doing, pulling you out of any app to do so. A friend of mine who also bought the Evo told me he has never had this problem, he also told me he never uses his phone in landscape mode…
11. Yesterday I had the first instance of my phone randomly rebooting itself
12. Today I had an issue where my phone refused to go to my home screen when I pressed home, instead it went to a very clean interface only allowing my to choose from 6 options, mostly make a phone call or use navigation choices, only by hitting the menu button and changing the settings of the app I was able to get out of it. apparently it is some kind of a lockdown system to prevent you from doing things you shouldn’t while driving. Except it activated when I plugged my phone into a wall charger… I have since turned that off of automatically activating; however hitting the Home button still does nothing but “refresh” whatever screen I am currently looking at…
Next up, “Let’s talk about the Evo 4G camera…”
(ok, just direct FTP’d 14 pics and videos from my phone to my website using AndFTP app for Android, I got the stats on 3 files for you…)
1. a 2.0 MB picture
in 22 seconds transfer time
with a 3 second setup time
peak transfer rate of 86.4MB/s
2. a 13.6MB video
in 1 min 34 seconds total
with a peak transfer rate of 91.3KB/s
3. a 41.9MB video
in 8 mins 7 seconds total
with a peak transfer rate of 87.5KB/s
All files uploaded on 3G with a full 6 bars of signal, with a max data upload rate of 92.4KB/s
(I had a hard time adding the images to this post, I kept getting errors adding them to the wordpress gallery and had to manually link to them)
The week before the Evo launched I read about the SD card error, which I immediately wrote off as “idiots trying to use a class 2 SDHC to write 720p video” when any photographer could tell yo uyou need at least a class 6 to do HD video. so I was not worried I had already planned to spend the money on a 16GB class 6 micro SDHC card. then they started complaining about battery life, the lack of an AMOLED screen, then it was confirmed it was shipping with a 8GB micro SDHC not the rumored 16GB card. Then there was the extra $10 fee to “unlock greater than 5GB data usage per month” NOT for 4G access like everyone kept saying, please read the fine print people! Next came a charge for tethering, then you needed a special HDMI cable to do the HDMI out, next was the supreme compression level of the 720p video and the 8mp images, the final issue was the monthly charge for Qik!! I could not believe how badly Sprint and HTC had fucked up the perfect cell phone. At least the promised to give Froyo to the Evo before years end, that was the only bonus to look forward to…
then I started using the phone, I installed 259 apps that I had preselected using appbrain.com (also an android app called “app brain”) that uses the Android Marketplace to search for and “queue” apps to install on your phone. what you do is go on the website, find apps you want to use, and then you click install and it loads them into a queue on the website. then when you get your phone (as was my case, since I did this 3 days before the Evo launched), the first thing you do is go to the market and install “app brain” then unfortunately you have to launch the app and login, then it will check the installed app database and compare it to what the website says you want/have installed. DO NOT CLICK THE SYNC BUTTON AT THIS TIME!!! I did not on my phone, but when I upgraded my wife’s Samsung Moment to Android 2.1 I used AppBrain and hit the “Sync” button, instead of updating the phone to match AppBrain’s database, it made the AppBrain Database match the phones (which at the time only contained AppBrain), and I had to go through the marketplace and manually locate and install everything again.
Ok, back to using AppBrain on my Evo, I clicked the “Install” button to add the 259 apps to my new Evo, this sucks, the only thing AppBrain is capable of doing (I think it is a security limitation set by google) is to:
1. open the Android marketplace
2. insert a search query for the apps you selected on their website, one at a time.
So, after clicking install you are provided with the marketplace search screen and after a few seconds it pulls up the app you were looking for (if it is available in your country/OS version, while there is a filter on AppBrain’s website for OS version and country, you may still find and select apps that are not available to your phone, personally I selected about 12-15 that were not found in the marketplace when I tried to install them). from this point on it is almost like doing it yourself, you have to click the install button (or buy if it is a paid app, but I recommend doing th efree version first to make sure it runs well on your device. I ran into several apps I wanted to buy after trying them on my wife’s Moment, only to find out they REQUIRE a physical keyboard, or a ball, or a D-Pad), the install button gives you the warning page of the access that the app wants (if any), just the same as if you did this without AppBrain, select OK and it will initiate the install. NOW, to get to the next app in my huge list to add to the phone (by the way, after 8 days I still have not narrowed the list down to less than 200, but I am working on it) you MUST HIT THE BACK BUTTON on your phone, some apps when they start downloading the MarketPlace will automatically take you back to your search results (which by the way, AppBrain searches by the Unique Identifier for the app, so only the correct app will come up in the search, or no apps), some apps will leave you on the details to watch the progress meter go by while it downloads and installs, if yo uare on the details page, press the back button to get to the search results, once you are on th esearch results page, press the back button again to get the next app on your list. This seems to be the only way to do it, so yes, I had to do this process more than 200 times to get all those apps installed on my phone.
The only benefits I found to using AppBrain, was that I was able to use my laptop to interface with the marketplace and I did it days before I hand my phone in my hands, saving me hours after I got the phone. Now, one more limitation on AppBrain, their website can only show you 50 pages of 10 apps each per category. this means that the maximum number of apps you can browse from AppBrain without doing a search is about 15% of the current android marketplace. So to compensate for this without doing specific searches (yes I looked at all 50 pages of almost every category) they place a “similar apps” and “others by this developer” list on the right hand side of the screen when viewing the details on an app, very handy.
Not too long after I started this process (at exactly 8:00am) my Evo received the now famous SD card patch OTA update.
Alright, so within 2-3 hours I had all 250+/- apps installed that were found, time to start loading them and testing them out, several were duplicate apps that I could not decide which I wanted to use without having actually used them. To this day, I still have not loaded all of the apps on my phone, I have purchased 3 or 4 total, 2 or 3 of which were planned purchases before I even got my phone, I was just waiting to make sure the demo’s worked first (that means 1 was not a planned purchase and just plain surprised me when I found it). There are others that I intend on buying, but need to wait until my next paycheck to afford it, as Android apps on average cost 2-4 times as much as comparable iPhone apps AND the graphics on almost every single Android app looks like an 8 yearold designed it. I really feel that google needs to step in and regulate some quality controlls over the apps, not content, but quality. I am sick and tired of loading an app and finding stick figures, or a plain black background and hand drawn squares and circles and teardrop shaped drawings (see a couple of pictures below for examples, what is sad is those are some of the games I really like too, but won’t buy because they are $2.99 or $4.99 and the graphics are a blank screen with “stick figures”). If you really want to understand my frustration with the graphics, go find someone who is an Apple lover, and has owned more than one iPhone, and ask them to show you some games, then you will understand. some of my favorites are the rogue trainer, field runners, rocket bears (I think that is the name, it’s a teddy bear looking brown bear that is under attack by zombie panda bears), and pocket god (I’ll have to check out my friends iPhone and see what some of the others I like are called, so you can go check them out. trust me there is a huge difference and almost everything he buys is either $0.99 or $1.99 sometimes he waits for it to go on sale before buying, but never pays more than $1.99 for an app).
People complain about the “fart” apps on iPhone, well I think there are more on Android than iPhone, AND Android has a ton of freaking jigsaw puzzle games, I cannot understand that, why is there not 1 or 2 apps, and the rest could be download add on packs that give you more images to use in the jigsaw app…
right next post will be about the phone itself, I’ll post it in a few minutes…
The week before the Evo launched I read about the SD card error, which I immediately wrote off as “idiots trying to use a class 2 SDHC to write 720p video” when any photographer could tell you you should use at least a class 6 card to do HD video. So, I was not worried I had already planned to spend the money on a 16GB class 6 micro SDHC card. then they started complaining about battery life, the lack of an AMOLED screen, then it was confirmed it was shipping with a 8GB micro SDHC not the rumored 16GB card. Then there was the extra $10 fee to “unlock greater than 5GB data usage per month” NOT for 4G access like everyone kept saying, please read the fine print people! Next came a charge for tethering, then you needed a special HDMI cable to do the HDMI out, next was the supreme compression level of the 720p video and the 8mp images, the final issue was the monthly charge for Qik!! I could not believe how badly Sprint and HTC has fucked up the perfect cell phone. At least they promised to give Froyo to the Evo before years end, that was the only bonus to look forward to…
then I started using the phone, I installed 259 apps that I had preselected using appbrain.com (also an android app called “AppBrain”) that uses the Android Marketplace to search for and “queue” apps to install on your phone. what you do is go on the website, find apps you want to use, and then you click install and it loads them into a queue on the website. then when you get your phone (as was my case, since I did this 3 days before the Evo launched), the first thing you do is go to the market and install “AppBrain” then unfortunately you have to launch the app and login, then it will check the installed app database and compare it to what the website says you want/have installed. DO NOT CLICK THE SYNC BUTTON AT THIS TIME!!! I did not on my phone, but when I upgraded my wife’s Samsung Moment to Android 2.1 I used AppBrain and hit the “Sync” button, instead of updating the phone to match AppBrain’s database, it made the AppBrain Database match the phones (which at the time only contained AppBrain), and I had to go through the marketplace and manually locate and install everything again.
Ok, back to using AppBrain on my Evo, I clicked the “Install” button to add the 259 apps to my new Evo, this sucks, the only thing AppBrain is capable of doing (I think it is a security limitation set by google) is to:
1. open the Android marketplace
2. insert a search query for the apps you selected on their website, one at a time.
So, after clicking install you are provided with the marketplace search screen and after a few seconds it pulls up the app you were looking for (if it is available in your country/OS version, while there is a filter on AppBrain’s website for OS version and country, you may still find and select apps that are not available to your phone, personally I selected about 12-15 that were not found in the marketplace when I tried to install them). from this point on it is almost like doing it yourself, you have to click the install button (or buy if it is a paid app, but I recommend doing th efree version first to make sure it runs well on your device. I ran into several apps I wanted to buy after trying them on my wife’s Moment, only to find out they REQUIRE a physical keyboard, or a ball, or a D-Pad), the install button gives you the warning page of the access that the app wants (if any), just the same as if you did this without AppBrain, select OK and it will initiate the install. NOW, to get to the next app in my huge list to add to the phone (by the way, after 8 days I still have not narrowed the list down to less than 200, but I am working on it) you MUST HIT THE BACK BUTTON on your phone, some apps when they start downloading the MarketPlace will automatically take you back to your search results (which by the way, AppBrain searches by the Unique Identifier for the app, so only the correct app will come up in the search, or no apps), some apps will leave you on the details to watch the progress meter go by while it downloads and installs, if yo uare on the details page, press the back button to get to the search results, once you are on th esearch results page, press the back button again to get the next app on your list. This seems to be the only way to do it, so yes, I had to do this process more than 200 times to get all those apps installed on my phone.
The only benefits I found to using AppBrain, was that I was able to use my laptop to interface with the marketplace and I did it days before I hand my phone in my hands, saving me hours after I got the phone. Now, one more limitation on AppBrain, their website can only show you 50 pages of 10 apps each per category. this means that the maximum number of apps you can browse from AppBrain without doing a search is about 15% of the current android marketplace. So to compensate for this without doing specific searches (yes I looked at all 50 pages of almost every category) they place a “similar apps” and “others by this developer” list on the right hand side of the screen when viewing the details on an app, very handy.
Not too long after I started this process (at exactly 8:00am) my Evo received the now famous SD card patch OTA update.
Alright, so within 2-3 hours I had all 250+/- apps installed that were found, time to start loading them and testing them out, several were duplicate apps that I could not decide which I wanted to use without having actually used them. To this day, I still have not loaded all of the apps on my phone, I have purchased 3 or 4 total, 2 or 3 of which were planned purchases before I even got my phone, I was just waiting to make sure the demo’s worked first (that means 1 was not a planned purchase and just plain surprised me when I found it). There are others that I intend on buying, but need to wait until my next paycheck to afford it, as Android apps on average cost 2-4 times as much as comparable iPhone apps AND the graphics on almost every single Android app looks like an 8 yearold designed it. I really feel that google needs to step in and regulate some quality controlls over the apps, not content, but quality. I am sick and tired of loading an app and finding stick figures, or a plain black background and hand drawn squares and circles and teardrop shaped drawings (see a couple of pictures below for examples, what is sad is those are some of the games I really like too, but won’t buy because they are $2.99 or $4.99 and the graphics are a blank screen with “stick figures”). If you really want to understand my frustration with the graphics, go find someone who is an Apple lover, and has owned more than one iPhone, and ask them to show you some games, then you will understand. some of my favorites are the rogue trainer, field runners, rocket bears (I think that is the name, it’s a teddy bear looking brown bear that is under attack by zombie panda bears), and pocket god (I’ll have to check out my friends iPhone and see what some of the others I like are called, so you can go check them out. trust me there is a huge difference and almost everything he buys is either $0.99 or $1.99 sometimes he waits for it to go on sale before buying, but never pays more than $1.99 for an app).
People complain about the “fart” apps on iPhone, well I think there are more on Android than iPhone, AND Android has a ton of freaking jigsaw puzzle games, I cannot understand that, why is there not 1 or 2 apps, and the rest could be download add on packs that give you more images to use in the jigsaw app…
right, next post will be about the phone itself, I’ll post it in a few minutes…
outdoor image in full sunlight taken with the Evo
outdoor image in full sunlight taken with the Evo
taken indoors with minimal lighting from about 6" away
taken outdoors in early morning sunlight in the mountains with the Evo
taken at the same time and place as my dog (the previous picture)
taken about 5 minutes after the last picture of the house from about 2' away
taken just after dusk outside
I have been a proud owner of one of Sprint’s HTC Evo 4G cell phones now for an entire week and I have decided to share my thoughts and experiences with you. I have always used sprint, since 1997 or 1998.
To start I need to tell you a bit of background, I purchased my first smart phone in 2000 (maybe real early 2001) it was a Qualcomm branded Palm phone, was in greyscale and was a touchscreen that did not require a stylus for input, and I was not impressed, but it was cool and no one had anything like it. the front looked like a normal cell phone, like the classic Pokia (if I can find images I’ll add them to the post at the end), but the face flipped up to reveal the Palm 2.x OS interface. I replaced that cell phone with the second generation model of that series which was what will now be the standard format of the smart phone, a large-ish screen with a D-pad, Talk and Hangup buttons, plus it had the classic Palm Home and Contacts buttons. I used that phone for about 3 years and went back to it when other phones died or I broke them for another 2 years after that, and finally sold it for $65 5 years after I bought it!
After that I owned a Toshiba windows 2003 (first edition) smart phone and I liked it tremendously; however my friend had a Dell Axim x3 and it it killed my Toshiba on performance for everything it did, we had a lot of the same apps, having been friends for almost 10 years at that point and having lived together both in college and a bit after I graduated from college. I was very envious of the power of his PDA and the extra features it had that I did not (like a phone! which I thought was because I had a hybrid device and they had to make comprimises on the hardware), the only thing I noticed as a negative for the Dell is that he had to manually reboot the phone between every 18 and 36 hours to keep it running well. So, I decided that my next phone would be dumb and I would get a PDA and carry them both around all the time.
I purchased a Dell Axim x31 which was not the newest model, but the newest model (the x50) had just launched and was $200 more expensive. I was very happy with my choice, so much so, that I sold my Axim on ebay as soon as the Dell x51v started to appear for sale on ebay, and I used the money to pick one of those up, even though by this time I had read all the reviews stating how the Axim’s underperformed compared to similarly spec’d models from other handset makers, but I did not care, as the Dell cost $200-$400 less than those other models and the perfomance was good enough for me.
I loved my Dell and it was very hard for me to let go of it, I used it constantly, everyday, but eventually it became very difficult to carry my Axim around, my cell phone, AND my work cell phone. So I gave in and bought an HTC touch, the processor was 1 generation of ARM newer than my dell, and as the dell was a 600MHz, the Touch was a 524MHz, I knew I would take a hit on the hardware as it was a hybrid device, and I was okay with that to save pocket space. I was very disapointed with the tiny ass screen, I was very disapointed with the slow performance of the HTC Touch, even being a newer generation of processor, it was MUCH slower, had less system RAM, AND the Dell had WinMo 2k3SE and the Touch had WinMo 2k5. the biggestdifference between the two was that they removed the slider that let the user adjust how much system memory was to be used for applications and how much was to be used for user storage, gthis was very bad for me (I understand now that it has more to do with the difference in the type of flash media in the device than with the OS). this was very bad for me, as I had a couple of applications that would only run if moved the slider all the way to Programs (I had an external SD card plugged into the device anyway, or maybe it was a miniSD, I forget) and now I could not do that and use my apps because of the amount of available system memory.
I kept my HTC Touch until the day the HTC Evo came out and was moderately happy with it, except for the microscopic screen size and the lack of wi-fi. right, now that you are all caught up with my past cell phone experiences it’s time to move on to the Evo…
I first heard about the “mysterious” HTC code named:Dragon from engadget back in October 2009, the first smart phone announced to have a 1GHz CPU! unbelieveable!! I was extremely excited, and I though wow I bet it will be out for the holiday sales season, and nothing happend, then I though well maybe in January, still nothing, but a mysterious direct message on twitter replying to my post to HTC to please tell me where and when I could get my hands on one (something I did atleast 2 times most weeks since November), the DM told me “you will, wait until January 24th”. so I got super excited and told everyone I knew that would care, and several that I knew would not! Somewhere in there the HTC 2010 roadmap was leaked and the first one was all non-USA, but one device looked to be the Dragon, but it was only rumor. I waited and waited, and finally the day came!! There was nothing. no tweets, no news releases, nothing on engadget, nothing on the forums, it was like all the hope in my life shrivelled up and died. Then I thought maybe I was looking in th ewrong places and the news would spread in a day or so and hit the sites I trolled… nothing. I believe it was around Feb 10th when something finally broke, a report that the fabled dragon was coming to Verizon and would be called “incredible” most of the specs remained the same, but it would not be available until after the HTC HD2 launched with WinMo and the 1GHz snapDragon, so the Dragon would no longer be the first 1GHz smart phone, but at least it would be the first 1GHz Android Phone… finally on March 24th HTC announced to the world that the HTC Evo 4G was coming to Sprint and was almost identical to the Incredible in specifications, code name “Supersonic”. I was so happy, finally something would be right in the world! The more I heard about it the happier I got, even the failed Flash Demo was not enough to deter me!
by the time you finish reading this, I should have posted the next part of this post (I wrote it all at the same time, but broke it up so they would not be quite so long)…
I have been a proud owner of one of Sprint‘s HTC Evo 4G cell phones now for about 10 days and I have decided to share my thoughts and experiences with you. I have always used Sprint, since 1997 or 1998.
To start I need to tell you a bit of background, I purchased my first smartphone in 2000 (maybe real early 2001) it was a Kyocera QCP6035 Palm phone, was in greyscale and was a touchscreen that required a stylus for input in a small box at the bottom and you had to write in palm script, and I was not impressed, but it was cool and no one had anything like it. the front looked like a normal cell phone, like the classic Nokia (if I can find images I’ll add them to the post at the end), but the face flipped up to reveal the Palm 2.x OS interface. This phone was broken, while I was talking on it and walking my dog (the phone was pressed between my shoulder and ear, the dog pulled hard, the phone flew out and hit the concrete destroying the screen). I replaced that cell phone with the Samsung SPH-I300 that was what would become the standard format of the smart phone, a large-ish screen with a D-pad, Talk and Hangup buttons, plus it had the classic Palm Home and Contacts buttons (the website I found the information on these two phones has them listed in order of discontinued date and states the the Kyocera was in use for about a year longer, I replaced the Kyocera with the Samsung, and that the Samsung had only been available for a week when I bought it). I used that phone for about 3 years and went back to it when other phones died or I broke them for another 2 years after that, and finally sold it for $65 almost 5 years after I bought it! I loved that phone, it came with 2 batteries, and I had adobe acrobat reader on it, that I used to read books, the battery would last 8 – 10 hours of constant use about 90% of the time, it came with a dock that charged the phone and the spare simultaneously.
After that I owned a Toshiba windows 2003 (first edition) smart phone and I liked it tremendously; however my friend had a Dell Axim x3 and it it killed my Toshiba on performance for everything it did, we had a lot of the same apps, having been friends for almost 10 years at that point and having lived together both in college and a bit after I graduated from college. I was very envious of the power of his PDA and the extra features it had that I did not (like a phone! which I thought was because I had a hybrid device and they had to make comprimises on the hardware), the only thing I noticed as a negative for the Dell is that he had to manually reboot the phone between every 18 and 36 hours to keep it running well. So, I decided that my next phone would be dumb and I would get a PDA and carry them both around all the time.
I purchased a Dell Axim x31 which was not the newest model, but the newest model (the x50) had just launched and was $200 more expensive. I was very happy with my choice, so much so, that I sold my Axim on ebay as soon as the Dell x51v started to appear for sale on ebay, and I used the money to pick one of those up, even though by this time I had read all the reviews stating how the Axim’s underperformed compared to similarly spec’d models from other handset makers, but I did not care, as the Dell cost $200-$400 less than those other models and the perfomance was good enough for me.
I loved my Dell and it was very hard for me to let go of it, I used it constantly, everyday, but eventually it became very difficult to carry my Axim around, my cell phone, AND my work cell phone. So I gave in and bought an HTC touch, the processor was 1 generation of ARM newer than my Dell, and as the Dell was a 624MHz, the Touch was a 400MHz, I knew I would take a hit on the hardware as it was a hybrid device, and I was okay with that to save pocket space. I was very disapointed with the tiny ass screen, I was very disapointed with the slow performance of the HTC Touch, even being a newer generation of processor, it was MUCH slower, had less system RAM, AND the Dell had WinMo 2k3SE which I upgraded to WinMo 2k5 and the Touch had WinMo 6. the biggestdifference between the two was that they removed the slider that let the user adjust how much system memory was to be used for applications and how much was to be used for user storage, gthis was very bad for me (I understand now that it has more to do with the difference in the type of flash media in the device than with the OS). this was very bad for me, as I had a couple of applications that would only run if moved the slider all the way to Programs (I had an external SD card plugged into the device anyway, or maybe it was a miniSD, I forget) and now I could not do that and use my apps because of the amount of available system memory.
I kept my HTC Touch until the day the HTC Evo came out and was moderately happy with it, except for the microscopic screen size and the lack of wi-fi. right, now that you are all caught up with my past cell phone experiences it’s time to move on to the Evo…
I first heard about the “mysterious” HTC code named:Dragon from Engadget back in October 2009, the first smart phone announced to have a 1GHz CPU! unbelieveable!! I was extremely excited, and I though wow I bet it will be out for the holiday sales season, and nothing happend, then I though well maybe in January, still nothing, but a mysterious direct message on twitter replying to my post to HTC to please tell me where and when I could get my hands on one (something I did atleast 2 times most weeks since November), the DM told me “you will, wait until January 24th”. so I got super excited and told everyone I knew that would care, and several that I knew would not! Somewhere in there the HTC 2010 roadmap was leaked and the first one was all non-USA, but one device looked to be the Dragon, but it was only rumor. I waited and waited, and finally the day came!! There was nothing. no tweets, no news releases, nothing on engadget, nothing on the forums, it was like all the hope in my life shrivelled up and died. Then I thought maybe I was looking in th ewrong places and the news would spread in a day or so and hit the sites I trolled… nothing. I believe it was around Feb 10th when something finally broke, a report that the fabled dragon was coming to Verizon and would be called “Incredible” most of the specs remained the same, but it would not be available until after the HTC HD2 launched with WinMo and the 1GHz snapDragon, so the Dragon would no longer be the first 1GHz smart phone, but at least it would be the first 1GHz Android Phone… finally on March 23rd HTC announced to the world that the HTC Evo 4G was coming to Sprint and was almost identical to the Incredible in specifications, code name “Supersonic”. I was so happy, finally something would be right in the world! The more I heard about it the happier I got, even the failed Flash Demo was not enough to deter me!
this post was published using the Easy Tether application on Android via my HTC Evo 4G, over a 3G network with spotty coverage. (I learned yesterday my cell coverage is poor where I am currently, because the there is no cell tower, the “antennas” are attached to a water tower, and therefore are not at the height that a normal cell tower would be, and as such is more easily blocked by building. just a note, there are NO cell towers in this immediate area, I believe all carriers have antennas mounted on the same water tower, I’ll try and get a picture of it later and add it to this post.)
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