HTC Aria Review

I shopped around for a smartphone for quite a while. Since I wanted to do mobile app development without having for fork over a lot of money for a Mac I decided I would skip the iPhone and go for an Android phone.

I have had my HTC Aria for about 6 months now. I purposely did not get a Nexus One or a faster Android phone because I wanted to develop games and run them on a slower device to make sure that they would run well on almost all Android phones. Since I use AT&T and I get a corporate discount my choices pretty much came down to the Aria or an unlocked Nexus One. Since I was going to start forking out money for a data plan, I figured I might as well get a subsidized phone. The reviews of the Aria were solid so I took the plunge.

Overall I am very happy with the phone. Aside from occasional glitches it has met or exceeded my expectations.

The speed of the phone is very good. It is definitely quicker than my 2nd gen iPod Touch at pretty much everything. Since this is my first smartphone - the iPod Touch is the only thing I have to compare it to.

The screen looks very good. The only issue I have had is when I had the brightness turned down in bright sunlight and it was impossible to read. Once I figured out to increase the brightness it was still impossible to read in direct sunlight, but give it a little shade and it is workable. I assume that this is similar to most phones. At 480x320 and 3.2 inches, the screen is smaller than most high end Android phones. I don't do a lot of web browsing on it so it is fine for me. If I did a lot of web surfing I would probably want a bigger, high resolution screen.

One reason I chose the Aria is because it is a little smaller and fits very well into my front jeans pocket. It is light, yet feels very solid. It has already survived at least 3 drops onto hard with no damage.

I personally like the Sense UI. I definitely prefer it over the stock Android launcher. It is very easy to use.

I have experienced a few glitches with the phone:

• Headphones - Sometimes if you plug in headphones while media is playing, the phone won't send the audio to the headphones and the only workaround I have found so far is to reboot.
• Data Connection - Several times my phone seems like it is connected according to the status icons, but will not send or receive data. Sometimes stopping and starting the data connection worked. Other times it needed a reboot before working again.
• Browser Crash - This has only happened a few times and it happens just as often (if not more so) on my iPod Touch.
• Total Crash - Just the other day the phone crashed while I was playing music, doing email, and getting driving directions all at the same time. This was the only time the phone ever spontaneously rebooted - but this sure didn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling.

The one last thing I'll say about my Aria (and I think this applies to some other Android phones as well) is there is not a lot of memory for storing programs. I have only 25MB free on mine and I haven't loaded a lot of large apps. Why does it have this limitation? I have an 8GB iPod Touch that lets me use almost the entire 8GB of flash memory for programs if I want to. The fact that Android 2.2 includes support for optionally moving 2.2 compatible apps to an SD card is good, but let's tell it like it is - it is a big hack that should not be necessary. The engineers at Apple were probably laughing hysterically when they heard about it. Was this just simply a way for phone manufacturers to cut costs? Maybe someone at Google could enlighten us as to how this came to be.