8 reasons I love my Android phone

Just got my HTC Desire for a couple of weeks and boy am I loving it, Android has truly become a geeks dream come true. And there are plenty of reasons why its an iPhone/Crackberry killer and Windows 7 doesn’t stand a chance, but here’s my top 8 reasons why,

• 1. Freedom to root

  
  Its my phone and I should and can do what ever I want with it. Even Android’s App Store called Market place hosts apps that require root privileges. Moreover, I don’t have to worry over the next firmware update breaking my jailbreak and all my apps that require root. I also don’t have to wait for iPhone dev team or geohotsomeone to figure out another exploit to jailbreak it.
  

• 2. Live wallpaper

  
  You can setup interactive background wallpapers on the home screen. One of the coolest one I found was an actual self playing Super Mario live wallpaper. This sure sucks up battery life but its amusing as hell.
  

  
  

• 3. Data backed up in Google’s cloud

  
  This is a matter of convenience, is debatable and will probably haunt me in future when Google becomes evil. But in the meantime, it is awesome and doesn’t need any dedicated program like iTunes to handle the sync. Yes, for other mobile OSes, there’s Google Sync to do so but it does not work as seamless as on android (believe me, I’ve used Google sync on iPhone and Windows phone 6.1 and 6.5).
  

• 4. HTC’s People app for managing contacts

  
  I absolutely adore this app that came with the phone for managing your contacts because it links up my contacts with my Facebook account, twitter account and probably a number of other accounts. If it was not able to automatically add a user, you can just manually link it. After linking the accounts, their Facebook or twitter photos show up in your address book! It even synced up all my Facebook friend’s birthdays into my calendar.
  

• 5. Unlock screen options

  
  You get the option of the usual swipe to unlock then enter a pin OR a visible pattern swipe to unlock mechanism. Essentially, the visible pattern swipe allows you to set a custom swipe pattern that doubles as your authentication mechanism.
  

• 6. Metal detector

  
  What else can I say, someone figured out how to use the magnetic compass to pick up metallic interference.
  

  
  

• 7. Send content from Browser to Phone

  
  Chrometophone is a cool project from Google that allows you to send a link or text to your android phone with just one click from Chrome or Firefox. Which pretty much means, I can read an article on my desktop, then send it to my phone to continue reading when on the go!
  

• 8. Expandable space

  
  You get a sd card slot on pretty much all android phones in addition to any built in storage space, so rather than buy a phone with a fixed size of 8gb, 16gb or 32gb. You can buy a sd card to suit your desired size and read/write speed.