So Sprint released Eclair for the Moment the other day and while I’m slightly sad of losing all my naughty pictures of Ashlynn my text messages, I’m rather impressed with the update for the most part.
The only annoying part of the update was the damn device drivers, they included them in the downloader, which was fine, except it involved uninstalling the old ones, and then installing those, restarting, and then rebooting the phone in order to flash it with the update. Win7 however didn’t want to play nice in some step of the process and I ended up having to restart a couple times and uninstall/reinstall the damn thing to get it to work.
After the update, the most notable feature is an actual locking screen similar to the Hero or iPhone. Two little sliders slide to unlock or silence your phone if you need to, as well as the time. Frankly given the “pocket dialing” 911 people experienced with the pattern lock feature before and my experience with third-party lock screen apps from Market, it’s about damn time they included this one.
Nothing much changes with the home screen, though the lead-in and lead-out animations as you switch in and out of programs and the home screens have a fade-in and fade-out transition. The Moment only has three home screens but three is honestly all I need, hell, I probably only use two. My main home screen has the Retro Clock and Calendar app along with Curvefish’s OnOff apps for Wifi, Bluetooth, and Silent/Vibrate, which Errant cued me into early on and I love for having one-touch access to those functions. I use Handcent for messaging and the default phone and contact buttons for calls. The menus are pretty much the same with a little UI-tweaking here and there, and several of the default apps got updates for 2.1 including a much nicer Youtube UI and Google Maps. Facebook and Seesmic, which I use for Twitter, remain the same.
Anyone who knows me and tech knows I love anything that allows customization. It’s like half of the fun of owning one of these damn things. Handcent is an excellent text message app that allows you to customize the notification tone for each person who messages you, but also allows you to customize the backgrounds and colors of each person who messages you. The only thing is does not do, which I imagine may happen someday, is allow you to place people into groups, which would be nifty for me to organize my work people and friends, but probably more so for Ashlynn as she still gets FB notices sent to hers and that was hard to sort through before I switched her to Handcent on her Hero.
Finally the only other significant update was the camera, which wasn’t so much significant as they changed around some of the UI to make it easier to access functions like flash and settings while staying in the camera screen, although I haven’t found a full screen button.
Overall they say the OS is faster and some functions were changed or streamlined. Speed wise I don’t see a terrible difference, though it may have to do with the fact that in 2.0, Sprint had a lot of their unneeded crap start up when the phone started up, like the NFL shit and NASCAR. Since I use Advanced Task Killer I used to just kill everything on startup so it would use what I was using or the mail and sync. In 2.1 I noticed the startup is a little faster presumably because it is loading less on startup, which is good. I also noticed they added Text-to-Speech in so that it will say the name of who is calling you. Neat, I suppose.
In short, I love Eclairs. The food. A phone may be fine too.