The HTC flagship of its time, Mytouch 3G, was a small form factor candybar style phone and a great addition to the growing population of smartphones. My first initial experience with this phone was that it was easy to use, operate, and very user friendly.
This phone specs are located at this web address MyTouch 3g specs.
A list of simplified specs are listed below.
- Android 1.5 (could move to android 2.1 with an OTA update)
- ARM 11 CPU clocked @ 528MHz
- Adreno 130 GPU
- 128MB of ram/512MB Rom
- 3.2in display @ 180ppi with corning gorilla glass
- 320 x 480 Resolution
With all things considered RIM (Research In Motion) and the blackberry OS and the Windows Mobile platform at the time were not viable competitors in the smartphone market. Yes they did allow people to have a smartphone, but they were very limited in what the could do, not hardware wise, but with the software. With Android and HTC bringing the 3G to the table it allowed for things such as customization of the UI, downloads of free games and software, the ability to sync to personal email, stream online videos more efficiently,provide a better web browser experience, and most importantly of all is the use of adobe flash.
As many positives there are with this phone, there are always negatives that do go along with it as well, and with this phone it wasnt lacking in that area.
As shown, this phone had impressive specs on paper, but how would it perform overtime in the hands of a user? The answer to that is it would succumb to the lack of hardware that supported the robust features it sported out of the box.
Initially this phone worked and operated very smoothly, but it would soon operate slowly and its overall performance would diminish over time. The reason for this would be that the more you added to the phone, albeit new applications, pictures, or videos, this phone could not process all of this data efficiently. This seemed to be a serious flaw in all android handsets initally, and it was both due to the lack of hardware specs and troublesome coding in the android OS on the handsets.
Initially I did some testing with this phone when I got it and wasnt all too happy with what it couldnt do. This phone was presented in such a way that you could customize the phone and make the UI look how you wanted it, essentially represent your particular style. What was not mentioned is at what cost you could do this, and that was if you applied a skin via a theme manager and then added icon packs the hardware on the phone and the OS didnt seem to handle that change very well, initially and over a period of time.
In order to have a good experience with this phone and not experience a lot of the issues present with android at the time, you had to essentially keep the phone as clean as possible and with as little extra apps on the phone as possible.
These issues seemed to counter the overall appeal to this phone very quickly, especially with the support lacking from both HTC and T-mobile themselves.
Overall, this phone was a good alternative to the current market of smartphones and allowed for a better experience for those who wanted to step away from Apple, RIM, and Windows branded phones. However, the lack of support from HTC and T-Mobile and some of the issues present still proved that android was still in its infancy and had a lot of work to do to be a major contender.
