Time to switch phones again

I finally gave up on the Palm Pre for corporate email. I really tried hard to make it work but eventually I just stopped using the phone altogether.

The phone wouldn't autoconnect to known wifi networks. What's worse, Half the time I found WiFi had turned itself off.

And, The phone couldn't stay connected to the outlook server even with a good wifi connection . My inbox was never up to date. I'd have to re-login to outlook to force a sync. Messages would get stuck in the outbox for days and there was no option to resend.  It was infuriating to find emails hadn't been sent when i thought they had been.

It all became a vicious cycle when my growing disuse of the phone meant it was more likely for the battery to be dead when i pulled it out.

So I was missing meetings and not responding to emails very fast. Not good.

So... In desperation I got a used Motorola Atrix off ebay. I wanted it for the fingerprint sensor, because y'all know how much I hate the 4 digit PIN.

The fingerprint sensor works pretty well, although half the time it takes more than one swipe. But it double-buzzes you when the swipe fails, so at least you can get into the phone without having to look at the screen.

And - since I'm using it without a sim card - it autoconnects to known wifi networks with no intervention, which is awesome because there's 4 different networks available to it between the home and work networks. So it's got connectivity as often as it possibly can. Thank you Motorola! The Pre could never do that.

Never loses contact with with exchange, never leaves mail in the outbox. Email just. plain. works.

Other advantages of the Atrix :

Better screen. The QHD screen, even tho its the much maligned pentile LED type , has higher contrast, more resolution, and less reflectivity outdoors than the HTC Inspire 's.

WWAN radio: speaker, mic, voice quality rock solid as I would expect from Motorola. Atrix calls were crap.

Music speaker: kicks ass. Great fidelity and loud. So loud I don't even need to plug into the cassette adapter in the car. As good as my old Blackberry 's, which was way ahead of its time.

Fast: opens apps and browser pages faster than any other device i've ever used.

Downsides :

4" screen seems really small after the Inspire 's humongous 4.3" display. Makes the keyboard smaller too.

Camera is just poor, and there's no excuse for this. Noisy sensor, terrible in low light, not sharp, low contrast, dull colors. Certainly the worst Android camera i've ever used (and I've used the Samsung Galaxy Tab, dell streak, htc inspire, htc incredible). Dudn't matter that it's 5MP. It's like going back to the Blackberry Bold's camera and that was only 2MP. 2009 called, they want their camera back.

Plus... After 6 months it just seemed like time for a new phone. :-)
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