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Huawei Ascend II

Cricket hooked me up with an Android phone for $99.

Huawei Ascend II

Ever since Google announced the Nexus, I’ve wanted to play with Android. My choices were to send $500 to Google for an unlocked phone or go into a 2 year contract with some wireless carrier to get the price of the phone down.

Our cell phones are all on prepaid plans, on various networks, so there’s bound to be one that has bars, no matter where we roam. Going into a contract didn’t appeal to me, so I waited, until now.

Yesterday, I walked into my local Cricket store and they were offering the Huawei Ascend II for $99. An Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) device on a $55 all you can eat month to month plan, how could I resist.

Since I got the phone, I haven’t put down the Linux computer in my pocket. By now, I’m very familiar with the interface and it’s quite speedy on the Ascend II. The phone defaults to a desktop metaphor, just drag and drop your most used apps onto your various desktops. Number of desktops can be configured, just like any X based window manager, and swiping left or right takes you to the various desktops a-la Compiz.

Decided to create a new Google account just for the phone, so we could play around with all that Google has to offer at an arm’s length. It’s very fascinating to see the phone figure out my address from it’s incredible navigation capabilities, and direct me to the nearest restaurant after reading favorable reviews, but at the same time it feels creepy.

Orwellian or not, it’s the direction we’re heading and I have to keep pace with the changing times. Wonder if there’s a theft security app that when a signal is received by the handset, it wipes away all storage devices and resets the phone to factory defaults? Or else I can look into creating a cron job that monitors the Gmail inbox for a self-destruct order and kicks off a script with a bunch of dd commands, yeah I’m feeling safer already.

It makes me wonder when I grow to be that age
Will I be walking down the street begging for your spare change?