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My 2.1 OTA experience & observations

bjf88

Android Enthusiast
Dec 13, 2009
384
37
DISCLAIMER: This got huge and long, read at your own risk!

Well, I woke up this morning with the system update notification waiting in my notificaiton bar timestamped 00:36. I decided not to jump on it right away. I have been following this whole process closely and was getting the impression that it just might not be worth it. I have been very happy (and lucky I guess!) with a very stable 1.5 and was hesitant to make any changes.

So after doing some last minute back ups and a little more reading around here, I went ahead and took the plunge. The update took about 20 minutes total and soon I had a brand new looking phone.

I did encounter a few FC's right away and hated that fact that my Facebook contacts were automatically put in my contacts, so I ended up doing a factory reset.

Before Factory reset:
-All apps were all there
-Contacts synced immediately
-ALL Facebook friends were added to my contacts (no thank you!)
-Layout/wallpaper/scenes were back to default
-"Favorites" "person with a heart" icon in people is now missing, however, when the People widget was added, Google must have remembered them because they were all in there. Now they are in the Group section under favorites.
-Swype was still default
Can't remember anything else...

After factory reset
-Everything was gone, of course. Had to re-install apps.
-Contacts and calender synced pretty quickly.
-Did not sign into Facebook during setup to avoid having all contacts synced. I later then went to settings>accounts & sync and signed in to Facebook for HTC Sense. Not sure what the difference is between the Facebook and Facebook for HTC Sense option. THANKFULLY it did not pull over all my friends, but just linked everyone in my contacts to their Facebook. Pictures did show up almost right away blurry, but then sharpened up after a few minutes.
-LOVE that I can turn off that strong haptic feedback on the 4 soft buttons. So far I don't miss it at all. It makes things seem so much smoother.
-General navigation around the phone is quick, smooth, and very cooperative.
-Navigation/navigator is awesome! GPS located me within about 2 feet! Hardly any lag.
-Weather is working just fine, no change from 1.5
-Love that you can set Search to look in different places, not just the web.
-Re-installed Swype from my SD card and it is working great.
-Hello YOUTUBE!!! It's good to have it back. Kind of wish I could find a way to make it play in high quality by default...
-Battery life has been understandably horrible. It was fully charged at 8am this morning, did the update at about 10am and by 3:30 pm I was blinking red. I've been playing with it almost contstantly, so I know it will get better. Just takes a little tweaking and time, just like when I first got it.
-Weather animation is cool, just wish it would also work with the other smaller weather widgets. I don't use the big time/weather widget anymore, it's just way too big.
-Speed dial is working for me, everyone I've assigned is sticking. Haven't done a reboot yet, though.
-Dialer is working fine, no lag to speak of and contact's photos are showing up like normal and almost immediately.
-Phone calls come in just fine, contact's photo is showing up right away and is focused.
-Vibrate at the beginning of a call is slightly annoying. I'm sure I'll get used to it.
-Market is MUCH improved.
-For some reason, when I added the music widget or even just open the music app, the first song will play be default. The play button isn't even pressed. So I have to press play and then pause to get it to stop. Weird... but it hasn't happened again.
-People app is a little off. The spaces between each contact seem a little bigger and the contacts on the bottom are almost cut in half. Wish they could change the formatting to fix that.
-I do not have the 50% without signal bug. I couldn't find it at first, but just looked it up on here and I am at 14%

OVERALL: I like it! I very much agree with the theory that good 1.5 = good 2.1. I also think that doing the factory reset helped avoid a lot of the bugs most people have reported. Starting fresh! Cheers! :D
 
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