General Got Milestone Yesterday

I have a HTC Hero with MoDaCo 3.0 on it. The milestone is pretty cool even if rather expensive. I don't have a droid to compare it against. Have noted a few things here in the US with it:

1. Running without a SIM is difficult when you first power it up. Setting up for US English is almost impossible and getting past or ignoring the setup screens is far more difficult than with my Hero.
2. After putting my ATT SIM card in it, it works and I am able to create my accounts on it for google and exchange email. The calendar app is not very useful since it does not show the combined google and exchange calendars like the Sense UI. I like having everything in one place. Setting up for a exchange 2007 environment with a self-signed certificate was not terribly challenging.
3. If I pull the SIM card, all the paid apps go away from the market and I can only see the free ones. I don't remember that with the Hero.
4. Root will be a major thing for me since I need to use the market enabler to fool the market when traveling in Singaore and India.
5. Wifi seems rather strange at times and will associate with a WPA2 Personal hotspot I have but then drop every so often.
6. Getting used to the slider and a real keyboard takes some work after hunting and pecking my way through the virtual keyboard on my Hero.
7. It does not appear that there is bult-in facebook integration like on the Hero. I need to investigate this further.

Perhaps a few of the issues get solved with the upcoming January 2010 release. As far as usability goes at this point, The HTC Hero with the Sense UI wins in a few areas like integration of applications like the calendar; but the milestone wins at setting up exchange 2007. I always had to deal with the SSL certificate not in the root store errors on my Hero. The milestone has a setting to always accept the ssl certificate! Yay! The overall interface on the milestone is very attractive and things are close at hand that make using the phone easier. On my Hero, it took a bit of work to make things comfortable and usable.

 

Hi-

I had purchased the SIM Card for use with my unlocked HTC Hero phone so it was in there for a bit. It has a data plan associated with it already that I purchased as part of the simcard purchase. The APN was not included for ATT so I had to find the APN settings and then create a new APN file. Not quite pop-in. More like pop-in, futz around, and create a new APN.

The phone works now on the ATT edge data network because the radio is not right for ATT I am gathering.

I'm hoping a root exploit comes along so I can run backup for root users and the market enabler before I take off for Hanoi and Singapore later this month. If not, I'll just use the hero phone I have I guess.