Android Phone HTC Legend Acquired

A few days ago, my son smashed my phone almost beyond repair. This morning, in a moment of impulse, I went to Old Ding’s place and spent 3K RMB to bring home an HTC Legend. As a staunch supporter of Microsoft and Windows CE, I resisted the temptation of Apple (who invited me to WWDC in the US plus San Francisco sightseeing) and didn’t get an iPhone. I resisted Blackberry (invited to their Waterloo headquarters in Canada) and didn’t get a Blackberry. I resisted Symbian (invited to a royal resort outside Beijing for entertainment) and didn’t get a Symbian phone. This time, under the temptation of Google’s 136K RMB donation to establish an Android lab at our college, I finally strayed. It proves the saying: “There’s no unbreakable family, only insufficient effort from the mistress.”

After playing with it for a few hours, I found Android is surprisingly crappy. Many built-in apps in the start menu don’t even work:

What’s YouTube, Picasa, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia? All those icons return 404 not found. What a tragedy. Google, what have you done? The Chinese people are very upset.