Virgin Mobile Motorola Triumph
The Intercept always seemed to have problems flaking out when the connection was bad. When it started rebooting itself spontaneously two or three times a week, I decided to get a new phone.
After reading up on the latest Virgin Mobile android phones, I picked the Motorola Triumph (which also happened to be on sale at Radio Shack).
Since the Intercept was upgraded to Android 2.2 and the Triumph comes with 2.2 already installed, they are very similar to use, but the Triumph is definitely bigger (which can be good and bad :-). I am fairly certain the Triumph needs charging more often though.
On the good side, the Triumph has a lot more memory and a faster processor, so it seems much zippier to use. One thing good about the size is that it can't turn sideways when I carry it in my shirt pocket, so taking it out of my pocket doesn't act like a screen swipe to answer the phone :-).
The same annoying Virgin Mobile startup and shutdown sounds made me just as anxious to root the phone as I was on the Intercept, but fortunately, it turns out that it comes from the factory almost already rooted: See this astonishing article (especially astonishing since Virgin Mobile claims not to want people to root their phones :-).
After that, it was a question of finding this article about the locations of the startup and shutdown sounds. It didn't quite work as written for me. I couldn't just rename the original files, I had to move them completely off the flash memory and onto the sdcard, but once I did that, I get glorious silence when rebooting the phone.
The single most annoying thing was the somewhat newer version of the calendar app. The old calendar had arrow buttons at the top of the month display to go forward and backward between months. The arrows are gone in the new version. There is no menu item for switching months, swiping back and forth in the same direction the arrows previously pointed didn't work, so I was wondering if the app was just broken. I finally found a completely different calendar app that I was trying out when it popped up a tooltip telling me to swipe up and down to change months. I went back and tried that on the stock calendar, and it worked. It only took most of one evening to discover. I love interfaces that are so intuitive they need no documentation... (and if swiping back and forth isn't actually used to do anything, why not make it switch months the same as swiping up and down?).
The most amazing thing I've found is the Epson iPrint app. I happen to have an Artisan 725 printer, and the app supports printing (and scanning) directly over my local Wi-Fi network to the Artisan. No google cloud needs to be involved. (Not that I need to print from my phone all that often, but it is nice to know that I can without giving google a copy of my printout :-).
...And in later news, I just got a micro HDMI cable from Amazon ($5 with free shipping, rather than $30 at Best Buy or Radio Shack) and it actually works. Plug the cable into the TV on one side and the phone on the other and in a few seconds, the phone screen appears on the TV. Don't actually know if I'll ever have any real use for it, but I had to give it a try :-).
Here's the first bug I've found (not a big one).
I close with a link to my home page.