Epidiascope

I recently started using an android-powered Google Ion (also known as the HTC Magic or T-Mobile myTouch) courtesy of the Google I/O conference.

I really like it, though I do miss the hard keyboard of the G1 I borrowed for several weeks. I feel that the smaller size is a fair trade, since it now fits comfortably in my pocket, where the G1 felt quite bulky. I had assumed that I would generally use the horizontally oriented keyboard since the keys are larger in that format, and typing should be faster. In fact, I find that I usually use the vertical orientation and type with my thumbs. The reason for this is that I can see more of the content I’m replying to, and don’t have to toggle the keyboard on and off to switch between reading a conversation and replying to it. Overall, the soft keyboard works pretty well, though I’ve found it works better with my thumbs than my fingers (I recently broke both my wrists, and my thumbs are immobilized, so I’m forced to type with the fingers).

When I first got the phone, the interface was snappy, and everything responded quickly. Over the past few weeks of use, things seemed to slow down to the point that menus would take several seconds to load, and pulling down the notification tray was sometimes not possible. Needless to say, I was extremely unhappy about this turn of affairs. I tried rebooting the phone, but that only caused a minor improvement. I checked to make sure there weren’t spurious background processes, and that the phone’s memory wasn’t overflowing. Finally today, I discovered the fix quite by accident. I am notoriously bad about checking my voicemail, and have had messages in my inbox for nearly the entire time I’ve had the phone. Amazingly, when I checked my voicemail and cleared out the inbox, the phone instantly returned to it’s old snappy self. My best guess is that clearing the notification tray entirely was what fixed the problem.

This may be related to issue 3453 in the android source, but my resolution seems to be different enough that it might be a separate bug.