For more than two years, I have been using Blackberry smartphone for my dialing and mail needs. The service is awesome especially for my email needs, but the charges I am paying for the relatively monopoly service are very high by today’s standards. Also, the handsets and the OS are relatively constrained and I am not using the full potential of the spare network bandwidth I have at home and at work.

Given this situation, I am compelled to make a switchover. Going by the choices in the market, there is no better option than Android based smartphones. I really like the Apple phones and their OS, but the feeling of lock-in always haunts me. So I decided to go with Android.

I bought a HTC Wildfire S, the entry level smartphone that should take care of my primarily email and social networking needs. Played with it for the last few hours and configured my email accounts, Google utilities, facebook and twitter on the phone. Being new to capacitive touch screen, I am having a few challenges typing my emails, but the adoption curve seems to be steep enough so far. Currently using this phone with my second cell phone connection, still leaving the contacts on the Blackberry with my primary carrier. Will make a switchover of the phones during next weekend.

Haven’t put in additional memory on the phone yet, want to test it with the basic memory for a few days. Hence haven’t downloaded many apps yet. Using the default ones that come with the Gingerbread (2.3.3) installation on the phone.

Will post more updates after I play with the phone for a while.