Although I very much love my Ubuntu phone, and will continue to do so, I’ve come to accept that it’s very much work in progress. The concept’s brilliant and the phone’s so intuitive to use, so I’ve no plans to stop using it. And it’s great to be part of something from the beginning.

But I’ve, after a few months, accepted that I do need a phone that can do mainstream stuff. At least as an interim measure. So I bought an Android phone yesterday. It’s pretty decent, an HTC, and it, well, works.

It’s not as beautiful, or as nice to use as my Ubuntu phone though.

While it may be work in progress, and it’s a little buggy, there’s now a pretty decent email client for the Ubuntu phone. The set-up for my old BT account was really straightforward, although I’ve not yet had any success with my preferred account. It’s just a matter of looking up the right settings and a bit of trial and error, I’m sure. The connection issue over 3G’s still there, but it’s not happening every day and isn’t too much of a pain.

I’m not at all regretting my move away from a mainstream phone and I have to say that I’m thoroughly enjoying the experience.

At this rate, I’m going to run out of Roman numerals. I lost connectivity over 3G again today, but at least I’ve found on a forum that there’s a networking bug. So, now I know that the problem’s not down to my phone, three, or me, I’ll patiently wait for a fix. I do love the phone though.

After replacing the default APN settings with the manual settings from the three site, my phone now has an internet connection again. Of course, since the phone had randomly worked a couple of days ago, the problem may not have been resolved. I shall monitor the situation.

Well, my phone has again lost the ability to receive data via 3G. My optimism of yesterday may be fading.

Well, it seems as though three may have been the cause of my phone’s limited connectivity. With no intervention on my part, I was able to open a browser with no error messages. And it’s worked fine since.

So it seems that I can retire the iPhone after all.

I’m now wondering whether the problems I’m experiencing with 3G data are something to do with three. I can’t find anything on the Internet which would explain why I can only get web connection over wifi. But the phone’s so new there’s not a lot of information out there.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the phone; it’s very much like using a computer. There’s even a decent file manager, which lets you see just how close this is to full blown linux.

But I miss occupying myself with eBay and Twitter on the bus to and from work. The only immediate solution might be to use a second phone.

Well, my new Ubuntu phone is proving to be something of a challenge. But I’m thoroughly enjoying the experience.

The sparsity of apps isn’t (yet) proving to be the pain I’d anticipated. There’s an eBay app, although it defaults to the US (which is odd, since the phone is only available in the EU) and I now have Twitter up and running.

It’d be nice to have a native email application (the phone currently only has a gmail app), although this is planned in a future update. And the WordPress app only supports wordpress.com sites (I’m using my old iPhone right now, but will probably switch to my old Blackberry tablet until something else comes along).

What else? Oh, the phone would initially work in 2G, and refused to pick up a three signal, but there was a software update waiting and that only took an hour to figure out. I still don’t seem to be able to use the browser with anything other than wifi, but that’s the next thing I need to figure out.

Overally, I love the phone and the minor hassles aren’t detracting from the new experience.