Having been passed back and forth between Vodafone and Carphone Warehouse for two days, both companies have now finally admitted that my Vodafone contract wasn’t set-up correctly and that’s why I still don’t have service on my HTC Desire. But I’m assured that it will go live by 4pm on Monday, and I’m inclined to believe them this time.

However I can already use the phone on WiFi and I absolutely love it. It was a bold leap to jump from the iPhone because it’s such a nice phone, and there was a very real chance that the Desire would be a disappointment. But it isn’t. Not even a little bit. Right now I can’t think of a single thing that I don’t like about it. Sure I can see that the Android operating system isn’t quite as ‘refined’ as the iPhone, and it certainly won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but at heart I’m a tinkerer and I like to have total control over my gadgets and the freedom to hack away and change them as I see fit. Android gives me that freedom.

For me, the Desire is better than the iPhone in every way.

Before I got the Desire I started writing a simple Android app that I tested on an emulator. This afternoon I finally got time to plug the Desire in to my laptop and it took all of 10 minutes to get it up and running for development. Getting the test app to run on the Desire was then a 2-second job.

And here it is. It ain’t much, but it’s a start. It’s a Facebook app by the way. There isn’t a really good Facebook app for Android so I’ll do what every good tinkerer does: I’ll make my own.

android facebook begins