It has been a few more weeks since my first post about using the touchMyself 3G and I thought it high time to relay more thoughts. Overall, I love my phone. I love having instant access to email, RSS, Wikipedia, Google Maps, etc. I have basically quit checking my gmail account on my Mac. In fact, I have more or less completely neglected my beloved MacBook Pro recently, using it only for the little bit of web development that I do outside of work and the times when I just need a big screen.
It comes down to this: if the iPhone had never been created, then I would be standing on a mountaintop singing the praises of Android to the world. My sermon would start something like this, “Friends, are you tired of the abusive relationship that you are forced into with your phone? Well a little robot is here to rescue from that abuse and deliver you to a blissful world where information is always a touchscreen away.” Sadly, that is not the case, and the iPhone’s existence means that Android developers and phone manufacturers need to pick up the slack fast before Apple goes from having most of the momentum to all of it. Don’t get me wrong, I am happy that the iPhone is so successful. It raises the bar for other phone manufacturers and my stock value. But the market needs healthy competition. For far too long, we have had awful choices in handsets and the existence of iPhone OS, Android, and Palm’s WebOS is extremely exciting for the future of the little chunks of plastic and silicon that we cram in our pockets. But I digress…
This is supposed to be about my impressions of Android. As I said previously, overall it’s a great platform. However, there are numerous little things that drive me up the wall. Granted, I am much more critical of the little details than most users. My wife, for example, thinks her touchMyself 3G is pretty fucking amazing. However, if no one points out the flaws, how are they going to improve? My laundry list follows.
The Good
- I’m starting to get pretty good with the keyboard and after trying BigKeys and TouchPal, I’m back with the stock Android keyboard. The main reason is that I finally got good with the suggestion bar (or whatever its official name is). I can type an entire email now with only a couple glaring typos. I’ve found the key is to just keep hitting keys even when you know you hit the wrong one and the suggestions are usually one tap away from perfect spelling. This makes a huge difference since in the first couple weeks, it took me 5 minutes to type 1 sentence!
- I have started to find some actual quality apps. Layar is my current fave. It’s an excellent augmented reality app that makes great use of the OS and the phone hardware. And the interface is, while not beautiful, a shining gem in a sea of crap. Google’s Sky Map is another excellent example.
- I love the notification bar. Email, Twitter posts (tweet? really?), texts, RSS feeds, hockey scores(!), etc. all right there collected in one neat place, accessible from any app (with the exception of the ones that default to fullscreen). From the little I’ve seen of iPhone push notifications, the notifications drawer is way more practical.
The Bad
- Using the music player is like jogging with a 90’s-era portable CD
player with no skip protection. If any other process is using the phones network connection while music is playing, the song inexplicably skips and stutters. Why the fuck does network access effect an app that is accessing files on the SD card? When I am listening to music, I don’t want some background process to disrupt it. Said process needs to wait til I’m fucking done, thank you. - The only way to store apps on the SD card is to root the phone. Why should this matter? Because, as an app junkie, I can bring this thing to a creeping halt by having to store all of my apps in the built-in phone memory.
- I am sick and fucking tired of getting the little popup error message that says something to the effect of “This process so-and-so is not responding, do you want to quit or wait for it to catch up.” The most annyoing part about this is that 90% of the time, the process in question is the friggin’ home screen! Seriously?! Not to mention by the time this message appears, I have already waiting something stupid like 20 seconds for the home screen to appear and touching “Wait” almost always just shows it as if nothing had ever happened. I have a feeling this is one of the drawbacks of having an OS that is hardware agnostic; Google had to account for all possible exceptions on all possible handsets.
The Ugly
- Widgets are simultaneously awesome and fucking horrible. I love the practicality and the instant access that they offer, but use more than 2 or 3 and your home screen comes to a screeching halt.
- 90% of the user interfaces of apps in the Market.
