My day with Android
I now love my iPhone even more.
Long story short, my friend, an Apple lover who has an iPod touch decided to buy an HTC Legend recently. It seems, while he loved the iPod touch, he was beginning to get a bit too used to the UI and was looking for something new. An acceptable reason, and I encouraged him, curious to get my hands on an Android phone after all this time.
Well, he got it this weekend and brought it to work today. While it had some really nice touches, overall, the phone, well, Android, wasn't very impressive.
To name a few, the UI felt so
underdone. Almost beta-like and lacked a lot of the thought put into Apple's iOS. To name a few
- I was in Contacts, and went to make a new contact. I then decided to go back, deciding to view a different contact instead, but saw that it created an "Untitled contact" despite me not putting in an ounce of information. What? Why save that and create a useless contact I now have to delete?
- Edit Contacts was at the very button and acted just like a button to add more information to the contact like a phone number. Unlike in iOS, where it sits in the top right corner, this was just thrown in. Weird.
- Android Market was really depressing. Not only was the Market's UI saddening (why take up that much room with that banner?! It's obscenely large and useless). The apps, even from big content producers like Twitter, were not very impressive. I couldn't find a killer app, and of the apps I downloaded, none were all too polished.
And it doesn't even have native currencies? There were also a lot of music pirating apps and ringtone wallpaper junk too. I see why Apple's market is curated.
- Scrolling was just poorly designed. It was laggy when totally zoomed out, almost-fluid when scrolled all the way in (but the physics engine still feels really unintuitive compared to iOS, as well as too fast) and due to the lack of rubber-banding (Apple patented, I know) it just abruptly stopped when it hit the bottom. There was no visual queue really, and it was hard to tell it was the bottom sometimes.
- Zooming
Not bad. Multi-touch wasn't too bad, not as fluid as iPhone's. Double-tap to zoom was horrible, though, and formatted it really weird. I definitely prefer iPhone's here, sometimes it would just randomly zoom in. iPhone formats the zoom to the width of the picture/block of text. Much nicer.
- Battery life. Wow. We had to charge this phone twice (top to bottom) and I was only testing it, running it through the paces. I think it would be hard to get it through a day.
- Reception wasn't too nice (iPhone 4 seems to have troubles here too, but this was even when not held). I had 4 bars on my iPhone in the same area, on the same network, that the Legend had zero! What?!
- Keyboard was really bloated. May just take some getting used to.
- Trackball more or less useless.
- The fact the phone probably won't get 2.2 until the Nexus One is one 2.3 or 3.0.
- Music app was absolute junk.
- Personal preference, but the 3.2" screen was a bit small. The AMOLED wasn't that impressive either, and it was pitiful outdoors (but not quite unreadable).
- The phone actually got hot. Like, uncomfortable to hold. Not quite burn you, but like, why is this so hot sort of thing.
- The messaging was so strange. It like staggered the messages. We'd be texting 1-to-1 responses (like me him me him me him) but Android would have me me me me me him him me him him him him and we couldn't figure out why.
- Some other quirks, such as lack of consistency across the UI and a general absence of polish.
And then the
worst thing, ugh, this was painfully dumb. So my friend, just getting the phone, had not been a Google user of any sort yet. No Gmail, no Google account whatsoever, nothing.
I find myself at the Android Market and it requests a Google account. I'm a Gmail user, so I input my information, remembering to log out later as I just wanted an app. So, I download Twitter for Android, play around a bit, and then go to log out of my Google account.
First thing I noticed, it pulled all my email onto his phone. What?! I just wanted to download an app. Fine, I'll log out, he won't see my email anymore.
Then
there's no log out button! What on earth, Google?! "This account is being used by an app and cannot be deleted. If you wish to remove, you must reset phone to factory settings." What. WHAT. I stare blankly at the phone. You have to be kidding me. A logout button is impossible on Android, I guess.
My friend, now rather pissed, wipes his phone completely to factory settings. Lost all his contacts he brought over from his old phone (now gone), his bookmarks, everything. Wow. Impressively engineered, Google. It must be too much to ask to be able to check my email on his phone, because he'd have to factory reset it shortly after. Thank you, Apple, for implementing a log out button in Settings.
But, onto the nice things! 
- Wow, the notification system is amazing. So unobtrusive and very intuitive. It sits in the status bar whenever a new message comes in, just pull down, access whenever you want, and has a history. My highest desired feature on iOS. Unlike iOS' date implementation, it doesn't explode and demand your attention, forever gone if you decide to ignore it.
- Widgets are really nice. I'm not craving them, but they were nice. I don't get the big clock, though. It says the time in the status bar, without taking up half the screen's pixels
- Browser seemed pretty fast, and was only on 2.1. My 3GS still beat it, even with Flash off (Flash slowed it down abysmally when enabled) but under 2.2, which I hear is even faster, it's definitely going to be competent in speed, even if the UI is lacking. Then again, iPhone 4 is faster too, so hard to tell.
- Unibody enclosure is very nice. Strangely Apple-like.
- Speaker was pretty loud.
- LED notifier seemed rather cool.
- Though I couldn't find it on this phone, the speech-to-text anywhere with the keyboard mic button seems really cool.
- The nightside mode is a feature I'd really like on iPhone too. Very nice.
- Speed at which platform is evolving.
All in all, Android seems like a viable platform in the future, and it's something I'll definitely keep an eye out for down the road, but for now, it feels very beta-like, unpolished and unintuitive. I was very happy to go back to my iPhone after a few hours with that.
