The problems with Google Android

Modern smart phones strive to become part of our daily lives and integrate seamlessly the gap between our online and real world lives. Google is in a wonderful position to create such a device, with mail, maps, online document editing tools, news feeds, and a massive user base giving it worldwide brand awareness. I think they failed when they released Android.

I’ll start with the few things I liked about Android 2.2 (aka Froyo, the latest stable version at this time) on the HTC Desire. I thought it had great integration between my contacts in Google, in Twitter, and in Flickr. I could link them up and it would use one of the pictures when people call or when I view contacts. It worked really well, and was one of my favourite features. I wish my mail client could do this.

Erm, what else. No, that was about it. Everything else was either poorly executed or of no relevance to me for daily use of the phone.

I wanted to take some screen shots to put on this post, but it seems it’s horrible and difficult, involving development tools, debug modes, and USB cables. It highlights the mindset needed to work with Android, and it’s not what I want from a mobile device.

Firstly, lets get the hardware side of things out of the way. It was ok. Battery life was average for a smart phone, roughly one day from full to empty. I can cope with this because I can switch off the data if I need to, effective turning it into a normal phone.

In terms of sound, voice call quality was reasonable, if a bit quiet. Ringer volume was either quiet or too loud with a massive jump in sound level.

The HTC Desire has an ‘optical trackball’ – if you’ve ever tried to control a computer with a mouse turned upside down you’ll understand how I feel about this. Ultimately it was too strange, wiping right on the touchscreen would move the screen contents to the right, but wiping right on the ‘trackball’ would move it to the left. It broke the experience, and it constantly made me go the wrong way. If they had put an option to invert it, that would have helped, but I digress, that’s a fault of the manufacturer – something outside of the control of the operating system vendor, Google.

The stock music play is utter rubbish, and the best one I found was ‘Cube’ which looked quite nice but just wasn’t really great for managing playlists, and I never managed to get last.fm integration to scrobble anything with any player on this phone.

There is no built-in video player. Seriously?

The camera on this phone is terrible. Please please please can hardware manufacturers stop putting the outer lens into the battery cover. It means that it’s not a sealed unit. Dirt, grim, dust, grease, it all gets between that outer transparent plastic piece and the lens in the main body of the phone. The net effect of this was that ever photo I took after the first month was in soft focus. It wasn’t even good enough to snap pictures of documents. It was 5 megapixels of blurriness. Also, anybody who claims LED flash is the same as xenon flash is deluded. Again, I know this is hardware and not directly the fault of Android but it’s part of my experience with the phone system.

It’s quite nice that I can add shortcuts, applications, or interactive ‘widgets’ to the home screens (the pages shown when not in an application) and change between them by moving left and right, but why does it limit me to half a dozen pages? I could have used many more. Which brings me to applications… the fact that even on Android 2.2 most of the applications in the MarketPlace do not support being installed on the SD card. Which means the developers must make them tiny. No frills. It all feels like the applications on desktop computers in the mid-90s. They lack any kind of visual appeal, they barely have any design done at all. One application I used for train times forced me to enter the station name by typing it in every time – I couldn’t even pick from a list or see a history of past stations. It’s just not acceptable.

The SMS text messages should be a safe bet, but for me it had problems. Sure it was great that the contact picture appeared in the message conversation, which is something the iPhone doesn’t do as far as I’m aware. The problem I had is that it doesn’t do any housekeeping until it reached 201 messages to and from a contact, at which point it keeps the last 201 messages. I have no idea why they chose this number. This would be ok, except it randomly scrolls me to the top of the list when I am writing a message for no discernible reason whatsoever. I’d then have to scroll down to the bottom, page after page after page. Argh.

There are a few other little bits and pieces. Calendars were just calendars, they worked quite well if you like Google calendars. There is no Google Docs integration, which is seriously missing a trick in my opinion. The clock on the home screen was fun with weather effects but that’s hardly a selling point.

All-in-all, after a handful of months I had two choices – either take a chance on Windows Phone 7 (or whatever it’s called) or go back to iPhone. I chose the latter. Going the Microsoft route on a mobile device was just not something I wanted to do again, it was even worse that the Android phone that I’m abandoning. Apple’s iPhone is a good compromise, it’s a little on the large side but will let me do email, text messages, flickr, twitter, facebook, take photos, and play music occasionally. I wanted a phone which doesn’t make me think when I use it, and sadly that just isn’t Android for me.

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