[tweetmeme] The Android OS. The iPhone alternative everyone talks about, but no one really gets into. Ian Wright, an Android user for a while now, shares in what might be the longest post on SA, his experience with using the Android phone. I realise it’s a little late, in that we’re not only past the Droid, but also seeing the official Google Phone. Still, I think much of what’s in here is still very relevant, even today. So, is the grass really greener on the other side?

Sidenote: He also took it up as a challenge to do a smartphone review, without mentioning the iPhone. To think this is an Apple blog.

The Android OS has now had it’s first year in the wild. It was released with high expectations but ultimately met with a lukewarm response. The HTC Dream/G1 was criticized as being underpowered and it was well noted that the application store was understocked… unless of course you liked a good range of Flashlight Apps.

However, a lot of people have stuck with Android as early adopters and its price has put a genuine smart phone in a lot of typical users’ hands. So a year on, how is the Android OS standing up? Two major updates and on the verge of a third all named after cakes, and an application store that has grown large in size should make for a expandable and useable smartphone. 

Having your cake and eating it, so to speak.

Out Of The Box

The first thing that greets an Android phone owner after turning it on is a request to either login to a Google account or register one. If you are already using Google in any depth it will sync up nicely, easily and automatically. One of my favorite things about having Google as the engine to the system is how painlessly “set and forget” the synching is for all its cloud based products. Before it even fires up for the first time it has everything it needs to be ready for use.

We are definitely in the future now.




Finger Smudging.

The GUI may not necessarily make a smartphone, but it can certainly break it. The Android interface may not be the prettiest of things, however it is smooth enough and the organization well thought out. A bar across the top of the screen, thick enough for a line of text or small icon, takes care of notifications. Drawing the bar down with your finger draws down a page to reveal the details, then the relevant app is then just a finger tap away. I doubt there is anyone that has used an Android phone and not lost a few minutes to pinging the notifications menu down and up again, then generally messing with it following their finger tip up and down the screen.

The bottom tab draws another screen in the same fashion, but this one contains all the pre-loaded and any downloaded apps. Hold a finger on an app icon a few seconds and the page disappears and then you can drop it onto one of the main screens to organize your apps on their pages. The main screens are swiped sideways in either direction and you can add embedded widgets and organise your pages nice and easily.

It’s also simple to change the wallpaper… apparently that’s a selling point. I would say it’s a selling point if an OS on a phone is not taking every advantage of every bit of the limited real estate.


Android is all very nice. But quite frankly I wasn’t blown away by my first and only touch interface experience. Everything made sense and it’s intuitive enough to figure out without any instructions but… touch suggests feel and interaction, and it never quite feels like that. Mainly Android feels like the UI hasn’t had that last ten minutes spent on it for fine tuning – even after a year of development while in the wild. The “soft” keyboard is indicative of this. You know that relative that concentrates on their fingers when they type? That’s me using Android’s software keyboard. Think Windows XP instead of Windows 7.

Googling with Google on the Google Phone.

Well, it’s the “Google Phone”, and it comes with a bunch of Google apps. Google is of course the engine of the phone experience here, and the engine is driving you to use their search or store your information with them. Search is their income, the smarter the search the better the targeting. Your information of course, is honing their search.

Whatever your view of Google—whether it’s privacy paranoia or cloud computing evangelist—it’s hard to use the web wholly efficiently without them. Search, Email, Maps, and YouTube are all built into Android, and very good they are too. YouTube does exactly what it should, the Mail app is very sweet with its threaded conversations. 

The Maps app is very functional but lacks a few features that would make it even more useful—being able to hit my location, for example, and adding it to one of “My Maps”. Generally though, it is as good as your data connection allows.
Search is what Google does, and the search widget is truly useful on the fly… as you simply touch it, type and next thing the browser is open with your results.

Included in the search widget is voice searching – either as a stand alone application or a button on the search widget. When this first turned up I was cynical and expected it to suck straight away. Particuly as I am English. By that I mean I don’t have an American accent. I was not disappointed, it really sucked.

However, after the Cupcake update (I love the zero macho bullshit of the update names), something magical happened and it now works well. It became accurate enough to use it on the fly and nail a search with my English accent nine times out of ten. It is however U.S-centric with words where there are large pronunciation differences. This should get better when Google Voice eventually makes it to the rest of the world and it’s not just American accents being used to develop the technology.

All Singing – Little Dancing

Important to a lot of people of course is the MP3 abilities. Tap the Music icon and there is not a lot to fault. It’s intuitive enough to find what you want quite quickly, pretty enough not to annoy and feels like part of the phone. However if you are a Mac user you will want to use your iTunes library… and to do that with some efficiency it’s going to add to the total cost of ownership. Salling Media synch offers the software I have settled on. It syncs iTunes with a multitude of phones via a sweet and simple interface. The free version will re-write everything you choose when you want to sync (Time consuming to say the least if you have a few gig on there). Purchase the software for $22 and it will only sync what has changed. Double Twist is one to watch. They offer an iTunes alternative that’s in its infancy and are looking to be platform agnostic when it comes to synching devices and computers. Currently it is beta and free.

There’s A Nap For That.


We move on to the applications available to download. Now, to this reviewers mind, a good application on any OS will feel like it is part of the OS despite actually being a bolt on. A good application will enhance said OS, and become a part of it for the user. The Google mail application is an example. It is an app, its appearance and operation with threaded conversations is so simple and elegant you don’t notice until you actually think about it.

However, the application store for the Google phone has become a running joke. I haven’t had applications freeze so much since I last owned a Windows computer. The count as of writing, the application store has 10,000 apps available. Unfortunately due to the double edged sword of an open and unregulated lack of any system this means an awful amount of apps written and released with very little care or attention. Whether it’s people writing their first app and simply publishing it, or sub-par developers releasing crap simply because they can.

I’m sure there must be a few gems in there, but my patience has simply run out before I have found them. I have been asked a few times to recommend some apps, and I find myself at a loss. Even the basics recommended on “best of” lists of Twitter clients are pretty shoddy, and Twitter whether you love it or not is currently a useful temperature gauge for this. Finding a decent Twitter client represents my experience as whole for finding decent applications.

I use the word “decent” advisedly. I have given up trying to find a killer anything app for now. 
I love my Twitter, and the best application I can find is reasonably useable if a little gaudy. It is functional enough not to find exasperating, however it is a memory hog. The most often recommended Twitter app “Twidroid” is perfectly serviceable, but for some reason the developer has chosen colours that inspire nothing more than a headache.

Now, two things that are incredibly frustrating regarding the application front on Android are the rating system for applications in the store and the lack of the big boys coming out to play. Case in point of that is Skype. Skype is a huge tool online for communication and breaks into the real world as well. They released “Skype Lite” very early, and it turned out to be nothing more than the AIM part of the service brought to the mobile and an interface for using your phone number to make (chargeable by your cell provider or using call plan  minutes) calls via a Skype account. I don’t even bother except on occasion, I simply have the Skype number to dial before dialling international phone calls programmed into my phone. It’s simply not worth opening a program to make a phone call unless it takes advantage of VoiP of either 3G or Wireless. 
This application was released, complete with Beta tag over six months ago, and since then Skype has released full VoiP apps on other phones utilising Wireless since and not even updated the very public “Beta” since.

Point is, they are not the only ones. Android is simply bottom of the pile for everyone despite the obvious fact it is growing fast in it’s user base and going to be competing with the top dogs very quickly. Those larger online developers know the value of mobile apps tying in with there services and being cross platform yet Android is either ignored or done half heartedly.

As for the rating system, well. People reviewing apps they haven’t used, a large majority of unhelpful reviews from those that have. Think comments on a Youtube video and you pretty much have it.

While we are on the subject of the application store and to hone my point with an example of how crap the application aspect is. I downloaded an app from the “Top Paid” section of the android.com market site. When downloaded I was greeted with a an option to make the application my default home. A note from the developer was underneath shouted at me : “Do not make this application your default home. You have been warned!”

Yes. A “Top” Android application gives you a pop up before you use it the first time with a decision to make, that not only it shouldn’t, but the developer instead of fixing it, has to warn you about tapping the wrong button (Can I remind you this is a PAID application?). It’s actually a hugely useful application and has a widget which makes it even better. But in what has no become a tradition in downloadable Android apps, the icons look like they have been made in MS Paint and are complete shit.

Another splinter in the side of the apps on Android is indeed the splintering of Android itself. Already in the store are two very useful functions that require a hacked phone unless you are very fortunate with your service provider – Bluetooth tethering and Wifi. Both of course break the vast majority of EULA’s for service providers but nonetheless a lot of people see these as functions a phone should have and are simply locked down in the name of protecting profit for the service providers.

That’s just the needle tip of the iceberg. With a whole slew of new phones available with different flavors of Android about to drop, a variety of hardware means a huge headache for developers to keep on top of their apps – only being able to add certain features on certain phones due to hardware limitations will be a huge issue. Inevitably that will lead to phones going out of date quickly when developers stop updating for it. Backward compatibility will be a nightmare. On top of that, flavors according to service providers will be an issue. One obvious example is AT&T’s recent and much publicized announcement they will allow VoiP, meaning you will be able to use the such of Skype on AT&T phones via the 3G connection. If it does, I know my UK cell provider won’t allow VoiP over 3G whether AT&T does or not.


Basically, with so many cell providers in so many countries the app store is going to be split in many different ways. The “Open Source” operating system can only be as open as the carrier allows it. Then mix that with different phones and differant hardware and you have a lot of complication.


In summary of Apps, I have basically reached a point where I am minimalist towards apps out of necessity. The necessity is to not reaching the point of frustration where I actually throw a couple of hundred dollars of phone at a wall.

 This means that rather than having an online Swiss Army Knife in my pocket ready for any eventuality, I have a good quality penknife with a couple of well honed blades.


Overall



Earlier I gave a Windows operating system analogy and that was quite deliberate. Having spent five years living in Apple computers, using Android reminds of the low level yet consistent frustration I used to suffer under Windows. The general feeling the software wasn’t actually built with the end user living with it in mind and making those small but constant operations a few click further away than they should be. An big example being quitting a background application/service. Open a few applications that that communicate somewhere often (Twitter, Facebook etc) and the battery suffers, or maybe you just don’t want the service running anymore. The only way I can find to actually close an application/service like that is Menu> Settings> Scroll down to applications> Manage Applications> Scroll through every process on the phone to the application you seek> Scroll down past the “Uninstall” option to Force Stop.


It’s great that you can run a couple of apps at the same time—multi tasking is important—however it’s easy to do too many (in particular on the underpowered G1) things at once. Hopefully at some point someone will figure out a clever way to limit depending on the hardwares power without losing half composed emails and that killer tweet being polished.

 The big problem is definitely the application store. Apps will be the make or break of smartphones. The slow uptake of the big players making apps that extend their online services or computer applications has been painful, but the sheer volume of awful and pointless apps to trudge through before finding something useable and not too offensive on the eye leads frustrating and ultimately giving up bothering to look. On the one hand it’s great that kids have something they can learn on that’s open, but the problem is the vast majority are not ready for prime time, which can only lead to frustration for the consumer. Even something so simple as an icon. Of the few Apps I have found that are vaguely useful, only a couple remain because of the icon looking like a stain on the screen. I do understand that sounds a little snobby, but on a $400 dollar phone I don’t want to be seeing an icon that looks like it was made in MS Paint circa Windows 95.

The big overall is that a ‘smart’ phone should be able to offer its functions quickly and easily. It is used when you are on the move after all. Between its slightly annoying soft keyboard, disappointing intuitiveness and lack of high quality applications, I have come to forget I have a small computer in my pocket as it is a chore to do anything useful quickly. [1. Except the public Beta of the Evernote Application. It’s superb. If you use Android and Evernote, it’s quite excellent. Very simple, very pretty and very useable. It’s the best application available for Android… and it’s Beta! Not even in the store at time of writing.]


Despite its faults, Android is here to stay and will grow. As it gains market share big companies will roll out the Apps, a whole slew of new and more powerful hardware is about to hit the streets along with flavors of the operating system. This is a mixed blessing to the platform. Flavors developed by service providers and handset companies will confuse people. Crippled functionality on one service, enhanced on another.

Of course the big news in Android is the Droid phone. It will be big news for a while until the next powerful phone running a different flavour of Android comes along from the next provider. It’s not a killer phone, it’s the best of class until the next provider or manufacturer puts something out. The good news is really for all of us. Verizon are charging for tethering on an unlimited data plan, this will push another company to one up and just include tethering as part of the data plan. It’s part of the road of communications companies only providing the data pipe.


Whatever happens now, it’s going to be interesting. Love it or hate it Android will change things for the better in the grand scheme of things as each company in the playing field pushes the others to be better, faster and usable in the field… ultimately leading to service providers having to give up the call and text plans to VoiP and Email and accept they are simply data service providers.

Ian Wright is a man of few words (this review not withstanding), but those are words well appreciated. He claims not to regret not going with the iPhone platform. Oh, and he’s from England.