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July 1, 2010
A Week With an Android
After determining that the iPhone is a piss-poor replacement for a Blackberry, the team at work decided that the next attempt was an Android phone, specifically a Nexus One. (And, since the then-shipping version of Android didn't have native Exchange/ActiveSync support, a license for TouchDown.)
I ended up as the on-call two weeks ago, and spent a week living with (and playing with) the Nexus One.
And all I can say is "wow."
And not in a good way...
The hardware itself was fine - reasonable form factor and a nice screen - good color and contrast, made my iPhone 3gs look anemic and washed out. That's pretty much where the praise ends.
Battery life was mediocre at best, even with everything other than 3g turned off, the smoothness of touch interactions on this "current gen" device wasn't nearly as smooth as the first generation iPhone, and the user interface was, shall we say, clearly built by developers.
The home screen, like the iphone, pages side-to-side, but once you hit the "all apps" button, it scrolls up and down - and the only indication of that is that the top row of icons is slightly distorted, as if wrapping onto the top face of a cube. (I'm told this is unique to the Nexus One version of Android - which sorta opens the door to pointing out that "Android" as a consumer brand is going to be defined by it's crappiest implementation, but that's a different story.)
There were several places in the interface when a text entry box would appear, complete with what looked like focus (outlined in the select color, with blinking cursor) but after waiting for a moment, you'd realize you had to tap in the box to make the on-screen keyboard appear.
The oh-so-discoverable notification bar that you were supposed to intuit could be dragged down from the top screen edge. How 'bout responding to tap? An icon appears, I tap it, nothing happens. I assume it's just a notification, and not actionable. In fact, I needed to tap-drag it.
And I won't even start on the TouchDown interface, or how it just stopped syncing mail without explanation, and required a "full reset" to get going again. Ugh.
As a developer I like the relative openness of the platform, but as a consumer device, well, I wouldn't use one, and I certainly wouldn't recommend one for Dawnise.
The whole thing felt not-quite baked.
Everyone keeps saying the next version will be better - and I suspect by the next time I'm the on-call, I'll have a chance to evaluate that.
But for now. Blech.
Posted by dberger at July 1, 2010 8:36 PM