My year with Android

Now that Google’s Android operating system is appearing on a bunch of new smart phones, it seems like a good time to report on my year with Android on an HTC/T-Mobile G1 phone.

How has it worked as a phone? Call quality and reliability are as good as can be expected on the T-Mobile network. In other words, it works great if you stand on one foot in space L17 in the parking lot of the Swedish Physicians office across the street from T-Mobile’s Bellevue, Washington headquarters. The phone has survived a few drops onto concrete and asphalt surfaces. About 5 percent of the time that the phone rings when in my pocket, I manage to hit the “hang up” button while pulling it out; I wish that it were a flip-phone design. Dialing via voice recognition works remarkably well considering that my phone is hunting through a list of several hundred contacts.

The slide-out keyboard is nice, but the “carpal tunnel hump” on the right side should be patented by hand surgeons. Will the next dictator of the world please require mobile phone QWERTY keyboards to be freely accessible from both sides?

Using Android means using Google Web applications. As of late 2008, syncing with Microsoft Outlook did not work well even as a one-time transfer, much less as a day-to-day operation. If you’re wedded to Outlook, stick with a Blackberry or Windows Mobile phone. I was already a user of Gmail and Google Docs, so moving to Android meant mostly adopting the Google contact manager. Contacts is the weakest part of Gmail and especially a year ago, could best be considered a work in progress. Importing contacts from Outlook, Google’s software would drop much of the information on the floor. Microsoft’s programmers envisioned a world in which some phone numbers are associated only with a company. The Smartest Programmers in the World (TM) wrote software in which such a contact was imported as just a phone number with no association to any text string, person’s name, or company name. Repeating the import command resulted in a complete set of duplicate contacts. Via this blog posting, I am hereby offering to purchase a Windows 7 machine for the Gmail group and a copy of Microsoft Outlook so that they can see what the average user might need. One wishes that someone at Google had spent a few hours watching a Microsoft Outlook user and writing down those features that were most critical.

Speaking of Outlook, the To-do Lists and Notes features are missing from the Google world and/or buried so deep as to be useless.

What works well? The native Gmail client is excellent and Google Calendar is mirrored painlessly. Google search and Web browsing work well and are fast on the 3G network.

I have just begun to experiment with Google Voice, which offers some very nice features, especially the ability to use one phone number for home, work, and cell (could save huge $$ for someone who travels internationally; calls will forward seamlessly to an Android phone with a local SIM card; voicemail messages will be transcribed and attached as an audio clip to email rather than retrieved at $3 per minute). An Android user can download an application that sends the central Google Voice phone number as the caller ID so that call recipients don’t get confused about who is calling. This important feature is unavailable to iPhone users who labor in shackles on Steve Jobs’s plantation.

For a completely Googlified Lifestyle (TM), the most glaring omission is Google Docs. I don’t necessarily want to edit Google Documents from the phone, but I store many snippets of critical information in various Google Docs. It would be nice to have an application that took a search string and made it easy to scroll through fragments of documents and spreadsheets that contain that string, pulling out the complete document for review only as a last resort.

As far as style goes, most of the people I’ve met using iPhones were overweight middle-aged men. Most of the G1 users that I’ve met were attractive slender women between the ages of 20 and 40.

The year-old G1 is somewhat underpowered for the latest Android release. One of the drawbacks of a phone running a normal multi-tasking operating system is that a background process may be consuming 100 percent of the CPU, memory, and network. It is common for an application to freeze, not because the code is buggy but because the phone is devoting its resources to a background process.

What’s missing? A dock so that I can use my Android as a home computer, as described in “Mobile Phone as Home Computer”. An Android device offers voice and text communications, Web browser, music, photos, and video. If I learn to use the Android interface, why should I have to learn anything else? Just give me a big screen, normal keyboard, and fast processor.

More challenging would be to rethink the user interface to a task/user orientation. A traveler with a mobile phone ought to be able to say “show me nearby hotels with vacancies, their room rates, and a button that I can press to reserve a room”. This would have been possible in the 1990s, even before phones had built-in GPS receivers. The carrier knows approximately where the customer is. Expedia knows where the vacant hotel rooms are and the rates. The hotel industry pays commissions to anyone in the booking chain. You’d think that you would be able to do that on any phone with more than 5 lines of screen space.

Current smart phones, especially the iPhone but including the Android, put themselves first instead of the user first. The phone is proud of its abilities to display movie showtimes, so the user looking for an evening of entertainment is expected to hunt among the applications and select the “MovieTime” app. A user-oriented interface would try to capture some information about the user. Is the phone user at home, work, or traveling? Is the phone user working, trying to connect with friends and family, or looking for some kind of diversion?

Suppose that the phone has figured out that the owner is on his way home from work and is trying to figure out what he wants to do for the evening. Instead of giving the owner a choice of 100 applications from which to choose, the phone would gather the most relevant information about entertainment options, nearby friends and family who are also planning to go out, nearby restaurants, etc. and present that information in a compact format. Despite all of the virtues of a SmartPhone, the lack of a full-size keyboard and mouse makes it slower to interact with than a PC. The phone should anticipate more of what the owner is likely to want to see and bubble it up to higher level pages.

Summary: If your life revolves around Microsoft Outlook, a Windows Mobile phone will be a better choice or possibly a Blackberry. If your life revolves around Google Web applications, the Android OS is probably the best phone on the market. In the abstract, how does Android compare to the iPhone? Text-oriented users will appreciate the fact that several Android models have full QWERTY keyboards. Voice-oriented users will appreciate the fact that all Android models to date have superior call reliability and sound quality to the iPhone. Both iPhone and Android suffer from the “let’s lump all applications into a big array and let the owner click down into one after another to accomplish a task.” A Macintosh computer owner who uses a lot of desktop applications will probably prefer the iPhone; a Web-oriented computer user or Google Voice enthusiast will probably prefer Android.