i can see!

I decided to fix the over-zealous background. Much more readable.

clear as mud

It’s clear that Google spends a lot of time on the web. A LOT. During the announcement of Chrome OS I had to keep telling myself, “It’s only for netbooks.” Without that statement, Chrome OS seems rather preposterous… kind of. I’m a huge fan of using web technologies as replacements for heavier programming languages.

I guess the big concern I have is what this means for Android. I think Google has too many independent arms all moving in opposite directions. A little over 2 years ago Google announced a mobile platform built on Linux with APIs leveraging Java. Now, they are developing an entirely new OS for netbooks based on linux and HTML. Wha? Java or HTML? Make up your mind.

As a potential developer for Android this strikes me as unsettling for the shear fact of not knowing what it means for future Android development. Is Google going to continue supporting Java on Android devices? Are they going to migrate towards HTML like the Pre. Why the hell did they bother with Android in the first place if they were just going to reverse course?

I’d love to develop in CSS/JS/HTML5 for Android devices, and the fact that it’s not really available as an option right now blows me away, especially after what Palm has done and what Google is doing with Chrome OS. Unify Google, and stop getting all Microsoft on us.

The announcement of Chrome OS makes me want to develop for Android less. The opposite should be the case.

Both Falling Bright

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

I can’t even begin to explain how much I loathe flash. On the other hand, this is still a beautiful song.

just checking in

I feel like a failure.

Droid: Sometimes more is more, and sometimes it isn’t.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! New smartphone coming in to “kill” the iPhone! You’ve heard it all before. First it was the Storm, then it was the G1, and now, the Droid. I’ve been using the droid for about 3 days forwarding all my calls to it, and putting it through it’s paces. So where does it fall?

Hardware: Specs! Specs! Specs!

I don’t understand when people start drooling about processors, GPUs, Snapdragon 1ghz blah blah blah. Is the phone functional? Does it feel snappy? Is the screen readable? Those are the questions you should be asking yourself. The HTC HD2 uses one of the most advanced processors, but it feels laggy because the software is poorly optimized. That being said, the Droid takes some of the best things about the smartphone market and puts them to use. If you take the screen res of the HD2 (480×854) cram it into a 3.7” display, pair it with a processor from a 3GS/Pre, glue on a keyboard print, and remove all curves, you would have the droid. It’s the Pre/3GS antithesis; not curvy, very industrial. It’s a hardware design only a verizon user could enjoy.

The screen IS beautiful. Your porn will probably never have looked so good. Seriously. Just 3 solid days now and the thought of going back to my iPhone to read news seems painful. You simply get that much more stuff on the screen. Movies, photos, text, icons; everything is much much clearer. This is by far the greatest screen I have ever used or seen.

The phone also comes with soft-touch keys at the bottom of the screen. It seems that this is an android requirement for phone functionality. They function, but only due to the lack of swiping ability on the platform (more on this later).

They physical keyboard. I won’t mince words. The physical keyboard is garbage. It’s there to say, “Hey, we have a physical keyboard.” It’s horrible. There is little definition between the keys so it makes tactile use impractical. It’s cramped for being landscape. I found my thumb hitting the top of the slider screen when using the top row. It doesn’t have any prediction like the software keyboard does. Do yourself a favor and never slide the phone open. The only companies that seem to be able to get a physical keyboard right are RIM and Palm.

The camera is another one of those, “We have the specs, we are better!” cases. It’s that chest thumping mentality again. 5 megapixel, dual LED flash, real auto-focus. What’s not to love? First is the focus, it takes so $#&@ing long to focus that every shot has to be posed, or done of inanimate objects. Next is the 5mp. Stuffing that amount of pixels results in grainy images. The last is the LED flash. It’s nice there is a flash, REAL nice. It means I can take pictures in places I can’t with my iPhone. But, the software has a hard time figuring out that LEDs give everything a blue hue. You wind up getting blue images. It can be fixed post-processing, but that’s hardly acceptable for those on-the-fly-drunken-bar-night-facebook-photos. A bright spot for the camera is the physical button for taking photos. None of this, “I’m doing a self portrait with my best friend, I hope I have my finger on the right spot on the screen to take a photo.” business. Nice.

The last, and minor complaints I have are the volume keys and the headphone jack placement. These are minor gripes to an otherwise solid, well thought out, phone. If you use an angled headphone plug it covers the on/off toggle. This is a pain. The other small issue is the volume keys. They are hard to find unless you are looking at them. The angular design of the phone makes the volume keys almost invisible to the touch. The volume keys are also on the bottom side when talking on the phone. This makes adjusting doubly awkward since you can barely feel them, and you have to adjust the natural hold of the phone while mid-call.

Oh yeah, last part of the hardware, the back is soft-touch plastic/rubber. The world needs more soft-touch material on electronic devices. It prevents slipping, gives it a matte look, and makes scratching less likely. Imagine a world where iPhones didn’t look all scratched on the backside without needing a $30 case… oooh, novel.

Software

The Droid is the first Android 2.0 device. For all the non-tech people out there, that means “Google Software 2.0” or “gPhone 2.0” It’s a little odd for some to get their head around. Think of it like a PC. You can buy an HP computer, but it will run software made by Microsoft. Same same. This phone is made by Motorola, but with Google software.

At first, I hated the OS in comparison to the iPhone OS or WebOS by Palm. “Un-intuitive!” I would shout. As the days rolled on and I got accustomed to the nuances of moving in and out of apps, I found the OS to be incredibly capable. It doesn’t have the immediate ease of the iPhone or Pre, but it gets you where you need to go, just a little more dirty than those users are used to.

The consistency of the OS and built-in apps are one of the sore spots of the phone’s UI. One app will let you bring up a menu and quit the program, another won’t give you the option. This is where open source development lacks… consistency.

There is also a lot to love about the general interaction of the phone though. I’ve never liked widgets on OS X. I press F12, wait for a zooming mechanism, wait for my widgets to load, and then POOF, I can see what the weather is. Slow, and lame I’ve always said about widgets. On Android, widgets are flawless, quick, and useful. The moment I unlock my phone I see what the weather is, no waiting, no lag. I setup a media widget that allows me to control pause and play of my music. None of this, double press the home-button to do random things crap like on the iPhone. Wait until Apple implements a triple-home-press, I can’t wait! Not so much. All in all the general use of the phone is pleasant. You have 3 screens to spread out Apps, direct links to contacts, widgets, and links to web pages. It’s a bit over-whelming at first to have so many options, but after a few minutes setting up what YOU want, it blows other implementations out of the water.

A big sore spot is the music player. It’s awful. It’s not pleasant to use, it doesn’t identify podcasts (more on this in a sec), it doesn’t let you create playlists on the fly, and it is just lacking. Just like no one can get a physical keyboard right like RIM and Palm, no one can get a music player right like Apple. A bright spot about podcasts is an app called Listen by Google. It takes a different approach than Apple on Podcasts. Rather than mandating that you only download podcasts via iTunes or on WiFi, List allows you to stream podcasts without taking up any physical room on your computer or device. You simply subscribe, and press play. The app sucks down the entire podcast for you to listen to (over wifi or 3g), and removes the temporary file when you’re done. My iPhone on the other hand, won’t allow me to download anything above 10MB on 3G, and it also makes me store everything on my phone taking up space.

Mail. I’ll be honest, I’m not a huge mail person. Generally, I get about 3-10 emails a day. I’ve designed my work life to be like that. People get a hold of me through IM, SMS, or custom web apps for trouble tickets. So I’m not super anal about my email apps. To put it simply, this is not the device to get people off their blackberries (see bad keyboard), but the two email apps (one for gMail, and one for everything else) are very capable combing all common functions that are needed when mobile. I did find the need of the menu key to be a bit daunting. Every time you wanted to do something with an email, you had to hit the menu key to get a list of options. This contrasts with the iPhone that presents all the most common options right on screen. The Exchange Active Sync system does work as advertised, push email as email should have always been. I’m still amazed that it took until late 2009 to get all the major smartphones to support this. As far as the gMail app is concerned. It takes all the best aspects of gMail and throws it into a true app. gMail addicts are second to only blackberry addicts and the app doesn’t disappoint.

Unlike the physical keyboard, the virtual keyboard on the Droid is a pleasure to use. It does feel just a touch more cramped than an iPhone, but it’s minor. The droid’s keyboard is however, more flexible than the iPhones. Where the iPhone gives you ONE option to fix your misspelling, the droid gives you several. This is a theme throughout the phone when comparing the two devices. The iPhone says there is one way to do things, the droid says there are several. The keyboard is no different.

No one but iPhone users like it, but the iPhone has the most apps. Just above 800,000 if I remember correctly. Android is rocking about 1,000 apps if I remember correctly on that front. I’m going to be honest, you can see the pitfalls of Open Source development in the app catalog. If there is one thing that can be said about the majority of Apple Developers, they care about usability and style. Android Developers make it very apparent that they’re developers first, designers second. This means you have a wealth of apps, but most don’t work very well, or are so un-intuitive that it’s pointless to try them. I went looking for a simple RSS reader that sync’d up with Google Reader. Sounds easy right? Nope. I went looking for an eBook reader so I could read like I do on my iPhone. Nothing worked the way it said. To be fair, since this is a loaner phone, I wasn’t about to buy any apps, but the paid apps didn’t look all that compelling.

There were a few bright spots in the app catalog, or “Marketplace” as Google calls it. I found a great Solitaire program, the already mentioned Listen, Photoshop.com Mobile, NBA Game Time, Meebo IM, Video Player, Flixter, and Twidroid to name a few. All these apps have performed as advertised and have been better, or as good as their iPhone counterparts.

In Android 2.0, Google stole a few technologies, and they ignored others. First up, is Synergy. This is essentially tech that Palm developed that allows users to sync contacts from multiple places and unify them. Google didn’t steal all of it, but it’s enough to look familiar to Pre users. Missing is the messaging synergy, but in place is the facebook, exchange, gmail contact syncing. It’s a pleasure to have photos for a lot of my contacts pulled from facebook. It just makes the phone seem more… personal. The tech they chose to ignore is multi-touch. Despite the ongoing speculation as to why it is, or isn’t there, Google is dropping the ball. I never realized how much I use pinch to zoom and swipes to navigate my phone. It’s missing, and potential iPhone switchers will notice it as a glaring omission.

Where the droid lacks in multi-touch, it makes up for it in multi-tasking. It’s not as good as the Pre, but it’s definitely passable. iPhone app management is rubbish and non-existent. Pre app management like saint-hood. Droid app management is like a good friend; not perfect, but you’re incredibly glad you have it. Press and hold on the home button in any app to switch to something else. It’s that simple. For those that haven’t used an iPhone, it’s painful to try and transfer information from one app to the other. Everytime you want to do something on an iPhone, you have to take a trip to the home screen. The Pre and Droid also have a dashboard that shows you information about what you have going on. Get a text message, pull down the dashboard on the droid and decide what to do with it. With an iPhone, you have decide RIGHT THEN AND THERE what you will do, leave or ignore, even if you just read the SMS pop-up!

Navigation. For the first time ever, Google is jumping into the navigation market. It’s such a game changer that Garmin, and Tom Tom are gonna go the way of blockbuster. Their stocks to a MAJOR hit when Google and Verizon announced free turn-by-turn directions. This is also a first for Verizon, who has made a habit out of gouging people for these types of services. To contrast this, on an iPhone, it still takes a solid hundy to get turn-by-turn directions. I’m glad to see the trend of free navigation that the Pre started is rolling over to other phones. You’re move Apple.

The web browser on the Droid is about an 8.5 out of 10. It’s webkit on a speedy phone, so you know it’s going to be good, but it’s not great. Many times I would read a blog in portrait only to see that content sections were cut in half, in landscape mode page rendering hasn’t been as much of an issue. I do enjoy that it doesn’t try to open a new tab/window everytime _newwindow is called, it makes mobile browsing more fluid. The phone doesn’t quite render as fast as an iPhone 3GS, but the scrolling speed is there. I found that having a physical back button was nice, but found having to press a menu button to pull up the forward button to be a bit confusing. All in all, it’s a good browser, better than most, but lacking in a few minor areas.

The last part of software I want to talk about is the actual phone app. It’s a passable design, but can get confusing when trying to juggle multiple calls or trying to merge calls. On the other hand, the call quality is the best I have ever heard. Even talking to my Dad, who is on AT&T, was loud, clear and crisp. The interface may suck, but the call quality is top-notch.

Conclusion

At first glance, the Droid may seem a little cumbersome. It’s not the cleanest design in software or hardware. What it lacks in consistency it makes up for in diversity. This can pay off at times (multiple options for listening to podcasts), and it can be a downer for other times (lack of consistent apps). Motorola, Verizon, and Google got it right; this is the iPhone’s main competition. In that statement I’m not ignoring the Pre, it’s probably better than both phones, but lacks in mindshare where “Google vs. Apple” take center stage. I wouldn’t recommend the Droid for my iPhone toting Dad (who hated going to AT&T), since there are some times TOO MANY ways to do something on the Droid, and “not enough apps”.

I do know that I am going to be sad when I have to let it go. It’s the perfect phone for people that like the iPhone, don’t need a zillion apps to feel special, and want more than what an iPhone offers in functionality. I can safely that the Droid’s shortcomings are just narrowly outweighed by it’s triumphs, while I can no longer say the same about the competition.