Google Android: some kind of psychedelic drug?
by moose
You may remember a post on this very blog a while ago, where Walt Mossberg earned the dubious honour of a “Spot the idiot” entry. Basically he was blasting the phone for the whole review, then concluding it was a good phone. Go figure.
Well, looks like maybe Google is shipping some powerful recreative drugs with their review G1 units, since Gizmodo feels the same:
Google Android: T-Mobile G1 Google Android Phone Review:
Keyboard: It’s got numerous problems.
Buttons: you’re naturally going to want to use the red power button to quit apps or end tasks, but all that does is lock your phone
Trackball: switching between the trackball and the touchscreen can get awkward
Screen: There are cases when screen presses don’t register properly
Battery: A full charge lasts about a day [...] and you’ll need to get used to a mid-day charge at work.
Camera: It’s passable
Other Issues: It’s hard to fathom why HTC left out a 3.5mm headphone jack in 2008 [...] You have to pop out that microSD card and use a card reader every time you want to load a ringtone or a song or a photo or a video
Calling: the screen annoyingly times out after about 10 seconds. If you want to power on the screen again, you have to hit the menu key or the “call” key, which takes you to the dialpad. [...] And pressing the power/end button, which you’d think would power up the screen, actually just hangs up the call. Annoying.
Stability Android handles [stuck apps] spectacularly well by using the PC paradigm where you can choose to Force Quit a frozen app or wait for it to unstick itself. [great! CTRL-ALT-DEL for the masses]
Interface: As we have observed, the UI suffers from general usability issues such as inconsistent actions or surprisingly unclickable regions
Contacts: Phone contacts sync nicely with Google’s Gmail contacts—great if you use Gmail, and an extra place to backup your contacts if you don’t.
Browser: the lack of multitouch gestures in Android’s version makes zooming a pain. It doesn’t have Flash support [...] and it doesn’t auto-zoom to maximize the column you want to read in your display
So, with this truckload of problems, missing stuff and the like, you would expect a harsh verdict, right? Like, the iPhone was BLASTED for way less than this (think recessed standard audio jack)… Here’s the review conclusion:
Verdict
Despite all the UI quirks and bad design decisions, it’s still better than other smartphone OSes out there. It’s not perfect, but for people who like tinkering, its cons are outweighed by its pros such as Gmail and the Marketplace.
Hmm, let’s see if Engadget got the same powerful magic dust:
engagdet: T-Mobile G1 review
While there’s plenty to praise in this phone, there’s a lot more that’s missing — and some of those missing elements are what we consider to be core components of a device in the G1’s class.
Shortcomings aside, though, you’re still buying into one of the most exiting developments in the mobile world in recent memory.
So, it’s crap but it’s one of the most exciting things around?
Please Google, can I have some of your medecine, I want to be happy too…
P.S.: Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against Google or Android, if they get it right, fine, if they manage to release a better phone than my iPhone, I’ll switch happily: I don’t buy Apple products because it’s Apple, I buy them because they are better than the competition according to my own criteria (i.e. for me “cheaper” weighs less than “better quality”, which for example leads to my old G3 clamshell iBook still working under Tiger, while my wife’s company-provided 2 years-old Thinkpad crapped out on her last week.)
