As I write this, I am ending my first full days worth of use with my Android Phone. I actually received the unit yesterday afternoon, and after about 90 minutes I had gone over every feature and all the current apps in the apps store.
The first thing to mention is that battery life is not so good. The phone came off its charger at 6:55 AM, and by 4:30 PM it had to go back on to charger. It takes about 30 minutes to get a full charge. Now my days use today was pretty typical for me, I spent 78 minutes on the phone, 54 of those minutes on speaker phone. No bluetooth. I did have the GPS turned on all day, and I used WIFI for about 20 minutes. The phone is set to auto sync with my Google Apps account. I did travel about 75 miles today, crossing some areas where I lose cell signal for about 15 minutes. I can only use edge, because there is no T-mobile 3G in Crossville, or all of Tennessee for that matter.
Oddly, the phone is crashing my 10.5 Macbook when I try to plug it into the USB port to charge. It does this both with USB storage turned on or off. I don’t think it’s my G1, because it plugs in fine to my 10.4 eMac at home to charge. So I think it might be my Macbook, it has some other issues anyway.
The interface is kind of kludgy, but I’m warming up to it pretty quick.
I use my own domain with Google Apps, and the Phone had NO PROBLEM syncing up and keeping me up-to-date with Emails and Calendar reminders. My Google Calendar has a couple of sub calendars on it, Business, Personal, Public, etc. I can only add stuff to ONE of those calendars, but the UI seems to have a spot where I could select another one, but no other one shows up. I’m guessing that it picked the default one for me to enter stuff in on. Entering an appointment is a little awkward, the UI for selecting time seems a bit inconsistent.
Email, I can read and reply to my messages, however, when I went to put in a signature, I could only “see” a couple of lines, but it seemed like I could enter more. Looks like a UI bug.
Contacts. BAD BUG!!! My contacts pulled down from Google, images and all. However, those contacts which are only a company name, are not showing up in the Android Contact list by the Company name, but rather by the phone number. (or just by the address for one contact that is only a company name and mailing address). There seems to be no way to adjust the view or sorting of contacts, they come up alphabetically by last name. I fear that contact feature on the phone is as bad as the contact feature on G-Mail.
Voice Dialing. Having been spoiled on Microsoft Voice Command, this feature seems very lacking. However, the voice recognition did work rather well, and was quiet accurate. However, you still have a UI button to confirm the call, so it’s not quite as nice as you think it should be. Also, no bluetooth activation of the feature. The good news is that the hard part of voice dialing is the accuracy of recognition, and android seems to have that licked, so if that polish up the apps functionality it might be a fair competitor to MS Voice Command. Also, Company Names do not work here, only first and last name, and the tag line “on mobile” or “at home” only changes the ORDER in which the number confirmation UI is given to you.
On a funny side note, the “flick to scroll” feature of the phone is messing with my head. My multi-touch Macbook has a feature to scroll pages. However the interface for scrolling “up” and “down” is exactly reversed between my G1 and my Macbook. On the Macbook the multi-touch gesture is designed to emulate the mouse wheel. To move down a scrollable page, your fingers move down the trackpad. But on the G1, it designed to emulate moving a peace of paper, which is the exact opposite motion. To move down a scrollable page, your finger moved “up” the screen.
It’s been a long time since I’ve had a phone that had a movable screen, and even then I used my bluetooth headset 90% of the time. Now, when holding the G1 o my ear, my fingers feel the slide-out screen move ever so little, and it just feels odd.
All in all, it was a good day. In the world I am in now, with Google Apps and Macintosh, the phone made me feel more productive than my t-mobile Dash. However, it still did not have the same feeling of productivity as my T-mobile Dash did when I was in the Windows, Outlook, and Exchange world.
What will make or break this phone will be third party apps. As a phone by itself, it’s ok, but without the additional functionality of apps, it would not be worth it.
If you look at the iPhone, it survived the first year without third party apps, because it had the iTunes integration to fall back on, and a great web browser. Android does not have that “fall back” position of a media infrastructure. (yes, it did come with the Amazon MP3 store, but the lack of a headphone jack and/or bluetooth stereo, and NO video player, makes this phone a non-starter for a Portable Media Player.) So the only thing it can rely on would be awesome third party apps.
So comparing Android to iPhone on the merits of third party apps, I think Android has the greater potential. Yes, at this moment, there are tons of apps for the iPhone, but as a third party platform the iPhone biggest problem is Apple’s obsessive need to control it. Android has no such road block, it is free and open, and yes that will lead to chaos and we will see apps that can brick phones, but from that will emerge better applications that push the envelope. The four strongest advantages that Android has are, off web application installs, background processes, an open source os, and tight integration with Google, thus giving us “free” push email. If the iPhone had these, then there would be no market for Android. That is a danger, because there is no technical barrier to Apple doing these things, only artificial contractual issues.
If Apple opened up, just a bit, I fear that it will kill Android a borning.
