Hi all,
I figured I wanted to write a review after using the OS for a little while. I actually did do a writeup as I learned my way around, but it got lost (GMail Drafts usability issue) so here's a new version.
Beware: it's long; but I do think it will be all the more complete for it.
My background
I've been using PalmOS for years and years, my first device was a Palm III and I loved it; I called it my 'plastic brain' then, and ever since. After that came a brief period with a Psion Revo (which was perhaps even better, but died much too soon of hardware issues).
Lately, I've had a couple of refurbished Palm Tungsten T3's with the absolutely fabulous collapsible display. Its capability to do transparent full-screen handwriting recognition is simply superior to everything I've tried to this day, and the five programmable hardware buttons gave me instant access to almost every app on the device.
Eventually, I got annoyed by having a pda and a phone as two separate devices, so I grabbed an old Treo 680 from eBay, which I had refurbished and still own. Beyond the obvious phone capability, the Treo has all the OS niceties of the T3, but a much smaller display and an ugly but quite useful keyboard, but sadly no wifi or fast internet.
For completeness, I must also mention that my twin brother used (up!) five Psion Series5's over the last 13 years. Earlier this year, he gave up on continually refurbishing them and switched to an iPhone.
Making the switch
As you may know, Palm pulled the rug away from under a quite thriving user community, so I figured I had better cut my losses and get with the times. My needs could be described, roughly, as a modern pda with a built-in phone. A camera and internet ability would be nice but not all that critical. However, I did intend to write some apps for myself (as I did for my Palm), and preferably in an environment that was straightforward, didn't cost a lot, and ran on linux.
The major contenders seemed to be iPhones, Symbian-based Nokias, the Openmoko, and some Android-based phone. Taking a closer look, iPhones were prohibitively closed and expensive (optimally, you need the full Mac treatment); Symbian seemed sound but a little obscure, but the fatal blow was (is) that the SDK is only available for Windows; the Openmoko is magnificently idealistic and ultimately open, but frankly years away from day-to-day dependability; and the Android path, while sounding impressive, was pretty much a dark horse, and also led unavoidably to a Google account (which I was/am squeamish about trusting). Evidently, I was going to have to compromise.
That turned out to be easier said than done. I had set up my requirements based not on the ability of devices currently on the market, but on what I could do with my old device. I was in for a shock -- in nearly all aspects except internet access, it seemed that ability had regressed by many years, and some features which I had considered obvious were not even to be found! It seemed that users were generally awed by bling and prettiness rather than "hardcore" road-warrior pda features.
To be brief, I decided on an Android-based phone, and furthermore decided to wait a couple of months for the release of the Samsung Galaxy, because its sleek form and gorgeous screen appealed to me (and still do!). Meanwhile, I set up a Google account. I had rather a lot of trouble getting all my contacts into GMail, because apparently the import/export feature only covers about a third of the fields a contact can store. Odd. I never tried to migrate my calendar, choosing instead to manually enter what I could think of.
First off, I was obscenely impressed by the device, the display, the smoothly rendered graphics, and the general newness of the experience. It was a slight surprise to find that the "Location" setting also determines the language used by the OS, so that I am pressed to pretend I'm in the UK (this is inaccurate, but quite acceptable). Luckily, there is a separate setting for the time zone, so all is well.
The Galaxy
Note: This section was added in a later version; the review initially was almost entirely about the OS.
I would be tempted to say that the phone, physically, lives up to typical modern-day standards. That is to say, the gadget is very compact (thinner than an iPhone) and is dominated by a display that is huge (though slightly smaller than the iPhone's, to end the comparison), very brilliant, and even power-lean. These three factors (ignoring the parentheses) were the main reasons I opted to hold out a few months for a Galaxy instead of a device that was already in shops in my home country. In retrospect, I don't think I would have liked an HTC phone, so it seems like a good choice. I've never enjoyed e-book reading so much since my Psion Revo broke, it really is a fine device for it.
Looking closer at the device: It's been criticised for its old-fashioned design, but I like that things generally are where you expect them to be. Granted, the "Call" and "End" buttons are placed rather low and you must take care not to drop the device; but with a screen like that, buttons are bound to be quite near the edges. I thought I'd like the "Lock" side button, but I am 'merely' satisfied with it (that is to say, I don't hate it with a passion as I've read others do). I think it's pretty slick that there's hardly any indication of how to open the device: there's no awkward "press to explode" tab; instead, you just palm the device and slide your hands in opposite directions. Neat, effective, clean. While we're on the subject, you need to take off the back cover to access the memory card slot; for me that's not an issue but others might want to swap more often. I do miss the hardware slider to enable silent mode that is the epitome of the Treo; in fact I do miss (as I knew I would) a few more purpose-made hardware buttons in general, but that comes later. One more thing that's obviously missing is a signalling LED, so one doesn't need to pick it up and turn it on to see if you've missed a call or received a message.
The device comes with a quite adequate standard protector in the form of a plastic "sock" with a small cut-out for the speaker. Apparently, there ought to be one more cut-out, because reportedly the camera button, when half pressed in by the protector, drains the device's battery when it ought to be sleeping. This can really not be justified, it's a silly issue that should have been caught by Samsung QA -- or at least have been fixed in any of the 7 or so newer firmware versions. Of course, a protector is not really necessary, with the display being made of scratch-proof glass; it just avoids scratches to the rest of the case which is made out of plastic (and attracts finger prints like you wouldn't believe, but that's of no functional consequence).
The built-in camera has higher resolution than my 'real' digital camera (a Casio Exilim compact), and less optical barrelling too. Naturally, my camera beats it on capture modes such as red-eye reduction and long-exposure night modes, but overall I am very impressed by the quality of images it produces. One gripe: tilting the phone in photo display mode usually has undesired effects; the device doesn't use its G-sensors, so pictures taken in landscape mode are displayed scaled down and orthogonal to the display. This is just another stone in the shoe of the firmware; one that we can hope will be shaken out by a later update.
The modern sensor capabilities are great fun! It's neat to have a compass, a spirit level, and a metal detector in your pocket 'just because you can'. Wifi, GPS, G-sensors, Shazam, and QR barcode scanner apps really makes you think you're in the future, and I can't wait to see how apps will make use of these within the next couple of years, though obviously we already have the flatulence and light sword apps covered.
Coming back to the battery, it is no surprise that it does not live up to its advertised longevity (well, it does if you just leave it on a desk in standby, but where's the fun in that?). Initially, I would get a few hours of use out of a charge (I would think it would be even worse with a regular LCD display). With a bit of practice (and abstemiousness) you
can get three days' use out of it, but mostly you'd be well advised to charge it every night and, if you use it for commute entertainment, at the office. If you work out in the open, you can't rely on having enough juice left for use Google Maps to find an after hours bar, and frankly that's just poor. In the olden days we had week-long battery life; I know that we had neither GPS nor Facebook integration back then, but in my opinion this is a poorly balanced trade-off.
Sadly, my device has a very poor compass, being out of alignment by usually no less than ten degrees and often more than 90. Even worse, within the first two months my G-sensors went bonkers and some plain flat-lined. I've now sent my phone for warranty, but it's evident that this would have been much, much simpler if I had bought it in a real store in my own country.
Back to the software side of things.
The Market
It's bloody brilliant, if you'll excuse my language. I mean, from the Palm community I was, admittedly,
quite spoiled with an infinitude of applications for every conceivable purpose, and most of it free or very cheap (I think the only apps I paid any noteworthy amount for were my Bonsai outliner, my BackupMan automatic backup, and my TealScript handwriting customizer; and they were worth every cent). In Android, you not only have nearly the same multitude of apps (
already!), you even have it all in one convenient place. Okay, it would be
real nice with alphabetic sorting, but Barcode Scanner makes that a moot point. While I'm on the subject of the Market, I don't know what we're waiting for before we can have paid apps in more countries, but from what I've read you even get a 24-hour trial period on paid apps. Eat that, iPhone! In fact, eat that, just-about-any-other-platform! And, if you're still not happy, you can just pass around apk files manually. Simply unbeatable.
Alas, I soon found that I was struggling with the user interface.
Desktop
I had thought that the several desktops were, well, a bit of bling, and the Hero's
seven screens were quite excessive. But no: there is no way to sort, control, or quickly access the applications in the "drawer"; adding and removing apps even change the position of everything else in the list, so you can't just fixate your stare on 'the left half five lines down, where it used to be'. Similar to the Android drawer, the Launcher I knew from PalmOS also provided alphabetic sorting only, but at least let you use user-configurable "categories" to sort your apps into a number of sub-lists. As any Palm user already knows, this concept of "categories" was an OS-level feature that was pervasive to any app, be it a calendar, address book, or shopping list. Back in Android, it seems that making desktop shortcuts is pretty much the only way to get fast access to the most frequently used apps; in short order, I ran out of icon space. Hm.
Another compounding factor is the lack of programmable hardware keys. The
hardware bit lends surface contours for your fingers to instinctively find, identify, and press. In comparison, on my Palm I had: a side button which could start the voice recorder or toggle keyboard backlighting, four application buttons, and the green "answer call" button; all of these could be more or less programmed to an application of choice. One of my apps was a button launcher which layered additional levels of button presses to further extend the number of launchable apps. At current count, with three clicks or less I can start any of twenty-six applications on the Palm. I say this not to brag, but to put into perspective that these were all functions that, in Android, would have to be replaced by desktop icons (which, mind you, don't offer tactile feedback). Clearly, I was facing a limited feature set.
As a final note on this sad topic, I just want to point out that all Android --and iPhone-- commercials and demonstrations include shots of users happily swiping through pages and pages of icons. This is pure bling. It does feel absolutely great to browse around while saying,
I am master of all I survey, but usually I just want to switch to that other app, like,
now, you know? Honourable mention goes to the Recent Applications switcher, which comes in handy some of the time.
Scale of UI controls
This is an odd point to have to make, but I wouldn't have if it wasn't so ... noticeable. There's no end to the amount of required swipe-scrolling of lists, and I can't help noticing that, especially given the extremely sharp and high-density display, they could have made the fonts 1/3 the size. And what's with the separators that take up almost a full line height, and simple check boxes that are a full square centimetre? Compress it! Oh right, you're limited to the crummy accuracy of your fat fingertip which, inconveniently, obscures the thing you're pointing at. I was amazed that there wasn't a way to calibrate the touch screen to shift the 'perceived touch point' to the very tip of my finger where I could see what I hit, instead of smack underneath the centre of my nail. Hmm, less than ideal. Especially dealing with the keyboard, this meant I was constantly hitting keys one place further right than I intended, and it took me more than two weeks to get my
finger calibrated for acceptable accuracy. More on the keyboard later, though.
To make matters worse, it dawned upon me how much productivity the PalmOS can thank combo boxes for. With combo boxes, you can see what the current setting is, you tap, drag, and release, and then you see the new setting (or a different view of your app, or whatever). In Android, the UI guideline seems to be to instead use a button (or menu item) which brings up a (sub)menu with choices. This means two (sometimes three, if there's an OK button too) taps, and more frequently than not, you have to tap it just to see what the current setting is. Android could benefit from greatly promoting the use of combo boxes.
Keyboard
As I already said, the Market is great: I quickly located the Scandinavian Keyboard and its matching Danish Dictionary, and I was flying. Only one thing could have made it better: I have yet to find a Norwegian Dvorak layout, although it would be an understatement to say that that's a niche request. As I also said, in the beginning I suffered heavily (now I only suffer moderately) from hitting keys next to the ones I meant to press. I guess I'm too fat-fingered or motorically challenged, which I'll have to deal with. Overall, I knew that a virtual keyboard was going to be a lesser experience than my accustomed (and personalized) handwriting recognition, so I was fully prepared to take my expectations down a notch. I am confident that, if Android ever gets multi-touch, it will benefit the virtual keyboard immensely.
Still, I had not anticipated just how little screen real estate would be left over for the application when popping up the virtual keyboard. More applications than you'd think suffer horribly from this, and I often find myself wishing for a real, external keyboard (G1 users, appreciate what you have). Even worse, when using the bigger keyboard of the landscape mode, the app is hidden
entirely, to be replaced by a single text edit box. I guess I hadn't thought this through, nor understood the true effect when reading and watching reviews: many apps (for instance, chat apps) become nigh-on useless, because you have to constantly hide the keyboard to see what the other guy is typing (or whatever your app is doing). This is a real drawback and costs a lot of 'review points' for me.
I am extremely glad to have seen one or two handwriting apps, because they give me great hope for the future (and would recoup
more than the points lost in the previous paragraphs). As it is, they need visible input areas as large as the virtual keyboards (viz, they're not transparent), and I struggle to enter some specialized characters (say, å). It must be possible (if tricky) to tell apart a
swipe from a
stroke, because the Palm does it, and stroke customization is sure to follow.
Calendar
The keyboard is the main reason it's so slow to use, but there are other factors. I frequently whip out my pda to make a quick appointment while talking to my friends, and on the Palm this would take 20 or 30 seconds. On the Galaxy, however, I haven't been able to do it in less than two minutes. And that's frankly too long; it makes people wonder why I'm all of a sudden playing with my gadget in the middle of a conversation.
As I said, my own slow and error-prone typing skills is one thing, but the UI is definitely contributing also. To create an event, the configuration page is at least two screens long, and the "Save" button is way down at the bottom. Couldn't there be another at the top, in the menu, or just in a non-moving footer? Instead of having a dedicated button only for "Cancel", it would be nice to have some standard (perhaps even physical) "OK" button, too. A double-press of the centre 5-way (or trackball)?
With the Palm calendar, everything is more or less on one screen, and what subscreens there are are quite efficient. For instance, there's the "Go to date" button that brings up a year/month popup to quickly go to any other date -- Android does not have such a facility, forcing you to switch into month mode and swipe swipe swipe. Also, the time selector? Palm does an adequate job with two selection boxes (for hours, and minutes in 5-minute intervals), and the iPhone
really exploits the swiping gesture with its analog dials. I thought Android used those dials, too, the first time I needed to set a time on my Galaxy, but alas you have to tap tap tap on ridiculous "+" and "-" buttons. Or, you could manually select/delete the existing hours value, bring up the virtual keyboard, switch to numbers mode, and type two digits. And the same again for the minutes. Worst UI ever.
Phone book vs. Address book
On my Palm (my eternal benchmark), you could enter a birthday and an anniversary for an entry. On Android I find a surprising lack: even though Contacts in GMail supports both birthdays and anniversaries, they are nowhere to be seen in Android -- they're simply not synced over! This also means that you cannot enter them on your device, you need to do that in a web browser (and ironically, GMail does not work with the Android web browser). Further, my Palm pda would automatically show birthday reminders in the calendar, and tapping a reminder would open the person's entry in the address book. I could use some additional software to also show the ages, and the anniversaries. In all fairness, Calendar in GMail does have a way to show birthdays, but no way to show ages and anniversaries so it is not at all as useful.
It also seems odd that Android will gladly show a "Send SMS message" option for
any phone number, not just ones marked as mobile phone numbers; similarly, fax numbers are suggested for telephone calls. When you also consider the very clumsy way that groups are handled, this makes for a very cluttered contact list when selecting contacts for sending emails or text messages.
That Android seems to be satisfied with a "mere" phone book makes it evident that there is a large gap between a smart phone and a pda proper.
Multitasking
It's very nice that you can have all sorts of services running in the background. I understand that the iPhone doesn't, and quite frankly I can't fathom how you'd get anything done like that. PalmOS is event-driven, so there's basically hooks for
anything you might want to be notified about (this is not quite the same as multitasking, but you can get almost the same effect), and I was plenty used to this. Here's me thinking,
Android must rock!
Not quite. True, you can do all you can do in PalmOS, but I hit a surprising limitation in the web browser: if a page is slow to load (which happens frequently), you're tempted to open another browser 'tab' and surf somewhere else in parallel, or quickly check your mail, or whatever. But noo! The browser suspends all activity you're not watching. That it doesn't even continue loading other tabs
within the same app is hardly forgiveable, and very tiresome. And then it reloads even static pages if you switch away for just a second. I know that the Android life cycle reserves the right to pause or kill any off-screen app at any time, but this is just a missed opportunity of amazing proportions.
Choosing multitasking over an event-driven approach also means that Android is, quite often, agonizingly slow; it's not uncommon to have to wait 1, 2, maybe 3 seconds just for the contact list to show up. As I was used to fraction-of-a-second performance from a comparably ancient device, this frequently drives me up the wall with impatience.
Other gripes
I want to get in a few more jabs before I get flamed to smithereens.
I accede that Android is fundamentally linked with Google and Google is 'out there' on the internet, but why-oh-why is there no exhaustive
local search? I can search for anything online, but I can't find a darn thing that's stored in the Note field of a contact or a calendar item (to say nothing of any 3rd-party app) -- and the data is
right there, millimeters away from the search field! Apparently, Android 1.6 is improving this, choosing pretty much the same method as Palm. Still, it seems there's quite a way to go before we'll have search capability matching that of a 10-year-old embedded OS. And this from the world's premier search corporation? They should have gotten this down pat from the start. Now, thousands of apps that are already out there need to play catch-up.
And while they're playing catch-up, why not implement a standard framework for per-record privacy? (Need I say it: Palm did it over a decade ago.) Plenty of users have asked for this for their contacts, SMS messages, photos, and whatnot. Come on, you designed the database -- why didn't you add a privacy field? (I'm tempted to say something paranoid-sounding right here.)
Yet another thing I'm continually seeing people complain about (and with good reason) and trying to make applications for (which is futile, as you'll soon see) is battery monitoring. Come on,
ChaDis did a great job on my Psion, as did
Battery Monitor on PalmOS, but Android will never see anything in that league. Why? Because Android only lets you query the battery for voltage, temperature, and (knid of ironically) percentage -- but what you really need, in order to keep track of energy spent and remaining, is amperage. And that's the one thing they forgot(?) to provide. So we'll have to use best-effort guessing, as
Battery Left so commendably tries very hard to do.
Palm in hand
Now we're up to date, where I've sent my Galaxy in under warranty to get its G-sensors fixed, and in the mean I'll be using my Treo.
I must say, when I first popped my SIM back into the Treo and booted it, I didn't, as I had half-expected, get that
ugh feeling you get when you have to resort to using Word 95 for the rest of the day. No, I was actually rather content to be back in familiar surroundings, and immediately reconfirmed my joy of handwriting recognition and programmed quick-launch keys (plus that little handful of apps that I couldn't migrate). After a few days, I do sort of miss the easy-fast-everywhere internet connection, but must say that I wouldn't mind not going back to Android. At least, not just yet. There are a number of things that they are going to have to
*cough* copy from Palm *cough* implement (though, presumably, not before having re-invented them, Google-style).
Update: I've now had the Galaxy for several months, and I still find myself relying on my Palm, which I keep with me at all times, for the things that Android just will not do. In that regard, I am
still dragging around separate devices for pda and phone; which was the reason I switched from a pda-only Tungsten T3 to a pda-cum-phone Treo. Now, I wish I hadn't sold the quite superior T3.
Conclusion
Overall, I must give Samsung rather good marks for the hardware (warranty issues aside), but decidedly low marks for its rough and beta-quality firmware. As many others have complained, it seems that Samsung is not even interested in being in touch with their customers. Samsung
really needs to get their act together.
Android is a very nice OS. Sure, it's missing a couple of features, but it's still young and yet quite adequate for the average modern person. I am certain that in a few years it will be rock solid and supremely useful. Personally, I was looking for a pda with a phone in it, and Android only provides a phone with some pda-like features. No blame on Android for this, and none on me either; a good, proper pda just does not seem to exist any more.
So there you have it. For the old-school pda road warrior, nothing beats a PalmOS-powered pda. Even if it is, ostensibly, obsolete. Not even today.
Review: My take on the Android OS and the Galaxy
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