G1 Dev Phone - Software
Posted: January 27th, 2009
Amazing how time flies - but that’s given me a couple of extra weeks of experience using the Android G1 Dev Phone as my day-to-day comms device, and it is still growing on me. As an example, my wife and I were talking holiday destinations, including one in Florida where some friends moved recently. Unsure of the distances involved, out comes the G1, into Maps and found it very, very quickly and allowed zoom and pan at stunning speed. Ok, you can do this on other devices, but there was something very low friction about how this worked - it’s a good user experience for me anyway.
The most famous feature of Android has to be the parallax scrolling. For those who have not seen it, it means that the background image, screen furniture and icons scroll at three different speeds providing a sense of depth in the user interface. It’s one of those little tricks that keeps the eye busy and makes the brain subconciously happy.
The desktop control is fine - just poke your finger at it long enough and the context menu pops up. No cutesy dancing icons, but a nice blib on the vibe and highlight on the menu tab to let you know you can drag things to it. The ability to bring just the items you use the most to the front is good - much easier to track and use the key apps than on the iPhone where most people seem to be perpetually hunting around for the right thing.
The dialer application is excellent, quite the best I’ve used - it’s just quick and natural. The favourites list of the people you call most is a nice feature. Contacts are well managed and easily navigated, especially compared to the iPhone where scrolling is pretty much the only option unless you want to sharpen your fingers to a small point and have particularly good eyesight.
Alphabetical scrolling is achieved in two ways on Android. You can whizz along with momentum scrolling from your finger, as in the iPhone, and when you do a finger tab appears which you can touch and pull up and down while the letter on display appears. Nice.
Lots of people having been dissing the e-mail app, and while it’s certainly not perfect, it’s better than most mobile e-mail clients. In particular it renders HTML e-mail properly, even complex and large items which normally crash(ed) the iPhone e-mail app, and that the Nokia client didn’t even attempt to render. Suffice to say that as a means of checking e-mail between laptop sessions it works fine for me. The only benefit the N95 had was that you could disconnect the e-mail so that it didn’t go beep in the middle of the night. I now turn the phone off. Initially I found the lack of push e-mail irksome, but I’ve got used to the regular check, which is what Outlook and company do anyway.
The Messaging app offers nice threading of SMSes which are presented in a pragmatic, space-saving and easily read list.
Contacts are cool - you can have as many numbers as you like per person without having to invent strange labels for them, and then it is all synced directly with your gmail account. Very smooth. Even smoother if you use gmail, which I don’t but I’ll forgive them as I can manage the content via the web when I need bulk updates.
E-mail, messaging, and Twidroid, the Twitter client I use, all use the notification mechanism. Icons appear in the top bar of the window, which can then be pulled down to reveal what the alerts are. Twidroid even puts the text of the tweet in the list. It’s quick and efficient, but probably too techy for normal people to use.
The music player is rudimentary, especially the means of putting music on the device (mount a filesystem and copy!), but I don’t use it much anyway. The camera software is as bad as the iPhone one, but thankfully you can download others, including SnapPhoto which includes an image stabiliser. Picture gallery is ok, but it could do with better rotation control.
The alarm clock is basic but effective, but is a useful comparison with the S60 alarm clock. The latter is a piece of arcane technical excess designed by someone with an overactive imagination and no clue about user experience or flow. The Android clock, in contrast, is delightfully simple. However there is a limitation: the hardware doesn’t switch on if you set an alarm and turn it off. I suppose off being off makes sense for power consumption, but combined with the nocturnal beeping on e-mail arrival makes it all less useful as a travelling alarm clock.
The Android Market is not, thankfully, swamped with millions of useless apps hiding the occasional delight. I’ve downloaded a few very good apps, SnapPhoto included. Compass is very nice, if somewhat academic, but the best is Skymaps which is perhaps the best use of novel UI features I’ve ever seen. Well done to the guys behind it. Like others, that’s the app that I use to show off the device.
One of my principle gripes about the iPhone is that screen rotation is not universal. With the exception of the rather pathetic Telegraph application, everything on Android rotates correctly. And everything works with the real keyboard. Nice!
And as before and as others have noted, the phone is much faster than anything I’ve owned before. I tried a HTC Touch HD recently and it was somewhat faster even running WinMo. So clearly for sheer performance HTC is the one to beat.
The 3G service, which for me is on Vodafone, is also very fast most of the time, and the device is reasonably good at connecting to remembered WiFi networks. Occasionally needs a hint and I think it gets confused when there is more than one available choice.
Perhaps the most telling observation is that I’m using the device significantly more for internet work, eg looking things up when talking in the family, that the N95 or even the iPod Touch which I bought pretty much for doing that.
Looking forward to the updated software, but very happy with it as it is.
