A year with Android
That’s another year over and done with during which mobile continued to drill into everyday life for everyone in ways that couldn’t have been readily predicted. For me personally, the most notable feature was that I wasn’t desperate to get my hands on some new phone. I received my G1 on the 19th December 2008 and have used it is as my main mobile constantly since then. The much maligned hardware has proven much more robust than everyone thought and the software is brilliant.
Like any gadget, Android offers a lot more features than I actually use, so I thought I’d look what I do actually use.
Probably the biggest workload goes, unsurprisingly to email and browser. The email client is not great, but it does a much better job of rendering HTML e-mail than any other mobile email client that I’ve used. The browser is good - it does the job especially for the specially-built sites like Flickr which is the one I use most.
Direct search integration is wonderful - I love being able to simply type into the phone and get a search query. As a family we often look things up on the phone at meal times.
Google Calendar integration is awesome - and the calendar widget is great. My home screen has the clock, the calendar widget, and the eight most common functions which are Calendar, Google Maps, Google Mail, HulloMail, Dialer, Messaging, Email, Browser.
HulloMail is a free visual voicemail service which sends your voicemails to you as MP3 attachments and has a nice Android client to see who called and when. It also tells you who called but didn’t leave a message while you are on a call, something that Vodafone’s own voicemail doesn’t do.
Google Maps is worth a special mention as it is so good and the GPS on the G1 so fast that it becomes an instant habit to use it frequently. When people ask me for directions, which happens disproporianately often, I often use Google Maps to show how to get from where we are to their destination. I tried really hard to use Nokia Maps on my N95 8Gb but was plagued by two problems: the slowness of the GPS and the appearance of the mapping itself. I found it curiously difficult to figure out which was I was pointing on Nokia Maps and found myself walking down streets the wrong way until common sense registered that landmarks weren’t going the right way. Never had this problem with Google Maps - it just works.
On the other hand, Street View is fun to play with and great to demo, but has little practical utility that I’ve found.
Moving off the home screen, the left-hand side has the search widget, which is actually redundant, and the Facebook widget. If I was a heavy user of Facebook I’d probably put it on the main screen as it is very good. I use that to demo the utility of widgets - at least for real-time information. The music player widget completes the screen, but I’ve not got much music on the device and don’t play it very often as a result.
On the right-hand page I have AK Notes which is a great little app for keeping, well, notes. The absurdly-complex alarm cloc, the inexplicably-simple calculator and the Facebook app.
I also have FourSquare installed by find it of little value as the local information is out of date and the user interface is frustratingly awful. And last is the Compass app, which is a good bit of software but of limited utility for urban beings.
And that’s it - I don’t have a lot of downloaded apps installed. I did have Twidroid but it crashed so often I removed it.
I’m looking forward to a burgeoning of good stuff for Android this year, and may opt to upgrade to a new device at some point. The key driver for that is likely to be incompatibility of updates with the G1 as the device is the right size and offers adequate performance.
