I ordered one of the Google unlocked developer Android G1  phones mid December. It finally arrived on the day of our office Christmas party so I was able to play with it over the festive period. I’ve yet to do any development for it, so this is a review of the phone itself.

Since this is a developer model I wasn’t expecting any smart packaging, and was therefore not disappointed. None of the packaging theatre of the iPhone, just a pragmatic white box. US-pronged powersupply, but the order form warns of that.

While the handset isn’t that impressive to look at, it sits nicely in your hand and has a good case texture. I much prefer it to the iphone which is too wide and slightly too thin for comfort. I like the slight bend at the bottom. The sliding screen arrangement feels a bit wobbly and even a little bit Heath Robinson (Rube Goldberg for US readers) but it works well enough and the open mode is surprisingly well balanced.

The little keyboard is good as these things go - it works certainly as well as a BlackBerry keyboard and is just soooo much better than only using the iPhone screen keyboard.

The screen is very good, and the heat-sensitive finger tracking as good as anything I’ve used. I do like having hardware green/red buttons as you can operate them with gloves on (important in Scotland in winter) and you can find them without looking, unlike virtual buttons.

The trackball looks a little bit redundant, but I find myself using it more than I’d expected. It is easier to use than the BlackBerry Pearl but I think that’s probably because the ball is slightly stiffer and acceleration is much lower. The ball is a great compliment to using the G1 in landscape, keyboard mode.

Turning down the brightness of the screen gives at least one day of heavy use from a charge, which is acceptable. Charging via USB is ideal for computer workers, although I can see that the power of the software (see next post) means that it would be easy not to lug a laptop about as well.

The GPS is fast and accurate, and the compass very cool.

Phone audio is great and speakerphone is adequate. Bluetooth headset support is excellent, and the Samsung model I use works better on Android than it did with Nokia.

Wifi is great when it connects, but it’s not so good at reconnecting when you walk out and back into a registered Wifi zone. This is a bit of a problem in our house where the kitchen is out of wifi range - be connected, walk down to the kitchen, walk back and the wifi does not reconnect. It is easy to reconnect and it doesn’t get stuck disconnected as I’ve seen some devices.

The camera is small and fuzzy and has no xenon flash. Installing a Market camera app (SnapPhoto) gives much better results.

The most impressive thing,  however, is the sheer performance of the device. I guess this is because it was designed to run Windows Mobile which is a resource hog. The much lighter Android software flies on it like and it is just much, much faster than anything else I’ve used.

So how does it compare to the N95? Well, I’ve cleaned all my personal info off the N95 and put it into the office test pool.

How does it compare to the iPhone? The iPhone sits in my back most of the time unless I’m developing for it.

As my VC friend Sandy says, “Game changing, mate, game changing!”

I’ve been comparing some iPhone apps between Duncan’s iPhone and my iPod Touch. For the small sample of apps we’ve tried, none of them work on the iPod Touch!

Duncan thinks this is bound into problems with the V2 OS as he’s found rebooting several times in a row has helped some apps work on the iPhone. And he wondered if any QA was being done on the apps at all.

This is perpetuating the classic I tried it and it didn’t work problem of mobile content, and could kill a potentially interesting market before it gets going. Again.

I’ve pointed out before that the Apple iPod/iPhone software’s reliance on the clickable panic button is a real weakness. This morning I’ve been working with an LG Chocolate which has a mixture of touch buttons for navigation and softkeys, but a real clickable keypad for data entry. The screen is dark, small, and recessed behind a fashionable casing and is not touchable.

I find it difficult to move from the light brushing movement needed for the touch buttons to the quite firm click of the keypad. Combined with the small size is makes for cramped fingers. Even discounting the awful LG user interface software, it makes for doing anything other than making calls very fiddly.

Clearly anybody with a feeling for user interface design will know that consistency of action is important; now we can add to that the need for physical consistency of the interface.

Insisting that everything be artificially consistent is, of course, just as bad, so I think that answering/hanging up calls work well with a positive click, even if the rest of the interface is just brushing.

Clearly there is plenty of scope for additional innovtion in physical handset design as well as user interface software.

I love this article in Time about how the iPhone 3G will be ideal for mobile porn. Gosh, you can cut out the carrier, gosh kids will be able to get at it. So how does this change from any other phone with a browser, or for that matter an iPod Touch?

However the humour in the article appears to be unintentional: “the iPhone is like a Trojan horse that lets smut providers cut out the carrier as middleman.” Heavens above, they missed off the trademark on Trojan! And it gets better: the Apple spokewoman is called Bowcock. The less said about that the better, I think.

On a more serious note, as a service provider things like Vodafone’s Adult Content Blocker is an inconvenience, it’s not very well implemented, but it does actually do what it says on the tin. However the article makes no mention of the good work that has been done in the UK at least in this area, and it ignores the unregulatable world of personal wifi.

People are getting excited because there’s pacman running on an Android demo box. Gosh. So a 30 year old game is the best we can do? Compass mode is a cool toy, where the streetview changes direction when you move the device, but what practical use is it? Looks like something you show to your friends and say, wow look at this, and then never visit it again. The rest of the UI looks like an iPhone without the odd restrictions.

Where is the real innovation?

So much gushing has been written about the iPhone interface that it seems to have washed away any serious analysis. I’ve not seen anybody do a real breakdown of it. Perhaps they’re scared of the reaction. Well, here goes.

Yes, I’m going to pick at this icon of design. Design but not usability. And I’m going to pick at it because it could be utterly brillaint if the sharp edges were taken away.

At first site the screen is very pretty - lots of bright colours on a very dark background. Once you’ve found out that you have to press that anonymous button at the bottom to switch it on. (I’ve decided it’s a Panic Button as you use it when you start to Panic that you’ve lost where you are.) And once you’ve managed to slide that slidey thing across. Given that you need to have a warm finger to operate the touch screen, why does it need that unlock function?

So there’s all these bright icons and some special icons across the bottom. But special to someone else. I don’t have any videos or photos loaded on mine, so that’s two high-value real estate buttons that I can’t use. Well, despite what you might read, you can move them around, although you can’t get rid of them. I don’t know if this is different from the iPhone, because I’ve read people bemoaning the lack of configurability. Clearly they’ve not been tactile enough - ya just gotta try stuff here as the affordance is real low.

Moving icons involves holding your finger on one until they all start jiggling about to some hidden techno beat. Then you can drag them about as you wish. To get rid of ones you don’t want the only option is to drag them, still jiggling, onto a second or even third screen where you don’t normally see them. Of course you have to look this up on the web as it’s not at all obvious and there is no on-device help that I’ve found. Nor does anybody tell you have to press the Panic Button at the bottom to stop the icons dancing about.

Looking at the icons, they look like they’re live, so the weather looks like it’s telling me that the current weather is sunny and 23C. But it isn’t, nor is it permanently 10.15 on the dot. These icons are too concrete - go read Scot McLoud to understand how they should be more abstract, just like Safari’s compass. Talking of which, how’s yer average user supposed to know that Safari’s a web browser?

Most people buy iPod Touches for two purposes: browsing websites when they’re wandering about their home, and listening to music. I’d add that reading e-mail is likely to be a third, as the e-mail program is quite good for browsing. I can’t begin to imagine what it would be like to touch-screen type in an e-mail. Nor would you want to use the contacts list often. Why? Because the only option that I’ve found of locating a contact is stabbing at the alphabet and then lots and lots of scrolling. My fingers are way too big to select an item accurately off that alphabet.

And now that I’m in Contacts, how do I get to the Music? Not obvious! Just a small [::] button top left would solve that, but no, we have to press the Panic Button at the bottom which takes you back to the main menu. This strikes me as a weakness in the whole design - why does this buttonless interface make you go to the one button it’s not suppose to have so often?

Lots of people have raved about the browser and the zoomy effects. Well, it works, even smoothly, but the frequency of zooming is quite tiring on the fingers spreading and squishing. I also found that the act of touching the screen to zoom quite often clicks a link, and boom, you’re off somewhere else.

But the real doozie in the UI is the rotation not being ubiquitous. I’m browsing in portrait orientation, click into a field, and I cant type easily in the tiny buttons. So I rotate the device to go to landscape. Except it doesn’t, cause the keyboard is open. Duh! You press the Panic Button, and yo, it’s all the little icons are on their side! Hey, my Nokia N95 swaps everything when you go from portrait to landscape. It shouldn’t be that hard.

This modality afflicts the entire interface, and I think is part of the reason for the Panic Button.

This same modality applies to the music player as well, where the interface changes suddenly and completely when you rotate the device, offering different functions depending on orientation. Clever, yes, but not friendly.

Here’s a question for the fanboys: how do you put a track on repeat?

I had to look it up on the web - absolutely zero affordance.

People have gushed about coverflow, but it doesn’t work for me. This might be because a large part of my music doesn’t have cover art. Maybe people with more mainstream material would find it useful. The artist and track lists are more or less unusable because of the same problem as contacts - stab, scroll, scroll, scroll, ooops, over shot, scroll back.

And how do I move from function to function? Via the Panic Button of course. I repeatedly found myself getting sort of lost between the multiple presentations of the same information. It’s all a bit like a committee off UI people all came up with different ways of accessing music, and instead of picking the best, they put all of them in.

Email, on the other hand, has but one option. The long scroll. Yet it’s quite a nice little e-mail browsing tool when you are just looking at a small number of messages. It has it’s own poor affordance feature, though, which I found accidentally by dragging my finger across the screen, right to left. A big red Delete button appears! Wow. How are you supposed to find that one?

The rendering of e-mail is certainly very good, but in this case it’s the lack of rotation that causes problems. With wide messages in HTML they would be rendered better in landscape. Why not?

Conclusion: huge potential as a browsing device, sadly mared by some strange decisions, or maybe it just wasn’t ready in time for release. Sure this isn’t by design.

How would I improve things?

1) Make rotation work absolutely everywhere.

2) Get rid of the Panic Button and design app-to-app navigation into the user experience.

3) Make navigation through long lists easier, probably by grouping letters so that they can be reasonably clicked by someone with my size of fingers.

I bought the smallest (8Gb) iPod Touch in duty free while travelling back from London, getting it at about £160. Immediately the salesdroid wanted to cross sell me a leather case for £25 which covered the entire thing with a flap on the front. I inclined, but did buy one of these silicone covers which cling to the case. He also tried to sell me some screen protectors, which appear to be bits of cling film at exhorbitant prices. Presumably invented by the same people who do the ink jet cartridges, the most expensive fluid you can buy. Putting aside the natural inclination to sell high-margin accessories, this acceptance of cases tells you something about the hardware - it’s perceived as being fragile or scratchable or something. Which is strange, because it clearly isn’t.

So I take out my little box - it is tiny but beautiful, like a perfume box rather than an electronics product.

Opening the box, out comes a sliver of glass and chromed something. It’s much thinner than an iPhone, in fact it’s skinny. It’s slightly too thin for its width, I’d say. Curiously my first reaction was that it looks like a very small flat-panel TV!

Next observation is that the edge of the frame into which the mineral glass on the front sits is quite rough. It’s not smooth all round, which was surprising. You can grate your finger on it.

Clearly the form factor has been determined by the iPhone as you could clip a good centimetre off the top without affecting useful screen size. And it’s wide. I’ve tried holding it like I would hold a phone, and it’s too wide.

Next curiousity is the black corner on the back of the case. That’s odd, since it breaks the smooth chromed finish.

Then I was pleased to see what looks like an on/off switch at the top. As I’ve said before, the absence of some way of turning off the iPod has always perturbed me. Well, I was pleased to find this power switch until I discovered that it appears to turn just the screen on and off. This is the first of many bits of mystery meat affordance that spoils the user experience. More of that part 2 on the software. No doubt the fan boys will say “ah yes, that’s the dingleflibber, you must know what that was for.” Well, I didn’t, and I don’t mind admitting it. Make it obvious or label it.

Working down the way, the mineral glass screen radiates solidity and antiscratchiness, great job.

Then there’s this strange button recesssed into the surface. It has a small square on it. What’s that do?

And finally, a couple of sensible sockets in the bottom. It plugged directly into my iPod-to-hifi stand, and headphones plug straight in, no silliness with non-standard connectors.

What’s curious is that almost everyone I’ve seen with one thinks that their iPod Touch looks gorgeous - it does - but immediately feel compelled to put it in some kind of cover. I find it easier to hold in the silicone thing, and find myself nervously slipping it back on after use in the stand where it doesn’t fit when covered.

This rush to cover the iPod is irrational, but I think it comes from the fact that the screen is flush with the surface. My Nokia N95’s screen is slightly recessed, and I have no concerns about damaging it. Maybe the desire to cover it is because both the glass and the chromed case show finger marks very easily, but they don’t interfere with viewing. Whatever the cause, it’s a source of curiosity.

It’s mad here at Rapid at the moment, hence low posting rate. Coming soon, however, comparison of using Dell XPS with Vista and Macbook with OSX, as well as iPod Touch thoughts.