Android phone for a day

I did try out an android phone for 1 day. I could see no reason to do more days.

First and foremost. The Android OS is actually much better than I thought. Even on an old phone it actually was almost smooth. All the phone operations were great. The reception for the gsm network was excellent. Dialling and speaking into the phone, holding it to the ear and the sound quality was excellent. So as a phone, Android kicks Nokias behind, hands down much better at being a phone than Nokia. HTC makes good phones.

But for everything else. I did not become faster typer with the keyboard than on the screen keyboard. It was nice to have the whole screen while typing, something that I miss quite often on my iPhone.

Now for the rest. Doing the settings on the phone, change ring tone, warning tone, timezone and all that. Pretty straight forward but not easy, not at all. The whole idea that sometimes I must press the menu button and sometimes not is quite confusing. Changing timezones was really bad, you need to have more cities in the list.

The media player was kind of "what were they thinking". Not a very good product to say the least. Songs would not play in the album view. But once the song played it was good. I did not try audiobooks, I must try that one day.

I downloaded a few software titles. For the sakes of the author I will not list them or speak their names. They were so bad. One ping pong game had graphics like the 1970's pong. Just two squares at the top and you control one of them and the phone the other. Then there is a small ball that bounces. This was awful. Even though the graphics were quite minimal the game felt awful and slow and the animation flickered quite a lot.

The photo application was ok, even though it could have been quite a lot better, easily.

The camera literally took 30 seconds to take a picture. This could have something to do with the lens being scratched. I tried taking pictures of my kids (3 and 5) with no luck, they could not stay put for that long.

I did try some other games and apps but none of the apps had any good quality to it. Almost all of the apps are free, but some have very badly done advertisements, and make you feel annoyed.

As a phone for a technical person it was ok, but I would never actually tell anyone to buy one unless he/she really were technical.

Just being fair, I did not try out twitter or facebook or any voip software. I know these run in the back and are always up to date, but I just can't shake the feeling that it would still not make the phone any better.

To finish this off, I had a little interest in doing some development for the phone but it went out the window. It looks to me that programmers don't get the tools they need.

The phone I used was an old G1 phone with 1.5 android system. I have heard that things have become quite a lot better and I will try to test one of the latest ones. If I was Nokia, I would be really scared as Sony Ericsson, HTC, Motorola and others are all coming out with Android phones, and they are so much better than anything Nokia has (I have not tried the N900).

I will try to get my hands on a 2.1 android phone as I really want to get a non Apple phone that I could like.