I acquired an HTC “G2” Magic less than two days ago. It runs the Android operating system. The feeling of being confronted with something very alien pushed me to record my first impressions with it to give an account of how a foreigner perceives the Android world with his naïve eyes, in his own words. For other systems where I’m a power user, I find the experience of newcomers interesting when they candidly point out problems we ignore because we have simply grown used to them.
This entry relates my feelings from friday night to sunday night. It may seem ridiculous in the future, but it is an instantaneous snapshot – for what it is worth.
First contact with the Android is a severe case of culture shock. More than ten years of Palm OS have shaped my expectations, and the disappointing past year with S60 on the Nokia E71 has not changed them much. But plunging into Android is unlike anything I have used so far – many of the UI conventions feel utterly strange. The home screen has a familiar status bar – but beyond that, Android is a class of its own. For example, instead of grabbing the scroll bar and sliding it, one has to slide the list itself – not illogical, but the contrary of any familiar widget kit I have come accross anywhere else. And many other things are just as alien.
After poking around a little, my first reaction is disorientation from the lack of keyboard. I could write tolerably fast with Palm’s Graffiti, but I was in love with the Treo-style keyboards – on the the Treos as well as on the E71 they let me write considerable volumes fluidly and without excessive strain. But my first attempts at text entry on the G2 are stumbling hit and miss torture with each word containing at least two typing errors. And why does the automatic correction insist on changing my “jm@liotier.org” address to “kn@liotier.org” every single time I enter it in a web form ? Text entry on the G2 is tedious enough without this sort of annoyance…
To be fair, I knew I had to expect text entry woes – I had anticipated that risk when choosing the G2 over the G1. Learning a new tool takes times, especially when low level reflexes are involved, so I have budgeted a few weeks for climbing up the learning curve. Then I’ll decide if I like onscreen keyboards or not. But whatever the learning, it seems that text entry on a virtual keyboard requires to keep one’s eyes on the keyboard – whereas with a physical keyboard, after a while muscle memory sets in and you can forget the keyboard to concentrate on what you are writing. So I’m not optimistic so far – but I’ll keep my mind open. Meanwhile, tactile feedback screens are on the way – I’ll keep an eye on them.
I miss the four-ways arrows button, but the obscene pointing device works rather well although like the rest it will take time to get used to. A “page down” button would be even better than having to swipe the whole screen every time I want to scroll down one step – one page at the time would be more precise than scrolling a random number of lines according to how much inertia the widget takes from the swipe. Screen swipe and inertia are sexy gimmicks, but I don’t understand how heavy users tolerate them for more than five minutes. I’m the sort of user who disables smooth scrolling and any on-screen animation that introduces the slightest lag in my interaction with the system – and I know I’m not the only one who wants responsiveness above everything else.
A combination of importing in Evolution a CSV file generated with Outlook, synchronization from the Nokia E71 to Google and copying native Evolution contacts to Google did not manage to capture at once all of the information I wanted transferred – so I had to munge some of the data and re-enter quite a few of the notes and adresses manually… Hopefully that is the last time I do that. Those contacts had often been through various synchronizations between Palm OS devices, Outlook and Evolution – but getting them to Google seemed lossier than usual. I have read about many other contorted data migration paths, and this one looked straightforward enough – but if I have to do it again I’ll spend time setting up better automation. I’ll concede that it does not have much to do with Android – anywhere you look the synchronization ecosystem seems quite wet behind the ears.
I won’t complain too much about how tightly tied the system is with Google’s applications – after all that is a major feature of Google’s Android business model. With the defaults applications, Android is a seamless extension of the Google universe. Synchronization of calendar and contacts is excellent – although it only happens eventually and you have no way to know when or to trigger it (this is the first time I ever see this implemented with no control by the user). In addition, I am very uncomfortable with the idea of using a third party as my synchronization hub and I’ll look for another way.
But every functionnality seems available through an API – so with the user in control and free to act there is no reason to complain. I’ll ignore the Gmail and Google Talk clients, and replace them with a decent XMPP client and an IMAP client better than the default one – and maybe I’ll even find a decent contacts manager. Meanwhile the native Google Maps client is such a pleasure to use that I could forget everything else (though I wonder why the relief layer has been omitted – I find it very useful for planning human powered movement).
The scarcity of exposed configuration options, output logs and exposed information in general leaves me wanting. For example the Jabiru Jabber client tells me “connexion error” but won’t explain anything, resulting in frustration. Of course, Jabiru is not part of the basic system, but this rarefied atmosphere seems to be the norm in the Android world. And why is there no option to sort the contacts by “family name, first name” instead of the default “first name, family name” ? Would that clutter the interface too much ? Even the simplicity-worshipping Palm OS gave that choice…
I guess that a compromise has been struck in favor of simplicity by default over configurability, and that developper tools are available to provide advanced access to deeply buried parameters – but for example not being able to set the language to english with the french keyboard upsets me a lot. I’m used the english as a device language, and I’m used to the french “AZERTY” keyboard – reading french or typing on a QWERTY keyboard with no accents feels awkward. On any other system I know, keyboard and language are two separate options – but not on Android. I hope I find an application that provides finer grained options. I was also frutrated not to find any configuration option that would solve my above-mentioned problem with the scrolling style.
The Android Market feels sluggish. I have been spoilt by APT caching all packages descriptions locally – and now I have to suffer Android Market loading package descriptions and icons slower than I scroll accross the list that only shows six items per page with no way of getting the device to display smaller characters in order to cram more lines per page. I can understand that the icons must be stored online for storage space’s sake, and maybe the user comments in order to keep them current – but why not load the whole package list at once ? And why does every list on this device use a standard widget that seems sized large enough for legibility by half blind users ? Where is the configuration option ?
Many of my gripes are probably related with the default applications, and after exploring the Android Market for a while I’m sure I’ll feel better. I’m commenting an operating system in its default form, and this is obviously not how I’m going to use it – In a few weeks, after the normal process of appropriation, my Android will hopefully not look and feel like its current state at all.
So see you in a couple of months for a look back at these first impressions – we’ll see which were real problems and which were merely artefacts of the clash of cultures ! For now I have the eery feeling of having stumbled in a sort of Apple-esque Disneyland with my hands tied…