We’ve had the iPhone since day one, so AT&T’s network isn’t new to us. It seems to be getting worse though, the last month, dropped calls increased, the 3G service disappeared, texts came through hours late, and sending a text usually took multiple tries. Finally fed up, we decided to get ourselves Verizon phones. This was pretty embarrassing for us, we’ve spent the last year and a half building our business specifically around the iPhone. We love the iPhone and we tell everyone to get one.
We initially went to Verizon for the Motorola Droid, but were unimpressed. It was ugly, and the phone just didn’t feel “right”, we may be biased against sliders though. Overall the phone felt clunky, heavy and we weren’t too sure that it could survive the trauma of a parking lot drop, which is surprising as Motorola typically makes very rugged phones. We took a look at the HTC Droid Eris (a repackaged HTC Hero), and it was a clear win over the Motorola Droid. It has a nice feel in your hand, the weight is just right and the phone feels solid. HTC’s SenseUI is very nice, and compared to the Motorola Droid’s stock Android UI, it wasn’t even a contest. We pulled the trigger, and picked up a few Droid Eris phones knowing that it had inferior hardware to the Droid, and knowing that it was running Android 1.5 and not 2.0. Sorry Motorola, but people do care about how things look, however, that’s another blog post.
Our Impressions
Android, with the HTC SenseUI, makes a great first impression. You unlock the phone for the first time, and you’re shown a gorgeous Weather Widget, with the weather in your current location, imagine that (very annoyed iPhone’s weather app doesn’t get current location). Although, while the weather widget will tell you the weather for your current location, it doesn’t let you enter every city, only major ones, which is a really annoying issue. Eager to get the devices setup, we tried to get our contacts on the phone. We all use Spanning Sync, to synch our calendars and contacts with our Google accounts, so they were already on the phone (which was very convenient). However, also on the phone was every single person we’ve emailed since we had our Gmail accounts. It took us two days to figure out how to fix this, here’s the text that was sent explaining this: “Finally figured it out: Go to People, tap the third tab (groups), hit the Menu button, tap ‘Sync Groups’, Uncheck ‘Sync all contacts’ and check ‘My Contacts’, then tap ‘Save’”. Really Google? Why would this not be the default option!
One of our favorite features on Android is the “People” app. Apple should “borrow” from this. Android’s “People” app completely integrates your contacts with their social media presence. I get to see all of my friends Facebook Status updates right under their name in the contact list and it even synchs my address book pictures with Facebook so I have pictures for every contact with a Facebook account. If I tap into them, I see all of their Facebook albums, Flickr albums, etc. Here’s where it gets even cooler: Tapping into a contact, shows you everything on your phone about that contact. You get to see recent phone calls, ongoing text conversations, emails, etc. It’s a very nice “portal” for your contacts and allows you to essentially see everything you need to know about the contact you’re currently looking at.
We also used our Google Voice accounts to make having two phones easier. As everyone knows, Google Voice isn’t on the iPhone without jailbreaking, so we were definitely excited to get the Android app installed. While the setup was a bit puzzling (you have to restart the app twice?), it wasn’t too bad. After that, every contact called, every phone number dialed, was routed through Google Voice. It’s far from seamless though. The app seems to “hook” into calls as the device makes them and routes them through Google Voice’s VoIP servers. The device actually shows the dialed number as Google’s number and not the number you intended to dial. While it’s not that big of a deal, it’d be nice if it was more transparent and worked at a system level without you even knowing what’s going on. Then you stop and think about that for a second, “Did a third party app just hijack my entire phone?”. Everyone has different opinions on this, and obviously people love the “openness” about Android, I however, am not one of them. Yes, it warned me before I installed, but who reads those gigantic lists anyway? I don’t feel very secure on the Android. Sure people will say “well you deserved it”, but any developer knows that a user just cannot be trusted. They hit “OK” without reading things all the time. A notice isn’t going to protect people from anything, especially not themselves. Given what Google Voice actually does, and how tightly integrated it needs to be, I’m just confused as to why it’s not built in at an OS level.
The Keyboard
The keyboard on the Android is very odd. The layout just seems a bit “off” and different than the iPhone, but that’s fine and you’d expect that going from phone to phone. It’s not always obvious that you’ve hit a “key” and it’s a bit laggy if you start to type fast. It has some nifty enhancements that the iPhone could benefit from. The best of all is that it gives you “choices” of words when it’s correcting you. The UI for this feature isn’t as nice as I think it could be, but the feature itself is awesome. Anyone who’s typed a certain word and ended up with “ducked” knows exactly how annoying the suggestion feature can be on the iPhone, so this was warmly greeted. Another cool thing is that you can hold down a key to essentially emulate a “shift” key. This is nice when you don’t want to swap the keyboard (like you have to do on the iPhone) just to hit a question mark. The biggest problem with the keyboard is how small the keys are, especially the space bar. You have a tendency to hit the wrong key a LOT and thanks to the suggestion, you can usually get by, but its a bit annoying to deal with.
Using the Phone
There’s three small features the iPhone has that Android doesn’t have, they seem insignificant and most users probably don’t even realize they’re using them: but aren’t those the best features?
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Tap-to-Top
- This is a feature that didn’t appear on iPhone until 2.0. You tap the status bar, and in most apps, it scrolls to the top. This is genius, especially in apps that contain a lot of data (Contacts, Safari, iPod).
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Bounce Scrolling
- All of iPhone’s scroll views have “bounce scrolling”. If you’re not aware, “bounce scrolling” allows the view, or list, to slide past the top or bottom a little, and then slide back into place. This seems like a “cool”, “pretty” feature that has no real value, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
- It’s not until you don’t have it, that you realize why it’s there. The scrollbar on mobile devices aren’t seen like they are on a computer. They’re small and usually hidden under your fingers when you’re scrolling. The “bounce scrolling” provides great visual feedback to let you know there’s no more scrolling in that direction, since you don’t see the scrollbar hit to the top. For the most part Android doesn’t do this; a few apps try, but fail to do it well. When you scroll on Android, it just stops, and since the scrollbars aren’t very visible, you’re not sure why. It’s very awkward, and I end up trying to scroll again until I realize why it’s not working.
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Navigation
- App navigation should not be based on physical buttons, this is very confusing. Every app navigates differently too, so standard buttons makes it weird and they don’t always “apply” to every app. On the iPhone, there’s a navigation bar thats present in just about every application. There are obviously reasons to hide the navigation bar, and apps do, but for the most part, it’s necessary.
- Android relies on physical buttons to navigate the phone. There’s a “back” button to go back, all the way at the bottom of the phone, why is this? On a touch screen phone, my hands are positioned to navigate the screen, stretching my thumb to the bottom of the phone to tap a tiny button is very awkward.
- Android also has a physical “menu” button. Again, this button is at the bottom of the phone, not easily accessible, and it’s not “obvious” that tapping that is bringing up more features for the view you’re not — not even the app, it’s specific to the view. I’ve had the phone for a week, and I’m still having trouble getting used to this.
- To make everything worse, the “physical buttons” on the Droid Eris are touch sensitive. What is the point of having a physical button that gives no feedback? Seems like the touch screen could have done a better job, at least then you’d be able to see visual feedback of the button being pressed.
Putting it all together
Putting together those three points above, here’s the Android Browser vs iPhone’s browser. Android’s browser is backed by the same rendering engine as iPhone’s Safari, WebKit. Getting to the top of a webpage in Safari is simple, you tap the top of the screen, and it slides up to the top. Android? You’re forced to scroll the entire length of the page to get to the top. Scrolling and zooming is very smooth on iPhone’s Safari, and when you get to the bottom of a page, it bounces up a little, then slides back down, clearly indicating there’s nothing left to scroll. Android just comes to a sudden halt, which almost looks broken. Here’s where it gets really confusing though: navigating the browser. Here’s a real life example: When I got the iPhone, a friend of mine picked it up, and instantly went right to ESPN. He had no trouble doing this aside from asking what icon was for the browser. The browser opens, and there’s the navigation bar, you tap the address bar and start typing. There are back/forward buttons right there on the screen, you can stop/reload, it’s right in front of you. That same friend, looking for a new Verizon phone, picked up the Droid Eris the other day, and started asking questions. “How do I go to a website?”, quickly followed by “How do I go back?”. You have to tap the “Menu” button to bring up the address bar and the back/forward buttons. People are familiar with the address bar being at the top of the screen, which is why simply scrolling to the top on an iPhone, is so obvious and familiar to them. Despite that though, browsing the web on Android is miserable. It’s choppy, takes forever to load and things don’t just feel quick. On the iPhone I’m typically very inclined to Google something, it’s almost a joy. On Android, it’s painful. It shouldn’t be that way.
The Worst Part
Android is slow. I mean, really slow. We talked about this with a few people so far and they claim that it’s the device, but I refuse to believe that. The Droid Eris has better specifications than the first generation iPhone and it’s responsiveness doesn’t even come close. Waiting 1-2 seconds between button presses is expected. The UI on most of the apps is clunky and inconsistent as is. Add in the fact that that it’s nearly unresponsive, it just makes it a pain to get just about anything done. Verizon should add this to their Droid ads: “Droid does…everything slow.” I’m really hoping that in the coming months, Google is able to improve the speed of the OS through optimizations and updates. I’ve been told that Android 2.0 is much better in terms of responsiveness, but I haven’t had the pleasure of trying it just yet. People keep telling me to give it time, but that’s just absurd to me. Apple would have never shipped an iPhone if the interface was as unresponsive and slow as the Android is. The “it’s still new” argument is just an excuse. Get it together Google!
Wrapping Up…
Android does a lot. It can do a lot more than the iPhone can, there’s no question. Unfortunately, Android doesn’t do anything well. Google spread themselves too thin with Android. They should have created a core set of features, and made them awesome. Instead, they put out an OS that looks like they jumped from feature to feature, without polishing anything. Yes, Android can do everything the iPhone can do, and more, the catch is, Android can not do everything the iPhone can do, as well as the iPhone can. I don’t care if my phone can fly me to the moon, if it can’t dial a phone number without lagging, what’s the point of calling it a phone! The only thing Droid Eris does better than my iPhone, is hold a phone call, so that’s all I’ll use it for and that’s why we picked them up to begin with. My iPhone will continue to be my go-to phone for web browsing, texting, emails, and everything else except for calls. It’s actually pretty pathetic that we’ve been forced to this by AT&T, but being able to make phone calls is important to us (Go figure!).
I used the word “awkward” a lot, and that’s the best way to sum this up: Android is awkward, iPhone is polished. It sounds “fan boyish” to say, but it’s the absolute truth. Android has made us appreciate the iPhone 1000x more, but neither of us think that Google failed all together here. There’s a lot of room for improvement and I think that if Google fixes some of the colossal problems with the OS, it could be very interesting.
7 months ago
