IT Professionals

My Android Experiences

Posted by on Sep 2, 2010 | 5 Comments

There should be an image here!I’ve been sitting on this for a while now, but I think I am ready to come forward with it. Android is neat. And I will be among the first to admit my experiences with it have been generally limited. Both borrowing a friend’s phone in addition to going to the Verizon store and playing with no less than four different models it offered at the time. So with this said, I have no idea if these phones were running the latest Froyo release or not. Understand this, I am merely speaking as what Joe User sees today when he goes phone shopping.

Based on my experiences, I found the Android phones I was able to play with to be fast, responsive, and for a geek, simply awesome. But my goodness, I would sooner recommend playing in traffic than tell a casual phone user to try this as their first smart phone. The UI is awful, despite the different skins in play. And while the app store was, in my honest opinion, easier to navigate than what Apple offers, I noticed that the phones I was testing downloaded the apps and they were then nowhere to be found. Kind of annoying — likely user error. But the point is, the apps were confirmed as downloaded. On the iPhone, just slide back and forth and there they are.

Great, so clearly this means that I am now some rabid Apple fanboy who is going to exclaim that everything about Android sucks and your time is best spent with an iPhone 4. Actually, no. I’d  more less equate it to this. For some people, all smart phones might be overwhelming. For others, maybe specific types instead. But based on my experiences with both platforms, I am finding that if I am going to be recommending a smart phone for someone not as geeky as myself, I cannot in good faith, include Android phones in their current form to tech novices. There is just no way. For people comfortable with technology, however, oh my, yes, I think Android phones are very powerful and full of potential. They do a lot of things right, sadly appealing to new users is not necessarily one of those things. Well, at least they have keyboard choices…

[Photo above by laihiu / CC BY-ND 2.0]

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  • http://THERESTLESSMOUSE.COM J.D.

    I have a had a MyTouch Android phone from T-mobile for about a year, it generally works OK, all the apps I need are there and usually free.

    But I have toyed around with a friend’s I-phone and I have to say that it’s much more responsive. My Android has “Force Close” issues sometimes too.

    That being said, I am so happy with T-mobile that I will probably get another Android phone next time, hoping that they have improved.

  • mike

    techie or not you really must ask any person buying a phone what they want to do with it…..if they want to play games and listen to music ETC the choices get smaller and smaller quickly it really does not matter what they know when they pick up the device. If they want to do it they will learn. Simple as that. If you give them a standard phone well then I believe you limited them too much. Techie people tend to write off non techie types right away and say well dumb yourself down instead of challenging them to do what it is they really want to do anyways. Having said that I know there is always people who are best with the flip phone :) . Just an IMO from me

  • Len Cleavelin

    Granting that I am a geek, Android’s “just worked” for me right from the beginning.

    The big advantage for me is that I NEED a physical keyboard, and there are a number of Android devices that accomodate me (my current phone: the T-Mobile myTouch 3G Slide). As long as Apple insists that a sucka$$ touchscreen keyboard is the only way to go, you can’t pay me enough to touch an iPhone.

    (I have an iPod Touch, and my mT3GS does allow for touchscreen keyboard input, so I am very familiar with that style keyboard; I simply can’t abide it for anything longer than inputting a URL into a Web browser. For those of you who can deal with it, fine. I’m glad I have a choice, though.

  • Brian Hanifin

    There are no less than 2 places you can access the newly installed app.

    1.) Open the app menu* from the icon at the bottom center (up arrow or squares) of any home screen.

    2.) Newly installed apps are added to the notification bar^.

    * Instead of the home screen being the app menu, the app menu is a drawer at the bottom of the screen. The advantage of this approach is you can have widgets on the home screens, and you can drag only the apps you use most often to the home screens.

    ^ With a downward swipe from the top of the screen you can open the notification bar. Recently installed app titles will appear on this list.

  • warpwiz

    I went Android, wanting to consolidate my Palm TX and phone into 1 device. But I returned it. Android’s calendar and contacts utilities are so weak and inadequate, I could not begin to justify the switch. No user-definable fields, no ad hoc fields, no security by entry. The Palm TX is ancient and still years ahead of what is needed by anyone who keeps their personal data electronically.

    Couple that with no ability to directly port the data (the only method is to give all my contacts and calendar info to Google – again, no place for anything but name & address. Let’s not even begin to discuss security & privacy).