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touching Androids

The other day, I spent a little time laying my hands on a few of the smartphones available at a nearby Verizon Wireless store. I’ve been reading the latest reviews of these pocket computers. However, most reviews are written by geeks who are largely oblivious to (or mask) their own prejudices, and worse, are so immersed in the testing, tinkering and minutia of this rapidly advancing technology, that they’ve lost the perspective of ordinary people. It was time to test the utility of these gadgets myself.

There’s been amazing development since I bought my current (barely) smart phone, two+ years ago. Every year, the iPhone has gotten better, while its competition has been catching up. Today, the most talked about alternative to Apple’s iOS operating system is Google’s Android, now used in dozens of phones from a half-dozen manufacturers, including five models sold by Verizon. But two things have yet to change: Verizon still has the widest coverage in most of the places I happen to live and travel; and no iPhone works on Verizon’s network.

That’s the context in which I spent an hour, on the advice of multiple reviewers, trying out two high-end Android phones: HTC’s Incredible (touchscreen only, like the iPhone) and Motorola’s Droid (with both a touchscreen and slide out keyboard). Here are a few quick impressions.

In general: Any recent Android phone is (in most ways) significantly more capable than my aged LG Voyager. Every Android phone is (in many ways) more complicated to use than an iPhone. For each fabulous feature in any given model, there’s an odious flaw; another model without that flaw will also lack that fab. The challenge is to find the smartphone which sucks the least in those ways that matter most, to you.

Touchscreen keyboard: Writing is what I do the most. Unfortunately, typing on the touchscreen of an Android phone sucks even more than typing on a shitty chicklet-size physical keyboard. No wonder people post so many typos and stupid abbreviations, or just retweet what others have typed. The touchscreen is perfectly good for consuming content (surfing the web, reading friend’s updates on Facebook or Twitter, watching YouTube). But the minute you want to create or type something, like your own microblog, or enter the words for a search, you’re in hell. The better you type, the worse it seems. If you’re a hunt-n-peck typist, you might not notice the difference. For anyone else, it’s enough of a pain to decide, “F*ck it, I’ll wait until I’m at a real computer” or ask “Where’s my iPad?”. And just forget about typing a paragraph the size of this one, little more a whole article. If you want me to immediately stop micro-blogging from my mobile phone, buy me a touchscreen-only HTC Incredible.

Typing passwords, strong passwords, the kind that contain numbers and letters (both upper and lowercase) is a miniature nightmare on the phones I tested. Both the onscreen and mechanical keyboards include a mere subset of keys you see on a full-size keyboard, so typing numbers, symbols and caps necessitates pressing special key combinations. Because passwords are disguised with ******* in place of what you type, it is nearly impossible to know if or where you’ve mistyped. Thankfully, Android will store some passwords, so you only need to login to those accounts once.

Tip: Do not login to your own accounts when testing the display models in the store. Several Facebook and Twitter apps I tried had no “logout” button. I had to dig down into more obscure settings to find and remove my personal account and contacts info (to avoid leaving my private account open to the next person who used the phone). This is a biproduct of the way these apps integrate and store you info on the phone; convenient on your own phone, awkward on somebody else’s.

Mechanical keyboard: In the store I visited, the Motorola Droid was the only Android phone with a mechanical keyboard. This is the model I was expecting to like best. But I found the keyboard to be just awful to type on, kinda sorta better than typing on the touchscreen, but two steps backward from the phone I have now. BTW, that gold doodad on the right is a pointing device. My first instinct and preference was to simply tap the screen to select text or move the insertion point. The fact that this was consistently inaccurate no doubt accounts for Motorola giving space to this pointer, space which otherwise could be used to better layout the keys.

Orienting yourself: As you may know, when you turn an iPhone-inspired device in your hand from portrait (vertical) orientation to landscape (horizontal), the image on the screen is supposed to automatically turn as well, so it’s always right way up.  This is helpful on these tiny screens, because one web page or another app will fit better in one orientation or the other. Unfortunately, I often found the Android phones didn’t rotate the screen when I turned it. Looking at videos of geeks using these phones, I’m guessing you eventually learn to trick your phone into reorienting itself, adapting yourself to its shortcomings.

Geekitude: The Android OS is just geekier to use than the iPhone. Overall, it feels like it was designed by a committee of engineers. To my mind, its best feature is being in second place to Apple for having the largest variety of apps available, with more in development all the time. But it’s like Windows or Linux (versus the Mac): setting up, using and maintaining your pocket computer will require more work and bother on your part, and some geek fortitude, especially if you want to use it well and to its full potential. It does not always “just work”; you have to show it who’s boss and put it in its place.

Tip: If you buy an Android phone, set aside time to read the manual and search for tips and how-tos online, to figure out how it works, and get around its limitations.

The consensus of the geekerati is that the HTC Incredible (or it cousin the Nexus One) is this month’s best answer to the iPhone.  ”Aww shit”, say I, “that’s the best you can do? Please Verizon, cut a deal with Apple to carry the iPhone this summer.” There are occasional rumors of that; also, rumors of a Motorola’s Droid 2 having a better keyboard. But I can’t make phone calls with a rumor, so I’m looking seriously at the third runner in the pocket computer races, the Palm Pre running WebOS. More about that in my next post.