Initial Android impressions

I was able to play with a pre-release Android phone a few weeks ago, courtesy of Rushabh. And now that the phone has finally launched, I'm free to blog about it. Interestingly, my initial impressions are pretty much summed up by something that Erick Schonfeld said in his review on TechCrunch:

Where things break down with the G1 is in subtle differences in the user interface that keep making me stumble and pause to try to figure out what to do next. This is a problem I rarely have with the iPhone. The crux of the problem is that the G1 has too many buttons. There is, I’m afraid, a hardware/software disconnect. Too often on the G1, the hardware gets in the way.

From: What Android Can Learn From the iPhone: It’s the Software, Stupid.

When I was using the Android phone, I found that all of the extra buttons really diminished from the experience. The problem is that in each application, the developer was free to decide if they wanted to use the touch screen, the 5 buttons on the front, the trackball, or the keyboard. So sometimes, operations that are common between applications can be triggered via different means - maybe one developer decided that clicking the trackball should launch an action, while another decided that clicking on the screen should trigger an action.

Once you figure out how an app works, you're fine, but when you switch, this disconnect becomes apparent. Of the many, many, many things that are genius about the iPhone, one is surely that it only has one primary button. This forced the software developers to embrace the touch screen, and combined with Apple's HIG, makes the inter-application experience much more seamless.

So, the current Android is not quite as polished as even the iPhone 1.0 was. It will be interesting to see how the Android evolves, but for now, I think it is primarily interesting for phone geeks.

-Andy.

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