Six Weeks in DroidTown

It's been an interesting six weeks. To be honest, it's been rather embarrassing recently, having to admit that my mobile phone, was, well, just a phone, when everyone else was toting impressive glass slabs that, when not conveying real-time Twitter feeds to their owners, could be used for proxy farting, or ocarina playing - thankfully, due to Apple's ban on multitasking, not at the same time!

I toyed with joining the iPhone Set, but Apple's benevolent dictatorship, efficient as it may be, repels me. Nor did I particularly wish to mortgage my soul to a mobile carrier for the next two years for the privilege of being allowed to join the local Ocarina Club.

I'm a libertarian at heart, which left me with a number of options.

Firstly, there was Windows Mobile, the reason I never got a so-called 'smartphone' in the first place, and which hasn't improved much with age. Whipping out a stylus and performing brain surgery on one of these things while being jolted violently around on a number 77 bus just doesn't seem an entirely sane thing to do. Particularly while standing.

Or I could have become the second person in the entire UK to purchase either a Nokia N900, running Maemo (which I believe rhymes with Nemo), or made the O2 salesperson's day by buying a Palm Pre (hey, Steve, I sold one of those Palm things to a geek today!)

No, DroidTown was clearly the place to be. The joint was jumping, neon lights shone everywhere with music and dancing. New models were appearing daily. Albeit with silly names, I mean, Motorola Milestone?. Seriously?. But, Android looked like the future.

Unfortunately, being a pay as you go kind of person - you can ring me, I'll text you back - the cost of a ticket looked pretty steep. Until I discovered the T-Mobile Pulse. At 140 quid, this is definitely my kind of price.

Of course, all phones are starting to look more and more iPhone-ish. And the Pulse - a rebadged Huawei phone - is no exception. I won't bore you by banging on about the specs, but broadly speaking you've got everything here the iPhone has except for video out, or indeed, any kind of a dock connector at all.

So that's the hardware. And pretty impressive it is, reminding us that the Chinese make most of our high tech stuff these days anyway, so why shouldn't their 'own label' stuff be just as good?.

But it's DroidTown I want to talk about. Now, compared to the Apple experience - and I own an iPod Touch, which seems a pretty good point of comparison - there's no doubt there are rough edges. For a start, each of the carriers seems determined to Stamp Their Own Personality on whatever stock Android release the phone comes shipped with. (Imagine Apple allowing this!. The horror, the horror!). When you've seen what Orange can do to a perfectly nice UI colour scheme, you'll know what I mean).

In the case of T-Mobile this means (natch!) an unfortunate fondness for magenta, not, to be honest, a colour I particularly appreciate being jammed up my eyeballs, and which, in my opinion, ought to be reserved for error messages along the lines of 'Pump Failure on Reactor 1. Now SCRAMMING Core. Please evacuate building immediately'... and so forth. Here, every time you type text into something, you're trying to read black on a magenta background. And to bring the phone out of standby, you have to slide a magenta-coloured little ball upwards (why not sideways, like the iPhone?. Is this a patent issue, or something?).

My first surprise was that there's no way to re-theme in Android, so you're stuck with this. Ah well. Over time, like that horrible patterned wallpaper you swore you'd paint over when you moved into the flat (but never did), you get used to it.

After that things went reasonably well. Of course, I expected - and indeed found - that quite a number of apps from the Android Market didn't always work absolutely perfectly. An odd recurrence seems to be that the 'return' key won't work, for example, in any terminal application I can find. And the default mail client, well, let's just say, Apple don't need to lie awake at night pondering how to improve theirs.

But there are enough apps - K-9 mail, ES File Explorer, Aldiko, Astro etc. to more-or-less get the important stuff up and running, such as mail, file transfer, eBooks and so forth, and the phone does come with read-only versions of software to read common Office document formats.

Oddly, there's no Android application I can find that will read rich text files (rtfs) - a niche I commend to some entrepeneurial developer.

My second surprise had to do with contact synchronisation. I already knew that Google Mail was the best place to set up contacts and that the phone would then pull them down - which it does. However I've yet to be able to get it to work the other way, i.e, if I add a local contact on the phone, getting GMail to pick it up. This wasn't The Great Google Experience I had anticipated.

The screen and keyboard seem fairly comparable to the iPhone, albeit that, in landscape mode, the bottom row of keys can be a little tricky - the sensitivity of the capacitive touchscreen doesn't seem to extend right out to the very corners of the visible screen, as it does on the iPhone. Still, that's a hardware issue.

Oddly, the accelerometer will position the display between portrait and landscape but NOT if you rotate round to inverted portrait or landscape. Whereas, sensibly, the iPhone does what you'd expect. I have no idea why this limitation exists, either, and it's annoying, because sometimes if you have the charger plugged in, it would be useful to browse in landscape and have the cable on the other side... but you can't.

I swapped out the default, but rather busy, Android keyboard -it's certainly clever, the way you can shift between upper and lower case while typing, but I much prefer the more spartan version, which resembles the iPhone's keyboard, and started to get comfortable with Life in DroidTown.

Some more quirks emerged progressively. YouTube works perfectly on 3G but on WiFi there's some kind of timing bug that causes many videos to fail to play. This is a widespread issue and has been reported against quite a number of different handsets. Hopefully it's resolved in Android 2.1

Which of course brings me to everyone's major concern. Will the handset manufacturers, not to mention the carriers, upgrade phones such as this, currently running Android 1.5, to later releases?. At present the prevailing opinion is - we think so - but this exposes the biggest issue with Android. Whereas Apple have committed to providing updates for their entire device population, albeit at times for a fee, there's no guarantee that Android handset owners, not to mention owners of forthcoming Android netbooks, will ever be able to update the OS. Now, compared to a truly open infrastructure such as Windows, this really is unacceptable. Indeed, it was one of the major concerns people had with Windows Mobile and Windows CE devices. Many of these have never been upgradeable beyond the initial release, causing a good deal of bad feeling.

Android doesn't help itself here by putting a major roadblock into upgrades. Most Android phones have a very limited filesystem partition for applications, not to mention the operating system itself, and indeed the oldest phones may not be upgradeable to 2.x at all, because there simply isn't enough space, even though you may well have a gazillion gigabyte SD card installed.

In my case, installing some 20 or so applications has already gotten me to the point where my space usage is reported as '92M of 105M used', which means pretty soon I'm going to have to triage applications. Now, sure, Astro, that wonderful file manager, lets you back up and restore apps to the SD card, but you can't INSTALL them onto SD (although most apps try and use the SD card for their data). Why this is, I'm not sure. Security has been raised as a concern as well as DRM issues, but frankly, I think this is the biggest flaw in Android right now and simply needs to be addressed.

Of course, I could 'root' my device, and work round this issue. But that's not really a solution for the mass market.

Other quirks: Every now and again one of the core tasks locks up and a dialogue comes up asking me to 'force close'. To Android's credit, the phone seems to recover from this without rebooting, but it's disconcerting. The browser, every now and again, just quits - but in fairness even on version 3.2, my iPod Touch browser sometimes chokes on odd web pages.

Scrolling is kinda weird. On the iPhone its awesomely smooth. As soon as you start moving your finger, the text scrolls. On this phone - and I suspect this is Android, not the phone - there's a lag. Then suddenly the text will start scrolling. It then scrolls smoothly. I think this is a design decision but it's annoying, and detracts from the fluidity of the touch screen experience.

Of course, there's no multitouch. I'm not entirely sure if the hardware supports it on this phone and we know that on phones which do, the feature has been crippled in the US at least due to the threat of software patents Apple holds. Therefore the browser displays a pair of zoom buttons every time you scroll the text. How I yearned to configure it not to do that - but alas, you can't. There's an alternative browser called Dolphin that I tried, which uses gesture recognition instead, but frankly after trying it for a while, I went back to the default browser. It was just too awkward. Apple's pinch is definitely superior to any alternative UI.

At least they didn't do what Nokia did. I went into the Regent St Nokia shop and had a look at the N900. I asked how you zoomed and the sales assistant went into gestures that looked like he was trying to stir a spoonful of sugar into the screen. Apparently you rotate clockwise to zoom in and anticlockwise to zoom out. Or is it the other way around. At any event it looks risible and when I tried it the whole screen just danced around under my fingertips; obviously, I had not found the G spot.

Anyway, back to Android. I have the keyboard set for haptic feedback, so that each keystroke registers via the phone's vibrator (how silly that sounds, but I'm not sure what else to call it).

Sometimes it'll go into a momentary 'petit mal' epileptic fit where the phone starts vibrating like an angry bee when you type, and won't stop. Pressing another key will calm it down. Rather disconcerting.

After a week of use I charged the phone up one day and left it on overnight. In the morning the battery was absolutely dead. I repeated the exercise the next night. Strangely, no battery drain occurred during the day. After some trial and error I found that if I turn WiFi off overnight, the problem goes away. Something's going AWOL, but what, I have no idea.

Otherwise, to be fair, things have been pretty good. I have never had it crash to the point of needing a reboot. Call quality is good and it seems to pick up a signal most places there IS a signal. And although T-Mobile's 3G network coverage is a bit spotty, where there is a good 3G signal, browsing is an enjoyable experience. T-Mobile's wonderfully generous PAYG plan helps here; if you top up 10 pounds a month, you get 'unlimited' internet access - in practice, a fair use policy of 40M/day - and unlimited texts. This kind of compensates for their higher voice call charges compared to Orange, particularly since most of the time I'm texting and browsing on this phone, not making voice calls.

So, what does the future hold?. Well, outside the affluent Western countries, I think Android has a very bright future. With no licensing costs and Google's fairly benevolent platform management, I think there's no doubt that Android makes the perfect partner to all those 'Shanzai' phones which China currently makes with - I imagine - unlicensed copies of Windows Mobile. Applications are easy to develop - the SDK is freely downloadable with no pesky NDAs - and you don't have to learn a truly weird programming language to write them (although, in fairness, I understand .NET is coming to the iPhone. It needs it).

However, the relationship between the handset vendors, Google and the carriers is definitely strained. Google's Nexus One was clearly introduced so that Google could at least guarantee one handset would always be upgradable to the latest version of Android. But it has driven a wedge between Mountain View and some of the large handset manufacturers, particulary Motorola, who has been granted a miracle reprieve from oblivion with the success of its Droid/Milestone.

HTC, of course, also has a dilemma. As a major player in the WinMo market, and with a handset (the HD2) that many would like to see running Android, it'll be interesting to see what Microsoft have to say to HTC over the next few months. Redmond doesn't like losing and it has never hesitated in the past to use aggressive business methods if that's what it takes to win. You only have to read 'Hard Drive' to see how ingrained this culture is within the organisation.

Google's 'laissez faire' approach to platform control has, so far, only resulted in one piece of known malware. Whether this will remain the case, is hard to say. Obviously bad guys go where the money is. The ARM architecture means that smartphones don't make an obvious nexus for introducing viruses into an Intel-dominated corporate infrastructure, though they could certainly carry them. Network-sniffing trojans, which relay corporate intranet traffic to the outside world, seem like the most obvious threat, and this is where Apple have a trump card.

With the latest version of the iPhone boot rom, which has not yet been jailbroken (at least, untethered), plus the fact that each iPod/iPhone has a unique, embedded serial number, Apple have a traceable and almost tamper-proof platform. Although they screwed up with the earlier Exchange security fiasco, I'm sure they've learned that lesson. Corporate IT will be much more comfortable with iPhones on the network then they will be with Android phones. And it's hard to see that antivirus software is a practical proposition on these platforms, due to resource constraints. So that's an issue.

On the flip side, rolling out a mobile LOB application on Android is much easier for an SME, because you don't need to get Mother's permission. Anyone can write apps for Android and anyone can distribute them. And your developers probably already know Java, so retraining is less costly and there will be a larger pool of developers with business knowledge. Sure, there are lots of iPhone devs, but most of these people are focussing on game development, for which the skillset is very different.

So we'll see. Meanwhile, I'm enjoying the bright lights. I don't miss the walled garden, but it'll all come down to the numbers. When the people inside the wall are watching U2 at Glastonbury, sometimes you don't want to be outside looking in. If Apple can cement enough critical relationships with key vendors - today's McMillan deal is a prime example - it may be better to be on the inside of the wall, at least, for the fortunate Western consumers. Everyone else will be in DroidTown, a little poorer but still happy enough with what they have. At least, as long as their Sugar Daddy in Mountain View keeps pouring aid money into the economy. If not, it could get dark very quickly down in DroidTown.