i was hoping a lot from my first android dabble.

this is my first trial with an android based phone and overall i found the experience reasonable. i’m pretty spoilt in this arena in part to having the iphone 3g and the social features and linear way that it can be used to do the tasks i required at a speed that was acceptable of a smartphone when producing media. remember, we are carrying small computers these days not just phones that can make phone calls – i use mine for email, geo location, mapping and audio recording for interviews. it needs to be a multi functional device.

the one reason i originally asked for the trial phone was that i wanted to keep up with my runkeeper updates (i’m doing 10 miles a day but want to do more) and until my cheque arrives through the post for my 18 month+ iphone 3g (recycled) i thought it would be the perfect time to have a android phone to give it a good test of the application on a different platform. turns out that you need a 2.x version of android to run the android version of runkeeper. suckage. luckily i found a similar application which actually was much simpler and the gps actually seemed more accurate – it’s called endomondo and that worked well.

i’m afraid to say that pretty much rounds up the ‘good points’ because overall i found the experience with the htc hero sluggish, buggy and unreliable. i never got the stability feeling from the phone like i did my iphone 3g. it seems to do random things and close down applications, beeping and notifying and the battery life was well, painful. i felt like i was using a windows machine all over again.

the ui looks nice but in practice actually feels very much grafted on top of the operating system. i believe that this is the case with this sense ui which is from htc running on top of android – i’ve tried it on the htc desire and it is better, but where as the ui/experience of the iphone layout feels thought out on the hero i felt like i was an imitation chinese phone.

it comes back to that old chestnut for me of ‘entrypoint’ – for me the ‘consistent experience’ you have with a device on a day to day basis are the foundations that make me trust and rely on it. i good phone to me regardless of who makes it is if it can handle my day to day pipeline – after years of open ended clueless messages on my nokia when it would not do something it left a bad taste in my mobile experience, every phone i have now has to come up to the experience that is the iphone.

truth is, no unit can pull all the elements together like the apple iphone can for me yet. this all said then why bother with android anyway? – i’m a sucker for open source projects. i like the fact that it exists, the fact that it can get better and that features that the iphone does not have will always be talked about when it moves up a new revision – take the htc evo for instance. that alone for a hotspot on the 4g and the fact that it has a 1 ghz snapdragon processor make it worthy of a look. even if it is heading up to almost ipad territory size (j/k) – i like integration, i like that google maps is polished on android and that it will never ever be as integrated on the iphone in that manner.

it’s the stuff that the geeks that will not use or buy apple will always use as talking points. it keep things moving, healthy. and that’s a good thing. when the mobile phone turns that corner to the all singing all dancing device switching between operating systems might be a thing of the past. imagine that. modular mobile computing. i’ve already had a conversation about geeky gps footwear this weekend.

As i have effectively gone ‘cold turkey’ after my iphone recycle (after 18 months not being able to take photos of my breakfast as you can imagine is killing me – j/k) having to use the htc hero as a replacement created a fantastic oppurtunity for me to switch my reliance to another device to see if it could handle the workrate and usage level that i normally expect of the iphone – my tweet checking, my facebook and geo location updates – recording the odd audioboo and taking pictures and sharing them via email to posterous, all quite mild activity really for my iphone and nothing over the top but a clear day to day pipeline of actions and usage.

i wanted to like the android based hero but it is woefully underpowered. it’s like jumping in a ferrari to find that the engine has been replace with one from a classic mini – it just about moves but it needs room to breath. also, i felt that the butchery that is the ui overlayed over the top should be an option to be removable – i’ve always said this for sometime that you should be able to customize via software the configuration you want your phone to run at based on a bunch of criteria on install and be able to unload or swap out modules depending on what you intend to use the phone for.

i really wanted to like the background tasks but knew that really, all i was doing is loading things so it could the battery down faster. it never felt dynamic – it felt like a windows machine you had been running for a year and need it’s yearly culling to get back to full speed again. htc seem to be understanding what is required for the hardware side of things and i’m excited to see where they go with android – just wish they would not create lots of landfill products on the way to discovery.

drop the race, build something awesome – take your time, have separate teams building out different installers and versions for different ‘kinds’ of usage for different cross sections of society – allow your phones to be diverse – invest your time and community in that underground hacker culture who are actually making awesome hacked versions of android to run on your phones. you only have to look at the gaming sector and fatality to see how having someone hardcore can effect the demographics of your products – get these homebrew dudes together on a tweetup, collect feedback. build what they want. let them surprise you.

more thought needs to making that experience as slick as possible instead of throwing more horsepower at it which seems to be the case with the new htc desire. it’s faster and slicker but until i’ve used a desire for any length of time i’m not sure if i’ll get away from that reliability and stable factor. i just felt like the phone could do something unpredictable at any moment. maybe apple is smart to vet all the apps before they go up on the appstore helps the memory management/leakage control (i’m not sure) who is to say that background applications is a great idea anyway if they are not talking to each other in the background why have them there – make the apps
more efficient and less bloated, i would only want a few applications to be resident apps anyway – my geo location stuff, camera application and maybe a social network updating tool like twitter.

things i noticed about the htc hero as i played around. ..

• could not find runkeeper on the android market
• firmware from htc  (only windows only) 
• v1.5 firmware, need v2+ to use runkeeper 
• sound is great from headphones and spotify is great.
• found a villianrom that gives me 2.1 goodness but it’s a hack
• installed http://www.virtualbox.org and then rc1 of windows 7 so i can do a flashing backup of the phone!  
• it aint an iphone – multitasking is slow on this processor/phonetype of android 
• text entry looks confusing and does not instil as much confidence as the iphone does when typing. 
• photos is not as feature light/rich as the iphone – i loved my pipeline of sharing/sending photos to posterous via email
• having things running the background not as important as i used to think, got annoying tbh. 
• standard twitter client is ugly – not white space and padding. lack of features. 
• quite like the side swiping to different screen effect
• aint no iphone thou portrait/landscape transition is lame. flicks to it, rather than rotates whole screen. 
• gowalla ran perfectly well on it 
• wifi detection notifications were nice touch 
• android settings are on the whole pretty good 
• why have a custom power connector on the bottom that LOOKS like usb but actually isn’t. landfill.
• i like the side rocker for volume adjustment 
• the camera is actually pretty rocking and the auto focus works really quite well. 
• audioboo not as whizzbang as on the iphone for the recent boo tab - not as detailed