I like collecting phones. It's fun to try stuff out and see how technology's progressing. So obviously, I had to try an Android phone at some point. Given that I want to try Android, and not some bastardized version of it, I got a Nexus S.
After using it for a little while, here's my notes. The summary is that it needs work. Lots of work.
Location Services: Anonymous always-on statistics gathering? Really? wtf?
(for comparison: the iPhone uses Skyhook, which also gathers base station statistics in order to do wifi-location when location has been requested and the presses an allow button. But Android will gather even when you're not using location services. It just sits there and spys.)
Google Voice: Nice that it allows you to use the normal dialing interface. But I realized very quickly that I can't tell how it's connecting to the world. This matters since I get charged by the minute, but at the same time, Android 2.3 is supposed to have some sort of integrated VoIP/SIP support.
Maps/Navigation:
I guess that since I didn't let it do wireless, it couldn't find anything.
And since I'm indoors, real GPS signals don't make it.
UI:
Responsivness of scrolling is so much better than prior devices/ OS versions (with the exception of the Samsung Captivate on 2.0)
Downside, it's become a bit twitchy. Like, the inertia/friction parameters need some tuning.
Landscape/Portrait orientation changes arn't animated. Meh, whatever.
Camera:
Meh. Once again, it's no f31.
White balance isn't so great.
Camera App/Gallery:
Atrocious.
1) Well, actually, when I first launched it, it looked pretty cool with the animated flow thing showing me the few Picasa albums I have up. That's about all that's good.
2) Either the camera is totally awful, or there is a limit to how much detail it'll let you zoom to see.
3) When you delete the last picture, a blurred leftover version of the last picture is left onscreen, and half the UI thinks there's still a picture. The rest of the UI is interactive, but accomplishes nothing. It's like everything's just trashed. Menus don't even appear sometimes.
4) Multi-touch interaction : pinch to zoom. It's awful, it anchors using some arbitrary point that I can't figure out. The result is that the zoom will shift what you can see away from what you wanted to zoom. At least they did it right in Maps.
Battery life sucks: It's much worse than my 3 year old gen-1 iPhone. 80% of battery is gone in 18 hours.
Updated: Battery life while all radios are off. 15% of battery is remaining after 5 days 5 hours. In other words, the battery usage meter lies about the display using the most, and this explains the "Android handsets use more data" statistic. It's true, but it's not the user, it's the phone.
App Storage Limitation to 1GB:
I get it... all the debate/complications stem from the fact that they wanted to support allowing the phone to show up as a USB Mass Storage device without shutting it down. Whether this is a good idea is up for discussion.
Device front buttons:
Capacitive buttons suck. They sucked on the LG Chocolate years ago. And they suck now.
Additional reason they suck: They're not tied to the rest of the UI from a usability standpoint. If you swipe using a finger down the screen and just past the boundary of the screen, you hit a button. And it activates. the OS recognizes you've done a gesture, and scrolls. But the button isn't linked into the recognition logic, so it activates even though it's the followthrough of your finger gesture. On iOS, using gesture recognizers, this can't happen unless the developer deliberately messes it up because the OS will handle exclusivity for you by default. On Android phones with capacitive buttons, this can't be fixed without tailoring a fix to each phone. And even then, it's still half-assed.
If you think this is a non-issue, you're not a designer. If you are, you should change jobs. If you want to understand why this sucks, read up on Fitt's Law.
Buttons on BOTH sides of the device:
It bugged me a little on the Motorola Q when I first got it. But since the buttons are pretty stiff, it wasn't that bad. The Nexus S pushes that problem to a whole new level because the sleep switch is on the side now because there's no other physical buttons on the front.
Put side buttons on one side, not both. Because if you put it on both, without looking at your phone every single time, you're bound to press both sides at the same time because you need something to push against. This is hella annoying especially since it's the wake button across from the volume-up button. So yes, without contorting my hand, my volume goes up or down every time I turn on the phone.
Music playback:
1) It's okay. It's old-school. There's no file system-based ordered view.
2) For some reason if I wake from sleep when not playing, the playback shuttle sometimes jumps to a new location. No idea why. But it's kinda annoying.
Actually, I have a funny feeling it could possibly be due to the way I have to hold the phone to unlock with one hand (using the thumb) and avoid the side buttons. The retracting of my thumb might be close enough to register as a press on the playback shuttle. I'll investigate more another time.
Application Menu (2.3) :
I love that it's not as laggy like every other Android phone out there (except the Samsung Captivate 2.1 I played with earlier).
With that said, it still needs work.
The 3D fade edges on the bottom don't work with the gesture recognition system.
-Wifi Hotspot gives out when device goes to sleep if background data is off. Uh... I guess that sorta makes sense but still, lame.
- Background data is required for Android Market? wtf?