Posts tagged words

Okay, this article has been a long time in the coming. THe delay is partially because I’ve just been crazy busy, but it’s also because I wanted to spend enough time with the Nexus One and Android so that I wasn’t judging them purely on what I was already accustomed to. I think that I’ve spent enough time with them now to be able to do that. Not only has it been several weeks, but when I was in the U.K. for NSConference, I had only my Nexus One most of the time because I didn’t want to incur AT&T’s incredibly high data roaming rates. As a result, I got a real feel for what it’s like to use the Nexus One as my main phone.

In this posting, I’ll talk about the device from my perspective as a user. My thoughts on the Android SDK as a developer will come in a future installment, hopefully in the not-too-distant future.

Let me state that I tried to be as objective as I was capable of being, but this is in no way an unbiased or objective report. These are my subjective impressions, which is to say that they are the subjective impressions of somebody who has used and developed for iPhones for nearly two years, who teaches workshop on developing for the iPhone, and who has written books on the topic. While I tried to be fair, it should come as no surprise that I believe in Apple’s approach to both hardware and software, so caveat emptor.

Hardware

The Nexus One hardware is so close to being a home run that it’s painful to have to bash it around a little bit. But, it misses in a few really major ways. If Google and HTC can solve a handful of annoyances, the Nexus Two could be pure awesome from a hardware perspective. I can’t honestly bestow that adjective on the Nexus One, however, because these few flaws were enough to make me want to throw the damn phone at the wall. Hard. Repeatedly.

First, the good. The phone feels really nice in your hand. It feels like a quality piece of hardware. Not chintzy or cheap like the Motorola Droid or most cell phones. It feels solid and very much like the iPhone. The first impression was very good.

The screen is vivid and high-resolution and looks really, really nice… that is, as long as you are indoors. Outside on a sunny day, the OLED screen is almost completely unusable. That’s kind of a big deal for a phone. I applaud HTC for pushing OLED technology forward, and I can see it being a great technology today for devices that require mostly indoor use, but this is a phone, and as such, I need to be able to use the damn thing outside.

The touch screen is noticeably less precise and sensitive than the iPhone’s. It really makes you appreciate the iPhone’s touch screen, which is something I think most of us take for granted since we’ve had so few points of comparison. The Nexus One’s isn’t horrible, but it’s also not great. Mis-taps are far more common and the finger tracking isn’t nearly as accurate. How much of this is the hardware and how much is the averaging algorithm used to determine where the touch registers, I have no idea.

One real issue I have with all of the Android phones is the four hardware buttons they all have: back, menu, home, and search. Three of the four shouldn’t be there. Coming from Google, I can understand the emphasis on search, but it simply doesn’t belong in a hardware button. I don’t need to search while I’m playing a game, for example. Likewise, the menu button isn’t applicable in all situations, nor is the back button. Of the four, only the home button really needs to be a hardware button, and it’s not a coincidence that Apple made that exact design choice. You have a touch-screen, for crying out loud. Anything that’s context sensitive rather than universal, should be contained in an on-screen control, not a hardware button. Search, back and menu are not universal. Home, power, volume – those you might need at any time and should be hardware.

To make matters worse, the sensors on the Nexus One for the four hardware buttons is not exactly aligned with the silkscreened icons. You have to tap noticeably above the button to get it to register. That was very frustrating for me until someone (from Google nonetheless) pointed out the mis-alignment. Up until then, I consistently had to hit the buttons three or four times to get it to register.

But even worse than that, the home button on the Nexus One is right below the fracking space bar on the portrait keyboard. Combine that with the not-completely-precise touch screen, and you have a UX disaster. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been typing and ended up leaving my application due to accidentally hitting the home button. Leaving an application mid-sentence is hardly a good user experience.

The Nexus One also has a Blackberry-style scroll ball. It serves no purpose whatsoever. You can use it for navigation on Android’s home screen, and in some table views, but it’s never necessary (touch screen, remember?) and never offers a better experience than the touch screen. I’ve seen the argument that it could be used for games. Well, I tried a few games that supported the trackball. It sucks as a game controller. It sucks in general. It should never have been put into production. For the most part, you can just ignore it, but you can’t help but to wonder what the thought process was that led to this completely superfluous control being included.

The final issue I have on the hardware side is minor, but the SIM card can’t be removed or inserted without taking the battery out, which means you have to re-boot. And, on the Nexus One, rebooting takes quite a long, long time. Most people won’t need to do this very often (if ever), but as I had to do it several times, I really came to appreciate the location of the iPhone’s SIM card slot and the fact that the SIM card can be hot swapped.

When it comes down to it, the Nexus One gets it about 90% right. Unfortunately, it’s that last 10% that really seals the deal for most non-geek consumers, and the Nexus One just doesn’t have it.

But the Nexus One does have a few advantages over the iPhone. Unfortunately, most of these advantages will only appeal to geeks and not the larger consumer base. For one thing, it has a faster processor and a much higher resolution screen. The faster processor isn’t all that obvious in day-to-day use, however, because Android 2.1 doesn’t seem to leverage the GPU for most OS-level tasks. Things like table scrolling (for example) are often skippy, which is just inexcusably bad engineering given the 1Ghz chip and powerful GPU inside. That big screen is also partially responsible. The Nexus One has an awful lot more pixels to push than the iPhone, and the end result is that it simply can’t do as much work per second as the half-year older iPhone 3Gs, though a firmware update might be able to rectify that, at least for games specifically written to take advantage of the GPU.

The higher resolution screen makes text and drawn elements look a touch smoother and less jaggy, but there’s a high price for something most people won’t notice. I could see a difference when placed side-by-side next to my iPhone, but the Nexus One’s screen didn’t jump out at me as that much noticeably better than the iPhone’s screen, and even when placed side-by-side, the difference wasn’t earth-shattering. Besides that, having all those extra pixels to display text smoothly is rather a waste given that text on the Android’s quite simply looks like ass.

The iPhone’s 150 ppi screen has a higher-resolution that the vast, vast majority of LED or CRT devices ever created. I don’t know of a single person who ever looked at the iPhone’s 150 ppi screen and said “if only I needed a more powerful magnifying glass to see the jaggies”. The Nexus One’s screen seems like a pure case of trying to compete on specs without regard to whether there was any need for a better spec. In other words, a solution looking for a problem. After all this time with the Nexus One’s “better” screen, I don’t find my iPhone to be at all lacking in that regard.

“Because you can” is rarely a good reason for including a feature.

I do like the ability to mount the device to gain access to its contents, but most people won’t care about that, and for the average user, not having tight integration with iTunes and iPhoto makes this phone that much less accessible.

The last hardware feature I’ll mention is the haptics, which I’m ambivalent about. The Nexus One issues a little shiver when you touch certain onscreen controls. Most of the places where I appreciated having it was due to some other design flaw that the haptics compensated for, such as the misaligned hardware button sensors. It’s kind of a neat feature, but I don’t miss it on my iPhone. If it could be designed to tell you specifically which button was pressed instead o just that some button was pressed, I could see it as being a very useful feature, but as it is, it really doesn’t add much value.

Software

The Neuxs One shipped with Android 2.1. As far as I know, it was the first and so far is still the only phone to ship with this version of the operating system. When I first got the phone, the most noticeable aggravation for me was the lack of multi-touch gestures such as pinch-in and swipe in the delivered applications like the browser. An update has since added these gestures, and it helps some. Not enough, but some.

As I mentioned earlier in the hardware section, one big shortcoming of the Nexus One is the fact that it doesn’t seem to leverage the full processing power available to it very effectively. The hardware in the Nexus One is capable of doing amazing things, yet everyday tasks like scrolling are still often jumpy and unimpressive looking. Games written to use the GPU (presumably using OpenGL ES) seem to be better in this regard, so it’s not that the hardware isn’t up to the task (based on specs, it’s quite impressive actually), it’s just that the operating system isn’t taking full advantage of the hardware.

Android’s home screen can be configured in a much greater variety of ways than the iPhone’s. In addition to application icons, you can also add “widgets” for searching the web, reading headlines, or discovering the weather. Third party developers can also develop additional widgets. Not a bad idea, and it reminds me of Mac OS X’s dashboard. The implementation isn’t as polished as I’m accustomed to with Apple products, however. The shipped widgets lack a uniform aesthetic and some of them are just ugly (Analog Clock, I’m looking at you!). With a little nicer execution, this could be a really great feature, but it left me unimpressed.

One of the small things that really bothered me on the Android is the lack of scroll bounce. I always thought it was silly eye-candy on the iPhone when you scrolled to the end of a list and it went a little past the end and bounced back. But you know what? That’s powerful visual feedback. You know that you’re at the end of the list. On the Android, when I came back into an application with a scroll list, I often didn’t know if the phone was frozen or if I was just already the top or bottom of the list. This is especially important in apps like Twitter apps where the contents of the list may have changed since last use. That scroll bounce is part of that last 10% I was talking about, and the Android software doesn’t have it either, for the most part.

“Multitasking” is one of the much lauded benefits of Android over the iPhone. Of course, it’s not really multitasking. Everybody except most “tech pundits” knows that the iPhone’s Mach kernel supports full preemptive multitasking and also knows that at any given moment there are somewhere on the order of twenty daemons and other processes running on a stock (non-jailbroken) iPhone.

What people mean when they misuse this term is the ability to run more than one GUI application at a time, the way we do on our regular computers. And the Android certainly allows this. Only, it’s not really a point in Android’s favor. When you hit the home button, the previous application keeps running, which means it keeps eating memory, keeps using processor cycles, and keeps eating battery. To truly quit most applications requires a multi-step navigation that is neither intuitive nor well-documented. The ability to have more than one GUI application at a time on a device with such a small screen isn’t as important as some make it out to be, since you can’t actually interact with more than one a time.

In the early days, I was a big proponent of having Apple add the ability to run multiple apps to the iPhone OS, but I’ve come to change my mind on that. I think most people don’t need it and Android’s implementation only confirms it. Yes, the app keeps running, so when I go back to it, it doesn’t have to relaunch. But, if the app were designed to go back where I left it and launched quickly, the end result would be exactly the same, only without the wasted processor cycles and battery time, not to mention the confusion about which apps are currently running. Most people don’t want to ever see a process monitor or to even know what one is.

To the extent that there may be a need to have more than one GUI app going at a time, it’s also a non-trivial problem to solve. Oh, the technical problem has long-since been solved, but the user experience issues around presenting multiple GUI applications on a small screen have not yet been adequately resolved. Android’s solution is simply bad. If Apple does offer a solution to allow more than one GUI application at a time, I’m sure it will be much better, but given the choice between having only one GUI app running and Android’s system of keeping everything running, I’d rather have only one app running.

This post has gotten longer than I intended, so I’m going to finish off with just a general statement. Basically, when it comes right down to it, most of the delivered applications on Android just aren’t as good as the apps that come on the iPhone. The differences are minor and often subtle, but they make a big difference in the user experience.

To give one example: setting an alarm. Both Android and the iPhone have the ability to set alarms and act as an alarm clock, buzzing and playing a sound at a given time. The day of my flight home from the U.K., I set alarms on both devices (I’m paranoid bout missing flights). It took me quite literally three to four times as long to configure and enable the alarms on the Nexus One as it did on the iPhone. Add that extra time by the number of tasks you do on your phone in a given day, and it can add up to a considerable amount of time.

To make matters worse, on the Nexus One, if you snooze an alarm, there’s no obvious way to prevent it from going off again at the end of the snooze interval. You can turn off the alarm, but the snoozed alarm still goes off after the interval (in my case, while in the shower). On the iPhone, if you go manually turn off the snoozed alarm, you never hear it, which is as it should be.

Conclusion

Overall, it’s just a general lack of attention to detail that defines the differences between the iPhone and the Nexus One, and that lack of attention to detail exists on both the hardware and software side. The Nexus One isn’t a bad phone by any stretch of the imagination. Had it come out three years ago, it would have been revolutionary. But you do have to train yourself to Android’s idiosyncrasies much more so than the iPhone. If you’ve never owned or used an iPhone, you’ll probably find the Nexus One to be a very adequate device and will assume that the minor annoyances are just part of owning a smart phone. If you’ve owned an iPhone for any length of time, you’ll likely feel, as I do, that it’s a rather half-baked device with some good ideas but generally weak execution.

Then, the question becomes, are the other advantages, such as it being a truly (mostly) open platform or being able to not use AT&T as your mobile provider important enough to you to justify using a less-polished device. Certainly, the answer for some will be “yes”. For me, it’s a resounding no. I would never willingly choose the Nexus One over my iPhone for daily use, nor would I recommend it to someone who didn’t explicitly state that avoiding AT&T or using an open platform was among their top priorities.

But, if the iPhone is not an option for one reason or another, the Nexus One is definitely a most adequate phone. I’d gladly recommend it over any currently available Blackberry, Windows Mobile, or Palm smartphone.