The Droid Experiment
For a while now, I’ve wanted to try a new mobile platform. The iPhone OS is great and there are many things to like about it. But I have been growing weary of the dropped calls and intermittent 3G connection on AT&T since the iPhone 3G was launched. While I feel there is a lot to like about the iPhone, there are areas that need improvement and the hardware was starting to get a little boring to me.
Last Friday I made my way to a Verizon store at 7am to purchase the new Droid. Thanks to Verizon’s 30-day “Worry Free Guarantee” I knew that I could try out the new device as a potential replacement for my iPhone without fear of getting locked into a contract. I went all out. I bought the phone, the desktop charging dock, and I got the best plan Verizon had to offer for data, messaging, and voice. I wanted to give this device a chance to replace my iPhone and AT&T.
From an industrial design aspect, the Droid looked fresh and edgy. The screen is absolutely gorgeous. It’s so sharp and crisp that it really made my iPhone screen look almost out of focus in comparison. There’s a slide-out QWERTY keyboard that makes the Droid only millimeters thicker than the iPhone. I mean, at first glance it appeared that Motorola had knocked this one out of the park. But there was a problem with the design that doesn’t make itself identifiable until you actually buy the phone and use it for a while. With that keyboard, the Droid is noticeably heavier than the iPhone. And while it’s only a few millimeters thicker than the iPhone, it doesn’t curve thinner toward the edges. It’s a solid width all the way across and when you put the phone in the front pocket of your jeans, it looks and feels like you’re carrying a brick.
At the bottom of the screen there are 4 “soft” buttons. These are important buttons for the Android operating system and they represent “Back,” “Menu,” “Home,” and “Search.” Pressing any of these buttons at any time during your experience immediately takes you to the intended destination. The problem is that they’re touch sensitive and they sit at the bottom of a giant touch-sensitive screen. When you’re using the screen in portrait mode and you’re typing on the virtual keyboard, if you happen to go a little too low for any of the keyboard buttons you easily hit one of these soft buttons. I kept hitting the “Home” button which immediately takes you out of what you were doing and back to the home screen. At first I kept thinking the apps were crashing. I found these buttons got in the way for several tasks and I would inadvertently trigger them doing everyday tasks. The decision to make these buttons touch sensitive was a poor one and just adds to an overall frustrating user experience.
There’s a reason they were able to make this phone so thin while including a slide-out physical keyboard. The keyboard is flat and every button is flush with one another. It is practically unusable. If you try to use the meat of your thumbs to type, you’ll mash keys. The only way to use it effectively is to use the tips of your thumbnails to type. Surprisingly, this requires a lot of concentration and you type very slowly and deliberately to avoid accidentally mashing a neighboring key. But even if you found your rhythm with typing on this keyboard you’ll find that you have to be accurate in every way because there is no auto-completion turned on when you’re using the physical keyboard. For example, if you’re typing to a buddy and you want to say “I’m going to be about 30 minutes late” then you’re going to have to type every key, every symbol, and every letter of that sentence. If you type the letters “i” and then “m” and hit space, you’ll get “im” with no options for choosing “I’m” or auto-correction. In the virtual keyboards you get the auto-correction and options to choose words but not on the physical keyboard.
Many people have asked me what was the nail in the coffin for the Droid and the truth is that it wasn’t one, single thing. Nothing was so bad that I just had to return the device immediately or I’d go on a shooting rampage. But these little annoyances started to add up quickly. The 5MP camera took flat, bland images that were easily bested by the 3MP camera in the iPhone 3GS. The apps from the Android Market that were also available on the iPhone paled in comparison in both user interface design and feature set. And there were a lot of apps that I’ve grown to depend on that simply don’t have an Android equivalent. Entering my Exchange info into the device yielded me a working version of my work calendar but a blank, black screen in email. And I’m not the only one. Clicking an icon on the home screen would show a yellow highlight around the icon as visual feedback that I clicked it but nothing would happen. Clicking it again would launch the application. I only got about 4 or 5 hours of battery life before I had to charge it again. It was death by a thousand little cuts.
Android 2.0 seems like it’s moving in the right direction. Honestly though, do you want a device for day-to-day use that seems like it’s moving in the right direction or do you want a device that is already there? For all of the cool things in Android like the ability to run multiple applications, the notification bar, and the ability to run widgets on the home screen, there are about 10 other things that just make you wonder what they were thinking. This is exactly how I feel every time I try out a new version of Linux on my desktop computer. There are really great features and things that really show some innovation. But after playing with the new, innovative features for a while you start to get aggravated with the rest of the system.
Don’t get me wrong though. I have some Droid envy, I really do. I wish I could run Pandora in the background while texting my wife. I still think it looks attractive when sitting on a table or propped up in the desk stand. I’m going to miss that screen big time. But in the end the device wouldn’t work for me and my needs. If you’re all about communications and phone calls, and you have some aversion to Apple or AT&T, the Droid might be everything you would ever need and then some.
