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(More customer reviews)This phone seems to combine a lot of promise with above average frustration. One the one hand, this "smartphone" is much more useful than my previous "dumb" phone. The ability to synchronize my Google contacts, e-mail, and calendar automatically is a lifesaver, and is very helpful when traveling. This phone also boasts impressive specifications, including GPS, WiFi, bluetooth, internal compass, ambient light sensor, and autofocus-capable camera/video. When I first got it, it ran Android 1.5, an old version which had some annoying problems, such as a horribly frustrating YouTube app. Also, the default settings ensured lousy battery life. I have since updated the phone to the latest Android 2.1, which made some things better (e.g. the YouTube app works well now) but other things worse. Most glaringly, the phone is now noticeably slower to do everything. It was never very zippy to begin with, but us now downright irritating, and I am constantly killing background tasks just to keep the slowness at a manageable level.
Using this phone reminds me of my experience many years ago when Windows 95 first came out. Then, as now, that was the product to compete with Apple, but it had a lot of rough edges, crashed constantly, and had a less intuitive user interface.
Here are my detailed observations, starting first with the good things:
1. If you use gmail and Google calendar, Android will synchronize your life. If you add contacts on your phone, they show up on your gmail account within a few seconds, and vice versa. If you add calender items online, they show up on the phone, and vice versa. It just works. All phones should be this easy.
2. The GPS is great, much better than my older HTC phone. It finds satellites quickly, even indoors when I'm not particularly close to a window. If it doesn't find satellites, the phone will locate itself using cell phone towers.
3. HTC's "Sense" interface is pretty nice.
4. There is an ambient light sensor that automatically adjusts screen brightness to match the environment, like the iphone. It works well most of the time.
5. Google's apps store, while still lagging behind the iPhone, is catching up fast. There are a lot of good ones, ranging from useful things like WeatherBug, to nerd toys like the barcode reader and sky constellation viewer for astronomy nerds. You can read user comments before you install any app, which helps weed out the flakier ones. OK, now for the frustrating parts.
1. The processor is a tad slow. Under Android 1.5, simple things like typing sometimes had noticeable delays. After updating to the latest version 2.1, the phone has gotten slower still. The lag is particularly annoying if I am traveling, or running through airports, etc, which is ironic since the whole point of getting a smartphone was to help keep me organized when traveling away from home. To make the situation tolerable, I installed a Task Killer, without which I would probably have thrown the phone at a wall by now. I find it particularly helpful to kill the camera application, which slows the phone a lot if running in the background. Sometimes rebooting the phone helps too, but it takes almost two full minutes to power down and back up, again not a fun thing to do while trying to make one's connecting flights.
2. Typing. This phone has one of the increasingly common "capacitive" touchscreens (like the iphone). If you're already used to this, you know what you're in for. But if you have never used this kind of screen before, get ready for several days of fat fingers. This phone's screen responds only to the fleshy pad of the finger, not a stylus or fingernail. Your fingers will feel like giant marshmallows as you try to type on the tiny on-screen keyboard. On my old phone, I could use my fingernail or a stylus to touch a precise spot on the screen, but that is no longer an option.
3. With Android 1.5, the YouTube app was horribly buggy, and barely worked. Fortunately, under Android 2.1 it is vastly improved.
4. Settings are often hard to find, and buried deep within menus. For example, to turn off dialpad tones, you have to exit out of the phone application, then go to "Settings", then "sound and display", then scroll to "dialer keypad tone". It took me days to figure this out, and the setting really ought to be placed in the phone app itself.
5. Battery life is middling when using default factory settings. It seems to get better if you turn off "always-on" in the wireless settings, but then email gets much slower because the phone no longer downloads new mail in the background. These things aren't obvious - you have to figure them out by reading forums and seeing what other people have tried.
6. Slightly arrogant user community. Getting help with this phone reminds me of the IT departments at my job. While setting up my phone, one comment I got from another Android user went along the lines of ... "if you don't want to flash your own custom roms, then get an iphone". OK, I don't want to have to "flash a custom rom" just to make my phone do what it was supposed to do from the beginning. Why should I have to become a tech support expert when Google/HTC have highly paid engineers whose job it is to solve these problems?
7. Google Chrome automatically syncs bookmarks across your PCs, but this does not extend to the Android browser. Of course, no other phone does this either, but it seems like a strange omission. I have no doubt Google's engineers are working on this, but it's not here yet.In summary, Android feels like the early days when PCs became popular. There is a lot of potential, but I'm still waiting for bugs and quirks to get smoothed out, even in Android 2.1. If you are still getting this phone, be aware that you will have spend some time fiddling and tweaking, and reading in forums to find out how other users worked around various quirks. Once you do all that, phone becomes very useful, albeit frustratingly slow to operate, especially after updating the Android 2.1.
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