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The Great Android Test 2012

Originally published here.

It sounds like some sort of desperate attempt to gain geek credibility, but I've been using smartphones and PDA's for years. My desire to have my very own tricorder took me through the joys of an HP Jornada, a Compaq iPaq, a Dell Axim, a Palm Treo, and a couple of HTC Windows Mobile 5 and 6 based devices. I held out against the iPhone incursion for as long as I could, until I succumbed to the siren song of the 3GS.

The funny thing is that, for someone who changed device every 6 or 12 months, I've now had the same 3GS for nearly 3 and a half years. The combination of solid hardware and an active ecosystem meant that, despite the temptation of a higher res screen, I've not really seen the point in upgrading. Buying an iPad probably helped as well.

Anyway, the 3GS is getting slower and slower, and the battery has suffered from about 1500 charge cycles, so it's time for a replacement. And being a gadget whore, I thought I'd check out the competition before lazily falling back into bed with another iDevice.

First up was the HTC One X. I'd loved my previous WinMo HTC devices, and I'd heard about the lovely screen on the One X, so I was excited. When I got it, however, I took an immediate and not entirely rational dislike to it. The hardware is solid and the screen is wonderful, but there were very quickly some minor annoyances. The power connector is at the side instead of the bottom, making charging while in a case a challenge. There's no physical 'home' button, and the power button is way up at the top, making it hard to reach on such a big phone - so even turning the thing on and off was a little bit annoying. The major issue, though, was the software, although weirdly I couldn't pin down exactly what it was that I didn't like. It was like looking at Mickey Rourke 20 years ago and now, and trying to work out exactly what had gone wrong; it just felt lumpy and misshapen.

So, that went back and along came the legally contentious Galaxy S3. This was a very different experience - slick, smooth, well thought out. Some people complain that it's too plasticky but, coming from a 3GS, that isn't something I noticed particularly. There's a physical home button, the power button and power connectors are in sensible places, and the screen, like the One X, is wonderful. And though there are alot of complaints about Touchwiz, the software seemed much more polished to me, even if there are a fair number of Samsung specific apps I have no intention of ever touching.

Benefits

Things I absolutely love about the S3, and indeed the wider Android experience, are:

Unsurprisingly, after 3.5 years of iPhoning, I have one or two gripes:

Gripes

Useful notifications on the lock screen.
I like to pin-protect my phone, and as I mentioned above I'm a sucker for seeing lots of useful information with as little effort as possible. iOS has a killer feature for me here - all new emails, texts and missed calls are shown on front screen as soon as you touch the on button.

On Android by default, the best you get is an icon telling you how many missed emails you have. There's the pull-down notification bar (which Apple shamefully ripped off in iOS 5) which shows alot more info, but that groups emails together, once again leaving me with the certain knowledge that I have some emails, but no information on what they are.

After hours of looking around there's an app called Executive Assistant that seems to do most of what I want, but there are still problems. Most annoyingly, because Google locks down the email database from third party apps, EA has to fetch emails itself, which both messy and a waste of battery. It also doesn't clear the list of new emails automatically on unlock, so you have to clean it out manually.

No decent email client
I was enormously surprised by this, given Google's background, but the stock email apps in Android seem a little... sucky. Yes there's the GMail app, but I've personally never particularly liked the GMail interface, and like many people I have other email accounts. There's the stock email app, which is okay but does threaded conversation views rather clumsily. On the app store, K9 is a nice free alternative, but that doesn't do threaded conversations at all. Ultimately Maildroid looks like the best option - good email threading, fast delivery, nice interface.

However, none of them do as good a job as the stock iOS mail of squeezing emails into a small screen space. If you get emails with lots of embedded pictures (Amazon being the email nemesis in this regard), iOS does its best to ensure you never have to scroll horizontally. All of the Android apps behave as though you're at your desktop, looking at things through a very narrow web browser. Here's an example of what I mean.

Android iPhone
Android iPhone

Minor things

There are a couple of other niggles too:

Conclusion

My conclusion, at the moment, is slightly inconclusive. Android is clearly a very capable platform and, once you've seen the S3 screen and experienced the joy of live widgets, iOS seems like a very dull place. At the same time, some very core parts of my phone experience are lacking on Android - lock screen notifications and a nicely integrated email client being the being main ones. At the moment I'm inclined to fall back to what I'm more familiar with, but that doesn't seem as much fun...