Last thursday I upgraded my personal mobile from an old NOKIA N73 (Symbian S60 3rd generation) to a T-Mobile Pulse, ANDROID powered fullscreen multitouch device.
After testing it over the weekend quite intensively, I am very disappointed. Well, not compared to the NOKIA, of course the ANDROID is better. But at the same time it is far behind the iPhone (I am using as business phone).
1) Most of all the usability. The easiness of the iPhone is missed by far. My wife (after her Mahjong-Benchmarking) put it to the point: "If they build this to copy and compete the iPhone, why don't they do it completely?" That was the question I couldn't answer myself. No gestures, just buttons. Half of usage (scrolling, selecting items) is done on the screen, the other half via the little ball and keys. Even stuff like browsing the internet or using twitter app was hard compared to iPhone.
2) Another disappointment was the "openess". I understood that ANDROID is OpenSource to give people full control over their device, no closed (proprietary) OS. Still, one of the first things I had to do was to "hack" it. Hack it to get full (root) user access, and to add custom made ROM (OS-version). Because I needed to fix two main issues: memory handling and tethering. While the first is completely stupid - the ANDROID puts all applications into the (usually very small) phone memory and reserves the big SD-card storage only for files (photos, music etc.), the second was perfectly done on my NOKIA already. If it was really planned to give me full control over my device, why there is no checkbox in the settings "enable root access"? They even can ask two times for confirmation "Do you know what you are doing? Do you really want to get root access?" ;-)
3) Next thing: the Apps. Okay, I was aware the Apple's App-Store was probably the best on the market. I was aware that there are approx. 10 times more apps for iPhone than for ANDROID. Still, the ANDROID "Market" is second biggest, far better IMHO than NOKIA's ovi Store or any other proprietary one from LG, Sony or Samsung. And thus it was very disappointing to see the quality of the apps. Especially in the game section (as far as I know the biggest part of iPhone Apps), but also in other areas.
And this leads to my theory:
I guess it is a question of the environment of the two competing mobile operation systems.
The iPhone aims IMHO for the user who prefers easiness, loves gadgets but is not technician/nerd. It is expensive, and people buying it do not mind spending money for it. And thus they do not mind spending money in the AppStore. Thus, the developer can sell their work very well and of course they supply many applications to this market place. Additionally, having rather strict rules for passing the app to the AppStore as well as a strong guidance for design (even a GUI-set which can be used by all designers) makes most of the apps both stable and beautiful as well as user-friendly.
The Android OS started as the new open source OS for mobiles, to give people full access to the phone, to have an open platform, with all the advantages of OpenSourceSoftware. One main criteria: the software is free. The target group is rather the geek/nerd/developer. They do not care much for usability, "real" nerds do not need GUI at all, they use console. So why bother with UX (user experience)? Okay, that is probably unfair, as the GUI is nice. But the UX is far behind the iPhone. If you can not do it better, why don't you at least copy the good stuff?
But my main point is that probably the perception of the "open source OS" is a hassle to the App developers, too? It seems that most apps are for free (at least much more than on AppStore). Maybe because the target group had voted for an ANDROID phone because the OS is open source (read: free) and thus those people are not ready/willing to pay for Apps? So it does not make sense for a developer to develop ANDROID apps, at least if he needs to get a living from this business. Even the games I found were mainly for free - but then showed ugly, misplaced Google-Ads :-(
So far my theory. There is one thing I like about the ANDROID: the widgets I can put on the start screen. But it is not enough to become my favorite as long as the rest sucks so much. If I would not have the iPhone for business, I would give the Pulse back to t-mobile and get myself a iPhone4 (thanks God I trained myself from being left-handed to right-handed when I started in school) ;-)
