Android Phones

About 3 months ago I took the plunge and abandoned my rusty and rarely trusty Palm Treo 680 for a brand spankin new HTC EVO 4g. Ironically my biggest hesitation about investing in a new phone platform was the adoption curve for the phone in the marketplace and between the time I ordered the phone and its arrival Oracle (aka Sun) decided to launch a lawsuit against Google with a cease and desist order for violating the Terms of Service for Java.

I'll not rant too much about that topic, but back when Sun bought MySql, Innotek (VirtualBox) and a few other open source projects I was fairly vocal about the murky water that could evolve from that. I think this Java debate is just the first round of Oracle trying to own all things.

Back to the phone. For those of you who haven't yet had the chance to play with an Android based device you'll be in for a treat. The interface is similar to the iPhone from the other evil Empire who believes in Open Source only when they get to define the words "Open", "Source" and "Independent Thought". If your willing to be an iClone go pick up an Apple product and leave your brain at the Genius Bar.

The Con's

My biggest gripe is really the lack of a physical keyboard. I've found lots of ways around the problem, the most interesting being the voice to text feature. Whenever the keyboard appears there is a microphone button and you can then say what you want to type and it does a damm good job of decoding it. That being said there is a catch. It seems that the voice recognition works so well is because the phone uploads the audio clip (I'm assuming to Google) and then the translation comes back to the phone. Don't try to use this feature when you don't have at least a 3g connection, it will just fail with a network error.

Being an "Open" platform I found a replacement keyboard app which asked for permission to read my existing SMS's, Email's, etc so that it could learn my vocabulary, style of writing and it did a great job of predicting what I wanted to say. Typically I was typing 1-2 characters of a word and then could hit space (word completion) and move to the next word.

Between the voice recognizer and the predictive keyboard I had several of my friends begging me to "stop texting them" since for every 3 words they sent me I was responding with paragraphs of comments, questions, answers. You get the idea !

Unfortunately that keyboard replacement was a beta and one day I was greeted with an "Upgrade" which proceeded to remove my free beta, download the crapware demo with a 7 day limit and somehow the product actually got worse between beta and production. Even tho they only wanted 7$ for the new version, between the "Improvements" no one liked and the kick in the rump I got after helping them beta test (Beta Testers had to agree to upload data about hit ratio's, replacement words, etc) I wasn't even offered a discount on the final product.

Lastly while the device itself is amazing I now surf from power cord to power cord. I don't measure battery life in hours till dead but in feet to power.

Please don't take my comments so far as the Death of Android, I just wanted to get my gripes out of the way first.

The Pro's

Physically the EVO is a full color, 4.3" LCD touch screen, weighs about the same as my old Treo 680, has a 8MP rear camera, a 1MP front facing camera for video conferencing, a regular headphone/headset jack, one of those annoying "New" USB ports (gota start buying new cables) and the highly touted "Kickstand".

Yea, its got a little flip out foot that helps it stand up when its in landscape mode so you can watch movies on it. Not 100% stable, but I'm using it far more than I'd expect.

Besides the connectors I've described so far its got one more connection on the bottom about the size of the USB port. Its MAYBE 3/8" by 1/4" in size but damm if it's not a "Micro HDMI" port. This thing will output 720 progressive (1280x720) video and it looks sharp on my 42" LCD in the livingroom. That was a bonus extra I was not expecting.

Internally its got 1GB of flash plus a Micro SD slot and came with an 8GB card. I haven't even had a chance to see how big of a device I can get for it. Most of the media I have loaded are audio and video podcast's and the App I use for my RSS feeds has some utilities for purging podcasts that have already been watched, auto download new, etc. etc. The program is BeyondPod and cost me 6$ (My most expensive purchase to date) and its got some bugs, but i've watched/listened to over 200hours of content since I got the phone.

HTC did a nice job on the user interface and had they included one feature in the desktop manager/launcher (HTC Sense) I would not have discovered the world of alternative launchers. Strangely none of the Sense interface panels auto-rotate to landscape mode and I found using the phone in the car awkward since landscape is the best suited for the Navigation App, but I was having to look sideways at the menu's which was not good for driving.

I found a replacement launcher called LauncherPro and it does about 99% of what HTC Sense does. The most significant way that Android and the iClone is about widgets. I'll be the first to admit that I've spent less than 1 hour with any apple product in the last 10 years so maybe I've just never never discovered the world of iPhone widgets but this seems to be the defining difference between the products.

Like the Google Desktop Widgets that most people have a love/hate relationship with in Windows, Widgets are one of those things that make the Android unique in my mind. It's not just about Dynamic Icons, with widgets if the app supports it you can use various portions of the screen to display toolbars, calendar entries, etc etc, just about anything you can think of.

On my phone, main screen across the top is a 5 button widget showing status of the Brighness, Wifi Radio, BlueTooth Radio, GPS Radio and if AutoSync is enabled. Touching the portion of the icon changes the state of the device and I can customize which buttons appear in the bar.

Also on the front screen I have a widget showing battery charge, time to dead or time till charged and the widget is also a conventional icon. I tap it and it launches the battery minder (an add-on called JuicePlotter).

There is another one called 3G WatchDog which keeps track of my data plan usage. I told it what my monthly allotment is and when my contract monthly renewal is and it shows me if I'm going to go over my allotment. It will even disable the 3G Radio if I want at a preset limit.

This only scratches the surface of what I can do with this phone but it has one amazing feature that my Treo could never do reliably. I can ACTUALLY make and receive phone calls on the device. Yes amazing but true its actually a phone. Every time my Treo would ring it was like playing a bad Vegas Slot Machine. Would it answer, lockup, reboot, you never really knew !!

I've had a few difficulties with the Evo and phonecall's but that's mostly related to my being a long time user of GrandCentral aka GoogleVoice.. There is excellent integration with GV on the phone, voicemail's automatically download to the phone and can be listened to even when your out of a service area.

My frustration's are related to the operation of GoogleVoice in general more than the phone itself. For the first month every time I got a Text I'd get two copies of the text, then a text from myself to myself telling me I was not available to respond to the text and then another text telling me I had messages waiting.

Ok, enough for my first post on the phone. I promise I'll continue the posts on the phone if people are interested. Please use the poll on the right side to tell me if this is something of interest.

Rick