This is probably best described as a partially informed review of Android. I’m a techie who uses a lot of Apple products so I’m coming from using a MacBook and iPhone 3GS daily. I generally keep a passing eye on Android developments but that’s about it. When it comes to phone I typically have at least two with the additional phones serving as backup or travel devices i.e. one phone will have my regular SIM and I’ll put either a local or Maxroam SIM in the other phone when I’m travelling. Since I gave my Nokia E71 (from Lebanon) to my girlfriend after she lost her phone I haven’t had a secondary phone. This has been fine as my travel this year has been almost nil. Recently I was back in Lebanon and wanted to give Maxroam a trial there but had no extra phone. So I decided to use this opportunity to pick up a used Android device and see what life was like on the more open platform that people rave about and use to slam the iPhone. It didn’t quite work out that way as I didn’t get the HTC Hero until I was back in Ireland. Still, it meant that I could trial it in an easy environment.
So the HTC Hero is now a reasonably dated device but it is and was a significantly cheaper device than the iPhone. So it’s important to accept that you can’t do a like for like comparison on the hardware. A fairer head to head would probably be the HTC Desire. For a good discussion on the Desire, check out @eske‘s post here
The Hero that I got was running Android 2.1 with the HTC Sense UI overlay. This is a useful feature of the Android platform for device manufacturers and Sense is pretty decent. I didn’t think all that much of some of the HTC apps on there: Peep is a good example of a Twitter client which I really didn’t like but in fairness it’s easy to setup and will suit the casual Twitter user. I spent a bit of time with this setup – using the phone and installing apps like Seesmic, Tweetdeck, Foursquare and Facebook from the Android Market. However I was much more interested in trying out some of the more interesting features in Android 2.2 like WiFi tethering. HTC aren’t taking Android on the Hero any further so you’re into the root and reflash the ROM world. This is a pretty trival task with plenty of guides out there on how to do root without requiring any thought on the users part. Similarly there are plenty of Android 2.2 ROM choices out there which are just as easy to get onto the device. I went with FroydVillain as it was the ROM I’d happened to read about most recently. This gives you a stock Android 2.2 with the latest Google Apps. I took the SIM from my iPhone and used it in the Hero so that I could make sure network performance was the same. I also experimented with the default kernel as well as overclocked kernels with the 768MHz failing to boot fully but the 652MHz working just fine (doesn’t seem to drain the battery excessively either).
Once you’re done flashing FroydVillain (rooting and reflashing is less than 10 minutes end-to-end) you’re presented with a device which behaves like new. This means you get to run through the setup where you can setup your Google Account, signing up for one if you don’t have one already. It works just fine with a Google Apps account so that was a positive straight away. The device then just syncs away and you’re soon up and running with mail and contacts, etc. This is where the Google integration rocks – it’s quick and easy and you know that even if you wipe the device you’re going to be back up and running in no time with another sync. Running the new ROM makes no difference to the way you interact with Google services or more importantly the Android Market and application updates. VillainRom also offers an update service so you can keep up-to-date without fear of losing your root/custom ROM. This is obviously the best example of the open nature of the Android platform over Apple’s tightly controlled iPhone/iTunes environment. It’s huge and you can’t underestimate just how much power over your device this gives you by comparison.
With this more cutting edge setup I felt that it made things fairer and I felt prepared to love Android. It’s important to now get out of the way that I hate the touchscreen on the Hero, in comparison to the iPhone/iPod Touch it feels unresponsive and clunky. I’m putting this down as part of the cost differential – for your money, Apple give you a touchscreen that rocks – it’s quick and feels like a natural extension. That said, when input registered the response from applications seemed a little sluggish. So that out of the way we’re down to the Android applications – my experience was effectively 100% Android Market driven (will talk about the exception later). I’m not a fan of the Android Market – right now it just seems chaotic and hard to get to the genuine, quality applications. You really need to be following app guides to be productive – browsing the marketplace really didn’t cut it. @misterebby was kind enough to point me to this one . I find myself in agreement with this assessment via @gruber which takes Angry Birds as an example and highlights the number of ripoff apps you will find on the Android Market. This can only make for a poor user experience, particularly for those who are just getting started in the smartphone world via Android (by all accounts this is a sizable number of people based on reports of Android marketshare). While I have a serious dislike of the way Apple arbitrarily expels apps from the iTunes store I think the Android Marketplace is on the other extreme and places a burden on the user to determine the genuine quality apps to download and in some cases pay for. Many of the apps are also quite poor versions of those that exist on the iTunes Store; Facebook and various Twitter clients being the best example. I really did expect the apps to be on a par – I mean, the lessons have already been learned on the iPhone of what works so why aren’t the improvements to be found already on Android? In the Facebook app I couldn’t add favourites to the app home screen the way I can in the iPhone version. Tweetdeck on Android feels like it’s 6-12 months behind the iPhone version. The Android Market app had lots of problems with downloads appearing to start then experience issues like stalling, immediately failing or duplicating in ‘Downloads’ and simply disappearing from the Download list. This happened both on 3G data and WiFi (both the same as what the iPhone is used on). iTunes App Store can have some similar issues but you can, more often than not, attribute this to a specific event like a new update or a newly popular app not having the capacity for uptake. Typically these resolve with a short amount of time but the issues on the Android Marketplace seemed more random and thus frustrating. Again, this is going to come down to Google having a long hard think about Android Marketplace and making the appropriate fixes in policy and delivery. They’ll get this right I’m sure but it will take time. Explosive growth and a less forgiving userbase than us Apple fanboys might make this rougher though. The open approach does yield big wins though, WiFi tethering under Android 2.2 didn’t seem to be ‘out-of-the-box’ on the Hero but the Android Marketplace provided Barnacle which does a wonderful job and is a testament to the open platform. This worked a treat and also highlighted a hardware win over the iPhone as well as the obvious Android Marketplace versus iTunes App Store openness. 3G performance on the HTC Hero kicks the arse off the iPhone 3GS – I got consistently better performance tethering with the Hero than with the iPhone 3GS. This shows that device manufacturers like HTC can beat Apple on the hardware front and at a lower cost.
I’ve now gone back to the iPhone 3GS as my primary device, simply because the apps on there are so far ahead of their Android counterparts and because the iPhone is clearly a better piece of hardware overall than the Hero. However, if I was to take a device like the HTC Desire HD I think the hardware experience would be very different and I strongly suspect that when I come to replacing the iPhone I will be going the Android route. I am hoping that Android has improved significantly by the time that comes.
While thinking about this blog post another observation came to mind: Custom ROMs and what that offers. The likes of VillainRom.co.uk are amazing resources with paid features like ROM and Theme Kitchens where you can get custom setups. This made me think that an area for independent revenue would be industry/use case specific ROMs which would have high appeal to small and large businesses. The custom ROMs these type of sites offer usually have various applications already in there and I could see a tailored setup for specific professions being a serious selling point. There’s also the possibility of custom Marketplace implementations that would offer vetted applications to more restricted environments.