You'd be mistaken for thinking that the iPhone is the be all and end all to smart phone technology with the amount of media attention it receives. While it is a very nice piece of hardware there is a major competitor nipping at its heels. Google's Android mobile operating system has been making tracks in recent times since being released in 2007 to developers.
Android is an open operating system and as such any mobile manufacturer can use it on their devices should they choose to. HTC, Motorola, LG and Sony Ericsson have taken up the call and have developed some unique handsets to cater to the functionality of the Android operating system. This is a very distinct contrast between Apple's iOS mobile operating system and Android as Apple does not allow any other manufacturer to use their proprietary system.
Last week I picked up my first Android based smartphone, the Telstra HTC Desire. After hearing nothing but good reports about it, I caught up with a friend who had acquired one and asked if I could check it out. I played around with it for about an hour and I was instantly sold. While I loved my iPhone, I believed it was time to move on to greener pastures. Apple's closed system meant that iPhone users were at the behest of Apple to fix problems or release new features. Apple's application store was also very tightly controlled, meaning that if apps did not meet Apple's strict and sometimes undocumented rules they were often rejected without any real reason.
I admire Steve Jobs as a business man, he runs a very successful company, but his arrogance towards what his customers want versus what he ultimately decides we need just didn't wash over well with me. Apple was built upon values that characterised its uniqueness to think differently, a value that many of its long time fans bought into and propelled the company to what it is today. Apple was the poster child, the underdog, battling against the supreme overlord of IBM and Microsoft back in the late 80's and 90's. Some say that Apple has since morphed itself into the very thing it was battling and now controls everything to an extent that makes it just as uncompetitive as its adversaries of the past.
So with that being said, here's my initial thoughts on the Android operating system, the pros and cons and the challenges facing someone coming from Apple's iPhone iOS.
Initially I was a little perplexed by the user interface of the Android OS, it appeared a little clunkier to use than Apple's refined interface but I soon realised that the near infinite amount of ways you can customise the home screen and side screens made it far superior to what Apple offered. For starters, all the installed programs are listed under a menu, so if you didn't want that application icon showing on the screen, you didn't have to have it there. This was in stark contrast to Apple, which places and icon for every installed application on the home screens, including system tools, regardless of whether you use them or not.
Other functionality also included the ability to use widgets on a home screen, this feature is nice for when you don't particularly need to open an application but would like it to continue running in the background. There are a plethora of widgets for just about every application and each is as customisable as the next, allowing the user the ability to change how they want their phone to look and feel. For instance, if you don't use email on your phone you can simply hide it away and put up a Facebook widget to quickly access your news and friend feeds.
Being an open operating system, the customisations to built in applications are almost limitless. I didn't quite care much for HTC's SMS messaging application and instead installed ChompSMS to take care of the SMS functions. ChompSMS displays messages almost identical to the way iPhone's SMS application does, with the added bonus of a widget for quick access on one of the home screens.
I also installed an alternate web browser called Dolphin that offered more functionality than HTC's browser. I've since learned that Mozilla is developing an Android based version of Firefox called Fennec. I had a quick look at it, but due to it still being in Alpha release it was extremely buggy and used an incredible amount of system resources just to run. I'll keep my eye on this one for future developments.
There are a few tiny cons of the HTC Desire and Android. The first thing I find myself doing after having used the iPhone for a few years is pressing the optical trackball a lot as it is positioned in the same place as the home button on the iPhone. It's a little annoying, although I'm getting used to it, pressing the lock button at the top of the phone to engage the screen when it has gone to sleep. Ordinarily I would just press the home button on the iPhone to wake the screen up but none of the front buttons do this on the Desire.
The other challenge of the Desire is that it leaves all the applications running in the background once you've opened them. It wasn't immediately clear how to actually close them once you're done but thankfully there is a third party application called Advanced Task Killer that does a good job of closing applications when you're done with them.
Because Android handles SMS's and emails as notifications, there is no way to distinguish between the two when they come in with a unique sound tone. This is something I hope they'll fix in later revisions as I like having different tones for email and SMS to signify what type of message has just been received.
The iPhone4 has now pretty much matched most of the other specifications, both the HTC Desire and the iPhone4 have a 5-megapixel camera capable of focusing, zoom and video recording. They also both now have an LED flash for taking pictures in low light or dark. The Desire does not have a forward facing camera, whereas the iPhone4 does, this is something I hope HTC will add in the next release of the Desire. There are already several HTC models that do have a forward facing camera already.
Other benefits of the HTC Desire is that its memory is upgradeable with an SD card supporting up to 32GB. It comes with a 2GB SD card as standard. It also has a removable battery, something the iPhone lacks. It's also far easier to transfer files to and from the Desire, simply plug into a PC with the USB cable supplied and the phone appears as another drive under My Computer. No longer are you confined to using iTunes, which in my opinion is a piece of software I'd rather not be using.
Overall I'm pretty satisfied with the switch so far and I'm looking forward to what the future will bring in the smartphone space. The competition between the mobile manufacturers and software developers can only lead to more innovation and better devices for everyone and that's a good thing.
UPDATE: I mentioned in the article that there was no way of changing the SMS and email tones to differentiate from each other. I've since learned that this problem seems to be confined to the HTC Desire as the mail application is different from other Android models. I've found an alternate mail program called K-9 Mail that offered a little more flexibility in changing settings. As a result I now have a different tone for the SMS's and emails and a few more little features that have come in handy. Yet another tick in the positive column for Android and my HTC Desire.
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