{"id":607,"date":"2008-11-11T23:38:26","date_gmt":"2008-11-12T04:38:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=607"},"modified":"2010-07-19T01:56:56","modified_gmt":"2010-07-19T06:56:56","slug":"great-googly-moogly-the-sequel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=607","title":{"rendered":"Great googly-moogly, the sequel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few posts back, I <a href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=578\">described<\/a> my good early experience with the T-Mobile G1, the first Android phone.  It&#8217;s now two weeks later; I&#8217;ve learned the phone thoroughly and developed a stable usage pattern.  That makes it a good time for a more considered verdict on the device.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>My more considered verdict is this:  HELL YEAH!  The iPhone should be feeling teeth in its ass right&#8230;about&#8230;now.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not any one feature that makes me say this.  It&#8217;s that the gestalt, the entire experience, is so comfortable and pleasant.  I <em>enjoy<\/em> using my phone.   After two weeks, I think the biggest single reason is that the haptic responsiveness of the touchscreen is tuned just right &#8211; the flick-and-pick gesture (drag a selection list to start it spinning, touch it to stop) feels very natural.<\/p>\n<p>The quality of the display is also a big factor.  It&#8217;s not grainy or glary or tiring to look at; it&#8217;s good enough that I even find the browser usable, not the peering-through-a-grainy-porthole trial I&#8217;ve experienced with previous mobile devices, and much better than on my wife&#8217;s Blackberry.  The Blackberry, however, still has a better keyboard; I&#8217;ve gotten used to mine, but I don&#8217;t like it at all and still consider it the weakest point of the G1 design.<\/p>\n<p>I like being able to attach my own MP3s to events.  I&#8217;ve been showing off my custom default ringtone, the Star Trek communicator chirp, to my geek and hacker friends; their reaction, unanimously, combines laughter with mild envy.  I like being able to GIMP my own contact icons.  I like having a beautiful glowing astrophotograph of the Andromeda Galaxy as my wallpaper.  This is coolness.<\/p>\n<p>Leaving aside these sexy superficialities: the big good thing to say about the Android UI itself after two weeks is that I have nothing to say about it, really.  It neither hinders me nor gets in my face with how stylish it is.  The few weak points are all near the T-Mobile &#8220;Faves&#8221; feature, which is pretty obviously a late and not terribly well integrated patch on the Android superstructure.  (A clue to that is that Faves icons aren&#8217;t available for use on Android&#8217;s main contacts list; I noted this in my earlier post but hadn&#8217;t yet figured out what it meant.)<\/p>\n<p>Thinking about it, I suppose there are two aspects of the UI that merit a mention: the status bar and the pull-down notification area.  The main screen of the Android UI has a thing like a task bar at the top; it includes a clock, a battery-charge display, the familiar signal-strength indicator, and one or more status icons.  The status icons are condition alerts: they tell you if you&#8217;ve had a missed call, or have voicemail, whether or not your GPS is active and has lock, that sort of thing.  This is pretty normal, my old Samsung 660 had a status bar too.<\/p>\n<p>One difference, though, is that the Android icons are&#8230;witty, is the best way I can put it.  Not obtrusively clever or showy, but the designers made skilled use of the relatively high display resolution.  My favorite example: the icon for &#8220;You have voicemail&#8221; is a stencil image of an old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorder.  I love that.  I&#8217;d like to shake the hand of whoever invented that combination of representation, gentle irony, and retro respect.<\/p>\n<p>When there is more information attached to an alert, the status bar grows a visual feature with a touch-me-and-drag <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Affordance\">affordance<\/a>. Drag that down and the status bar turns into a windowshade-like object, taking up just as much of the main screen as it needs to display its event-message queue.  Of course, each event message can be touched, starting your response actions.<\/p>\n<p>Friends, this is the <em>right thing<\/em>.  I checked with an iPhone-owning friend, and this feature actually out-Apples Apple in its utter appropriateness and quiet style. It&#8217;s so natural, and such a smooth transposition of pull-down menus into the key of gestures, that it took me a while to notice how clever and innovative it actually is.  Besides being easy to operate, the notification pulldown implies a particular model of the phone&#8217;s behavior space; it is your unitary monitor of the information stream, helpfully aggregating events you need to watch for in one place.<\/p>\n<p>Compare this with an alternate model we see on computers, where you often have separate apps open to watch for email, IM, system notifications, etc.; on a phone, that would be a mess.  Also compare it with older cellphones, which had notification icons but no hooks to a message queue<br \/>\nthat is implicitly a set of action buttons as well. As was once said of Robert Heinlein&#8217;s writing, the Android&#8217;s windowshade is the art that conceals art &#8211; no ostentation, but lots of understated effectiveness.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s been some criticism of the G1 that it&#8217;s bar-of-soap clunky, almost dowdy compared to the slick industrial-design sleekness of an iPhone.  I now wonder, seriously, if this wasn&#8217;t a subtle and rather clever positioning strategy.  Rather than proclaiming &#8220;I&#8217;mmmm so <em>fahhh<\/em>shionable, dahlink!&#8221; the G1\/Android combination is unobstrusively effective. Nothing looks tacky faster than yesterday&#8217;s overcontrived hip hotness; the designers may have gambled that their more functionalist aesthetic would outlast the iPhone&#8217;s slick presentation.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve seen one firmware update, on 3 November.  It actually did something that I noticed: there&#8217;s now a status-bar icon for USB connection active, and if you pull down on that one you get an option to dismount the SD card from being used as the G1&#8217;s storage and offer a USB-I&#8217;m-here notification to your computer so <em>it<\/em> will mount the SD. This is better than the old way of handing off control of the SD card, which involved burrowing into a relatively obscure system settings menu.<\/p>\n<p>So, yes, this is just Android 1.0, and yes, they are actively improving it even as we speak. I think it&#8217;s going to win.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few posts back, I described my good early experience with the T-Mobile G1, the first Android phone. It&#8217;s now two weeks later; I&#8217;ve learned the phone thoroughly and developed a stable usage pattern. That makes it a good time for a more considered verdict on the device.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=607"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2357,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607\/revisions\/2357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}