I broke down and purchased a Blackberry and put my barely used mytouch 3G up for auction on Ebay. Please bid on this POS. I can’t stand to look at it any more. I tried really hard to like it for almost 3 months. I knew it was time to move on when my colleagues told me to stop yelling at my phone.
I’m calm now and wanted to dissect the particulars of the my hatred of the Android Operating System and write them out in the hopes that some 20-something Stanford grad who isn’t too busy spending their $117k bonus from Google might read and actually think about change.
Android fails because it’s first a horrible phone. It’s a pain in the ass to make a simple phone call with. I bought it as a mobile phone to #1 make calls and it fails right out of the gate. #2 – it’s a horrible way to manage email. Horrible is an understatement, it just plain sucks platypus snot. You will go absolutely insane trying to do email on it. But I said I was going to be sane. Here’s the list of things I hate:
Boot time – Android takes 3 full minutes to start up on power on. 3, like in 1, 2, 3. My Windows machine boots faster. Blackberry from a cold battery reinsert takes 2 minutes and from a warm power on is about 15 seconds.
Alarm Clock – Traveling I came to depend on my Blackberry’s alarm clock to wake me up. Android has an alarm clock, but the phone has to be powered on to go off. Who thought that up? Blackberry will power on automatically.
Slow to energize – Android would signal it had an incoming call from me, but it often took it 15 seconds are almost 2 ring cycles to be awake enough for me to actually answer the phone. I missed more calls while hitting the green phone button waiting for Android to be conscience enough to connect.
Impossible to use in car – Android should be the leading reason States ban cell phone usage while driving. It’s virtually impossible to call someone while driving with this thing. Contrast that with Blackberry, whose hands free voice dialing using Bluetooth is a breeze to call a contact or dial by number someone. Android’s voice dialing is basically useless.
Dialing a contact – If you have more than 3 contacts, it is a virtual nightmare to try and find a contact to call with Android. Your fingers will be numb from scrolling. I tried various 3rd party apps, with only partial success. Blackberry is really easy, just start typing their name, first, last, name of their dog, who cares, it will try and find it for you to call.
Multiple email – Who doesn’t have multiple email addresses? Android treats everything other than your primary Gmail account as a poor second cousin. In fact, the email interface for secondary accounts is almost completely different. Who thought that up? You end up having to looking at individual folders for each of your email accounts to read your messages. Contrast with Blackberry, which can dump all your emails into a single folder.
Reading email on the go – Android often won’t let you read certain emails if you’re out of radio range (like on a plane, my god, who travels on an airplane these days what with nothing but terrorists and small children). Imagine settling into 32C and trying to catch up on email only to find Android didn’t download the message. Arghgh. Blackberry again wins.
Keyboard – the onscreen keyboard just sucks. You will soon give up and just sned emils ot spelt whtevr wich wuy becuse u dont care anymore and have given up screaming at the phone for fat fingering something wrong. OMG and please don’t try any of the add on programs that attempt to ‘help’ you with spelling. All I can say is the Chinese need to learn how write English first before developing these programs.
Searching email – another painful exercise that also required that your wireless data signal be active. Again slow slow slow.
Random reboots – In the end, my mytouch 3g was randomly locking up, freezing for a moment or two and generally slowing down my communications. I liked the GPS, with turn-by-turn directions, but this often froze the phone solid.
Music dongle – 2 years ago this might have been ok. But to listen to music, you have to attach this stupid dongle to plug in your headset. The dongle plugs into the USB jack. Which means – you can’t charge the phone and listen to music at the same time. Great engineering.
You getting the picture here. I now have reconnected with my hatred emotion when I think about this phone. Thank you Google.
Having said all that, it was a cool little play toy and I had all kinds of neat little games to play with on it to amuse myself. But as a production work tool, Android fails and fails often on multiple fronts. Please bid on it on Ebay today!