Things I hate about my Android MyTouch 3g Mobile

After a few short weeks, I come to loath my Mytouch 3G Android phone. It’s so woefully inadequate against any Blackberry offering . In a word, it sucks as a business tool. I’m still trying to keep it, hoping it will get better, grow on me, but I’m still steaming a bit.

The first is simply the only email client is Gmail. But if you’re like most people, you’ve got multiple email addresses you’d like to use. Gmail handles it fine, only you can only send from your primary email, meaning if someones sends you an email to your XYZ.domain, you’re reply will come from gmail.com. Sure you can configure it to pull other email, but then you end up having to open each folder to see the incoming mail. Who thought this up? Blackberry wins.

Trying to read email is the next difficulty, you can’t change the font size and the 19 year old grad student with 20/0 vision who created the client, obviously has no problem, so if you 0.0003% of the population with 20/0 vision, this shouldn’t be a problem.

The Gmail client has all kinds of problems displaying inline images and I gave up opening any of the common enclosures (PDF, doc, xls). There are a number of add-in’s but they have a ton of their own issues. Come on folks, get with it.

I’m not going to talk about how horrid typing is on the phone, I know have 3 keyboards (one I stole from HTC and illegally installed). Typing on the MyTouch is an exercise in driving yourself slowly crazy. None of the T9 capabilities work well, when it gets it wrong, it won’t allow you to correct it and god help you if you try to backspace up to fix something, then, when T9 should jump in to help, it doesn’t. I’ve sent more emails sounding like a drunken sailor than ever before which ironically has led me to drink more.

There is also no easy way to get back to the HOME menu, if I’m deep in a program, hitting home sometimes just backs me up a level. So I’m often struggling to get HOME. Why is that?

The simple act of dialing a contact is another exercise in driving yourself crazy. Who designed the dialer application, please call me to discuss. This same 19 y/o grad student with 2 contacts (his mother and the pizza shop) obviously hasn’t thought about someone driving down the road trying to find one of the 900 contacts to call. I’ve downloaded 6 different dialer applications and found StarContact the best of the worse.

The simple act of turning on Bluetooth on Blackberry was a single touch of a dedicated mechanical side button. Android has hundreds of widgets that turn Bluetooth on/off, but I’ve found most are slow to respond, eat up processing power slowing down the phone and yet another icon in a sea of icons I need to find (while driving down the road). I realize my 19 y/o grad student doesn’t have his license yet, but I’m hoping he will try out the phone extensively in a car (not a bus) the next go around.

The final straw was the alarm clock, I long ago gave up on trusting any hotel alarm clock or wake-up service. You could set the alarm on the Blackberry and no matter what it’s state (on or off), if there was enough juice for it to do it, it would chirp away. The Android requires the phone to be on for the alarm clock to work. Meaning it chimes all night with incoming email and junk, people can call me, waking me up, just so I can hear the Alarm. Who thought this up?

No surprise, Android is a tiny computer trying to act like a mobile device and it has much to learn. I’m just hoping someone other than a 19 y/o grad student starts looking at how to correct these serious deficiencies.