No love for Android

Warning: rant alert.

I've had my T-Mobile G1 for around a month now. At first I thought it was great. Fairly nice UI, some decent apps available and relatively good Internet connectivity. I noticed straight off that flicking/dragging to scroll isn't as smooth as on my iPod Touch.

Now I've had it a while, there are some things which are really starting to get to me. First is the battery life. I know it's an Internet-connected device and network polling will have extra load on the battery, but seriously, I'm lucky if I get a day's charge out of it. Second is the notifications bar. It's a neat idea, but constantly having to drag it down can get annoying, especially when it isn't always easy to drag it down. This kind of links in with another point about text message notifications; I'd prefer it if it had the option of giving a popup for text messages. Yes, there's the SMS Popup application, which I use, but it's not great and viewing the message from that doesn't acknowledge the notification, meaning I have to close the popup and then drag down the notification bar and clear it. Bleh.

But perhaps one of my biggest gripes is when actually using the device as a phone. Sometimes when I have an incoming call, the display turns on and shows you who's calling. Sometimes it doesn't and I have to press Menu several times to get it to show me who's calling. wtf? There's also the fact that the dialpad is hidden by default when in a call, meaning if you do need to press a key, you first have to unlock the screen (yes, it actually locks while you're in a call! Very helpful!) and then drag up the dialpad.



Worse than that, once the dialpad is up, it continues to keep locking it, so if you're using an automated menu system, like voicemail or a customer services line, it gets very tedious. It doesn't always like the way I double-tap to unlock the dialpad either, meaning my responses to the menu are delayed which often results in the system saying I gave an invalid answer. Sheesh.



The virtual keyboard is also rather lacklustre, but I can live with that. I just don't use it unless I only want to reply ":-)", for which there is handy button on the virtual keyboard.

So all in all, I'm rather despondent about the G1 and Android. Had I not just signed another 18-month contract with T-Mobile to get the G1, I'd be very tempted to get an iPhone right about now, but don't really fancy spending another £35 a month.