I've given it over three months and I am reluctantly going to give up on Android as a mobile phone choice. I have a T-Mobile G2 (which is a re-branded HTC Hero) and although I love it to bits as a bit of hardware, Android itself leaves a LOT to be desired right now.
So the handset is on Ebay and I have to work out what to do instead - iPhone (which would mean a second hand one unlocked and therefore running a couple of versions behind) or something simpler as I don't want to go back to Blackberry.
My thoughts are swaying towards an iPod Touch for apps and games, and a simpler, cheaper phone for calls, texts and checking email when out and about. We'll see.
But why am I giving up Android? Here's a just a few of the reasons:
(a) 3G support is awful - the phone has to stay stuck to 2G only to make it usable. When on 3G it suddenly stops transferring data for as much as fifteen minutes. It's a known issue with certain phones on certain networks but no-one seems to be taking responsibility for it and fixing it.
(b) OS updates. The phone came with Android version 1.5 (even though it was bought months after 1.6 was released), with the general talk round the internet that 1.6 would be imminent. Then Google announced 2.x (who knows if it's 2.0 or 2.1? I can't tell!) and HTC then decided that they would skip 1.6 and go straight to 2.x - more delays. Of course, then T-Mobile have to edit it and add their bits to it, so we're looking at *maybe* April, though nothing is yet confirmed.
(c) Market Place. Great idea - have a totally unrestricted Market for apps, unlike the control freakery of Apple and the App Store. Shame that I can only browse the Market on the handset (why no desktop/web version?) and shame that searching is essentially the same as "give me a random app" (why can't Google make a decent search function - I heard that they knew something about searching once). Then there's the fact that there is almost nothing stopping anyone uploading apps to the Market. So we have hundreds and hundreds of duplicate apps - soundboards or wallpaper collections. All the same, just with different sounds or pictures in. And how do you find good, new apps when listing apps by date order just brings all these duplicates as they keep re-submitting them?
(d) All syncing is done through Google's online services. Great that they are, they are ten years behind the functionality of Outlook. Google Calendar and Contacts remind me of Palm Desktop from long ago. With no ability to sync a huge number of fields from Outlook, the PIM applications become next to useless for anyone wanting more than the very basics. And forget about syncing Notes to To-Do's as they simply don't.
(e) Support is non-existent. There is a thread on Google's own Android Marketplace forum that was started by a Google employee. He asked for details of anyone having trouble downloading from the Market. He started the thread in May 2009 and to date (March 2010) he has had over 500 replies and NOT ONCE have Google acknowledged the problem or that anything is being done on it. This is just one example, but Google are spending development time on the Nexus One OS with animated wallpapers and forgetting to sort out the basics and the real issues. Google are developing the "sizzle" and forgetting the "sausage".
(f) Applications - iPhone has been around longer and has many, many more users. Combine this with the fragmentation in Android hardware and software versions and developers are simple not developing for Android as there's no market. Applications are poor cousins to the iPhone versions in almost every case.
(g) Application storage - linking in with (f) above, my son is a great example. He has run out of applications storage his device because all applications have to be installed to the internal memory of the handset. He has over 2Gb of empty space on his memory card and he has money to spend - real cash to give to developers. But he can't because to buy more apps he would have to uninstall current ones. So there's a possible customer the developers have lost.
There are many, many other reasons why I am giving up on Android but these are the main ones. Yes, they may all be sorted in furture OS updates but iPhone, Windows Mobile and even Symbian do not have these problems.
So bye bye to the 'droid. It's been an experience.
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