I’ve had the Droid for a few days now. Here are my emerging opinions.
Things I like
- Background processes – push email, IM, and notifications in general provide a superior communication experience.
- Surprisingly long battery life. Despite running all those background applications, the phone’s battery is still at half full after 12 hours.
- The LED on the front bezel blinks when you have something waiting for your attention – no need to turn on the screen.
- It’s fast. Most applications seem to have almost no load time.
- The slide out keyboard lights up in the dark.
- Facebook and Google sync everything in the background. When a new contact appears in Gmail, it’s automatically on the phone.
- The screen is extremely readable. Font rendering is especially good compared to the iPhone.
Things I do not like
- The camera takes horrible pictures and does not focus properly.
- Scrolling the home screen is rough.
- The virtual keyboard does not automatically appear when a text input field is highlighted. You have to tap the field to summon the keyboard.
- There is a limit of 3 home screens.
- Some of the applications that I enjoyed on my iPhone do not yet have an Android equivalent. Amazon Kindle is the one I miss the most.
- They layout algorithm for the home screen truncates application names longer than one line, even when there is obviously plenty of space.
- The interface aesthetic needs a lot of work. For starters, the black background featured in some parts of the interface is mismatched with the gray gradient background found in other parts. There needs to be a universal design tying all the components together. This would also help unify the appearance of third party applications as their developers take cues from the standard UI and widget set.
- The volume rocker and camera button have too much play, which makes them feel cheap.
Posted in Technology.
Tagged with Android, Apple, Facebook, Google, Motorola.
By Kevin Chiu
– November 11, 2009
Why:
- China Unicom reported only 5000 iPhones sold in the first week. This is in stark contrast to the 1 million new 3G subscribers it gained in total. Also, the iPhone App Store is not available, and neither is Wifi. This is a huge hit against the iPhone’s greatest strengths, apps and web browsing.
- Verizon just launched the Motorola Droid. The new phone is echoing around the blogosphere, leaving an impression as a true iPhone 3GS competitor, and in some ways, shows itself to be a superior product.
- Exclusivity with carriers in various countries creates a smartphone vacuum amongst the carriers that are not partnered with Apple. Android is steadily moving into these free spaces. In the US, these include Verizon and Sprint, among others.
- While yearly iterations on the iPhone platform have steadily improved Apple’s product, Android has nearly accomplished product parity in only two thirds the time.
Why Not:
- Android as a commercial platform for application developers is not currently as attractive as Apple’s solution. Google is trying to populate the store with higher quality applications through its Android Developer Challenges, but this also has the unpleasant side effect of temporarily suppressing the Android Market economy. Many of the high quality apps made for these challenges are released for free, wiping out revenues for entire application niches.
- Applications in the store seem to convert fewer buyers than their counterparts in the iPhone App Store.
- Piracy seems to be a more significant issue on Android, which might be a direct cause for the low conversion rates.
Niggles:
- The Droid camera autofocuses poorly, and the color processing is significantly more bland than that of the iPhone 3GS. However, this should be addressable with a software update.
- Applications can only be installed on the phone’s internal memory, which on the Droid, has an upper limit of 256MB. This means larger applications must install a small binary that will download the remainder of the application for installation on the removable memory.
Future Strategy
It’s very likely that the iPhone’s dominance will end in the near future if Android continues advancing at such a rapid clip. Apple is currently stuck in disadvantageous exclusivity contracts while its competition enjoys free roam among all other carriers. Apple’s saving grace is a superior application library and application discovery interface. If Android can revamp its approach to applications and find out where it can find its own iTunes-like foothold, things will start to get a bit more interesting.
Google stands to be the major winner if Android succeeds, even though it’s giving everything away for free. In the same manner Microsoft overtook Apple in the early days of Silicon Valley, Google stands to take over Apple in the mobile wars thanks to hardware independence and a strong foothold in personal online information. If Google releases a Sync application, perhaps within Google Desktop or Chrome, the stability of the foothold it could establish in competition with Apple will be tremendous. Currently, nearly everything on Android can be easily synchronized with Google’s services. However, a few strategic services remain unimplemented, such as media. In the same way Google Docs has displaced Microsoft’s Office in many small workplaces, Google could also displace iTunes using an online equivalent.
Posted in Business, Technology.
Tagged with Android, Apple, Google, iPhone, Motorola, opensource.
By Kevin Chiu
– November 7, 2009
I was trying to visit Dropbox’s website today and noticed that http://dropbox.com is now owned by Google. (Dropbox’s actual URL is http://getdropbox.com)
Is Google planning to buy Dropbox?
Posted in Business, Technology.
Tagged with Dropbox, Google, startups.
By Kevin Chiu
– October 11, 2009
Last year, I bought 16 oz cup of Alpine Strawberry ice cream from a small eatery across the street from Columbia University, and it changed the way I’ve thought of purchasing this type of good ever since.
As I enjoyed the creamy treat, I realized that I was deriving less and less satisfaction from each additional bite. The effect was so extreme, that as I scooped towards the midpoint of my cup, I found myself annoyed that there was even more ice cream to dig through. And, even though I didn’t want to eat it, I continued eating dutifully to avoid the guilt of wasting food.
When I finally emptied and disposed of the white styrofoam container, I realized that what I was purchasing wasn’t the ice cream, it was enjoyment derived from the experience of eating the ice cream.
The nonlinear relationship expressed on the ice cream store menu suddenly made sense. Larger sizes were disproportionately less expensive when compared using an assumption of a set amount of enjoyment per unit volume, which corresponded to the reality that enjoyment extracted from the ice cream as it was consumed fell over time.
The integral of ice cream enjoyment in reality creates a measured enjoyment that is significantly less than the expected enjoyment estimated using the misguided assumption that there is a direct correlation between enjoyment and volume. Additionally, there are further negative enjoyment effects, such as an expanding waistline, to be taken into consideration.
Purchases of things that temporarily improve your life at the cost of future well being should be avoided.
Posted in Business, Personal.
Tagged with Business, economics, Lifehack, marketing.
By Kevin Chiu
– August 27, 2009
I read a lot of news feeds. Thousands of stories pass by my eyes nearly every day. Here are some selected sources from my tech section.
- Ars Technica – Very high quality stories, but slower to respond to breaking news.
- Engadget – Gadget blog – arch rival of Gizmodo
- Gizmodo – Gadget blog – arch rival of Engadget
- Lifehacker – Random life tips
- MacRumors – Mac Rumors (of course)
- Slashdot – An old standby that I temporarily left for Digg.
- TechCrunch – A rather famous tech blog – more like a newspaper
Posted in Personal, Technology.
By Kevin Chiu
– August 21, 2009
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