.plan

@400000004bca0e7d377f2164
Project: Week 1 of Android
Plan:

I switched to a Nexus One last week due to a hardware failure on my
iPhone. I won't get another iPhone, in spite of it being the best mobile
platform available, due to Apple's intense evil in the handling of said
platform. Here are my impressions. Well, complaints, really.

1) SMS notifications don't appear on the lock screen. This means I have
to unlock and pull down the notifications panel just to see who texted
me. All mention of this online is from people wanting to *disable* this
feature, which is apparently present on the Hero.

2) Exchange integration is pathetic. I know that the Droid has good
integration, but I'm using T-Mobile, as they're the one telco who didn't
participate in warrantless wiretaps. As has been noted, the N1 only
syncs e-mail and contacts with Exchange, and does so reasonably well.
For calendaring, you have to buy Touchdown, which doesn't integrate
terribly well. It also means that you have to have Touchdown sync your
e-mail as well, so that you get invites (which, by the way, you aren't
alerted to receiving), which causes extra battery drain. I'm basically
going to have to roll my own ROM with Motorola's calendaring APK. The
lack of enterprise support in the base OS is just lazy - in the iPhone,
Exchange integration is phenomenal. Android seems to be designed for the
unemployed.

3) The XMPP client only talks to Google Talk. Not terribly surprising,
but stupid. I don't use Google Talk, Gmail, Gcalendar, or anything G
other than search (and Android).

4) Similarly, the calendar app *only* supports Google Calendar. You
can't subscribe to remote ICS files, which is how I generally aggregate
my various schedules. You can't even have a local calendar; you have
to actually go subscribe to these in Google Calendar on a computer,
and then supposedly they'll sync to your phone. I'll never know this,
though, because I'm not going to tell Google what I'm doing at every
given moment. And obviously, this calendar doesn't talk to the Exchange
one. So, scheduling and calendaring on this device is basically
impossible.

5) There isn't an application for TAKING NOTES. Come ON, people, this is
practically a hello world app. EVERY PHONE HAS ONE. My StarTac 10 years
ago probably had one. It's a total cop-out to rely on "the community" to
make your basic apps for you.

On the hardware end, there are some niggles, like the touchscreen seems
to be miscalibrated to recognize taps slightly above where they should
be, the fact that the trackball isn't sensitive enough and is otherwise
basically useless, and the fairly bad GPS signal aquisition. Basically,
this is an unpolished Symbian phone, but with a semi-open-source model,
non-fascist app store and slightly nicer development platform (albeit
one that still sucks horribly compared to Objective-C + Cocoa Touch +
Xcode). Not impressed, but I'll stick with it, as it seems the only
non-Apple game in town.


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