MacDailyNews Take: If Buchanan was excited that there could be a serious challenger to Apple iPhone because he hopes competition will increase the pace of innovation, then fine. We just hope it’s not because of some underlying issue that some people seem to harbor which goes something like this: “I’m supposed to hate Apple, but not any other companies, for no real reason other than they make the best products, they know they make the best products, and they aren’t afraid to tell the world that they make the best products.”
Buchanan continues, “The problem in this promotional mock-up image is obvious: The analog clock says it’s 9:10 but the digital clock says it’s 2:47.”
“The problem with the clocks would have never escaped Apple’s ferocious attention to detail, but it is not the image itself that’s so troubling. It is what it symbolizes, what is missing at Android’s most fundamental level: Attention to detail,” Buchanan explains.
When using the G1, Buchanan explains, “Typefaces boldly change from place to place, giving a sense of randomness to the whole interface. The same thing happens with color schemes—going from color over white, to color over black, to browns combined with greens and blues, to green over white—and the way the graphic elements are treated—with solid colors or with gradients. Even the shape of the widgets and sizes look arbitrary. Finally, the icons themselves—which get different treatment from flat to fake 3D—add to the overall confusion.”
“Perhaps the explanation for this apparent lack of overall coherence is Android’s Design by Committee nature, something that seems to plague many of Google’s applications and most open-source projects,” Buchanan writes. “Hence the question: How many Google engineers does it take to tell the time?”
Full article, with the images, here.
In another article for Gizmodo, after a photo mockup of the Google G1 exiting the rear end of a cow (we shit you not as we reminisce about our own “Zune Dock” imagery), Buchanan writes of “Android and T-Mobile G1’s Five Most Obnoxious Flaws” which include:
• Contacts and Syncing: There is no desktop syncing app
• Video: There’s no video playback at all right now, except for YouTube
• Hardware Inadequacies: No multi-touch, lack of a headphone jack
• Miscellaneous: SD card required, you have to use the QWERTY keyboard for all text entry which can be annoying, t’s locked to T-Mobile
• T-Mobile obnoxious flaw: If you’re lucky enough to live in one of the markets sprinkled with 3G, after you’ve used 1GB of data, T-Mobile will slow you down to 50Kbps for the rest of the month – that’s slower than EDGE
Full article here.