“So here I was, all excited about Android. Not because the G1’s physical design is especially attractive. In fact, it’s a gray design with no soul. Not because of the user interface, which at first glance reminded me of a mash-up between the Nintendo DS and a ’90s Windows desktop manager. No, I was excited because this is the first post-iPhone smartphone that could be a serious challenger to Apple’s mounting dominance. Then I looked closely at this image and realized the G1 will not pose a threat to Apple at all,” Matt Buchanan reports for Gizmodo.
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.
Since the first introduction of the iPhone, and all through the merciless criticism and listing of faults, I wondered if this was just the iPhone “haters” and if this level of complaint and faultfinding would be applied to the promised iPhone competitors.
Now, it is apparent that the professional complainers and nit-pickers just can’t help themselves and are circling the new swimmers, smelling blood in the water even before the actual introduction.
I guess sharks will just be sharks. It’s in their nature.
Inaccuracies as far as who wrote the original article and where the quotes are taken from are still present…
What do I see coming out of the Android/G1 release? I’m hoping that we’ll see more ground-level innovation. If you’re not happy with how things look on Android, lets wait a few days and see how the developers change it to their liking.
Developers will get a free rein over their products. Does this mean that the G1 will have more whoop-y-cushion software than the iPhone? Probably, but what I’m hoping for is that we’ll see development trickle down to the iPhone apps too. The iPhone developers will come up with some innovation that may have gotten its start from Android. (*cough* copy & paste *cough*)
I’ll say it again. The G1 is not necessarily competition for the iPhone as much as the other mobile phones out there. I tend to agree with maclover, that it’s more competition for the Sidekick and those type of phones.
“How many years was it before iCal ever said it was anything but the 17th or whatever it was?”
Until version 3, iCal’s icon displayed July 17—the date iCal premiered in 2002 at the Macworld Expo—by default until the program was run.
(source: wikipedia)
Android already has its aplogists… claiming things like “the analog hands are just reversed” (not true… 2:47 on an analog clock means the hour hand is much closer to 3 than 2.)
Weirder… the reviewer says the clock reads 9:10… but it actually reads 9:11.
Which has me wondering… while analog clock reading may not be all that necessary… the visual estimation we use in reading one may be a useful skill… an obviously it is a dying one.
Android will get a lot of fans amongst the geekset. But to the average user (people who neither write code nor obsess over their xbox), will it really become an aspirational, loyalty inducing phone? Open source has NEVER produced that kind of experience before.
There are 3 kinds of phones: iPhones, Crackberries, and others. I don’t see Android as changing this paradigm. It may become a significant player in the “other” category.
Gotta love the fan boys.. people who manage to comment on a product they’ve never held in their own hands.. Baaahhh Bahhh. To be honest I couldn’t care less I own an iPhone, a Windows Mobile and a BlackBerry (though I only carry the iPhone and BB).. They all stink in their own way.. My iPhone has a great interface and is fun as hell to bad I can’t get a proper call to it (even after the updates). The BB is highly functional and is rock solid. The WinMe phone is nothing special.. not good not bad.. News flash every phone has it’s problems especially phones that were designed to run on man different hardware platforms.. Hey you know what.. maybe thats where all the attention to detail has been going with the android.. Wait.. that almost makes sense.. they are busy getting it to run on tons of different hardware and haven’t finished the gui totally.. Could it be… NAH that makes no sense.. I’m a fanboy and Apple is god.. Android may be souless (like my iPhone has got a freakin soul wtf??) but you people are drones.. bah.. bah.. bah..