Great googly-moogly, the sequel
<p>A few posts back, I <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=578">described</a> my good early experience with the T-Mobile G1, the first Android phone.  It&#8217;s now two weeks later; I&#8217;ve learned the phone thoroughly and developed a stable usage pattern.  That makes it a good time for a more considered verdict on the device.</p>
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<p>My more considered verdict is this:  HELL YEAH!  The iPhone should be feeling teeth in its ass right&#8230;about&#8230;now.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s not any one feature that makes me say this.  It&#8217;s that the gestalt, the entire experience, is so comfortable and pleasant.  I <em>enjoy</em> using my phone.   After two weeks, I think the biggest single reason is that the haptic responsiveness of the touchscreen is tuned just right &#8211; the flick-and-pick gesture (drag a selection list to start it spinning, touch it to stop) feels very natural.</p>
<p>The quality of the display is also a big factor.  It&#8217;s not grainy or glary or tiring to look at; it&#8217;s good enough that I even find the browser usable, not the peering-through-a-grainy-porthole trial I&#8217;ve experienced with previous mobile devices, and much better than on my wife&#8217;s Blackberry.  The Blackberry, however, still has a better keyboard; I&#8217;ve gotten used to mine, but I don&#8217;t like it at all and still consider it the weakest point of the G1 design.</p>
<p>I like being able to attach my own MP3s to events.  I&#8217;ve been showing off my custom default ringtone, the Star Trek communicator chirp, to my geek and hacker friends; their reaction, unanimously, combines laughter with mild envy.  I like being able to GIMP my own contact icons.  I like having a beautiful glowing astrophotograph of the Andromeda Galaxy as my wallpaper.  This is coolness.</p>
<p>Leaving aside these sexy superficialities: the big good thing to say about the Android UI itself after two weeks is that I have nothing to say about it, really.  It neither hinders me nor gets in my face with how stylish it is.  The few weak points are all near the T-Mobile &#8220;Faves&#8221; feature, which is pretty obviously a late and not terribly well integrated patch on the Android superstructure.  (A clue to that is that Faves icons aren&#8217;t available for use on Android&#8217;s main contacts list; I noted this in my earlier post but hadn&#8217;t yet figured out what it meant.)</p>
<p>Thinking about it, I suppose there are two aspects of the UI that merit a mention: the status bar and the pull-down notification area.  The main screen of the Android UI has a thing like a task bar at the top; it includes a clock, a battery-charge display, the familiar signal-strength indicator, and one or more status icons.  The status icons are condition alerts: they tell you if you&#8217;ve had a missed call, or have voicemail, whether or not your GPS is active and has lock, that sort of thing.  This is pretty normal, my old Samsung 660 had a status bar too.</p>
<p>One difference, though, is that the Android icons are&#8230;witty, is the best way I can put it.  Not obtrusively clever or showy, but the designers made skilled use of the relatively high display resolution.  My favorite example: the icon for &#8220;You have voicemail&#8221; is a stencil image of an old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorder.  I love that.  I&#8217;d like to shake the hand of whoever invented that combination of representation, gentle irony, and retro respect.</p>
<p>When there is more information attached to an alert, the status bar grows a visual feature with a touch-me-and-drag <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance">affordance</a>. Drag that down and the status bar turns into a windowshade-like object, taking up just as much of the main screen as it needs to display its event-message queue.  Of course, each event message can be touched, starting your response actions.</p>
<p>Friends, this is the <em>right thing</em>.  I checked with an iPhone-owning friend, and this feature actually out-Apples Apple in its utter appropriateness and quiet style. It&#8217;s so natural, and such a smooth transposition of pull-down menus into the key of gestures, that it took me a while to notice how clever and innovative it actually is.  Besides being easy to operate, the notification pulldown implies a particular model of the phone&#8217;s behavior space; it is your unitary monitor of the information stream, helpfully aggregating events you need to watch for in one place.</p>
<p>Compare this with an alternate model we see on computers, where you often have separate apps open to watch for email, IM, system notifications, etc.; on a phone, that would be a mess.  Also compare it with older cellphones, which had notification icons but no hooks to a message queue<br />
that is implicitly a set of action buttons as well. As was once said of Robert Heinlein&#8217;s writing, the Android&#8217;s windowshade is the art that conceals art &#8211; no ostentation, but lots of understated effectiveness.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s been some criticism of the G1 that it&#8217;s bar-of-soap clunky, almost dowdy compared to the slick industrial-design sleekness of an iPhone.  I now wonder, seriously, if this wasn&#8217;t a subtle and rather clever positioning strategy.  Rather than proclaiming &#8220;I&#8217;mmmm so <em>fahhh</em>shionable, dahlink!&#8221; the G1/Android combination is unobstrusively effective. Nothing looks tacky faster than yesterday&#8217;s overcontrived hip hotness; the designers may have gambled that their more functionalist aesthetic would outlast the iPhone&#8217;s slick presentation.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve seen one firmware update, on 3 November.  It actually did something that I noticed: there&#8217;s now a status-bar icon for USB connection active, and if you pull down on that one you get an option to dismount the SD card from being used as the G1&#8217;s storage and offer a USB-I&#8217;m-here notification to your computer so <em>it</em> will mount the SD. This is better than the old way of handing off control of the SD card, which involved burrowing into a relatively obscure system settings menu.</p>
<p>So, yes, this is just Android 1.0, and yes, they are actively improving it even as we speak. I think it&#8217;s going to win.</p>
