Anyone who talks tech with me should be scratching their heads at the title of this post. "Hates Android? I thought he was an Android fanboy?" Actually, yes, I am... which is why I am hating Android. No, I'm not bipolar, but I can see how you might need this statement clarified.
I absolutely adore Android. I have been using computers and gadgets since the 80s and have experience with a wide variety of operating systems. Android is, by far, my favorite "small form factor" operating system from the list of those I have used regularly. I even like it better than some of the desktop operating systems I have used. I'm even crazy enough to have tried running it on my netbook.
The problem comes in when that operating system I love gets put into use by the current cabal of hardware manufacturers. If only I could get a pure, unedited version of Android on hardware that is nice and actually works as expected, I would never be able to write such an opening title.
My first Android device was the Samsung Moment. It was running Android 1.6. It was a pure Android, with no custom modifications by Samsung. I adored this phone. The keyboard was great, and Android lived up to almost all my expectations. When Android 2.1 arrived on it, I loved it even more... Well, mostly.
You see, there was this one "small" issue. I call it small because Samsung has never been bothered to treat it as anything more than that. Unfortunately, for those of us who live in areas with meager signal strength, it was rage-inducing. Whenever the phone would switch from a 3G signal to a 1X signal then back to 3G, it would cause the cell radio to lock up. No calls, no data, and no way to fix it but a reboot... Which would take at least 2 minutes. In our area, this would happen almost every time you entered a large aluminum-roofed structure, a.k.a. a store.
The day I stood in Office Depot rebooting my phone 3 times in a row before I could make a call was the day I gave up on this phone that I otherwise loved.
I suffered with this until I could get an EVO, which took a while due to the supply shortage. Within days, I was almost willing to go back to the Moment. You see, HTC, in their infinite wisdom, decided they could make a better interface than Google, which they call "Sense". After having spent almost a year using a stock Android install, I hated every change HTC had made. The music player was downright ugly and looked like something designed by a honky disco king. I despised it. Unfortunately, you can't just download Google's stock music player. I finally found a slightly modified version of the stock player in the Marketplace, which relieved most of this annoyance.
Then there was the browser. Try as I might, I could not figure out how to make the thing stop running in fullscreen mode. I must have gone through the settings 10 times desperately looking for it. I finally accepted defeat and downloaded Dolphin Browser, which was good enough, but sometimes just didn't feel as snappy. While the gestures can be useful, there were enough accidental triggers of features in my daily usage that I could just manage to tolerate using it, but never liked it.
Then there was the modified calendar app. I liked the clean look of the stock one, but this was ugly in the same ways the music player was. Worst of all, though, were the bugs. I experienced constant syncing problems with it. I would add an event to my Google Calendar at work in my browser and set a reminder, only to get angry hours later when I realized I had forgotten something important because the phone never picked up the new item. It would go the other way, as well. Sometimes, I'd add something from my phone and it would never make its way up to Google. Other times, I would add an event from my phone, then, when I realized I had missed the event I would check to see that the event had mysteriously vanished from the calendar on the phone altogether. It was so bad that I stopped using the calendar app and started using the browser version of the Calendar site, with reminders being sent to me from Google by SMS.
Then there were issues with the wifi radio that would cause connections to mysteriously stop working properly even though the phone still indicated that it had a working wifi connection. I would often have to turn wifi off then back on to get it working again. It would also cause weird issues with downloaded audio files (whether through the browser or Google Listen) where the audio files would have missing bits throughout them. It was as if wireless packets had been dropped and the OS did not realize it, and just treated the file as if it had been fully downloaded. I never experienced issues like this on the Moment.
After about 9 months of this pain, I decided to root the EVO and put CyanogenMod7 Beta on it. I loved Android 2.3 and the additional abilities that came with having a rooted phone, but there were so many bugs that I decided to go back to version 6 until the final release of 7, which I am on now. Throughout all this, I have continued to experience the wifi radio problem, though not always, just on certain update versions. So, even Cyanogen can't seem to save me from HTC's radio engineers.
I have looked at the other Android options on Sprint, but they haven't been much better. At first, I had thought about switching to the Samsung Epic, until I read about all the GPS problems with it. Then I thought about the successor to the Moment, but the keyboard on it was terrible, the hardware was actually lower specs than the Moment, and... big surprise... I was reading a lot of complaints from users due to major bugs. There was the Hero, but that had its own set of issues, in addition to having too small a screen to want to use a virtual keyboard on a daily basis.
And so the story goes. Even now, all this time later, it seems like every Android phone on the market has some ghetto custom skin on it from the manufacturer and / or some fairly major hardware problem of one sort or another... or it is an AT&T phone, which I won't even consider. At this time, the Samsung Nexus S is the only fairly stock build of Android you can get. After all the other problems with Samsung's radios in the past, can I really have any faith that the Nexus S will be any better? I'm looking into the EVO Shift, which looks nice from a hardware perspective, but has Sense on it... oh, and of course, I have found a lot of complaints from owners of fairly major bugs.
And this is why I hate Android. It's not that I hate Android itself, but that I can't actually buy what I would consider a "real" Android phone from a company that makes reliable hardware. It's really Android in its current state in the market that I hate. All I want is a phone that is well-built, with a nice keyboard, that has no radio issues of any sort, and that runs a stock build of Android that gets its updates immediately after they are released by Google. Is that so much to ask? Apparently.
Will this utopia ever exist? It is starting to look as if it will not. The few attempts by Google to work closely with hardware manufacturers to make something like what I want haven't turned out to be huge successes. I can't see Google ever making their own hardware, and I guess I wouldn't really recommend that they do, either, since they have bigger fish to fry in the software and platform arenas. So, I am left with a thirst that cannot be quenched, living with compromises and daily annoyances, clinging to the hope that some company will finally decide to stop counting pennies and just do the right thing. Until that day, I am left with my bitterness... hating not the Android that should be, but the Android that is.
Todd Russell
May 24, 2011
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