Goodbye Android, We Hardly Knew Ye

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

AT&T service remains as much of a non-starter as ever, iPhone or not, but with Verizon announcing a new HTC Android phone, and with our growing restlessness to move on after a decade of Blackberry, it seemed the moment had come.

And to top it off, we found an opportunity to combine our personal “end of Blackberry” anecdote with a breezy segue into how Google (also via Android) is moving into TV-related devices.

Oops.

Three days later, our HTC Incredible is on its way back to the Verizon Wireless shipping center for a refund. Other than the blazingly fast web surfing, we were left speechless by how bad the user experience was. Since we also own an iPod Touch, the Android experience reminded us of the early '90s ad campaign from Hertz, where the understated punch line about the quality of competitors’ service was (relative to Hertz), “not exactly.”

To give you a small taste of what “the problem” is, let’s take the simple use case of making a phone call.

• Touch the phone icon embedded in a touch-screen three button arc-shaped icon at the bottom of the home screen immediately above the hard-wired home, menu, back, and search buttons on the bottom of the unit
• Look at a display list of contacts that you have recently called or called you which blends (apparently when the list starts over again alphabetically) with your regular contact list in alphabetical order
• In the middle of the screen is a bar directing you to ‘enter name or number Tap to see smart dial tips’ with a vertical bar and left-pointing arrow on the right. Beneath the bar is a phone keypad for dialing. Below that is a grid-like icon, a big green ‘Call’ button, and another icon which is a box with a slanted phone receiver
• Since I have over 1,000 contacts, scrolling through the list alphabetically to find who I’m calling isn’t the greatest option. So hit the hard-wired ‘menu’ button below the touch screen and up pops (covering up the bottom part of the phone keypad) a set of icons: people, speed dial, phone settings, call history, tips.
• Touch ‘people’ and up comes the contact list again. Then touch the hardwired search (magnifying glass icon) and up pops a new contact list including Google account contacts that weren’t previously displayed, a search box at the top and a qwerty touch keyboard on the bottom

At that point you’re getting tantalizingly close to being able to make an actual phone call. Or on the Blackberry, hit the green ‘phone’ button, up pops a screen, start typing the contact name until it appears, and then call.

The larger Android experience (i.e. using email, SMS, generating speed dial lists, etc.) put us very much in the mind of Louis Menand’s classic take-down of Microsoft Word. We too, with a slip of the finger on the touch screen, found ourselves experiencing a journey through a wormhole, much like Menand on MS-Word keyboard slips:

“Strike the wrong keys in Word and you are suddenly writing in Norwegian Bokmal (Bokmal?). And you have no idea how you got there”

We have only ourselves to blame, having bought the thing sight unseen, pre-ordered over the Verizon website. In hindsight we made three major mistakes:

•  relying on technical reviews: Reviews in the geeky, but mainstream, sources, like engadget, ZDNet sounded reassuring. We don’t fault these detailed and comprehensive reviews for technical inaccuracies, but when it comes to actual utility and user experience they seem to have completely lost the plot.
• relying on the Google brand: We thought, naively, that there’s some sort of Google housekeeping seal of approval implied with these devices. That the somewhat quirky but simple and useful style of Google’s web apps we use on a daily basis (reader, notebook, docs, whatever) would manifest itself in Android.
• thinking others “get it” already: During Apple’s translucency and colors phases of Mac design, Dell and HP slapped colored plastic housings on their PCs in a pathetic effort to ape the trend. Or as the Mac OS progressed, Microsoft came out with … Vista. It’s clear that iPhone-“like” functionality still isn’t. Or at least, not exactly.

So, surely the Verizon Wireless iPhone will become a reality this year? Please?

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