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Maladroid

I promise this is my last post about the droid, whose inadequacies only I care about. I can only repeat that it is a very premature baby despite the Verizon advertisements. And it has a schizophrenic personality, part teenager part geek part businessman.

Great to have a good browser, which makes me persist with it, maybe even until something better comes along.

Great to flick through pages and to have a Notification window blind that tells you about arriving emails, missed calls, appointments and alarms.

Not so great to have Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, none of which I particularly want.

Sad to have hard-to-hit keys on the real keyboard.

Sad to have a clumsy touchpad (on the real keyboard) that is too small and awkward to manipulate. One constantly has to suppress the urge to pull out the non-existent stylus in order to select and edit text precisely. I still reach for the stylus and then realize that it isn’t there. The finger pointing doesn’t work very well. On the iPhone you can two-finger zoom a text field to enlarge it and edit it better, but not here.

Very sad to have no Notes and Tasks.

Very very sad to have tediously awkward menus that make editing an appointment require many many keystrokes.

The good thing about the latter is that it makes me think twice before I decide to change something, so perhaps I will eventually use these things less.

I have a renewed respect for the planning and design that went into the Treo and the Palm (who leveraged off the Newton team). Their technology was less sophisticated, but the functions were tremendously well integrated by comparison. I am curious to see whether the Pre, when Verizon gets it, will work better.

You don’t need a lot of apps if you have a good system and a browser.

They call it Android but I call it Maladroid.

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