The underwear didn’t fit…

In my last post, I outlined why I felt uncomfortable with my shiny new Android phone.

I’ve now consigned the ‘droid to a drawer for 7 days to see if there’s anything I miss. If there isn’t, it’ll go on ebay, and hopefully the proceeds will go part of the way towards an iPhone 4.

Why have done this?

A combination of poor battery life, numpty applications and it just not being an iPhone.

If I’d had an Android phone all along, I think I’d have been reasonably happy with the Desire HD, apart from the battery life. I took it to London with me yesterday. I took it off charge at just after 9am, and made NO calls with it. A couple of texts, but that’s it. I also used it for about 5 minutes with Google Maps to try to direct me to Kingston-Upon-Thames station, but as the ‘droid thought I was about 10 miles off the coast of St. Malo, it wasn’t a lot of help. Come 10pm, and the phone was absolutely dead. Not really good enough.

Ok, I can make it go longer with doing things like turning off mobile data, etc, but that’s hardly the point of a smartphone. I have found myself over the last few months consciously NOT using the phone to look something up on the ‘net because I have been worried that the battery won’t last long enough.

Numpty applications – by this I mean that none of the applications on the ‘droid look or feel complete or polished. Every man and his dog can publish to the Market, and they do (yours truly included). I found two apps on the ‘droid that I thought were really very good, as good or better than their iOS counterparts – Do it tomorrow and Evernote. But, the only reason for using Do It Tomorrow was because I couldn’t find ANY other half decent GTD-esque task manager on ‘droid that’ll sync with anything. Do It Tomorrow isn’t GTD at all, but it looks pretty and it syncs. I don’t need the pretty, but it helps, I find with me WANTING to use an app to keep track of stuff I have to do.

The music players and browsers available for Android are numerous, but none of them come close to being the complete package that “iPod” and Safari are on the iPhone. So much choice, yet actually no choice – nothing fits the whole bill. “iPod” is a fantastic implementation of a music player, no surprise, but Safari isn’t exactly the greatest web browser, but it does just work. If it doesn’t work in Safari, it doesn’t work on an iPhone, full stop. Unlike on the ‘droid where you think, I’ll just try Dolphin or Firefox or Opera, just in case they work.

So far (day 1), I really miss the speed of the Desire HD (but comparing it to an iPhone 3G is hardly fair), but that’s it. I do love Google maps on the Android, but that’s not enough to tempt me back.

Let’s see what happens over the next few days. Meantime, anyone who’d like to buy a mint HTC Desire HD with 32Gb SD card, let me know. Even better, swap it for an iPhone 4

Wearing someone else’s still warm underwear

I switched from an iPhone 3G to an HTC Desire HD just over a month ago. Basically for two reasons: curiosity and cost. The iPhone 4 was going to be £140, the HTC £0. Curiosity because I’m an OS geek, and Android appeals to the Linux/Open geek within me.

However…

There are some great things about the Android platform. I can write code for it (badly) easily. I can customize seven kinds of hell out of it. I can get random apps to do all sorts of things.

But, I can’t get anything that says “quality”. I’ve not yet found even one app that looks like it’s spent more than 2 minutes having its UI worked on. They’re all functional, but all ugly, unpolished, and everything works differently. For example, the back button (god knows why you need one, but apparently you do) – sometimes it goes back to the previous pane in an app. Sometimes it takes you back to the home screen. Sometimes it does something else entirely. There is no consistency. The most obvious example of this is DoubleTwist – sometimes I press back and expect to go back to the Library/Album List, yet I end up back on the home screen. Other times I get to the Library. I think it’s to do with how I got to DoubleTwist in the first place, through menu or notifications.

Another thing that stands out – iPod vs a million and one different music apps that look like they’ve been designed by a death metal loving teenager. The iPod app has evolved over several years and just works nicely. All these Android apps are lacking in some way. I’ve only managed to find one that actually lets me sort by Composer (well, Writer, but it’s close enough) – Meridian. I didn’t think I’d ever say this, but this kind of thing really highlights the difference between Apple and Android and I think that for me, the Apple way is better – Apple is no choice, you take what we let you have or leave it. Android is have any old crap that someone feels like writing, see if you can make it work. With the Apple way, you tend to get a quality product, and in the “core” functions of the smart phone; phone, mail, messaging, music, camera, the iPhone wins hands down.

Other things that suck; HTC Sense accounts for facebook and twitter as well as normal accounts. The amount of polling the thing does unless you stop it. The mediocre exchange support; it mostly works, but things like having multiple calendars in one exchange account (I have Personal and School) just doesn’t work.

BATTERY LIFE. If I don’t give my phone a short burst of juice in the day, it’s dead come evening.

The killer – the lack of a decent GTD app. I’ve been spoilt by OmniFocus on the iPad and iPhone. Nozbe’s also very good. But, Nozbe on Android is fairly pathetic (it is only beta, so watch this space), and everything else just sucks. I’m back to using Remember the Milk, which isn’t my favourite, but at least it talks Android/iPad/PC/Mac.

Ok, things I do like. Notifications. HTC Sense/Launcher Pro with their multiple home screens and widgets. Very nice. All the google sync, the facebook integration. The Gmail application. Tweetdeck and Evernote are both decent apps.

Things that surprised me (good and bad):

• FlipVibrate – turn the phone over to put it in silent/vibrate
• I have yet to find the ability to have Flash useful. No website I’ve visited has *required* it.
• Uninstalling applications is rather more complicated than on the iPhone – having to go to settings, applications, etc. And I’ve got an app that won’t uninstall…
• The quantity of apps (and sometimes system functions) that crash
• How much I miss visual voicemail – thank goodness for HulloMail
• The difference in audio quality of the built in mic vs the iPhone. I recorded myself playing the organ with both devices. The HTC version is absolutely hideous, painful on the ears. The iPhone version is quite usable.
• WiFi Hotspot – fabulous. Obviously I didn’t have a 3GS or 4 so I’ve never tried it on the iPhone, except through MyWi.
• Even after a month, I find typing a most frustrating experience. I’ve purchased SwiftKeys (and the new beta), but they drive me insane; even though I’ve told it that my typing preference is to be accurate and not use completions, it insists on inserting words when i press space (and yes, I’ve changed that preference too, no avail)
• Having a choice of browsers to use is more frustrating than liberating, as none of them render anything particularly well; built in “Internet”, Dolphin HD, Opera, Firefox have all been tried and found wanting when held up against Safari.

So, you can probably tell what my answer to iPhone vs Android is – if you’ve been an iPhone user, stick with Apple. Going to Android will feel like wearing someone else’s dirty underwear. If I didn’t have an iPad too, this thing would have gone straight back. It was not a good decision, but at least I now have some experience of the “other side”.

For me, the sheer amount of choice on the Android platform just doesn’t work. Choosing between a mediocre app and another mediocre app isn’t much of a choice. I’d love it if someone (however unlikely it is that anyone reads this blog) out there could recommend just ONE app that really shines on the Android platform. Go on, please?

Update on Moodle/GApps SSO

For some reason, since I got SSO up and running a while back, an annoying problem hit; new users were not syncing over to Google, so Google was throwing up a SAML Invalid e-mail error, Please try again later.

Fortunately, it’s an easy fix (I can say that now, having spent ages trying to diagnose) – go to your LDAP authentication settings in Moodle, and, under the Bind section, turn Hide Password to No.

Then, delete all the users from mdl_block_gdata_gapps in your moodle’s database that have status = ‘accountcreationerror’ – connect to the moodle sql database – on my system it’s called moodle, then type:

mysql> delete from mdl_block_gdata_gapps where status = ‘accountcreationerror’;

NOTE: this doesn’t delete your users from Moodle, just from the gapps synchronisation database. But, if you’re not confident about it, don’t do it, and the usual disclaimer (if anything goes wrong, don’t shoot the messenger) applies.

Then, get your broken users to login to Moodle afresh. They should sync over just fine.