There's an interesting little piece by Chris Walters here, talking about his journey from Nokia N82 to the T-Mobile Android G1 and back again - hurriedly, when faced by appalling hardware and build quality. Seems he liked the general interface though....
Every platform takes time to mature, a lot of the good stuff now in S60 is there because of feedback from many previous versions since 2002. Android and Android-compatible device manufacturers haven't had the benefit of real world feedback at all, so it's virtually inevitable that they would produce something with one or two major problems.
On the other hand, they have to start putting Android into devices that are desirable anyway (for example devices with a good camera) if they want it to be a serious alternative to something like Symbian. That's not necessarily to do with the platform, as the hardware itself is the responsibility of the manufacturer.
So both platform and hardware have to learn quickly if they want to succeed quickly.
the google OS and UI is very very nice and usable - and it will only get
better and better
the htc 'dream' (nightmare more like) hardware is a great let down.
if you thought the iphone 3g had bad battery life - think again
ive been using it less than my N95 to avoid drainage and it still runs out around 4pm each day.
i had to stop using hte mp3 player as i lost 50% of the battery on my 40 minute journiey into work from listening to mp3s and reading emails only.
This guy (the article author) is saying exactly what I've been saying for weeks in more succinct form - the Android OS has lots of potential, G1 would be crap.
It genuinely amazes me that people would expect anything different from HTC. I know Americans (God bless 'em) are impressed with anything better than a Moto RAZR, but seriously - look at HTC's past. They build Windows Mobile phones for goodness sake! Win Mo is the world's worst phone operating system, fitting coming from a company (Micro$oft) that built the world's worst desktop OS (Vista, of course).
HTC churn out crap typical of jump-on-the-bandwagon me-too manufacturers that are prolific in the Far East.
Google's choice of HTC for a launch phone is a major boo-boo on their part. Many blogs, reviews and consumers are lumping together Android and the G1 as one conceptual unit and tarring both with the same brush. Google should have had a clue and realised this would happen. And realised how very poor a partner HTC were. Oh well, more power to Symbian and Nokia I suppose, which is not a bad thing.
Roll on a proper handset manufacturer bringing out a decent piece of hardware with a final release of Android on it, not the current work in progress (albeit very promising one) that the OS currently is...
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