Frustrated with Desire

I was planning to share my thoughts on the range and quality of the apps available for the HTC Desire and Android that I have installed on my phone.  However, after a night of absolute frustration with the device, I decided to sit on my hands and wait until calmer heads prevailed, and discuss what I think is one of the key shortcomings with the device, particularly in comparison to the iPhone.

One of the main things that has appealed to me about the HTC Desire is how easy it is to configure. This phone will allow you to do things that you can only dream of doing on an iPhone, such as adding a wide array of widgets, shortcuts and folders to its seven screens.

Widgets allow you to access at a glance text messages, mail, calendar, RSS feeds, music, as well as social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Buzz. Shortcuts enable you to place links to information such as bookmarks, maps, and contact details on the home screen for quick access.

Folders allow you to group your shortcuts and applications into the one place, revealing their information in pop-up menus. In practice, this has meant that on my main homescreen I can have a link to my wife’s contact information, alongside a folder of my favourite contacts and my most used apps.

Most of the functions I use on the Desire can be accessed from one screen. This is something I really love. Tying these all together are Scenes. Scenes allow you to save configurations for specific uses, and then swap these as the need arises. The best way of explaining this is that you can have a Scene containing apps, widgets, shortcuts and folders that are useful in the work setting, and swap these over at the end of the day for a setup that hides everything work related and loads a setup that switches focus to music and social media. There are several that come loaded by default, and you can save your own Scenes.

Since getting my Desire last week, I had saved about a dozen scenes. You could probably load them chronologically and see me gradually defining and inscribing my personality in this new space. That is, if I hadn’t been forced to delete them all this morning to restore the phone to some semblance of functionality.

The problems began of Friday night. When dragging an app to the Phone/Remove bar at the bottom of the screen, the screen froze completely for about a minute, until I received a pop-up notification that the Sense UI had been forced to close. After restarting the Sense UI, animations such as switching screens or the ‘helicopter’ mode (Expose’ for the Mac nerds) lagged to the point where it felt like the 1GB processor was running at about twenty-five percent of normal capacity. The Sense UI continued to hang and force quit for the rest of Friday night, and all of Saturday. By the end of Saturday night, I was so frustrated I had to move back over to my iPhone.

This morning, I took a calculated risk and cleared the HTC Sense data, which took with it all the Scenes I had saved to that point. This has thankfully fixed the problem of the Sense UI crashing, which would seem to indicate that it was a corrupted Scene that was at fault. This raises a core issue I have with the Desire. On the iPhone, I was sufficiently frustrated by the lack of opportunities to customise, that I ended up jailbreaking for a while, which allowed me to tinker to my hearts content. This ability to tinker out of the box is what I love about the Desire. But the instability of the Sense UI often makes it feel more like a jailbroken phone than the brilliantly powerful device it is.

I have used a wide enough selection of computers and mobile devices to be able to figure out a solution to an OS problem when it arises - it is just a matter of getting your head around the particular metaphors and idiosyncrasies of that particular platform. Yet there would be many potential consumers of the HTC Desire who would have had not the faintest clue about where the problem I had with the Sense UI lay, nor the slightest idea of how to fix it.

Desire - Day Three

I am interested to see how far, in three days, my Desire has come from the stock setup. While this has been in part to minimise the impact of the bundled Telstra apps on my user experience (as discussed on Twitter and here), it is a testament to one of of the things I really like about this device – its configurability.

I love my iPhone, but I have really wanted to grapple with Android because of its integration with Google Apps, as well as its widgets and shortcuts. This is why I entered the competition to become a social reviewer.

Even though I have never used an Android phone before, I have had no problems adjusting to a different set of UI metaphors, although I find the keyboard different enough to the iPhone’s to be frustrating (muscle memory is a powerful thing).

The HTC implementation of Exchange server support is absolutely brilliant in comparison to the iPhone. So good, that it seems that Telstra has perhaps pitched this device to the wrong market – there are so many iPhone apps that offer are amazing and feature rich social experience, yet Exchange server support has felt altogether too restricted on the iPhone.

There is a glaring opportunity to emphasise the suitability of the Desire for deployment as an enterprise device. Prior to owning an iPhone I had a Windows Mobile phone, and the Desire feels like it is at least as capable of handling email, contacts and calendars as any Windows device.

My jury is still out on the quality of the Sense UI – in comparison to the understated nature of the ‘vanilla’ Android UI offered on devices like the Nexus One, the mixture of black and green throughout the Sense can feel garish after prolonged use. But being able to flick over to screens with a feature rich array of widgets, does go some of the way to compensating for any perceived aesthetic shortcomings in the UI.

These are just some more initial thoughts on a phone that I am really beginning to like. A lot.

HTC Desire: First Impressions

My HTC Desire arrived this morning. Since then, I have used my iPhone twice. Once to set up call divert to the unit I will be testing for the next two weeks, and then to get the Exchange sync settings for my work email.

I never thought I would say this in a million years, but it has not been missed.

I suspect this is as much about me as the device itself - I manage most of my life with the Google suite of productivity apps, and have done so for several years. One of my biggest frustrations with the iPhone has been the way it has handled feature rich apps like Gmail. The built in Mail.app offers only a basic means of managing email - advanced functions that I rely on such as starring and labelling mail are only possible in the web app version of Gmail, and this has been too slow to use on my ageing 3G model. My experience has been the same with Calendar, Contacts and Reader.

My first impression of the move over to Android is that it has simplified things for me. The iPhone has almost too many brilliant apps available for it. In the productivity/GTD space for example, I have moved constantly between Things, OmniFocus and Remember the Milk, depending on my mood. Put that down to my particular combination of flightiness and OCD.

On Android, Remember the Milk is the only service that I have used that has an app available. So while the array of apps is fewer, the small selection of choices would seem to simplify things for me.

So - a couple of initial experiences and impressions.

The process of setting up the device was simple enough that it could be done while two inquisitive 15 month olds hovered around me, trying to get their hands on Dads bright new shiny toy. Powering up the phone, I was first struck by the quality of the display - it makes the iPhone look dull when the devices are placed side by side. This is a high quality device, that really feels like a competitor to the iPhone.

Which leads me to my first criticism - if Telstra, HTC and Google are trying to pitch this device as being as good or better than the iPhone, why in the hell are they hobbling its potential by only including a 2GB MicroSD for media storage? My iPhone is the base model 8GB 3G and I can just about get by with the built in storage for my apps, photos and music. I refuse to believe that consumers of high end devices will enjoy the experience of shelling out $800 for a device, to find a 2GB media card in the box. The great selling point of this phone should be its openness and extensibility. Getting your customers to ‘extend’ the phones functionality by making a second trip to their local electronics store and purchase a tolerable amount of storage on the day they get their phone, is not a good look.

On the topic of openness, I do not understand why Telstra has to pollute the Desire with so many of their proprietary applications. It seems like every second app on the device is a Telstra product or service. To make matters worse, and unless I am mistaken, there is no way to uninstall them. I find it frustrating and annoying to be continually confronted by Telstra apps and branding. I received my Desire for free and see the branding as a small price to pay for the privilege. I am not so sure that others who pay for their phones would agree.

Ultimately, these are small quibbles in what has been a really enjoyable first day with this phone. So much more to say, but that can wait for tomorrow.