(Finally posting my summary of good and bad about my experience with Android on the Samsung Captivate. Not sure why I let this sit on my desktop so long.)


Google Maps Navigation - For being a free app, it's very impressive. The few times where the Captivate GPS worked, the navigation was decent, and as expected came up with routes the same way Google Maps does. I have a few quibbles with how it wanted to route me to work from home (mostly because it likes to route up a very hilly residential road with speed limits dropping to 5mph in some tricky turns) but I've yet to find a GPS solution that routes the way I'd expect every time. Voice quality was ok, and good enough to understand street names. Google Streetview integrated is really helpful. I was a bit disappointed to find voice search didn't work for contacts on my phone though. Overall, this was probably the best part of Android for me, and I'm hoping Google sticks to their promise to bring it to the iPhone one day.

Notifications - This one I'm mixed about. Not being blasted with popups is a definite improvement over the iPhone for sure. However, I found myself having to clean up notifications frequently to prevent the icon bar at the top from just filling up. Mail would commonly leave notifications about "1 new message" even if I've read the e-mail on my computer. Gowalla would blast several into there when it checked from time to time, and none were realtime due to the lack of push notifications in Android 2.1. I also wish there was a way to see a small preview without action, similar to WebOS notifications. It's kinda annoying to be driving and have to try and pull down the tray to see what SMS came in, vs being able to see it at a glance on iOS or WebOS. This is mostly a timing issue though, and I may have missed a setting allowing the notification text to stay in the bar at the top longer before it returned to icon view.

Google Listen - Having all my podcasts just download directly on the device was nice. I could set a schedule, and know for certain my episode was ready for me in the morning. Since the iPhone only does a sync when the device is first connected, I sometimes miss the morning sync to grab new podcasts.

Swype - I'm mixed on this one too, mostly because I didn't have a lot of time to adapt. I did however like the idea the keyboard could be replaced, and did start using swype more and more. I'd need additional time to really give it a proper review though. Doing normal hunt and peck typing on swype was definitely worse then the iPhone touch keyboard. I didn't spend much time with the other keyboards to really compare them.


My curiosity is much lower about Android now that I've had a week of hands on time, and overall I am sticking to not trying it again until at least 3.0. I am interested to see what steps are taken to add a bit more polish to the experience as a whole. These are the negatives I saw outside the Captivate issues:

Photo syncing - I've had all my photos with me since my iPhone in mid 2007 and it's not something I want to give up. Apple even chops the size down of each image during sync to help preserve space, while still presenting a good looking image on the device. DoubleTwist was an absolute failure here, with no ability to sync photos. All it offers is drag and drop, and I'm not going to drag and drop new photos every time I add them to my computer. The full Google solution would be to upload everything to Picassa and then let the device have access over the air. This is also not acceptable due to my collection exceeding the storage space provided for free, and the slow browsing speed on the phone as it downloaded them over the air.

Search - For as good as Google is supposed to be about search, it was horrible on the phone. Google Listen just outright failed to find podcasts by name, and overall the Google search options seem more focused on looking online then looking on the phone. With my iPhone I can go into search and in mere moments find any app on the phone, any contact, any e-mail, or any music file. Spotlight is just natural to me after having it in an OS for 5 years and on a phone for 2, and stepping back to a less polished experience here was harsh. I didn't realize how much I depend on good local search until I had the Android phone for the trial.

Battery life- While somewhat device specific, I just generally didn't feel I could trust having the phone survive the day. The AIM issue was specific to that app, but what was worse was being provided a tool to analyze power usage and finding out it's faulty. I also don't want to deal with task killers and other apps just to know the phone will have a charge left. After talking to my coworker with the Evo, he's having a much harder time, backing up the battery concerns of all the Evo reviews I saw. When Sprint calls next time, I'll tell them to take me off the list. (As an update on the Evo, the local Sprint store never did call me, so I guess when they told me in July they would put me back at the bottom of the list, they instead just dropped me off it.)

I don't feel I had enough time to really evaluate Android apps and the marketplace, so I don't have much to say there. Most of the apps I tried were counterparts to ones I use frequently on the iPhone, like Gowalla. I think 2.2 will help bring some better apps to the platform as long as developer interest is there due to both push and the ability to run them from the external SD card. I've got certain ones on my iPhone that just simply can't exist on Android pre 2.2, such as handheld console equivalent games with lots of assets. And adding push capabilities should help cut down power usage, instead of forcing apps like Gowalla to always be in the background to poll for updates.