Thread: Android annoyances

I've switched for a few months now from my dead Treo to HTC Legend. While this phone is great in some ways, there are certain things that are just damn annoying. Some of these are probably true for all Android devices while others perhaps apply to HTC only.

1. Search. Surprising, considering Google is behind this. I find Calendar in particular to be a hit and miss affair where search is concerned. I have a calendar entry "Bought HTC Legend" in May. Using Search and looking for "Legend" yields nothing. If I specifically go to the month of May in Calendar, and do the same search, then it is found! But later, again it can't find the same item! This is so totally ridiculous. My half-dead Treo can still do an integrated search and find my 2005 entry "Bought Treo", done in just a couple of seconds!

2. Alerts. This is supposed to be where Android beats iPhone. But I find it lacking, because the alerts on my Legend frequently make no sense. Sometimes, I get alerted for events way past. Sometimes, I heard an alert, but when I picked up the phone, there was nothing (no, I was not mistaken). And then, you have the option to "Snooze All" or "Dismiss All"??? What if I want to snooze or dismiss only selected items? I need that because I use the Calendar as a reminder tool, for one-off tasks like grocery reminders to periodic tasks like reminders to clean the aircond. That's why I would like to be able to selected keep and dismiss the due items.

3. More on Calender, but it is reflective of UI design in general. To set up an event, you have to specify the time. There is a rolling selector for minutes, from 0-59. It's logical. But wait, look at Treo: the minutes are in 5-minute intervals: 0, 5, 10, ..., 55. Of course! Who needs to set an appointment time down to the precise individual minute? This makes for a shorter list and is just a little less inconvenient for a task that you will be doing many many many times. As I said, this is actually illustrative of the UI design philosophy differences between Palm and Android. Palm is beautiful in how the common tasks are streamlined to be done in as few steps as possible. In Android, the equivalent tasks typically take many more steps.

4. No auto save. I've encountered this in People, and other apps. Enter a contact's particulars, then, instead of Save, click something else, like the Home button. Oops. No warnings, no nothing, everything is gone. Do the same thing in Palm: it auto-saves what you have entered, no questions asked.

5. Cannot have multiple mobiles. Each contact can only have one mobile number! What? I know people who carry up to 3 mobile phones! Yes, I know you can link multiple contacts, but that is way too many steps. Palm, again, has no such restrictions.

Well, my faithful old Treo is half-dead; Palm itself is dead; and you would have to hold a gun to my head to make me switch to iPhone, so I'm a pretty reluctant Android user. It's not bad, actually. I just wish Google had done more homework to learn from the granddaddy of smart phones.

More months have passed and I have not grown more enamored to my HTC Legend. More gripes:

1. Every HTC Android phone is advertised with the admittedly gorgeous analog clock with full-screen weather animations. But every HTC Android owner will probably one day face the same panic when, after an OS update, the widget just disappears and is nowhere to be found! As I recall, it requires a battery pull (i.e., reboot) and the widget will reappear in the widgets list. How intuitive!

2. The Photos app scans all folders. Even program icons and movies end up displayed. There is no option to "scan only these folders" or "ignore these folders". This is just dumb: folders are good, people use folders to organize stuff, respect folders.

3. Low on space. Yeah, I know, Froyo will one day arrive for Legend and solve that and all other problems and we will live happily ever after. Wait, I'm talking about the Legend, not Fairy Tale.

4. Somebody calls you. You want to forward the number as SMS or email. With Android you have to save the number to the People app. Then open the People app, which opens at the beginning (letter A), so you have to scroll and search for the newly created contact. Then select Edit. Then select the number and choose Copy All. Whew! In Palm Treo, every number in the Call History can be copied to memory.

5 Create a shortcut to a contact (People app) on the screen. Now, if the contact's number changes, edit the contact in the People app. But the shortcut still retains the old number! What kind of "shortcut" is that???

That's all for now. I'm waiting for the HP Palm Pre 2 to hit the stores here, then I'll give up on Android. The Palm folks are the only ones who know how to build a solid smartphone that's smart in all the stuff that matters even if not so much on the razzle-dazzle as these modern pretenses like Android and iPhoney.

Originally Posted by jonnyace

3. Low on space. Yeah, I know, Froyo will one day arrive for Legend and solve that and all other problems and we will live happily ever after. Wait, I'm talking about the Legend, not Fairy Tale.

Want to tell that the fairy tale is alive!
FroYo for Legend was realased in the EU the last week, just go in and update it

Well, I'm from Singapore, not the EU. I am not sure what exactly will be the difference where Froyo for Legend is concerned, whether it is the EU release or not. I think there will be regional customizations. So I guess I still have to wait for Froyo to make its way here.

bad for you it's awesome!!

Originally Posted by M.R.

bad for you it's awesome!!

Ok, got the much anticipated Froyo today. Some pretty cool stuff:

1. First off, my "Low space" warning is now of course no more, after I moved the moveable apps to SD card.

2. Tried the hotspot feature and to my surprise it works on Legend. That's great!

3. There seems to be a general improvement in responsiveness, always a good thing.


Now, for the new gripes:
1. There's no more separate wallpaper for home screen and lockscreen!!! I was using my daughter's photo as the lockscreen wallpaper, but I don't like photos as homescreen wallpaper as it looks messy. Bring back the lockscreen wallpaper!


2. My contacts are messed up. Many of my contacts now appear on the summary list without name; completely blank! When you click on the contact, you can see the name, display name, etc, the data is still there in the relevant fields; but in the summary list, they are shown as blanks! The contact is sorted to the correct place in the list but does displays as a blank! I wonder how many other people get this. This is a most serious bug. I don't know how to get around it yet. Assigning to a Group seems to solve the problem: but I have hundreds of contacts! What has the Group got to do with the name of the contact as displayed in the list??? Hope this will be fixed soon.

Update:

The above was posted too soon after doing the OTA update. It occurred to me to do a battery pull. After which, the Contacts are displaying correctly.