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Andriod UI - what are they thinking?

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EarlyMon said:
Lots of new users have battery concerns, especially after visiting smartphone forums or listening to advertising.

Nothing wrong with your opinion, but neither is there anything wrong with wanting to understand one's phone and to be sure of things.
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Certainly new users are concerned with their battery. Heck, I don't anyone can truly say they wouldn't want to squeeze just a little bit more out of their battery. I think the point is, using the phone is going to drain the battery. You are going to see battery drain on your android device. That is a given. The only way to eliminate anything from draining on the battery is to not use the phone. The OP's original concerns were that of a dialer using 4% of the total battery used. I suspect that stats are the same across the board with all such smartphones. The difference lies in the fact that no other OS (to my knowledge) actually lets you see this data. Sort of an out of sight out of mind thing. When I first looked at the stats I was astounded at how much the cell radio drained the battery. My initial instinct was to say that it's ludicrous to have that thing be so power hungry. Then I calmed myself down and told myself "this is a phone son, which is constantly communicating with the cell towers. Of COURSE this is going to be the vast majority of your battery drain when idle". We all tend to compare android to iOS and maybe Symbian (sp?), Blackberry OS, and perhaps even Palm. I don't think any of those report just how bad the drain on the battery is by the radio.
 
And by controlling settings for Background data, mobile data and so forth, a lot of battery life can be extended over the generic battery setup, should a user not care about those things.

I just turn on background data when the Market or something needs it, and I sync to my personal services manually. I still get automatic email download and sms, and I don't need instant gratification of other services hogging my battery.

Again - a personal use case, good for many, not applicable to everyone.
 
lunatic59 said:
Now if you are on the dialer because that's the way you want to think about phone calls and the dial pad is in front of you, simply press the search button that all Android devices have and you can search right from your contact list.
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I was trying to figure out now how to switch back to the original dialer so I could test this, but gave up after 5 minutes because I couldn't find out how to do it....

....

...

dot dot dot
 
My battery's main drain is "display", so I turned my brightness waaaay down. And ya know, now that I'm used to it, when I have to use my old phone for something (it's got a crazy loud alarm clock, so I keep it around for that), I'm nearly blinded by how bright it is. I should probably do things like data control, but unlike EarlyMon, I'm all about the instant gratification. For the first time ever, I have unlimited data (and a way to use it!), and I make the most of it. Besides, I like blinky lights. I turn notification on for everything, in as many different colors as it'll allow, just to watch the light flash. :D
 
(sorry, by keyboard is dying, so my punctuation may be a little off. getting a new one tomorrow)

wow, i can't believe how entertaining i found this thread. i especially like how everyone has managed to keep their sense of humour through it. although i must be reading this post-moderation thankfully. I've been using my htc desire for 6 months or so & am totally in love with it. but i have to admit that i agree with UI on at least one point. this one below:

UIexpert said:
I just felt that my Nexus came too stripped down... but I guess that's the point of it. The UI has some flaws. I would include in the notification bar, once you're in an App, options to "close" "uninstall" and "go to App home" to give apps more consistency. Some features need to be more easily accessible... that sort of thing.
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i loaded up a few of my larger apps like google listen, kindle, audible & imdb. funny thing is that these apps all actually have a home button that pops up when you hit the menu button. I'm sure that there are apps that don't have this button but I can't seem to find any atm. although on a side note, audible calls it library rather than home which is a little confusing.

oh I remember now the game crystallight doesn't bring up a home button when you press menu, only things like pause. when you hit the back button, your presented with things that should should be on the menu, like home & exit game. the back button also refuses to respond after you press it & the menu pops up. I've never read the documentation google has for devs about things like this, but i'm guessing that they are not supposed to do that.

I'm talking about quite a polished game here too. apart from this inconsistancy, the app is very well written. honestly though, this is more an issue of having an open market. one would assume that apple would reject this game until they fixed it.

i have to agree with everyone saying that an app killer is not needed though. i can run my phone for several weeks, loading & using many of the apps on my phone. Then, if i restart my phone (which would kill all my "running" apps), I don't notice any difference in performance. basically, androids own in-built running tasks manager works perfectly well.
 
I've been watching this topic with some interest. It's pretty sad that the others got the best of the OP, because he has some good points.

Backing out of an app only works for about 60% of apps. Lots of apps fail to properly Exit when you back out of them. The most notable example is the Android browser - comically the subject of much debate in this thread.

No, the browser does not Exit when you back out of it. It continues to run in the background (maybe not using CPU, but certainly using 15-40MB of RAM depending on how much you used it).

The reason why Task Managers are so prevalent on Android is due to the fact that so many application developers fail to provide an Exit/Quit Option, Too many App Developers think their apps need to run as services, and when your phone gets to the point where it's closing stuff down to grab resources performance has degraded to a point where you most likely have to Soft Reset your phone, anyways.

It also wastes battery...

Android Controls look worse than iOS controls. They look like GTK controls (Lol), and waste more space on the screen than they need to. It looks especially ugly on the Android Tablets I've looked at (i.e. Galaxy Tab) with bigger screens, as well...

The dialer is pretty bad.

Seriously... Think of it from a consumer point of view. Not an uber geek/tinkerer... A consumer looking for a device easy to use with an attractive interface...

You pay $500+ for a phone (Unsubsidized or over the price of the contract) so you can immediately change the dialers, buy an Exchange Client that works for $20, buy a decent IM client for $5-10, completely change the launchers, and then buy a bunch of widgets to replace the ones you've lost (or aren't on the phone).

BTW, Samsung Widgets are pretty terrible. Daily Briefing as a 4x1 for just Calandar Event stuff takes up an entire Home Screen.

The main issue with the Android User Interface is that it really doesn't have one. What you see isn't what you get. What you get depends heavily on your OEM, Carrier, Android Version (and whether you get updates - that's for another thread, though), and how much you're willing to spend on the market...

Denying, Making Excuses, WorksForMe™, and telling people to mod their phones with some dubious replacement app won't change the fact that the stock Android experience really isn't that good compared to competing products (except maybe RIM and Symbian), and that there are obvious issues that Google needs to fix.

Google still hasn't bothered to add Bubble Chat and File Transfer to its own Google Chat Client, but for 2.3 we got some modified stock keyboard (half the manufacturers developed their own keyboards, most better than the stock one) that came from a company they recently purchased and... a darker notification bar?

Seriously? Take the blinders off...
 
uzetaab said:
(sorry, by keyboard is dying, so my punctuation may be a little off. getting a new one tomorrow)

wow, i can't believe how entertaining i found this thread. i especially like how everyone has managed to keep their sense of humour through it. although i must be reading this post-moderation thankfully. I've been using my htc desire for 6 months or so & am totally in love with it. but i have to admit that i agree with UI on at least one point. this one below:



i loaded up a few of my larger apps like google listen, kindle, audible & imdb. funny thing is that these apps all actually have a home button that pops up when you hit the menu button. I'm sure that there are apps that don't have this button but I can't seem to find any atm. although on a side note, audible calls it library rather than home which is a little confusing.

oh I remember now the game crystallight doesn't bring up a home button when you press menu, only things like pause. when you hit the back button, your presented with things that should should be on the menu, like home & exit game. the back button also refuses to respond after you press it & the menu pops up. I've never read the documentation google has for devs about things like this, but i'm guessing that they are not supposed to do that.

I'm talking about quite a polished game here too. apart from this inconsistancy, the app is very well written. honestly though, this is more an issue of having an open market. one would assume that apple would reject this game until they fixed it.

i have to agree with everyone saying that an app killer is not needed though. i can run my phone for several weeks, loading & using many of the apps on my phone. Then, if i restart my phone (which would kill all my "running" apps), I don't notice any difference in performance. basically, androids own in-built running tasks manager works perfectly well.
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That's because good, disciplined developers know what users expect.

But 80% of the crap on the Android market looks like it was designed by people who haven't used a computer since MS-DOS 6.0 with a DOS Shell.

I've taken to installing every app without one lately (due to them running in the background and wasting battery when I was busy and didn't have the time to constantly spend fishing for the Exit Option, or it not being there), and an app without a trial (so I can check first) simply doesn't get consideration from me.

Some people here are acting like this isn't a big deal. It's a big deal...
 
Naterz said:
The reason why Task Managers are so prevalent on Android is due to the fact that so many application developers fail to provide an Exit/Quit Option, Too many App Developers think their apps need to run as services, and when your phone gets to the point where it's closing stuff down to grab resources performance has degraded to a point where you most likely have to Soft Reset your phone, anyways.

It also wastes battery...
Click to expand...

If you're using a task manager to constantly kill apps, you're wasting your own battery. Android is working as it should. I'm a noob and even I know that.

Android Controls look worse than iOS controls. They look like GTK controls (Lol), and waste more space on the screen than they need to. It looks especially ugly on the Android Tablets I've looked at (i.e. Galaxy Tab) with bigger screens, as well...
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That's totally a matter of opinion. I personally do think the controls are ugly because I don't like the Android green color. But I'm not everyone else. Neither are you or the OP. Opinion != fact.

The dialer is pretty bad.
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Again, opinion. Some folks like it. Some don't (I'm not really a fan of it). And you don't even give details as to why you, personally, think it's bad.

Seriously... Think of it from a consumer point of view. Not an uber geek/tinkerer... A consumer looking for a device easy to use with an attractive interface...

You pay $500+ for a phone (Unsubsidized or over the price of the contract) so you can immediately change the dialers, buy an Exchange Client that works for $20, buy a decent IM client for $5-10, completely change the launchers, and then buy a bunch of widgets to replace the ones you've lost (or aren't on the phone).
Click to expand...
Or you grab the completely free ones. And really, how is this different from iOS? Oh, right. You don't like iPhone's interface, too bad, unless you wanna jailbreak the phone, something I'm sure your "consumer looking for a device easy to use" will rush to do. And even if they did, they still have to go through the exact same process to customize it.

The rest of your post.
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Not even bothering, because it's more opinion. Though, I will point out that you mention the interface IS better than stock RIM and Symbian in your opinion. So are you an iPhone fan, or a Palm? ;)

Seriously? Take the blinders off...
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Indeed.
 
Galaxy S phones come with a stock task manager accessible by long pressing home, but u obviously don't understand what I man. I'll brake it down for you.

The OS manages memory, but any OS bought to the point where it has to autoclose Alps will suffer in performance, and usually until a reboot is performed. It,s been like this on desktop and smartphone forever. People use autokill to prevent the drop in performance (the OS cannot detect usage patterns, so oftentimes it cannot clear ram faster than the user is consuming in these situations), at the expense of battery life.

My point was the fact that even the browse obviously doesn't exit clearly demonstrates "use back button" is a terrible rebuttal, and exit options are clearly called for. Apparently you missed it.

Pretty much this hole thread is opinion. Grats on noticing that, though.
 
Also androids UI being terribad is a general consensus, not an independent opinion. Google brought a company to work on it, that's how bad it is...

Oh, and I use a Samsung Vibrant. You don't have to use something else to acknowledge Android's failings. Nice fail on that, though...
 
Google hired a company to help do that UI design. Obviously someone thought the work was good because RIM Blackberry just bought that company.

Apps don't need a quit button because the OS handles it automatically. All Dalvik VM apps are killed by the Dalvik VM automatically.

Few Android apps, yes, there are some of them, that have a quit button are native apps. With Unix/Linux kernels, native apps cannot be killed by the kernel, only by the user who owns it or the root administrator. This is also true of iOS, which uses a Unix kernel. Under iOS 4, you have to switch to the tasking menu, and click on the red negative sign on the corner of the residing apps. Every app on iOS is a native app and the OS has no ability to self terminate these apps.

Samsung task manager, unlike the Task Managers you see in the Android Market, will only list either unclosed native apps, or Dalvik apps that have not been closed at that moment (but can be closed soon enough automatically through time). So essentially, it shows nothing but show a snapshot in time. The Samsung Task Manager is only good for killing native apps (aka Opera Mobile/Mini or Firefox browser) or apps that are intended to stay memory co resident like third party shells or lockscreens, or certain IM apps. If you actually use it, you will only see one or two apps, maybe three if you're lucky, because that's probably a native app, a shell app, and just about every app you have opened has been closed. In that sense, the Samsung Task Manager is very unlike Task Killers and Managers in the Market that will list threads and services being generated by apps in the background but the main apps themselves are not running. If you actually used the Samsung Task Manager, the number of apps it would list is so small its no bother to kill them, and STM doesn't list like 40 or 50 processes, threads and services, that Market stuff like Advanced Task Killer or Manager would.

You cannot compare Symbian, iOS and desktop Windows apps to Android apps. The first three are primarily native apps. These have to be managed by the OS independently and tends to expose the operating system to their errors. Android apps run within a virtual machine and this virtual machine handles their management while sandboxing from the rest of the operating system.

Just because a task is resident in memory doesn't mean its running. When its not running, its battery consumption is ZERO. Staying resident in memory and running are completely two different things. A task manager only shows apps that are resident in memory. It shows zilch about its CPU consumption or if its running unless you have a task manager that actually measures clock cycles.

Saying that an OS cannot detect usage patterns is also a piece of BS. Any OS can detect user to app input events (touch screen inputs) and I/O events (file I/O, net I/O such as streaming, downloading). In the absence of such, its a good clue that the app is no longer being used and can be terminated, or paused into a cache.

Oh, and the 4-1 Daily Briefing, who told you it displays the Calendar only? The Daily Briefing shows 4 panels of information, weather, stocks, news, and calendar. Oh, the amount of memory the stock Samsung browser uses starts only with 10.5mb.
 
Hey, mines going back when the shops are open again after the xmas holidays - cant wait! - and I got a lovely selection of youtubes to show how poor the interface is.

So - thought I'd ask a few simple final points seeing as there seem to be a lot of Android fans in here (mind you it IS an Android forum so I suppose they have a right) - anyway, here goes...

In all the following cases, please assume I just brought a brand new Android phone and know nothing about UIs, and am assuming that an Android should be easy to set up out of the box and without having to download an app -

1) I dont use Gmail - how do I get rid of that icon in the top window saying I need to sync to Gmail?

2) I just got an mp3 ringtone, how do I set it as a message alert?

3) I want to save some of my photos and my ringtones to the memory card - how do I do this?

4) How do I set up an audible delivery report for my SMS messages?

All of the above is a doddle on any other smartphone, AND intuitive, AND they are all basic, standard requisites. So how do you do it on the 'really intuitive' Android UI?



(Edit) - Oh and I also found this - a little out of date by a couple of months, but oh, how true!

Symbian vs Android
 
hannahl3 said:
Hey, mines going back when the shops are open again after the xmas holidays - cant wait! - and I got a lovely selection of youtubes to show how poor the interface is.

So - thought I'd ask a few simple final points seeing as there seem to be a lot of Android fan-boys in here (mind you it IS an Android forum so I suppose they have a right) - anyway, here goes...

In all the following cases, please assume I just brought a brand new Android phone and know nothing about UIs, and am assuming that an Android should be easy to set up out of the box and without having to download an app -

1) I dont use Gmail - how do I get rid of that icon in the top window saying I need to sync to Gmail?
Click to expand...

LOL. Go to the Notification Bar. See that CLEAR button.

There is never, ever an icon notification to ask you to sync to GMail. All sync is automatic. The only icon that tells you is when a mail arrives on GMail.

2) I just got an mp3 ringtone, how do I set it as a message alert?
Click to expand...

Go to Music. Set as Ringtone. (If this is HTC, which is the most common Android you will find.)

If you got music installed and Handcent SMS installed, go to Settings > Sound > Phone Notification and a pop menu would ask you, "Android System or Select Music".

3) I want to save some of my photos and my ringtones to the memory card - how do I do this?
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Does it automatically.

If you got two memory cards, use File System (Samsung Galaxy S).

4) How do I set up an audible delivery report for my SMS messages?
Click to expand...

Get the right app.

All of the above is a doddle on any other smartphone, AND intuitive, AND they are all basic, standard requisites. So how do you do it on the 'really intuitive' Android UI?
Click to expand...

Really? Which smartphone does them intuitively?


(Edit) - Oh and I also found this - a little out of date by a couple of months, but oh, how true!

Symbian vs Android
Click to expand...


LOL. Mister Symbian Guru, who wrote that article, since then, is no longer Symbian Guru, quit that blog and has bought a number of Android phones for himself and his family. Including a Nexus One.
 
Guamguy said:
LOL. Go to the Notification Bar. See that CLEAR button.

There is never, ever an icon notification to ask you to sync to GMail. All sync is automatic. The only icon that tells you is when a mail arrives on GMail.



Go to Music. Set as Ringtone. (If this is HTC, which is the most common Android you will find.)

If you got music installed and Handcent SMS installed, go to Settings > Sound > Phone Notification and a pop menu would ask you, "Android System or Select Music".



Does it automatically.

If you got two memory cards, use File System (Samsung Galaxy S).



Get the right app.



Really? Which smartphone does them intuitively?





LOL. Mister Symbian Guru, who wrote that article, since then, is no longer Symbian Guru, quit that blog and has bought a number of Android phones for himself and his family. Including a Nexus One.
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1) The notification keeps coming back

2) MESSAGE tone please, not ringtone

3) ...and how do I move things from the phone to the memory card?

4) ...and without an app?

And in answer to your Qs -

Yes its a HTC

Every nokia and SE symbian phone I ever owned does it intuitively

Regardless of where the guy is or isn't now, its 100% true
 
Naterz said:
Oh, and I use a Samsung Vibrant. You don't have to use something else to acknowledge Android's failings. Nice fail on that, though...
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If referring to my short post, that was intended to avoid any flaming you with a needless round of questions regarding your Android experience.

I added the WebOS reference because many consider that the finer UI experience - including Google, who tried to hire its inventors but were unsuccessful.
 
quote; form hannah13[

So - thought I'd ask a few simple final points seeing as there seem to be a lot of Android fans in here (mind you it IS an Android forum so I suppose they have a right) - anyway, here goes...

In all the following cases, please assume I just brought a brand new Android phone and know nothing about UIs, and am assuming that an Android should be easy to set up out of the box and without having to download an app -



This is poor reasoning,any individual who is buying a product whether it is a cell phone,car, or tv should go research that product first. We will go through some learning curves when dealing with a smartphone,if ANDROID is not to your liking you have other choices out their. Whenever possible, try a phone out for two weeks or so,the daily life integration is different for all of us.
 
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