I've got my iPhone 3GS in for repairs, so I decided to try a HTC Desire meanwhile, to give Android a chance.
I expected the android to be pretty close to the iPhone, except for a little frame-rate sloppiness that I've noticed here and there. So far, I'm quite disappointed to find out that I don't even consider the HTC Desire to be in the same league as the iPhone 3GS.
User experience often comes down to a thousand little details, I figured I'd create a post and update two bullet point lists as they come along.
A lot of this is really minor stuff, but it's the kind of stuff that adds up to a different user experience.
Note that this in no way tries to be fair and balanced or even a review – it's just a bunch of little details I notice along the way.
Things the HTC Desire / Android does better than iPhone 3GS
- The notification pull-down system is very nice.
- I can edit my dictionary if I put wrong words in there.
- I can choose between different completion possibilities when typing, and I press the one I want (unlike the iPhone where you illogically have to press it if you DON'T want it).
- The headphones come with foam pads.
- The camera has a LED flash.
- I like that I can make a HUD screen that includes stuff like my next calendar appointment, clock, weather, etc.
Things iPhone 3GS does better than HTC Desire / Android
- The packaging (HTC Desire tried, but it's nowhere near the solid, tight little brick that the iPhone comes in).
- There was a bunch of separate little film strips I had to pull off the Desire headphones and phone on various places.
- There were CE stickers stuck around all the cords that I had to pick off.
- On the iPhone, I can flip between Danish and English input languages with a single button, not a multi-level menu that takes half a second to load.
- I often see the interface being drawn up part by part when I open something on the Desire, over a course of maybe 200 ms. As my friend Peter put it, it looks "flickery".
- The Desire headphone cord is regular wire, whereas the iPhone headsets have this stays-straight-easier-to-untangle wire.
- The iPhone only has one hardware button, and it's completely logical what it does. The HTC Desire has 5 hardware buttons, and most of them act differently depending what application I am in.
- The HTC Desire has a scroll trackpad, which is just weird and useless when you have multitouch.
- The weighted dragging of lists feels disconnected and crappy compared to the very weighty, physical feel of the iPhones.
- You can't over-drag a list – it just stops scrolling when you hit the end, and there isn't that elastic feel you get in iPhone lists. Makes it feel less real.
- There is no animation when you rotate the HTC Desire on it's side. It just rather abruptly changes orientation.
- The HTC Desire browser zooming fucking sucks! I often get pages where I can't zoom out far enough to see the entire page, for no apparent reason.
- On the HTC Desire, Google maps changes the zoom level slightly when I stop my pinching, like it's snapping to a set zoom level. This feels like I'm not in control.
- The unlock switch on the iPhone was successfully grokked immediately by my 1 year old son, whereas I read the on-screen instructions to get the unlock on the HTC Desire. My friend Peter was also initially stumped as to how to activate the device.
- Major: The interface animation is constantly lagging and halting on the HTC Desire. The frame-rate is generally low for everything (drags, swipes, etc), but sometimes it completely stalls for a 100 ms or so.
- The build quality isn't as solid as the iPhone. It's close, but it's a little more squishy and plasticky.
- It often feels like the HTC Desire isn't registering my "clicks" and sometimes also swipes.
- Dragging between the screens on the HTC Desire lags 10-15 pixels behind my finger and never catches up no matter how slow I move my finger, which makes it feel slightly sluggish and unresponsive.
- No two applications on the HTC phone look like they were made by the same team. I can't spot an overall Android Way, just a bunch of confusing and conflicting differences.
- Android Market is complete shit compared to the App Store.
- I always wonder what functionality that menu button is hiding every time I open a new application – what is the logical split between what is on screen and what is hidden in the menu?
- When I click on a day in the calendar widget on the Desire, nothing happens. Or rather, sometimes nothing happens. Other times it puts me into the calendar app.
- When I enter the calendar app from the calendar widget and hit the back button, I end up in the calendar apps month view, not back on the widget screen.
- The top button placement is much nicer on the iPhone for a lefty like me.
- Batch 2
- There is a lot of hidden interface in Android – on the iPhone, there is one hidden interface feature I can think of: sideways swipe to uncover buttons for a list item. This is used everywhere. In Android, there is?(sometimes)?the hold-to-popup-menu (except on the widget screens, where it's hold to rearrange or remove) and there's the menu button.
- Text selection works differently from app to app (in the browser it's like the iPhones, everywhere else it's shit)
- Having hardware buttons for common tasks is actually kind of annoying due to the extra amount of force needed to activate them – it's a weird flow breaker to be doing something like "tap, tap, tap, tap… push… tap, tap, tap".
- I can't find a basic note-taking app installed by default.
- I find myself manually opening and closing the on-screen keyboard all the time, to my great annoyance.
- The icons for the apps (especially in Android Market) pretty much all look like something made in Paint.
- When I hit the play button on the headset remote, it starts both Google Listen and Music, so I get to listen to both until I've manually opened Google Listen and turned off the podcast. And it happens every time I hit the play button.
- If your phone is lying on the table, you have to grab onto the Desire to activate it's screen and see what time it is, rather than just jabbing a finger at that big round button on the front.
- When I click the phone button, it takes about half a second to open the phone screen. On a phone with a 1 GHz processor.
- I often don't know what those mystical icon buttons do (what are those buttons on either side of the "Call" button in the phone screen?)
- When the Android UI uses a pop-menu for something, I can't close it by clicking outside of it. I have to use the hardware back button.
- When I google "best android games", I get Robo-Defense as one of the best games – while it might be fun, it looks like amateur hour graphically.
I'll update when I find more.