A bit of history, first… Earlier this year, the two year contract on my Verizon Palm Pre Plus ran out, so I began looking for a replacement. I really wanted to switch from Verizon’s really costly plans– At the time, I was spending $90/month for 450 minutes, 500 text messages (don’t even get me started on what a racket charging for texts is), and “unlimited” data. I looked around at prepaid plans as a replacement for the more expensive contract plans.
I primarily considered Virgin Mobile and T-Mobile’s prepaid plans. VM’s $35 plan appealed to me, since I typically used much less than 300 minutes a month and unlimited data & texts were a big plus. I considered two plans from T-Mobile: 100 minutes and unlimited data & texts for $30/month, and the $60/month unlimited talk & text, with 2GB data. I figured that I’d probably be a heavier data user than talk, so I decided that the $30/month plan would be a better option. Since Virgin Mobile only offers their phones on their plans, I decided to go with T-Mobile– I could use any GSM phone that supported the T-Mobile bands, so I wouldn’t be locked into a limited selection of handsets.
After weighing my options with T-Mobile’s unsubsidized phones, I finally decided on an LG Optimus T, for $179, which included a $50 card for the phone service (basically giving me my first month and a half for free).
I’ve lived with this phone for the past five months or so, and as my first Android phone, it’s been a pretty negative experience. Surprisingly, many aspects of the phone aren’t negatives, like the screen size and the processor speed. Google seems to have done a pretty good job with pinch zooming, and the browser is decent at reflowing text to fit the screen with a double tap to zoom in to the content on web pages that aren’t aware of the limitations of a phone’s screen. Processor wise, so long as you don’t make too great of demands of the hardware (in other words no games), it seems up to task. It handles web browsing with ease, as well as other light apps (like Twitter and Foursquare).
Unfortunately, the hardware makes some compromises that are pretty difficult to live with. LG has seen fit to only put 512MB of internal flash in the phone, which is a pretty big detriment. To make matters worse, the tiny internal flash memory is further divided into separate partitions for the system and apps (referred to as the “internal” storage– the system storage is normally hidden from the user). This makes loading apps on the phone difficult. While it’s possible to move apps to the microSD card, there are many that will not work, or work unreliably, when not installed in internal flash.
To make matters worse, installed apps will automatically update themselves, causing the available memory to shrink further. Every time one of the default apps updates, such as Google Maps, or the Facebook app, the free space on internal storage will shrink by a megabyte or two. That doesn’t seem like much, but at this point there are only about 40MB free (it varies between 30 and 40MB) on the internal storage of my phone. That’s after starting at about 99MB free. While many apps can be installed to the SD card, freeing up valuable space in internal storage, many can’t. My phone runs Android 2.2 (affectionately referred to as Froyo), which I believe was the first version of Android to allow installing apps in flash other than internal storage. Even with the ability to install to the SD card, many apps will not install anywhere other than internal storage– unless you have a rooted phone and use a utility to force them to install elsewhere. For apps that run as OS services, this is understandable; however, for other apps, it makes no sense (like the app for one of the banks I use, for example).
While the problems I’ve had are a major limiting factor for me, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m probably an outlier as far as my phone usage goes. I would imagine that most people that use the phone only ever use the apps that come with it, and rarely if ever use it for anything other than phone calls and texting. I would also imagine that this presents a problem for the Android platform.
Looking at market share stats for mobile browsers, Android’s browser is about 1/3 that of iOS devices, as of this writing (19.41% vs. 66.22%). My personal interpretation of those numbers is that a far higher percentage of people on Android are simply using their phones as just that– phones. Few people are taking advantage of them as what they could be, if they didn’t have such crippling shortcomings– Truly mobile computers. To me, as someone who would like to jump into mobile development, this is disconcerting. I’d really like to give any apps that I develop exposure to the largest number of potential customers, and going by raw numbers of phones out in the wild, that would appear to be Android. But if only a fraction of those users are willing or able to install the app, then doesn’t that need to be taken into account, as well?
I began this post over a week ago, and in the process of writing it decided to ditch my phone and get a Galaxy Nexus. I’ve had the new phone since Monday, and it addresses almost of the shortcomings of my old phone. It’s really a decent mobile computing platform, and not just a glorified flip phone. It remains to be seen if Android is the platform that I want to stay with, but I’ve definitely got a better experience with this new phone.
Time will tell.
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