Adroid = awful

[holesovice]

Long story short.
I needed a new phone.

I got a new phone with Android on it.

Android is awful.
Simple as that.

A am over 40 and do not want guitar hero 5 or who want to be a millionaire or the rest of that type of thing on my phone.
But in order to take that crap off I have to root the phone???
Which the make almost impossible.

And from what i have read this weekend. You should use windows to root an linux phone????
The world is becoming absurd.
I cannot choose what i wish to use on something I paid for?
OK this may be standard with Apple. Which is why i do not use touch or in particular buy apple products or only use windows when I have to.

But to find a phone that is "open source" closes me out is not good.

And then this week there have been a number of viruses found that automatically root your phone.
No one out there see any irony in that?

Maybe I missed something but, non of the tech press seem to be discuss ing the subject of how closed this Android system is.
Closed. Did I say closed. Locked down.

Bottom line.
Android is proprietary, locked down and awful.
To call Android "open source" is misleading at best!

Unless you have time to play with it.
Stay away.
At least for a year or two, after which some nice (linux) people will have sorted something and you will be able to use your phone how you wish!

[JasonLG]

A couple points...
1. if you don't want a fancy phone why didn't you just get a basic non-smart phone? If you hate that much take back and get a different phone.

2. Android does not equal GNU/Linux. Most of Android is open source but is released under a BSD style licence. The kernel is pretty much the only thing GNU/Linux about it.

3. I'm pretty sure that you can uninstall the crap you don't like, you just haven't figured out how.

4. Rooting your phone is a bad idea unless you really know what you're doing as it is the equivalent of logging in as root on your computer and it will probably void the warranty.

5. It's pretty much common knowledge that the cell carriers generally have Android locked down. Google released it under a BSD style licence because they knew that if the carriers couldn't lock it down they wouldn't use it.

[toad]

I'm in the same boat, got myself an LG P500 with Android 2.2

Awful? No, not by any means. Easy? No, not by any means

I don't see what age has to do with anything here. Nevertheless, my carrier/phone manufacturer also put stuff on there I don't want. afaiac the choice is twofold:

a) just delete it from the screen - okay, the app is still there, somewhere, but at least it is out of the way.
b) root the phone and get a custom ROM (firmware) so you have complete control and chuck what is otherwise not chuckable.

So far I have rooted my phone but am shying away from the ROM option as Android 2.3 is coming out for my phone next month.

The most difficult thing I have come across so far is the choice of apps. Some are great, others keep on "calling home", slurp juice and one has no idea what they are doing apart from some fancy thing one installed them for in the first place (but they are doing _something_!).

I am still looking for a number of decent "control" apps that don't do anything else but what I'm after. Hm, perhaps time for an "Android apps" thread...

[tommy_oliver]

Most of your complaints come from carrier-imposed restrictions, not Android itself. You want the best possible Android experience, click that banner at the top of this forum that says "Nexus S"

And no, Android != Linux in terms of flexibility. No mobile OS that becomes successful ever will. If they can monetize it (and Google most certainly has) there will always be aspects of control.

But hey, its better than a friggen iPhone...

[DataMan]

My simplistic approach is:

1. If you want to make calls - get a cell phone.

2. If you want to play games etc. - get a tablet ie IPad or derivatives.



-DataMan

[viking777]

I'm in the same boat, got myself an LG P500 with Android 2.2

Awful? No, not by any means. Easy? No, not by any means

I don't see what age has to do with anything here. Nevertheless, my carrier/phone manufacturer also put stuff on there I don't want. afaiac the choice is twofold:

a) just delete it from the screen - okay, the app is still there, somewhere, but at least it is out of the way.
b) root the phone and get a custom ROM (firmware) so you have complete control and chuck what is otherwise not chuckable.

So far I have rooted my phone but am shying away from the ROM option as Android 2.3 is coming out for my phone next month.

The most difficult thing I have come across so far is the choice of apps. Some are great, others keep on "calling home", slurp juice and one has no idea what they are doing apart from some fancy thing one installed them for in the first place (but they are doing _something_!).

I am still looking for a number of decent "control" apps that don't do anything else but what I'm after. Hm, perhaps time for an "Android apps" thread...

I agree 100% with everything you said toad. I have made exactly the same decisions on my Android phone. I remember feeling peeved that I had a lot of bloatware on it that I couldn't remove without rooting, but if you hide it out the way that feeling soon disappears . The rest of it is really pretty good I would say. But since it is the first smartphone I have ever owned I don't have much to compare it with.

[cocochens]

My simplistic approach is:

1. If you want to make calls - get a cell phone.

2. If you want to play games etc. - get a tablet ie IPad or derivatives.
ipad2 smart covers
iPad 2 cases
ipad2cover



-DataMan

The most difficult thing I have come across so far is the choice of apps. Some are great, others keep on "calling home", slurp juice and one has no idea what they are doing apart from some fancy thing one installed them for in the first place (but they are doing _something_!).

[JasonLG]

My simplistic approach is:

1. If you want to make calls - get a cell phone.

2. If you want to play games etc. - get a tablet ie IPad or derivatives.
ipad2 smart covers
iPad 2 cases
ipad2cover



-DataMan

The most difficult thing I have come across so far is the choice of apps. Some are great, others keep on "calling home", slurp juice and one has no idea what they are doing apart from some fancy thing one installed them for in the first place (but they are doing _something_!).

Are you a parrot?

[toad]

Are you a parrot?

Copying and pasting can be sooo difficult (speaking from personal experience here...).

Oh, and here the link to a thread about which Android apps are safe - please feel free to pop over and contribute...

viewtopic.php?f=18&t=67805

[ken138888]

I think Android is better and SB

[blacksilva]

Long story short.
I needed a new phone.

I got a new phone with Android on it.

Android is awful.
Simple as that.

A am over 40 and do not want guitar hero 5 or who want to be a millionaire or the rest of that type of thing on my phone.
But in order to take that crap off I have to root the phone???
Which the make almost impossible.

And from what i have read this weekend. You should use windows to root an linux phone????
The world is becoming absurd.
I cannot choose what i wish to use on something I paid for?
OK this may be standard with Apple. Which is why i do not use touch or in particular buy apple products or only use windows when I have to.

But to find a phone that is "open source" closes me out is not good.

And then this week there have been a number of viruses found that automatically root your phone.
No one out there see any irony in that?

Maybe I missed something but, non of the tech press seem to be discuss ing the subject of how closed this Android system is.
Closed. Did I say closed. Locked down.

Bottom line.
Android is proprietary, locked down and awful.
To call Android "open source" is misleading at best!

Unless you have time to play with it.
Stay away.
At least for a year or two, after which some nice (linux) people will have sorted something and you will be able to use your phone how you wish!

I have to say...i laughed while reading your post.

But really. Android is not as bad as you may think. Most people, not saying you, group Android into one big pile. Android is not just one thing. It is 100 different things. You can have phones like the motorola charm and also have phones like the nexus one or nexus s. they all run android but are in no way the same. except for the basic stuff. Sure the tube tv is a tv but its not a plasma tv. it may have most the capabilities as the plasma but will never be a plasma. get what im saying?

And I have used linux mint 10 to root my phone, build my own custom roms and kernels. so im not sure what your talking about on the rooting situation.

And the apps that contain viruses are only on third party app markets. so you have to go online to another app market, not googles, and download it. so really its not androids fault you downloaded a virus from some strange website. And their are some apps that will root your phone on the market but you have to download it. and it clearly says will root your phone, or something like that, in the description. so again. if you download it without reading what it does thats your own fault.

And to everyone who says android is hard to figure out i think your making it hard lol. to get to the phone app you just press the phone app. to launch the messaging app just press the messaging app. to enable wifi go into the settings, that is if you dont already have a widget on your home screen (menu, add, widgets), wireless and networks, enable wifi. have never seen android as hard to use. and this is coming from someone who has had android since 2008 the day the G1 came out.

O and btw i have had multiple iphones, blackberrys, windows mobile (including the hd2), windows phone 7 (hd7), webOS, and symbians. Android has always been the best for me. Thats why i still have a Nexus One, 2 myTouch 4Gs, HD2 running Android off the Nand, my original G1 and none of the other phones.

Out of curiosity, which Android phone did you get?

[ThistleWeb]

As others have stated, there is no one Android, there's lots of handsets varying in spec running lots of different versions of Android, and ruined in various ways by lock down UI components and policies from the network providers. Basically "how long is a piece of string?"

If you're with a network who insist on insane overlays and policies, then of course you're gonna have a negative experience of Android. If you're on an entry level Android device with less RAM and a small resolution and are trying to run a higher end application or game and it's not aligned right, or jittery, it's not Androids fault.

I have an entry level Samsung Galaxy Portal (Spica to most of the world) and I love it. It's definitely "entry level" by the definition I'd apply to it, and although I've seen a lot of bile aimed at Samsung for their Android phones, I don't see what they see, perhaps Three in the UK just improve the default Samsung experience, as unlikely as that sounds. I dunno. I do know that I need to be aware of too many apps running, but it's fine. Part of what makes Android so appealing is that the range covers a great many needs and budgets. I don't need much and I can't afford much. It is still a slick Android phone that does everything I want with a smartphone UI.

Another selling point of the Spica for me was a screen resolution I could read without my reading glasses. It becomes a lot less convenient to have to carry reading glasses everywhere, and whip them out when the phone rings. As cool as the high end phones are for HD video playback etc, the fonts are tiny, and Google in their infinite wisdom didn't think to include a font size setting in Android. Apparently there's an app that does it for rooted phones though.

I'd love to see handset makers and network operators wise up (or be forced to by law) to give the user an unlocked experience, which would mean they'd have to compete for customers. In today's culture, that's not gonna happen.

I remember an outcry by some customers of a network, I think it was a Canadian network although I'm not 100%, about a new range of Samsung (I believe) Android phones with the default search set to Bing and no way for the customer to change it. The reason Samsung gave? I'm paraphrasing but the jist of it is "let's face it, we build handsets for our customers; the networks. If they have a deal with Microsoft to be rewarded for including Bing as the search engine, that's what we build. End users don't enter into the equation as far as handset makers are concerned." The theory is that if customers don't like Android with Bing, they just use another network, which is fine in a market with proper competition, which in many countries doesn't exist in any meaningful way.

Networks are also very inconsistent on when they release updates to the newer version of Android. Some are shameful in how they neglect that, while others may be faster on their HTC range than their Sony Ericsson etc Sometimes the only option is to find an unofficial ROM like Cyanogen which I haven't been brave enough to try myself yet, as much as LOTS of people say it went flawless for them.

Vodaphone in the UK also got into trouble for tricking people with an update, where customers were eagerly awaiting the new Android to appear in the updates, they got what appeared to be it, only to find it was lots of Vodaphone branded bloatware which did all sorts of stuff like changed default home pages etc

Android does have issues to work through, it is inconsistent for various reasons (many of which are outside Google's control), it's also not Linux as in the desktop definition but it's one of the two top smartphone OS's currently on the market, the other is iOS, which is not to everyone's tastes or budgets. Many people are seeking the pure Android experience, ie the Android Google intended without any third party overlays or lockdowns, which means buying direct from Google and attaching it to whatever network gives you the best deal. This is arguably the best way to get Android, although it won't allow you any subsidised discounts you'd normally get on contracts.