Dennis Forbes is a Toronto-based software architect. While focused primarily on the .NET and SQL Server worlds, Dennis frequently ventures outside of this comfort zone into game development and image processing. He has been published in several industry magazines, has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal and has been interviewed by NPR.
The first Android-based
phones available in Canada are the HTC Dream and Magic, both
recently introduced by Rogers Canada. The Dream is better known in
the US as the G1 under its T-Mobile guise, where it has been
available since October of last year. The Magic is a newer phone,
known in the US as the G2, offering a bit more internal memory and
flash storage, and a sleeker, lighter design made possible because
it doesn’t have the physical keyboard that the Dream sports.
The phones are a bit late to the moose party, but at least they finally made it. We tend to get these things a little slower here in the Great White North, as we’re a lucrative enough market that these companies want to pursue some sort of strategy to aggressively monetize us, yet we’re a small enough market that they’re in absolutely no rush to do so. We’re often stuck in a bit of limbo, embargoed out of play until some grand strategy is developed.
Alas, the Android finally got their landed immigrant papers and moved in.
The Android launch has been rumored to be a big disappointment for Rogers, and they've already resorted to slashing prices. The phones aren’t nearly as sexy as the iPhone, and their release in Canada came right as anticipation for the 3GS started swelling, exploding into a tumultuous wave of gooey pro-Apple fanaticism.
The poor reception isn't all that surprising. For many end-users the iPhone really is a better product, an assessment made even truer with the release of the 3GS. It was a close race with the 3G, but there seems to be a clear winner now that the 3GS is available.
The Dream, its 528Mhz processor purportedly underclocked to 384Mhz* — presumably for thermal reasons — fell behind the iPhone 3G, and is easily kicked around by the 3GS. The HTC’s design is comparably stodgy, and the app support isn’t as robust or polished (especially here where inexplicably there is no access to the commercial Android market apps. Instead we’re restricted to the free software). The hardware saw no upgrades at all over its year-old G1, so there’s still a restrictively small amount of on-phone storage, and yet Android 1.5 — the “cupcake” version installed on the Rogers phones — has yet to support installing to the SD card while they iron out the inevitably futile DRM efforts, so that remains a very real concern.
* - Note that the statement about the underclocked processor is based on information I discovered online while researching the phone, repeated across many sites, not that repeated assertion gives it any further truth. However I can say that when playing around in the shell on the phone with the excellent and free connectbot app, the scaling_max_freq is set to 528000, implying that the Rogers build of the phone will clock all the way up to the limits of the processor.
Rogers made the situation for the Dream worse by crippling the one meager advantage it holds over the iPhone (in my opinion a huge advantage, but subjective opinons differ), which is that it has a real keyboard. For reasons that are hard to understand — I have a strong suspicion that it relates to bilingualism, which is the reason why we also don't have voice search, a feature really sorely missed given how valuable it is in the latest Google maps update — the Rogers build of the Dream variant of the phone has no onscreen keyboard, forcing you to pull a Transformers routine on the phone every single time you need to enter so much as a letter. This turns the physical keyboard into as much a liability as an asset, and if it ended at that I would recommend that people go for the Magic and steer clear of the Dream. Not only does it make it a pain to do quick interactions with the device, but I'm sure the endless opening and closing (often in situations where you shouldn't be trying to open and close a device) isn't optimal for the long term reliability of the unit.
Thankfully this terribly stupid decision can be easily overcome, and you can get the incredible utility of both the software keyboard and the physical keyboard, as each best fits. When you just want to punch in the start of a business name to look it up in Google Maps, there’s no need to pull out the keyboard.
The HTC Android phones came to Canada with excellent Exchange ActiveSync support, so for corporate users it supports their Exchange installations with no unnecessary middleware software or services.
Enough about the HTC phones, I recently had the desire to upgrade my smartphone, and as you can see above I firmly believe that the iPhone 3GS is the superior phone. It is impossible to argue otherwise.
The choice is clear.
So I went and bought an HTC Dream, signing up for the 6GB / month data plan. Given that I'm usually around a WiFi point, I doubt I'll ever use even a fraction of that, but I'd rather not even have to worry about it.
I simply believe that the Android platform has a very bright future ahead. That it is poised to be unstoppable. I am of the belief that gaining the developer knowledge and comfort with the product now beats using the faster, slicker (and definitely cooler) iPhone 3GS. And I like having a real keyboard.
I am convinced that in the next two years we'll see the release of a variety of compelling and powerful products based on the platform.
And while it isn’t an iPhone 3GS, and I wouldn’t recommend it to my sister in-law, it’s still an amazing little phone in its own right. It is far from perfect (there are Windows Mobile-like interface delays throughout, and several apps have outright crashed on me), but it’s very decent and technically amazing.
The Google integration of the phone is a nice benefit of the device. A few years back I predicted the emergence of Satvertising, in particular as satellite imagery became available on navigation devices, so it's interesting to see it become a real possibility with Google maps on the Android. It’s pretty bizarre to pull up the map while sitting on the deck out back to find that Google maps had me literally at the table that I was sitting at.
The deep Gmail integration, especially for Google Apps users (including "Standard Edition"), is excellent. The Exchange integration is close to perfect, and it certainly beats what the MotoQ, a Windows Mobile device, offers. Using both on the same device is painless, with excellent integration (e.g. calendar events drawing and saving to either) and no confusion.
Several videos I encoded with h.264 AVC (one of the best codecs around) played brilliantly, and I've read that it's comfortable with a number of other video formats. The included player is a little buggy, so occasionally things like update spinners would get orphaned on the screen, overlaying your video for the duration, but its easy to get around. The unit plays MP3s well enough, so not much notable there. On WiFi some better YouTube videos look amazing, though some arbitrary limits of the software has the quality declining to somewhere between atrocious and terrible when you fall back to 3G, not because 3G can't feed the data quickly enough, but instead because the YouTube app starts sending a "mobile" bit, telling the server to send the degraded version regardless of the capacity of your pipe.
The onboard camera stinks, but so does the onboard camera integrated into any cell phone (yeah, I'm talking to you iPhone users as well. The lowest-end P&S camera does a much better job than your phone does). It works in a pinch to document some random taserings, but I wouldn't convince myself that it replaces a real still or video camera. It does allow for some pretty cool uses like ShopSavvy. The GPS-like integration of Google Maps is very cool, and again works in a pinch (and offers some really dramatic functionality like overlaid satellite imagery, and is great when walking in a big city), but I wouldn't depend too much on it, or imagine that it replaces a dedicated unit. Given that it's downloading on an as-needed basis, a weekend trip to a conservation area outside of town had it drawing a blank, and despite having a GPS lock, it had no context to know where it was (having the constant need for a data connection). Maybe there are full-out GPS apps with real maps you can store on your SD card, making it usable for off-the-pipe usage — I've heard that BigPlanet is just such an app — however just a warning for those thinking that this phone alone replaces the need for a real GPS.
The short battery life of the device is well known, and is similar to most other high-power smartphones. I grabbed a 1400mAh battery to replace the included 1050mAh unit, and hopefully that makes it a bit less of an issue.
The wireless speeds seem decent enough, but despite signing up for a 6GB/month plan (which was a closely-held secret that you could get for $30 up to June 30th), it goes out of its way to ensure that it pretend that I’m on dial-up. YouTube, for instance, has spectacular quality when connected to WiFi, but the moment you’re on the supposedly 7.2Mbps 3.5G network, it unnecessarily degrades to a garbage quality level (maybe there’s a “quit skimping on the bits” setting somewhere, but I’ve yet to find it, beyond ridiculous workarounds including downloading videos fully first and then viewing locally). This is one of those consequences of illusions about throughput.
Other potential services like VoIP are simply servico-non-grata (err…), with vendors like Skype providing terse statements that they’ll never support pure VoIP, careful not to open that can of worms. I’ve heard such a use of the service has even been made they-come-and-cuff-you illegal in some countries, which is extraordinary. You’ll pay for those minutes and you’ll like it, damnit!
Alas, what really compelled me to choose the an Android-based smartphone is my software developer urges. What incredible hacker fun the platform provides!
Getting started developing for the platform is surprisingly easy (I think I’m going to post a little “first steps” post about what it’s like for a non-Java, non-Eclipse developer to get started developing for the Android), and the free development ecosystem is remarkably robust and feature rich. The normal complexities of software development present themselves as you try to build something “real” — no magic bullet there — but there isn’t the demotivating waste of time dealing with the typical nonsense when starting on a new platform. And you don't have to go and buy a Mac or agree to let Apple name your firstborn (iConsumer) just to develop for it.
And you don't have to stay in the stratosphere of the Davlik virtual machine, but instead you can create native code, or even alter that base platform itself. The whole thing is open source after all.
It really is a powerful little computer in your pocket. In just a few more years I’m sure such a device will be central to a user’s computing reality, on a need basis wirelessly connecting to keyboards, displays, mice, and so on.
What an amazing time. To have such a remarkably powerful device with accelerometers, a compass, GPS, a very powerful little processor, 3D hardware assists, WiFi, WiFi-like cellular network speeds, all targetable by anyone using extremely rich, yet free, development environments (the Eclipse integration is spectacular)…the potential is truly limitless.
Amazing things lie ahead.
