Exstatica

I recently replaced my Palm Pre with a HTC EVO. I couldn’t be happier. I’ve had the entire weekend of non stop playing and have come up with a few things that bug me, and could be improved.

I’m a huge tech guy, and switching from WebOS to Android was a bit of a challenge. I kept wanting to swipe, and view the launcher and switch between applications.

It wasn’t until I really started downloading apps, and playing with all the cool features, that I realized while this Platform is still young it has a ton of potential. I thought that about WebOS and Palm, and I thought Palm was going to come though.

I think things are very different with Google, they want to go to war with Apple, but most of all they want to produce something that the world can change, and be part of it. To me thats a company for people, not to people.

Anyway onto a few of my little issues.

Swiping:

If you have ever used a WebOS device closing applications and switching between them is pretty cool. I can get over not having that feature on a phone, and while holding the Home button on the evo shows applications, I’d much rather see it in a Expose sort of view like the Sense view, but with all my applications. However I would kill for a notification view that shows the current/last 5 applications so I can switch between them that way too.

But the “Card” view isn’t the issue. Its the deleting emails. In WebOS you swipe to the left or the right and it deletes the email. With Android you have to either click menu, or long tap on the item and delete from there.

Contacts:

The Android Contact screen is pretty awesome, but it needs to be changed a little bit. It just seems like there is way to much information to display on a screen. I’d rather have it be dual tabbed. top tabs for a contact show different contact methods. Like Phone, Email, Web, Social Networks.

Service Details:

I’d love to be able to click on the battery or the signal stuff and get better details, I mean really no percent option for battery? Ok I know that the Pre doesn’t have it either but it just seems like a simple option.

Launcher:

I’d love to be able to pin a program to the notification Menu. See the issue I have is, I haven’t figured out how to get to the the launcher without going back to the home. If I’m in the middle of doing something I want to just open the application rather than going home first and then bringing up that panel.

So why Android?

Well Palm is taking a stupid long time to do things. First and foremost why hasn’t Palm made their OS use the GPU yet? I mean seriously, it would give the phone such a huge speed up, and remove a lot of the lag. Maybe they are afraid it will eat the battery to no end. Don’t get me wrong Palm created a pretty cool OS, but their development is horrible. They take way to long to do anything. There should be tons of updates coming in and fixing little bugs, and tweaking the OS to have much better performance than what is currently given with it.

So far I love the Android OS. There are some things that bug me. I love Google though, they have done some amazing stuff and Foyo will not disappoint. At this point they need to look at user experience and give users what they don’t know they need, but will want like no other.