Alec’s geek blog

I attended the Google I/O conference last week, and like everyone else there, was given a free Android Phone. I guess this thing is called a “Google Ion” but it is made by HTC and runs Google’s new mobile platform, Android.

This is an incredibly smart move by Google – we each paid like $400 to attend the conference and each got what appears to be a $200-300 phone. Conference attendance alone is an auto-selecting function – the fact that we even attended the conference means we’re already buying into Google’s story at least at some level. I’m sure most people will play with it, let the 30 days of free service run out, and then either put it in a drawer or sell it on eBay. But even if 1% of the attendees go and try to write an app for it, that’s a huge win on google’s part.

(And I sure hope that people don’t really put this in a drawer – it really would be better to have these things flood eBay and get redistributed to people who want them rather than slowly depreciating)

As for my review: I already have an iPhone so I wasn’t exactly in the market for a new phone, and I’ve also been fairly content in Apple’s walled garden of iTunes and iPhone Apps. I use my iPhone easilyi 2-3 hours a day for music, podcasts, twitter, games, and of course as a phone.

The last bit has been the biggest surprise – this phone, like so many smartphones before it, is really focused on being a phone above all else. Yes, it has an html5-compliant web browser, and yes it reads my e-mail, but I still don’t know how to sync this with my mac, which has all my contacts, calendar, etc.

As one example of how this phone is just missing the basic point of being a multifunction device, the Ion has just a single mini-USB plug, and no headphone jack. This means I have yet to try to use it for music or podcasts, which is probably the biggest reason I carry my iPhone around. I mean I’m sure this has an amazing application for getting podcasts, but I don’t even have a way to listen to them on this yet! The phone did come with some goofy headphone + headset that plugs into the mini-USB jack, but I have my own set of Skullcandy headphones that I’m not really interested in replacing.

All of this said, the user interface is nice. I can see that there is some support for running multiple applications, and I’ve heard its somewhat stack-based (so that one running application sits “on top” of another running application) but sometimes I’m not sure if I’ve got a few applications running, or not. I don’t know what happens when I hit the Home button (or the back button a few times) – am I leaving potentially battery-draining applications running? Am I overthinking this?

Overall I think this thing has promise but still feels a little clunky after using the iPhone. It lacks some of the simple effects/transitions that give the phone a more polished feel. These are the kind of effects that have absolutely no practical function but do make the phone feel modern. Even switching orientation feels like something from 2005 – it blurs slightly, fades out, and then fades back in with the orientation swapped.

I absolutely love the idea of running linux on the phone, but as a developer I have zero interest in writing Java, so I hope the Python support is good.

I’m going to keep playing with this but so far it hasn’t one me over.