So, as I mentioned before. I ended up ordering the Samsung Vibrant Android phone for T-Mobile. Just a few short days later, I’m sorry to say that I’ve ended up sending it back.
On its surface the phone is pretty good. The display is crisp and amazing. The form factor is nice and relatively compact. It’s got an expandable micro SD slot and I generally got pretty good reception with it.
There were a number of smaller issues though that kept annoying me. The biggest one had to be the battery life. The phone would be almost dead after 12 hours of standby and mild use. Worse, there would always be a bunch of random pre-installed apps that would start in the background and were probably killing the battery.
I had to download this program to kill the apps since it wasn’t always obvious what was running. And even then there was no clear explanation of what had been started and why.
Besides the poor battery life (which I probably could have addressed in a month or two by buying a larger battery), the GPS functionality didn’t work. It was unable to ever determine my position with the GPS. A quick search online revealed it as a widespread problem that would supposedly get fixed in an update that was coming out soon but given that the GPS was one thing that I really wanted to get from the phone, I’m not willing to hang onto it and hope for the best.
And finally we get to the Android OS. I generally like the OS but it suffers from the same thing that Windows always has, when the OS itself wasn’t designed for specific hardware, it just doesn’t feel seamless. The way the Samsung vs. T-Mobile vs. Google apps worked was just too inconsistent. I was never confident of where to look or how to use something. As someone who has gone to school for interface design, it was just inconsistent enough to be frustrating. And I don’t want my phone to be something I have to sit there and tinker with.
There were a number of other nitpicky things that annoyed me as well: lack of an integrated music library manager, no integrated video store, the location of the power button, the poor integration of my work/GMail/phone contacts, the use of a separate GMail client vs. work email, no Skype app, and more I’m sure.
I guess at the end of the day, there were too many little details that I was unhappy with to commit to using the phone for the next 2 years.
My plan now is to wait a few months and see what happens and if anyone is going to come out with a phone that addresses my issues (Microsoft, Palm/HP, Google, or even Apple). If not, I guess I’ll just have to suck it up and deal with what I can get but until I’ve reached that point I’m going to go back to using my ol’ Sony Ericsson phone.
Ah well, it’s way cheaper anyway.