Android 2.1’s Best Features in Screenshots | Hacker News Reader

Android 2.1’s Best Features in Screenshots

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33 pointskosofalla28 comments

We have come full circle.

First, we got the telephone and started talking. Then, we got instant messaging and started typing text messages. And now we say our messages, but they get translated into text messages?

And then we take screenshots of them and post them on our blogs.

Yes, but they are asynchronous.

Don't forget the text to speech functionality for the recipient!

The multi-touch keyboard in 2.1 is a big improvement over the previous generation, I type much more quickly with it.

I'm a little surprised this hasn't gotten more attention.

I'll have to check it out. I played with a Motorola Droid today and the typing was absolutely horrendous. Definitely a lot of room for improvement.

Wait, where's this multi-touch? I have the Nexus One and if I hold down one key, I can't type another. In fact, if I start typing too quickly, I will often miss letters because I'm not lifting my thumbs up enough.

You can start typing the second key, when you remove your finger from the first key the second gets activated.

this behavior is new to 2.1

I hate to be 'that guy' who's always putting down Andriod, but there are a few 'features' listed here that make me think Google just doesn't get how customers actually use their phones. The cube menu interface seems really impractical, and given how poorly existing Android phones perform at simple scrolling, I doubt the Nexus One will provide a smooth and fluid experience. And as for the speech-to-text, hardly anyone will use that. Who's going to be sitting on the train or in their cubicle with the phone up to their mouths speaking their message into the phone, most probably multiple times until the phone produces something that requires minimal editing, when they can fire off their text in writing and spare themselves the potential embarrassment and hassle?

I totally agree on the voice stuff.

Being a new Nexus owner I wanted to clarify that the scrolling app menu is only for the app menu. Android has a 'home screen' just like the iPhone (well five of them that you can swipe between) and you can install the app icons you use the most there. The scrolling menu is basically the 'everything' bucket, which I like.

It is also buttery smooth, unlike every other Android device I've touched.

I've been an iPhone user for many years and think the iPhone has always been the bar to measure everything with. Android is catching up with this phone though, it is REALLY good, especially if you are the type who is willing to live with a few warts here and there.

I think speech-to-text will be a great feature in the long run.

Off the top of my head, I can think of a few use cases for it: people who text while driving, dictating an e-mail in the car, quick reminders in a notes application.

I thought the voice search was superfluous at first, but I love it, and I've wished I could use speech-to-text for a few other things.

I got my Nexus One yesterday.

Yeah, the "cube" is annoying and the tweaks they made to the physics of the menu made it worse (IMHO).

But the speech-to-text (and probably the text-to-speech too) is part of their "Car Home" app. Voice Dialing is a pretty common and useful feature while driving.

> And as for the speech-to-text, hardly anyone will use that.

As someone who has been using a Nexus one for a few weeks now, I have to say that I use speech-to-text ALL THE TIME. In fact it's one of the things that really convinced me to give the thing a chance over my iPhone.

I haven't used it much for texting or emailing yet, but I use it constantly for:

- searching the web - making phone calls ("call sally") - initiating turn-by-turn navigation ("navigate to town hall")

It's perfect for when you're in your car and you can't safely type. And it's pretty accurate too.

Funny story actually: some friends and I were going to get brunch after a rehearsal, but we couldn't remember if there was an IHOP in the U District in Seattle or not. My friend who has a Droid and I both pulled out our phones and did voice internet searches at exactly the same time, totally without meaning too. Since we were talking at the same time neither of our phones knew what we were saying. :)

I'm disappointed in 2.x so far. Google is making some good refinements but they seem to be ignoring two of the biggest usability issues in my opinion:

We need a real multi-tasking UI. If the OS is going to multi-task apps we should have a way to intuitively interact with this functionality. Installing third party utilities such as task managers shouldn't be required to use a major feature of the OS. The "alt-tab" feature and the inclusion of multi-tasking elements in the pull down menu doesn't cut it for me.

Copy & paste is a mess. It either just doesn't work right or I'm an idiot. I can't manage to make it select accurate text regions. Usually I just can't get the copy & paste mode to kick in at all

I'm curious: What exactly are you expecting to be able to do with multitasking that Android doesn't already do?

It's just a GUI issue for me. I want a way to easily see which applications are running and more consistency in how applications terminate or stay running in the background. Right now I'd say it's 50/50 -- some apps quit when you hit the home button, some remain running. There's no taskbar, dock or expose style feature to quickly see what's running or switch between applications. The drop down menu is hit and miss. A few apps will put up a notification that say they are still running but most don't. I also think there should be someway to ensure the core applications don't suffer from background tasks. If I leave some apps running in the background sometimes my dialpad in the phone app becomes very laggy to the point of being unusable so I have to get into the habit of pausing my music before I made a phone call and restarting it afterwards instead of letting the phone pause it for me.

Holding down the home key shows a list of six running/recently running apps.

There are task managers in the market, I've not gotten a lot of use out of them, other than to note that I should remove an app I'm no longer using any more that I wasn't aware was running.

What happens when an app no longer has foreground capability is app-dependent.

install the advanced task killer app on android

As an iPhone user I'm shocked if that is actually the state of things in Android. The iPhone automatically fades out music for calls.

And these multitasking interfaces: http://www.cultofmac.com/kirikae-jailbreak-app-switcher-for-... http://www.multifl0w.com/

Sorry if I made it sound worse than it is. Android does fade out the music it just doesn't do so well handling multiple things at once. I feel like certain apps (phone of course) should always work more or less perfectly no matter what else the device is doing. The lack of a good multi-tasking UI just aggravates the situation because I'll often have 3 or 4 background apps running that I had no clue about until I notice a performance drag. I'm not going to run a task manager every few minutes to make sure my device can operate properly. That's just unacceptable.

I still really like the "cards" metaphor that Palm WebOS uses (well, I like the idea of it -- I've only played with it in a shop, not lived with it full time, but I do live with android and I still want to be able to do it)

I have to admit I have a real thing for aesthetics. Maybe one reason I'm partial to apple products.

But I keep waiting for the Android UI to look nicer. I'd love to see a top end design firm take a shot at cleaning up the icons etc.

Even that wallpaper is pretty atrocious.

That specific wallpaper is animated. I don't know about atrocious, but I do find it a little hard to see the icons because the colors are so bright on it.

But complaints about wallpapers are kind of dumb: you can change them, or even set it to your own picture that is non-atrocious. It's like complaining that the default twitter avatar icon is ugly. No duh: then change it.

It looks like a smartphone OS designed by Tetsuya Mizuguchi.

That's kind of awesome.

It would sure be nice to also include text-to-speech. Then you could actually use it without having to get too hands on.

Even Android 1.6 has built-in text-to-speech.

Hah, I've clearly asked the wrong Android user if it had text-to-speech. Thanks for clarifying.

It does have text-to-speech, which figures prominently in the "car mode" app.

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