"Why I abandoned the free and open Android rebellion" -- a traitor's UX review | Hacker News Reader

"Why I abandoned the free and open Android rebellion" -- a traitor's UX review

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25 pointsTerretta32 comments

I installed third party roms such as Bugless beast, and Cyanogen, I over clocked the stock 550 mhz processor to 800mhz, but in doing so I took a chance that my hardware would never work again, as a well as suddenly relying on these third party developers to keep me up to date, and secure.

But close the camera app, and try to use it again later, and it was a 50/50 chance, at best, that the program would crash upon starting. Even if it did start and you took a pic, occasionally the photo wouldn’t save properly. The droid camera is just buggy and slow, and I believe it was on the hardware level, not the software level because these problems occurred in every camera application I used, including the default one.

I think the first quote negates the certainty of the latter. I find it a hard stretch to blame the device when you have installed custom ROM's. Unless you have pulled dumps and logs off of the device and stepped through the code to find the issue and isolated it for certain, the first suspect should be your modification to the device, not the hardware and not Android as installed by the manufacturer.

My buddy's non-rooted Nexus will lose connection to it's camera 1-2 times a month, requiring a reboot.

I have a Droid X and the camera, so far, works every time I have tried to use it.

I havent restarted my phone for two weeks now and taking pictures yesterday at costco wasnt an issue and taking a picture of this post wasnt either. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/693878/hi_hacker_news.jpg

Yes, my example was a bit anecdotal and the rest of my friends have no issues with their plethora of Android phones. However, the need to preventively maintain it was a pain to find out when we needed to use the camera in an emergency.

I've got two Nexus One's (mine and my wife's). Never had any problems with the camera. Both are running the stock OS, no custom ROM's or anything else fancy.

Stock Droid owner here. I love my Droid, and I'm admittedly biased against Apple, but I agree with his complaints about the camera. I've never done any OS modification at all (even rooting), and I've noticed the Camera app is the crashiest thing I've got on my phone. Even when it starts up, it takes about 10 seconds before I can actually take a picture, and the quality is...lacking, overall. I'm no photographer, so it doesn't get to me too badly, but I can understand his frustration even from just using it occasionally.

I am not saying that it is the case, I just think when you modify the device that much (especially overclocking) and you experience hardware and software issues you cant run out on the net and blame the device unless you have the proof to eliminate those things as the cause. I have a Galaxy Tab and the photos are better than my iPhone so it very well could be the droid hardware, it could be the version of Android but by adding that many variables via modification you can't just go out and blame the device without due diligence. There are a host of external variables that could be causing that problem.

I started having problems with the camera on my Droid 2 right away.

The color balance is random and difficult to reset. Sometimes there is a 5 second delay before the shutter fires (it is confused by motion - like rain or snow even). The pictures are often fuzzy. The Sport setting is the only one I use, since these problems are worse in the other modes.

It even crashes sometimes and takes down the entire phone (it reboots!). Sometimes the flash gets stuck on for 15 seconds first. Yes, the picture quality is often bad on the Droid 2 - sometimes it is perfectly good, though, which is even more frustrating. I can't rely on the camera at all.

The camera on my iPod touch is actually better, though it has 1/4 the resolution. It's reliable, has good white balance, snaps right way, and the photos almost always look good.

I'm definitely wary of Motorola products as a result of this and a few other issues with this phone. It has nothing to do with Android, though. I wish I bought a Samsung or HTC, not an iPhone.

I've owned a few droids and have written basic apps for the phone. In my experience the camera app is really slow. Unusable at times even because it just takes too long to open and get the picture taken.

I have a My Touch 4G, today at lunch my colleague was taking a picture of another coworker with her Canon 5D MarkII.

I pulled out my phone and snapped a few pics of her taking pics. I clicked on effects, applied a border and some other things and got a fantastic pic. What i thought was amazing was the quality of these pics from my PHONE.

She is taking pics on a camera that cost much more than my phone. She cant email them, she cant apply effects to them, she cant skip over to reddit/HN as well.

She was talking about how she had some book that showed her how to apply antiquing effects to photos with all these layers etc... and I pointed out it was just a click of a buttton now on MY PHONE.

http://i.imgur.com/jcfjz.jpg http://i.imgur.com/xT9Mm.jpg http://i.imgur.com/8U8LT.jpg http://i.imgur.com/L6nEv.jpg

I say, stop bitching.

"There is all this amazing technology, and nobody's happy!"

I'd also worry about the over clocking being the cause of his problems. A chip designer explained to me once why over clocking is risky. I'm not a chip designer, and I'm reporting what he told me from memory, so I may be slightly off, but here goes:

Sometimes it is completely safe. For instance, suppose a chip maker sells a chip in three speeds: 500 mhz, 750 mhz, and 1000 mhz. You have a 500 mhz chip. It might actually have been manufactured to be a 750 mhz, and passed all the tests at 750 mhz, but the manufacturer had a shortage of 500 mhz chips and an excess of 750 mhz chips, and so marked yours as 500 mhz and sold it as such. Congratulations! This is a chip that is safe to at least 750 mhz.

Sometimes, however, your 500 mhz chip may be one that was meant to be 750 or 1000 mhz, but failed their tests at those speed. It was fine at 500 mhz, so they sold it as such. This is a chip that is risky to run at 750.

How can you tell whether you have one of the safe chips or one of the unsafe chips? You might think you can simply try it. Over clock it, put it under the heaviest load you've got, and see if it appears fine. If it seems to work, you might assume it is one of the safe ones.

The problem with this is that failure can be too subtle to notice. It might be that at 750, your chip loses the lower bit of integer multiply if one of the operands has a run of alternating bits longer than 18 bits, or something really obscure like that, something that your testing is not likely to hit. (Look how long it took the Pentium FDIV bug to be discovered).

When the chip manufacturer is doing their test to see if the chip should be a 500, 750, or 1000, they know where the weak points are and how to stress them. They are also testing before the chip is put in its case, and so can access test points on the chip and see electrically that the signals are fine at the danger points.

I have been called a whore and a traitor by my friends, but I did it anyway. Last week I turned off my Motorola Droid, and activated an Apple iPhone 4 on Verizon. This was considered by some of my Android loving friends as an act of war, by some just an excuse to banish me from their twitter circle.

Friends dumping you over your choice of mobile software aren't really your friends. Not even by the loosened-up social networking definition of 'friends'. Useless melodrama...

I doubt his friends are really "dumping" this guy over his choice of phone. What kind of sociopath would void a friendship over something like that? Most people don't even have access to one person that nuts, let alone a plurality.

I would guess that they're probably just tired of him preaching the superiority of his new phone and have just phased him out a bit. I mean, he is a blogger. They're not exactly known for holding back.

My suspicion is that this guy is probably just feeling the effects of Miguel de Icaza's "Well, actually..." syndrome (http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html).

"Well actually" has some interesting dynamics that I haven't quite mastered. For example, my inner voice goes "well actually" all the time, especially when I listen to some skilled socialite acquaintance going off on a funny tangent that keeps everyone entertained. Since puberty, I'm not giving in to "well actually" anymore, it stays firmly in the realm of inner monologue.

But once in a while, when I'm following an entertaining story being told in a social setting, another guy will pop up and say "well, actually..." and people will not stop admiring him or her, they will say repeatedly how smart and how unexpectedly brilliant this person is (even if they just pointed out a very obvious flaw).

So I'm calling bullshit on "well, actually", because it often works when a charismatic person with a huge ego does it. That means the problem is clearly not in the smart-assery of the content, the presentation itself is faulty.

That is cool that he enjoys the device he purchased, that is really what matters, but I feel that he was hardly entrenched in this so called war. Not only that, he is comparing the experience of a 1.5th generation phone versus a 4th generation phone. The Droid is a good phone, but I wouldn't call it great. It has a slower processor, less ram, the hardware feel is what some call flimsy. In my opinion Motorola didn't make great phones at first, and their drivers had lots of issues. Don't get me started on their penchant to lock down the phones.

The iPhone 4 is a great phone, but I wouldn't trade my Nexus One in for one, not even if I was paid. There are a lot of reasons, more than I wish to extrapolate in a comment. I started out with a G1, I have been in the 'trenches' if you will since the start. I know what Android has achieved, and how great it really is, because I saw it when it wasn't so great.

He didn't abandon anything, he just got a new phone.

His story reminded me a lot of the time I switched from Linux to OS X. There was a point where compiling my own kernels stopped being fun and I just wanted a computer that I could work with instead of work on.

I abandoned Linux on the desktop five years ago, and I still occasionally hear some snide remarks about "defection".

Even though I still manage a bunch of Linux servers and advocate towards Linux whenever it makes sense.

Linux on the desktop has made a lot of progress in five years (Ubuntu at least). I made the switch a year ago and haven't looked back. YMMV.

It's your choice to compile a kernel. You could also have just used a distro like ubuntu. I think for a hacker, the difficult part here is to forget about all those tweaks that are possible.

Why did you have to leave Linux? You could have just stopped compiling your own kernels. Even the guys who tweak and compile the kernels we deploy to our servers just run stock kernels on their desktop machines. Sounds like you have the same hacker OCD that makes this guy overclock his processor and install third party ROMs and then have the balls to complain about stability. (He makes it sound like the modifications were necessary to make the phone work in the first place, but overclocking the processor falls into the "I just can't help myself" category and undermines his credibility a bit.)

Once a hacker, always a hacker. For some people knowing the ways you can tweak something makes it quite hard to stop yourself doing it. Sure, he could dump Ubuntu on his computer, but he knows how to poke around and change the settings to get his money's worth from his hardware. That knowledge won't transfer to OSX, and (hopefully) nor will that temptation.

"Compiling my own kernel" is often a metaphor for the effort involved in running a Linux system. I run a dual-boot Windows/Ubuntu system right next to my MacBook using SynergyKM to control both, so I have a good opportunity to compare both on a daily basis. The "compile my own kernel" factor with recent distributions of Ubuntu (9.10 and newer) is really, really insignificant.

So, it's a mixed bag. "Linux" means so many things that it's hard to say "Linux is easy to use" or "Linux is hard to use" and not be right in both cases.

No, I had to compile my own kernels for several reasons.

1. My soundcard didn't work with any vanilla kernel (+ modules)

2. I owned a webcam that had a slightly different USB id than the ones supported by the driver that in fact also supported mine.

3. I owned a laptop with a touchscreen which involved having to compile some non-standard modules.

Anyways, things have gotten a lot better since I've "left", but Linux (on the desktop and Android, for that matter) will always be "very good the next release". Which is, of course, utter bull. If you don't have excellent polish as a priority from the start, you'll always be fixing things for the "next" version while simultaneously introducing 10 new half-baked "features".

"If you live on your GPS, then this would be enough of a reason alone to choose Android over Apple"

I dont live on it meaning I dont have to use it all the time, but when i'm going to a new restaurant for example I love being able to either search at home and send myself a map link or search on the phone and hit directions and have navigate open itself up with everything set and ready to get me to my destination.

I have used other stand alone GPS's and they all have their quirks about them but theres something about the full intigration of the navigation with Google that makes me love that feature the most on the Android OS.

activated an Apple iPhone 4 on Verizon. This was considered by some of my Android loving friends as an act of war, by some just an excuse to banish me from their twitter circle. I feel as though I wear a scarlet “i” on my chest everywhere I go

Heh. "The Scarlet i" would make for a great parody play! I hope some talented teen picks this idea up and gets their 15 minutes of YouTube fame with this.

Seriously, folks, it's just a damn gadget!

Yes there is a strong Jailbreak community for the iPhone, having been a long time iPod touch user, It’s a community that I have even participated in. But with every update of iOS, Apple makes it less and less necessary for the power user, and it’s just not necessary at all for the average use.

I was a jailbreaker, and stuck with my 8GB 1st gen iPhone for a long time. Now, my factory unlocked non-jailbroken iPhone 4 does everything I want. I have no contract and I only pay $46 a month to T-Mobile. Sometime next week, I'm going to get an alternate account AT&T sim so I can test an app with MMS functionality.

I personally find it strange when people compare an android phone made by X with the iPhone and describe that comparison as android vs apple. Unless it were a nexus phone maybe.

Right, the problems with the Droid cameras have nothing to do with Android itself. It is just Motorola being shoddy.

I don't "switch" operating systems or devices, I supplement them! My setup with an Android phone and an iPod Touch works great as I am now familiar with both OSs.

Similarly, I have a MacBook Pro, a Toshiba with Win 7 and also run Linux on both of them.

I like Android, but I will be buying an iPhone 5 when they come out. I'll also be buying whatever the next Nexus is too, though. Isn't that how most serious device geeks operate?

Ehmm... who cares? Your so called friends are not talking to you anymore 'cause you changed phone? They're not friends, that's all. Go on and live with it.

a traitor? a whore? you need new friends. its a phone.

It's ridiculous to say that you have abandoned something when it sounds like you didn't even take sides with it in the first place. To me those who choose the Android phones and tablets do so specifically because they want to customize their experience with it and even get the dev kit and make something of their own. After reading the article, I find that you're just another one of these "Oh, look at all the pretty pictures I can take, I'm so media-centric an creative now, I might even get paid for the photos I take with it". This in itself is absurd and, were you telling me this, I would have smacked the thought right out of your empty little head. This smells too much like paid advertising and I don't like it. If it is real, I'd dock you a point (-1) for Bad and inconsistent grammar, (-1) for Spelling Errors, (-2)for saying iphone (An overpriced piece of shit with an environment that's toxic to devs and more recently content publishers) is better than Android, which makes no sense because you compared only the iphone against one android phone, and a bad one at that. I mean, if you're willing to spend that much on an iphone, why didn't you just get a better android phone? And finally, you are docked for supporting apple, which the most bullshit company I've ever laid eyes on and deserves all the bad publicity it gets. (-1) Also, -1 for advertising for apple by not giving a fair comparison of solely the operating systems but the phones. That's a 4/10. All in all, a failing grade for a failing article.

Not everyone chooses Android because of a desire to customize or tweak. I bought my N1 because I wanted a smartphone with a decent browser on TMobile. I know plenty of people who've purchased Androids for similar reason (wanted a 4" screen, wanted front facing camera, etc).

While all of us techno-geeks like to obsess over every minor difference between the Apple and Android platforms, the reality when you step back and look at it is that for most users, the difference is negligible.

People get way too invested in these stupid product/platform wars. Everyone needs to remember: You aren't defined by the products you buy and use!

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