Comment by tdoggette | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tdoggette | Hacker News Reader

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Okay, this is just nonsense. I'm a power user, more or less, and I have an HTC Incredible that I've been using for a few months. Here's my take:

1: When I plug in my phone to my computer, I have to mount two separate drives and then hunt for the file I'm looking for.

Where's my music? Is it in "My Documents" or "MP3" on the phone storage? How about "data" or "documents" or "My Music" on the card?

The whole thing is a huge mess. Every app has its own little scheme for storing data.

2: Okay, so I hit "install" and now it's installing. I do something else for a minute, and now I want to put it on a page and launch it. Where is it? The app list. Where in the app list? I dunno. What's its name? Is it the same as the one in the market? Not always. Google Reader is "Google Reader" in the market and just "Reader" in the list.

3: No, he doesn't like having to hunt for something, then manually place it before being able to use it easily. Why isn't the option to place an app on a pane given at install?

4: Do you use Android at all? There's no adherence to an interface standard.

5: You're right on this one. Multitasking works great without me having to bother it at all.

1: It's funny you mention data and documents, the fact that Android even allows you get documents on your phone and then edit them in whatever app of your choice is quite a feat. I have a friend who is a Grad student/TA at a tech school. They all got iPads and he couldn't for the life of him figure out how to edit word documents on the thing. Took him 5 minutes on Android. For music, I use mostly cloud services like Pandora and Slacker, so not too familiar with how the music is stored.

2: You don't know where the app locker is? It's the main button on every home screen. Once you take 5 seconds and figure that out, you will never have that issue again. Not knowing the name is probably a moot problem that happens in a very infrequent cases. Getting it on one of the home screens has the same usability as the iPhone... hold and drag. I prefer to have clean home screens with the 20% of the apps I use 80% of the time. The other 80% are in the locker for the infrequent use.

3: Not sure, is that really the issue? Sure it would be nice, I agree. But to discount an OS cause you have to drag an app onto a home screen of your choice?

4: I have used Android (Droid X) for about 8 months now. I'm not consistently switching phones, so I learned my phone in a day and I was set. When I use a friends phone like a Galaxy or an Incredible, the main points of the interface are the same. Sure there may be a few different buttons here and there.. but it doesn't take more than a minute to figure out what they do.

5: It's a different line of thinking, for sure.

Like I mentioned once, its a moot argument. You don't like Android? Fine, get an iPhone. Some of us like the customizability of the OS. I like that different phone manufacturers have slightly different concepts of what makes the OS the most functional. Because at the end of the day each iteration will better future phone models as they learn what the market likes more. Instead of what one companies design team likes better.

I don't want an iPhone. I like my Android phone a lot, it's just a big pain in the ass sometimes, mostly due to a lack of attention to detail in the design.

You've sidestepped #1 entirely, so I'll leave that be.

#2, I have over 100 apps, most of which came with the phone and/or are components of other things. It's like your grandma's Windows desktop in there. It's not much of a pain to get things more usable on the home panes, it's just a UX headache that doesn't need to exist.

And as for inconsistency, the original article was talking about inconsistency among different apps, not phones/UIs.

I didn't "sidestep" anything. I specifically said I do not store music on my Android so I have no familiarity with it. It isn't sidestepping, its addressing my lack of familiarity with the matter. I mentioned the documents as an aside because its a good problem to have "I can't find my documents" vs "I can't even get documents on the damn thing."

Gotcha, thanks for the clarification on the inconsistency. A lot of people are talking about hardware inconsistency, so that is what I went with. For app inconsistency, I guess I don't use enough apps to notice a problem. The majority of the time I can open a brand new app and guess what will happen if I hit the menu button (a menu pops up), the home screen (I go to my android home), the back button (I go back in the interface), or the search button (if its an app that has some sort of searchability, then I can search). There are indeed cases where that doesnt work, but meh.

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