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Comment by nhebb | Hacker News Reader

The battery life and "scorching hot" temperature sound like hardware issues, but I doubt they're representative of all Android phones - just this model.

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I owned 3 different Android phones over the past 3 years. My wife owned 2 models different from mine over the same span. My experience is based on using 5 different Android models from different manufacturers. Although I'm focusing now on the things I did not like, the fact that I stayed with Android for so long should suggest that there was plenty I did like.

Battery life was terrible on every Android phone I used. I could not get through an 8-9 hour work day with moderate use (an hour or two of streaming, maybe a few web pages, some texting and a brief call or two). I can absolutely confirm the weird battery issues this user experienced. On multiple phones. At times, the phone would get warm (not scorching hot in my case) and the battery would go from close to a full charge to nearly dead in the span of an hour or so. I kept spare chargers everywhere. Five freakin' phones.

I finally gave in and switched to an iPhone. Now I'm kicking myself for not doing it sooner. Maybe this is a little dramatic, but after using iOS for several weeks I have come to the realization that Android is flat out trash in comparison. I like having an "end call" button that is actually responsive and, you know... ends a call. On Android I would press it several times before the call would end. Just about every time. On too many occasions I had to pull the battery off.

The unresponsive button thing isn't isolated either. Push a button. Wait. Wait. Push it a couple more times. The whole thing is agonizingly slow. Try to unlock the screen. Crap. I have to push the button 3 or 4 times. Arrgghhh!

Don't even get me started on typing. The keyboard would lag on a regular basis, to the point where it was just not practical to use it for texting. I would start to type, the keyboard froze up and then a bunch of special accented characters would show up. Turning off basically every feature of the keyboard like haptic feedback and auto-correction would help, but the typing experience was still the worst of any phone I have used since T9 predictive text has been available.

Apps crashed left and right. I'm not even talking about random stuff from the Android market. I'm talking about the built in ones. I had a task killer installed. It was my most frequently used app. Let that sink in. My task killer was my most frequently used app. I was constantly killing things that were slowing down the phone or eating up battery for no good reason. Search the Android market for task killers. There are tons of them. Some of them run in the background and automatically kill stuff in an attempt to improve performance.

I could go on, but I'd rather not. I'm just glad I don't have to use those Android phones anymore. It will be a very long time before I would consider buying one again.

Wow... I'm replying to this from my HTC Desire, which I've had for over a year. I have had exactly ZERO of those problems. The biggest complaint I have is that I still don't have an update for Android 2.3 yet.

I'm glad yours is working out. I know people that absolutely love their Android phones. I know some others that don't like them so much. After 5 phones, 3 manufacturers and 2 carriers I have seen enough to believe it's not an isolated thing, but I also realize my experience is not necessarily representative of the majority of Android phones. Still, it's enough for me to avoid them. It seems to me like a pretty hit or miss proposition. In any case, my wife and I are happy iPhone users now.

Froyo is the OS version that made Android competitive. Gingerbread is the gravy that made is excellent.

I've had 4 Android devices, all the ways back to cupcake on the G1. In the early years I absolutely saw the issues that the GP observed, tolerating the platform for secondary reasons while hoping it would get better. I, too, had to pull my battery to end a call more than once. Until Froyo I never recommended Android to non-tech friends or peers. With a modern Gingerbread device I would recommend it in a heartbeat.

But...wow...reading their post is like a blast from the past. jm4 seems to have a really bad sense of timing "buy high sell low!" because Android today is a slick, smooth, reliable platform.

Task killers don't do anything, the issue that created a need for them was patched in 2.2. Now they're just a placebo.

> My task killer was my most frequently used app.

Oh. You probably weren't aware of this, but task killers can cause every problem you list -- app crashing, UI lag, etc.

As soon as I got rid of mine, my phone was much more responsive and had about twice the battery life!

I can't discount your experiences. There is no doubt that Android in its earlier years was kind of an ugly baby. The OS suffered fundamental faults, lag on user interactivity being a primary one.

Is that true with current devices? Absolutely not. Gingerbread suffers from zero of the complaints that you mentioned.

"I had a task killer installed. It was my most frequently used app."

You should probably remove this from your post because it betrays that you are an ignorant user. All else follows from that.

While you have edited your post here to temper the zeal, comments like "Android just replaces feature phones" are, well, "fanboy" type comments. Tell my Galaxy S II that.

You're angry about something and are taking it out on Android. No one should draw much from your dated observations.

This story is about a bad device, possibly even a defective handset. Call the press, someone got a lemon!

And thus has the editability of HN posts been exploited.

The GP post originally contained a claim that Android is "garbage", would persist on "feature phones", among other nonse belonging in Engadget comments.

FYI, I edited my comment once to remove an errant comma. The content never changed. I definitely did not have anything in there about feature phones. I was somewhat confused by your reference to that and previous comments I made. Are you sure you were looking at the right comment?

Mysterious battery drain seems like a really common problem on Android phones. Sometimes my Droid X lasts till 6PM -- sometimes it's dead by 1PM. More or less the same usage patterns. When it dies early in the day the phone is definitely warmer than usual.

In my experience doing anything with constant data flow when you have bad reception can turn battery into heat amazingly quickly. Otherwise it works just fine.

I do wish having an idle skype didn't send packets constantly, though.

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