My girlfriend has an Android, I have an old SE

My girlfriend picked up her new HTC Magic yesterday. It's not activated yet so she hasn't really touched it. I, on the other hand, have been playing with it ever since. It is by no means an iPhone when it comes to UX but on the other hand it doesn't tie you down with a 2 year plan. There are many minor things that bogs down the UX, the weird effect when the phone is turned from being held horizontally to vertically and vice versa for instance. On the iPhone there is a nice graphical effect but on the HTC Magic the image is blurred for a second and the phone freezes then it shows the screen in the new mode.

I do feel that the iPhone is restrictive in the sense that I can only get my apps from the Apple App Store and that applications needs to be approved by Apple's seemingly random committee before release there. The Android suffers from none of those things, however (which was discussed at the last IxDA Café) the vast majority of people probably don't care (those remaining 80% which we are actually designing for according to HFI).

I did write a little application for it just to try it out. Sadly the development environment does suffer from the same problem that most Java based development systems suffer from - the lack of a proper graphical development environment for creating the UI. You can specify the UI an XML but that is not what I would call usable. There is a program that is called DroidDraw but it is by no means Interface Builder. The default environment for developing applications is Eclipse and there is nothing wrong with Eclipse for writing code but I switch to NetBeans whenever I have to design a user interface for a Java application.

Another problem is that that for being a touchscreen device it has way to many buttons. The way that Apple solved it with gestures is simply a lot more pleasurable to use. In a way it makes me think of the third generation iPods with the row of buttons on top of the scroll wheel. Simply put, there was a reason that apple placed the buttons inside the wheel in the following iteration. However Apple is in an unique position since they have control over both hardware and software.

Now that I ranted on about the things that I didn't like I must admit that my experience was positive overall especially considering the pricetag. I am actually contemplating buying one myself since I do not think my company has any plans of upgrading me from my old SE K850 to something modern.