Ahhh, that is a problem. Though, from what I'm reading after a Google search of the issue, it does sound like turning on USB debugging mode will make it work in regular old mass storage mode. That should make DoubleTwist happy.

I'll accept your conclusion of Android not being ready for the newbie family member. However, I'd say that if that family member were a heavy GMail, Google Calendar, and other Google services user, Android is a fine option.

Any other things you're liking about the phone? I don't think I can help you out on the alarm snooze issue, as I think the alarm you were using was a Samsung-created app. At least, my default alarm doesn't do that pre-alarm thing you mentioned, and I don't have to long-press to snooze...and my snooze button works

I have to say, I think if you decided to stick with the phone, and someone released instructions for getting stock Android on that model, I'd probably try rooting it and putting that on there. I'm a little sad that you can't try out Froyo during this trial period, because the speed difference is tremendous.

While there's no excuse for an MTP or mass-storage implementation that doesn't actually work (nor for bad UI or bad documentation), it's important to realise that the reason you're given more choices here than an Iphone gives you, is because your phone can do useful things that an Iphone can't. There's no mass-storage ("act as a USB key") support on Iphone, though there was on earlier Ipods; and surely "PC Internet" is USB tethering, which Iphone can't do either.

Peter

From an outsider's perspective, it seems to me that Android has regressed much of what other companies had advanced in the Smart Phone game. And that's leaving Apple completely out of the picture. I've never heard of the mass consumer really having a problem with a BlackBerry, Treo or Nokia phone.

Tom's descriptions and the reviews don't jive at all with what's being promoted in the commercials. And here we're ignoring the Verizon Droid and the HTC Evo commercials because those don't promote phones at all - does anyone even understand those commercials? I think they're going to end up the like Taco Bell dog spots. Fun/funny to watch, while leading to lower (and lost) sales for the companies.

Anyway, at this stage I have an affinity for Android (and Meego as well) from a development standpoint and for the purposes of integrating custom designs on those platforms. But from a consumer phone perspective, at this stage, I can't think of anything as horrible. Maybe WinCE... Though at least it had easy-ish syncing.

Tom, I'd also recommend an app that Bitt clued me into:

Apps Organizer

It's funny, iOS just got folders, and I'm already onto the next thing.

I'm obsessed with how my apps are organized on my primary home screen, and Apps Organizer has really helped. Half of the app is a screen that shows all the apps on the phone. In this screen you can apply to each app any of a set of labels (you can change the labels). The other half of the app is the ability to create a widget on your home screen for any of those labels, which creates an icon. When you press that icon, you can a window with all the apps to which you've applied that label.

As someone who maximizes efficiency on his home screen, the part I really like is stars. On the screen where you apply labels to each app, you can also star the apps individually. This lets me launch the widgets and only show starred apps, the 4-8 I use most often in any category of apps, and puts them front and center. The other apps, that I might use once every two weeks to two months, get hidden and don't take up space.

Bitt, is there anything else you're liking about Apps Organizer?

Oh, and Tom, have you gone through the various Android threads on the board here and downloaded some other recommended apps? I'm curious if there are any that you've enjoyed.

Dignan, have you checked out ADW Launcher?

While true that the iPhone lacks mass storage (much like my Android device did until I turned on USB debugging), it does offer USB tethering for internet and has since 3.0 came out in mid 2009. If tethering is turned on in Settings, it automatically tethers and still allows iTunes to sync or files to be manually copied via the iTunes storage window. Tethering is indicated by the clock area on the lock screen being blue with the text "Internet Tethering".

For me with the Captivate, PC Internet never did anything either. My Mac never showed the connection as connected, and


Ahh, the finger pointing has started, I missed that from the PC world. "Nono, thats not Windows, thats Dell, blame them". I knew full well coming into this that Google has even less control over their OS then Microsoft does over Windows, but I didn't understand the extent. I wonder how many more fun "issues" this will cause for me.

I know, I'm being a bit difficult on all this, hopefully something on the phone will grow on me to counter all the negative experiences I've had so far. The rough edges are very rough to people used to polished products.

I'm not intending to finger point, simply making sure that you don't blame Android for a problem that isn't Android.

Because there are so many variants of Android phones your experience will vary depending on what phone you use. Clearly you've chosen a phone that has issues that other phones don't (and I'm sure the opposite is true as well). I'd probably end up frustrated as well. I'm glad my Nexus One is just Android.

Fair enough, though the end result is still the same. Frustrated user, poor experience. Knowing who to blame doesn't fix the problem. Google doesn't sell phones anymore, so I don't have many options to get a "pure" experience. I'm getting the same experience any other customer pondering an Android device would get.

I did try Google Maps Navigation this morning to get to work. Put in Tom into the search field, and it showed my home and work address (though it didn't differentiate these, just listed both addresses), so far so good. Told it to route to work and it sat on "Searching for GPS" for a while, with a flashing icon in the notification area changing between a satellite dish, and one receiving data. Saw the same thing last night a few times, seems thats it's way of telling me it's trying to lock onto my location. Very distracting. Finally five minutes later the phone started routing me to my work, after I had already given up and just started driving. I also ignored the first route suggestion, as Google seems to like going through a very scenic neighborhood with speed bumps and 15mph limits in parts, instead of on a 65mph highway. Once I turned on the highway, it quickly rerouted. It did seem to frequently see me off course though, and interrupted my podcast with bizarre directions due to it thinking I was a few blocks over. I guess the GPS wasn't getting a good signal, though I had the Samsung phone in the same place 3 generations of iPhones have been, and never had a problem that bad. Will probably improve if I can track down a proper car dock for this thing.

Rereading the Engadget review, seems they may know what is going on here too, again awesome QA on this product.

Did a little digging on what the default USB mode "Samsung Kies" meant, and found it refers to Windows software Samsung makes to do media syncing. Trying to download it in the US leads to the message "In many countries, Samsung Apps is available for use on a PC. We aim to provide you with these services in the near future."

So they shipped a US only phone set to a USB mode that only works with software not available in the US. Clever.

Ugh. That sucks. The GPS on my Nexus One, for comparison, is the best GPS I've ever had (at least as far as time to lock and accuracy go), including on dedicated GPS devices.

Actually no, the iPhone can and does do USB tethering (appears as a network interface) since v3.0 software.

iPhone doesn't do mass storage, no, because it doesn't use anything as broken as FAT for internal storage (something that we'd decided was a good idea at Rio, though the market didn't agree ) and also because there's no restriction on things that can happen when connected to USB - on the android phones, when connected to USB and "mounted", nothing can access the FAT partition for obvious reasons.

Yes, you can pick "charge only" if you want to use the phone when connected to USB, and at least it doesn't go into airplane mode when plugged into USB (like the Palm Pre) but personally I don't find the lack of MSC a problem on the phone.

The fact that their MSC implementation doesn't work with macs sounds like a pretty obvious bug; Macs don't have problems with every other MSC device I've ever tried so they're not doing anything out of the ordinary. I wonder if it passes the USB-IF MSC test?

It's actually pretty smart, you can do PTP/MTP, iTunes sync *and* tethering concurrently over the same USB connection on an iPhone (multiple active USB configurations).

The main plus is that the user doesn't have to choose, it "just works" (as long as they aren't expecting MSC anyway )

Actually, the Pre only goes into airplane mode if you mount it as a USB drive. You get three options when you plug into USB: "Just charge", "Media Sync", and "USB Drive". If you select "just charge" (or do nothing) the wifi and radio still work and you can take calls, etc.

Android phones (at least generic ones) can do multiple connections over USB. I've got USB debugging enabled and it works at the same time as MSC mounting of the memory card.

Not saying it's a HW issue, it's just a matter of whether it's been implemented or not. Can you tether and do MSC at the same time?

No one knows; who wants to tether with a cord when you can just turn on the access point?

When 500+ other people near you are also using their private access points...

...in which case, bluetooth might stand a chance of working for tethering, as offered by the iPhone (btw, multiple devices can connect to a single tethering iphone with bluetooth concurrently)

IMO the lack of a WiFi AP mode for tethering on the iPhone is annoying. Bluetooth works fine for me but it feels very last decade.

One reason to use a cable is that you don't drain your phone battery - just your much bigger laptop battery.

All I know is that I can unlock my phone and with one tap on my home screen my laptop is connected to the internet. I prefer that.

Tom, I'm sorry to hear about your troubles with your phone. I wasn't aware that the Samsung phones had these issues, so I apologize for recommending it (although I don't think any of the reviews were out yet).

While I honestly don't think OS release version fragmentation is a huge problem, I do think that this skinning is a big problem. The Engadget podcast just reminded me today that the original Motorola Droid is the only phone for sale left that doesn't have a skin on it.

So yes, it saddens me if these skins are screwing up the Android experience for users. I seriously don't see any problem with the stock Android OS.

...sigh...

Did someone come up with a widget to turn that on?

Actually, I hadn't had a lot of chance to play with it yet. I was doing so today. One thing I discovered is that, seemingly, if you load an icon pack and use an icon from it as a folder icon, you don't need to leave the icon pack installed. I guess it copies the icon into its local storage. Which is nice.

I'm also playing with AutoAppOrganizer and App Categories. They're kind of neat in that they try to categorize your applications on their own, the former doing a much better job.

Coming late into this thread... I've had my Motorola/Verizon Droid X for just over a week now, coming from two years on my iPhone 3G. Random thoughts, in no particular order:

- I adore the notification pane along the top. The iPhone can be quite annoying in trying to get your attention (meeting in five minutes! there's an unknown AP nearby, should I connect to it?), while the Droid keeps all of that where you can check it if you care and otherwise easily ignore it.

- I *really* adore Swype. I can go very, very fast with Swype. My only two gripes are that (1) if you're halfway through a long word and you have a brain fart, there's no way to pick up where you left off. You have to delete the old cruft it failed to recognize and then start again. (2) Swype's custom word dictionary is disjoint from the Android user custom dictionary. Dumb.

- I've disabled pretty much all the Moto app crap.

- The nav system is almost brilliant but has a variety of quirky UI features and one genuinely annoying bug, wherein it seems to randomly hit the "back" button on me every five minutes, requiring me to reach out and have it start navigating again. I have no idea why this happens, but we were on vacation all last week, with the Droid X as our navigation system, and this got very old, very fast.

- The Gmail integration is sweet. It was a pain to get my Gmail contacts all cleaned up and merged properly, but synchronization happens transparently over the air. Unlike the iPhone, I particularly like that the Gmail app knows about Gmail labels, stars, spam handling, etc.

- The voice recognition stuff (powered by code from Nuance) is occasionally brilliant, occasionally dumbfounding.

- The built-in eight megapixel camera is total garbage. My iPhone 3G (with what, two megapixels?) takes radically better pictures.

- Call quality, over Verizon, seems to be uniformly better than AT&T. Data service is unquestionably better.

- WiFi on the iPhone is superior. The Droid X seems really dumb about dealing with my home WPA2 network. Sometimes, it just wedges on "acquiring an IP address." The support for the WPA2 Enterprise WiFi at work is also odd. It does connect and work, but there was no way to install the client-side certs. That means that any server could well pretend to by my office network and use that to spoof me, possibly getting my login credentials (although I'm not entirely clear on the relative security of the different WPA2 Enterprise authentication modes). On the iPhone, all of this just magically worked, including downloading our enterprise WiFi config as an email attachment which auto-configured everything in one click.

- The Droid X is remarkably comfortable in the hand. I thought it would be too big, but it isn't. The goofy curve on the back turns out to be perfect for pressing the speaker into your ear.

- Battery life is comparable to my iPhone.

- DoubleTwist on my Mac "works for me." It was slow to scan my library, but after that it really just magically worked, transcoding my Apple Lossless audio files and my various video files.

- There's enough internal memory on the Droid X, unlike earlier phones, that you don't have to get particularly wigged out by what goes where.

- The Droid X web browser is very fast, but an iPhone's browser is optimized to scroll smoother, zoom smoother, etc.

- The Droid X charges via micro USB. So does my Jawbone Bluetooth gizmo, as does my Kindle 2, as does my wife's new LG cheapo phone. I can now standardize on micro USB chargers everywhere and be done with proprietary cabling and chargers. (Didn't Apple promise to switch to micro USB to follow some new EU initiative?)

- Of course, the new treadmills at my gym have iPhone-proprietary connectors on them, to blow up video from your iPhone for everybody to watch over your shoulder, versus the micro-HDMI connector on my Droid X. (And, the new Panasonic LX5 camera I've got on order has **mini** HDMI, so I'd have to buy a mess of oddball cables if I wanted to support both of those.)

- I haven't yet tried to tether or jailbreak or whatnot through my Droid X. Regular old-fashioned WiFi seems to be amply available for my laptop anywhere that I'd care to actually use it.

- I intend to jailbreak/unlock my old iPhone 3G for the next trip I make overseas and see about acquiring a local SIM card. I have no such travel yet on the agenda, so we'll see how that goes.

I'd prefer the option that doesn't even require me to touch the phone, and the Bluetooth DUN support of the iPhone allows for that. Of course, I'd also have to have tethering as an option, so the Nexus One on T-Mobile still wins here. With how infrequently I need tethering, I can't justify the $20 a month fee AT&T wants (or the $30 fee Sprint wanted on the Evo).

As for the app suggestions, I'll probably come back through and look at them more later. For now I still feel like I'm settling in trying to figure things out, so I don't want to rush ahead too quickly. Priority for now is to try and do everything I was doing with the iPhone and adjust to the little things.

The AGPS "fix" of putting in a google server instead of some other one via a deeply hidden menu seems to have fixed the AGPS issue. Gowalla is locking on to my location now quickly enough to check into places. One annoyance though, the GPS icon in the bar at the top is very distracting, any way to make it less so? It flashes between two states rapidly that it draws my attention every time, and I could really care less what the exact status of the GPS lock is.

I've found a number of apps that came with the phone that require WiFi to be disabled, including the built in AIM messaging. Well, again here comes a confusing point, is AIM actually built into Android? If I go into contacts, I see "Chat using AIM" to any of the people I have in there with account info, just as I see "Chat using Google Talk". It then launches an AIM login that requires WiFi to be off. I downloaded AIM from the Marketplace, and it appears to be different. To add to the confusion, under "Android Widgets" I have Instant Messaging which appears to be ties to the AIM stuff out of contacts. This is separate from the "Samsung Widgets" section.

I did get work e-mail set up, and one feature that is nice on Android compared to iPhone is the ability to set a push schedule, and poll or disable outside the schedule. Keeps the phone from beeping like crazy at night, but still lets me get instant delivery during work hours. Also, on the topic of e-mail, any way to turn off or change my mailbox view at the top? It's nearly worthless for my home IMAP server, due to shortening the visible folder text. For example, I have a folder titles "Online Receipts", then inside that folder are additional folders for various places. All I get on the Android e-mail client are "Online Recie" over and over again without the ability to tell what each is.

Battery life is hard to judge so far. I don't feel I've used it a ton, and am down to 12% now. It was fully charged 13 hours ago, though oddly the phone says 9 hours ago. I'll have to see how it goes over the next few days. The battery indicator does seem pretty useless though. For how many pixels it uses, it seems to just have 4 or 5 positions. I found the iPhone icon much more usable, and even better when battery percentage was added.

Google Listen so far seems to be dealing with my podcast needs, once I got bast the useless built in search. One feature I really like is the queue. I can wake up, queue up "Today in the Past", then start my drive to work, with the phone seamlessly going right back to where I was in another podcast once John Hodgeman is done entertaining me in the morning. I never did find a quick way to do this on the iPhone, so I tended to just resume whatever long podcast I was last on.

Doubletwist seems to work for syncing music onto the phone, but photos, not so much. As best that I can tell, I get the option to just select then drag and drop. Not much syncing there. The mess it leaves in Gallery is also useless, with a bunch of folders in alphabetical order. The folders are all my various named events out of iPhoto. I'm used to a chronological order, makes finding photos much easier.

One day down, 29 more to go. I'm slowly getting used to the android way, though I still don't always remember what button is where. It doesn't help that the phone seems to enjoy turning off the backlighting on the buttons as quickly as possible. I've also has a number of times where I thought I pressed something, and nothing happened, probably due to being in the dead spot between the screen and the buttons. Overall, if forced to have touch buttons, I prefer this layout compared to the Nexus One. The gap allows enough space that I haven't hit a button accidentally when typing. Back is a very strange button so far, sometimes doing what I expect, other times showing some unexpected behavior.

Oh, random odd thing that came in from somewhere outside normal Android. Certain places, including system settings do have the little springback when scrolling past the end. It's not everywhere though, so not sure what is doing it. I think having it in some places but not everywhere is even more confusing then not having it at all. Something more pure Android, what is with the tendency to have checkboxes with fake checkmarks? I've noticed the default checkbox also has an outline of where the check will go, and on a number of screens with certain color schemes, this makes it look like the box is already checked.

Text selection is going to drive me up the wall at some point. So far I haven't needed to do much, but even simple cursor placement, well, isn't simple. Really understanding why the Nexus One and a few other devices have hardware to control the cursor now.

Also, any easy way to take screenshots these days? Would make describing certain things much easier.

AIM isn't a standard part of Android. By the sounds of the not-usable-with-WiFi I'd assume its something that AT&T added to the handset.

As Trevor says, AIM is not part of the core of Android. I'm sure that there are a variety of IM apps available, but I haven't looked.

I've never encountered any app under Android that required a particular type of connection. I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm just saying that's really odd.

Battery life is obviously very hardware specific, but I find that the two things that kill the battery the most are the GPS and the display. Since you're doing initial playing with it, you're probably using both of those more than you're likely to in "real" use. That said, I definitely have to charge my N1 every night, and if I use it a lot during the day, I might fail to get 15 hours out of it.

I'm not sure what you're saying about the button placement. I don't think I've ever accidentally hit one of the buttons while typing.

I've not noticed that the unchecked checkbox ever looks checked to me, though I understand what you mean. That's just the default checkbox widget.

There's currently no way to acquire screenshots without attaching the phone to your computer and using the SDK. Google cites security as the reason for this, which sounds lame to me.

This is annoying (what else do you expect from me?), but a big "ditto" to everything Bitt just said. I really hate to say it, Tom, but I've never experienced 90% of the problems you're having, and for fear of proving certain people on this forum correct, it sounds like the biggest problem with Android today is the skinning done by the manufacturers. I still don't think that the OS fragmentation is as big a deal as people make of it, but the skinning is, and that's a big problem.

Google made a big deal about this to these companies - how they could differentiate themselves from the other guys with their own skins. Apparently Motorola forgot that they're awful at writing software... (and the others are no better)

And Dan, I fear that your problem with the GPS glitch has something to do with this too. I never once had the problems that you or Tom are experiencing with your GPS. Like Bitt, mine worked perfectly in Phoenix, and hasn't led me astray the few times I've used it around my own area...

I've kept mum on a couple of things but I'll say them now. Samsung. Korea. Yeah that's it. I don't know when we'll ever see quality design coming out of that country on anything but some Hyundais, but they're completely out to lunch in software/IT, I'm sorry. It's a good place for component manufacturing and they seem to be able to do that well, but IMO, that's about it.

Samsung used to make some nice displays, but I can't honestly say that I'd ever buy any consumer electronics product from them today, whether it be a phone or a television.

As for the apps that only work over 3G, I'm not certain where they come from. One was an AT&T TV service that actually looked kinda cool, but not something I'm going to pay for. The built in AIM one is what puzzles me the most, as it makes it pretty worthless if it's just going to disconnect me on WiFi. I wonder if it's some weird attempt by AT&T to get people to use more data. It's a good thing this phone is riding on my still unlimited plan from the iPhone. I'd be curious to hear if the Galaxy S on T-Mobile has similar apps with 3G only modes.

The official AIM app from the marketplace is also bad, in that it keeps setting me to available. This causes messages to go to both my desktop and phone at the same time. I did try checking for BeeJive IM, but it seems the only thing available is a free download to try and show interest in getting the company to bring it to the platform. Odd, but ok. On my iPhone, it was my preferred IM solution, as it gave me one buddy list for both AIM and Google Talk, and used peoples real names if their info was found in my address book. It also allowed me to tweak priorities on Google Talk, resulting in messages going to the phone only if I was AFK at my desk or not logged in. I'll have to do a deeper search of the marketplace later.

Also had my first near miss with malware. Was searching the marketplace for a LinkedIn app, and found one in there that steals peoples accounts. Thankfully the usage of "2" for to in the description, and comments from about 30 people tipped me off.

Another mail issue beyond worthless folder support, worthless HTML e-mail support. At work, we have build e-mails that go out when something breaks, and it includes a color coded section to see at a glance what broke along with text. All I get is the text, no color coding anywhere in the message. It's clearly HTML as fonts are different where they should be, the layout is kinda right, and links are in it, but no coloring.

Battery isn't looking good today. Fully charged this morning, and now 7 hours later, I'm at 38% left. I've been using the phone less today then I did yesterday, with most of my use being listening to a podcast during my drive into work, then some e-mail and browsing for maybe 20-30 minutes. Guess I should bring a spare micro USB cable to work just in case. For a battery the same capacity as the new iPhone 4, it's not lasting half as long.

*Edit* Is there a way to quickly scroll to the top of something? With the iPhone, tapping the very top returns to the very top of a scrolling page, in any app. Couldn't get similar to work, but I may be missing something.

You can scroll faster by throwing the page faster. It'd be nice if all (instead of just some) apps that have potential to have long pages added the quick scroll that pops up on the right in the contacts app.

Dan, please let us know what you think of 2.2 when you get it.