Is Android Right For You?

We’ve have already looked at Windows Phone 7, and according to the latest statistics, most Canadians figured out a long time ago that iOS is right for them (coming in a future column) but Android seems to be the curious choice for mainstream consumers these days.

It is ubiquitous. From the $150 LG Optimus Chic to the $599 Motorola Atrix (to $799 Xoom tablet), and hundreds of devices in between, you can’t seem to escape its diminutive robot interior. Since launching in 2008 it has proliferated to 350,000 activations per day on almost every carrier around the world. Its primary backing manufacturers, HTC, Samsung and Motorola especially, have benefited from its open source roots, and adroitly add features to the stock experience to differentiate from the myriad choices out there.

But Android is still seen primarily as a competitor to iPhone, and to the “walled garden” of Apple’s App Store. Created and backed by Google, it has been deemed the open alternative, a platform where ideas, customization and, most importantly, choice are both welcomed by its fans and vilified by its detractors. No one can deny that Google has created a virtual monster, and like it or not, you’re going to see at least one Android device beckoning at you when you seek out your next smartphone. Is Android right for you? Read on to find out.


Similarities:
Most smartphone operating systems rely on an icon-based home screen workflow, where a limited amount of essential information is made available to the user, and by downloading applications from its requisite marketplace, more features are made available. iOS has perfected this model.

Android makes use of this idea, but expands and complicates it with the addition to the home screen of widgets and a permanent notification bar. Indeed, without even opening an application, a great deal of information can be gleaned, from weather to stocks to tweets.

The permanent expandable notification bar at the top of the screen is also a huge advantage to the notification systems in other mobile platforms. It means that, unlike the current iOS system, notifications can be stacked and actioned at the users’ convenience. But it’s not exactly pretty: each notification, though uniform in its top-down, boxy presentation, is designed by the developer of the app. webOS done a lot to improve its notification system in its 2.1 version, and Android has picked up some of that for 3.0 Honeycomb, where the notifications are at the bottom of the screen as individual little icons that expand once touched. Very intuitive.

Differences:
Android is slightly different in its makeup than most of the other mobile platforms out there in that its component parts are built primarily on heavily customized, yet off-the-shelf Linux parts. Due to its open source nature, Google agrees to open-source the code of each new version after it is finalized (though it has delayed the release of Honeycomb for compatibility reasons). This allows anyone to compile the code and attempt to run it either on a device, or emulated on their computer. It also allows for a very active developer community.

While HP’s webOS has a thriving developer community, it is significantly smaller than its Android equivalent for a number of reasons, but mainly because there are far fewer handsets out there.

To some extent, Android’s biggest advantage and its greatest liability is the quasi-legal status in which many of these developers’ custom ROMs exist. I will touch on this later.


Touch-love:
Android was designed for scalability. It has been installed successfully on hundreds of handsets at different resolutions and screen technologies. From the 2.8” screens of the Motorola Charm to the massive 7” screen of the Samsung Galaxy Tab, it scales very well. It also allows for touch and hardware keyboards alike in any number of configurations.

But mainly Android was designed to be used with capacitive touch screens at 3” and above, and over the years many improvements have been made to its multitouch capabilities. If you are concerned that by moving to Android you will lose the fluid browsing and pinch-to-zooming of your iOS or webOS experience, you don’t have to worry. In fact, technically, Android is as capable as any mobile OS. If an app of feature does not exist that does on another platform, you can rest assured that someone will cook up a version of their own.

Half-baked:
At times, the problems with Android stem from that previous sentence. Due to the largely un-moderated nature of the platform, there is no limit to what you may code, and load, onto your device. Sideloading, or installing apps from outside the official Android Marketplace, is not only possible but encouraged. That leaves all Android phones vulnerable to malicious code. Even apps installed from the Marketplace do not have to be approved by Google, and enforcement is only done when complaints are received. Apps updates are pushed immediately, which is nice, but because the code isn’t checked for bugs or API adherence the prevalence of buggy code increases.

So, with Android you have a choice. It can be quite rewarding to discover a polished, unique, capable app from a small developer in the Android Market. But there is equal chance of installing a dud, a clone of a popular iOS app that mimics nothing but the name, or worse, an app with malicious code. By default, Android does not enable sideloading apps, which provides some protection. (AT&T has gone one step further and disallowed the process altogether.)