More notes on the Sidekick 4G

[mmcirvin]

Reading other users' reviews has been interesting: they've spotted things I haven't.

A common and true complaint is that the keyboard leaves off common ASCII characters like the tilde and backtick even though there are available empty ALT spaces to put them in. Strangely, they're not even included on the tiny SYM key menu, half of whose symbols are already there on the keyboard; you have to use the completely different Swype layout (which requires closing the screen) to get them. This seems like an obvious candidate for a firmware update.

Swype works much better than I expected. I don't think I'd type anything long with it, but it was surprisingly easy to learn how to write short sentences with the screen closed.

I didn't bother much with general complaints about Android, but many longtime Sidekick users have them. Android does not have the cross-app consistency of, say, iOS or the old Sidekick platform; the relative anarchy is the price you pay for a less tightly controlled system. A lot of people seem put off by apps quitting (and losing state) instead of going to background when they didn't expect them to, since on the Sidekick the general pattern was that everything stayed eternally persistent for as long as possible. I haven't had much trouble with this, possibly because I've gotten used to Android's activity lifecycle in other contexts. Some people claim that apps always lose state when you switch to another one, which is not true, and I'm not sure what is happening to them.

The web browser has a bug in which very wide text entry fields keep automatically zooming and recentering such that the characters you are typing are off the screen.

The camera is pretty bad by 2011 smartphone standards. Sidekick cameras have never been great so this was not a shock to me. I'm not bothered by the lack of a flash, since in my experience phonecam flashes are useless anyway. There is a front-facing camera for video chat, but I haven't tried video chat.

Something weird is going on with battery life: about half the user reports I've seen say that battery life is terrible, much worse than old SK models, and the other half are seeing nice long lives like I do. My best guess is that this has to do with how the radio is being used. I'm actually using wifi almost all the time at both home and office instead of cellular data.

Comments

[kodi]

The only app I have on any Android device that always loses state is Angry Birds on my Droid. Even Words With Friends, bizarre memory hog that it is, generally manages to retain enough state to force close when I switch back to it. In principle, the only ways an app should consistently lose state are if they're cheating and allocating memory with the NDK, or if they're doing something stupid. But if someone is actually capable of convincing themselves that apps always lose state, I wonder if that's not a bug on the platform.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah... in Android, there's no clear visual distinction between "I created/destroyed a new activity with its own window" and "I put the current activity window into a different state", and the means by which these two things happen are arbitrary enough to surprise the user. I think that's the fundamental problem here.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Get yourself an Advanced Task Killer. These things were originally designed to save battery, but that's been debunked-- there's a lot of crap you never use and can't install that launches itself anyway, using up more power in the launch than it ever used while idling. But you will have to kill off a program from time to time.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Task managers are all very well, but from an OS developer's POV you want to minimize or eliminate the user's need for them, because nobody really wants to mess with that.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Agreed, but sometimes you'll get an app that just won't die and that means it won't stop playing its music loops, etc.
I think I go a month without breaking out the task killer these days, and at least 4-5 months in between having to remove the battery to finish off some process that's really holding on (probably because it doesn't let me get to the task killer).

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I find that the application devs set their apps to behave in an expected way. "I'm a music player-- I should keep playing music even though I have been superceded by another app." "I'm an app that displays time-sensitive data. I won't update until the user returns me to the forefront." Yes, it's unpredictable, but by and large, I believe someone is thinking it through for each app.

Then again some apps do a doofussy thing like "I'm a locally-cached-voicemail app. I'll stop playing because the user put the phone in his pocket and the screen re-oriented." That one makes me use the F-word out loud.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Using the "auto-fit" setting in the browser seems to help with the text-field bug. Unless I'm imaging things.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Swype is a great keyboard, I've discovered, better than my Sprint Evo's pretty great HTC keyboard. It also works well on my smaller myTouch 3G (I carry a second phone for work-- yes, it's odd sometimes). Do yourself a favor and take the time to eliminate bad (junk, not vulgar) words from the dictionary by selecting/highlighting them and hitting the ol' swype button. The main reason to do this is to avoid the frequent Swype pop-up (which fills your screen and kicks you out of your text box) to tell you how to do this very thing.

I like that swype copes with touch-typing, too. But I think the interesting part of Swype is that it makes you remember spelling that you might have kinda forgotten thanks to the wonders of muscle memory. I like that it makes me pay attention to words sometimes.

[nextov.livejournal.com]

Отлично!