After spending over a week on my new Android phone (Samsung Captivate Galaxy S), I can’t help but wonder if the experience I’ve been having with it is typical for other Android phone users.
The Captivate has a lot going for it – a beautiful screen, fast processor, excellent video camera, and good battery life to name a few. It just seems to me that the software – Android 2.1 – isn’t really a serious production release. There seem to be so many things with it that simply don’t function well or reliably. And some of those things are pretty significant on a smartphone:
- The device constantly loses the settings I’ve configured for my Exchange server email. It completely forgets that the account existed on the phone and prompts me to enter a new email account as if I were starting email for the first time. I had it happen at least 7 times before I simply gave up and stopped setting it up again.
- During those times when it did remember the account, deleting emails would be problematic. I would select a set of emails and press Delete, but still see those ‘deleted’ emails sitting there even after the app said they were removed. Sometimes they would go away if I waited a bit. Sometimes I needed to exit out of mail and then return for them to be gone.
- The unit often becomes unresponsive if any I/O is taking place, with the touch screen remaining frozen until it finishes what it is doing. There were several times when I thought the unit had crashed on me only to have it spring back to life 20 seconds later.
- Getting the GPS in the unit to lock on to my position is a complete crap-shoot. Sometimes it connects right away while other times I need to try repeatedly to get it to work – with both experiences happening in the same location right outside my office.
Given my lack of familiarity with Android, my initial reaction was that I was doing something wrong that was causing these things to happen. But after doing a little research to try and figure things out, I’m not so sure. It seems that I am not the only person having problem like this. Whatever the causes, I find myself in a position where I have no confidence in the device.
I had even considered returning it to AT&T for a different smartphone.
What kept me from doing that, despite the problems I’ve been having, is that I can see some real promise in the platform. It absolutely doesn’t feel completely baked or debugged to me, but I can still see glimmers of ‘something powerful’ in the software that are making me stick with it – at least until the new 2.2 FROYO version is released.
Once it’s out, I’ll do a through review of the device, and compare it in detail to my experiences using the iPhone.
And I’ll decide then for myself what I’m going to do next.
At this point, I couldn’t recommend (this) Android phone to anyone if it were the only smartphone/portable computing device they wanted to carry. The reliability just isn’t there – at least for the things I’ve been trying to do with it. If you needed to choose something right now, I think the iPhone is still the way to go – assuming you can deal with being on AT&T.
If you can wait, the best option is to see how good the Android 2.2 released ends up being, and to make your decision then.