Android smartphone coming up, II

A look back at the Motorola Milestone

I’m continuing the history of my [cell] phones by replacing my two-year-old Milestone. It literally has been a milestone: It was my first smartphone, and I could do everything with it (which, of course, wasn’t specific for that device, but for Android in general): Contacts and calendar were magically in sync with Google’s web apps. I could browse the web fully, even start embedded Flash videos—a zombie technology, considered dead since years. I used the GPS to do local exploration, e.g. with Google Maps/Places, used location-based games like Brightkite (meanwhile dead), Foursquare or Gowalla (which I lost interest in soon), or recorded my bike rides. It’s so “living in the future” to pan through Google Street View on a mobile device. I was root on a Linux system. GTD task managers and note apps are in sync with their respective web apps. I access important files in my DropBox. I receive audio streams from Google Music. I hold the phone up to a speaker and it freaking tells me what song it’s playing. Apps with AI (e.g. text predicting keyboard apps) are popping up, just as those implementing computer vision and augmented reality.

However, since several months my most used app is Running Services (which I called ruining services), followed by Android’s internal Task Manager: I had to cope with the phone’s limited RAM of only 256 MB every day. I could hardly install additional apps, although I had already applied a mem hack. It was a regular task to copy a Google Maps upgrade from /data/app to /system/app using Root Explorer (and do a hot reboot followed by deleting the old cache file). The phone also had a memory leak (since that infamous Android 2.2 upgrade that every European Milestone user was whining for for months), occasionally killing the alarm clock app during the night, making a precautionary reboot necessary every other day. However, I didn’t have the nerve to flash one of those very experimental alternative unofficial ROMs—Argh, the locked bootloader!—as they often introduced heavily disturbing and way too serious bugs, which I consider out of the question for a productive device that simply ought to work. The actual problem of course is that developers are constantly bloating their apps, keeping track with the hardware specs of the most recent phones.

My Milestone even got two hardware upgrades: A new and stronger battery, and a new LCD, which I had smashed accidentally.

Phone vs. tablet

So, I’m getting a new phone, but I didn’t really want to: Actually, I’m leering at an Android tablet since more than a year, and my intention was to use that device primarily and reduce the smartphone to a simple phone. I want to use a tablet as a kind of e-reader that supports handwritten input—I want to write formulas and draw freaking arrows!—, replacing my non-electronic (cardboard) tablet that holds printed sheets of paper and a pencil. So far, my workflow is to print research papers and read and annotate them with pencil on paper. There are also computer science e-books with hundreds of pages involved, printed incrementally, where I can only carry the currently read sections with me. Sadly, it seems that such a device is still months away. One of the main issues for me is that all of those 10.1" tablets currently only have a pixel count of at most 1280 along the wide edge, resulting in ~140 ppi, what I consider way too low compared to the densities of ~250–300 ppi of current phones. Another thing is precise stylus input using an actively powered stylus, allowing effective palm rejection. Slowly, that technology evolves, e.g. with Samsung’s Galaxy Note. Also, although Android 3.x had been optimized for the tablet form factor, it appeared having been rushed to market. I expect an incarnation of a tablet that meets my expectations within the next months, with an NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core CPU, Android 4.x, and e.g. Samsung’s S Pen. But I’m not going to wait any longer.

Coming up: Samsung Galaxy Nexus

This device is at the bleeding edge. But one of the important advantages is, just like with Google’s previous two Nexus phones, that its Android software is a “pure Google experience”, without any adaptation by a specific hardware manufacturer, what is one of the issues people have to deal with on other phones. This ensures that updates or upgrades come early and for a longer time. Of course, the hardware specs are a total win, giving me a dual-core CPU with 1 GB RAM. New to me will be the NFC chip, what will probably be of no use for me initially (as a European, but we’re getting there), and a front-facing camera for video chats. Let’s see if I’ll miss the Milestone’s hardware keyboard. Given that the Galaxy Nexus is also the first official Android 4.x device, it introduces new software features, but those won’t be specific to that device.

As I use to say: With that phone, I won’t need something else for years again.