on Android

Diverted from my family affairs by the notorious Oracle-Google lawsuit I decided to take a look at the current state of Android from my perspective. I own an HTC Dream phone – the first Android device on the market. The device was presented less than two years ago and was being actively sold until mid 2009 I believe. The first thing that I found was that the latest Android OS 2.2 was not officially supported on my device, it was stuck at 1.6. This concludes that Android has preference for Symbian-like pattern for OS versions support over Apple’s one. With Apple you can be sure that any of iPhone models produced in the last two years (haha) will have the latest OS available. Fortunately there are lots of Android fanatics out there which means 2.2 custom ROM is available for almost any Android phone, including my Dream one. Unfortunately it will contain lots of bugs in it, but will be more or less usable. Cyanogen ROM got installed with no issues, and it was running pretty fast. The first and the major functionality that I expect from a phone is being capable of holding and managing contacts. I was really upset with the way Android was dealing with contacts, it had a single text field for the first, middle, and second names in the beginning. Fortunately that has changed starting with Android 2.0. The contacts API changed drastically, deprecating lots of classes and functions. The bad thing about it is that your program written for Android prior to versiob 2.0 will just fail to work on any new device. And even more, to make your programs compatible between =2.0 the code will resemble the one that was used by JavaScript devs to distinguish between IE and NN, but that was quite some years ago, and I hoped that this approach to code would have gone for good. The even worst thing is that Google seems to have forgotten to update (or had just dropped the ball on) documentation – their developers guide still instructs you to use deprecated Contacts API (People for one). If you follow the guide you’ll receive a faulty application that would produce exceptions on any Android device on the market. And that’s exactly what had happened to my application that I used to import contacts from a file found on an SD card when I tried to run it – exceptions… But, after a day of devastation I suddenly found out that Google started to provide exactly the same functionality out of the box beginning with Android 2.0! Now you can finally import contacts from vCard files placed on an SD card. To wrap up – Android is becoming usable. Once they catch up with Apple with video calls (yes, I still miss video calls that I was able to do on my Nokia 5 years ago!) I will start to like Android.