The Mobile Ping

Living with Android is a feature where we focus on what sets Android apart from the other guys

-marvel at my lame photoshop skillz

For our first Living with Android post, I wanted to start by talking about what may become Android’s greatest strength; the ability to download alternative applications to Google’s built-in apps. The main reason Android got all of geek-dom supremely excited was it’s Open-Source nature. Meaning all parts of the phone will be open and accessible to any developers. If you don’t like how contacts are managed or you want more workspaces for your home screen, not a problem, either write you own version to your liking or peruse the Android Market for an alternative that seems to hit the points you were looking for. At the end of the day Android isn’t quite as open as originally intended, but it’s still miles beyond any of the competition.

With most, if not all other mobile phone platforms, the default applications for SMS or E-Mail or even the Phone are locked so that they cannot be replaced by a third party application, and in some cases (like the iPhone) you’re barely able to even really interact with any of the data within those default applications. This is one part of Android that really sets it apart. When you start to dive into the Android Market you’ll notice different Address Book applications, different SMS applications and even some different web browsers. Personally I’m very happy with most of the Google built applications, but they don’t do some things that some users may need. Like for instance, if you are using a “With Google” branded Android phone there is no built in Microsoft Exchange support, however it’s not too difficult to find a contact managing application that allows for Exchange support. Similarly there’s no built in support for desktop synchronization with Outlook, yup, there’s an app for that.

This could be viewed as a bad thing for some people. How could I consider Android a great smart phone platform if it doesn’t have support for such ubiquitous business applications? Well, how about you look at Microsoft’s own Desktop operating system, which does not include Outlook or Exchange support out of the box. Google’s objective is to create a promising and powerful open sourced mobile operating system. Furthermore they decided to bundle it with very powerful applications that work in tandem with the platforms they know best, their own software. With Android you don’t have to wait for Google to integrate Exchange support like you did with Apple and their iPhone. Instead you maybe had to wait a few months until a reliable application was released in the Market. And that’s what it’s all about; options and choices put into the users hands.

I would like to now tell a quick story about how the alternative applications available to Android have benefited me. There is a great SNES emulator available on Android Market called SNesoid (something you would never see in the App Store). I loaded a few roms onto my SD card before going to work for the day, but around the time of my lunch break I realized that I had forgot one. So I browsed around and found a rom of a game (I actually do own) and tried to download it. Unfortunately the file was zipped, and Chrome told me that the phone didn’t support that file format. Lame, I thought. But then I remembered there was another browser on the market called Steel. I promptly downloaded the app, copy and pasted the URL from Chrome into Steel and was allowed to download the zip file. I was then able to download an application called AndroZIP to unzip the file, and move it into my Rom folder on my SD card. And that’s the thing about Android that I love. If at first you can’t do something, there’s probably an alternative way to go about it that will let you get done what you want to get done. It’s the most like a computer any smart phone has been.

Obviously Android is much more open than any other platform on the market, but it doesn’t go as far as a fresh install of Debian or Slackware. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, this is ultimately a cell phone. You’re not able to build the device yourself using any hardware and form factor that you’d like (well, you can load Android onto x86 devices among other things, but I haven’t seen any homebrew phones yet), you’re using a device built to maintain a certain level of user friendliness and reliability. If I could break Android as easily as I could break a Linux install (or even a Windows install really) I don’t think I’d be quite as in love with it as I am. I’m extremely satisfied with the degree of openness allowed by the operating system, and now that the Native Developer Kit is coming out we can only see the level of openness and quality of applications increasing.