Worth heading over to Slashgear to see Vincent Nguyen like a kid in a toyshop with a pre-release Android phone from Qualcomm. The videos are a little frustrating as he doesn’t always ask the questions or tap the menus I’d like to see. For example when the guy is about to show him the ‘double tap to zoom’ function but he asks to make a phone call instead. However, it is a great scoop so congrats to them and to androidcommunity.com .
What comes across on this particular device is that Android is running really quickly on a hi-res screen. On the less positive side, the interface doesn’t seem that intuitive. I know that Android is the underlying platform and therefore is not the phone and is not the interface either. However, it does still reflect badly on the prospects for the interface on the first phones.
Where the iPhone excels is by being so simple that your granny could use it. I don’t wish to pre-judge how others may have designed their interface for Android but I hope that it is more simple than what is shown here. It is particularly surprising that the browser came across as complicated given that it is based on the almost over-simplistic Google Chrome.
P.S. Demo shows Google Gears running on the Android browser so that’s yet more proof that the web is full of more false rumours than a BBC documentary. I previously reported there would be no Google Gears on early versions, I was clearly wrong (oh, the shame).
