The other side of the moon

Just got a Nexus 4. Started it up, and tried to sign in to my gmail account. I have two-factor auth set up for extra security, and you'd expect a google device to work well with google auth, but here's a list of bugs I've found within minutes of opening the package.

1. It first asks you to sign in to your gmail account. Type in your username and password.
2. It then tells you you need to sign in on the web to continue, so it opens the browser for you to sign in.
3. Focus is on the username field, but there's no keyboard available. You need to tap on the username field (which already has focus) to bring up the keyboard. This is counter-intuitive.
4. Type in your username and password and submit. It then takes you to the 2FA page (at least in my case) where you enter your security code.
5. Again, tap on the field to bring up the keyboard. This field is a numeric field, but the keyboard starts out in alphabetic mode. This is probably a bug with all mobile devices, but you'd think that something this new would have fixed it.
6. Type in the code, and now try to click on the checkbox that says "Remember this device". Except the keyboard goes away and you now end up clicking a link that explains what 2FA is.
7. Ok, cool, I just want to go back and hit submit... except there's no back button on this browser. There's no toolbar that normally pops up at the bottom of the browser. No, this is a special browser that does not allow you to navigate through the browser history. FAIL.
8. The only way forward is to shut down the phone and then start it up again. Except at this point you start from scratch, including selecting your language.

A few other things I've noticed...

• The timezone by default appears to be UTC. You'd think that it'd localise this based on my location, which it knows and is configured to use.
• If a transient alert message pops up, and you try to tap on it, you'll actually tap on the item below the message.
• The icons are a bit too small for someone with normal sized fingers like me. It's easy to tap on the wrong item.
• The position of the power button and volume control buttons means that when you press the power button with your thumb, your forefinger will inadvertently hit the volume control (or vice-versa). This happens because of Newton's third law of motion. Google/LG engineers should know this since it's a 300 year old basic law of motion.
• You cannot move a widget from one screen to another by dragging it. You have to remove it from the old screen and then go through the process of adding and configuring it again for the new screen.
• When you select punctuation on the keyboard, entering an apostrophe should switch back to alphabetic mode. It doesn't.
• It just reboots at times.

Will post more as I use it.

I got an HTC Freestyle from AT&T today. It was free, so I can't complain about the price, however it's a bit of a downgrade from my E71. First, what I like about it.

It has a decently sized touchscreen, and the Twitter+Facebook app is pretty decent. The browser is WebKit based and handles CSS @media queries correctly. It even switches correctly when you rotate, which the iPhone gets wrong.

On the downside though, rotating from portrait to landscape is not automatic. You need two clicks to tell the browser that you've rotated. No accelerometer in this phone. Which brings us to the things I don't like about it.

No GMail and GMaps apps for it. Since the primary reason I went in for a smartphone was to check my email and use the GPS while I'm on the road, this makes the phone a complete non-starter. The sales rep at AT&T told me that it was an Android device, but once I got it home and looked it up, it turns out that that isn't true. It runs something called Brew MP.

Transferring contacts from my older phone is clumsy, but doable. The main problem here is that I need to use the SIM card to transfer contacts and it just doesn't have enough space for all my contacts.

I could set my ringtone on the E71 to any mp3 file that I had access to. On the HTC Freestyle, it's limited to files under 300KB. Seriously. Kilobytes. What is this? The 80's? My current ring tone on my 3 year old Nokia is 6.4MB.

After using the real keyboard on the E71, the onscreen keyboard on this device is extremely clumsy to use. I've made mistakes on every occasion that I've needed to use the keyboard. I even make mistakes trying to hit the backspace key. I guess I'll get used to this eventually, however one thing to note is that the E71 does far more with just one key than this phone can do with its keyboard. The main problem is the number of times your hands/fingers need to move in order to type or even to just select menu items.

No wifi. 'Nuff said.

Ok, so that's it for the "Smart" part of the phone. Now to the phone part.

I tried to make a call when I got out of the AT&T store. The call dropped after 3 seconds. Remember, this is right outside the AT&T store. All the phones inside the store had decent signal strength. I thought it may have been due to the battery having almost no charge (since it was a new phone), so took it home and charged it up, but it hasn't changed. On 8 out of 9 calls that I've made so far I've been unable to hear what the other party says though they can hear me.

Switching on the speakerphone requires two clicks after the call connects. On the E71 it was one click while the phone was ringing. This makes a big difference because the person at the other end has no idea what's happening while you're switching on the speakerphone. It also makes it impossible to answer the phone in speaker mode while driving.

The speakerphone sound quality is also pretty bad. It's not clear when soft, and starts jarring when loud. There doesn't seem to be an optimum volume setting for it.

All in all, this is not a phone I'd pay for.