Android Impressions – HTC Tattoo, Samsung Galaxy, Motorola Droid

Last Monday, I went to the Android Developer Lab event in Mountain View where Google invited Android developers to test out their apps on several Android devices.

I’d only tested my apps on a G1, so I was anxious to test these phones out.  Especially since I get numerous complaints about Force Closes on other phones which I’m unable to reproduce on my device.  At least with my iPhone apps, I can get Crash Reports through iTunes, so I have a better clue what’s going on with those crashes.

Here are the phones they made available for us (and the OS version):
Motorola Droid (Android 2.0)
HTC Hero (Android 1.5)
LG ??? (Android 1.5) [I guess the name wasn't catchy enough for me to remember]
HTC Hero (Android 1.5)
HTC Tattoo (Android 1.6)
Samsung Galaxy (Android 1.5)

I only had time to test 3 phones, but here are my impressions.

HTC Tattoo
The first phone I check out was the HTC Tattoo.  It’s a nice small phone, but I don’t know if the choice to go with QVGA (240×320) was worth it.  This phone caused the most buzz around the room, but not for good reasons.  Many people were complaining how their apps looked on the Tattoo.

I admit that I’ve optimized my apps for HVGA(320×480), and made many UI decisions based on this.  My biggest problem on the Tattoo is that I have 4 buttons along the bottom of my screen, which doesn’t fit the Tattoo at all.  The far right button ends up just getting cutoff.  Plus the buttons look really large and fuzzy, kind of embarrassing.

There are solutions to this that require some effort, so I decided to punt and look at other devices.  To be honest, unless I see that HTC is selling tons of these phones, I’m not sure it’s worth the effort to make it work.

Plus, my apps don’t even show up in the Android Market on the HTC Tattoo.  My apps don’t explicitly state in the manifest that they’ll display correctly at QVGA, so they don’t show up in the Tattoo Market.  If people were downloading my apps on a Tattoo and getting a bad user experience, I’d look into fixing this, but I’m going make this device a low priority unless sales are outstanding.

Another weird oddity from a user perspective:  I had problems using this touchscreen.  Whenever I tried to scroll, it would select what I was touching.  I didn’t spend a lot of time investigating this, but it’s something I didn’t encounter on any other Android devices or the iPhone or the Pre.

Samsung Galaxy
I was very impressed with this phone.  It might be my favorite Android phone if not for the Droid.  No complaints about this phone from a developer perspective. (probably because it’s running Android 1.5 and has a normal 320×480 display).

The biggest problem with this phone is that it looks like a toy next to the Droid.

Motorola Droid
The Droid lives up to the hype!  If I were on Verizon I would get one immediately.  The screen is massive and beautiful.

When I first used it, it reminded me more of a tablet or computer than a phone.  Partially because the edges remind me more of a picture frame than the sleek, slimming iPhone style edges.

The Droid’s resolution (854×480) didn’t cause too many problems.  The biggest problem with my apps was that my fonts were tiny and unreadable.  This was an easy fix, though.  I changed my fonts from Points (ex: 10pt) to Scale-independent Pixels (16sp), and things were great on the droid and other devices.

Unfortunately that was all I was able to test since there were limited numbers of each phone and waiting lists.