TechiePundit: Google Nexus S Complaints And Suggestions

2011 February 05 Saturday

Google Nexus S Complaints And Suggestions

I started using a Google Nexus S (albeit with AT&T 2G as I wait for my contract to expire) a few weeks ago. It has been a gradual learning process to make it become more useful to me. I am stepping up from a Blackberry Bold. Here are some of my observations from using the Google Nexus S with Android 2.3:

Connectivity:

Sometimes it looses data networking access so persistently that I have to cycle power to get it to do AT&T 2G networking again.
It gets confused if two wireless access points have the same SSID (or close enough, one was NETGEAR and the other Netgear). I think it tries to connect to the weaker access point and fails. Strangely, when it gives me the stronger one listed I click on that one to connect to and yet it still failed. To solve this problem. I renamed my own access point and got far more reliable connections. My Win 7 laptop was smarter and always connected to the right access point in spite of the SSID naming conflict. Note that lots of people do not give their home wireless router a unique name. So Android ought to get smarter about handling this. Remember the Mac address? Or why not just try the stronger signal access point first? I'm not sure how wireless connections are negotiated.
Wireless 802.11g access is not reliable on wake-up of the device. Even after giving myself a unique SSID I still find the phone does not always connect to the access point. I have to turn off and on wireless to get it to work. Most times it works fine though. The phone is close to the access point when I am having problems.
Not using 802.11 to suck down big files while recharging? When the phone is plugged in and recharging and it goes into lower power mode (at least the screen darkens) when I wake it up the WiFi icon is not visible for several seconds. So then has it shut down WiFi and reverted to using 2G/3G while recharging? I happen to have selected a couple of Android Market apps to download. I would think it could make short work of downloading them while recharging if it continued to use WiFi. When it is plugged in it has lots of juice. So why not do the heavier energy user task of running WiFi and get big files during that period?

Bandwidth usage strategies:

Need the ability to set refresh rates of apps based on type of current connection. It ought to be possible to set refresh rates for GMail and the main weather/news app based on whether you have 802.11, 2G, 3G. So, for example, if on 802.11 do updates more often. Also, be able to set to prefetch articles only on 802.11. Optionally adopt lower data usage strategies when people are more likely to be paying per amount of data fetched.
When looking at news stories be able to click over on the right on a button per story to say to prefetch it. Story fetches take so long that I'm disinclined to read much on the phone.
Be able to zoom in to start reading a news article while still downloading a page. When downloading news stories the browser makes the slow download time (it will have the text but still be downloading adverts and images) even more irritating by not allowing the tap to show the news column zoomed to fit the screen. Surely there must be a way to handle this more smartly.

Multi-tasking:

I find the UI for managing multi-tasking to be baffling. Why isn't the "Windows" icon for seeing the list of app windows accessible in more places? It appears to only be for having multiple web pages open. I am left wondering: Android doesn't support multi-tasking?
The 5 desktops are similarly baffling. Are they just for putting more icons on desktops? They seem like natural places to have different apps open.
I'd like to be able to start apps from the desktop for them to go do their things in the background and then add themselves to the top bar to indicate they ready to be used. So, for example, one could tell GMail to go get the latest mail, the New York Times front page to load, and a few other things to happen. Then one could start doing whichever one of them is first ready.

Google GMail app:

Blackberry GMail updating works better. With the Blackberry GMail app when you have new mail the desktop icon gets a different color and it buzzes. The desktop GMail icon on the Nexus S provides no indication that I've seen that it has new mail. Why such a big step back? Is the GMail app not running when you are not in it?
GMail does not seem to update email in the background or even in the foreground reliably. It will even show a number of unread emails greater than 0 and yet not show the non-read entries. I've had problems getting it to show the entries even after hitting Refresh. I am still playing with this to see what the pattern is. Seems slow even on home WiFi.

Google Books:

Why show the "1 of 368" at the bottom of a page with no way to get rid of it so that it overlaps with text on the page? I found going to Flowing Text got rid of it. But to read the book in the original page image form I can not see how to get rid of the bottom info pop-up bar. Update: A single tap on the top bar will get rid of the top and bottom bars so the whole page can be seen. But I have yet to figure out the pattern of when those bars will pop up. Tilting the phone might do it? Not clear.
Dismissing the top (book title) and bottom (page range) bars is too hard to do, especially since I haven't yet figured out what causes them to pop up in the first place. Single taps on the top area to get rid of the book title at the top and page range at the bottom have to be very precisely put in that area. One needs to use the small edge of a finger. If the area was bigger in the first place (the document ceases to be readable when it is there, so why not?) it would be easier to dismiss it.
Too easy to lose your place in a book: It is too easy for the book reader to pop up the bottom (page range) and top regions when you do not expect it and then for you to tap on the bottom area and suddenly be half the book away from where you were. If you do not know the page number of where you were it is time-consuming to find your way back to it.
It ought to be possible to put the reader in to a mode where it accepts only 3 commands: next page, previous page, menu of options. That way it would become harder to suddenly be somewhere you do not want to be or for the zoom to change unexpectedly.
Jane Austen's Emma in Google Books has mistakes in its text when you go into the Flowing Text form that should be cleaned up. One can still read it. But surely enough free versions exist to allow easy comparison to identify mistakes? I realize this isn't the fault of the Android developers.
The book reader app ought to have a setting in it for keeping the screen lit longer when it has focus. If you do not speed read you run the risk of the light going out on you.

Software updates:

The biggest advantage of the Nexus S over any other Android phones is that Google keeps it up to date with the latest OS and application revs. I've already been notified ohttp://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s25crush41&r=11f software updates from Google once after less than a month of usage. The biggest problem I see in the Android ecosystem is untimely updating of the phone software. The various phone makers and cell phone carriers do not release fixes in a timely manner. As security hole exploitation becomes a problem on smart phones this is going to become an even greater problem.
It would be useful if Android had an alerting system for third party app updates.

Bottom line on the critique: Even at 2.3 Android is not as mature as I hoped for. On the other hand, many of the less optimal aspects strike me as fairly easy to fix. I hope I am not alone in my sense of what is deficient about this operating environment.

Posted by Randall Parker at February 05, 2011 07:34 PM

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