Plaidophile

So I've spent some time with Android now, via my G2 HTC Magic myTouch 3G, and while comprehensive reviews have probably been done to death, here are the things which stick out at me:

• The screen is very nice.
• The UI takes some getting used to, but so did iPhone's. Android's UI has some slightly goofy conventions, but they're adhered to quite consistently. Having so many face buttons does make things feel a bit "old-fashioned" though.
• Locking and unlocking the phone is a bit odd. Locking one-handed is inconvenient (especially if you use your left hand, as I usually do) since you lock via the 'hangup' button on the right. Unlocking is way too easy - press any button and then "menu," or set a swipe pattern (which I actually prefer since that eliminates the possibility of pocket unlocks)
• The app launcher really needs a way of bulk-moving apps to pages
• Twidroid is widely regarded as the best Twitter client for Android but I kind of dislike a few aspects of it compared to Twitterrific on the iPhone. However, being a well-behaved Android app means that it integrates seamlessly with other well-behaved Android apps (at least in theory, although I haven't tried any of the apps which supposedly try to integrate). What would be a killer thing is if someone wrote a widget which connected to it as a ContentProvider.
• The app store is kind of wonky and it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Search kind of blows on it. There's also an annoying bug where if you press the 'search' button from a view other than the front page, it gives you a search result count but no actual results.
• There are three separate email clients: GMail (for the sync provider), Email (for POP and IMAP), and "Work Email" (for Exchange). IMAP doesn't support push. I refuse to try the Exchange for various reasons. GMail works nice but my GMail account is only for calendars and contact sync and the like (for various reasons I won't get into here). The UI of the built-in IMAP client is a bit cumbersome and there is no way to specify the sending email address from the "compose" screen (like how it used to be in the bad old days of the iPhone). K-9 is an opensource fork of the built-in Email app which fixes some things but other parts feel even shoddier. So email is a work in progress.
• The keyboard kind of sucks. The main problem with it is that the comma and period keys flank the spacebar, making the spacebar tiny (the iPhone puts them on a separate screen, which is okay because they're both less frequent than most letters and periods have the double-space shortcut anyway). I relented and tried Better Keyboard but it only really addresses some minor cosmetic issues, and the alternate layout mechanisms are horribly useless at present (because they rely too much on the corrective dictionary). For all the research into better touch-friendly input mechanisms it's a bit surprising there aren't more researchy keyboards for Android. The keys are also physically smaller due to the smaller (higher DPI) screen of the phone. That said, typing isn't that much worse than the iPhone, but there's a different set of things to get used to.
• Like most music players, there is no shuffle-by-album. Neither the iPhone nor iPod Touch have this either, though (while non-Touch iPods do, last I checked). It's puzzling why this seemingly basic function doesn't exist. The phone came with a few songs pre-loaded but not enough to really mess around with playlist management. I will probably try Salling Media Sync.
• I really like the global notification mechanism (even if things tend to spam it with fine-grained updates when really I just want to see that there are N pending messages from such-and-such app), and the fact that apps don't lose their state when I switch between them.
• Some parts of the OS feel snappy. Other parts feel laggy.
• I won't know how good battery life is for a few days since I'm totally in the "playing with every feature" phase. The battery seems to be draining at about the same rate that the iPhone did during that same period. What's yet to be seen is if they fixed the power drain issues for when the phone isn't active.
• There is an option to turn it into a developer phone, right on the main settings page. I am surprised T-Mobile didn't remove that in their customized firmware.
• It would be nice if the voicemail app were integrated into the phone app instead of being separate. But I get so little voicemail that it's probably not an issue. Chances are the voicemail notification broadcasts an intent and the voicemail app will respond to it anyway (because that's how Android is designed), but I won't know until the next time I get a message.
• The alarm clock app has pretty much the same settings as the iPhone one, but annoyingly enough you can't set custom audio tones (there's a fixed set of 10 or so) and you can't change an active alarm, you have to delete it and make a new one, and the UI for that sucks. I am sure there are third-party replacements.
• Many of the built-in ringtones are actually usable! Amazing! I will still probably be figuring out how to install my own soon though.
• There doesn't seem to be a way to quickly set the phone to silent mode. Annoying. Of course there's a widget for that so it's not a big deal.
• There's no official Yelp app, but there are several third-party ones which use their web APIs, and "Sherpa" seems pretty neat (although it's a bit slow and laggy)

After messing with Salling Media Sync:

• Salling Media Sync makes it just as easy to deal with as an iPod. Highly recommended. I don't think it's worth the $22 that Jonas is asking for registration, though, especially since even the "slow" sync is reasonably fast over USB 2. (Personally, I'd be willing to pay as much as $10 for it.)
• The media player actually has some nice features that are sorely missing from the iPhone/iPod Touch, such as a quick-scroll tab.
• The A2DP support is phenomenal, including remote control functionality (which IIRC the iPhone does not have)
• The web browser feels a bit weird coming from the iPhone, but it's not that it's a worse layout, it's just different
• I'm getting the hang of Twidroid after all. Again, not worse than Twitterrific, just different.
• I really love how the Weatherbug widget puts things in the notification area unobtrusively but readily-available. Of course the home screen widget looks quite nice as well
• I think Android is going to do very well once they polish a few rough spots (mostly improving app store searching and reviews and add some better recommendation services)

Basically, the one thing I really want to see change about Android is the keyboard, or rather I'd like to see more experimental input methods show up. I'm half-tempted to try writing some of my own. Other than that I think Android is an excellent platform with a lot of potential.