[General Topics] eaglesteve:
I can see that you really like Android. To me, it is okay to be enthusiastic with the phone. The only things I like to see from you are:

- Be prepared to also see other's viewpoint without getting emotional or getting upset.

- Refrain from attacking another person, just try to state any alternative views as objectively as possible. If both cannot agree, then agree to disagree and move on. Do not keep harping on the same point when the other person refuse to back off. Stating your viewpoint once is enough. Not replying to troll does not mean he is right.

Let me offer an alternative view on this. I'm familar with phones with many button before so I'd draw on some of my experience with it also.

First, I personally think that the green and red phone buttons unnecessary curse. While they lets me press the green button to dial directly, it also unfortunately let me accidentally touch that button to dial unintentionally in my pocket. I used to have people calling me back asking why I called them, and found my phone bill higher than it needs be as a result. Similarly, the red button sometimes terminates the call while I was trying it fish the phone out of my pocket. I thought the slide to answer design is the best way to prevent the problem, and the sliding should be horizontal to prevent unintentional actions from being registered while coming out of the pocket.

Second, regarding the back button, I undersand that it lets you go directly to the previous application without bringing up the most recently used program list. This is the way I see it:

Android: You may use the back button to go the previous application. Going to the next application is not supported by one click/touch operation.

iPhone: Using Circuiutous, you may use any of the 19 methods mentioned above to go to the next and previous application. Some people find it extremely intuitive to swipe the taskbar left and right to go to next or previous application, similar to the way pictures are changed. You could of course also use hardware button if that's what you prefer.

Third, the menu button. This is closest to the home button in iPhone. The difference is iPhone's home button is concave whereas in non-iPhone they protrude out. The cancave design is IMO better in that you will never be able to accidentally touch it. Also, iPhone's home button could produce three different actions: double press, press and hold, and single press.

Fourth, with an application called Activator in iPhone, you may customise the action of the other hardware button as well, such as the power button double press, power button press and hold. Even the volume rocker could be customized for specialised used for people who like such design. There is for example volume down then up, and volume up then down.

While I do not in anyway discount that many would find it useful to have so many buttons, I know many iPhone users who would be disappointed to have even one more button appearing. Many of them feel that it is the most perfect design.

For me, I do think there would be a great advantage to have a button for voice command, although after trying it out since many many years ago, I'm yet to find the voice recognition software capable of recognising my accent.:o So perhaps even that I have to pass, so as to prevent accidental pop up of voice recognition window.

Edit: with JB iphone, it is possible to assign one of the buttons (e.g., click and hold the power button) to automatically fire up Vlingo (described in the last part of this post) to do voice command.

iPhone has a mute switch. I wish it has a screen rotation lock like in iPad. I hope to see that in iPhone HD.

My experience with HTC's music player was only in the winmo environment and I didn't like it a bit. Music pausing without explanation. Video player was sluggish and often froze my device (my last winmo was an HTC HD). How is it like in the Android platform exactly? Could you use it to play the video in the video test (see post 14) and report the result please?

In practice, it is not possible to swap the SDHC card in order to say expand the music and video collection on the phone, once applications are installed in it. Or am I wrong? I wasn't able to do that with my winmo device at least.

I think iPhone generally beats Android hands down in the graphic department.

Yes, Android has an edge for now in processor speed, until iPhone HD is released this June anyway.

I understand that there are not one but many market places. Is there one for each vendor's hardware? One for each country?

Are the same sets of applications appearing on them all, with the same version number for the applications?

If I change phone, say from Samsung Galaxy to HTC Supersonic, do I need to buy from a different market place? Would the ones that I had already paid for be free?

If I crash my phone, will the market place tell me which applications I have already purchased for re-downloading? Or I have to keep a manual record of my purchase? Is there a way to just click one button to have everything re-installed after recovering from a crash?

I seem to read somewhere that it is not the case, so please correct me if I'm wrong. I understand that Hero did'nt get 2.1 the moment it was released but only a year later, is this true?

Is there no issue of fragmentation arising from OEM's customization of Android specifically for that handset (such as having sense UI on the Hero running an older version of Android),hence the only way to upgrade to the newer firmware is to redo the sense UI for Hero first. And since some vendors can't bother with doing such update or place it on a very low priority, you may miss some upgrades, or get them very late?

Upgrade of firmware is probably best done not over the air IMO, but have the firmware stored on the PC. In case we need to restore the firmware, there is no need to re-download. Also, 3G quota is expensive in many parts of the world anyway for such activities, so for me at least, I would not see it as a desireable feature. Other's view will be respected of course.

Having exactly the same UI layout across all applications is actually a plus, not a minus. Having said that, there are some applications which failed to follow the mainstream convention of placing the back button on the top left of the screen. I hate those applications because my finger has been trained to go there to back up one level automatically. Fortunately, such offending applications are on a small minority.

The actual UI discussion for applications should cover much more than this. I would like to cover that under the browser section to give you some flavour of the possibility in UI.

In addition to gesture control, I think elements of UI also includes things such as

- quality of onscreen keyboard

- Task switching

- pinch and spread usage

- layout of controls

- size and colors of controls

- size and fonts of text

- ease of toggles (e.g., to enable or disable orientation, wifi, bluetooth, location services, etc)

- speech input

- support for visually impaired (and may include abiltiy to speak out the control for the visually impaired, zooming in and out the screen, display in black and white, and ability do speak out the text for the visually impaired)

- Screen sensitivity and accuracy

- Screen resolution and size

- Consistency in way things are done.e.g., in cut and paste, in zooming in and out, in method of backing up to the higher level , etc

- Smoothness of operation and consistency of response time

- efficiency and number of steps needed to perform a task.

Please see my reply in my previous post (one post ago)

Fully agreed. While iPhone has the ability to put all the key info on the lockscreen, Android does beat iPhone hands down here. This is one of the areas that some iPhone users feel strong about when they discuss the top wish list for future firmware.

Actually Safari and Opera are not the only application for web browsing. Also, Opera is nowhere near as good as hyped. It was heavily downloaded, but I doubt many people uses it after trying it out, except when WIFI and 3G aren't available. This is because iPhone users are spoilt for choice when come to web browsing, and Safari is certainly not the best choice. There are probably close to 50 different web browsers that I've tried. A few of them earned their place on my springboard, and my most preferred one depends on the features introduced by the application's update. Competition is fierce there. For me, the best browsing application at the moment is the Atomic Web Browser. Speaking of efficient and innovative UI design, this is one that illustrates it best for iPhone. Just to mention the key features here using MY setup (users could customize it differently to suit their personality and preference):

- Three finger touch to show search box (website address, and search).

- Automatically go to full screen mode after webpage is displayed. True full screen, with no taskbar to occupy precious screen space.

- Ability to open linke in background. That's how I browse a forum such as this. I open all the thread with new post first. By the time I finish all my selection, almost all web page loading were already fully done.

- Two finger swipe left or right to move from tab to tab. Therefore there is ZERO time wasted waiting for the loading of those webpages

- Two finger swipe down to close a tab, and make the next tab appear. This is a much better way then going back, and click the new link.

- Two finger up to go the top of page. I can also go to any part of the webpage by using Quickscroll without swiping.

- On the full screen, semi transparent buttons for forward, backward, action (add webpage, save webpage), refresh, open favourites, show/hide tabs, go to setting.

- Allows privacy browing.

- Two touch to lock or unlock screen rotation

- Two touch to increase/decrease font sizes

- Start up screen could be home, last page viewed, last sessions (all opened tabs) or blank.

- Able to import bookmark from the PC browsers. Bookmark folders/subfolders can be created.

- Option to block all adds, and edit the ad blocks filter yourself to include new ones

- Customizable buttons to appear for full screen.

- Customizable gesture navigation.

- Color and theme

- Choose your own search engine other than google, such as Yahoo, Amazon, Bing, Ebay, Wikipedia, and Youtube. It also lets you find and add new search engine that you want.

- Identify itself as Safari desktop, mobile safari,firefox 3, internet explorer 6/7/8, or wap device.

- Download files, pictures,

- Find within page

- Copy and paste text and pictures.

- Able to scroll the text within the text entry box such as what we have on this forum when we make a post. This is done with two finger swipe up or down within the text box.

etc

Could you please comprehensively list what could be search?

In OS 4.0, the search could include:

- Web search (new in OS 4.0)

- Wikipedia search (new in OS 4.0)

- Search for contact name

- Search for applications installed on the phone

- Search for music's name, artist, or album name

- Search for podcast

- search for video

- search for audiobooks

- search for notes name and within notes.

- search for mails and text within the mails

- search for calendar items

I don't use it because I don't speak with American accent, so this is a problem area.

However, for those with better accent than I have, voice search and text entry are possible for some applications. Vlingo is one of the applications that lets you press a big button and do twitter update, do googleBing web search, compose emails, compose SMS text, perform facebook updates, make calls, find POI on google maps, all without using keyboard. If you wish, you could assign Vlingo to say the sleep button, so that double press would show directly let you press that big button on the screen to perform those voice command.

Both can do it. It just means that if you want to write a program for yourself without Apple's approval, you could do so. It also means that users could get applications outside the official application store.