Coming to grips with Android: staying alert
The HTC Dream smartphone has a lot of rough edges, but Adam Turner is impressed with Android's notification system.
In this age of information overload, I'm always looking for more effective ways to process information so I can focus on what's important.
An efficient pop-up system is vital so I can quickly assess email, RSS and calendar alerts without taking the focus away from what I'm working on. Google's Android smartphone operating system does a very good job of applying this concept to a mobile phone.
Rather than use pop-ups, Android features a pull-down notification panel. Across the top of the desktop is a notification bar, which appears on almost every screen in Android's interface.
The notification bar offers information such as battery life and signal strength, as well as icons when a new email, voicemail or SMS arrives, or there's a calendar alert or alarm. What's really useful is that you can tap the notification bar and drag it down with your finger to reveal a notification preview panel.
The pull-down preview panel comes down over the top of whatever you're doing, so you can quickly check the alert without having to get out of the application you're in.
Tapping on an alert launches that application, after which you can use the the Back button to return to the application you were previously using.
Unfortunately the pull-down notification panel doesn't work when you're in a phone call. Like the iPhone, you can switch to speaker phone, press the Home button and then launch an application while you're still on a call.
The notification pull-down preview panel offers a fair amount of information, such as the contents of an SMS and the subject of a calendar appointment.
As for email notifications, you're only told how many unread emails you have for each account. This is enough to know if an email is personal for work, but it would be far more useful to know the sender, if not the subject and a preview of the contents.
The pull-down preview panel is a great foundation to build on, and hopefully third-party developers will be able to flesh out its features.
While Android's notification system is impressive, it's of little use to you when the phone is locked and the screen is blank. Incoming messages or calendar alerts cause the phone to beep and a tiny red light to flash, but nothing pops up on the screen.
This is one of the iPhone's great features - when you get an SMS or calendar alert you can slip the phone out of your pocket and see at a glance what's going on.
The screen goes back to sleep after a few seconds, but pressing the Home button calls up the screen saver with the new message visible. Unfortunately this doesn't apply to incoming emails.
Even when you press the HTC Dream's Menu button to wake the screen, you still can't view the alert or access the pull-down preview panel until you press Menu again to unlock the screen.
If it's a calendar alert you'll now see it superimposed over the desktop, but if it's a communications-based alert you need to pull down the preview panel window. It's a lot of work for something the iPhone will show you at a glance.
When an alert is triggered, Android should wake the screen and display the pull-down notification window - with the option to press Menu to unlock the screen and keep looking at the list of notifications.
A little more information about an incoming emails would be handy. Actually, I'd like to see more info on the iPhone as well, as when a push email comes in there's no onscreen notification and it's frustrating when you want to know at a glance if it's something important.
Android and the iPhone both have strengths and weaknesses when it comes to their notification systems.
Thankfully Android is open source, so Google is less likely than Apple to dictate what app developers can and can't do. As such, Android's notification system could evolve into something amazing.
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