Android Time

I bought an Android Tablet last spring and have been using it for several months now. It's been interesting to have another point of comparison with other kinds of computing devices (Macbook, Ubuntu Netbook, and iPhone). Today I discovered an interesting deficit: In Android you can neither set the time accurately nor enable software to do it for you. They claim this is a security issue, because they don't want userland processes mucking about with the time. But that just goes to show you that time is important. One of the things I learned early on about unix system administration is that you really want the time on all of your machines set to the same standard and to be within a second of one another. Not only so that you can correlate events across log files, but also so that networked file share timestamps make sense and security protocols work correctly. You can't do that in Android -- unless you root the device.

In most other respects, however, I've found Android to be satisfactory. The interface is less consistent than the iPhone and the fact that the "back" button is often in the lower left, rather than upper left like on the iPhone, is often confusing when I switch back and forth.

The particular tablet I got, the Samsung Tab 2 7.0, has also been good. The battery life is reasonable, the screen is good, and the performance is generally snappy. I've been disappointed in one aspect, though. I had wanted was to view PDFs of magazine pages so that I could read them in full-page mode, but the screen is too small and too low-res for that. I had quit reading Esperanto publications on paper, but the ones I was interested in were only available in PDF, which I find particularly unfortunate on a computer. I had thought with a tablet, I might start reading them again, but it hasn't helped. I was pleasantly surprised to get a copy of the Drupal special edition of LinuxJournal in Mobi format (which is what I've been using for books). That appears to be very readable and makes me want to subscribe.

As an e-reader, I find the tablet to be extremely satisfactory -- generally better than a paper-back book. Lighting conditions are mostly irrelevant and the text is uniformly clear and crisp. I've been using the Kindle app. I haven't bought any kindle books, however, because they seem overpriced. I did buy a whole bunch of Baen E-Books, that were priced at $6/book and DRM free. That seems entirely reasonable to me. There is a kindle book I'd like at Amazon that I have wanted to get for a while, but they want $10 for it. That seems too much for a digital copy of a book that's available for $6 in paperback new or $2.31 used. If I thought the author would get the difference, I might spring for it. But I suspect the publisher will get the lion's share of the profit.

I have to admit, however, that the size doesn't make the tablet that much more useful than the iPhone. Yes, it's nice to be able to see pictures and things a bit larger. But the lack of a 3G connection means that there are a lot of places where the tablet isn't usable. And the Facebook app doesn't know how to use the larger screen real-estate effectively. Twitter messages are short enough that they aren't really helped by the larger screen either. And the tablet hurts a lot more than the iPhone when you drop it on your face in bed.

I am pleased to find that that there is a satisfactory alternative to the iPhone. I don't plan to buy another iPhone, unless Apple makes a radical change in direction (which seems unlikely, as they're raking in money hand-over-fist). Indeed, given their current direction, I currently think it unlikely I'll buy anything from Apple ever again.