What Google Android Dev Phone could learn from Windows Mobile

Fed-Ex delivered the unlocked Google Dev phone 4 hours before my flight to New Zealand was about to leave. Perfect timing, I pulled it out of the generic white box, plugged it into the charger, fired it up, glanced at the not-helpful included instruction sheet, and waited.

The cool looking Android logo came up on the bright display, and then some instructions about needing a data card and signing into a Google account.

No worries, we had some data (SIM) cards in our lab, I toss in an AT&T 3G card, fired the device up again, it showed good signal strength, I typed in my google info, and waited… After a minute or so I get a generic message that it couldn’t connect with the Google servers and maybe the SIM card didn’t support data, and that I should contact some non-specified customer support (I’m para-phrasing the message from memory).

I try other SIM cards which were working perfectly on Windows Mobile devices, still no luck.

To cut a long story short I take the Google phone to NZ, confident that I can get it to work on a non-T-Mobile network (Vodaphone), alas I was wrong. It wasn’t until I got back from my trip that I found that simply hitting the menu button during start up provided a list of editable APN’s, of which AT&T was not listed. I add the appropriate data (Google Groups has information on setting this APN), and magically everything works.

So Google, a few suggestions that Microsoft gets right with Windows Mobile.

1. Don’t treat the Android Dev device like a phone with iPhone-like activation and control. Treat it as a mobile computer. Let the user have the flexibility to configure and deploy as desired.
2. Don’t tie a device to a Google/user account. Many of the enterprise mobility deployments we see, the device is not used for email/calendar, but rather some type of field service application, whereas the device is not necessarily tied to any specific user.
3. Let me choose what data/network connection I want to use on my unlocked mobile computer, many enterprises will run their device populations on multiple networks based on regional availability, some may be WiFi only.
4. Lastly, include a “How to set up an APN” with the dev phone in the shipping package, with settings to common APN’s, or at least a link where you have that info. This will greatly improve the initial experience.

With all that said, I think the Android user interface is pretty impressive given the youth of this product. We look forward to seeing more of these devices out in the field and definitely plan on adding support to this product within our CloudSync management platform.