Android Issues

Some of this might well be rendered obsolete by the 1.6 update I’ve just received.

GMail Client
No bottom- or inline-posting, only top-posting. And, while you’re at it, there’s no way to read the quoted text while replying.
You have to read to the bottom of the email to get to the reply button, which is an odd move from someone who promotes top-posting. It’s not even in the Menu.
There’s no way of editing Labels or Filters.

POP/IMAP Client
This is very different to the GMail one, I don’t know why.
It also doesn’t honour read/unread flags in IMAP folders, and I continually get notifications that I’ve got new mail that arrived six months ago.

Calendar
To set the date in the calendar you have three boxes, year, month and date ((The order is configurable)) which are adjusted by either entering in the date, or a + and – button on each. This is fine when you don’t go over a month boundary, at which point it gets confusing. Since nearly everything I plan is for ‘next wednesday’ or so, about one in four of my appointments require more thinking than I think they should.
There’s no way to add calendars that are not already available to the www version of your calendar.

Google Docs
Editing documents is possible, but creating for some reason isn’t. Also, no control over labels.
As in Mail and Calendar, there are web versions of these optimised for the Android screen, but they’re similarly crippled.

Contacts
When viewing the contact, everything that has a number has a ‘call’ and a ‘text’ option, which fills the screen with never-used options.

SMS
When entering a name into the To: field, the first suggestion is as if you were writing a word with a keypad. For example, entering ‘mum’, the first option is ‘686’
Once you’ve scrolled past the useless entry and selected the one you want, the field is populated with name . Which is only an issue if you want send a message to more than about ten people, since you run out of characters in that field.
Enter is send. This is not a problem, but I _never_ remember and send multiple messages when I mean send.

Google Maps
When selecting start and end points for directions, recently chosen points are arranged alphabetically, not in the order in which you used them. And they’re not named by how you searched for them, but by what Google calls them.

Everything’s Massive
Google took a very straightforward approach to lists and fingers – make the buttons huge. I’d like more than two options per screen, though, and I think varying the length of the buttons would be a better approach.


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