Basic OS Functions

Been a bit busy and also feeling quite poo this week, hence the delay for more musings!

The time spent feeling poo has really given me the time to check the phone over and really get to grips with some of it finer and not-so-fine points. All in the name or research and honesty of course - it is the best policy after all.

Basic Functionality:

I don't get why SE do away with so many of the stock Android apps? One whose absence bothers me a lot is the File Manager. In the old days of Symbian you could Bluetooth music/photos etc and the file would appear in the appointed media folder. In Android, the file is received by the phone and stored in a folder on the SD card called, yes, Bluetooth.

If you're like me and you like to carry music on your phone in case the iPod packs up, it makes sense to have some emergency tracks in the media folder, not lurking in the bluetooth folder. Call me fussy, but I like to keep things organised! Just to clarify, you can access the file you've transferred by dragging down the status bar, however, without something as simple as a File Manager you can't shunt the file about into it's respective folder.

The stock File Manager will enable you to perform some basic housekeeping without messing up important firmware of your phone. Personally I like to use Explorer by SpeedSoftware as this has a built-in ZIP manager, which I found very useful when zipping music on the X10 to be Bluetoothed to the Arc when I was first setting the phone up.

There's some other basic stock apps missing too, or they've removed some usability from the OS to suit some sort of purpose - I don't know why, as it's annoying at times to use the SE 2.3 when the 2.2 custom ROMs I've been using have more tweakable options. Just seems the phone is being dumbed down for the general market - maybe take on board some of things my fellow Test Lab attendee Graham Gilmour was talking about and rather than treat all customers as casual users, perhaps include the option to have a setup for the more discerning user and let us play with the phone more? That way, we can tailor the experience to our needs, rather than what SE think we should have.

Plus I think they should include an option to use long-press of the back key to kill an app - it's in all the custom ROMs. For the amount people complain about the battery life of a smartphone, the ability to kill an app when you've finished using it, rather than letting it continue to draw juice in the background, seems to be a glaring omission.

Also what about when you hold the power button, having the option to reboot, rather than just turning the phone off and waiting 5 seconds, let the phone do all the work!

It's these simple little things that can make all the difference to the user experience.