Android: things they forgot to tell you

I recently bought a second-hand Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro (big name for a small phone) to replace my SE Z550i (the battery started failing, and I can't get a new one - the best way to make a phone obsolete!). Being a strong proponent of Linux, I was very keen to see what the hype around Android was about. Of course, I'm an SE fan, and loved the idea of the slide out keyboard, so the X10 seemed like an ideal choice! This is my first smartphone, but after two weeks of using this device it seems to me that the Android developers concentrated on the 'smart' and less on the 'phone'. So, in this post, I'll look at a few things that really wasted my time. These are all to do with usability and HCI from an Information Science viewpoint.

The phone has the default SE Android 2.1 installed, so some of my gripes may have been addressed in later releases of Android, but somehow I doubt it.

SMSes
Deleting an SMS Something as simple as deleting a single SMS probably seems trivial to a hardened Android user, but to a newbie, it was very frustrating trying to figure out how to do it, especially as it's so easy with a non-smartphone. Conventional wisdom would say, select the SMS, and then press the menu button on the phone. However, this method yields Delete conversation ie, delete all the SMSes between you and the other party. While this can be good on occasions, you sometimes want to retain the information contained in one of those SMSes.

The trick, I found out totally by accident, was to "long touch" (touch and keep the finger in position) the SMS in question. This brings up a menu with useful options such as forward and delete the SMS.
Changing the notification tone Conventional wisdom would expect the SMS notification tone to be under Settings>Sounds & Display. Settings for changing most other sounds seem to be here, but not the SMS. To change this tone, go to messages and then press the menu button. The settings option on the subsequent menu has an option to change the SMS notification tone (among other things).

Phone book/Contacts
As far as I'm concerned, this is the most messy part of Android. I really have no idea what the developers had in mind with the way they implemented the phone book. With Symbian, a very nice feature of the contacts list was birthdays. When a one of your contacts' birthday came around, Symbian would notify you at 09:00 of the event. I have yet to find an easy way to implement birthdays and birthday notifications...

Also, if you happen to have Facebook and Gmail accounts, contacts from both accounts are downloaded to your contacts list. This might sound like a good idea, but if the contact has nothing in common between these two accounts, you end up with two entries for the same person in your contact list. If you've moved a SIM card from an old phone, then its contact list gets added to the mix making an even bigger mess. You then have to go through a very painful process of joining these contacts.

A further horror is that every email address that you have written/responded to ends up in your Gmail address list and all of these end up on your phone, regardless of their relevance.

Afrikaans characters
A major problem for South Africans wanting to communicate in Afrikaans is the ability to use letters from the Germanic character set. The default Android input languages do not have the ability to select these characters, even though they are in the font set. What I found to work was to install the MultiLing app from the Android Market, together with the Afrikaans plugin for MultiLing (I'm not sure whether the plugin is necessary, but it does give you access to an Afrikaans dictionary for Quick type).

To use it, go to any app that requires text input, long touch the input area and from the menu that appears, select "Input method". Select MultiLing from those available. Now, long touching any letter on the keyboard gives the option to select extra characters associated with that letter. What made me doubly pleased about this was that it also works with X10 mini pro's slide out keyboard - the only disadvantage being that the symbol key does not work.