Why can't Android phones be iPhone

Until recently, I have thought Android is enough good.
At lease, Google is not MS. I have known Google's S/W products from the day Google made their search engine public. I'm not sure, but probably I was one of the earliest user of Google search.
So, my impression on Google has been, "Oh, these guys understand what is S/W products."

Based on all of my impression on Google, and have used Android simulator and looked over others', who used Android phones, shoulders, I have thought that Android is enough good and would be much better.

Well, not everything I though was wrong. Actually, if you compare the Android on the G1 phone and current HTC Incredible, icons and fonts on the top-most bar and other parts of screen look a lot better nowadays. It is not just because better resolution. The way they render fonts and visual elements seems to be improved.

Today, I have used someone's HTC incredible with Android 2.2 extensively. I installed some apps, modified some settings for him, enabled WIFI access in his house, and so on.

My impression? Oh, My....! Google is the MS in 2010s!
I'm talking about technological aspect and "How considerate they are" about GUI which is not for "look" but for "guiding people how to use a device". About greediness, I don't know if Google is comparable to MS, yet.

What kind of problem I noticed?
Let's itemize some of them.

1. Settings and SetUp

Andorid 2.2 on HTC Incredible has two apps for setting. One is "Settings" and the other is "Set up". As a user, what are you going to think about them when you just look the both". I thought "Why are there two identical apps? What different setting I can modify when I click "Settings" and "Set up"? "Why do Google differentiate the both?"
Actually, some of the things you can set are common on the both.
Some are different. "Settings" looks like that it is "the set up" app.


2. Where I can check the IP address the Incredible retrieved?

In the Settings app, you can turn on WIFI signal and can detect broadcasted SSID for wireless network. However, when I connected to the WIFI router I set up two weeks ago, it failed in connecting to it. However, it didn't say why it failed.
I found out that the NAT device still had my "MAC address based" device allowance setting. So, I released that restriction, instead of adding MAC address of the HTC device to the table, because I had to go to other screens to figure out what MAC address it has. Moreover, after wasting several minutes and answering all the questions the master of the house threw to me, I just tried to change the WEP password scheme on the router. Instead of 128bit Shared WEP password, I used "64bit automatic WEP password".
Now, it started to connect to the in-house WIFI network. However, it was purely based on my guess that it may not be able to understand 128bit shared WEP password scheme. If the NAT device was not owned by me before and I had not exclusive access to the device, I would not be able to guess that!

What is worse is that I didn't find any pages which showed its IP address.
I still don't know where I can get the information.
In the case of iOS devices, it is very easy and all information related each other are supposed to be there together. However, Android OS doesn't have that kind of philosophy.

3. How to remove an application?

Wouldn't it be easy if you can choose an app and select remove from a menu to remove an app? iOS devices provide much easier and less-screen-cluttered approach. If you click-and-hold an icon, you can remove the app or move the app.
However, Android was totally different from common-sense.
I had to go to "Settings" app to manage apps. And it was not visually easy to find.

4. To reduce or mute "notification" or "key click event" sound volume, you should reduce "ringtone volume"

What??????????

I had difficult time to figure out how to mute or have lower volume for some events like "notification", "key click", and so on. It turned out that I had to use "volume for ringtone".

Well... it says "volume for ringtone". Then it must be about ringtone, not anything else!

5. The width of screen key

I hate screen keyboard. The size of each screen key on iOS device is kind of pain to type on it. However, I also understand that it is a big improvement from the general cell phone keypads. How painful it is to type with the cell phone keypads.
( Except for Japanese and Korean teenager girls! I salute you, girls! )

The width of each screen keys for Android was even narrower than that of iOS.
What is even worse is that gap between keys is even narrower.
So, it is pretty easy to mis-type.

6. The screen organizer

You can put app icon here and there on Android phones also.
However, if you are OK with it, I would like to ask if you have ever used iPhone/iPod Touch.


Final thought..

Overall, problems were that it was pretty hard to find some information on the pile of apps/settings. They didn't have some level of consistency.

However, I believe Android will be successful anyway. Just like people did with Windows, they will be fooled by Android because it seems to provide all the features of iPhones. On PC, it was OK that Windows "looks" like to provide all the functionality. It had bigger screen than phones. So, you can revert what you did easily and go here and there more easily. But phones are different. You are confined in small screens. It is not as convenient as PC to jump from here to there.
So, having good and less-painful "behavior" of the GUI is more important than that of PCs.

But be careful, potential Android buyers!
Try to play with your friends' iPhones and Android phones at least for a few hours, thinking that it is yours. ( It is important to pretend that it is yours. When you think it is yours, you concentrate more on how you are going to use them. Then you will actually start to think, "where this setting is?" "How to do this", and so on.

I can't understand that why there was no "review" which address what I have mentioned in this post so far. Probably the reviewers were not as careful and focused as I am, as usual.