Get lost.

So I've been meaning to write a piece on Android for a while.

As an owner of an HTC Hero, its currently my mobile OS of choice, and I have to say, that despite the hardware limitations of the said phone (its a bit slow to respond sometimes), I'm actually very impressed with the operating system itself. So with my personal opinion of the OS out of the way, there are a few other things I would like to cover in the coming three articles.

Firstly: Using the Marketplace

Secondly: The state of the apps

Thirdly: The future of the Android Marketplace

I've had the Android device for 4 months so far, and I've been downloading an eclectic selection of free, and paid for, apps. For anyone who has yet to use the Android app market, upon entering the Marketplace app itself, you are initially presented with about 4 different choices. Firstly 'featured' apps - a selection of mostly paid for apps for premium brands such as Spotify, along with a couple of free apps, selected, presumably, by a deity somewhere in Google towers. Below that you can brows either 'Applications' or 'Games'. Within the 'Applications' menu there are further subcategories for various types of app. Within these you are presented with a list of apps sorted either by date, or popularity. For me, the biggest problem with this is that there are supposedly 30000+ apps on the market. This means that within each category there is, on average, about 3000 apps.

Fine. Thats good of course, choice is almost always a good thing. But it does mean that scrolling through the list is a labour intensive task. Additionally a lot of the apps seem to repeat themselves, and beyond the ratings and reviews you can view, there is no way to sort by 'highest rated'. I suppose you could perhaps argue that 'most popular' (ie: most downloaded) can be correlated with 'highest rated'. Frankly sorting by 'date' seems to be a total waste of time, unless you check the app market every 10 minutes to see what new apps have been released. New apps are released so frequently that this is a community where reputations are built on the strength of user reviews. I can't think of another media in which I rely almost entirely on fellow users to make informed purchase decisions. Since the importance of 'ratings' is given such weight, it would be great to have the choice to sort by 'highest rated - ever' and also 'highest rated - over the last 7 days/month/year etc' - to give new apps the chance to float to the top of the list on their merits. Right now, whatever apps are at the top of the ' most downloaded' list rule the roost, and will continue to do so, regardless of their quality compared to other similar apps.

I can't speak for those of you using the iPhone, but browsing the Android marketplace makes me feel lost very quickly indeed, especially if you aren't extremely specific with what it is you are looking for.

Despite this, I did find a very useful Dice application the other day using the search function, which helped no end with 'drinking snakes and ladders' in the pub.