Three Things Android Needs To Improve

Android has seen some solid success and growth since its debut in October 2008. The platform has progressed from 1.0 to 2.1, and high-end Android handsets have been all the rage in recent months. For all its successes, there are still some major failings of the platform. Here are three of them.Video

Most Android handset come without a video player pre-installed. That's inexcusable. Many of the Android phones for sale today have screen resolutions approaching high-definition. Screens that look this good beg to be used for watching movies. Sadly, users have to download a video application from the Android Market to watch video. There are plenty of free video apps in the Android Market, but the quality of these apps is all over the place. Android falls flat when it comes to video, and needs to do better. Google owns YouTube. You'd think it could figure out how to make a decent on-board video player.

Music

The Android platform does have a native music platform, but it is bare bones and uninspiring. It is visually bankrupt and offers only a meager feature set. Companies such as HTC have improved on the player with their own designs, but no one has knocked it out of the park yet. There are a number of alternative music players in the Android Market, but again the quality is hit-or-miss. I have yet to find one that does the job better than the built-in app. The iPhone's iPod functionality trounces Android's music player, as does Palm's webOS music player.

Media Syncing

This last piece goes hand-in-hand with the first two. Google does not provide its own version of iTunes to make transferring content between phone and PC better. Android's competitors are doing this. BlackBerry users, for example, can make use of the BlackBerry Desktop Manager if they wish.

There are third-party solutions that fill the role. DoubleTwist is probably the best one out there. It lets users sync playlists from iTunes directly to the microSD cards of an Android phone.

While alternatives exist, I think Google should develop and offer its own media syncing software. One of the iPhone's strengths is its relationship with iTunes, which makes adding and removing content seamless. Google doesn't create a lot of desktop software, but this is one product it needs to work on -- or acquire.

I think it would be a great help to users if they could sync not only their music and movies, but their photos as well. I understand that Google lives in the cloud, and would prefer that people share their photos via services such as its Picasa Web Albums, but let's get real. People take pictures with their phones and expect to be able to put them onto their computer without too much trouble.

Given the power of the Android phones hitting the market today, there's no excuse for providing a half-baked media experience. Android needs to improve these functions.