Android is interesting, but the Market is so messy right now. Many app authors work from the assumption that all phones have keypads or other features only available on some phones. I feel there needs to be a better profiling program so that apps can be categorized and listed in Market ranked according to how well it's suited to a particular class of phone or flagged as incompatible. As an example, many terminal apps won't bring up on-screen keyboards because their authors assume all phones are like the G1 and has that built in keypad.
The Hero trackball is poorly used as a joystick in some game apps. There's a port of the Frodo Commodore 64 emulator that is largely unusable on Hero - no niceties are provided such as employing on-screen touch areas to serve as joystick controls. The Hero itself, a very handsome device, was released prematurely with a tardy and ill-behaved HTC Touch UI that apparently was bloated with debug pre-release code only fixed more than a month post-launch in a firmware update. This is unacceptable for wider market adoption.
Without suggesting that Google should copy appstore and employ prissy self-serving QA nazis like Apple does, I feel they should at least tidy the Market up. The versatility of the Android platform should be embraced by users, publishers and developers, but as it is the lack of QA and insufficiently developed Market presentation there is strong potential for a detrimental consumer perception of the platform as being maddingly disjointed and perpetually in a state of beta-pre-release. And where the hell are the paid apps?
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