Mediascape or how not to design a media player

Oh yeah, you read that right. Mediascape is one of the worst piece of shit that I've ever got to see on/for a mobile device, and I've been using a cell ever since you could install Java-powered games on them, so I've seen a lot of shitty things. Mediascape and Timescape are just excuses for Sony  Ericsson to claim a branding over the Xperia and the Android platform. They're utterly useless, badly designed, proprietary and do not take into consideration user preferences or ability to customize whatsoever. And that's only the apps that run on the phone itself.  I won't go into details because these apps aren't even worth taking the time to talk about them more than I already am. Suffice to say that I don't know anyone who would use them. As you can guess, I'm extremely dissatisfied with Mediascape... and the best part? You can't fucking uninstall it. It's shoved on the platform, it's permanently running in the background and, as if that wasn't enough, it's the default viewer for the photos you take with your camera, the videos you have on your device and eeeevery song you want to listen to. Really Sony, if you wanted to force shit on your users, at least do it in a way that users won't feel like they're missing out on a bunch of features, do it like Apple.

Well then, let's hope Timescape is better?

You would think so, yeah. But no. Timescape is a nifty little concept that theoretically aggregates all your social stuff in one application. Twitter, Facebook, SMS messages, Emails, every social interaction you have. It fails brilliantly at all of them. First, I consider myself a social power user. I love Twitter and I tweet a lot. Timescape does not allow me to do anything with Twitter except read my friends' timeline. I can't filter replies or direct messages (or even see them clearly). Facebook, meh, I'm not really a Facebook user so it didn't really matter to me. But all the status updates from Facebook are tossed in WITH the Twitter updates in one cute little stack-thing. Can you see how it's hard to find/notice anything in that yet? Alright, there's more. Add to that your emails and your SMS, in chronological order. Nothing tells you this stack is an email or an SMS. You can't compose or reply. Again, this useless piece of shit your default application for emails, Twitter and Facebook when you first use the phone. Thank god for the Android Market.

Wow, that's two for two in the shitty department. How about PC/Sync apps?

Yeah, they're not getting better here. The apps that Sony Ericsson wants you to use on your (Windows, obviously) PC are even worse. Media Go and PC Companion are just one notch above vaporware. Media Go is Sony Ericsson's alternative to iTunes for iPhone. Considering that iTunes is already one of the worst applications available for Windows, it shouldn't be too hard to do better. Well, they somehow managed. For one, I couldn't install Media Go from the installer that's forcibly located on my miniSD card. I could however install PC Companion... with which I tried installing Media Go to no avail. I had to go to their site, manually download the application and run it. All that so that I can create playlists for Mediascape... because Mediascape doesn't offer the feature. Yeah, that's right. A media player that doesn't allow you to create playlists. Sony Ericsson just thinks you should toss all your mp3 on your phone, unorganized, and shuffle through it. Thanks Sony, but I have my own way of  listening to music, and as a distributor, you're supposed to facilitate it, not force your listening habits onto your consumers. I have resorted to transferring my files using the USB cable and my file browser (which also means it works under Linux, by the way), manually creating a M3U playlist with a shell script (oh yeah) and using Astro to validate/re-create that playlist on the Android. All that because Sony Ericsson's media player does NOT allow you to create playlist. Or delete them for that matter. How fucking annoying is that?

It says a lot about Sony Ericsson that Timescape and Mediascape are their first selling point for the Android...

In other news, I still haven't figured out how to take a god-damned screenshot.