To me the huge irritation with time picking in a lot of Android apps is that they usually force me to specify a fully populated "minutes" field. IIRC, in iOS most apps instead round to ~5 minute intervals. 99% of the time, that is what I want. If you round to 5 minute intervals, there are only 12 possible minute values, not 60. This makes it a lot less work to find what you want and get that calendar appointment scheduled or that alarm clock set up.

I'll sound like wierdo, but I always set uneven minutes to alarms, so there's less chance they overlap each others' snooze alerts. (yep, I have a problem with getting up and have to set up 3 alarms next to each other)

Now that I think about it this must be why iOS uses 9 minutes for the snooze interval, to avoid similar overlap (always wondered).

that's clever. now tbh I don't even know how long is snooze on my phone, I just assumed it must be even.

Hilarious because i've been flip flopping on how they worked. The arrows seem to be a paradigm from mouse-based computing, can you scroll these lists like on ios?

If you scroll them they actually remove the arrows and make a lot more sense.

Before you drag: http://i.imgur.com/4MUXO.png

After you press to drag: http://i.imgur.com/BqXMY.png

To be fair, it's a huge improvement over: http://i.imgur.com/2exF7.png

As a day 1 Droid user after 10 years on Palm OS, I was stunned that the control in your third picture made it into a release, and even more stunned it persisted so long. On Palm OS you could pick a time with a maximum of three taps. There's no reason it should take more than five: one for each digit plus AM/PM.

I'm not a fan of the swiping, but you're right. It is a huge improvement.

At my job the application we're currently working on is aimed for Android 2.1 and above so we can't the new TimePickerDialog.

I actually had testers come up to me and report bugs about the Android TimePickerDialog as bugs in our application saying that it didn't work as expected and it was against the UI specifications (which of course only have pictures for the iPhone version of the application).

I had to actually replace them with two dropdown sliders and a button so that the testers would be happy.

you know you can just press the number and use the keyboard, right?

Well, after pressing backspace twice to erase the already entered numbers... It's just amazingly bad :-)