

One month with Android - ryannielsen
http://dinnerwithandroid.tumblr.com/post/7172800536/one-month-with-android

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fferen
YMMV. I own a Droid X and recently got the opportunity to use an iPhone 4
briefly, and I think I'll stick with Android, for a few reasons:

\- The web browser doesn't seem to zoom into and magnify text areas as well on
iPhone.

\- No swype. It was absolutely painful to type anything.

\- The battery life was actually worse, especially while sleeping.

\- The common way to go "back" in applications seems to be a button in the
upper left, which I find harder to reach than the physical button near the
bottom of the Droid.

There may be a way to fix or work around these problems, but I'm quite happy
with Android, and really don't relate to any of his complaints. It fits my
needs.

EDIT: after reading the other comments, I see I'll probably get downvoted to
oblivion for this. :D

~~~
adziki
I'm in this same boat. I think that people's opinions on this probably also
tend to be biased by what you're used to from a desktop-use background. the
ugly, unpolished, clunky comments I just don't see. Any application weirdness
has been with how a specific app handles certain behaviors (logins, new
windows spawning, etc). Having worked through creating a few apps, I can agree
that it's not the simplest thing to create apps which 100% abide by the
android design principles, and having worked with people at my company trying
to divert them away from the "let's brand it so it's obviously our style" view
point to trying to abide by how Android apps function. that's quite a battle
some times.

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jinushaun
Blog post sounds more like a prologue than the meat of the story.

As someone who owns both devices (iPhone 3GS and a Nexus One running
Gingerbread 2.3) and uses them both regularly, I can confidently say that iOS
still beats Android handedly despite all its limitations and busted pre-iOS 5
notification system. Like the author of the blog, all that openness has shown
me is that that openness is necessary to fix all the problems and plug up all
the holes in the Android system. So many half baked and unfinished ideas.
Typing on Android still doesn't work. Google needs to seriously fix the
software keyboard. Even Andy Rubin knows how bad it is--he said so himself.
Seven releases and three years later, Android still feels like beta software.
From all the reviews of Android 3, that assessment remains true. Although I
have to admit, Gingerbread is the most stable version of Android I have ever
used.

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cgranade
It amuses me that the author talked about the Share menu as if it's a special
case behavior developed in. Rather, the Share menu is a direct consequence of
what may well be Android's biggest strength aside from openness: the
Activities and Intents model for UI development. When an application wants to
share something, it flags a Share Intent, which any other application is free
to respond to. You can see the same behavior with other kinds of Intents, such
as the Intent associated with clicking links in a web browser. The YouTube
app, for instance, consumes browse Intents whose URLs match YouTube URLs, so
that the UI gracefully hands off the Activity from the web browser to the
YouTube app. The use of Intents means that applications can integrate with
each other, even if they are not aware of each other's existences. There's a
lot of power and extensibility to that model, to be sure!

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bstar
I also agree with every single one of the author's points. I've had an Android
device since the day the G1 launched. Today I have the G2.

First off, for both devices I needed to run cyanogen mod. The devices were
completely unusable for me without it. The only acceptable Android devices are
the Nexus' or ones with custom roms.

I have not purchased an iPhone, but I do have a 3g touch and an iPad 2. I have
to say, I believe Apple's multitasking is vastly superior to Androids. The
reason being is stability. "Real" multitasking is great and all, but if you
can't make it stable then it just plain sucks. My experience is that apps open
in the background frequently FC, take up too much memory and slow the device
down. Sometimes finding the errant process is near impossible and forces me to
reboot.

Apple's suspend style multitasking ALWAYS ensures that every app is getting
the full resources of the device. The other day I was playing Dead Space on
the ipad and downloading 6 other apps I just bought... the game never
hiccuped, slowed don't or degraded in any noticeable way. I see why some
people don't care for it, but for me the benefit in performance makes it
vastly superior. On the topic of downloading, I could have 50 apps queued up
in the app store and it will never fail. The android fucking market always
fucks up the downloads. It's completely maddening.

Dealing with device support just plan blows. Nvidia has their own freaking
market for their 'optimized' games. Netflix is rolling out only on select
devices because they don't know how the fuck it will work on everything out
there- fortunately the G2 was supported early. Amazon has the best market by
far, but I still don't know how the hell to use it.

Talking about openness... I have to install cyanogenmod to get any semblance
of open, and that's not even the case. Recently someone had a patch to spoof a
phones personal data so that apps that steal your info and sell it would be
grabbing junk. It appears that Cyanogen is playing nice and not including the
patch to not piss off Google and the carriers. This is only as open as what
the carriers and google will put up with. It's no different than jailbreaking
the iphone (aside from that fact that you can actually build "some of" android
from the source, but what normal person can do that?).

In the end I still have an android device for one simple reason... economics.
I'm on t-mobile and my rates are far below att & verizon. I got my g2 for free
as well. I tether my data connection (to the iPad) with no issues. Even though
the G2 kinda sucks, it is good enough. Justifying paying $299 for a 32gb
iphone and paying the jacked up rates of verizon comes down to simply not
caring enough for a gadget. The iPad is a phenomenal value, the iPhone just
isn't. I'll re-evaluate the situation when my contract ends in a year and a
half. For now I'll be content with amazing turn-by-turn gps, decent browser,
tethering, a few 3rd party apps and a pretty good phone experience- it's the
best value out there. Boils down to taking a dirt cheap "7" over an expensive
"10".

------
cmer
I own both an Android (USA) and iPhone (Canada) and I couldn't agree more with
this article. It amazes me that Android is so popular despite being
significantly inferior to iOS in terms of quality and polish. The iPhone 4
hardware is also so much better than any Android device I've seen.

To me, Android looks and feels like Linux desktop (ugly and clunky, everything
is disconnected) and is as stable as Windows (read: unstable).

------
geuis
I know this sounds dumb, but hear me out.

I've been an iOS user since shortly after the first iPhone came out. At a
previous company, I had to do extensive cross-browser mobile testing on
iPhone/iPad, several Android phones, and the Xoom (Android tablet). Every time
I picked up one of the Android devices to do something, I had to "think". Its
annoying as hell.

And by think, I mean that when I went to turn on the Xoom the power button
wasn't in an obvious place (its on the back). When I was in either a phone or
tablet, there was a different way to access the wifi settings on _each_
device. Getting back to the home screen was annoying. Why do I have to page
back through 3 previously opened apps when I just want to go to the
homescreen. (To be fair, there _is_ a separate button to go to the homescreen
directly. But why are there 4 buttons at all?)

Clearly, my experiences have been shaped by my years of experience using iOS.
To that extent I've even been using iOS 5 beta for the last few weeks on my
phone. While it clearly has some rough patches, the new features are well
thought out and polished. (Sorry, not going to talk about specific features
because I don't know if they are uncovered by the NDA yet.)

So when I say that Android makes me have to stop to think, I mean that any
time I have to use one it has these annoying gotchas that require mental
effort to examine and bypass. I would be happy to say that it was just me, but
a lot of my friends have switched from iOS to Android phones over the last
year and I hear a lot of the same complaints from them too. They aren't
technical illiterates by any mean, but they don't spend their days immersed in
this stuff like I do. One runs a print shop, another is an audio engineer. One
even edits video at a porn company.

I think a good way to summarize the difference, and the problems, is in a
recent ad proclaiming "your wife will love the Tegra2 chipset". iOS devices
inspire people. Android makes them think.

~~~
benologist
"But why are there 4 buttons at all?"

Those buttons are awesome on the Galaxy Tab, they feel foreign to every
application, and they're in just the right place and hyper-sensitive so you
quit every other minute in games unless you're careful!

~~~
GiraffeNecktie
Oh and they're lovely on my Samsung Captivate! Just faintly marked so that
they're completely invisible in dim light until I (inevitably) touch the wrong
one and then they light up. Owned the phone for six months and I'm still
fumbling for the right one.

