IPhone to Droid-X: Lots to Like | Hacker News Reader

IPhone to Droid-X: Lots to Like

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66 pointscschanck78 comments

> The Back button, it is wonderful. I said this before, and after nearly a month I am even more convinced, the lowly back button is the most significant architectural advantage for Android.

To me (a Droid user since day 1), the back button and the whole workflow of launching other apps from within an original app started off as something I liked, but it's kind of a strange concept. When it works well (open a browser from an app, press back, and you're back in the original app), it's really nice, but sometimes these nested apps get a bit confusing. For instance: open a link from a Twitter client, and it brings you to the browser. Hit home, and then open the browser. Personally, I would expect to go to the link the Twitter client sent you to. However, this is nowhere to be found, instead you're at the last page you used the browser directly for.

I've become used to this, but it really isn't that intuitive for new users. I've handed my phone to my mom, and she's definitely had issues with where the back button is taking her.

Also, I've noticed a few games that don't implement the back button, and pressing it, rather than doing what you'd expect (bringing you a pause screen, the game's menu, etc.), it dumps you on the home screen. Granted, this is the app developer's fault, but it's just another area where the back button does something strange.

Home resets your state completely. Much more sane to do that than leave state hidden around. You want what you were just doing? Back. You want to do something different? Home. Simple.

"I pine for a Mini-USB conenction, but Micro-USB is much better than some properietary connector. (I like Mini better than Micro because the slightly larger form factor seems far more durable. Time will tell.) "

Actually the Micro USB was designed to be more durable than the Mini USB... up to 10,000 connect / disconnect cycles. Plus the wear parts in the Micro USB are in the cable rather than the device. Much cheaper to replace the cable.

I heard this from other people too, but somehow it just /feels/ less durable for me, especially when I am plugging it in. I feel some grinding of metal parts and often wonder if this thing will last. Actually, I feel the same thing with the iPod/iPhone connectors, but it's definitely more pronounced on the micro-USB connectors.

> "Wifi Tethering. I don’t need to tether often, but when I do, I do. I rooted my phone quickly, just so I could use one of the many apps in the Marketplace to tether my laptop via Wifi. Worked flawlessly, no extra charge."

That's tantamount to saying "I jail-broke my iPhone quickly, so I could use one of the many apps on Cydia to tether my laptop via WiFi" ... except you don't need an app for that because tethering is built into iOS. You need a different network provisioning file in the States, and elsewhere in the world tethering is enabled by default.

I liked the form factor of the HTC Aria but found his following points to be deal breakers, so am back to iPhone for now:

- every couple of days, you do need to reboot the phone

- no cellular data while you are in a call

- no cloud push in Android 2.1

- separate email apps for Gmail and everything else

- IMAP email is very weak; really weak

- the OS (and therefore the apps) are really clunky at switching between voice/data/wifi

I was also put off by the extremely popular apps carrying name brand logos that disclaimed association with the brand while asking permission to make charge calls from my number.

I agree with your tethering comment, but FWIW there are a handful of tethering apps you can get without rooting Android that allow any user to tether for free.

I pretty happily use PDANet for some basic stuff.

Tethering is also built into Froyo, which I've been happily using since May.

Also, "no cellular data while you're in a call" is a CDMA vs GSM issue, not an Android/iOS/Blackberry issue.

Unfortunately, the Droid X does not have Froyo yet, nor is the bootloader decrypted yet, so there's no way to get 2.2 on it as of right now. Hopefully it gets it soon, since the Droid 2 announced today does have it.

I also wouldn't be surprised if tethering were disabled in 2.2 for the Droid X like it is on the original Droid.

You don't have to jailbreak the Droid X to get tethering either however Verizon charges $20/mo for the feature.

It's built into Froyo (Android 2.2) as well.

- every couple of days, you do need to reboot the phone

Don't know if that's a phone-specific issue. Haven't had to reboot my Nexus One except for the Froyo update and instaling third-party ROMs.

- no cellular data while you are in a call

Limitation of the Verizon network. If the iPhone goes to Verizon it too will have that restriction.

By that time, Verizon may support 4G LTE, at least in major metropolitan areas, which does support simultaneous voice/data usage.

I've found I do have to reboot my MotoDroid occasionally. Usually the guilty party is GPS - it absolutely refuses to give fine location unless I reboot the phone.

I've also had issues with airplane mode totally ruining my 3G until I reboot. (I now avoid airplane mode.)

The no cell data while in a call is a CDMA issue, not a phone issue. An ATT or Tmobile Android phone can use voice and 3G data at the same time the same as an iPhone.

Also, I'm not sure how the no cloud push in 2.1 can be a reason for switching from Android to iPhone. Does the iPhone have a cloud push feature equivalent to the one Android 2.2 cloud push feature? I'm assuming that's the "no cloud push" feature he's talking about, since many Android apps have push messaging for email, IM's, etc. (I've had push Exchange mail since at least Android 2.1, IM's have always been push-instant, etc.)

I'm not sure if it's equivalent, but setting up the iPhone to treat your Gmail account as an Exchange Active Sync account gives the iPhone most of the cloud push features (Mail/Calendar/Contacts). I can add a contact on my iPhone that syncs OTA to Google that then syncs to my mac address book.

Google voice texting and messages don't integrate perfectly yet, for example if I get a GV text on my iPhone and read it it doesn't show read in GV on the web (unless of course I use the GV app/html5 site to read it). Also contact groups do not sync from Google Contacts.

The contact/calendar syncing is great and in my mind really makes MobileMe a hard thing to justify buying. The push mail is nice as well, but I found the limitations to be a little annoying (but not enough to keep me from using it on my iPad):

http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

Specifically, deleting a message from your inbox is the equivalent of pressing the "Archive" button in the Gmail webapp.

If you drink Google's kool-aid about never deleting mails, that's great, but I don't. As a workaround I created a tag called "0-To Delete" (so it showed up at the top of the folder list when alphabetized) and rather than delete mails, I apply that tag. Gmail tags the message and removes it from the inbox, and then at some point later on I can actually delete all the mails with that tag.

This is easy to fix.

Check the account's Advanced settings, and make sure that the account's Deleted Mailbox points at the "On the Server" trash. You may also want to confirm that the Sent and Drafts mailboxes point to their Gmail equivalents.

You can archive a message by moving it to the All Mail folder.

In iOS 4, there's an option at the top level settings of accounts created as "Gmail" accounts to archive or trash messages deleted on the device, I'm not sure how this relates to the above settings.

If you're using the Google Sync feature (to get your mail, contacts, and calendars pushed live to your device), Google presents your Gmail account as though it were an Exchange account. Consequently, iOS doesn't let you change the folder mappings like you can with an IMAP server.

Good point.

I work around it by setting up the Google Sync account on the device without mail and adding it as an IMAP account as well.

> I'm not sure if it's equivalent, but setting up the iPhone to treat your Gmail account as an Exchange Active Sync account gives the iPhone most of the cloud push features (Mail/Calendar/Contacts). I can add a contact on my iPhone that syncs OTA to Google that then syncs to my mac address book.

No, this is not equivalent to cloud push. Application-specific push (in this case google sync) was part of Andoid 1.0 on the first G1.

> The no cell data while in a call is a CDMA issue, not a phone issue.

Yes, I have successfully browsed the web in the middle of a call, using 3G(HSPA) on my G1.

Having just moved from the iPhone experience of 3 years to an android experience. YES, YES, and YES! The android is the true fully featured phone. With the iPhone, I felt the need to tether because surfing the web is so clunky. Now, even though I have the power to tether, I don't. Because its so much easier and fun on my Milestone!

The annoyances that plague this guy, well, doesn't really affect me, apart from the distinct radio groups that doesn't integrate together well, yeah, with SipDroid, that does become an annoyance when I'm moving and using VoIP. Other than that... Wow. Android. I am now a 100% fuck-you Apple anti-fanboy. Just saying.

  With the iPhone, I felt the need to tether because
  surfing the web is so clunky.

Can you elaborate?

I have an iPhone and I think I know what the GP is saying (although I haven't tried Android). I have a 3G which is basically unusable for the web because it's so slow, and I haven't even put iOS 4 on it. Apart from that, however, Safari basically just has no features. The form filling is so broken that, when I type half my email address in and it offers to fill it out, I tap on it to dismiss it and it fills the box out twice, so my email looks like username@domusername@domain.commain.com.

Apart from that, the screen is too small to navigate well, so it ends up being tedious. 99% of my complaints, however, are due to the slow speed. It's just unusable, period.

Interesting, I also have iPhone 3G (with 4.1 beta installed) and I do browse web a lot. Mobile Safari was the first useable browser on mobile device, imho, and multitouch + zoom on tap makes it even better. Android browser uses the same Webkit engine, hence my question, what's so different about browsing.

Oh, of course, I don't disagree with that. Before the iPhone and Safari, you could not browse the web at all. It's just that now, other phones have evolved.

I think an Android phone with similar specs will have the same speed (eg G1 or Magic), but modern iPhones & Android phones are much faster.

I had an HTC Magic for a year and found the web browsing to be great. Never used an iPhone to compare though. I loved that I could open multiple Windows, which I pretty much did every browsing session. I have an HTC desire now and its awesome. Really, really awesome.

You can open multiple windows on an iPhone too. I found the Magic and the iPhone 2G/3G to be pretty much the same WRT to speed.

Hmm yeah, probably... My comment wasn't exclusive to the iPhone, then, so disregard that part...

I have read somewhere else that iOS4 has improved the MobileSafari speed/performance. Maybe you should try it.

Whereby I couldn't really tell the difference. I have an 3GS and it was fast with iOS3 and it is as fast in iOS4.

iOS4 makes the 3G nigh unusable because the phone is constantly forced to flush memory to swap causing the UI to hang while the OS waits to write to disk. So, no, do not upgrade a 3G to iOS4 for improved anything. (Well, the icons are a little prettier.)

iOS4 is just horrible in my 3GS. I hit "App low memory" error during my first hour of use, and now I need to clean apps in App switch manager to free up some RAM when the phone feel sluggish. It gives me additional thing to do. I only like the folder feature.

No, it does not. I have been running 4.0 for the 3 weeks, sure it is a bit slower, and there are things you can do to speed it up (you shouldn't have to, but you do). But it is not unstable at all. It never crashes.

Is it worth upgrading if you have a 3G? No. You get some updates apps, better email, and folders.

He said unusable, though, not unstable... Do you know if I can finally add different email addresses for outgoing mail? I have 10 email addresses that map to the same inbox, but I need to send mail from all of them. Right now iOS 3 doesn't let me do that at all...

Does anyone know if this is easy on the Android?

iOS doesn't use a swapfile.

There are many WebKit based browsers in the App Store. I use Atomic Web because it has ad blocking and full screen. Won't fix your performance issues but it's worth mentioning there are some choices on the feature/UI side.

I just recently acquired a 3GS, after previously having used a 3G and a 2G. The 3GS is much faster, such that I don't feel like I experience lag in most operations. I had no idea that improving the speed could make such a difference in the entire usability of the device.

I am now using my iPhone more than I had ever used previous versions. I think because the time to accomplish a task is so much shorter, I find more opportunities to use it. I'm using the browser more, because the speed is close to a regular computer (or at least feels like it is). Sure, the screen is small for browsing, but I'm finding myself using double-tap to quickly zoom in and out of parts of the page (whereas before I used a lot of pinch zooming), and panning around the page is quick and painless now (I think it holds more of the rendered page in memory and has to re-render less).

I don't know if my next phone will be an iPhone or Android, but I do know one thing: it will be fast.

Warning on the 3G and iOS4: Iif you upgrade to iOS 4 on your 3G, you may fall into the large subset of people who are experiencing extreme slowdowns. I was one of those people. I had never seen such terrible slowdowns on an iPhone. With a bit of hacking, you can downgrade back to 3.1.2 or 3.1.3, but it's not supported by Apple and requires some 3rd-party tools. There are supposed fixes for this (such as turning off spotlight), but I'd suggest waiting for this to get ironed out before moving to iOS 4. Maybe 4.1 will fix things. iOS 4 doesn't give the 3G much of value anyway.

I agree with you entirely. I might paraphrase and say that every second I have to wait for my phone to perform an operation cuts my usage of it in half...

I guess I was only half on topic on the previous comment, since I was talking more about slow phones than the iPhone in particular (even though it is an iPhone and the slowness is a part of it).

I have struggled to find a fast phone for ages now. The fastest phone I've had is a Nokia 6500, which just does most of what I want, and instantly. Unfortunately, as I find myself connected to my business more and more, I need a phone that can help me.

I don't think you can hope that 4.1 will fix anything. Slowness on old devices is part of Apple's planned obsolescence. How else would they get you to buy a new iPhone?

"I don't think you can hope that 4.1 will fix anything. Slowness on old devices is part of Apple's planned obsolescence. How else would they get you to buy a new iPhone?"

This was my feeling, too, especially with the lack of an official way to downgrade. But there are people who are reporting no slowdown, so I'm attributing this one more to incompetence than malice.

The lack of bluetooth keyboard support in the 3G on the other hand... I guess not that different than MMS or A2DP missing from the original iPhone. These things were excluded purely for marketing reasons.

I'm glad you like your phone, but of course your brand new Android phone surfs the web better than your old iPhone. It's got a faster CPU, more RAM, and a higher-resolution screen.

Web surfing is very similar among similarly-specced phones across all of the major OSes (it's mostly the same browser, after all).

Not really that true, I have an 3rd gen touch and a Moto Droid, and I much prefer the android device. Better resolution, better browsers (parallel load of tabs, faster tab switching, capability to render more than one tab at a time, flash integration (skyfire), etc), better integration with other applications (youtube, quickoffice, music app, gallery app, etc).

Web surfing is very similar among similarly-specced phones across all of the major OSes

Actually, not at all.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/07/android-22-demol...

Good point, I forgot about the gap in Javascript performance.

We're currently in an arms race of Javascript interpreters, though, and there's nothing stopping Apple or Palm from using Android's interpreter in the next release.

You do realise that saying "I am now a 100% fuck-you Apple anti-fanboy" renders your entire post worthless? By the definition of fanboy you're saying your judgement is biased, your conclusions skewed, and your opinions suspect to the point that anyone who doesn't just want positive reenforcement of their existing ideas should ignore you.

We recently moved from a family of iPhones to a Droid and Droid Incredible. I can't believe we didn't make the move sooner, although I suppose the Incredible isn't old enough to have made it much sooner. Regardless, for those not wanting as large of a phone, check out the Droid 2, due out imminently:

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/see-what-droid-does-...

How is the Incredible? I'm about to get one on Friday when my $50 credit comes in.

It's fantastic, very fast and responsive, thin, and light. We bought ours through Amazon's wireless site and got a decent discount over Verizon's store. I'm not a big fan of the Sense UI, but it doesn't have any major flaws. At this time, I've rooted it using the Unrevoked method, but I'm waiting for a final release of the Android 2.2-based CyanogenMod 6 before trying anything more adventurous.

I think it's great. My only complaints are that the camera is horrendous. Every picture is blurry no matter how still I hold the camera.

Also the speaker sounds muffled and too quiet on regular phone calls. (Yes, the volume is all the way up.)

Oh and the battery life is kind of bad. I had to read a couple of articles and turn off all kinds of things off to make it last through the day. I think the battery has some kind of breaking in period too as it's been doing much better lately.

Sounds like your camera is seriously screwed; mine doesn't have this issue at all.

It took me until this month to get a smart phone because I'm surrounded by computers all day at home and work so I never wanted my phone to be one. Was going to switch to Sprint Evo or Droid-X but ended up stuck with ATT for a while longer so iPhone4ed it. Despite all the web-tabloid tech-drama, my general disdain for iLifestyle marketing, and having never owned an Apple device... I actually couldn't be happier so far. I just use the digitally imported (http://www.di.fm) app for music so I've never had to mess with iTunes, maybe that's why?

edit: going to get OSX to triple-boot with win7\ubuntu, maybe my mind will change once I give the SDK a whirl

" Every couple of days, you do need to reboot the phone. "

Love how this was tossed out there as an afterthought. Huge, obnoxious deal-breaker. I love losing state every 2 days! /sarcasm

It's odd, because that hasn't been my experience with Android at all. I've got a Droid (not X, not 2, just the original), and the only times I've never needed to shut it down. In fact, the only times it's been off have been from me forgetting to charge it. Last I checked, my uptime was 550+ hours with no sluggishness at all.

With my Droid, I regularly have to reboot to get GPS to work, and I've had the issue on all 3 of the Droids I've had (replaced due to other issues).

Have you tried just toggling the GPS settings? I occasionally have issues with it, but toggling the setting has always worked for me.

Yes, that sometimes works, but there are a lot of times where I need to do a restart of the phone too.

I get pretty bad lag (contacts, dial pad especially) on my Eris after a few days. Advanced Task Killer clears it up though. I feel like HTC Sense users get a lower quality experience in general. Poorer performance, cruddy built-in apps replacing the better stock apps, widget overload by default, too many bundled applications, etc.

I don't think I've ever rebooted my Incredible.

I blame motoblur lol. The only time I've rebooted my nexus one has been for updates.

Don't know if this is specific to the Droid X. My Nexus One doesn't need rebooting ever. The last time I can remember rebooting it was when I forgot to charge it overnight and it died.

Maybe it's a MotoBlur specific or Droid X specific problem? If I recall correctly, my Nexus One rebooted when it got the 2.1 update1 and when it got the 2.2 update. Other than that, I think the only times it's ever rebooted is, like you, when I've forgotten to charge it and let the battery die. :-)

I have Nexus One and I never had the need to reboot unless I'm upgrading the OS.

I think that it depends on the state that you are losing. All the state worth keeping on my phone is saved to disk (sd card actually,) so it wouldn't matter if it were rebooted. The only problem would be that I wouldn't be able to use it while it was booting.

Yep, android has always been similar to how iOS 4 works. To do multitasking on a mobile right, you need to save state when you get backgrounded anyway... so rebooting the phone basically loses you nothing.

That being said, the only time I reboot my phone is when Pandora hangs itself into an unrecoverable state (100% pandora's fault). Still better than the iOS pandora player though.

What state would you lose exactly?

This isn't a normal Android user's experience. I have had to reboot my Nexus One a few times when it seemed to be behaving strangely (laggy, screwed up multitouch) - but I'm talking about 3 times in three months.

IMAP email is very weak. Really weak. Even the third party clients are weak.

How so? I am an IMAP power-user and K9 meets all of my needs. Flagging works, push works, folders work, SSL + auth works in both directions, and it supports my self-signed certificate. K9 is infinitely better than my work Blackberry, which is supposedly the "premier push email experience".

I am really not sure what more an email client could do for you.

K9 is good. Not up to the standards of 6 year old ChatterEmail on Palm just yet, but vastly better than the builtin client of iPhone's Mail.

And it's an active Open Source project improving on original Android's source, a direct benefit of Android's openness:

* http://code.google.com/p/k9mail/

* http://www.slideshare.net/obrajesse/k9

* http://code.google.com/p/k9mail/source/list

* http://groups.google.com/group/k-9-mail/topics

Incidentally Mark Blanc, author of ChatterEmail on Palm now works for Google on Android Email (among other things?).

As best as one can tell he gave up on the idea of creating a killer email client for Android on his own or was acquired:

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Blank

* http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/packages/apps/Emai...

* http://forum.androidcentral.com/android-applications/22105-m...

K-9's UI is kind of terrible though it is fully functional.

Ugly it definitely is.

The notification bar says how many new messages you have. You follow the notification and get a list of messages. You read them, then they go away. You can press the star to flag. You can click reply to reply.

It's weird that you have to press menu and choose an option to send a message after you've composed it, but it's not really that bad of a UI choice.

Yup, I can never figure out why so many people recommend K-9 mail. I'm guessing from this discussion that it has more features for IMAP users, but for ActiveSync it has less, and the UI is as step backward, even more ugly and awkward than the built in Android Mail client, which IMHO is like the ugly duckling of the default Android apps.

I'm guessing that any ActiveSync features exist only by accident, from the original fork of the official Mail client. K-9 is an IMAP client, nothing else.

Are you sure? Because neither the description in the Market, nor the project description on the K9 Google Code project webpage say it's only an IMAP client. Here's the description from the K9mail Google Code Project webpage:

"K9 is an opensource email client based on the Email application shipped with the initial release of Android.

K9 is focused on making it easy to chew through large volumes of email. It's our hope that K9 leads to improvements in the core Android mail client. "

If they're intending it to be only an IMAP client, nothing more, they aren't doing a very good job communicating that.

I always find the statement 'I am yet to drop a call' from Americans very strange. What the hell is wrong with your mobile networks?

Droid X Questions:

Is it better than the incredible?

Does Droid X have a hardware keyboard? I can't tell from the page.

How does the HMDI thing work? Does it connect to a television somehow? Do I have to pay to do that?

> Is it better than the incredible?

it has better tech specs. the rest is subjective, imo.

> Does Droid X have a hardware keyboard?

no.

> How does the HMDI thing work? Does it connect to a television somehow? Do I have to pay to do that?

you plug it in with a type d connector (iirc). its free but only works for the gallery where you can play videos and view pictures.

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