One month with Android

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

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.

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!

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".

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).

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.