There And Back Again: A Lengthy Weighing Of The Galaxy Nexus And iPhone 4S | Hacker News Reader

There And Back Again: A Lengthy Weighing Of The Galaxy Nexus And iPhone 4S

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I think the Siri bit is interesting. People have bought the 4s specifically for this feature. I think the jury is still out on it, and it'll no doubt get better over time.

But I remember lots of people buying the 4 for facetime, and I don't know anybody that actually uses it anymore.

FaceTime is the primary way in which I communicate with my parents nowadays. The voice quality is significantly higher than via the phone network, and the video stuff is nice.

(We're generally doing iPad2<=>iPad2 or iPad2<=>Mac rather than via iPhone though)

Android is too chaotic for my tastes. The conservative simplicity of iOS just works better for me. I would be more inclined to give WP7 a chance than another Android device at this point.

Your comment would hold more weight if you elaborated on what is chaotic about Android. I have my complaints but "chaotic" is not one of them.

The back button is chaotic. Handy in many situations, but not in others. If you go into an app already running, there may not be a way to go back to the start screen of that app.

I so tire of this complaint. It's very consistent if you understand what it does. Think of Android Activitys in a stack. The back button pops off the stack. There, you're done. Unless an app overrides it in a broken way, that will explain all cases.

If you launch an app via the Launcher, it will try to restore state, and then the back button pops back through Activities to the "start screen". Likewise, if you're in an app and you go to a notification, the back button pops that notification's loaded Activity and you're returned to the app you were in when you clicked on the notification.

We all understand how it works, it is not complicated. Why you feel the need to explain this is amazing to me. There are problems with how it works, something you ignore in your "reply". Like getting to the start screen of an app, where an app always assumes it comes from the start screen, rather than in the middle of the app.

For one thing, the standard buttons are ridiculous. Differ phones have them in different orders, and the app deceleration has free reign to make them do whatever they want. The "menu" button sometimes hides crucial information and functionality, but there's no indicator when this is the case. In the Path app, recently lauded for its design and user experience, on one activity you have to press the phone's menu button, then choose "menu" from the onscreen menu. At that point, you're actually at the menu.

So you have several Android phones from different vendors, and use them all on a regular basis? Because otherwise the complaint about the buttons being arranged differently on different phones seems a bit odd. Why would you care, as long as you know the arrangement on your phone?

Is the path app for iOS better than the Android version? Because it also seems odd to blame the OS for the flaws of some specific apps.

Personally I am sad to see buttons being optimized away. For example my Galaxy Tab doesn't have a search button. Now all apps seem to hide the search functionality in a different place. I miss not having to search for the search button.

I do frequently use many different Android phones, because I do Android development.

I've briefly compared Path on Android and iPhone. Other than performance (iPhone is much smoother), I didn't notice many differences. I'm not really blaming the OS for having any technical flaws. I'm speaking more to flaws in the platform.

As others have mentioned the back button is kind of a nightmare. Rarely a day goes by I don't accidentally back my way out of an application. That sends me to a long-hold on the Home button to find the application again and sometimes this involves starting from scratch and other times I just pickup where I left off. It seems totally random to me.

I did not care for the day when my stock-ish Droid X got the MOTOBLUR update. Any OS can be updated in a way that changes a lot of things but it rarely happens with iOS or, from what I've seen, WP7. Basically everything stays the same with some enhancements. This change from stock-ish to MOTOBLUR was a big step backwards and when/if this phone gets ICS it will be another major change.

The locked boot-loader situation is chaotic. When I go to buy a new phone I have to study the details of locked vs. encrypted loaders. Checkout forums to see if anyone is developing a stock-ish ROM in case there's another MOTOBLUR type of incident with the carrier provided ROM. Motorola promised to unlock their loaders then just never did it. Obviously now I would go with a Google phone running stock Android instead but that was not an option when I got the Droid X.

Battery life is not reliable. Some days I get 6-8 hours and other days its dead by noon. I don't know why this happens. I can't rely on using my Droid X as an alarm clock because occasionally the battery goes from full charge to dead overnight.

Random apps in the Android Market are allowed to SPAM me with ads in my notification bar. It feels like a massive invasion of my personal space when this happens. I can't even stress how big of a problem this is for me. I'll stop using any platform that allows this to happen. It's a non-negotiable point. In general I'm also concerned about malware in the Android Market. I don't really install many third party apps anymore. There are things I would like to try out but hitting the install button is a difficult decision.

When it comes to games it's total chaos. You have no way of really knowing if the game is going to work correctly or not on your phone. The Droid X isn't all that old yet most games seem to lag on it. It ranges from annoying to unplayable.

The lag/jitter of the UI, especially in the stock browser, is just annoying. Some sites scroll fine and others jump around annoyingly. I can't really count on being able to happily use the web browser.

My phone reboots a lot. A few times a week at minimum. Something to do with being paired to a Bluetooth device. Bluetooth should never reboot my phone randomly. Never.

Every-time I plug my Droid X into my computer two volumes are mounted. The SD card and another Motorola Tools volume. Every single time I have to close the window when it comes up. Annoying.

My SD card is littered with all sorts of random files. Trying to find folders on it is pretty difficult. Some of the folders are from apps I deleted long ago. I have to go through every now and again and clean-up all these random folders. Annoying.

For other people these things may not be a big deal but they really deeply annoy me. It's not so much that I can't deal with them but just that I don't want to. I hate needing to micro-manage every little detail.

Wow... thats a really comprehensive, meaningful comment. Finally came to know whats so "unorganized" and "unpolished" about Android. I upped your post, but it was good enough to require a verbal vote of appreciation!

Really? It's a list of random complaints, most about Blur, and most of which are a result of the freedom apps are given and the freedom of choice that users are given. It's no more "chaos" than Windows or Mac OS X.

Just my personal preference. I don't want or need my SmartPhone to pretend to be a computer. I already have a computer. A SmartPhone just needs to do the most common tasks as efficiently and trouble free as possible. Being as it's a SmartPhone and not the constitution of my country freedom isn't really at the top of my priority list. If it was seamless I wouldn't mind just having a list of options to choose from but when we start talking about evaluating a bunch of different replacement apps/ROMs/etc I lose interest. It's too much time to invest into a device that is supposed to make my life easier.

My benchmark for SmartPhones is how difficult it is to complete some common tasks. I've found in most cases for Android that process resembles an if/then/else function. If I use app X then I do Y but only if A=2.2 && B=3.1 else I just give up and decide it's not worth the effort. I would prefer to just learn the one, maybe two, ways of possibly doing it and adapt. I don't need to modify the device to adapt to my every whim in part because that assumes I actually know exactly how I want it to work. I really don't. I want the OS to figure some of those things out for me.

Motoblur sucks, sure. Not all Android devices are the same. Blur is trash, almost as bad as Sense.

I already addressed the back button. I still have yet to understand how it's a nightmare. It's predictable. It's a stack. done.

Yes, locked bootloaders are ridiculous. None of my half-a-dozen Android phones have ever had locked boot loaders.

Yes, apps can make notifications. Remove the app, install another to block the adpush service. That's a result of freedom.

The Android browser is much better in ICS, again, the jittering you're describing is blur. Not all Android devices are made the same.

The SD card is also infuriating, but again, that's the beauty of Android. There is an API that, if devs used properly, places all files in a subdir of the memory card. Unfortunately, unless you want crippled, walled off apps ala iOS, there's no other way to do it.

No idea what Motorola Tools are. You really ought to try a Nexus device man.

>When it comes to games it's total chaos. You have no way of really knowing if the game is going to work correctly or not on your phone. The Droid X isn't all that old yet most games seem to lag on it. It ranges from annoying to unplayable.

What? I've never had a game not play on my Fascinate and it's older than the DX.

You say "chaos". I say freedom and choice. It's not hard to avoid the problems you're complaining about (save for the SD card, which I argue is hard-to-impossible to fix properly without just limiting functionality).

I am really enjoying the new UI paradigm in Android 4.0. Soft colors, geometric shapes, white space, thin dividers. Yeah, the UI of Android sucked for a long time. But I see it making lots of progress, especially since they hired Matias Duarte (the designer from WebOS). Hopefully third party app makers will start to put more effort into design now that Google is.

It's going to be interesting to see where Android and iOS go over the next couple of years.

I find myself wanting to like WP7 (the Lumia specifically) but that may just be because I respect the different approach they're taking.

I can't imagine a circumstance where I'd ever buy another Android phone (the 2 I owned were miserable enough experiences to put me off the platform for good), and that was before I ever used an iPhone. Now that I've invested in the platform (apps, media, and hardware peripherals) it would take a revolutionary breakthrough to switch.

But deep down I like technology, so I hope to see that breakthrough.

It's weird that most of the article consisted of "android doesn't suck as much as it used to"

His points are are ios isn't as superior as it used to be and Siri sucks. The former is probably true of the OS itself but not so of the app ecosystem. The latter doesn't match my experience where Siri is, especially when driving, freaking awesome.

I'd like to think there's more to it than that.

If he had wanted to make an article talking about the specific benefits of Android he could have gone to massive lengths about widgets, pervasive search, intents (holy crap I can't believe anyone would go back to iOS after using intents heavily), the stack-UI paradigm, background tasks, or any other features that already existed before ICS, but doesn't make sense to use them when comparing a new device that tries to polish and fix up the smaller details which are the basic critiques of iPhone users.

You might think he would mention what features of android he missed most when using the 4s, not need to be an idiot.

Perhaps from UI point of view, not overall. Android has been more functional than iOS since Froyo, mid-2010. And with Android 4.0 which brings a ton of new features, it leaps even more ahead functionality wise.

I really don't know why this comment was downvoted. Specifically from the point of view of functionality, Android supports a lot more functionality natively (again using Intents as an example, but also including the contacts integration system, event listening, tethering, and a few other details). Of course it's just one aspect of what constitutes a functional point of view, but it's not wrong either.

Jason has been an Android user for a while and him being partial to Android is not a secret. He clearly says it himself. In my opinion, this review was an honest assessment of what had improved with respect to earlier versions of Android; the comparison with iOS at each step is fair because that's the only other game in town.

Judging by all the reviews I've read thus far of the Nexus and ICS, I think it's great that Android is slowly catching up in areas where iOS was the clear winner, it'll keep Apple on it's toes. Can only be good for us, the end users. The only fly in the ointment for me personally is the sheer attention to detail that Apple puts into it's hardware, something that I don't think Samsung can ever do (maybe Motorola can?) with it's finger in too many pies (Win Phone, Android, feature phones etc.)

EDIT: My nitpick with the review is the somewhat flippant dismissal of Siri.

I moved from a Nexus One to a Galaxy Nexus and I'm with you on the hardware design and build. I like the GN better than other Samsung phones I've handled, but it is definitely nothing at all like the iPhone, and to be honest not even as solid feeling as the HTC-built N1 was. (The N1 was fairly ugly in my opinion, but it felt good in hand.)

Is it too much to ask for gadgets that feel as good to hold and use, in terms of the tactile quality, as my 1970's-era Canon SLR? The iPhone's pretty much there but nothing else (outside of ultra-high-end audio gear and cameras) even comes close.

Can you explain what you mean by "feal good in hand"?

My Galaxy S sucks for many reasons (mainly: lag!) but "feel in hand" is not something I've ever considered.

I think the article was good, and Jason tried to be unbiased (he "tried", since he has always historically been pro-Android). However I believe an honest comparison between iOS and Android cannot be done in less than 10 pages of indepth review.

For example, I believe he missed the following positive points for iOS and iPhone (just my casual thoughts): 1. iPhone 4s is 2 to 3 times faster than Galaxy Nexus in graphics: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5133/galaxy-nexus-ice-cream-sa... 2. Software update support: The new OS updates are not pushed fast enough to all android phones -- you may have to wait months to get the latest OS release like 4.0 on your phone -- and for most phones, it will actually never be released (apart from Nexus phones which have the best experience in this regard, but when comparing Android you have to look at all phones). Look at this: http://theunderstatement.com/post/11982112928/android-orphan... 3. Android market apps cannot be fully trusted, since they may be of poor quality or may be malware -- since they have not been reviewed, and also they can access more things on the phone. (with permissions, but most users just say yes to all permissions) 4. Lots of accessories available for the iphone whereas there are so many android phones that accessories available for each phone are much much less. 5. Airplay on iOS can push the screen content and video/audio to speakers/TV via apple tv. This is a really amazing experience -- for example showing your photos and videos to friends on the TV via airplay while flicking back and forth on your iphone/ipad. 6. iCloud Photo stream where your photos are synced automatically, without you having to do anything. Same for documents in the iCloud. iTunes match can upconvert all your music to high quality music, without having to upload it in the first place! 7. Fragmentation issue: Some apps work on some phones, some dont. For example, netflix was not available for most android phones for a long time. Angry birds also started with only a few handsets. 8. Galaxy Nexus is toooo big. iPhone can be used well with one hand with the thumb being able to reach any part of the screen. iPhone's styling and design as well is better -- though that is subjective. 9. One of the best quality support and service available via apple retail store. 10. The amount of quality apps available on the App Store, for everything, like games, music, productivity, etc. 11. Siri may be underwhelming, but still it can handle a lot of tasks much more easily and in much more friendly way than Android.

There are many more.... For android also, there would be a list like this.. but I believe the main plus point in favor of android are: free navigation app from Google maps (on iOS, you have to buy one for atleast $20), app-to-app sharing and more customization.

My wife and her friend each got a 4S on opening weekend, and neither used Siri for longer that a few days. Nothing has changed since our last discussion on that here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3156590

Further, I think the difference between Siri's very-weak-AI capabilities and Apple's presentation of them as strong AI contribute to ridiculous stories like Siri being pro-life. If you really understand how Siri works, you understand how ridiculous that is. But if you believe the commercials, you might think Siri has a personality and makes judgments on things like abortion.

Not sure what you're referring to about the commercials and Apple's "presentation of [Siri] as strong AI" - every commercial I've seen has been of people issuing fairly simple queries that would be likely to succeed in the real world.

I agree with your thoughts ... but personally I happened to keep using Siri!!

What is it with the page rendering of the linked article in mobile safari? It comes up perfect and then refreshes to crap.

Reader fixes it... I must start using it more often.

For some, Siri is a game-changer. For otheres (seemingly including JK) it's a "Meh". This is typical of reactions to Apple's many extremely successful products: see Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad. And as Siri gets better, it will perhaps be as successful as those products.

Why do you assume Siri will get better? Get better in what respect?

Why wouldn't it get better? Their speech recognition and ability to understand certain contexts will almost certainly improve over time as they gather more and more data. It's surprising to me that people dismiss it so soon. Does no one remember how poor google voice used to be at recognition?

It's too soon to call Siri 'meh'.

3rd party app support for one. Siri would be infinitely more useful if I could IM, tweet or Facebook with it. Or if I could control Spotify or Pandora with it.

The iPod didn't really evolve in any meaningful way from it's original offering, and the iPad has evolved even less. Those products received a big "Meh" from early adopter types, but it turned out that they weren't targeting those people, they were targeting the vast majority of people who had never heard of Rio MP3 players in 2001, and who don't even know what a hard drive is. The Media Mehs in those cases were because of a fundamental disconnect between what the reviewers expected to be important in a product and what the product actually offered, only to be shown that they can be useful to many people in their simplicity.

I just don't see Siri as something that is going to significantly evolve in a meaningful way. People seem to already find it useful in it's current state though, so I could easily see an argument for analogies to iPod and iPad that most early adopters / people involved in the software industry are notoriously bad at evaluating the current state of these products, even without it having to evolve.

This is typical for almost anything, from 3d-TVs, to cars, to cheap airline flights. Unless something is universally loves or hated, it falls into this category.

I would not be surprised to see Siri making it into other devices, including the new Apple TV.

This was written by consumers, for consumers. I come to HN for things written by producers, for producers.

Get off your high horse, it's an phone review.

High horse? This might as well be in the consumerist. I'm not being arrogant, and I'm not being preachy. It was an observation.

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