Comment by bratsche | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bratsche | Hacker News Reader

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"Apple are now seemingly playing me-too with Android/WP7-based handsets"

This seems like it must be a joke, but I read a lot of people saying things like this. The sum of a phone are the features that come with it right out of the box, like little checkboxes to look for, without regard for the quality of their implementations or their usefulness in general. And here of all places, Hacker News, to show such complete disregard for the 3rd party app market (and the quality of their apps). iOS has much, much higher quality apps available in general than either Android or WP7. And while iPhone may not yet have NFC capabilities that the average user probably has little or no use for right now anyway, it does have things like a very nice music player that stomps on Android's. A fucking music player, that's like the first app that both iPhone and Android had, and the one in iOS has always been superior. But somehow iOS is the one playing catch-up.

I just don't understand this new mindset that iOS has fallen behind Android, much less WP7.

iOS has much, much higher quality apps available

iOS has visually slicker apps, but they are less functional, because iOS is more locked down. With Android, I use a custom home screen and a whole bunch of widgets that make the device far more useful to me than iOS devices which seem like toys in comparison. For example, the 3G Watchdog's widget showing quota usage, and calendar and weather displays. The fact I can use rsync to sync folders between my phone, tablet and home NAS without storing my files in the cloud somewhere or having the files siloed in a specific application or generic "photos, movies or music" buckets is a game changer for me.

The only time I use my iPad these days is on transatlantic flights when I want to watch my own movies or play some slick games. But that's even being transplanted by my Nexus 7, which is much nicer to use owing to lower weight - and bonus, I get most of the apps that also work on my phone.

iOS reminds me a little of DOS circa 1993, while Android feels a bit like Windows 3.1 of the same era. DOS apps were typically silos using custom graphics libraries, while Windows apps were drab but more consistent and had some pretense at integration (early OLE).

"I can't wait to rsync my files on my new tablet!" -- Nobody

I do it for photos and video (~60GB worth on microSD card). Obviously barrkel does it.

Just because you don't use a niche feature doesn't mean others don't.

There's a saying in photography how everyone only uses 80% of their DSLR's capability, but it's a different 80% for everyone.

In photography, the general population probably just wants to take decent photos quickly. A DSLR, much like rsync, is a an awesome, powerful tool ... but probably not the right tool for non-enthusiasts. It might appeal to shutterbugs but that doesn't mean everyone needs or would use a DSLR.

You and I might use a niche feature like rsync, but the people that constantly complain that company X didn't include niche feature Y in product Z is, frankly, ridiculous.

rsync isn't a feature of android. Rather, the OS permitting something like rsync's functionality to run on it, and not in a silo or standard bucket basis - that makes all the difference.

That is, it's not this particular niche. It's the enabling of the existence of such niches in the first place.

Nobody in the population is average (this mythical "general population"). Everyone is odd in their own way. A product narrowly targeted at the average will lose to something more open. I believe this to be an almost natural law, like how free markets are better than the planned alternatives.

With such strange definitions (e.g. open, lose, narrowly targeted, etc) ... I don't think we'll be able to communicate with each other; we don't seem to have even vaugely similar definitions (in this context, at least).

Maybe you're right, maybe 'open' will win. But if it does, I'm fairly certain it won't be your definition of 'open'. At the very least, it's not the case right now. The most successful systems/devices are most certainly not 'open' and are trending towards being 'less open' aka designed for that 'general population' that you so actively deny exists.

Thanks for explaining that rsync isn't an Android feature. That explains why I've been using it for the last decade on Linux and FreeBSD.

You and I might use a niche feature like rsync

This is why I said it wasn't a feature; what you wrote implied it was. Stock Android has no rsync. It doesn't even have cp.

More importantly, I was trying to describe the structural strategic advantage I think Android has which will lead to it winning out in the longer term, in a similar way to how the PC beat the Mac.

Okay, point taken. But I guess I spend so much time around a computer, I carry my laptop with me most places, that I honestly don't ever find myself with a desire to do things like rsync files and folders.

For me, a mobile phone is not a replacement for a computer. There are a number of things that I can do on a phone now that I couldn't do 10 years ago.. but there are a ton more things that I hope I never have to do on a phone. There are already plenty of things that phones do now, in their race to out-feature one another, that I think are just plain retarded as fuck. Do I want to watch a movie on a 4" screen? Fuck no. That sounds like the most awful cinematic experience imaginable.

I own a Galaxy Nexus right now, and I think it's a really nice phone except for a few things that drive me nuts (like the music player being awful). I used to use an iPhone 3GS, and everyone at work has iPhone 4 or 4S, and I think the iPhones just feel like nicer phones. Better quality cameras, generally nicer apps with it (with the obvious exception of maps.. Android's navigation feature has been the one thing I loved better about it for years), nicer designs in general, etc.

It's all about what you get out of the phone though. The two apps that I use the most are music and maps/navigation. That's been kind of an issue for me since Android has had the nicer maps app, but iPhone had the nicer music app.

Re movie watching, I used to watch movies on my 3rd gen iPod Nano - beat sitting in an aircraft for 11 hours with nothing else to do. On a phone, way nicer. You have to consider the visual angle rather than absolute screen size. My Galaxy Nexus has a 12cm diagonal; at 30cm from my eyes, that's over 22 degrees of viewing angle measured diagonally. At a distance of 9 feet, that's around a 42 inch screen. It's better than the setup I use to watch movies with my girlfriend (we don't own a TV) - and that works fine, it's a lot better than the 13-odd inch TV my family had in the 80s.

I'd love to own an iPhone - but only the hardware. I'd want to run Android on it.

Holding a 12cm phone 30cm from my eyes sounds like an awful cinematic experience. On a plane. Holding a device up. Focusing your eyes on this little thing right in front of you. None of this sounds like the way to watch a movie.

But maybe I just put too much value in the experience of watching a movie. I love live concerts, but I don't refuse to listen to pre-recorded albums so maybe I'm just being absurd about demanding to watch a movie under certain conditions.

You don't hold the device up. You prop it on the fold-down table and look down at it at a fairly comfortable angle. BTW, around 30cm distance is pretty normal for lots of things - e.g. books, in use for centuries.

On planes with seat rear screens are probably even closer than 30cm to your eyes when the guy in front is leaned back and you're not.

(Not a fan of live concerts; sound is much better on studio recorded albums in any case.)

I would've completely agreed with you even a year ago, but it's just not true anymore. Any "useful" app on iOS has an equally useful equivalent on Android. Hell, one of my favorite "elegant" apps, Any.DO, originally launched on Android.

As for the music player? What are you talking about? Not only is the Google Play Music app great, it supports 20,000 songs in the cloud for free, it autoconverts FLAC to 320 kbps, and you don't have to use some bloated music suite to upload it all. Plus, it's not like there isn't a ton of viable replacements out there (Apollo, PowerAmp, Winamp, GoneMad, VLC).

Android played catch-up since the G1 launched. It caught up with Ice Cream Sandwich, and it got in front with Jelly Bean. No, it's not in every Android phone, but it's unfair to compare the Android ecosystem to the iPhone. Nexus vs. iPhone? I think it's pretty clear now...

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