An iPhone Lover’s Take On The Nexus 4
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Here are my impressions after a few weeks:
* Everything is so fast and smooth. It's the first Android device I've used that this was the case. My iPhone 4 was sluggish by comparison. I feel like iOS is getting slower while Android has been getting faster - at least on the phones.
* It's so much cheaper. $30/mo for tmobile pre-paid, no contract and unlimited data (though only 5GB/mo at high speeds).
* Lots of apps I used existed on the other side, and were as good or almost as good. Notably Gmail is better on the iPhone and Reeder still beats anything I've found on Android so far.
* I enjoy the bigger screen and find myself reading more on the phone than I did with the iPhone, but even with big hands it's some work to manage one handed use.
* The average quality of apps is pretty poor. So far I've managed to find nice ones for everything I wanted.
* Lots of things work in Android how they should work. The intents system is great.
All in all, I'm quite pleased. I don't think I'm ready to give up the iPad for a Nexus 7 or 10 yet, but it no longer seems like I'd be losing all that much even there.
UPDATED to add:
* The keyboard is just way better. I can type so much faster, and the result is that I'll actually use it to write emails now, instead of just waiting until I'm back at my desk. Some of this is due to increased size, but some is due to the keyboard software being that much better. For example, spelling correction is way better on Android. Just tap and choose after you've written everything else.
* Cut and paste is sort of frustrating on Android. One example: try to copy the url from the Firefox address bar. I've managed to do it, but it took a few minutes of trying various things.
I'm told Apple's keyboard is abysmally bad because it asks the question on a per-word basis: "Given these jabs at the screen, what is the probably that the user meant 'foo'?"
Just about everyone else looks at the words preceding and includes that when coming up with a probability.
I can understand that a swiping keyboard might be too freaky for some people at Apple, but the predictive accuracy of the jabby keyboard is just embarrassing.
The ability to quickly and accurately type things out is the number one thing that will prevent me from moving back to an iPhone. Even given a choice between stabbing at my much bigger iPad screen and swipe typing on my Nexus 4, I've found myself putting down the ipad to respond to emails.
I do love swiping words now I'm used to it though. Shame there's a palpable mental shift that has to happen when I had to stop swiping for stuff like proper nouns though.
Interesting... I've always used Android and assumed the Android GMail client was better than the iPhone one. In what way is the iPhone GMail client better?
It's not bad by any means. It is more that I was surprised that a a flagship app was not quite as nice.
As an aside, I'll say that I've been trying out Google Voice and continue to find it a little confusing and hard to use. As a developer, I understand a lot of the tradeoffs and limitations, but even with that knowledge it's been confusing.
It seems to work quite well for what it does, but I can't help feeling that much of it must address use cases I don't have. Specifically voice mail transcription is something I care almost nothing about, just as I barely ever used visual voice mail on the iPhone.
That's like saying laptops have barely evolved since they weighed 15 pounds. iOS has evolved a hell of a lot since 2007, and it continues to do so. Just because Apple hasn't slapped new paint on it every other year doesn't mean that it doesn't continue to have new features and improvements every year.
Just about everything you see in apps today is impossible on iOS3 (or absurdly impractical). Even something as simple as the ubiquitous slide-aside menu would have been insanely hard to implement in the first iOS SDK release.
Since the SDK first landed we've seen Grand Central Dispatch which has helped apps become way more responsive than before. We've seen large improvements to Core Data that helps apps cache more intelligently and easily. MapKit didn't even exist in the original SDK. The list goes on, and on.
This is a classic "frog boiling in water" phenomenon. You don't think there have been any real improvements to iOS because you've grown along with these evolutionary changes. If I gave you a iPhone 3G with iOS3 and a iPhone 5 with iOS6 - along with common, well-developed apps of their time - you will see and feel the difference immediately.
Meanwhile, the Android frameworks seem to be crawling and it seems like no one can be bothered to create a decent IDE for making Android apps.
iOS 6 on the other hand offered practically nothing in terms of lower-level apis, or even bugfixes for bugs that have existed for a few years.
I just upgraded to the Nexus 4 from a G2, I kind of like the G2 size and keyboard better, but apparently physical keyboard aficionados are a minority.
After a couple of weeks, I have 0 crashes (and I bought my Nexus on Play, so no t-mobile software installed), so I guess that's cool. I rarely use anything but a weather app, maps, and the web browser, though. I'd say the biggest single feature I'm interested in from the Nexus 4 is continual firmware support for a long time. The G2 stopped getting updates after about 6 months.
Also, the Nexus 4 is just large enough, it's actually difficult for me to operate with one hand sometimes, because I can't reach my thumb quite as far across the screen.
This and cost were the reasons I initially thought about switching. I do almost all of my real iOS use on my iPad. The phone just does calls, checking email, and some web browsing when I'm out and about.
That said, I have expanded my phone use with the Nexus 4 considerably since I've found it to be more pleasant. For example, I send emails from the Nexus 4 regularly, as opposed to never (or maybe in an emergency) on iPhone.
"Also, the Nexus 4 is just large enough, it's actually difficult for me to operate with one hand sometimes, because I can't reach my thumb quite as far across the screen."
This is probably the main thing I dislike, although it's hard to totally fault this as I enjoy the larger screen when reading or web surfing. And apparently the iPhone 5 is starting to have similar issues.
Better idioms for navigation that don't require long stretches to the top edges of the screen will probably mitigate this in time.
Seems like iOS's next killer feature needs to be customization/skinning/theme support.
(Correct me if I'm overlooking an already existing feature like this in non jailbroken iOS)
via http://www.redmondpie.com/top-tweaks-for-iphone-and-ipad-tha...
Now, I'll get curious every once in a while and download and there are a few that take minor creative liberties with Holo and look pleasant, but I always go back to stock.
I'd be very, very, very, very surprised to see Apple give users that level of control, not because I'm trying to be all holier than though about Apple, but because that would seem to betray their knack for polishing and making the experience universally whole. That having been said, I think it's really, really stale and am excited to see what they come up with for iPhone Next.
Also, it's interesting to hear people express "boredom". I went from being a crack-nightly flasher on Android who would build his own builds to include a patch that hadn't been accepted yet... and now I'm largely bored with my phone. It's a flashlight, a maps app and something to do when I'm in line at the grocery store. Maybe I've just changed, I'm certainly tired of the "appify everything" phase, but I can understand how a sense of boredom sets in.