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My Very Own Protocol Droid

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183 pointsmh_199 comments

There's no doubt Apple is playing catch-up with Android these days. Siri was their only real innovation in the last 3 iPhones, and Google leapfrogged it within months.

Meanwhile, Apple is still trying to implement a decent notification system, their auto-correct is garbage, there's no file manager, you can't set a default browser (or default anything, for that matter), there are no widgets, no app shortcuts, no custom keyboards, managing settings is a nightmare, and you can't side-load apps without jailbreaking. That last one is especially bad thanks to their cryptic app approval rules and the fact that their app store is the least intuitive to navigate -- if what you want isn't in the top 10 and you don't know the exact name, forget about it.

But hey, at least you get the privilege of spending a fortune on chargers and adapters. And other people with iPhones will think you're cool for owning one, right?

> there's no file manager

Is there one on Android?

Generally not by default, but that can vary by manufacturer. You can just download one of the many available from the Play Store.

Anecdotally my Droid Razr came with one.

I don't know if phones ship with one by default or not, but there are several in the app store. Personally I really like ES File Explorer, since it also lets me browse smb shares.

Depend on your phone model. Mine came with free version of a file browser with some functions (batch files operation, etc) disabled, with IAP to unlock those functions.

Default will depend on which phone you get, but there's no shortage of great free ones in the market (Astro and ES File Explorer, for example).

Also, Android phones work just like a USB drive if you want to drag and drop files then access them from another computer later. You can store anything you want and create your own folders, unlike the iPhone where you can only sync certain media types through iTunes. That's what I was referring to with the file manager thing, but I'm not sure how to say that succinctly...

"The Android phone functions as a standard USB hard drive." Also, it's not just a sandboxed area, like on my previous "feature phone" (store whatever you like on it, but the phone's OS won't do anything with it), but the real SD card in the phone, directly.

Which everyone wants of course. Except me. Or my girlfriend. Or my parents. Or my sister. Or in fact, everyone I know with one.

A feature that you think is critical is a feature that is critical for you. The refrain that iOS suffers from a lack of file exploration or drag and drop of any kind of content is based around the assumption that everyone wants that. Most people don't.

I can understand your point, but too often this sounds like an extremely weak excuse: "So iPhone doesn't have this feature? Good! I didn't want it anyway!".

I personally see having more options and choices as a great thing even when I don't personally need those options.

Even if I think the default android keyboard is the greatest touchscreen keyboard in existence, I still think it should be possible and easy to use another keyboard app instead.

Choice is great, my argument wasn't that choice is bad because that's silly. My argument was saying that a feature that a lot of people have no use for is a really big negative against a platform is an incredibly bad point. It's a feature that has inherent personal usefulness for the user, if there's a strong majority that don't have need of that then it's not a negative against a platform when it's functionality for functionality sake.

But the iPhone isn't just lacking in one or two options. It's a very locked down platform in several ways. I have a hard time applying your argument of "a lot of people have no use" when it comes to something as fundamental as being allowed to run an app or browser that Apple does not like.

Okay so here's choice. You can have chocolate or steak, what you can't expect is that the steak is made of chocolate. There's choice. Apple has presented a product with specific guidelines and won't budge, your choice is "Does this product do everything I want it do/or nearly everything" if the iPhone fits that then that's a fine choice, if it doesn't then you can go choose something else.

It's Apple's party, and they'll approve if they want to. They just don't, because they don't think it's what the majority of their customer base wants.

But now the game has changed from "most people don't need this" to "if you bought Apple you get Apple".

The latter does not deflect the original criticism thrown at Apple here, they are overly restrictive to the point where it's bad for their users.

I think that is a valid point to raise against Apple without meeting a blanket "You bought their product and that's just how they roll". Under that, no company can be criticized for anything, ever.

My mother kept asking me why I made her pay for "a device which can't replace a floppy disk". I'm an android user but I thought the limitations of the iPhone were actually a plus for my mother. It took me some time (and some fiddling with some "approved apps" to make things "work" for her) to understand that those small things could be real deal-breakers when not available.

> Except me. Or my girlfriend. Or my parents. Or my sister. Or in fact, everyone I know with one.

Yet Astro file manager has 35 million downloads. Perhaps you and your peers are not a representative sample.

You're also skewing the point, which is it's a nice option but not a necessary requirement for a large percentage of the user base. Unless 35m is a significantly large percentage of Android users, it's still not something that's an essential feature of a smartphone for a large amount of people.

My point is that tens of millions of people think you should be able to manage files on your smartphone, but Apple makes that impossible without jailbreaking and Apple apologists routinely argue by implication that because they don't feel they need it, it's not necessary.

For starters I'm not an Apple apologist. I use Apple products but I'm fairly critical of them. You don't have to be an apologist to have a specific opinion, and it's reductive to consistently frame counterpoints as "just another Apple apologist excuse". That's often what's bandied about, from both camps. So for the purpose of this discussion apologist, sheeple, iSheep, fandroids and so on should be verboten.

Second, if file management was a feature that people were crying out for in droves they'd either not be buying into iOS or they'd have created such a furore that Apple would have implemented it. Apple has responded to platform criticism by implementing the functionality as iOS has matured, they've just cherry picked what they're implementing to deliver the functionality that has a benefit to the most people. Aside from the obvious missteps like Newsstand or Passbook anyway.

If people want to manage files on a smartphone that's fantastic, there's a platform for them. Why is it a negative point that there's a platform that has a different opinion? It's not, there's a wealth of choice from smartphone players now.

Not quite - it shows that they think you should manage files on your Android phone. iOS is designed to hide files, but Android has always had it as an option, which is represented in its interface.

Back when I used Android (owned a Nexus One which broke), I had to manage files all the time, because the individual apps didn't do a good job of it. Instead of having a centralised place for photos, I just dragged photos to /sdcard from my computer, and looked at them that way. When I had to put music on my phone in a hurry, I did the same, and navigated to them in the file manager instead of having it in the music app. I had a bunch of Markdown files that were there, too, whenever I synced manually. Now I can do all that without having to worry about where the files are, using iTunes and iCloud.

Since then, every time I've seen someone have to open a file manager, it's to do a job an app could have done. That's why Apple doesn't want to include one - it gives users more functionality, but makes app developers lazy. It's the same reason they haven't decided to include a stylus: it's technically more precise, but would just cause developers to think "don't worry about finger click targets, the user has a stylus".

Well let's broaden this, there is no concept of files on the iPhone, and yes, you DO need them.

Example: try attaching an excel sheet you received from a friend to another email.

Example: the powerful Android "share" mechanism --the sole reason I have several iPads but switched to Android for real work (ie on my phone). Share is not limited to a bunch of "friend-aware" apps, but every app can register themselves as a "handler" for particular data objects (files), e.g. "picture" "pdf document" etc, and when you hit "share" all of these are shown in a list. No more circuitous nonsense where you have to open a file in goodreader or save it to dropbox first, so you can access it with another app, which speeds up things tremendously.

I think it's pretty safe to say that moving data from one app to the next is something everyone needs.

Honestly, "Share" is one of the most brilliant features Android has. Great example of something potentially minor (built-in "social sharing") becoming massively useful through extensibility.

Okay but the concept of files versus the specific application of a file manager are different things. I completely agree that iOS needs to expose file representations better between applications, but I think the very notion of a file manager is still utterly redundant for a large percentage of new smartphone owners.

Apple added basically the same functionality in iOS 6, but it seems like many apps don't support it yet.

> Which everyone wants of course. Except me. Or my girlfriend. Or my parents. Or my sister. Or in fact, everyone I know with one.

Even my mother has a problem with that on her iPhone. I installed her Dropbox and hooked up some of her apps on the same phone to the same account so that apps can share common data. Otherwise you have apps that take pictures and you can't mail out those pictures etc.

My girlfriend, who on the whole loves her iPad, absolutely hates iTunes for and photo and video syncing. She would be much happier simply dragging her nicely organized folders over to the iPad rather than fighting iTunes.

If you ever need to move a file of any kind from one location to another, Android makes it easier than iOS. The fact that my grandmother's cat prefers Meow apps over the ability to transfer files doesn't change that.

My sister wanted to copy a video file from my laptop to her phone. I had it up on the laptop's webserver. No can do; there is no 'save' option for a link or file system for it to go to. To get it there as best as I could tell I would have to get it to her desktop first, and then she would physically have to bring her phone there and wire it up to sync with iTunes. Maybe iCloud could have helped?

i recently re-installed ES File Explorer and was floored with how much work went into it! i've used it years ago so i could see the difference. it is now also an app manager, ftp client, bluetooth/network explorer.. and it's FREE! i'm also not seeing any ads. how can they afford to put so much work into this app?

I'd start by checking their privacy policy.

There's a 'Downloads' folder on Android, which at least covers most use cases.

Calling Siri innovation is revisionist history. Google had voice search nearly a year when Apple launched Siri. Also, Apple bought Siri, they didn't invent it.

Based on the interactions I've had with Siri/Google search (I have an Android) there haven't really been any innovations in the space since Google introduced voice search. It's useful, but imperfect.

If you want to be picky about that sort of thing Google bought Android, they didn't invent it.

They probably bought it, but it's Google who brought Android to the state it is today.

Just look how Android was when the G1 launched - and that's 2 years after Google acquired them.

If you really want to be picky about that sort of thing, Android wasn't even a pseudo-Blackberry OS-looking, D-Pad-controlled OS when Google bought it.

In other words, anything notable about Android today was created at Google, from the kernel up to the UI to the frameworks to all the little features all these Android "switchers" are raving about.

The things that make Siri as useful as it is (which for the record IHMO is not very) is tight integration with iOS contacts, calendars and text messages for instance - all things not in the product when Apple bought it and all things which may ultimately enable the sort of integrated experiences people are saying are great with Google Now.

Seriously, when Apple bought it Siri was interesting and pretty cool, but it's a different beast now. The parallel between it and original Android is fair - they're both evolved versions of something which was acquired.

That may be, but don't use a myth to posit your position. The Android that Google acquired is a grain of sand of what it is today. Anything remotely notable or worthwhile out of Android came out of Google.

FWIW, Siri is great and I currently use an iPhone.

Except perhaps the most important thing - the idea?

Possibly worth looking too at what I was originally doing - refuting the idea that Android was a major Google innovation where Siri was merely an acquisition.

Even if you say that Google have reworked Android to the extent that it's essentially new, the same is largely true of Siri if you look what it was when Apple bought it (small scale, movie tickets and restaurant bookings). The only difference is one is three years on, the other is ten years on.

What idea? Android? Android was essentially an unknown brand when Google bought it. It certainly wasn't a technology (or at least a technology that has any similarity to Android today).

It was a mobile operating system. That seems pretty similar to me.

Siri is not "voice search". Siri was very much an innovation when it was originally released as a standalone app, and was still ahead of the game when Apple bought it and integrated it.

Google certainly may be ahead now, but to compare Siri to plunking what you say into a Google search box is just wrong.

Sure, it was innovative back before Apple bought it, but what Apple did to Siri was basically dumbing it down to the level of plunking things into a Google Search box.

Google Now really has improved things a lot.

The most useful parts of Siri for me are time and location-based reminders, locating friends, and alerting me when a friend goes somewhere. All of this was in Apple's version of Siri, and as far as I know isn't duplicated by tossing text into Google.

Google had voice tasks (initiation reminders, text messages, emails, navigation requests) before Siri was released. The only difference is they are pretty strictly keyword initiated ("Navigate to X", "Text Y Z"), whereas Siri can parse natural language for tasks (or at least appear to; it may well just have a bunch of hardcoded variations).

Siri isn't about voice search. It's about voice-initiated tasks. Sometimes that's search, but sometimes it's a reminder, or a calendar appointment, etc. The innovation is in that distinction and in the context awareness. [1] And that truly is innovation. Regardless of where it came from. If/As Siri is expanded, it's going to become a Big Deal.

And Google's going to deliver something similar. Something beyond literal transcription and voice search, because what Siri presents really is an innovative improvement.

And as to the question of Apple buying Siri vs developing it -- where does that argument end? How could we possibly apply it fairly and objectively? Shall we wave off all of Android as Google's innovation, simply because Google bought it? How many improvements and integrations would it take to (dis)qualify an innovation as being fairly creditable to the current owner? How could we even know what the new owner 'created' vs what these acquired firms had in development at the time of purchase? Does Apple's SoC line count or not count, given they bought PA Semi, but we have no idea what they did pre- or post-acquisition? How in the world is anyone outside capable of knowing? It's essentially impossible for an outside party to fairly apply in a comparison between two companies.

The selective application of that qualifying logic winds up looking like nothing more than making excuses for whatever doesn't fit our preconceived positions.

[1] Being able to refine/adjust a command without restating the entire thing: e.g. the whole example of "make an appointment for 1 tomorrow" "here's your appointment, shall I create it" "wait, make that 2". To say nothing of the detection of things like scheduling conflicts in the first place, where the conversational context-awareness truly shines. i.e. It's not just simple input, it's an 'intelligent' exchange in the pursuit of the task.

Google search is also about voice-initiated tasks. Back in late 2010 /early 2011, when voice search was launched, I pulled out my phone and said "Navigate to <friend's name>." It automatically pulled my friend's address out of my contact book and started turn-by-turn navigation.

Obviously there are things about Siri that are different and better suited to certain tasks. I'm not saying Google search is better, I'm not even saying Google search is a great innovation to come out of Google. I'm just saying Siri is a bad example of something ground-breaking that Apple created.

> "Navigate to <friend's name>."

That's like claiming Wolfram Alpha isn't distinct from Google, because Google will occasionally hazard a guess at a canonical answer (if you formulate your search query precisely correctly).

Sure, Google does attempt such things some times. And it's genuinely useful if you know the syntax to make it happen more-often-than-not. But that remains qualitatively different from what Siri (and Wolfram Alpha) are doing.

> "Siri is a bad example of something ground-breaking that Apple created."

Only when you beg the question of whether it makes objective sense to try to parse out the parentage of technology as some qualifying factor.

> "their auto-correct is garbage"

The last three people who switched from iPhone to Android asked me what was wrong with Androids auto-correct and why it didn't "work". They ended up having to install a third party keyboard to get anything they could stand to interact with.

yes, but they could install a 3rd party keyboard.

Yes, but that they needed to was my comment. Personally, even as a mobile developer, customizing my phone is not my hobby. I'd prefer a new foreign car that has certain limitations to a used Jeep that I can extend in any way I want.

> I'd prefer a new foreign car that has certain limitations to a used Jeep that I can extend in any way I want.

Are you sure about that?

Absolutely. I need my phone to work, be simple and reliable, not require much/any maintenance. Similarly, I prefer a nice car with a warranty that I don't have to worry about or have any hassle with. A jeep might be cheaper, and when it runs slow I could install something to fix it, or if I don't like the steering wheel I could personalize it easily... but, for something I use every day and depend on, I just want it to be there and not have to deal with any complications. I'm ok with the one-size fits all steering wheel, the research driven interface on my stock radio, etc etc.

But you need specific skills to customize your Jeep. On Android it takes 30 seconds and no skill to install the keyboard you want.

It's not a very hard thing to do, I'm sure as a mobile developer you don't mind installing apps other than the ones that come with your phone. A different keyboard is just another app to fulfil a need, go to the Store, click install, new keyboard. Done.

Not really. Parts are cheap and most are bolt on. It's just a matter of preference, which is why all of these droid vs apple discussions are circle jerks.

The ability to customize a Jeep is not a mainstream selling point. Whether it is easy or not is irrelevant for most consumers.

Touché

Which is nice, but it's a bit like someone saying "this road is an accident black spot" and you replying "yes, but it's near the hospital".

No, it's a bit like saying "yes, but you can go around it using this free four-lane highway that works great."

It's still a shame that your Google GPS told you to take the dirt road though.

In this increasingly strained metaphor the problem is that all the road signs (that is a normal person's default) still point to the black spot.

Google should just buy Swiftkey. It's pretty great, and I love its Flow (Swype-like) feature, too.

Just buy Swype! :-)

Then you'd miss the SwiftKey prediction options, which allow me to tap out common sentences in a breeze, and the multiple active languages, a huge plus in countries with multiple languages. :)

Autocorrect is one of the most common complaints I see about the iPhone. Whether it's professional reviewers or normal users, there seems to be a consensus that the stock Android keyboard and autocorrect have now surpassed their iOS counterparts.

I'm not sure what your friends were doing or which phones they had, but as others have said, Android at least offers you the ability to switch keyboards if the stock keyboard doesn't fit your personal typing style. If the stock iOS keyboard doesn't work for you, tough luck. No keyboard will work for 100% of the population, so the ability to customize it is a clear winner in this situation.

I am an Android user, and I complain about the autocorrect (and keyboard) frequently. Maybe the iPhone would be the same for me, but others appear to breeze through typing on the iPhone, while I encounter a constant stream of backing up to fix typos, etc.

And regarding third party keyboards, how about Google do a good keyboard that doesn't require installing a third party app? Is that too much to ask? It seems like an important enough feature to do right instead of abdicating responsibility to others.

Which phone are you using? I have a Nexus with the stock 4.1 (Jelly Bean) keyboard and it corrects everything as expected -- proximity errors, misspellings, contractions, hyphenation, capitalization, etc.

Android also shows you a list of potential matches for what you typed, and you can add new words to the dictionary on the fly just by selecting the word you've entered from the list. Not to mention it only takes a single backspace to undo a bad autocorrect on Android.

> And regarding third party keyboards, how about Google do a good keyboard that doesn't require installing a third party app? It seems like an important enough feature to do right instead of abdicating responsibility to others.

No keyboard will please 100% of smartphone users. The only way to make everyone happy is to let them pick the keyboard that suits them best.

I have a S3 and have all kinds of auto-correct issues I didn't ever have on my iPhone4. For example, it will auto-correct numbers. I will input something like 5 and it will default autocorrect to a phonenumber e.g. 5605432760 that begins with a 5.

Just the other day I tried to type in "damn" and it was constantly auto-corrected to "Damon". Never had anything like this happen on iOS.

If it was the Galaxy that was Samsung's fault. It was the most infuriating autocorrect I've ever seen. If you hit space then back spaced to correct a word you typed it tried to autocorrect your correction but not the whole world.

I have an iPhone and iPad and one of my top 3 complaints is how garbage the auto correct is. It's not just auto correct, it's how you have to hit the tiny [x] on the suggestion to dismiss it. The [x] is to small, its not near the keyboard, and on some web sites, clicking but missing can have unexpected results.

I also have a bunch of incorrect spellings that I have accidentally added - I can't edit remove these though.

I've been seriously considering getting an Android and this along with not being able to change the default email client and browser are the main reasons.

Really? I've not had any issues with the autocorrect. I agree that dismissing the auto correct can be annoying sometimes. I intend to hit the X and instead hit the word, so it corrects to that. However, I can type complete nonsense, a row off, and it figures it out. My coworker tells me his android won't correct "sre" to "are" (as my iPhone will) because it assumes the first letter is correct. This is a top of the line android device (not sure what the model is though).

> My coworker tells me his android won't correct "sre" to "are" (as my iPhone will) because it assumes the first letter is correct.

Strange.

I just tested this on my two-year-old HTC phone with android v2.3.4 and it corrected "sre" to "are" just fine.

Any chance your coworker is using a non-standard keyboard (either by choice or vendor caprice)?

Given Steve Job's iconic quote about the stylus, it's rather sort of ironic that the autocorrect UI (eg. close x) on the iPhone is better-suited for use with a stylus than a fingertip.

I'd have been more tempted to get behind your argument and take it on it's merits until the final line. If you're still hammering on the "it's cool" line to put the device down, you're completely ignoring the fact that there's plenty of people who own an iPhone and think it's the right choice for them. Whilst being completely and utterly uncool.

Key Pieces of history in the Siri vs Google Voice Search

- Siri is a commercial spinoff of a DARPA AI project called CALO which was primarily designed to help the military handle information in the form of MS Office documents/Outlook email. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/22/siri-do-engine-appl...

- CALO was an almost 10 year project run out of SRI but executed primarily at Stanford,Berekley and the University of Washington. Many PhD's and post docs on the west coast in Machine Learning cut their teeth on some element of CALO. It's influence is pervasive throughout the Valley.

- Apple does not have in-house voice recognition technology and instead licences technology from Nuance.

- Nuance is essentially a holding company for all the commercial voice recognition technology from the 90's and 00's except what MSFT picked up from the TellMe acquisition and what Google developed under Mike Cohen.

- Mike Cohen is a Nuance co-founder who nurtured voice recognition tech at Google for many years before leaving in 2011 but Google's current voice recognition technology is largely the result of research products he ran.(http://9to5google.com/2012/05/23/manager-of-speech-technolog...)

To Summarize. Siri and Google Voice search share a common lineage. Google is better position to improve the technology because they are not relying an existing vendor and acquisitions for key pieces of technology but instead they have been gestating internal groups specializing in both semantics and voice to text internally for many years.

Amazing history, thanks!

    Siri is a commercial spinoff of a DARPA AI project

Interesting example of how a substantial innovation (like Siri) yet again does not come from a private company, but from a R&D or such funded project without a short-term capitalist adgenda. Also I'd bet that this fact is largely unknown; this I'd understand is also characteristic. -- No wonder we're having problems getting public funding for "actual" new tech.

Google has a structural advantage over Apple and MSFT in natural language.

Apple has plenty of cash to buy Nuance to integrate Voice Recognition technology but lacks the management bandwidth.

Microsoft Research has done a lot of path breaking work in natural language recognition but MSFT management seems to be actively hostile to their R&D group.

Google has natural language features in all their core product areas and management that prides itself on dog fooding their own R&D.

I'm a Google shareholder for these reasons.

Don't know if I'm doing something wrong with Android, or whether it's just because my phone is currently restricted to ICS, but I find the notification system appalling compared to iOS.

On iOS, I get a notification and (if I choose to make it appear there) it pops up as an alert on my lockscreen which then goes into a list of alerts since I last unlocked my phone. If any of them interest me, I swipe over it from the lockscreen and it takes me straight into that app.

With Android, I get nothing on my lock screen at all. What I do get, once I've unlocked my phone, is a little icon at the top telling me that the app wants to tell me something. I then have to pull the notification window down to see what it wants to tell me, at which point I can tap it to get into the app.

I have installed "iPhone Notifications" on my Android phone, which helps a little - at least I get a pop-up message on my lock screen - bit it's still some way behind what I'm used to on iOS.

Custom keyboards - thank god for that on Android. I found it almost impossible to type on the stock keyboard, whereas I've rarely had a problem with the iOS one.

As for settings, again I personally find iOS much clearer on this.

Everything is clearly not rosy in the iOS camp - I certainly miss widgets/live desktop when I'm using my iPhone for instance, but many of the other "issues" you list are subjective at best.

>Twenty years of using Macs conditioned me to think, “well, that’s the Apple way.” It’s such a small price to pay for such a user-friendly device.

Another Stockholm-syndrome patient cured! I recently took over a prototype project targeting the Mac. XCode is garbage. OS X itself actively works against improving your workflow. It's Apple's way or, well Apple's way. iOS is built to keep the user in a padded cell (aka Walled Garden) and OS X is moving in that direction.

Use Cyanogenmod. Be Free. Google Now is amazing by the way. Unfortunately I had to turn my google search history back on, but it was worth it.

Can you give examples of good stuff you've seen from Google Now that have been a real help to you? Stuff that's genuinely useful rather than just "look at that" cool.

EDIT: So far I'm seeing a lot of reasons why Apple wanted to get into maps. A lot of the value add here seems to be navigation related.

Google Now will remind you when to leave in order to arrive to an appointment on time (as long as you are using Google Calendar) taking into account the local traffic situation. This one helped me already a few times not to miss a meeting.

I actually had an OpenTable confirmation in my gmail that wasn't added to my calendar, and Google Now still alerted me when it was time to leave. That one creeped me out until I realized it had scanned my email (still kinda creeps me out).

If I search for an address on google my phone will know and tell me how long it will be to get there and offers to bring up driving instructions.

I searched for sports teams so my now cards will show up with scheduled games as well as previous scores, but only immediately before and after games. It's not permanent clutter.

Handles package tracking. No more logging into amazon and going through my cart to find a tracking number, or digging in email.

It does meetings notifications based on how soon I need to leave to get to the location. Previously I'd have to find out how far away the location was and set a reminder for that amount of time and leave enough time for traffic. Not having to worry about an accident or construction is spectacular. This is really my killer feature.

Google Now does all of that automatically.

One thing that I find genuinely useful is the Traffic/Navigation feature. It is almost always correct and gives me the best route even in Bangalore (India). Also if I search for some location on Google Maps, I get a suggestion on Google Now about traffic, route and direction.

One thing I thought was awesome recently, had a business trip, Google Now knew about my flight information and popped up a notification telling me when to leave to be at the airport an hour early - even offered to navigate!

Any idea on how it knew? An entry you'd made in your calendar? Scanning your e-mail?

They don't make a secret of the fact that they scan your gmail account for a lot of Google Now's functionality.

I believe it scans your gmail for things like flights and package deliveries.

This is all a YMMV situation... I find that if I google something associated with a physical address on my desktop machine, logged into google, my phone will have a card with directions to that location.

That can be useful, but it's usually just an annoyance as I only wanted to call them or do something on their website.

Anybody have a solution to deactivate that behaviour?

I'm pretty positive this came from Gmail.

It also regularly updates me when my flights status changes (delays, gates changed, that sort of thing).

I'm really torn on this. Part of me says "hey, I never [expressly] said you could look at that" and another part is saying "that's really neat".

I work from home and go into the office 1 day a week (on Thursday). Google Now has picked up on this and every Thursday morning I'll have card on my home screen showing me estimated time to the office.

Google Now notified me that it had determined where I live, where I work and where I make regular visits, and asked me to confirm that it had the locations correctly (it did). Now it tells me when I need to leave to get to an appointment, depending on how I'm getting there and what the traffic is like. I didn't have to set up or configure any of it - it just worked.

Several people have mentioned Google Now mining their email for flight reservations. I've seen that, but recently saw a new twist: it wasn't me flying but some friends coming to visit me who had forwarded me their details. Google Now put up a card for their flight, and labelled it with them as passengers, meaning it had distinguished between a reservation for me and one for them. Then the next day, along with the weather card for my town, it showed one for theirs as well. It had recognized that I picked them up.

Another story, this time where I was the one visiting: after spending a night at friends, Google Now added a card for directions and driving time back to what it called "Unknown location." From my location info, it surmised I was staying at that place and was offering directions back. Being in a foreign city, this was actually very useful.

Creepy, yes, but useful.

Searched for restaurants on Google Maps on my Laptop's Chrome... there were navigation options for each on my phone in Google Now.

Using Google Maps on my desktop to search for a specific location will pull up that location as a card in Google Now. This is always useful if I forget to record the address before I leave.

Appointments has a nice reminder that you need to get somewhere and it will take X amount of time, so you should leave at Y.

Traffic card is amazingly helpful and surprisingly very accurate.

Is there a better C++ IDE than XCode? Serious question, works well with cmake and all the other tooling people use with amazing autocompletion (given how hard parsing C++ is)

> XCode is garbage

Once in a while I see an argument like this and I wonder - does this guy really do mobile development? For the better part of last year I was into Android development, in Eclipse. If XCode is garbage, I don't know what Eclipse is. Resource-hogging, buggy monster with seven heads with shit on them, probably. I could list annoyances of Eclipse that got me for hours. On the other hand, in last month I jumped in to iOS development. And XCode was a breeze. Sure, it has its own gotchas, but many of them either have fixes or workarounds, and the start/build speed is just fantastic, compared to slow Eclipse and Android emulator.

>does this guy really do mobile development?

Nope. Like my comment said: "Targeting the Mac"

So why do you feel qualified to comment?

I can't tell if you're joking? XCode is not exclusive to mobile development.

File -> New -> Project

See all that fun stuff under listed under OS X?

Wow. I may have misread your initial diatribe, but the inference was that you don't use it often. But hey, being rude is the best way to correct me.

> So why do you feel qualified to comment?

How dare you try to call someone out for being rude when your first comment to them was that.

How dare I? Who are you!? My question was a legitimate one, I was being serious, not fucking fatuous like the OP. As I explained, the post came across to me as if the OP didn't have much day to day experience using Xcode, hence the question. The OP initial comment was aggressive to begin with! How dare I? Wow.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that because you're new here[0], you haven't read the comment guidelines. I suggest you do, and modify your behavior accordingly.

Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.[1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=_Simon [1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Get over yourself. 1) I have been reading this site for a while, certainly since 2010 and have read the guidelines. Since your account is only 150 days older than mine, it hardly puts you in a position to lord it over me. 2) I absolutely would say everything that I have said to your faces. 3) I haven't been uncivil, my 'crime' is at worst misreading a post, however I don't think I did. Rereading the OP, he was looking to troll and I fed him. My bad, I will be more diligent in the future. You, on the other hand attacked me. Would you be so damned patronising to my face? Reading your history (how utterly childish) it looks like you are generally a bit of a patronising know it all. I won't respond further. Just waiting in anticipation for you to attack my spelling, grammar or punctuation, which seems to be the modus operandi of a HN troll.

Amused to see you going through the same process with other people as you did with me: ie you post silly statements in sloppy language, act all hurt when people point out your mistakes, and finally accuse them of being trolls (using yet another word you don't understand).

I really don't think you are properly equipped to debate things on HN. You should go back to Digg. It's your natural home.

qt 5.1 comes out this month, you can write qml interfaces targeting both ios and Android, and qt creator isn't garbage!

No, please don't. Android app design is already a gigantic clusterfuck where half of the apps still look like they're stuck in 1995 and using a non-native UI toolkit isn't going to help.

And this is coming from a huge fan of Qt and a KDE user.

IDEs are an odd thing thou, some people can't stand my favourite VS1012+R#. I sort of understand why, I am willing to pay the price for the 2GB of RAM it just swallows, I have an SSD so it isn't dog slow to load.

Which is why whenever I see the XCode vs Eclipse talk I'm left with the gut wrenching feeling of hating them both.

Well there's your problem. Use Intellij IDEA. It makes every other IDE you may have used look like garbage.

Also, the ADT bundle that Google now has works way better than downloading Eclipse and installing the plugin.

Although, I agree with you, I think Xcode works quite well. But, there are improvements that could be made...

As a matter of fact I tried IntelliJ. It was nice, but it had it's own set of problems. Two of them: - compilation times of bigger Android projects sucks hard. It's just not fast enough. I even feel that using word fast in this sentence is a misuse. - one of the selling points of the IDE (from their website) is Jabber integration for team coding. Tried for several hours, didn't get it to work. Even filed a ticked for it, which is still unsolved (the package is unmantained for years).

Intellij is better than Eclipse and XCode.

You should try another IDE. Eclipse isn't maintained by Google. Xamarin Studio is very nice. http://xamarin.com/studio

Xamarin Studio isn't maintained by Google either...

Also it'd be nice if the IDE supported the platform languages (Java and ObjC).

IntelliJ Idea is vastly superior and when developing on Android it is very easy to use Idea as first class IDE.

Compare this with iOS development. IntelliJ's AppCoder is nice, but because quite a lot of things can be only done from XCode, Appcoder is second class citizen. Let me re-iterate, if you haven't used Appcoder, it is a vastly superior IDE compared to Xcode any given day.

I do a lot of iOS development in Xcode, and a lot of Android development in IntelliJ. The IDE experience is vastly better in IntelliJ. Xcode is garbage. Maybe Eclipse is worse, I don't know, it's been a long time since I used it, but that's irrelevant. That something is even more garbage doesn't somehow make Xcode better.

The only thing I really miss about iOS development when doing Android work is not having blocks in Java, and it's still generally Good Enough if I squint and pretend that anonymous inner classes are equivalent. (IntelliJ helps to reinforce this illusion with automatic folding, too.) The iOS simulator is a bit better, but I don't generally find myself really missing it, especially since developing on a real device is much better in Android land.

Xcode is way behind the times in terms of automated assistance while coding. Every time I have to stop in the middle of writing some code to go up and add an #import that the IDE could easily add itself, I hate Xcode a little more. And that's really the tip of the iceberg.

I'm really hoping that AppCode 2.0 can give me the IntelliJ experience for iOS coding, because Xcode 4 has been a disaster from day one and is not getting better fast enough.

Your opinion may differ, but please don't act like disagreement can only be due to ignorance.

I've been meaning to ask for a long time. Are you this http://www.mikeash.com Mike Ash?

The very same. I hesitate to ask, but, is that good or bad? :)

Good, but to be fair to every other Mike Ashes, they aren't bad either. I just never know of them :)

Thank you for the time and effort put into NSBlog. It's awesome. Had no idea you write for Android now. Will there ever be an NSBlog equivalent for Android?

Thanks, glad you like the blog. I've been doing Android fairly heavily (roughly 50% of the time) for a year or two now. As for NSBlog-Android, only if and when I ever get to the point where I feel like I understand it as well as I understand the Mac/iOS side of things. Which will probably be a while.

Never worked with XCode, but I can't understand why anyone would like Eclipse. It might be powerful but it's also buggy, slow and complicated.

Besides that I'll just repeat what was that here and what's said in pretty much every discussion mentioning Eclipse: IntelliJ Idea.

and I wonder - does this guy really do mobile development?

...

in last month I jumped in to iOS development. And XCode was a breeze

Something's off here. You're questioning veteran iOS developers' abilities after having started iOS development a month ago?

I used to do iOS development and still keep in touch with several iOS developers of apps everyone has on their devices. The best I can get out of any of them is "XCode is okay", but more often than not, there's expletives and scathing remarks, especially since XCode 4, when they "iTunesified" the interface.

You just started iOS development, which means you're still getting the hang of things and the workflows. Give it a little time before you call people out.

That said, I can't say that Android development is much better, although I've just gone through the tutorials on developer.android.com for the heck of it.

The work put into LLVM and Clang is great. But Xcode (the UI frontend) is really one of the worst Apple product.

"With Android (and T-Mobile) I killed my contract. Now I pay just $30/month. For $30/month I have unlimited texts, unlimited data, free tethering, and 100 minutes of talk"

Anyone else have experience doing this? My monthly bill for an iPhone with AT&T is $76.40 which includes 300MB of data, 1000 messages, and a whopping 450 minutes (I do have ~2700 rollover minutes though).

I don't feel strongly about Android vs iPhone, but $550/yr is nothing to laugh at.

Edit: For comparison,

T-Mobile http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/monthly-4g-plans

$30/mo: 100 minutes, Unlimited text/web (first 5gb at 4g)

$70/mo: Unlimited everything

Verizon http://www.verizonwireless.com/wcms/consumer/shop/share-ever...

$100/mo: Unlimited minutes/text, 2gb data ($10/mo per 2gb data extra)

AT&T http://www.att.com/shop/wireless/plans-new.html#fbid=hfBE29q...

$70/mo: 450 minutes, 1000 texts (plan not listed), 300mb

$90/mo: 450 minutes, unlimited texts, 3gb data

I use Ting, and hit ~$23 / month with my Android. I rarely go over 100 minutes / 100 texts / 100MB however, which is why I pay so little. They serve LTE phones now, and my area is serviced.

Realistically, since Ting doesn't do weekends / nights, you'll probably fall into the 1000 minutes / 1000 texts / 500 MB bucket, which is still only $42/month. If you ever do a month with less minutes through, Ting will refund your money for the month you didn't use all of it. (IMO, better than "rollover". Its like if rollover minutes gave you money instead of minutes...)

My friend uses a Nexus 4 on T-Mobile. He's doing fine on the $30/month plan as far as I can tell, with exception of the lack of LTE on the Nexus 4. He still gets HPSA+ however, and the first 5GB are not throttled. The 100 minutes / month is a problem for me however... their next plan is $50/month for unlimited minutes, but only 100MB of unthrottled data. After that is $60 / month for unlimited minutes / texts / 2GB throttled.

I strongly recommend both Ting and T-Mobile. They're good services.

I have been on that t-mobile plan for the last year with an unlocked Galaxy Nexus. It has been awesome. Speed is actually better than it was on AT&T.

I have had the same T-Mobile plan for a while. I'm not sure what kind of information you want about it, but it pretty much works as advertised. The coverage and uptime is not as great as Verizon, but it's faster than AT&T (AT&T's network has been saturated since the iPhone lock-in). It's definitely not the worst choice for 4G data, and the price is obviously very competitive.

Note that unlimited data is, as you probably suspected, not actually unlimited. The $30/month plan gives you 5gb free over 3G or 4G, and then it downgrades to 2G for the remainder of the month unless you refill. It never actually cuts off data, but 2G is too slow for pretty much anything but (slowly) getting your HN fix.

Data point- I never have hit the limit on the $30 T-Mobile plan and use about ~3gb during an average month. I'm connected to wifi at work, home or friend's place ~18hrs a day.

Most iPhone users are limited to 2Gb right?

So far, so good. I got my first-ever cell phone a couple weeks ago and am doing this exact thing: Nexus 4 + T-Mobile pre-paid plan. I'm on the $60/month plan on the page linked above by whichdan, but will probably drop to $30, because I just don't use many talk minutes. So far, I don't have complaints with the service.

*edit DON'T have complaints. Accidentally an important word.

I use this plan as well. I've never gone higher than 70 minutes, and the coverage and speed blow my previous Virgin Mobile service out of the water. I believe Virgin Mobile uses Sprint's towers.

I broke my Nexus 4 recently, and I'm waiting for a new one in the mail (with a case this time). I hope Google/LG isn't still having trouble meeting demand.

You can also move to TMO with an iPhone. They reframed their spectrum in many cities (such as Minneapolis where I live) and now 3G works on the iPhone. It's faster than AT&T by far.

For the money I'm saving vs. AT&T, I can afford to buy unlocked iPhones new, or grab them off craigslist for cheaper.

The data isn't unlimited with T-Mobile, at least not usable speeds.

You can run your AT&T iPhone on StraightTalk for $45/month and get unlimited calling. I don't use many minutes, butT-Mobile service is basically non-existent where I live.

I use the $30/mo T-mobile plan with my Galaxy Nexus in conjunction with porting my original number to google voice.

I use grooveIP to make VOIP calls with my google voice number (unlimited minutes) but will usually use ~70 of my 100 minutes a month when I feel the need to turn grooveIP off to save battery or if my data connection is spotty.

I highly recommend the whole setup. The only downside I have seen is that group text messages/ MMS dont work with google voice. I just give my close friends my direct t-mobile number for that stuff.

T-Mobile is supposedly coming out with new plans at the end of the month. If you have a family plan, $80 a month will get you a postpaid plan with unlimited minutes and texts with 500mb of data per person (2 phones). 2GB overage is $10 a month or add unlimited data for $20 a month. Hard to beat on a family plan.

Also as a contact free postpaid plan you get roaming (most prepaid plans like the current t-mobile $30 one do not include roaming).

Also, unlike what this blog post claims, this is not an android feature, not sure why they throw that out there as an Android+. You can get an iPhone on t-mobile's $30 a month plan too...

I would suggest going with straighttalk. $45 a month unlimited everything and it uses AT&T networks. I always have a signal. I would suggest going with a good unlocked smartphone to take advantage of it (I went with the Nexus 4). In fact, you can buy a whole years worth of service at a time and it averages out to like $42 a month... not a huge savings but I just like having my phone taken care of for the whole year. No bills or anything to deal with. It just works.

they have some devices that use the verizon network, too.

If you order just SIM card, it will be AT&T though, which is what I did. I was using T-Mobile, but their coverage just wasn't good enough (defined as not working at my desk at work).

The Verizon plan is actually listed incorrectly. If you have a smartphone you have to pay an extra $40 for "line access", which brings Verizon to a whopping $100/mo.

Wow, and here I was considering switching to Verizon to save $10/mo. Fixed.

If I'm not mistaken, Verizon charges you that $60 + $40 for each phone. So for just a solo user, it'd be $100.

virgin mobile usa is $35 (-$5/mo for autopay) = $30 for 300 minutes/unlimited texts/2.5g data, sprint mvno, data speeds are rather poor though.

I was on Tmo's pre-paid plans for years. You can't beat their price. Their coverage left something to be desired though. If you're in city (for me, Chicago and later Phoenix), it works great. Once you leave that city though (ie, 15 minutes outside of Phoenix), you have no coverage. And of course, if you have an iPhone (or any AT&T phone), you're only going to get EDGE speeds.

More recently, I switched to Straight Talk. $45/mo (plus tax), unlimited everything (warning unofficial 2GB data cap). They are an AT&T MVNO, so you get the same network at a reduced cost. Now when I leave the city, I still have coverage, and it's usually very good anywhere I go. The only catch is that you don't get 4G coverage, which if you're on an iPhone, doesn't matter.

Of note, if you are on an iPhone, it will still activate on Straight Talk without any hassle. Setting the proper carrier settings for data and sms is another story though, and requires either jailbreaking or doing a swap trick with a Tmo SIM (you can get a pre-paid SIM for $4 though).

I couldn't resist the temptation to "brag" a little.

Here's what you can get for 15 euros ($19.5) per month in Finland:

  - 2800 minutes.
  - 2800 texts (and MMS).
  - 1M bandwith with no traffic limit.
  - Month by month, cancel any time with no penalties.
  - No starting fee.

(Bring your own phone)

To be fair, this is a discount package from a subsidiary of a big operator, and it surprised me too.

I've been true to the Droid since the G1, and recently offloaded certain duties from my Galaxy Nexus to an iPod Touch 5 (needed for Facetime, popular with the family).

When using iOS, I really miss the Intent subsystem. It seems like every app seems to offer different and restricted sharing choices (implicitly asking why I possibly wouldn't be using Instapaper...) [1]

I wouldn't be surprised if this is the next Android feature to make it over to iOS, after multitasking and a sane notification system. On the other hand, it would be churlish to not mention that Android took a boatload of inspiration from iOS. :-)

IMHO, Android got the OS basics right with the much maligned early models, and are now adding polish. iOS obsessed over a slick UI, and are now revisiting some of the basics.

[1] Apologies if there's something I'm missing here. I'm fairly new to iOS.

Any chance to convince your family to move to Google+ Hangouts? They work great on iOS devices and having multiple people in the chat is great.

Thanks, will try out the iOS client.....

We tried chatting with the Google+ Hangouts browser plugin, but at the time the performance didn't quite match Facetime on one-to-one chats when bandwidth was scarce.

My experience of hangouts is video is slightly jerkier (though in a controlled way if that makes sense - it felt like a deliberately lower frame rate rather than just breaking up), audio is more solid.

On a poor connection I'd go with hangouts over the alternatives at the moment. It's not perfect but I prefer the trade offs.

> It seems like every app seems to offer different and restricted sharing choices... Apologies if there's something I'm missing here. I'm fairly new to iOS.

Sadly, you really aren't. The current, not-even-officially-recommended way to share data in between apps is to have one register a URI handler, such as omnifocus://, and another be able to detect that such a handler is there and provide a "Send to OmniFocus" button if there is. It's not great, is it? It's up to app developers to tell each other what their URIs are.

The new "Send To" screen on iOS seems to have been designed for extensibility, even if it doesn't actually offer any. Fingers crossed.

They are still in the honeymoon phase. I've been through it twice before with Android phones.

Also, in regards to point #1, I never have this problem with my car. Sounds like more of an integration issue with the headunit in the car rather than the phone.

Yup-I rented one of the newish Toyota Camrys the other day and my bluetooth streaming worked perfectly. None of this random app resetting he describes.

Still, having good integration with a wider variety of vehicles/head units seems like the sort of thing that could reasonably be described as an advantage.

Some units work better with iOS and some with Android. It's really hit or miss.

I agree. To me it really seems to depend on the age of the head unit vs the age of the phone. If they are significantly different then the chances of issues seems to be higher.

Once you get past the disparity in app ecosystem, the top of the line Android phones (4.1+) definitely have the features to make switching easy.

For me, the killer feature is typing. I cannot get past how goddamn primitive the iPhone autocorrection is compared to even the default setup of Droid phones. The state of text input is just absolutely abysmal on iOS.

Just reading the title I thought the guy created his own C3PO.

Me too. I feel disappointed.

the "Evangelist" bit about this post irks me. So you've found the light, stop trying "Evangelize" saying things like "I’d like you to switch too".

I've used the ipod since the beginning, but i've also used windows until it made more sense to me to start using OSX. today i still use the ipod touch and an android, and windows. each has it's upsides (love the battery life on the touch) and downsides (there is a ton on Android). I'm not in any "camp" or going around telling people why they should switch to my phone. definitely hate the "apple way" even though i love my macbook pro.

Wow, 37signals is pretty lagging.

In my company I've seen the ratio iPhone/Android reverse as it reversed in the global market share.

37signals are primarily North American so North American market share is more significant than global. They're also pretty well paid I'd imagine so you're likely looking at high end market share.

High end, North America, Apple is still kicking butt. Also worth noting that for North America over the past 12 months Apple's market share grew faster than Android's and Android's market share dropped in both January and February this year.

Installed user base overall still favours Android (about 70m to 50m against iOS) but I'm not sure it's reasonable to say that there has been a "reverse".

A common thing I have noticed in these recent Android switcher posts (and despite the disclaimer this is a fairly typical one): a shift in perceptive of who the phone should serve. Apple tends to make opinionated choose that works amazingly for the vast majority. Switcher tend to stop arguing for the norm and realizing that some people are different. When I used iOS and ran into a problem, I usually found that I just wasn't the typical user in that edge case. Which is fine to a point, but not when I rarely run into similar problems on Android.

I guess android works pretty slick if all you do is stream from the cloud. But, if you want to sync music with the phone it's a disaster. The Google-supported way is for me to put MP3s in a folder? Really? And some of the android phones (like the flagship nexus 4) don't support transfer via USB? Really? I have to do it via slow-ass WiFi and a third-party program like doubletwist? Total disaster.

Agreed, local syncing is indeed unfortunate, but not sure how else it could be better unless Google builds an iTunes-esque desktop client, which is never going to happen. However, once I started using Google Music, I never looked back.

Syncing works pretty well with MediaMonkey [1] though I'm not sure what part of it's syncing features are in the free version.

[1] http://www.mediamonkey.com/

Or just put all your music on Google Music and select the songs/albums/artists that you want to keep on the device instead of stream.

Actually if your using Google Music, there's an option right next to the album to keep it on the device. I use it all the time, very nice.

if you want to sync music with the phone it's a disaster.

This was indeed an Achilles heal of Android three years ago. Now it is a complete non-issue for the majority of users, and iTunes is becoming as much an albatross as a benefit.

> And some of the android phones (like the flagship nexus 4) don't support transfer via USB?

What? I have the Nexus 4 here and I'm 99% sure I transfered files over USB in the 1h before I installed a custom ROM. Additionally I've never heard that complaint before.

The android file transfer app does not work with the Nexus 4. At least, it doesn't if you're on Mountain Lion. Same goes for doubletwist. The Nexus 4 only supports USB MTP mode, not USB MSC (mass storage) mode. I think other newer phones are this way too.

The way I do it:

    rsync -rv ~/Music phone_ip:/

All nice and wireless

Ah, okay. I didn't know other systems have problems with MTP.

It works in OSX Lion so your comment is a little misleading.

I do however think the Google transfer app is somewhat annoying as it tends to popup every time I connect my device to my computer.

If you want music to be stored on the device, you can tell Google Music or Amazon MP3 to keep the copies on the device. This is accessible by long pressing a song or album and then selecting "keep on device". Alternatively in Google Music there's a menu to select multiple songs/albums.

> The Google-supported way is for me to put MP3s in a folder? Really?

That's the 'over the wire' method. I think that's how it should work seeing as how with iOS you need iTunes in order to do it. And then iTunes has a bunch of non-sense about how certain things can/can't be copied because of drm or however iTunes and that particular iDevice feels that day. As for once the files are in the Android file system, the content manager automatically indexes the files so in Google Music or Amazon MP3, the songs are not arranged by file name, but by album, song title, genre, etc.

> I have to do it via slow-ass WiFi and a third-party program like doubletwist? Total disaster.

The problem here is you've been conditioned to think that wifi is slow, and iTunes is superior. It isn't. When I download an album from the "cloud", I don't sit there waiting for it to finish. I get in my car and go, or I walk to wherever I need to be. The device does it wirelessly and because it is wireless, I don't care about sitting there waiting for it to finish. You're stuck in the iTunes mentality where there's a physical cable attached and you do have to sit there and wait.

"Meh." <- This article and all of the comments in this thread.

The Apple vs Android thing is pretty played out.

probably one of the better lists of concrete "here is where android is innovating better than apple" examples i have seen yet. well put together.

What's interesting to me here is that I don't see anything but the "Android" brand being mentioned. Several people on this thread mention having several Android phones, but not several "Samsung" phones, for example. This, despite the fact that Samsung seems like the only manufacturer "killing it" with the Android OS.

http://www.asymco.com/2012/05/03/the-phone-market-in-2012-a-...

This seems like a Google win and a Samsung loss.

For what it's worth, issue 1 has proven to be the opposite for me. I had an iPhone 5 and it worked perfectly playing whatever app I had previously been using and not reverting to the standard iTunes library as it seems to for this guy.

Indeed, I switched to an Android phone (S III) and found the Bluetooth experience so poor (quiet, poor quality audio) that I bought an iPod Touch merely for listening to Spotify and podcasts in the car..

Ars Technica did a series recently on things that Android should borrow from iOS and things that iOS should borrow from Android:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/03/five-features-ios-shoul...

I found it surprising that he thought his android was better at audio-on-the-go, as this is the very thing that has been keeping me on iOS. Maybe its because my car doesn't have built in bluetooth, but the ability to buy an FM transmitter, iPod dock, etc. and just know that my iPhone will work with it is a huge plus. In talking with my Android using friends, I've also never run across anyone who thought that they could find a better music player for Android than the built in iOS music player. Has the music experience on Android been significantly updated in the most recent OS versions?

Nice, but nothing compelling. Match irritates me no end, but I don't need to switch phone platforms to fix that. Showing me the way home is a neat trick, but I know my way home thanks.

Makes you wonder if the iPhone 5 isn't the last device Apple ships under that name.

How so? The iPod touch is the iPhone without the phone. I think the branding would be a nightmare if they changed it now.

Unlikely for a whole bunch of reasons but primarily that the brand value of "iPhone" is still massive and it doesn't seem to be doing them any harm right now.

Instead I think what's happening is far more powerful and more interesting than that: smartphones (be they iPhone, Android or whatever else) are changing our expectation of what a phone is and what it does.

Saying it's a phone doesn't limit it because people's thoughts on what you can do with a phone are no longer defined by an old landline handset.

Apple is literally selling them as fast as they can make them. The iPhone 5 and the iPhone 4s were the #1 and #2 selling smartphones last quarter. So, I kind of doubt they are on the verge of shuttering the brand.

Blackberry also did this and continued to sell the same technology through slightly modified hardware.

Look how long it took them to come out the nose dive they were in. Apple could very easily go down this path and never realize it until its too late.

I think they would start to realize it if sales fell. The fall in Blackberry sales was clear. iPhone sales are still rising.

Chasing revenue quarter to quarter is the surest way there is to find yourself out of quarterly revenue pretty fast.

That part of the article is somewhat flawed.

He should compare "Android" to "iOS" and - say - "Nexus" to "iPhone".

A good tip for new Android users now that I feel obligated to evangelize Android a bit:

Get cyanogenmod [0] and cyandelta [1]. First off your get:

Android 4.2.2/3 and

the swipable lockscreen widgets,

the alternative top right swipe to access the notification toggles,

the new 360/panorama camera,

and updating is simple since cyandelta runs a scrip where it downloads a delta file of the next cyanogenmod and automagically updates it in 2 minutes with the push of one button-- no need to manually update the zip file.

Another great thing is Android ADB [2] and how quickly it is to get up and running on a new Android device / Android ROM. iOS' Cloud sync is slow when syncing contacts. I remember I was testing between Paranoid Android [3] and it's expandable notifications [4]/ hybrid mode [5], Omega[6] with it's standard TouchWiz two apps at once feature (multiview) [7] and all the other TouchWiz features (gestures and popup browser--which I didn't really use), and Super Nexus [8] with it's pure vanilla Android experience on my I9300 (Samsung Galaxy S3) before sticking to CM and Android will sync my Google Contacts and Gmail first and fast.

Google Now is great by being proactive like the author said but he forgot to mention sports tracking for those who like sports.

Other than pushing apps from the market to the phone while you're at your PC, the chrome to phone extension [9], and the share feature [10] he nailed this list.

EDIT: Forgot about setting apps to default. On paper Android seems better but it's still a matter of polished skuemorphism and flat UI / extra MB added from HTC Sense, BLUR or TouchWiz. The low file footprint on iOS compared to these added slow layers make up the difference so I understand if you don't want to switch.

[0] http://get.cm [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cyandelta&... [2] http://developer.android.com/tools/help/adb.html [3] http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?s=bbf7229560d... [4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=V... [5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v... [6] http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1663656 [7] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v... [8] http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2076672 [9] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-chrome-to-p... & https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... [10] http://blogs.computerworld.com/android/21699/android-killer-...

where is there a good overview of the jailbreak landscape for androids. I don't know if I want a rom, root access or what. I find the forums that many of the mods are described on to be scary, I don't want to get a drive by virus or malware.

If you're just starting out, you don't need to run any scripts, battery tweaks, or do any overclocking. A ROM is just another OS for your phone. In order to overclock, do mods, or run scripts you need SuperUser, in Linux that means Administrator. In order to get SuperUser you need to root your phone. So if you want Cyanogenmod the process goes like this:

Root phone->Check if SuperUser works->Check if you have a Custom Recovery->Download a ROM->Go to Custom Recovery and Wipe Data and Cache then Flash It (Install It)->New OS on your phone.

Give me a break. This is so vein. People want to read about how 37signals... gasp uses an Android phone!? Go outside people..

Ok, (s)he lists four reasons why Android beats iPhone, my reactions to the four were:

1. Meh

2. Meh

3. Holy shit, they are going to take over! Hail our new overlords.

4. Meh

The Android is aware of it's environment and consequently can take personalised action, and is allowed to by product makers.

I swear undying loyalty oh masters

1 and 2 are in the realm of bug fix / minor enhancement. 4 very much depends on where you are in terms of both how much deals cost and how they're structured and what that money means to you but in any case it's not killer.

3 is definitely the most interesting one though it still doesn't feel enough like magic to sway me just yet. Basically it's worked out that he wants to go home and at that point has behaved the way a decent Sat Nav does.

The Sat Nav bit is neither here nor there, that's established technology. The interesting bit is how it worked out that he wanted to go home - get that sort of thing beyond lucky (slightly educated) guess and that is a big deal but without knowing how often it's making incorrect guesses it's hard to know.

It's the idea that a computer has a comprehensive view of an environment - location, personal owner, last purchase made, next appointment. At what point will it remind me to take my pills, call the doctor, ring the lead I met who just twittered something relevant.

Agent technology is going to be huge - as long as it can be standard interface agreeed somehow

At first I thought this guy really built his own protocol or something. But upon reading, it seems like it's just a rant about his experience with Android.

Disclosure: I'm an Android fanboy (4 HTC phones! 1 iPhone)

The sad part is, this is a heavily opinionated article fully about his own experience and it doesn't actually explain why Android is better than iOS yet. For example, he talks about integration issues with his car as an argument over his iPhone, which is just his own opinion. It would have been really great if he had pitched as to why Android is REALLY better than the iPhone. He doesn't talk about the actual reasons why Android is superior -

1) Choice of various Filemanagers

2) Better Bluetooth connectivity between other phones

3) No need for the memory hogging iTunes garbage

4) Better navigation and integrated Maps support

5) Choices between browsers and functionality (Some browsers even enable Flash even if your handset doesnt support it!)

6) Excellent Notifications menu and ease of access to important stuff

7) Better App. management (Move to memory card, etc) and true multi-tasking, install Apps outside of Market

8) Freedom to do whatever you want with the phone - Install any ROM you like, Root it, connect it to other electronic peripherals, etc.

This is just a short list, and I'm not sure if some of the features are now available on iDevices, but the last time I checked, they weren't..

This is a real personal thing though. He's listed what made a difference to him.

For me most of what you list doesn't bother me one way or another and there are things on there (for instance better inter app communications) that I do really miss on iOS.

Apologies for the following rant, but these topics annoy the absolute hell out of me.

That list isn't a list "...as to why Android is REALLY better than the iPhone." at all. It's a list of why you think it is better. I have iPhone and a Nexus S. I despise Android device. It's a Nexus S running Jelly Bean, and I find it to be clunky as hell. I found it to be clunky as hell with Gingerbread too. Why the hell should I have to simply to have a satisfactorily functioning device? Reading into it, there is no guarantee that installing Cyanogenmod will improve things for me either. Of course, these are my opinions and they are worth little to anyone other than me, much like your list of 'facts'. What happened to live and let live? What happened to use the tool that works for you? Why do we have to endure the endless and meaningless pissing contests?

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