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5 Reasons Why I Regret Switching From Iphone to Android

Posted: 04 Feb 2011 09:41 AM PST

Several months ago, I wrote about how I was going to ditch the Iphone and head on over to the Android side of the fence. I picked up an HTC Incredible.

Shortly thereafter, I wrote about my experiences with Android after a few days of using it.

Now, my main reason for switching at the time was Google Voice. It wasn’t available on the Iphone. Now, it is.

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So, where am I at?

Well, I kind of regret switching to Android now. My reasons for this go well beyond Google Voice.

I make no secret about the fact that I am a huge fan of Apple hardware. I used Windows for YEARS before switching to a Mac in 2007. And, honestly, I never looked back. Using a Mac adds so much to my daily workflow that it is unreal. I also have an iPad and love it.

I really dug my iPhone, too. I had the 3G and, at the time, it was beginning to show its age. It was slow and clunky because iOS had beefed up quite a bit. My AT&T contract ended and I had to make a decision whether to go with the Iphone 4 or switch teams. Even though I am an Apple fan, I’m not tied to their hardware and I’ll go with whatever does the job better for me. At that time, the answer was Android.

Today? Meh! Here are 5 reasons why I think Android isn’t as nice as the Iphone.

#1 – It runs Flash.

Apple-bashers can complain all you want about no Flash on iOS, but that is a GOOD THING. Flash SUCKS on a mobile device. I’ve lost count of the number of times my Android has literally frozen because of Flash content. I had to yank the battery out of the phone to restart.

Flash is slow and it is as secure as swiss cheese. It has no place on a mobile device, and I believe Android would be better off without Flash baked in.

#2 – It is segmented badly, which causes problems with the OS.

Android is the new Windows of the mobile world. With Windows, the OS is beefy because it has to work on so many different kinds of machines. The fact that Microsoft managed to make Windows 7 so nice in this environment says a lot about their development team.

But, the Android team isn’t there – yet. There are so many kinds of devices that Android runs on that it makes the OS more complicated. Plus, different carriers screw around with it by adding various ad-ware apps. Various handset makers doctor it up some more.

Sounds alot like Windows, doesn’t it?

Plus, buying apps is more of a pain because there is no centralized app store. You have a lot of different app stores. You also have some apps that bypass app stores altogether, thereby making you go through a bunch of technical wizardry to install it.

With Apple and iOS, the same company makes both the hardware and the OS. It is a match made in heaven, and that means the phone works slicker than snot. Always. Buying an app is always done from a single app store, and buying an app is just a matter of a single click and entering a password.

So, one can either go with choice or you can go with a phone which works. Speaking of that…

#3 – Android is half-baked compared to iOS.

I realize that it sounds like a snotty thing to say, but it just is. And it is something you don’t really notice until you’ve spent a significant amount of time personally using both systems.

Sometimes when I click a button to do something on my Android phone, the thing just sits there and chugs before it actually works. Sometimes it seems to misinterpret the button I actually pressed and therefore does the wrong thing. The spelling correction on the keyboard isn’t nearly as intuitive and I find my typo rate on Android is much higher than on iOS. The spell check on iOS seems to be better at predicting what it is I’m actually trying to say.

The GPS on Android is poorly managed and always runs unless you turn it off in settings. This forces you to enable it every time you need it – manually. On iOS, the OS is very good at keeping the GPS dormant until it is called upon by an app… and it doesn’t kill your battery.

My wife’s Android phone has frozen in the middle of calls. One day, I was talking to her on her phone… all of a sudden the line went nuts and I was talking to a completely different person. Her phone, with no prompting, had magically just called somebody on her contact list and brought them into a 3-way with us. WTF?!

When I’ve told people about some of these issues, they ask me hardware questions and to check various things… which brings me to….

#4 – You have to think about technical stuff.

For the longest time, my Android was triggering some stupid error every 5-10 minutes. It told me to “Force close” a background process, which, of course, had zero effect every time I did it and I kept getting the error.

To debug it, I had to wade deep into Android forums where people were talking about background processes, various scripts being used, various utilities to get in there and do certain things.

It was like trying to debug some arcane Linux installation, full of command lines and process names. This is a PHONE we’re talking about!

During my 2 years on the Iphone, nothing ever went wrong. Period. Quite literally, I never had to debug ANYTHING. You don’t have to think about ANY of the guts of the OS. It just worked (as Apple people are so fond of saying). It is quite true. My Android? It doesn’t “just work”…. the damn thing needs to be maintained like a Windows PC.

#5 – iOS is Currently Where Things Are Happening

Because of all the confusions with multiple app stores and multiple platforms, app developers aren’t putting as much effort into solid apps for Android as they are iOS.

This means that most of the buzzworthy and powerful apps are made for iOS. Android usually has to wait longer for a version and often it isn’t as nice.

Eventually, this is going to change. Once the Android market is simply too big to ignore, developers will begrudgingly spend more time on the platform. Arguably, we’re already at that point as Android has already surpassed iOS in terms of worldwide usage. But, still, the app environment for iOS is much better and better developed.

Your Milage May Vary

Keep in mind, this is MY experience. I know full well that there will be a lot of Android users who think I’m full of crap. In almost all cases, however, this is usually people who have never owned and used an Iphone.

I think Android is a nice platform. I think it will develop out quite nicely and I think it is destined to be the dominant smartphone OS in the world, far outpacing iOS. Eventually, that is. Right now, most people end up with Android because of carrier choice and cheaper phones, not because they actually think it is better than iOS.

So, what now? I’ll stick with the Android for now. It isn’t as if it sucks. It just isn’t as nice as an Iphone by any means.

Once I see how Verizon reacts to an influx of bandwidth heavy Iphone users, and I see what Apple does with the Iphone 5, I may bite the bullet and switch again. Unfortunately, I’d have to pay full retail for the phone because I’m not eligible to upgrade until 2012.

Not sure I can wait that long. We’ll see.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

5 Reasons Why I Regret Switching From Iphone to Android

Retro Friday: The VCR

Posted: 04 Feb 2011 04:42 AM PST

The videocassette recorder, commonly known as the VCR, was a staple of pretty much every household in America and more or less every other part of the world that had television; it was the de facto standard video recording/playback system in homes for roughly 30 years.

In modern times, there only one good thing about a VCR is that to date it is still the easiest way to record television programs or movies, so I’ll talk about that first.

SP, LP, EP.. huh?

A VHS videocassette has three modes of recording: Standard Play (SP), Long Play (LP) and Extended Play (EP). With EP you have six hours of record time which can easily fit three movies of under 2 hours in length. EP has the lowest quality because the signal is recorded at the lowest tape speed, but the point is while slow and clunky, VHS videocassettes are portable (play in any deck), copy-able (deck-to-deck) and allow for a rather large amount of record time for the cheapest possible price.

Generally speaking, DVD-5 discs are limited to 120 minutes (2 hours). It is possible to fit six hours of video on a single DVD, but the quality will be inferior to that of VHS when the data is compressed that much.

For the commercial movies you own on DVD that exceed two hours in length (like any of the Lord of the Rings titles), those are DVD-9 discs.

The bad old days

As said above, other than cheap-as-dirt long-play recording, everything else about the VCR compared to what we have now is horrible.

Loud, Loud, Loud

The first thing about VCRs is how loud they are:

The above video shows the unit with the case removed, but even with it attached it didn’t help things too much. I’m pretty sure all of us that used VCRs simply learned how to ‘tune out’ the noise.

Save That Rewind Motor!

VCR "rewinders" sold well because it was all too easy to literally wear out a VCR simply from rewinding videocassettes too much. In addition, during marathon movie-watching sessions, one does not want to sit and wait for the last tape to rewind to put the new one in, so the rewinder helped out in that respect.

"All I see is a blinking twelve"

Programming a VCR’s clock was an absolute nightmare. It was so bad that when the clock ‘lost’ its time from a power outage, most people simply left it that way.

(Those of us who exhibit OCD tendencies really hated seeing this and made us want to smash the VCR with a hammer.)

"Eaten" tapes

The playback head goes out of alignment and/or doesn’t disengage properly, and…

Drat. Now you owe the rental store 80 dollars.

Yes, 80 dollars.

We’re much better off now with our DVD players and DVRs, believe me.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Retro Friday: The VCR

you and you

Sabtu, 05 Februari 2011