The Great Experiment
So began the Great Experiment and I chose the lauded Samsung Galaxy S II as the best Android Smartphone to hold this event with.
On paper, this smartphone is a real challenger. I do love the large, bright, richly coloured screen, the striking images from the 8MP camera, and its feather-like weight despite the physical dimensions. But what are the practical upsides to this migration to Android?
Right off the bat, there was one huge difference I’ve never had to connect the Android phone to a PC for any reason. The SD card can be used to transfer books and photos, and there are many ways to sync or transfer files wirelessly from your PC. Registration is done through my Gmail account while connected online, and it even downloaded apps that I had previously trialed while trying out various Android tablets.
The next task was moving my contacts and email over to the GSII also quite effortless as I’m on an Exchange server at work. Moving text messages was not quite so easy I’ve managed to extract my SMS log and I’m still looking for the best way to load them into my GSII.
The next phase was ensuring I could continue to do all those midnight obsessive behaviours that I’d built up over time and yes, with a sigh of relief, I found all iOS apps I was using had counterparts in the Android Marketplace. (Except for a Cracked or Onion reader, I still haven’t seen
them yet).
I found free widgets for all those pesky settings that I wanted to the ability to change quickly and easily brightness settings, hotspotting, bluetooth and WiFi are just one finger touch away, and that’s hard to beat.
Notifications are also a great feature that up until now, the iPhone hasn’t done well. On Android, all notification summaries of mail, texts, social network and app updates and other push notifications are available on the dropdown menu for easy reference. I find this to be a great resource that helps me prioritise and absorb information without having to jump from app to app for each new update.
I’m addicted to Swype. It’s a massively intuitive way to type messages, and I’m almost forming complete words without looking now. The few times I’ve used other people’s iPhones, I’ve mistakenly just slid my finger around the keyboard, briefly mystified when it doesn’t respond to my command. If you’re at all familiar to the layout of a keyboard, then you’ll have no problem navigating your way around by Swyping instead of typing.
I also like the dynamic updates that are possible on the Android platform. Recent emails, latest news and weather, stock and currencies, and social network updates are all possible to have on your home screen, constantly displaying the updated information.
Not everything is perfect of course. I haven’t been able to send MMS messages since moving across, and I can’t open many files from email that I did with ease from my iPhone. Vcards sent from iPhones seem to arrive as garbled code.
Android is definitely a platform for people that like to customise. Whatever you want your phone to be — whatever information or adjusted settings you want it all seems to be possible with Android. Forums all over the world espouse Android’s openness for personalisation, and if you take the effort, you will be rewarded with a smartphone calibrated to your specific usage and functionality. I feel that I’ve only begun the journey, tweaking my phone here and there.
I guess this is the chasm between Android and iOS devices. Many iPhone enthusiasts jailbreak their phone to achieve what Android phones now offer as standard. Notifications, settings access and even Swype can be installed on a Jailbroken iPhone so a naïve question would be: why not just move to Android if it means that much to you? But I do understand that unwillingness, particularly when you’ve invested in applications and content from iTunes and the App Store.
I only eat mass marketed, low quality food. Each week, I pick a fast food restaurant and only eat all of my meals there. In fact, I don’t just eat there at meal times. I snack there. In fact, I snack there all day, everyday, even when I don’t really need or want to eat. I’ve been won over by the ecosystem of McDonald’s menu and ambiance, but the consumer experience of Burger King could tempt me back. The dumbest guy I know believes that if you’re not really hungry then you shouldn’t even at a meal or snack, and if you are going to eat then you should eat well prepared food made of high quality ingredients. He is such an idiotic jerk, and I think his elitist views are way out of touch about the evolution of eating. What are we, farm hands? He’s probably tricked himself into thinking that fast food ever made anybody sick.
Forgive me for the assumption, but reading the article, I can’t help but feel that either the author has hardly touched his iPhone, or he never owned an iPhone at all.
For instance, brightness. The fastest way to adjust brightness on an iPhone is to turn on Automatic Brightness in the settings, then switch the phone off and then back on. Upon unlocking, the brightness level will change to that which suits the current viewing environment. Also, a side perk of that setting is that it will automatically jack brightness up to a higher level as soon as a the phone is exposed to a brighter light source regardless of what state it is in.
you my friend didnt understand what he was saying, and yes i do have an iphone , but he’s talkimg bout any android device can adjust brightness to what “you” want it to be from the home screen as well set it to auto even ppc2003se had that, if you love apple, great, no need to try and talk down cause you like people to make choices for you. lets say you want to lower the brightness to a setting lower than the automated setting . choice is not so difficult to understand
If the Nokia N9 isn’t coming to my carrier, I will get the iPhone5 on contract and the N9 bought cash. Nobody needs to ask me about phones for the next two years then. :)
Great article! Looks like a converted Android user. By the way, you are not alone in your insights. Just look at the growing number of Android users from all over the world.
Android is the wave of the future. They have already reached the level of providing the same functionality of the iPhone, and more, like the widgets. The difference is, android smartphones are offered at more affordable prices than iPhones. The market would definitely choose the more superior product, in terms of quality and pricing.