Androids & Sheep

I’m in Canada so the Android mobile operating system can sometimes seem like a pretty obscure type of phone when I talk to non-techy friends. We don’t have big budget advertising campaigns like Verizon did for the Motorola Droid although Telus ads promoting their Android lineup have been ramping up.

“Is it like the iPhone?” I get asked. I like to answer with, “Sort of, except that it’s way better.”  ;)

So because I am asked this question over and over again, I thought that I would post some thoughts about what appeals to me about Android versus iPhone.

Please note: since there are many phones out there with legacy Android operating versions, I’ve marked which release version (1.5, 1.6, 2.1, or 2.2) has the most optimal experience. Check the specs of the phone you plan on purchasing since 2.1 is pretty standard in the U.S. right now but lots of Canadian phones are shipping with 1.5. Version 1.6 is probably the absolute lowest I would allow for a new phone and 2.2 is the version featured on the Google Nexus One phone. Most Android phones will see at least one software upgrade during its lifetime.

1) Apps by Google™

By far the biggest winning point for Android is all the Google-developed apps, and there are many:

• Gmail: I’ve been a Gmail convert since ’06 and cannot live without threaded subjects. The Gmail app on Android offers much more of a gmail.com experience than an iPhone ever could. (1.5 is good but 2.1+ is better due to an “undo” button and better labels support.)
• Google Contacts: Forget about keeping your contacts on a SIM cards — those days are over. If you invest in some time updating your google.com/contacts address book with emails, addresses, and phone numbers you will never again lose someone’s phone number and it’s available almost instantly on your phone. (Contacts entered on phone are also synced back online.)
• Google Calendar: Events are synced 2-way between the phone and web version. (1.6+ has a click-able map link when your event has an address attached to the event; 1.5 is almost the same but no map link so that one setback is pretty annoying.)
• Google Maps: Indispensable for getting around. What would I do without it??? Android also includes Google Navigation with turn-by-turn voice instructions for free! And if you ever favourite/star locations on maps.google.com, the stars also show up on the mobile version. (1.5 has Maps but 1.6+ has all the Maps goodies.)
• Google Voice: This one is questionable for how useful it is in Canada but I’ll include it because I use it for my voicemail. I forward unanswered calls to my U.S.-based Google Voice phone number in order to benefit from voice-to-text transcriptions. Transcriptions and sounds files can be forwarded to my gmail inbox, or I listen to the recordings in the mobile Google Voice app. Important note: If you missed the kerfuffle last year, Apple has blocked the Google Voice app from iPhone app store citing that it “duplicated functionality” — pffft, whatever.
• Listen: Do you subscribe to podcasts? This nice app streams podcasts to your phone and syncs to your Google Reader account.

Keep in mind that all these things are synced 2-way or kept in the “cloud” so if you ever need to replace your phone (or if you have multiple Android phones) getting up and running is simply a matter of entering in your Google Account email address. Data will start automatically showing up on your phone. You never ever have to hook it up to a computer to sync unlike an iPhone that relies on you to have a desktop with iTunes installed.

(Google also has a few more apps like Voice Input, Google Talk, Google Sky Map, Google Earth, and Google Goggles which are very cool but I don’t use them on a daily basis. Full list of mobile apps is here. Goggles will get pretty amazing soon though with an ability to take a picture of a menu in a different language and have it translated on the fly to your language!)

2) Homescreens

On an iPhone, you more or less just get a grid of all your apps with a dock for a few of your favourite apps.  How boring is that??

On Android, you get multiple (3 or more) homescreens that act similar to your desktop on your computer. You will most likely use this space to add shortcuts to your most commonly used apps. You can even organize apps into folders. Or create these nifty things called “live folders” where the contents are based on things that could change like the phone numbers from your Facebook friends or the files you have received over Bluetooth.

Android’s “live wallpapers” (2.1+ only) add even more oompf to your regular wallpapers (all versions). I use the built-in live wallpaper called “Grass” that is (surprise, surprise) waving grass. However the sky actually changes colour and texture (from dawn, to noon, to sunset, to stars) to reflect the actual time of day. It has a very nice ambient effect.

But my all-time favourite feature of the homescreens are “widgets”. You can pimp it out in many different ways. My current one is set up to let me see at a glance when my next appointment is, what my todo items are, and where my Foursquare friends are checked in. I also have widgets to see the current music track being played with play/pause/skip controls, and another widget with switches to quickly toggle on/off WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and adjust screen brightness.

And if you don’t want the stock homescreen, there’s a world of homescreen replacement apps waiting for you such as: LauncherPro which looks exactly like the regular homescreen but adds a favourites dock and can work in landscape mode; Slide Screen which gives you a simplified, one-screen highlight of your calendar, mail, weather, twitter, and other news; or Sweeter Home which has tons of downloadable themes. (For more homescreen replacement apps, check out Android Tapp’s roundup.)

Android is all about making your phone yours — not Apple’s.

3) Background services

The word “multi-tasking” is thrown around a lot when talking about mobile operating systems. Droid does and iPhone doesn’t, right? Most of the time, people seem to be referring to the idea of multiple, concurrently running applications. This is a bit confusing because the mobile experience is not like a desktop computer where you can see all your programs running alongside each other in separate windows.

As a mobile phone user on a tiny screen, you might not notice between a well-designed mobile app that saves its current state before quitting and reloads it where you left off versus an app that is simply paused while displaying a different app. So on this level, Android and iPhone are mostly the same.

However, let’s say you want your phone to check for your location at a regular interval and log your GPS so you can record a jog but you also want to do other things on that jog like listen to streaming internet radio and send off an email. Or how about automatically back up your phone photos and videos to Picassa or Flickr without any additional action on your part? How about automatically forward SMS messages to another phone number? Or something as simple as being notified if someone has posted a Twitter tweet that mentions your name without opening Twitter?

There is no doubt that Android currently rules in this area.  I especially love PicPush for automatic photo backups and NewsRob for auto-syncing of Google Reader items.

iPhone 4 OS will add a form of multi-tasking but it’s up to the app developer to enable these features so we shall see what developers whip up.

4) Androids apps, Android Market, and web access

This is obviously the biggest area of debate for the Android versus iPhone battle royale. I will try to sum it up in just a few points because it’s been discussed ad nauseam but focus on the user’s perspective:

• The Android Market might not have gazillions of apps like iPhone but the apps that I use today are pretty quality and almost always FREE or built-in; Apple’s app store will slowly but surely suck $ out of your wallet every month.
• If you have a phone with Android 2.1 (or even better, 2.2) and a 1 Ghz snapdragon processor like the newer Android phones, the web browser is fast, fast, fast so you don’t have to rely on apps because “there’s a website for that”.
• Android 2.2 (coming soon for public release, we hope) has Flash Player 10.1 for download in the Market. It doesn’t matter if you hate Flash or not — if some important piece of information is embedded within Flash content, good luck seeing it on your iPhone. If you want to, make it so you have to click to enable Flash content. (Within the web browser: Menu » More » Settings » Enable plug-ins. Select “On demand”.)
• All apps are allowed. Some of them suck but so do Apple ones. However, if it’s a paid app, you get 24-hours to decide if you like it or return it for a refund. No such refund policy for iTunes store.
• You can download Android install files(.apk) from anywhere outside of the Market and install it. Sometimes that means getting into cool betas like I am for the Swype keyboard replacement. Or, if you’re in a country that Android Market doesn’t support yet, you can use alternative markets like SlideME, GetJar, Motorola’s SHOPS4APPS, or one offered by your mobile carrier. Love it or hate it, iTunes is your one and only option for iPhone.
• The Android Market will eventually be fully viewable in a web browser and it’ll be much better than the current one. How is that a win for Android over iTunes? Well if you have Android 2.2 on your phone, if you see an app that you like while at your desktop, you will be able to send it to your phone using a Cloud-to-Device plugin to start downloading and installing — no USB cable required! Having a web-based listing of apps will also lead to innovative uses such as AppBrain which offers a crowd-sourced ranking of apps.

5) Notification shade

All of your alerts go the status bar at the top. You can dismiss them when you’re done with them or keep them around to remind you.  Much better than having something pop up in the middle of your screen and demand your full attention, à la iPhone.

6) Hardware choice

Since Android is a free operating system, manufacturers such as HTC, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, and Dell have been flocking to Android like there’s no tomorrow. And well, to be honest, the iPhone operating system was a wake up call for the lumbering mobile handset industry to go out and re-invent themselves or be left in the dust — software is one way to quickly close that gap.

Thankfully, manufacturers have created a steady flow of Android phones over the past year. Keyboard or touch-only? Little screen, big screen, or huge screen?

Much like point #2 about homescreen customization, a good selection of hardware means that you can try and get a phone that fit your needs — not fit yourself to a single phone.  Of course, with all these handsets, it does mean you will probably spend more time than before researching phones so, if you don’t like gadgets like I do, you should find a friend that does.

Having said all of the above, the only major thing that makes me jealous about the iPhone is the touch-screen sensitivity — hardware-wise, Android manufactures just haven’t gotten it to be as smooth as Apple has.

In closing

I often like to say that the iPhone is a like a smartphone with training wheels. Easy to get on and start pedaling but it doesn’t have all the nuances of  a cruiser / BMX / mountain bike /single-speed / tandem or whatever bike your heart desires. And you know what, some people like the comfort of knowing that they can’t fall, that’s fine BUT, and this is a big BUT, be careful of the marketing engines…

Anyone who sells products does this but Apple is especially dexterous in painting their devices with bold words such as “magical”  or “game-changing”.  These words are meaningless in advertising except to create psychological attachment to a product — please just remember that. They are also unabashedly unapologetic about their products.

Whenever possible, try out a phone for 1 or 2 weeks. Integrate it into your life. Don’t rely on just hype.

And with that, I leave you with a Facebook conversation (edited) I came across today:

Tags: android, comparision, iphone

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 24th, 2010 at 8:36 PM and is filed under android. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.