Ten reasons why an Android phone is not a phone for me.
Andy Rossetter says:
Hello Ralf,
I’m a little on the opposite end of the spectrum on the iPhone vs Android debate, although most of my reasons for switching from iPhone were carrier based (which may not seem like a plausible argument for this post, but when only one brand of iPhone is available on only one carrier, you have to take the service into account, and AT&T dropped WAY too many calls for me to consider it viable).
Anyway, I would like to address a few points from your article, if I could. I own the Motorola Droid, and have been by and large happy with it since I got it back in November. I’m by no means a fan boy for either camp, and I have no bias against either device (I think they are both fantastic phones). Here are some of my impressions from your article. Since the list format seems to be popular in the comments, I’ll go ahead and do the same…
1) I cannot really address this point. Being in America, the Droid’s carrier (Verizon Wireless) ensures your phone is connected to their network before initialization takes place. The setup was flawless for me for this reason.
2) I did some research on this topic (I also never encountered this). It looks like most of the people reporting this happening are in the European Market. I’m not absolutely sure why this is.
3) I’m starting to find a theme in these first three.. Lack of love for the foreign markets. It’s a shame and inexcusable, but nothing that cannot be fixed by diligent firmware updates (let’s hope someone at Google is reading this right now). However, the hardware keyboard does have support for foreign characters. Just hold the key with the accent down (for an umlaut, hold down the ‘o’ key, for example). Maybe not the fastest means of typing, but it works without changing the system language and can save you time in the long run. I use the hardware keyboard, so I have not looked for a software alternative.
4) This isn’t true. The phone regularly checks for updates (It looks to me like once every 6 hours or whenever you open the Market, but I am not sure) and will notify you in the task bar when updates to applications are available. To see your downloaded apps, in the Market app, click the ‘Menu’ button and click the ‘Downloads’ button. Any installed apps with updates will also appear in this list.
5) I 100% agree with you on this one, but the iPhone has been around a bit longer than Android. We’ll see more elegant Twitter apps as developers begin to devote attention to Android.
As an aside, developing apps for Android is actually far cheaper* and relatively painless compared to iPhone. This coming from a developer who would much rather work in Java than Objective-C, so I do have some bias here.
*You can develop Android apps on any platform that supports Eclipse. You MUST own a Mac to do any iPhone development. Very annoying.
6) I haven’t looked into this myself, but why would your average user want to do this?
7) I agree here, and Google acknowledges this as an issue as well (the next firmware update is expanding the number of home screens). Where Android shines over iPhone here is the presence of the Widgets. I would have LOVED to see these on iPhone. Plus, Android stores all of your applications in a dock (with unlimited room for apps). The iPhone can only store apps on its home screen, which means it needs more real estate than Android does.
8) This is true to a point. I’ve seen developers work around this like so:
- Provide the app on the Marketplace
- When the app is downloaded and ran for the first time, data can then be downloaded for the application and stored straight on the SD card.
In short, the application itself MUST be on the device memory, but it can read data from removable storage.
9) Fragmentation has been a buzzword going around iPhone fanboydom since the Droid was released. The problem here I believe is more on the developers than the OS.
Being that there are many different Android devices out there and only one iPhone, developers have to take into account hardware variance between phones when developing for the Android platform. The problem is that (especially with graphical applications) people can be too narrowly focused on one set of hardware and code with that hardware in mind. As an example, this can kill layouts, because when objects are placed in a graphical layout hardcoded to a specific resolution, that application will not look correct on a device with a different resolution. Providing relative positions on the screen is one way to thwart this problem, and many developers are successful in writing apps that target many Android devices successfully.
The API versions are there to prevent fragmentation: You cannot download an app from the marketplace with an API level greater than that of your phone’s. I’ve not seen any instances where developers *had* to specifically target hardware to make their apps run (this doesn’t necessarily make me right; just my experience).
10) I’m hoping this isn’t (again) a regional thing. I’ve not had to force quit any *system* applications, but at least the Android notifies you when something went wrong. I’ve had iPhone apps throw exceptions as well; the only difference is that they do not notify the user of what happened, they just send you right back to the home screen, forcing you to question the events leading up to your program closing. I guess one could argue it’s better to make the end user think it was something THEY did to return to the main screen, right? :)
Like I said, I try to stay unbiased and think that both phones are great, but they also both have flaws. Loving or hating a device eventually comes down to which flaws you are willing to work around until the developers swoop in to resolve them. Remember that it took three years for the iPhone to send/receive MMS. :)
aaReply
Great contribution here from Andy at TheNextWeb - as usual.
What makes me say this is typical Google? Seems to me there's always something about the way Google stuff works - that doesn't. In this case it appears there's more than "something".
And it also seems I'm stuck with the iPhone for a while longer. Apple has all the user experience and set up stuff sorted. The problem is the hardware gives me little confidence (my first one broke and the warranty claim was a nightmare). And a bigger problem is it's great for mobile web but it's a CRAP PHONE.
If only Nokia phones worked with Mac computers :-(
Comments [0]