Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Moving from Apple's iPhone to Google's Nexus One

This will appear disjointed because i'm going to put in dots as they come not in any particular order

Turning the phone on. The iphone's implementation of turning the phone on is better i know me that you can use the power button and the home button to turn the phone off on the nexus 1 only to power button will turn the phone on standby the trackball will not.

Keyboard: the iPhone will show you what key you're on if you hold your finger over it, as will the Nexus One. You do have a suggestion bar and that suggests possible words you're trying to type so using this could make typing much faster. (Note, yes auto-correct is turned on, I don't know if there's a way to modify what it will auto-correct.) I will say my biggest problem with the Nexus One is with the keyboard, if I start typing fast I eventually end up hitting the home button and kicking myself out of the application I'm using at the time. This NEVER happened on the iPhone. I think the Nexus One's suggestions are also more distracting than helpful as I'm spending more time looking for the right suggestion to assist in typing rather than just typing. The "keys" are also spaced closer together than the iPhone's, they keys could be spaced further apart to make tying easier.

File management: Adding custom ringtones is extremely easy on the iPhone, granted I have Garageband so its just edit a file, export as ringtone and done. The Nexus One requires no less steps in creating the file except I can create ringtones on the device from existing songs already on it, however transferring files to the Nexus One requires some extra steps since there's no management application like iTunes. You have to select the USB settings from the phone and Mount the device from the phone before you can modify files on the SD Card from the computer.

Default (built-in) Applications: The Nexus One has the most built-in applications but lets look at how useful those are, quality over quantity. Both phones have a browser, calculator*, calendar, camera, photo gallery, clock, address book, email, maps, app store, music store, SMS, Music player, phone (obviously), Weather*, youtube, clock and in current iphone models though not mine, voice search and dialing. (the Nexus One has these as separate applications while the iPhone combines these into one.)
(*The calculator in the iPhone provides you with a scientific calculator if you rotate to landscape view, the Nexus One remains a simple basic calculator.)
The iPhone also gives you Notes, Stocks and voice recorder.
Nexus One gives you Navigation, facebook, gmail, goggles, news* (built into the weather application), google talk and google voice.
Okay so the missing applications on the Nexus One can easily be added for free from the android marketplace. Not so easy to do on the iPhone, to get Google Voice for instance, you have to jailbreak your iPhone or use the web application but I'm not counting web applications, only native ones. (Google's web application is amazing though)
Here's where my issue of quality comes in though, I will never use the facebook application, but I cannot remove it. (If there is a way the process is far too difficult) This is space I will never get to use and since I'm limited to the internal phone memory instead of the expansion card for applications I'm quite upset about this "open" operating system forcing me to keep this application. (I'm sure it can be removed by rooting the phone but I don't want to do this, jailbreaking was part of the reason for giving up the iPhone.)

Camera: The Nexus One has the better camera hands down. Not because its 5MP, not because of the flash, because of the auto-focus.

Battery life: This is not usually an issue for me, my iPhone charges when I'm in the car and its very rare that I ended up with battery life problems. The Nexus One has mostly been left without charging for the entire day, still more than 1/4 battery life left at 13 hours of use. (Note: I'm not a heavy phone user.) If you're not getting the battery life you expect out of your Nexus One then you can see why by going into settings and about, it'll tell you what part of the phone is using up your battery the most and suggest a way for you to fix it.

Notifications when phone screen is off: the iPhone will light up for a few seconds with a message popup that will remain or become a list if you have multiple notifications when you turn the phone on, you can see this before you unlock, then each application will have a badge letting you know there was activity, but you'd have to browse though your applications to see these.
The Nexus One uses the trackball as a notification light, with the screen off I can see that something happened on my phone, turning the phone on, the icons in the notification bar tell me what apps are affected and I can use the same notification bar as many times as needed to access each application.

Docks: While I don't have the official Apple iPhone dock, I have the Griffin Air, which doubles as an amplifier for the iPhone's speaker and emulates the iPhone dock well enough. I slide my phone on, it connects to the computer, syncs with iTunes and starts to charge.
The Nexus One dock is designed for the phone's body, this is unfortunate because I have the invisible shield on my device (Both the Nexus One and iPhone) And although the invisible shield is very thin and much less obtrusive than a case, it prevents the dock from working as designed with the Nexus One. I have to work to get the phone to dock correctly, but its worth it for the clock and its "night mode" as I'm going to call it.

Instant Messaging/SMS: the iPhone doesn't have any native IM clients but its SMS application is as close to iChat as you can get on the phone, if you had two iPhone users with unlimited SMS plans then it would be for all intents and purposes iChat. The Nexus One comes with an SMS application as well as gTalk. The Messaging application works just like the iPhone's SMS application, doesn't feel like SMS messages do on other phones. Google Talk only allows you to use one of your google accounts, the one you setup as your primary account. This goes the same with Google Voice and any other Google application on the phone, they'll use the same Google account, so if you sign out of one you sign out of all of them. This doesn't work very well for those that have multiple accounts for public and personal use. So with both phones you're better off using an app downloaded from whichever store you have access to.

Overall I'm enjoying my time with the Nexus One, but will be keeping an Apple device around due not only to the many applications available, but the money already invested.

UPDATE: When a call comes in while your phone is locked the iPhone only allows you to answer the call or let it ring its full time to forward to voicemail, the Nexus One allows you to decline the call.

First 12 hours with the Nexus One UPDATED

My Nexus One that I ordered on Friday arrived today. (Overnight shipping my ass.) I'm still in the setting up and configuring phase for a few reasons, 1. I wasn't home when it arrived, 2. I had to get an Invisible Shield from Zagg on it so it wouldn't slip out of my hand. 3. I'm still reading The Manual. (Yes I read the manual.)

My early impressions are that its not an every-man's phone. Its not an intuitive UI. Browsing and selecting applications is more difficult than it should be in the world of the iPhone. Instead of having your applications available on your various homescreens, there's an application list that you have to select from, you can drag an application from this list to your home screens but why the extra step?

If your phone is on silent, you can't modify any of the sound options until you take your phone off silent, so I couldn't even view the ringtone list until I un-silenced my phone.

The keyboard seems to have some consistent problems getting along with my fingers, or the other way around, either way its always trying to type letters that I'm not trying to type when I'm towards one of the edges of the device.

Multitasking is great except when applications are competing for your attention with notifications that you have activity up in the header of the phone. However since there's no obvious way to quit an application I have to assume that every application I open is running in the background and chewing up my battery.

Uninstalling applications is also more steps than it should be, you have to go into settings, then manage your applications and uninstall via a menu system instead of removing from the homescreen.

Oh and since this is the big thing to make an issue, NO FLASH OMGWTFBBQ.... /sarcasm

I love the screen and the controls, having the option to roll the mouse down so I don't have to look at the phone is great.

The Android Marketplace is easy to navigate. It looks like most if not all the apps I used over 3G on my iPhone are here.

EVERYTHING is fast.

Oh yeah, Speech to text. This is AWESOME

I also bought the dock but didn't have much to say about it until I decided to go to bed and saw this... Okay now that is just cool and makes this the perfect accessory, great for travel and just so simple.

In about a week I'll review and compare the Nexus One and the iPhone after giving the Nexus One a fair chance. (And by fair chance I mean that I'll be writing this up after I'm as used to the Nexus One as I am with the iPhone, so if that takes longer than a week I'll give it longer than a week.)

Update: There's a task manager in the settings. I can see what applications are currently running now so I guess only parts of applications remain running if those applications have some sort of notification service, the main application shuts down when you leave it if the application isn't active. The notification bar tells you if you have an "ongoing" application meaning that its running in the background.

Update 2: I'm trying to not update this post too much but I didn't mention this above because I didn't miss it, but a software update released today adds multitouch to the Nexus One, looks like a good week to be switching.