Unfortunately, I’ve had no chance to visit “Nexus Valentine” party last sunday, hence I still do have something to day. I’ve been iPhone user, but it just made me certain that I’m not going to use that phone. But, of course, if there would be no Android phones, I probably would stick right to iPhone.
So, what are the reasons of switching? First one, most likely, is Multitasking and background workers, but this particular reason has lots of consequences. At second, there’s no native Jabber client for iPhone, so I should either choose between whatever is in AppStore, but neither application really satisfied me. Push notifications are extremely poor. Anything coming to my jabber just pops-up in a sms manner, and multiple messages look no good. Notification area of Nexus One (or G1) looks way better. There I can see that there’s some emails, some Google Talk chats, update for software from Android Store, text messages. So, lots of stuff.
Next, Nexus One’s display is way better than iPhone’s one. Some days ago we took iPhone and Nexus One and compared basic graphics. Pixel size on Nexus One is smaller, so picture looks better.
Calendar in Nexus One, as for me, is designed better than iPhone’s one. Tap and hold to edit, tap to create an event. All these things save time, they are handy and important.
On-screen widgets, and screens themselves. Anything you have installed on iPhone is on your screen. Anything you have installed on Android is in your dock, and you can choose icons and widgets (that are just GREAT), and organize them the way you want. One-click to enable Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth and Sync (native widget). I’m not sure how much time it saves, but it seems to be a lot. BTW, battery management is handy too, you can see how much battery was used by certain apps or hardware and turn off whatever is not really important for the moment.
Sharing. That’s another section of goodies. You can share pretty much anything. You can email, twitt, upload to flicr/picasa all your photos and videos. BTW, Picasa and gallery itself are extremely well-looking, and camera/video and their settings are handier on Nexus than on iPhone.
I can go on and on, telling all about Google Latitude, Skype running in background, Google voice text input and search, directions, opensource platform, Android Scripting Engine that supports Python, Ruby and Shell, but neither platform is perfect, so as Android. Exchange calendar integration is possible only through Google Calendar Sync, which supports Outlook only up to 2007, so I was forced to uninstall my free 2010 version. In terms of Games, iPhone has just tons of those. Android has just few. I miss Tap Tap Revenge a lot :( There’s no ability to integrate with Dropbox, i can’t use my Mobile Me, which is no good to, since it costs quite a lot of money, so I was forced to switch back to Picasa, but my problem with storage is still “in the air”.
So, if you’re an open-source and open-minded person, go ahead and use Android. Don’t let Apple think for you and say what you do need and what you do not. They pretend to know better, but it’s not always true. So think yourself, and make up your mind. Sell your old iPhone, and buy Nexus One for the same amount of money!
Update:
Well. I have another story to tell. I broke my nexus one, and it was in California in Android Hospital for about 2 month. It fell down and screen cracked. But today i also installed Froyo to my phone. Well, features are just awesome: tether your mobile internet through wi-fi (isn’t it great?), share your info from laptop to mobile through cloud service, play flash on device (apple loves adobe, so you’ll never get this on apple device), gosh do you apple guys even have a normal jabber client? no native one, that’s for sure.
Also i switched from Mac OS to Ubuntu on my Macbook. Good-bye apple OS. I don’t have any reason to keep up with your proprietary ideas. I repented and went open-source!
And, thanks to my wife, now i have an Android-oriented t-shirt :)
