My switch to Android

Why?

Boredom. Hard to expand on that, as that's the sole reason. I had an iPhone 3G for 2 years prior to the iPhone 4, which I got on launch day here in Australia. The phone I have is not the same phone I left the store with, as a dodgey home button was relieved by an EXTREMELY pain free experience at the Apple Store at Chermside. That swap was about 9 months in, and again, about 9 months from the swap my home button had all but given up, with only the most aggressive of pushes registering. And forget multitasking.

I suffered a mild case of fanboy in the early days, almost going out of my way to payout Android users, which proved difficult. You could almost say there was 3 different types of buyers, with 2 of them falling into the "above average tech background" catagory. The people that "hated" using Apple computers, and therefore refused to give them any money so far as a cellphone goes, the other side was the people that were smartphone users from the early days, Windows Phone 6 users and the like, that had tried an iPhone, but wanted more "freedom" as it were to customise and the like. The 3rd catagory is a massive market for android these days, people who went to a Teloptuvoda Store and bought a "phone." Nothing more, and nothing less. As mentioned in this article by thestreet.com's Eric Jackson points out, a lot of these android users aren't hooking up to Wifi, or browsing the web with their devices.

As the old saying goes, know your enemy, I figured I'd best hop on the train and see what this Android thing was all about. With that, I wondered into my local Telstra shop, and signed up for a HTC Velocity 4G.

HTC Velocity 4G

Why the Velocity

While it was hard to ignore the iPhone 4S on the stand in the corner, I narrowed it down to 2 phones. The Galaxy Nexus and the HTC Velocity. The store had a number of other devices for sale, but most were far to low end for what I use my phone for (HTC Wildfire) or I knew they were too far along their lifecycle (Motorola Atrix).

So why did I choose the Velocity? 4 main reasons:

The screen: I'm one of those freaks that can spot a Pentile screen from 10 paces, and the Galaxy constantly made my eyes feel like they were shifting focus. It's hard to describe, but hard to ignore. 

Guts of the phone: The other part was the CPU and video card. A small amount of researched seemed to show that the Snapdragon at 1.5Ghz and the Adreno 220 was a better performer than the Cortex A9 in the Galaxy Nexus. They were comparible in size, and looks don't mean a hell of a lot to me, as I always end up wrapping my phone up in some sort of Otterbox style case anyway.

LTE: Telstra in Australia, have rolled out their LTE network to a lot of regional centres very quickly, but most importantly, there's an LTE tower about 100m from my workplace, and with no Wifi, it makes for a much better internet connection when I'm away from home. In fact, it puts my poor home internet (ADSL 1) to shame.

Upgradability: The device shipped with Gingerbread (2.3.7 to be exact), but HTC and Telstra both promised an ICS upgrade when the device was announced. It took a month or two, but it's now happily running 4.0.3 with Sense 3.6. 

The good times

Speed - Importance - 40%

My god this phone is fast. I never have any lag as far as opening apps, changing screens, locking and unlocking etc. Everything runs well. Speed in this case also refers to the speed at which I can get a multitude of things done. The multitasking for ICS, as implemented by Sense 3.6 (which is basically the same as stock, allows for good switching between apps when your trying to accomplish something of significance on the phone. Not that you need it that often, but it's nice to be there.

Customising - Importance - 60% 

The inner geek in me loves the fact that I can try all these different keyboards and launchers, and muck around with widgets and home screen layouts. I've got the home screen of my phone setup just the way I like it.

App controls and associations - Importance 90%

This is a big advantage to Android, and not something that gets talked about. In iOS, you can have associations to files (eg, PDFpen on android shows as an option when you ask iOS to "throw" the file to another app), but what happens is the file is copied from whatever app has the file, and placed inside the app that you send it too, which means to end up with 2 copies. With android, apps have hooks into the OS in a similar way to desktop OS's, in that, if you have a PDF, you can save it to the phone, and any number of PDF readers/editors can open, edit and save, all while only having 1 copy. 

The bad

Inconsistency - Importance - 20%
This is slightly annoying, but about half the elements follow the Holo theme from ICS, and the rest follow the Sense theme...or something else..it's not a huge issue for me personally, but it would be nice if it was all tidied up.

App polish - Importance - 20%

In general, it's rare (but not impossible) to find an iOS app that it's polished off nicely from an interface point of view. It is, however, quite easy to roll into the google play store and find some absolute trainwrecks that look like poor shareware from the Windows 3.1 days. You can steer clear of them, and the general day to day apps all look ok.


Virus - Importance - 50%
This had me worried from the get go. Even the fact that there is antivirus available says to me that something is up. It's like reading the recommendations for travel to a foreign country and seeing "make sure you get ALL your shots before you go, including some special ones." I've never encountered a virus yet, and I steer clear of installing APK's that aren't from the store, but that doesn't mean I don't think about it, and the information that is stored on a phone is downright scary. I don't have that worry with iOS. It doesn't mean that it's not there, but the fact that it's talked about concerns me.

Battery Life - Importance - 90%
All this wonderful customisation, speed and control is all useless if the battery is dead, and my god, does this phone chew battery. When I bought this, I read up on the specs, and noted that it had a slightly bigger battery than my iPhone 4 (1640mAh vs 1400mAh), and I figured with the LTE and bigger CPU, my battery life would suffer a bit. My iPhone would usually have 30% battery at bed time (about 11pm) after pulling the plug on the charger at about 7am. In an LTE area, I'm lucky if I make it to 1pm before the dreaded 14% battery alarm goes off. It's totally unacceptable, and I'm actually in the process of seeing if Telstra can do something about it. I've sent it off once already to the repair centre, who said they did a software upgrade (I have no idea what this was) and it was now "working within manufacture specifications." If they can't give me a better phone, I'll have to invest in an extended battery, because I can't go on with this as it is.

Reflection

Would I do it again, yes and no. I think I would still switch to android, but to a different device. I bought right before all the usual suspects released their big guns (One XL and Galaxy S3), so I'm left with the most powerful last gen phone available. With terrible battery life.

Advice

What you should do if you're in my situation? For all but the most technically minded people, stick with an iPhone. It's likely to have whatever fun and new iPhone app all your friends are playing, with find my phone it's easy to set it up to track (android can do this, but to be honest, Apple's setup is WAY easier), and the after sales support is second to none. If you've been using PC's fairly heavily for a number of years, the additional options android gives you as far as actually getting things done will come as a blessing to you.


Just make sure it's got a decent battery.....


Damo