Sticking to the iPhone

Recently, I got a chance to play around with a Nexus One phone and I was using it as my main phone with the intent to use it as my new main phone. I had enough of the lack of background apps and the closedness of the iPhone, so I thought, I should really go through with this.

Unfortunately though, this didn’t work out so well.

People who haven’t tried both devices would probably never understand this, but the Nexus One touch screen is really, really bad. The bit of squigglyness you see on the picture in the linked article seems like no big deal, but after one week of Nexus One and then going back to the iPhone, you can’t imagine how smooth it feels to use the iPhone again.

It’s like being in a very noisy environment and then stepping back into a quiet one.

Why did I try the iPhone again?

While I got Podcast listening to work correctly on the Android phone, I noticed that a lot of my commuting time is not just spent by listening to podcasts, but that some games (currently Doodle Jump and Plants vs. Zombies) play a huge role too and the supply of games on the Android plattform is really, really bad.

And don’t get me started on the keyboard: Neither the built-in one nor the one I had switched to even comes close to what the iPhone provides. I’m about 5 times as fast on the iPhone than on the Android. Worse: After switching to the Nexus One, I again began dreading having to write SMSes which usually spells death to any phone for me.

Speaking of keyboard: The built-in one is completely unusable for multilingual people: The text I write on a phone is about 50% english and 50% german. The Android keyboard doesn’t allow switching the language on the fly (while the english and german keyboards are quite alike, the keyboard language also determines the auto correction language), and it couples the keyboard language to the phone UI language.

This is really bad, as over the years I bacame so accustomed to english UIs that I frankly cannot work with german UIs any more – also because of the usually really bad translations. Eek.

So, let’s tally.

	iPhone	Android Device
Advantages	Working touch screen Smoother graphics and thus more fluent usage. Never crashes Apps I learned to depend on are available (Wemlin, Doodle Jump […]) No background noise in the headphones	Background-Applications (I wanted this for working IM as the notification based solutions on the iPhone never seemed to work) Built-in applications can be replaced at will Ability to buzz pictures (yeah. I know. Who needs this?) On-the-fly podcast download.
Disadvantages	Can’t replace internal apps by better ones Needs iTunes to download podcasts No background apps No buzzing of pictures (at least not if you want a location attached to your buzz)	Really bad touch screen (jumpy, inaccurate, sometimes losing calibration until I reboot it) Very mediocre applications available UI sometimes slow Very bad battery life (doesn’t make it through one day even when not heavily used) Crashes about once a day Did I already write “really bad touch screen” – I guess I did, but: “really bad touch screen” Sometimes really bad, sometimes just bad background noise in the headphones. According to HTC, this can be fixed by periodically turning off the phone and removing the battery(!). No audible support (I know I could probably remove the DRM, but why bother at the moment?)

While I thought I could live with the touch screen, the moment I turned on the iPhone again to play a round of “Plants vs. Zombies” that just came out for the i-Devices, I’ve seen how a touch screen is supposed to work and I could not bring myself around to going back, but I still wanted some of the one big iPhone disadvantage, which is lack of non-SMS-based messaging fixed for me, so here’s what I’ve done:

• WhatsApp on the iPhone works really well as an SMS replacement (something I was after for a very long time)
• meebo so far never disconnected me on the iPhone which is something all other iPhone IM clients have done for me – and even on the android, meebo tended to disconnect and not reconnect.

For me, that’s it. No more experiments. What ever I tried to get away from Apple’s dictate, it always failed. The N900 is a geeks heaven but doesn’t support my expensive in-ear iPhone headset and doesn’t provide any halfway interesting games. Android has a bad touchscreen, next to no battery life, is slow and crashy.

It’s really hard to admit for me as a geek and strong believer in freedom to use something I bought for whatever purpose I want to use it for, but Apple, even after two years, still rules the phone market in usability and hardware build quality.

Can’t wait to see what the next iteration of the iPhone will be, though they don’t have to change anything as long as their competition still thinks it’s ok to save $2 on each phone by using a crappy touchscreen and a crappy battery.