There are tons of reviews and comparison articles about Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Android ICS or 4.0 and how it stacks up against other phones such as iPhone. But since many of you have asked about my experience with Android I figured I would address it as a post. And as a one liner, for the most part I am happier than being an iPhone (4) user, but there are things I find to be frustrating as well. It’s a trade off like everything else.
Android ICS is my exposure to Android (other than playing with friends’ previous Android versioned phones for 2 mins here and there) so I can’t comment on how things were before, but in a nutshell the UX in many aspects is similar to how you do things in iPhone, other things very different. Here is what I like:
Configuration – In iOS, apps exist in silo and can be configured to the extend allowed by the app developer, and between apps, they don’t interact much. In Android they do much more. A couple of examples: You can configure what apps should be used for calling depending on type of number (international, local, specific country). I can customize the home screen using any launcher app, I can configure it to ask me which of the three browsers to use each time I click on a link. I can configure it such that depending on what event has taken place (new email, new instant message, facebook notification etc) different color lights blink, the phone vibrates (or not, how many times). In other words you can really configure things at very detailed level. Not appealing to most people probably, but I really like this aspect as it makes the phone much more catered to my needs if I take the time.
Apps – It feels there are more free apps for android and I can’t say there are any apps I had on iOS that I couldn’t find for android (ok, maybe instagram), but it is clear that the same apps a lot of times feel less polished and snappy as their counterpart in iOS. Facebook app for example is plain awful in android and if you click on a link you need to switch to the browser app (in iOS it opens it within the app itself for the most part). Probably by design so google+ can get better traction.
Performance – since you can control things a lot more as a user, the performance can also be impacted by this, hence as a user, in iOS very seldom you find the phone slugish, in Android you have to keep an on things a bit more. The phone has also just frozen at times och screen has been unresponsive half a dozen times so far in my 3-2 months of usage. Never happened in iPhone.
Notifications and Widgets – By far I prefer Android’s approach here. You can also have widgets on the home acreen (e.g. your calendar) so you don’t have to start an app to check on things. Very useful. Still, the lock screen (if you use passcode) on Android is as useless as the iOS. I would like to see for example my upcoming meetings on it. And I have not found an easy way to configure this part yet.
In summary what makes me like Android more than iOS is the summary of what I described above but also other little (and sometime less significant) things such as the fact that you can take still pictures while you are shooting a video, a great turn-by-turn GPS app, superior experience in some of the Google specific apps like gmail or maps (e.g. you can offline-cache any 15 mile radius in maps in case you are heading into a bad reception area) and as I use some of these (gmail) it tips the scale easily towards Android.
Next stop will be getting a windows 8 phone to see how that measures once it is out…
