Prelude
I am an unapologetic former iFanBoy. Few months ago, I owned almost all the new iProducts that were launched by Apple in the past few years. The ones that I could afford at least :~). Heck, I was even one of the three fools who pre-ordered the AppleTV.
By the end of this year, I will have an Android phone, an Amazon Kindle and a Boxee box (provided they ship) instead of an iPhone4, an iPad (yeah I know the difference between the iPad and Kindle) and iTV. I have a few less iProducts at home as well. An iMac, MacBookPro, AppleTV and iPhone 3g were shown the door and other ancillary iProducts will be replaced by non iProducts as they die. I have removed my dependency on iTunes as my media server and worked around it. It has been an epic geeky “battle”, but so far I am winning it :~).
I now belong to the small noisy set of people who like iProducts for their design elegance, but hate Apple’s attitude towards developers, partners and to some extent, consumers. I think Apple’s attitude towards the iOS and the surrounding issues to it (3.3.1, Adobe fiasco, iAd restrictions, App Store approval idiocy) and the overall walled garden approach is bad to consumers in the long run. Some people, like DHH openly call Apple as being fascist, yet still use iPhone4 and iPad because of their design elegance. I choose not to do that.
I am dependent on OSX for work since that solves my work related issues elegantly (*nix support, Ruby & Rails support and run Office suite) and would be foolish to waste my work hours tweaking a PC laptop running linux and windows. Other than that, I see little need for Apple products.
Why this rant when discussing an Android phone? As Dan Ariely explains in Predictably Irrational, we anchor our current experiences based on prior experiences. Any of us who saw Mr. Jobs present the original iPhone 4 years ago and did the touch and scroll of contacts knew what was the new benchmark. He scrolled slower and the contacts scrolled slower. He scrolled faster and so did the contacts. He scrolled much faster and the contacts hit the bottom and did the little bounce thingie.
It made all the phones that appeared till that point archaic, tasteless and well, less magical. You knew you had see the future of phones that day and that becomes the anchor experience.
I have owned an iPhone 3G since then and my wife now upgraded to an iPhone 4. For good or for bad, my experiences with Android are now anchored against the iPhone 3G I owned in the past and the iPhone 4 my wife owns. I will often compare the Samsung galaxy S phone to the iPhone, just to illustrate how much better the Samsung phone can be in certain areas, if only they paid attention to detail. So, here it goes.
Hardware
The first thing that strikes you when you see the Samsung Captivate (that is the AT&T version of Samsung Galaxy S, called the AT&T Captivate 
) is how light it is, for the gorgeous 4″ screen.
The phone doesn’t feel like a behemoth to hold given its enormous screen, is ridiculously thin and weighs next to nothing, even with the battery snapped on. The only things that really ruin the phone are the big at&t and samsung logos in the front :~). There is ample space in the back for logos, isn’t it? I mean, I *KNOW* I am using an Samsung phone on AT&T, so do you have to tell *ME* about it? .
Between the size of the phone and the grip of the battery, this phone will stay in your hands. I really don’t see a need for a case for this phone, unless I want to hide at least part of the hideous logos in front .
Quick iPhone 4 note: The iPhone 4 is smaller, much heavier and has glass on both sides with a super slippery grip. Beware of dropping it on hard surfaces.
Update: A day after I wrote this, my wife dropped the iPhone4 and broke the screen 
.
The phone has the volume control buttons on the left, the micro USB port and headphone jack on the top and the power button to the right.
As with all android phones, there is the Menu, Home, Back and Search buttons at the bottom. The beauty of the Samsung is these are not real buttons, but they feel like real buttons. The buttons light up when you power on the phone and the tactile feedback you get when you touch the buttons is almost equivalent to touching a real button.
In short, the phone is gorgeous. It is comfortable to hold, slips into the front pocket of my jeans comfortably and doesn’t feel like it is going slip through my hands.
Buttons too many?
Coming from the iOS world, 4 buttons seems 3 buttons too much. It took me a while to get used to the Android 4 button approach. I have been using a friend’s G1 Android phone for a while that eased my transition to Android. It has grown in me.
iOS takes the approach of “no menus” anywhere in its phones. That implies that for all operations, the GUI designer in the app has to allocate space for actions and create buttons accordingly. They do and redesign screens accordingly, but every now and then you run into a screen which is all buttons and less functionality. Yes, there are smart ways of doing this by popping up the buttons if you select something, but what I observe is that the appearance of actionable buttons is now all over the place. ie, in different apps, you perform actions ever so slightly and it seems a bit jarring.
The menu button in Android kinda addresses that fact. The entire screen is available for you to render your content and to perform any action, you hit the menu. It seems pretty consistent. The one thing to watch for is some times, the “save” button is hidden in the menu and if you didn’t save it, you might lose what you just performed.
It is a trade off and I can live with either approach.
Now, the back button is just great. How often have I done something on the iPhone, drilled down many pages only to realize that there is no way to go back! Take the Yelp app for example. You start with with a search, read reviews, click on map and you are now in the map application. You want to go back and look for a related listing. What do you do? You hit the home button and you start over. Unless the app itself provides soft back buttons that lead you back to where you came from, you are in tough luck.
Android solves this problem elegantly. The back button in the base takes you one screen backwards and it seems to work flawlessly almost always. I dig this feature.
The search button is a definite nice to have for quick searches.
In short, the 4 button approach takes a while to get used to, but when you get used to it, you wonder how you lived without them. Different strokes, each works very well.
You can call me on this phone
For the past two years, my wife and me both had iPhone 3G phones. To top it, my wife has a 45 minute commute each way on the train with varying levels of network availability. Our telephone discussions often went along this line:
© Herge and Tintin Comics
At least once, I had to tell some one – “No I didn’t mean f*ck us, I meant ruckus”.
The iPhone 3G was magical alright, but the magic was distorted when it came to talking on the phone. Yes, you discount the fact that my wife was traveling on the train, but the phone still wouldn’t work when she is at work in a high-rise in San Francisco downtown. My phone would drop calls as I moved from one part of the home to the other.
Yes, I know AT&T gets thrown under the bus for iPhone voice problems, but consider this. I have been a somewhat happy AT&T customer for nearly 10 years now. iPhone is the only phone that gives me the most grief when it comes to calling and talking people over the phone. I have had instances where I traveled to Eastern Sierra and my phone never latched to any kind of a decent signal to make a phone call. Ironically, I would be able to do Foursquare checkins on Edge or GPRS, but never be able to make a call without dropping. However, when I borrowed my relative’s flip nokia and make a call, the call would go through, the voice would be clear and loud and you can actually hear the other person talking. The rub – my relative is also on AT&T.
IMO, iPhone is a marginal phone to talk on. I read that the iPhone4 is better, but I reserve judgment on that.
The Samsung Captivate changes all that. It has the clearest, loudest sound quality I have heard in a phone, in a long time. It is as good as the Blackberries I have used and I will stop looking at my really old Nokia 6010 lovingly to make phone calls. I know this is controversial, but if you are an iPhone user with call quality issues, please do yourself a favor and use your SIM card on a different phone. Hear the difference.
First time user experience
The first time user experience with the Samsung captivate is hideous. So much so that I had to write a separate blog on how to survive the initial experience of the phone. You really have to let the phone grow in you and understand the quirks. Unfortunately, a lot of the issues I faced were specific to either Samsung or AT&T. I would love to use the stock Android experience as in the Nexus One phone. This is where the iPhone wins, hands down. You never feel at loss trying to figure out how to do the basic things you want to do. In general, I see quite a bit of design by committee at work with Android. The iPhone often feels as if it was designed by ONE person. If design elegance is important to you, as it is to someone like DHH, I suspect you would love the iPhone better. But remember, design elegance comes at a cost. Apple sacrifies features for design. Features which will change the way you use your phone.
Screen
The AMOLED screen is gorgeous. After using the 4″ screen, I am surprised how I survived without it. Surprisingly, I now wonder if the 6″ screen on the Kindle is that big of a jump as compared to running the Kindle app on the phone itself . The screen size comes in handy when using the Android keyboard. You get extra space for the spell check suggestions to pop up and it doesn’t hinder your typing.
The resolution is not as good as the iPhone 4 resolution, but it doesn’t matter for most normal uses. Yes, the iPhone 4 resolution is better, but I will take the larger screen if I have to choose between the two.
Since the AMOLED screens eat more battery on white background, a lot of the default screens come with black background, it was odd at first, but I have gotten used to it.
Here is a bazooka, now go shoot yourself
There is nothing that is configurable in the iPhone. Different themes, nope (unless you jailbreak). Different layouts, nope. Hybrid widgets, no way. It is either iWay or the highway. Android has some killer features that will change the way you use your phone. Remember that I have had this phone for less than a week, but I have found things that bring a smile to my face already. I expect as I explore this more and find out more apps and tweaks, I am going to thoroughly enjoy the phone.
Android lets you change just about everything in your phone. The phone layout, what widgets, apps and shortcuts you want on each screen. What icons you want in the dock, how many docks you want, default behavior of buttons and so on. It lets you swap out core apps with your own, lets you change core services to what you like (for instance, you can change the app launcher service with your own so you can configure just about everything you see on the phone) and even change your phone calling service with something like Google Voice.
You don’t like the standard keyboard, you can download any custom keyboard from the Android Market. I haven’t grown out of the Android Keyboard yet, but every now and then I switch over to the fantastic swype keyboard which can be made default system wide.
You got yourself a bazooka and I guarantee you that your Android will never be like another Android phone you will run into. Here are a few that I have figured out in the first few days of use.
Quick turn off
Do you want to quickly turn off your Wi-Fi and Bluetooth? Easy, drag the quick drop drawer on top of the screen and you can turn off what you want. No more fiddling with settings to do things you do often. The notification area is pretty handy. All your notifications are stored in this one common area.
Even better, there are apps to let you create profiles and configure them based on what you to turn on and off.
Short cuts for everything
Remember the glorious old days when you could actually make a phone call while driving? You did a * followed by dial button twice to call the last called person. I don’t know about you, but 95% of the time, I call one of the last 5 people I called. 90% of the time it is the last person I called or received a call from. Life used to be simple.
Imagine doing that with the iPhone while driving in Hwy 880. You take your phone, swipe it, enter the password if you set it, hit the phone button, realize that it is in contacts where you left it last, then go to either recents or favorites, hit the number and hope it dials. By now you are either close to hitting someone else or like this:
Android helps. Not the whole way you are used to with your Nokia 6010, but definitely closer in that direction. You can create short cuts for just about everything. I have added direct dial short cuts for the phone numbers I call often and put them in a screen. So calling from phone is now unlock, password (you could configure your swipe in a pattern and use that as password if you like it), quick dial screen and hit button.
Widgets everywhere
Plenty of widgets everywhere. You will go crazy playing with those. The possibilities are endless. A couple of widgets in these two screens should give you an example.
Expose
Too many widgets and too many screens, android has an Mac OSX expose like screen management system. You can drag and drop icons from one screen to another, add and delete screens. You can knock yourself out totally.
Native Google voice integration
Popular voices like Michael Arrington famously quit iPhone and switched to Android for the Google voice integration. The google voice integration is brilliant. You can let google voice take over your phone and free yourself of your phone. You can make it the unified voice mail box with web and SMS alerts for voice mail. You can publish that one unified phone number and control which phones you want to receive calls on a daily or hourly basis. You can filter phone numbers and calls in a central place.
Voice is not my primary requirement of this phone, but if I job involved talking to people all the time, I would switch to Google Voice in a jiffy and use an Android phone just for that.
Multi tasking and battery life
The Samsung Captivate currently runs Eclair or Android 2.1. Multi tasking support, in the nicest way I can put it, is crap. I mean the apps run well in the background. I can finally use google chat in the background while using other apps (yes, I know about Beejive). The CPU scheduler isn’t perfect, IMO. Every now and then, the phone freezes for a second or two and then frees up. This happened to me about 3-4 times in the past week so far.
This would be a deal breaker to me but for two things. First, Froyo aka Android 2.2 is supposed to have much better multi tasking support. I am waiting for Samsung to upgrade this phone to Froyo, which they are supposed to do in September. Next, now I know why Advanced Task Killer is such a popular app on Android. I run it in the background and it periodically kills the idle apps. Apparently, Froyo killed this API that is used to kill apps. My hope is with 2.2, the CPU scheduler does the right thing.
From whatever little I have used iPhone4, the multi tasking works very well. It stays away from the user’s sight and I hope Froyo gets me that.
Battery life is actually pretty darn good. I get at least as good a battery life on the Samsung Captivate as I got with my iPhone 3G. I can last a full day without having to recharge. Turns out the AMOLED screen consumes battery pretty bad and the Samsung is one of the worst phones in terms of battery usage. IMO, it is adequate for a day’s normal use. YMMV. I haven’t done any of the advanced battery tweaking techniques yet, but I am pretty happy with what I have right now.
Apps
The apps I use on the iPhone have all been ported to the Android platform. They work as good as they did on the iPhone platform. Till now I haven’t missed any app on the Android Appstore, there seems to be a direct port or a competing app. I am not a big gamer on the iPhone, so I can’t comment on the quality of games on Android. Having said that, the casual games my kids play are all available in Android.
I disliked the stock email app on the Android. As with everything else, I was able to swap it to K-9 mail, which IMO, is far superior to the stock application.
Google app integration
The Android phone lives totally without the need for a desktop computer or something like iTunes. You have to see it to believe it. You enter your google username and password and your contacts, email and calendar are pulled in “magically” . I have switched to Google Calendar as my primary calendar and sync it to iCal through CalDAV. Works fantastic. My feed reader is tied to Google Reader, I use Google listen to listen to podcasts and use Gallery to view media RSS. The only time I had to tether the phone to the USB was to transfer ~10GB of music over to the phone.
If you use Google web services, there is no reason not to use the Android phones. For those times you need Microsoft office, there is an App for that as well.
What is there to hate?
Every now and then you will run into something that is so far out of what you expect you can’t stop saying WTF. For instance, for the screenshots I had to take for this blog. You either have to have root access to the phone to use this app OR you have to install the developer SDK and tether the phone on USB. Yes, WTF.
Those moments, thankfully are few and far between. There are minor irritants and initial hiccups in getting used to the GUI and it doesn’t feel as polished and smooth as it can be, but IMO that is a small price to pay for the flexibility Android offers.
Unexplored territory
I haven’t started to use the voice recognition features of Android. Fred Wilson once dictated a full blog on his Android phone. I would love to see what it does with my Indian accent. Since google feeds the voice recognition from the Google 411 project, I hope it works very well.
Update:
I absolutely love the voice recognition feature. I love the fact that it is built into the keyboard so every app on the phone gets it. I even made my first voice blog using that .
Conclusion
If you haven’t figured it out yet, I am a happy switcher. To me, Android opens a whole world of extensibility on the phone and freedom. There is little I miss from the iPhone other than the slick look and feel and smoothness. I am willing to compromise on design aesthetics and in return I get a much more extensible phone with a lot less hideous App Store to download apps from. I just wish I had switched earlier .
