A traitor’s review of the Verizon iPhone 4
I have been called a whore and a traitor by my friends, but I did it anyway. Last week I turned off my Motorola Droid, and activated an Apple iPhone 4 on Verizon. This was considered by some of my Android loving friends as an act of war, by some just an excuse to banish me from their twitter circle. I feel as though I wear a scarlet “i” on my chest everywhere I go, but despite the ridicule, I walk proud with that letter, and after a week with my new device I can hold my head up high and say honestly, I’d do it again.
At this point there is really no reason to review the iPhone 4, even the Verizon version which does run a slightly different release of iOS 4, doesn’t require it’s own article. But I feel it’s time to tell the tale of why I abandoned the free and open Android rebellion, a movement I have been entrenched in for over a year, for the power of “the Dark Side.”
The first and probably most important reason for my change, is the camera. The iPhone camera is great, it’s reliable, and the applications for it are inexpensive and plentiful. Being an avid amateur photog who dreams of someday perhaps selling some of his work, this was important to me. Sure the Motorola Droid camera is the same mega-pixel and I was able to coax some really great images out of it, especially using the buggy yet awesome Camera360 app. But overall, it was a roll of the dice every time I wanted to use the Droid cam. Most of the time after a fresh boot of Android the camera would work great, once, even twice. But close the camera app, and try to use it again later, and it was a 50/50 chance, at best, that the program would crash upon starting. Even if it did start and you took a pic, occasionally the photo wouldn’t save properly. The droid camera is just buggy and slow, and I believe it was on the hardware level, not the software level because these problems occurred in every camera application I used, including the default one. And from talking to my friends using different Android phones this is not an uncommon occurrence. The iPhone camera, to contrast, is rock solid, it works every time. You can touch the screen to change the focal and metering point, and I can switch photo apps all day without any hiccup, delay, or even thought of a problem.
I will miss the community that formed around the Android Operating system. Blogs and forums like Droid Life, or Android Phone Fans, were warm and welcoming. I could just shout out a question or frustration there or to twitter and I’d have a solution, some encouraging words, or a suggestion to just reboot the device in mere moments. Sure the iPhone support community exists, but you will need to shake the dust off of them first, as like the iconic Maytag repair man, they just aren’t needed that much.
This is my second reason for switching, OS stability and reliability. I am a technology geek, I have no issue diving deep in to an OS, hacking it, rooting it, installing third party roms to make the OS behave, well… as it should have from the beginning. The community around this sort of “delinquency” in Android is strong, because, it needs to be. I was never satisfied with the stock version of the android operating system that Motorola put out for the droid, so I hacked it, to make it behave as it should. I installed third party roms such as Bugless beast, and Cyanogen, I over clocked the stock 550 mhz processor to 800mhz, but in doing so I took a chance that my hardware would never work again, as a well as suddenly relying on these third party developers to keep me up to date, and secure. It was something that I was confident in doing for myself, but it was not something I could recommend my less geeky friends do, and therefor it’s not a device I could recommend to my co-workers for me to support, my mother, or even my moderately tech savvy wife. Not to mention that every new phone that comes out has more and more protections against such things, so this level of customization which is an asset to the Android OS, is slowly fading away.
Yes there is a strong Jailbreak community for the iPhone, having been a long time iPod touch user, It’s a community that I have even participated in. But with every update of iOS, Apple makes it less and less necessary for the power user, and it’s just not necessary at all for the average use.
Which brings me to my third and final reason for switching. The operating system ease of use. Don’t get me wrong Android is a wonderful and powerful operating system. But it’s fragmented, and it’s not always intuitive. Every Android phone has a different version of the operating system, and many have their own manufacturer layer (of crap) running on top of that. HTC Sense, Motoblur, and other manufacturer customizations, just add a layer of confusion to an operating system that is still struggling to refine it’s own user interface. I have no doubt that Google and Android will continue to refine the User Interface until it gets on par with Apple’s. Honestly, already many aspects of the Android stock user interface are even better than Apple’s, but on a whole, as a unified experience it is just not there yet.
For me it comes down to one question. Would you want to support this device? If I had to give and Android Phone, or an iPhone to my mother, my non tech savvy co-worker or friend, and help them learn to use it, which would I rather do? For me that question is an easy answer. iPhone every time. It’s simple enough I could hand it to my brother who has never had a smart phone and he is able to use it right out of the box, yet it has all the power to run the latest apps, which brings me to my final point.
All the Apps. Sure the iTunes store is a disaster, it’s so full of duplicated and knock off social apps, games, and utilities that it is near impossible to browser, and that is a problem that Apple needs to address. But if a start-up is going to launch a new mobile app, if there is going to be a hot new accessory, a great new game, you can bet your patooky its going to be on iPhone first. For me that’s more important than having total control over the operating system. Being a beer connoisseur I waited for months for the new social beer app Red Pint to come to Android, and to my knowledge it still hasn’t. Android has come a long way, and is even getting a few apps here and there, first now, but in my experience I end up waiting for the cool new thing to make it to the Android Store while all my iphone friends have it first.
Now I could go on, the iPod software compared to Android’s pitiful media offering for sure could deserve it’s own article, but thats just an added benefit of my switch, nothing I abandoned android for.
Now lest this rant be all one sided. I have spent a full week away from Andy Android and there are a few things I do miss.
Widgets, I never used a lot of widgets on my droid but, having news, weather and my web site statistics just hanging out on the home screen to just glance at without having to hit another button, was useful. I suspect Apple will address this with iOS 5 this summer but we’ll see.
Turn by Turn navigation. I don’t travel a lot anymore but still even around town having built in, solid, turn by turn navigation complete with Google street view, for no additional charge was huge. If you live on your GPS, then this would be enough of a reason alone to choose Android over Apple. I am resisting the thought of having to buy a Garmin or TomTom app for my iPhone to get the same thing.
The Android notification system is way better than the Apple push notification badges. Don’t get me wrong the red badge system is functional but it’s just so much nicer to see all your email, twitter, Facebook, Google Talk, etc. notifications in one place. This too I think will be addressed in iOS 5 this summer.
The e-mail application. Neither phone has a great native email application. It’s functional, but basic. In many cases too basic. The advantage android has is it allows competing mail apps to exist. I had an app called K-9 Mail for my Droid that was amazing, you could have one e-mail inbox for any number of accounts, but have different signatures, color codes, filters, and more for each one, so at least you have options on Android. Apple will not allow a competing email application in their store, and that… I don’t see changing anytime soon.
So what do you think? Am I just a smart phone whore, as my friend Rob calls me? Have I turned traitor to the Android Resistance? Or do you think, as I do, that the benefits of Apple’s closely controlled user experience out weigh the downside?
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