Andy Ithnako, long-time iPhone enthusiast, has switched to Android, and he has three columns (here, here and here) detailing why. The short reason is that Android gives him more ability to customize his phone and share between apps on the phone.
Ithnako switched to a Galaxy S III, which is Samsung’s flagship phone, not one of the Nexus devices (which are Google’s spam-free latest version of Android phones), which makes it more interesting, since the S III is running an older version of Android with more carrier-installed bloatware.
Talk about that, if you care, or anything else in this open thread.
scav
Non controversial software-based phone issues? idealist.
Winston Smith
Thanks to my browsing of Free Republic links, Google ads sometimes serves up this bit of wingnuttery here on Balloon Juice.
Follow the link for a cornucopia of racist dog whistles. Then, if the ad shows up for you, always click on it. It probably costs them money.
Oh, and rest assured that the effusive Facebook posts at the bottom of the page are completely fake.
Omnes Omnibus
What the fuck is the matter with you? You just realigned the warring parties, is all. Post pet pictures or something if you want to calm people down.
Winston Smith
I have a Galaxy II that I’m happy with.
I’m waiting for the Galaxy V. Not only will it be super cool, but the name sounds like a Motown group.
Woodrowfan
ARGH! Am struggling not to tell some inlaws that they are rightwing idiots so fing brainwashed by Fox that they are lucky they can still breathe without mechanical assistance. ARGHHHHHHHH
Xecky Gilchrist
If you’re going to troll, go all in: Rand Paul prefers Android to iOS, therefore all liberals must support him for President.
Betty Cracker
You’ll take my iPhone when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Omnes Omnibus: Hey, a realignment is at least a switch, or something. You and your family are in my thoughts.
Oh, and I need to write my medicaid expansion (pro) testimony for my visit with the OH House Finance Subcommittee on Health and Human Services looking at FY14-FY15 budget stuff. Thus I won’t be warring until the evening.
Violet
@Woodrowfan: Don’t let them get to you. Just have some fun with them. Ask them lots of questions and get them to tie themselves in knots with their lies. Example: I thought Dick Cheney said ‘Deficits don’t matter.’ Can you tell me why he said that?” I’ve enjoyed doing that with wingnut relatives. Sometimes they even storm off. You don’t even have to break a sweat.
Arrik
@Xecky Gilchrist:
LOL, that’s better than what I was going to post, so I’m going away now.
Walker
For a tech evangelist, Andy’s app usage is extremely lightweight. I guess that is why it was easy for him to make the switch.
Warren Terra
I have a Galaxy II that I’m fairly happy with. My only real gripe is the battery life, which is only partly mitigated by the ability to swap out batteries; at my desk, the phone is constantly, desperately searching for wisps of signal, with bad consequences for the battery.
I also have experience with iOS, and there’s one area where the two platforms are just leagues apart: text entry. I find it inexplicable that iOS still hasn’t caught up with Android here. I took notes in seminars on my iPod Touch for a couple of years, partly so I’d have searchable electronic copies and partly because if I was taking notes I wasn’t dozing off. And then I got my Galaxy II, and took notes on that. The screens are similarly sized (the Android phone’s is larger, but screen size was never a problem with the iPod), but the ability to use Swype and to directly customize my spellchecker dictionary has been utterly transformative. Heck, even just the feature where clicking on a word gives you options for other words it might be mis-spelled from or other words it could be spell-corrected to makes a real difference. Don’t get me wrong, text entry on my Android device could be better (cursor repositioning on my Android sucks), but between the two there’s no comparison. And, after all the time since Android devices showed Apple better methods of touch-screen text-entry, there’s no excuse.
To be sure, some of this might be B-S intellectual property issues, patents on text entry technologies that Google has or was willing to license and Apple doesn’t or isn’t. If so, I resent such inane restrictions, but that doesn’t mean I’ll give Apple a pass on its terrible text-entry technology.
bemused
Gross incompetence and chicanery rule the GOP. Via Steve Benen, NBC First Read reports after Obama’s dinner with R’s last evening, “One senator told us that he learned, for the first time, the actual cuts that the president has put on the table. Leadership hadn’t shared that list with them.”
Where to start.
Why didn’t their leadership share the list?
Why weren’t the legislators curious at all?
Why didn’t the legislators instruct their staffs to research the cuts?
Why didn’t the staffs research the cuts and inform their bosses?
I don’t think the answers to all those questions are hard to figure out…no one cared about the facts to begin with. I do think it’s interesting that the leadership didn’t share the list. Deliberately?
They live on their own barren island.
Peej
@Betty Cracker: amen!
ranchandsyrup
I’ll take IOS and Rand Paul is still a sociopath for a thousand, Alex.
bemused
@Woodrowfan:
Ask them why the House Republicans short term budget plan on Monday included no federal funding to ACORN which went out of business almost three years ago. It would be fun to hear how they answer why in the world they want to defund an organization that doesn’t exist.
ericblair
@Winston Smith:
It’s not your badly-advised browsing history; I’m getting the same shit and I don’t go anywhere near that sewer. It could be the polite and calm dR0Nz!!! discussion we’ve been having over the past few days.
Nice nym, btw. Technically, I wrote your ass.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Xecky Gilchrist: Actually, all drones run Android. Version Mama Bear will be self aware.
Violet
I have a Galaxy S III and I like it, although I’m kind of a low level user. One complaint is that prior to the OS upgrade, it would occasionally just shut itself off. After the upgrade, twice now I’ve gone to bed knowing the battery was either 100% (I charged it before bed) or at least 75%. The wifi was off, as was the mobile data, so the phone wasn’t really doing much, and I woke up to the phone being off and the battery being empty.
This is a known bug with the phones and if you search for it, there are various workarounds, including turning off most of the Samsung apps, which seem to work to greater or lesser effects. But it’s a worry because if you are, say, traveling and have charged the phone the night before and don’t have time to charge it in the morning, you’re out of luck. I’m not sure if the alarm would work either.
Scamp Dog
@Winston Smith: I clicked through. It got to a point where it said that bandwidth is limited, and if you’re a naysayer, liberal, dittohead, or other useful idiot, you should close the window and let some deserving patriot have the bandwidth. Since I’m an America-hating liberal, seeking the socialist destruction of our economy, I stayed on. I’m evil, Evil, EVIL!
The Dangerman
@Xecky Gilchrist:
But Rand Paul screams Windows 8, so fuck him.
Tone in DC
This is just infuriating. But, given the fact free nature of g00pers, it shouldn’t really surprise anyone here.
The Moar You Know
Related: Bought a Nexus 7 last month. Kicks the shit out of the iPad for everything save the camera. Gotta say Apple knows what they’re going with their cameras. But the Nexus…wow. Just wow.
Gonna run my iPhone 4 until it dies and then jump ship. I wish Google would get with one of the major carriers, probably end up getting a Galaxy and rooting it.
PeakVT
@The Dangerman: Are you sure Paul doesn’t prefer Plan 9?
bemused
@Tone in DC:
Normal folks would feel like jackasses looking so stupid. There doesn’t seem to be any down side for them though. Their supporters don’t even blink.
kindness
Love my iPhone. Don’t care about all the other crap that Android allows. I use a computer for that.
Cassidy
Androids suck. I heard that the OS for most of the drones were based on Android.
Vlad
I still like my iPhone, but I wish there were a way to make Safari spoof as a non-mobile browser.
Cris (without an H)
I gotta tell you — as a long-time, and I mean since 1982, Apple user, as somebody who is perfectly happy to pay more for the quality of experience Apple provides — if I decide I’m in the market for a tablet, I’m giving the Galaxy Tab a serious look. And it’s all about the ease of media consumption. I have a shelf full of DVDs and a disk full of DivX files (which were, uh, gifts) and I hate the prospect of running them through a converter and loading them into iTunes or iCloud or whatever in order to watch them on a mobile.
This isn’t really about a particular feature — it’s about a company’s entire philosophy. Apple believes, with clear justification and numbers to back it up, that they can lock their users into their content delivery system. Fine, as far as it goes, but it just isn’t in step with my own patterns. Gimme an SD slot.
dan
@Winston Smith: Or a big-ass car that rides like a boat. Either way, something from Detroit in the 70s.
dan
@Violet: That is a fun game. I played that one after my wing-nut cousins gave me shit after John Edwards was found out to be a scoundrel. I said, so that means you can’t support John McCain, right? Crickets. Echoing in their heads.
LarryB
Dream on, ithnako:
Anyone who’s got a Verizon Galaxy Nexus is laughing at you.
The Other Chuck
@Vlad:
If you’re jailbroken, there’s an app for that
(and jailbreaking is crazy easy now)
I just recently went the other direction, switched from my SGS3 to iPhone (after breaking the SGS3, my fault really). Love the hardware, the software is meh, but I jailbroke it after less than a week and am liking it a lot more now.
dan
I gots no money. I bought a ZTE phone (yeah that’s a thing) for $79 from Radio Shack. I get 3G coverage from Net10 for $40 a month, flat, no fees. And it can do most everything a Galaxy can do (except look as beautiful as a Galaxy).
Craig
The point is that Android is a reasonable platform to choose–at least for some people–on purely functional grounds, even if cost isn’t an object. And it’s a GREAT platform to choose when you throw cost into the mix.
I’m on an HTC Amaze, which was a “best value” decision for me. I still think the iPhone is the single best phone in the world, but the margin shrinks all the time, even without Apple shooting themselves in the foot with things like the maps fiasco.
? Martin
In the desktop space, Andy would be a linux user, with the same freedom to customize the experience to suit one’s taste. People may have noticed that linux hasn’t exactly caught on with desktop users. Customization is not a key feature for most people.
The threat/opportunity on Android is that’s its steadily becoming Samsung’s platform – at least outside of China/India/Africa. The opportunity is that Samsung wants to build on the platform in a manner similar to Apple. The threat is that it’s no longer Google’s platform, and Samsung will be calling the shots. And they’re now big enough that if they want to fork Android, they will – regardless of the Open Handset Alliance rules. The #2 Android platform has been HTC:
That’s their sales through lunar new year. Its Samsungs game now.
Culture of Truth
I’m considering a new phone. I like SIII, but Nexus 4 is better deal, financially.
different-church-lady
@bemused: Why would leadership bother to share the list when the result is going to be a vote against the president no matter what he proposes?
FlipYrWhig
I cannot imagine being the kind of person who wants to “customize” a phone. Who gives a shit? It seems like bragging that you can play around with the parts under the hood of your car. Or, the great thing about this stove is that I can set each burner to a different temperature range. whoop de doo. I don’t want to do that. I want it to work and to ignore how.
different-church-lady
@ericblair: What happens is that text-analyzing bots suck in all the text on the page you’re reading, run it through sophisticated algorithms, and then punk you for kicks.
Amanda in the South Bay
Apple has done a wonderful job of redefining computer usage for the average person, so its now assumed that the average user is a drooling idiot who can barely turn a device on and off. Which to be fair can be a nice thing, because people (well, people who have money and can afford Apple products) have been burned one too many times by Windows in the past, and don’t feel like you need an MCSE or some BS credential to operate their home computer.
And I think that, from a developers perspective, Apple doesn’t just work. I’m not a big fan of OS X package managers.
Winston Smith
@dan:
OK, that is what was tickling my brain.
srv
Can we stop calling them “phones” and start calling them something else that makes self-important idiotically nuanced users feel less adequate about their superiority?
The nice thing about my neighborhood is that people flashing their products at 1AM get mugged, so we see a lot less showing off lately.
Cassidy
I heard that Rand Paul and the drones in a fit of bipartisanism got together and created the Android OS.
bemused
@different-church-lady:
There is that, yes. I thought the leadership might have wanted to give them the cuts list with spin suggestions, how to talk about the cuts, undermine them, with the media but they didn’t bother to do even that. It looks like there is barely any communication going on there.
cmorenc
@kindness:
I heartily second that. Although I appreciate (and use) some of the expanded functionality of smartphones into areas formerly the exclusive province of notebook computers or digital cameras, nevertheless pocket-portable cell phones have an inherent severe limitation on screen real estate that is far below what’s needed for more than quick, terse sorts of tasks, e.g. finding store hours and location, etc. I’m not going to either text or compose email more than a simple line or two long (e.g. meet you at O’Malley’s Pub at 5p). There’s no way to get past that without moving into the tablet range, which is no longer pocket-portable.
WHY IPHONE? Because Apple is still head and shoulders better at designing an ergonomically friendly, intuitive user interface than Android or ESPECIALLY Windows. I recently switched from an Android phone to iPhone5…what a ENORMOUS improvement in convenient, intuitive, ease of use, while at the same time amply powerful and flexible in what it does best.
burnspbesq
All of my iOS devices share one core competency: when I turn them on, they do what I expect them to do, with near 100 percent reliability and no drama. Why on earth would I walk away from that.
It’s a tool, not a toy.
If I want to play with something electrical, I’ll get a DIY tube amp kit.
Tommymet
You spelled “Ihnatko” incorrectly.
Cheers
Tone in DC
@bemused:
I think there is a cost. It was visible early in November, regarding BHO’s reelection, and the Senate situation. A few conservatives out there are now ex-GOP.
Slowly but surely, like our host J. Cole, it’s happening.
Persia
@The Other Chuck: OMG, it’s past time to jailbreak my phone (went off warranty not that long ago, I was afraid to before then). Bye-bye, Guitar Hero ‘demo!’
Bob In Portland
I have problems typing texts on my iPhone. My fingers are too big.
Persia
@dan: I have a phone I love and need to switch plans. $40/month sounds pretty fucking good for 3G.
bemused
@Tone in DC:
And there are the Republicans no longer in office who are now saying how they really feel about same-sex marriage and other issues. It’s gotta feel very claustrophobic for any more moderate R’s that still exist in office.
Seanly
I like my Galaxy Nexus (phone not tablet). Battery life is a big issue, but it might be harmed by the enterprise email account I have. It had to encrypt the phone. Also, I’m on Verizon which regularly limits & cripples phones.
Amanda in the South Bay
Hands down my Windows Phone has much better text input and spell checking than my iPad.
James K Polk, Esq
@? Martin: The big players are about to hit the wall with respect to pricing. You follow the mobile industry enough to know that.
The value of a “mid range” mobile device and the power of it to do everything a “normal user” requires is about to break the model.
Witness the Nokia 620 sold for $249 off contract. It’s got a nice S4 Pro processor, WinPhone 8, all the bells and whistles.
Witness the fact that Verizon sold more iPhone4 models than iPhone5 models in the debut quarter.
The reckoning is coming, and even those Wall Street bozos see the writing on the wall.
Samsung has had a good run, but the also rans are going to eat their lunch. Moore’s law is changing the game again.
Mnemosyne
My mom just got her first iPhone. She accidentally disconnected me the other day because she forgot I was on my landline and tried to do Facetime.
Like it or not, tech-heads, that’s the future market for smartphones: senior citizens. For the most part, they aren’t going to want to jailbreak them or get into the root. They’re going to want to be able to turn it on, switch to Facetime, and video conference with their kids and grandkids.
I mean, I think it’s good that there are multiple options and my not-very-techie brother loves his Nexus because he can do everything by voice command and not have to type at all. But if you insist that everything has to be complex, you’re going to lose the vast audience of non-tech people who just want to turn the damn thing on and have it work.
JustRuss
@cmorenc:
This. Hated my old android, loves my new iPhone. Granted, it was an old android, so it’s not a fair comparison, but I’m sooooo much happier with the iPhone. I haven’t bought a movie or song in years, so if Apple’s media policies are draconian I don’t really know or care.
BretH
Size matters! I could never see hauling around a phone that is really a micro-tablet:
http://cdn.pocketnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/gs3iphone.jpg
The Other Chuck
And out of the woodwork comes legions of people tut-tutting and clucking over the very idea of customizing their phones.
So uh hey, great for you guys. No doubt rather than waste time on such frivolity, you’re off curing cancer or doing something else similarly productive. The rest of us like to waste our own time according to our own personal idiom, and sometimes that includes doing techie things with our techie toys. Get over it.
? Martin
@James K Polk, Esq:
Yes and no.
The issue of pricing is one that Apple has stubbornly managed to succeed against. Unfortunately, Apple’s ability to maintain their price premium is relatively out of their control as the carriers fuck up any ability to provide an end-to-end experience justifying the cost.
If Apple can overcome that, they can hold their pricing – and people will pay. Shit computers are what followed low prices, and shit phones are what will follow low prices with smartphones. Whoever can hold the line against that will be very well positioned. And Apple was able to use that position with computers to step ahead of the competition with much better build quality (that competitors didn’t have the money and supply chain to match) and now technology with things like Thunderbolt and Retina displays. If you don’t need those things, they don’t matter – but if you do, you’re going to happily pay Apple’s prices because there’s no other game in town.
The secondary effect of low hardware prices is that consumers stop paying for software. Nobody wants to pay $500 for a software suite on a $500 computer. That just seems stupid. And you see that now in the app space, where in spite of how many Android devices are out there, the majority of consumer sales of apps are going to Apple – by 5x. The market that Apple has nearly cornered is the customer base of people willing to pay for stuff. So who wants to write apps for people that are unwilling to pay for apps? That’s the real problem with Linux on the desktop – it’s a stupid platform to target because they’re all fucking freeloaders who believe they’ll just write their own CAD app. There’s no money there. There’s not much money on Android either, relatively speaking.
So yeah, zillions of cheap smartphones will be sold, but to what end? A huge % of Android phones are sold in China, where there are no software updates, no Google Play store, no Google apps, no GMail, no Google ads, and no Google. Google gets nothing out of those sales. App developers outside of China get nothing. So, other than turning minuscule profits on a fuckton of handsets, what does anyone get out of those sales? Now, build something around that – content, apps, and so on (which, ironically, Apple is doing a better job than Google within China) and that market will change.
But you’re 100% correct about the threat. All of the participants can avoid that fate to a fair degree, but they have to act. If they don’t, they’re fucked.
Mnemosyne
@The Other Chuck:
And some of us have slightly different ideas about what it means to customize our phones.
Just sayin’, it takes all kinds. I have no problem with people who want to customize the crap out of their phones as long as they don’t insist I have to do the same thing in order to have a working phone.
FlipYrWhig
@The Other Chuck: pfft, I’m not going to buy a kitchen table, I’m going to buy logs and plane them down and carefully fit them together and then apply just the right finish, and anyone who doesn’t is a drooling moron and/or a corporatist, and all those furniture companies are playing with fire, because from here on out it’s logs for everyone who matters!
Cassidy
Sentient drones use Android and guide their Hellfire missles of doom with google maps.
cleek
i, a long time Android user, switched to iPhone.
i am not switching back.
S. Holland
@Betty Cracker: Amen Betty!
Herbal Infusion Bagger
@Amanda in the South Bay: Amanda in the South Bay Says:
Which, given that maybe 30% of the personally-owned PCs in the US are unwittingly to their owners part of zombie botnets, not a bad assumption to make.
I’m locked into the Apple walled garden because I have a lot of apps and some iTunes content. But with the locked-down nature of iOS comes security. I can customize my PC readily, but so can the script kiddies and worse trying to get malware on my computer. I’d choose security over flexibility any day.
Keith G
@The Moar You Know: Bought my Nexus 7 in Janurary. I. Am. Thrilled.
On one level, it is awesomely utilitarian. An then there are all those other levels.
magurakurin
I’m thinking most of the people here who are claiming that Android is difficult to use have never used an Android system. The Nexus 7 more or less thinks to itself. If a person found a Nexus complicated and confusing the I would wonder how they tied their shoes.Seriously, some of these comments are embarrassing. They are all machines you press the buttons and they go. Get over yourselves.
Billy K.
I love your writing, and your politics, mistermix, but you’ve got Apple derangement; anything to tarnish the fruit, even just a tiny bit.
Please do a Cole/Iraq, and take a serious look at yourself.
Jamey
Samsung is the worst business to deal with. Their customer relations team are antagonistic and defensive. I’ve had probably a dozen Samsung products in the last five years, and half have failed. The latest is a Chromebook with a malfunctioning display.
I know Samsung are angling for the “coolest gear on the shelf” mantel, but from my experience, their devices are badly engineered poorly built, and supported in only the most cursory fashion.
Yeah, I got beef with Samsung. They can suck my dick.
Vlad
@Jamey: This is true. I bought my washing machine from Samsung, and when it broke after a month of ownership, trying to arrange for a repair or a replacement made me want to gouge my eyes out. It took NINE MONTHS to get them to do anything, and they ended up just writing me a check for a refund.