I’m poking at the whole dubstep thing. It kinda fits my pop/techno likes, though it seems pretty commercial and hyper-clean and I don’t like that that much, I kinda like some of it anyway. Generic Dubstep does seem to be better than generic Techno, but not quite as good as the cream of the crop techno mixes.
Anyway, PatrickReza isn’t too bad an introduction to a little Dubstep.
Then there’s Skrillex. Some of it is good:
But some of it exceeds my commercialism threshold:
OMFG THE BEEPING. This thing has totally outstanding Amazon reviews, and no mention of the ear-splitting, completely unacceptable beep it makes. Who could live with that and not throw it through a window?
I need a new toaster and microwave, but there is no good, reliable information on toasters or microwaves. Google doesn’t work. Consumer Reports can’t be trusted. According to Amazon, everything is garbage (though they may be right). Seriously, no one wants my money?
Wait a second… wouldn’t a progressive tax be like super trivial to pass via public ballot measure? Wonder why that doesn’t happen. Oh wait we just tried that and and it didn’t work. What on earth?!?!? I guess getting it on a ballot is easy, but overcoming massive advertising against it is hard. Still…
So you know how you can aero dock a window to the left or right half of the screen by pushing it up against the edge. Super useful, right. With a dual monitor setup, it’s not obvious how to aero dock a window against the edge that continues on a second monitor, but it is doable.
You can aero-dock with the mouse! Grab the window you want and hit Win->Left to dock it to the left half of the monitor it’s in, or Win-Left to dock it to the right half. If you dock using Win->Right arrow and Win->Left arrow you can actually walk the screen across the all four potential positions on a dual monitor setup. Pretty cool.
The keyboard is king. First person to figure out how to get a keyboard input method for mobile devices with good tactile feedback that *does not physically exist* (yeah yeah, maybe a physical impossibility, whatever), will be a millionaire.
For all the energy marketing departments go to to sell me shit I do not want, you’d think some effort would go into helping me find shit I do want.
The best at this is Newegg. Their DailyDeal page is a simple, easy to read page of temptations. It’s not even really personalized, and they’re not even really that great of deals, but it’s a NICE PAGE OF SHIT I MIGHT WANT. Kinda like the impulse-purchase racks at the grocery store checkout. And almost no one else does this. Amazon doesn’t even do it. Amazon does have their ‘most popular’ and ‘best rated’ product lists (which, truth be told, are pretty great places to go diving for products to buy), but they’re so buried in Amazonian interface incompetence that only the techies of techies could ever find it.
I think all these guys are so focused on trying to trap users in a slimy ‘opt out’ kind of marketing experience (side bars, popups, and the like), that they’re missing a good opportunity for opt-in marketing experiences. I’d love to be able to register for a well-curated, rapidly-changing (and revolving discount) pool of goods relevant to my interests. Valve exploits the revolving discount thing for video games to great effect. Knowing that there was just a great deal on something makes you want to buy it even more after the deal has passed. Having constant sales makes it feel like you need to interact with the system to find deals and that you are ‘winning’ the game against the person selling stuff to you (while they happily take your money).
Google, Facebook, Netflix are all trying so damn hard to build tools to automagically figure out what I like. If they provide me with a nice secure service and good interface to use it (I admit that’s way harder than it sounds… almost no one can do UI properly for even simple tasks), I can just tell them what I like, then they can shop similar stuff at me. Netflix tries a little, but fails hardcore on the interface front, and they try to build their recommendation thing into their whole UI instead of having a good exploratory tool. Things don’t rotate. There are no deals and there is no meta-game to it to engage me into giving a shit. And of course their useless rating system ruins the whole thing… they’d be better without one at all and just a link to the Rotten Tomatoes rating.
I’m gonna keep harping on this disclaimer in this Android/iPhone thing, so keep this in mind as you read: though it sounds like I’m bagging on the iPhone a lot, a lot of my complaints are around how I like to use the phone. Clearly the way the iPhone works is ok for a gazillion people. And even I don’t mind using it that much. But, I think it is good to be really clear on exactly what is possible on one device or the other. And as always remember my iPhone experience is less deep than my Android experience since I live with the Android all day, but only see the iPhone on the evenings and weekends :)
In my last post on smartphones I stated something that needs a little more clarification:
“For good car audio though a phone isn’t really the way to go. Just get a used iPod instead. You really don’t want to be plugging your phone into the stereo every day.”
That’s not really quite totally true because you can stream internet radio on your phone, and it’s kinda nice to have it plugged into the stereo for for turn by turn voice navigation. It’s also just nice to have your ‘mobile’ library in one place (on the phone), and not have to deal with managing an ipod and phone mix. Anyway, it’s not so cut and dry.
Another few points on Smartphones:
FILE ATTACHMENTS
On iPhone it appears you cannot just ‘save’ email attachments. If you’re lucky you find some app to handle the content of an attachment. I wanted to email an mp3 to Marian’s phone for a ringtone though, and all I could do was click it to play it. On android I get a nice ‘save’ button, or I can click it and it gives me the option of what to do with it (what app should handle it).
SOFT KEYPAD
Typing on these screens is truly a horrible experience. You can get ‘good’ at it, but that’s more just getting beaten down into accepting something bad. I’ll try to break down why. The first issue is that the screens are small, so the keys are small when you jam a QWERTY keyboard on there. If you try to tap a key with your fingertip, you will invariably miss it because your finger is rounded and your hand is at a slight angle holding the phone, so your finger contacts a bit to the side of the key. Until you learn to type slightly to the left (if you’re right-handed) of the keys, you’ll hit the next key over a lot. You’d think you could just hold the phone sideways and get more space that way and that kinda works, but using a phone sideways sucks, and you do a *lot* of typing on a smartphone… rotating all the time just won’t happen. Of course there’s the fact that there’s no real feedback like you’d get with a keyboard, but that’s never gonna get fixed :)
The stock iPhone keyboard is better than the stock Android keyboard (on Gingerbread at least, I haven’t tried an Ice Cream Sandwich keyboard yet), and better than Samsung’s basic keyboard. The key spacing and feedback delay (time between when you press a key and it shows you that key magnified) is pretty perfect. Since you will make a mistake like every fourth word you type, delete functionality is critical. On the iPhone keyboard if you hold down the delete key, it’ll delete letters really fast. On android if you long press delete it’ll delete the previous word. The word-delete is better (after all, you can fast-delete letters by repeatedly hitting the delete key), but I wish the delay before word-delete on Android was customizible. It’s pretty long (like 3/4 of a second)… just enough time for rage to build before it does its thing. On iPhone you can’t really use different keyboards (or at best they’re a skin over the exact key placement of the built-in one… man if someone knows how to find one let me know cuz I really looked hard). On Android however omfg there are keyboards galore. And, there is this unbelievable keyboard called Swype. With that you don’t lift your finger while typing a word, you just swype through the letters. Basic input is ridiculously fast compared to a tap-stype keyboard, but it relies heavily on auto-correct, so you gotta be careful with it. Swype is pretty incredible. The iPhone has ridiculously great Chinese character input. You can even draw the characters on the screen and it’ll recognize them really well. Android has a few apps that do chinese character recognition, but they don’t work very well (you gotta kinda learn their ‘shortcuts’ to recognition, which defeats the purpose).
CALL CONTROL
iPhone gives you almost no control over how you receive calls. You can use silent mode, change the default ringtone, or assign specific ringtones to people. Even on my old phones, I could set up custom profiles to do more advanced stuff (let specific people through while silent, vibrate for some not others, etc etc). On the iPhone the only way to do this apparently is to make your own ‘silent’ ringtone and set that as default, then let the people you want through with a custom ringtone for them. There are no apps to fix it. On Android there are a number of apps for customizing ring behavior (and replacement dialers if you don’t like the stock dialer experience).
PHONE DIALING
Both phones get this pretty wrong and are worse than old cell phones (though remember my caveat from the last post that you don’t really use phones for calling that much anymore). In the old days, you’d hit the ‘phone’ button, it’d bring up your list of contacts, you click on the one you want and it starts dialing them. Now, you click on the ‘phone’ button, get like 2x the contacts cuz your phone has synced contacts from email and put them in your phone dialer (fucking idiocy). Why did they do that? Because your ‘phone dialer’ is not a phone dialer, it’s a generic way to reach people. Once you click on a contact you get a bunch of options now (text, facetime (on iphone), or call). Stupid stupid stupid. If I clicked on the ‘phone’ button, all I want to do is make calls. If I want to IM someone I’d click the texting app would I not?!?! Again you can get Android dialer replacements to fix this and on iPhone you’re stuck with it. It’s not like it’s *that bad*, but it is annoying and a little surprising.
PHONE CALLS
What, you might wonder, happens when you make or receive a call and take that fancy touch and smush it into your cheek! The answer is there is a proximity sensor that sees your face coming and turns off the screen/blocks input. Then at the end of a call when you pull the screen away it gives you the screen back and options to end the call. Works incredibly well actually, on both devices.
VOICEMAIL
Android and iPhone both have ‘Visual Voicemail’, where when you get a voicemail it pops up a little player with a ‘play’ and a ‘call back’ button right there. Very efficient and much better than the atrocious voice mail menus of days of old where you had to wait 40 days and 40 nights for the system to even let you start hearing your damn messages.
SCREEN SMUDGES
These glossy phones get smudges on the screen of course. If you like a black UI and background like I do, you see them a bit more. A folded up microfiber cloth makes a great resting spot for the phone at work and home, and easy to just swish off the phone every day or two. Or you can put some horrible plastic screen protector on your phone. I’m a bit torn on those. On one hand yes, it’d be nice to protect the screen from scratches. On the other hand, most of those screen protectors look *worse* than a scratch to me (all bubbly and dim and diffused).
CONNECTING TO A COMPUTER
You want to put shit on the phone right (that’s why it’s got all those gigabytes). If you have to transfer a lot, that means you gotta use the USB. Both of them are a little ‘odd’ about USB connections. On the iPhone you plug it in, and it will load it, but not as just a USB mass storage device. Instead it’s some weird thing. It kinda looks like folders. You can copy to and from it. It’s just not a drive with a drive letter. It works, but I’m not sure you could automate anything with it (or at least you’d have to figure out how to access it with no drive letter). Apple wants you to use iTunes to do all the copying to and from the iPhone. I’m not going to write about iTunes here, it so fills me with rage. On android, you can access the device as USB mass storage, but it’s a little tricksy in how it does it. The reason it’s tricky is that the phone needs to prevent its own apps from accessing that storage at the same time it’s mounted as a mass storage device. Logical enough. The best way to do it is plug in the usb. Get the ‘usb plugged in’ notification in the notification bar. Hit the notification and that gives you a button to ‘connect usb storage’. It thinks for a few seconds and then the drive (or drives if you have a microSD flash card installed) mount up. Oh yeah. With the skyrocket you can pop off the back and stick a 32GB microSD flash card in there. They cost basically nothing. The base Skyrocket and iPhone are 16 gigs. Another $100 gets you a 32GB iPhone. $30 on the Android gets you a 16GB + 32GB = 48GB skyrocket. To infinity and beyond!!! Not all Android phones have a SD card slot though (we’re looking at you, Nexus!).
GETTING PHOTOS OFF THE PHONE
So you took your photos and you want them on your computer.
With the iPhone, cuz it’s not even a drive that you can automate, you have to do everything by hand (navigate to them, drag drop, lalala). Files are in a subfulder in the DCIM folder as they should be, but not in proper subfolders, so it will confuse most apps that are built to schlep photos off of flash cards for you. Android has the same problem. Files are in a DCIM subfolder, but its named weird, so it breaks automated systems. I wrote my own quick little C# thing that looks in the right place and copies them to a properly-formated DCIM/100Canon/ folder on a my laptop, then I run the automation against the laptop drive and it works.
Only did that for a little while though. Plugging in these phones is just annoying. There was a bit of software that came with the EyeFi card that I bought that happens to work pretty great for wirelessly transferring cards from the phones to the laptop! Since the photo-taking rate with a phone is so low, it actually makes sense to do it wirelessly. If you’re not too paranoid (I am) you can even have it bounce it off the EyeFi servers, so your pictures show up on the laptop even if you’re nowhere near it. On the Android it works real nice and sends them as they’re taken. On the iPhone you have to manually run the EyeFi app to kick it into pushing the files over. Still better than plugging in. Again I have it push the photos to that DCIM structure on my laptop so that the photo downloader can do all the nice naming/rotation/archival stuff that is needed if you shoot lots of pictures.
…or is one of the key signs of a good restaurant *mildly abusive waitstaff*.
Obama re-elected is only 55% on intrade. Isn’t that like totally free money?
We joined the smartphone generation a little over month ago. Marian got an iPhone 4s and I got an Samsung Galaxy SII Skyrocket (both on AT&T since I get a pretty good Sony corporate discount on AT&T stuff). We had resisted smartphones for quite a while (marginal real utility for pretty huge data cost). Our #1 priority for a phone has always been camera quality, though, and the only phones with good cameras anymore are smartphones, so when our Sony Ericsson phones died, we jumped on the bandwagon.
So let’s get something quickly out of the way: Smartphones are just completely awesome… Toys. They are completely unnecessary, but a lot of fun. Would I go back to a non-smart phone if I could get a good camera that way? No. And the reason is pretty simple: A Smartphone isn’t really a ‘Smartphone’ (that’s just a stupid name made up by marketing freaks to get you to buy shit), what it really is is a full on computer in your pocket, and that is a really super incredible thing (again, still in a ‘Toy’ sense).
DECISION
The big decision when purchasing of course was iPhone or Android (Windows phones didn’t have any competitive hardware a month ago and still don’t… the Nokia Lumia 800s that are coming will be good though). The top of the heap for quality (for us) on both sides are the iPhone 4s and the SII Skyrocket. You can get higher screen resolution in bigger screens (Galaxy Nexus), but it’s only a 5 megapixel camera and no removable flash. Also, the Skyrocket is already kinda pushing it for size. It’s a little too big and silly sized, but only *just*. Anything bigger would really be jumping the shark. The iPhone is significantly smaller than the Skyrocket and there’s a bit of shock going from one to the other. Ultimately Marian wanted the iPhone because it fit in her hand (her fingers really can’t reach all the Skyrocket screen to use it single-handed), and I wanted the Skyrocket because it fit in my hand (I always feel like I’m about to drop an iPhone).
CAMERA
Camera-wise the Skyrocket and 4s cameras are pretty identical quality-wise. Pretty great for phones. Totally rubbish compared to a good point and shoot. However, the iPhone phone software is really totally bananas great: continuous autofocus and it’ll take pictures all day as fast as you can push the shutter. It’s really pretty amazing. And you would think that taking the picture by tapping the screen would give you blurry shots, but in practice it doesn’t. The Skyrocket focuses more like a regular camera. Press shutter, wait for focus, release shutter. Or press and pray. Neither takes good pictures in even moderately lowish light. There’s a reason everyone posts ‘Hipstomatic’ old timey pictures from their phones… it hides (relatively… I mean this are still pretty good) cruddy image quality. The Canon S100 will shoot rings around either all day (and night) long. But jesus, every camera should have a shooting mode that is like the iPhone… it is really a great implementation. Once you’ve taken a picture with a smartphone, most likely you want to post it to facebook, or text it to someone, or something. Here the Android blows the iPhone away completely. From a photo view, you can click ‘Share’ and it pulls up a list of options for installed apps that can handle sharing. It’s totally transparent and obvious and great (other than that there’s no way to trim apps from that list, so it gets crazy once you’ve got tons of stuff installed on the phone). On the stock iPhone once you’ve taken a picture you gotta lumber over to whatever app you want. Open it. Hunt around for how to actually insert a picture, then go back and pick it from the gallery. There are replacement camera apps for the iPhone that will give you ‘post to facebook’ or a few other options (We use Camera+), but it’s never quite the same. You can’t as far as I can tell force the iPhone to just *always* use Camera+ for it’s default camera, so if you use the unlock screen camera button, you get the regular camera, blah blah blah.
PROGRAMS
Ok, ok, ‘apps’, god, what ridiculous naming. I actually expected a pretty shitty app store experience on Android. I was warned of malware, viruses, russian mafia, blah blah whatever. Actually the Android app store is pretty great. If anything they don’t do a good enough job of SELLING me shit. it’s pretty easy to find what is good though. Lots of different lists of ‘top’ apps is a good thing. The iPhone app store is a little more polished, but actually I find it a bit more impenetrable too, and harder to tell the good stuff from the bad. The Android store has lots of user review right up front, and once you learn how to read them a bit, you can get a good idea for what’s decent. Both stores have a pretty fluid experience. On the iPhone, I’m sure you can turn it off, but the way it’s set up right now you have to enter your password for everything you buy, and entering passwords on these phones fucking sucks, so that slows things down a lot. There are a lot of really good apps on the iPhone that are not available on the Android. However, anything that is *truly* popular and great seems to get ported to Android, and there is certainly enough.
On the flip side, there are just a shit-ton of Android apps you will never see in the iPhone store. Things like Tasker that lets you basically hook into any event the phone can trigger (location, usb in, headphone jack in, whatever), and set phone state based on that. The Google turn by turn GPS navigation is super great and not available for the iPhone yet. Deep inspection of battery, CPU and memory usage. Tons of crazy apps for Rooted phones. Basically any app that is remotely complicated or tricky or scary you’re much more likely to find on the Android store.
The Skyrocket seems to handle app downloads and installs way faster than the iPhone too (maybe 2x). Maybe it’s the size of the progress bar. Something. Dunno what. But its good. With the iPhone installed apps are ALL on your home screen (it seems). On android you can have installed apps that are not visible except from the Applications menu. Folder management is better on the iPhone, though it’s a little fruity… you hold down an icon you want to put in an icon with another. Then all the icons on the page start jiggling (that’s the fruity part… it’s just not very cool), then you drag the icon onto another icon you want to group with. The folder looks nice. On Android you create a folder, then drag shit into it. That’s mostly better (no juvenile jiggling), but the actual icon rendering just isn’t very nice looking.
Applications on the iPhone update automatically as far as I can tell. On Android you can choose whether to auto update or do it manually (even on an app by app basis if you want to).
Android on Samsung uses TouchWiz (Samsung’s shell over Android). 7 home screens, circular. You can pinch to zoom out and see them all, which is really nice. The iPhone home screens are inexplicably non-circular. iPhone just makes home screens as you need them (no blank home screens).
FLOW
iPhone has a kinda weird way of handling ‘settings’ for programs. Instead of a settings menu in each app, there is one main settings menu for the phone with a list of apps. It’s good and bad… good if you want to go through a bunch of apps and set them up all at once (though… when do you ever want to do that?), good in that it’s really easy to find the settings for something (don’t have to hunt through some incompetent app-writer’s menu system to get to their settings). However, it’s super bad in the most common case: You are in app X, and decide you want to change it’s setting. Now you have to back out, dick around to get to the iPhone settings screen, hunt around, find your app, change the setting, back out, go back to your app. Bad choice. On android there is a dedicated hard button (though in 4.0 it can be a soft button, as future phones won’t have hard buttons) for settings, and app makers tend to follow it pretty well. So, you are in an app and want to change settings, you press the fucking button. Done. Keep reading though, cuz this is about to become a theme.
When you’re in an app, say a web browser, and you want to go back a page, or in nested menus and go up a level, on the iPhone there is a little soft button, usually in the upper left hand corner of the app, you click it and go back. Problem is, it’s not always there. Sometimes you have to hunt a bit. On Android there is a hard button for it. You can muscle-memory the back press. It’s one of the most common things to press. The hard button is a million times better. This is all of course because Apple only wanted one big button on the front of their phone. The Android way is far better.
Android also has a dedicated search button. This is a little less useful because you don’t really search that much. But it’s kinda nice.
iPhone has the nice big ‘home’ button (android home button is in the row with the other hard buttons). iPhone is a little nicer here, but really because on the iPhone the ONLY thing you can do quickly is press ‘home’ and that just drops you straight out of your app, so it’s a bit of a double-edged sword. It is a true hard click to get it to happen though. On the skyrocket all those ‘hard’ buttons are capacitive, so while that makes them feel really super sexy and make you want to have sex with your phone, they’re easy to hit accidentally. That alone makes Android phones (at least the Skyrocket) pretty shitty for little kids, cuz they’ll just hit those buttons by accident and drop out of their connect-the-dots app. Not necessarily a bad thing though (hey kid, go play with mommy’s phone instead).
On the iPhone you cannot manage the lifetime of a running app. If you back out of it, it’s up to the app to decide when to quit. For me that’s totally insanely annoying, but for casual users it’s probably better. Android tries to auto-kill apps and stuff, but it’s not as good at it, so you need to remember if you’re running something heavy and actually exit it (or just be a man and actually back out of your app with the ‘back’ button instead of hitting the home button). The task manager is ok. There are insanely great task manager apps for android that’ll tell you everything running too.
Basic things like the web browser are kinda weird. Before Android 4.0, the browser cannot go full screen. There’s a nav bar on the top. But the iPhone is way worse, it has a bar on the top and the bottom. Pretty sure Apple does not want you to use it (of course they don’t. They want you to buy an app for everything). Android runs flash on the web fine. And on the skyrocket with dual 1.4Ghz processors it’s reasonably fast.
CUSTOMIZATION
I haven’t played around trying to customize Marian’s iPhone too much, but man you can customize the shit out of the Android. Change the shell. Change the lock screen. Change the soft keyboard. You can pretty change whatever you want.
NOTIFICATIONS
The Android notification bar is well implemented. It’s big enough that you can read it nicely, and still unobtrusive across the top of the phone. You can hook apps into it, which turns out to be really useful. It’s hard to describe why doing that is so good… just that it really is. It feels like you are ‘temporarily peeling back the skin’ of the phone to reveal all these options. Change one and it zips itself back up. Very cool.
The iPhone does basic notifications better though when the phone is sleeping. It wakes up the screen and puts the notification on the lock screen with plenty of text to read it. If you use the stock android lock screen it has enough text to read it, but won’t wake the screen for you.
BATTERY LIFE
The 4s basttery life is clearly superior to the Skyrocket. Probably 20-50% better battery life. In practice you have to charge either one of them every day. If you really play with it you can kill the Skyrocket in less than a day. HOWEVER, you can get spare batteries for the Skyrocket for dirt cheap, like 30 bucks for two of them. So, I have a spare battery in my wallet and one in my car’s glove box for basically nothing. So… on the off chance my phone somehow runs out of battery, swap in a new one and I’m good to go. The 4s battery is not swappable ever, so if it’s out, you have to plug it in. With the swappable battery, I have zero battery stress with the Android, which is a definite win. Both of them take a really long time to charge.
ACCESSORIES
There are way more accessories for the iPhone. It’s not even close. Since the form factor only changes like once every 2 or 3 years, there’s just way more manufacturer support. With android there are like a hundred different form factors every year. Basically, that means you can get a really nice case for your iPhone but only a pretty basic case for an Android phone. That brings me to a side topic: SMART PHONES ARE NOT COMPLETE PRODUCTS. Without a case, the phone is only a partial thing. Easily scratched. Slippery as hell and easy to drop. If you want to buy a phone, factor in the size of the case. You will have one.
IN THE CAR
The iPhone is definitely superior. Tons of hardware works with the iPhone connector. The iPhone connector is digital and can control the device nicely. With an android phone you are going through the headphone jack. Analog bullshit, subject to your volume control (though with things like Tasker you can detect it and set up your levels nicely). You can use bluetooth to get around it, but sound quality won’t be as good. For good car audio though a phone isn’t really the way to go. Just get a used iPod instead. You really don’t want to be plugging your phone into the stereo every day. [Note: I've refined my position on this here]
LOUDSPEAKER
The 4s speaker is way better than the Skyrocket. Deeper. Handles high volume better. Skyrocket speaker is really easy to cover with your finger while playing games.
AS A PHONE
iPhone is only OK as a phone. Amazingly. It’s serviceable, but even pay as you go phones sound better. I’m not sure how they achieved that, but they did. Skyrocket is pretty decent. Really though no one calls anyone any more. Phone quality isn’t really that important. Weird to say, but true.
CACHET
I thought this would matter more, but it doesn’t. The Skyrocket is sexy as hell, and so is the iPhone.
BUILD QUALITY
iPhone is metal and glass. Skyrocket is plastic and glass. iPhone wins, but I think the Skyrocket looks more balanced with it’s edge to edge screen and all-blackness.
BUTTONS AND STUFF
The power button on the iPhone is on top. The Skyrocket is on the right side. The real fuckup though is that the left side of the Skyrocket has the volume keys. So if you one-hand hit the power button of the Skyrocket to wake it, if you’re not careful you hit the volume keys. A little annoying. Doesn’t happen on the iPhone.
POLISH
The iPhone is a more polished but limited experience. The Skyrocket is *way* more polished than I expected it to be, and trades functionality for polish. That’s a good trade for me, but I can see how people like things the other way too.
UI LOOK
Android is nice hard square edges, generally a black theme. iPhone is all rounded corners and bubbles, generally a silver theme. I prefer the sharp look, but that’s a personal thing. The Android UI buttons are objectively bigger and easier to press. The iPhone UI is smoother. Less hitching when scrolling (though Android scrolling is really fine… we’re scrolling the applications menu with like 200 things in it).
TOUCHSCREEN
The iPhone touchscreen sensitivity is better than the Skyrocket, but you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference with one exception. If you are trying to draw with them, you’ll notice (or do like chinese character entry). Or if you’re really used to an iPhone then try the Skyrocket, you’ll feel it. In practice though, it’s not an issue.
SCREEN QUALITY
The iPhone has higher resolution than the Skyrocket, but it’s much smaller. Apple marketing calls this a ‘Retina Display’. In practice it just means your text is real damn small. The iPhone screen is too small (Apple users will all agree to this once the iPhone 5 is out and has a big screen and they’re in love with it). Colors are really nice on it, and it’s generally fine, even in bright light. The Skyrocket screen is an OLED. It’s fucking incredible looking, and you can crank the brightness to 11 and see it even on the surface of the sun. Lower res than the iPhone, but bigger. It could be a bit higher resolution to match the size better. But, in practice you only see pixels if you want to.
SPEED
They’re both stupid-fast. 2x 1.4GHz is ridiculous power in a phone.
CONCLUSION
Both of these top-tier phones are really pretty damn great. They both also have tons of flaws. If you’re looking for the good in things, you can be super happy with either. I’m pretty hard to please, and impressed by both. They also kinda complement each other… where one falls down, the other one tends to do that thing well. I probably could have fallen for an iPhone if I hadn’t started with this Skyrocket first. I don’t think I could ever give up the freedom and speed of it for the tighter, more polished, but more locked in feeling of the iPhone now that I’ve felt it. For a non-techie though, the iPhone is probably still better.
COST
The smartphone plans are expensive. On AT&T you can use the 200mb plan for 15 bucks (though I think that’s gonna change to 20 bucks for a similarly-useless 350mb). You’ll tend to consume the vast majority of your data over WiFi, and not pay for it. But me using the phone lax over the first month I used about 1GB, leading me to think you’d have to be pretty careful to stay under 200mb. If you pay for a text messaging plan, you can definitely save money if you’re willing to give up text messaging and use data alternatives. There are a bunch, but they all will require using a different number for texting and it’s kinda a pain in the ass. 30/month for text messaging is just rape though, considering how little data texting consumes. In the long run texting plans just need to die. We’re each using a $25/month 2gb plans (each $20 with the sony discount). So, our data plans cost us 40 bucks/month combined. Le’sigh. But… the freedom is kinda nice. If we could just get up the organization to drop the 30/month family unlimited texting plan it’d be totally great.
The phones themselves were ‘reasonable’ for this level of technology. $200 for the iPhone. $150 for the Skyrocket.
COMING
I’m going to try to do individual reviews of some apps too now that I’ve got this big system review out of the way. I’m also sure I missed some aspects and will maybe do a followup at some point. I need to shoot some pictures too.