OK, I Switched. Now Here's What I Love and Hate.

Posted by trevorep on February 23, 2012 01:06 pm 28

Maybe Love and Hate isn't the right wording. Here's what I love and would love some help with. I've been using an iPhone 4 since the day they came out and before that I had a 3G that I picked up the week they came out. I'd considered switching to Android many times but I had all these apps that I'd spent money and years of time finding setting up and getting everything just perfect. I had some music that was locked into iTunes with DRM. When iTunes Match came out I paid the $25 and got the DRM removed from most of those old songs which made for one less thing keeping me using an iPhone.

Every time a new Nexus device came out I wanted one but I just didn't want to start from scratch. The real tipping point was after I ported my phone number to Google Voice a few months ago and wanted a better experience. So a week ago I bought an unlocked GSM Galaxy Nexus.

The design

I love the design. The lack of buttons, it's so thin and clean. It's so thin in fact that I have trouble holding it. I'm considering an extended battery because I wouldn't mind the extra thickness, it might actually help to keep me from dropping it. The screen is HUGE, it's great. I've heard from a small number of people that it's of a low quality but if it is it's the best looking low quality screen I've ever seen. The ICS on screen home button is the way to go. The lack of buttons also kinda sucks if only because I wish it had one more button: a camera button. No big deal, there isn't one on the iPhone either.

Software

Ice Cream Sandwich is great, this is why I switched. It looks much nicer than any previous version of Android I've tried. The Google Voice app is exactly what I was looking for. I use it for all my texting (I refuse to pay extra to a carrier for texting) and outgoing calls and it works just the way I want it to. Google Wallet, while mostly a novelty, is really nice. It really came in handy the other day when I was on my way home from a run (so I didn't have any cash or cards) and was able to stop and buy something at the grocery store.

Back to the iPhone I used the Nike+ app to track my runs and it was great. If GPS reception sucked it would just count my steps and still give me an accurate distance. It played music from the playlists on the phone, had great voice feedback of distance and pace and everything just seemed polished. I've checked out a couple apps so far and neither has really been anywhere near the same experience.

The Gmail app is great for the most part but the formatting of HTML emails is frustrating. This HTML email is twice the width of the screen and makes for a lot of scrolling in every direction and there's no pinch to zoom:

I don't really read all my email. I just look at the subject and sender to see if it's something I need to look at and if not, then it sits there for weeks. I go through and clean out my in box every so often but it's there for a long time. Almost every time I get a new email the notification will be something along the line of "4 new messages" even though there's only one new one.

Unless I'm missing something there's no way to make the battery % show in the status bar. I've seen apps that do it but then you have two battery icons.

Lock Screen

The different unlock options are great. I always wanted a pattern unlock for the iPhone. I had an overly complicated pattern lock at first and I've now switched to a much easier one, I figure it's a least much better than just a slide to unlock.

Notifications

I was expecting some sort of notifications or widgets would be built into the lock screen. There are plenty of replacement lock screens but the ones I've tried out seem buggy and like they haven't been updated much for ICS or the 720p display.

Is there a way to have the screen turn on and show you the notification as they come in? On the iPhone I had all my push notifications show in lock screen. I would hear it come in and then look at the screen to see what the message was. I just heard an email come in so I hit the power button on the side, put in my pattern lock, slide down the notification menu only to see it's a "Policy Update" email from PayPal.

Geeky Fun

Ever tried reading the contents of the RFID chip in your passport? I set my phone on top of my passport and it tried to read the contents on it's own. I installed NFC Taginfo to try to read RFID tags and it apparently stayed running. It needed the passport number, birthdate and expiration date to decrypt the info but then it has a lot of the information that's printed in the passport including your photo.

Thanks in advance for any app suggestions anyone has.