Interesting. I had come up with a few of the same pluses and minuses before deciding to try the S4, so I’m curious why you say you’re already looking forward to switching back to the iPhone. “Drag and drop vs. iTunes”, “swappable battery”, “expandable storage” and one you didn’t have, “larger display” sum up the bigggest pluses to me, while “fewer apps” doesn’t matter (my list of core apps are all Android available), and I don’t use Bluetooth much to talk with. I will miss being able to share apps and charging cables with my family’s remaining iPhones, though.
Is it a whoosh that the earbuds are one of the two factors you cite for switching back?! I hate the Apple earbuds, they fall right out of my ears. The newer ones with the iPhone 5 may be different but I haven’t tried them. It’s moot to me anyway since I have used Etymotic earbuds with my MP3 and smartphones for years now (since before I even got the iPhone 3GS), and I never even unwrap the stock earbuds with any phone (iPhone, work-provided Blackberry, or this S4) except as emergency backups in the car to use to listen to sports broadcasts when I haven’t brought my “real” headphones (for music).
Also, re: the repeated suggestions to root the phone, I found this tidbit in the current Wikipedia entry on the S4:
That’s funny, I thought the whole point of Android was that I wouldn’t need to “Jailbreak” my phone to do crazy stuff to it including changing the UI and removing or replacing built-in apps, and now I find that with the S4 at least, I kind of will? Sigh.
My hopes soared when I saw this post, but then were crushed by the wishy-washy language in the article. “Might”?? Don’t tease me, it’s cruel! :mad:
It’s been a major issue for most Android users I’ve talked to who have had their phones for more than a year. When they’re new and shiny, Android phones are generally quite stable, but as time goes on you start getting lockups and crashes more and more frequently. Hard to say who is to blame, but I’m guessing at least part of the fault lies with the manufacturers not being as rigorous in supporting older phones when pushing out system updates. Or maybe it’s entirely on app developers writing apps that assume hardware resources or system calls that don’t exist on older hardware, I don’t know. For me, it was the single biggest downside of Android ownership – I loved my phone when I got it, and hated it by the time it was two years old.
It’s mostly the user-friendliness in iOS that I miss. Sure, you can do more with the OS in Android, but Apple knows their shit with UI.
Not a whoosh. I absolutely love the newer iPhone headset- it’s comfortable, gives great sound, and the controls work really well. Sadly, it doesn’t work at all with my S3, presumably because Samsung thought that all the headset manufacturers would decide that their pinout was far superior to the standard iPhone pinout. End result is that there are a TON of headsets out there… 99% of which don’t work with my phone. It’s damn hard to even find out if a given headset works with the S3. I’ve been using the stock S3 headset, and the controls are flimsy (and the earbuds fall out of my ears).
Oh, and the USB output won’t work with my wife’s car stereo. All the peripheral companies build to match the iPhone specs, which means that the Galaxy S3 hardly works with anything.
You need to unlock the bootloader in order to flash whole new roms, or different radio firmware, or other such fun things. You can do all sorts of crazy things to it including changing the UI or sideloading not-officially-approved apps without doing anything beyond checking a box in the settings (by default you can only load apps from the Play Store).
The UI can be modified by installing a class of apps known as “launchers.” Launchers are the app that launches when you hit the home button. Custom launchers let you change the number of homescreens, how they’re laid out, how you navigate between them, how the app drawer is laid out, and numerous other things. Nova and Apex are the two currently most popular (ADW and Go are past favourites) and are both similar to the stock interface but with a bazillion extra options. There are some others like Action Launcher that change the interface in a more fundamental fashion.
The extent to which you can uninstall built-in apps depends on what exactly you’re talking about. Installing a third-party dialer or keyboard or mail client or whatever and making it the default for that action will always be possible while completely stock. However, some manufacturers and some carriers install crap on your phone that you may not be able to remove entirely without root priveleges. Usually they can be disabled or at least avoided, but if you want to get rid of them you might need to root. Rooting will generally not require an unlocked bootloader.
Think of root as having local admin privileges on your computer. What root gets you is read/write access to the system partition of your phone’s file system. Without root, you only have read access. Most system apps (keyboard, dialer, etc) live in the system partition, and if Verizon puts their crapware into the system section you can’t delete it without root.
TL;DR Samsung’s locked bootloader won’t prevent you from doing things that require jailbreaking in iOS-land. It’s only of concern for people wanting to install custom ROMs.
Actually, the freedom Android provides is the freedom for the carrier to lock down (or not) and install extra crapware (or not) as they please.
The benefit of Android “fragmentation” is that you can find phones that can be rooted, unlocked and reflashed easily. Like the Nexus series. (Although even locked down phones are usually rooted within days of their release. It may be more difficult, but you will be able to root the Galaxy S4.)
The “benefits” of iphone include zero fragmentation (there’s only a few models and the software is almost identical across all of them), lack of carrier crapware, and guaranteed lockdown.
I should also mention that when you root your phone every argument against Android goes away. Get updates whenever you want, remove any app you want, make your phone a wifi hotspot, whatever. I can’t say I’ve used iOS very much, but I’ve yet to hear an argument against Android that applies to me and my rooted Nexus + Cyanogenmod.
I held on to the BlackBerry world for a few years into the modern smartphone era and then switched to an iPhone…then to an Android phone and then to a Windows Phone 8 phone.
With the iPhone, I really liked how easy it was to use and how most of what I wanted to do was just there as part of the base OS and just worked. There were some issues with iPhone that grew on me over time, the screen size was unimpressive compared to newer phones coming out. While I do not want to customize my phone very much, when I did want to add certain types of customizations it wasn’t possible because of Apple’s philosophy on what apps can and cannot do.
So when I first switched to Android I was pretty happy, but I soured on it eventually because it was just “too much.” The Motorola Atrix I had was preloaded with a ton of Motorola Apps, AT&T apps, and Google apps. I had like three messaging clients, four email clients, and etc. They all hooked in to other parts of the system as well, so you really had to basically prune your phone of these strange overlapping applications that all did the same thing.
Finally, Motorola would frequently push updates of some of its base software and then occasionally Android itself would get an update for the phone and often times lots of things would break and require you to fiddle with them to fix it. Android was highly customizable, but so much so that I found it really easy to add a bunch of annoying crap to your phone.
Recently I picked up a Nokia Lumia 920 and it’s probably my favorite phone so far. To me it sits somewhere between iOS and Android. WP8’s base interface is very strong in most areas with one or two weaknesses, and it’s like Android in that you can generally customize it to a degree. The best done parts of WP8 are the best phone experience I’ve had, and the parts that aren’t great you can generally find a good app to make it better. So far it has avoided the problem Android had for me in part because it isn’t quite as customizable as Android and it also appears Nokia and Microsoft have played nice together to make sure the Nokia-authored apps are ones you’d really want in addition to the Microsoft ones instead of being bloatware.
I also think Microsoft is getting good at integrating services, as the integration with SkyDrive works very nicely.
Where people have really blasted WP8 is in areas that do not much matter to me. For example some apps are not available (although the app store is nothing like the wasteland that was the BlackBerry app store), but I do not like to install lots of third party apps. In fact aside from a few standard ones like YouTube the more third party apps I’m installing the less happy I am (I developed this attitude after my Android experience.)
I also recently bought a tablet and bought the newest iPad, it’s interesting because I test drove the Surface and think Windows 8 is really not good in the tablet form right now, but I really do like WP8.
Rooting and installing Cyanogen aren’t day 1 activities. They’re “once you know you’re comfortable with Android but want to open up even more options” activities. If you root your device (which will be required to install Cyanogen), you may have difficulty returning your device. Once you’re comfortable with Android, root away. Rooting can give you a little more power to do cool things and customize your device without making fundamental changes. It will allow you to remove crapware from your carrier like the AT&T Find my Family or Yellow Pages apps.
Cyanogen is a custom ROM. ROMs are to Android what different distributions are to Linux. You have to root your device to install a new ROM. Installing a new ROM will probably wipe everything from your phone and install the new operating system. Cyanogen is the most popular one around, but there are others. I’m running AOKP, a Cyanogen offshoot. I installed it after I got tired of waiting for AT&T and Samsung to upgrade my device to version 4.x. The advantages of a custom ROM are better support of updates, no crapware, and better customization. The disadvantages are that there’s no carrier support and you may not get any improvements the manufacturer made to the Android stock program. This will include the loss of some of the features of the Galaxy S4 like the autopause or look scrolling, so if you like those features, be sure the ROM you’re changing to keeps them.
You missed an Android pro: no iTunes. That program has become such a bloated piece of crap.
That’s funny, since I’ve had the exact opposite impression. Of the iPhonites (iPhonies?) I know, there have been a few who made the mistake of upgrading their older iPhone to a newer iOS, and had their phones rendered mostly unusable. There are yet others who have learned from others and/or past experience and refuse to upgrade their older iPhones to the newest iOS because (paraphrasing) “It’s a scam they use to screw up the performance of your old phone so that you upgrade to a newer one.”
My stock Android phone was originally released in late 2010, and as much as I’d like to get a faster, shinier phone with more bells and whistles, I can’t justify it since it does everything I need it to do without any problems whatsoever… no matter how many times I keep dropping it HARD without any case or screen protector.
For most of them, simply just download them again. For purchased ones, you’d need to repurchase on the other platform (e.g. Angry Birds, full version of Tapatalk, etc.).
I’ve got an iPod Touch (purchased before we went to smartphones), and an Android (Droid X, though a new Galaxy Note is in a FedEx office waiting for me right now). In general the selection for Android isn’t quite as large but there are several apps where Android has better options (e.g. my sleep-tracking app).
Dropbox and many of the other major utilities are a complete non-issue - they have versions on both platforms, and their cloud-stored data is accessible regardless of which device you have. Ditto shared calendars - just set up a shared Gmail account for calendaring purposes and your Android appointment will “automagically” appear on your wife’s iPhone.
I’m quite jealous. My Droid X (not sure when released, but I bought it in March 2011) has been largely unusable for most of a year. Every OS “upgrade” has made it slower and boggier to the point where sometimes I can’t even answer a phone call (it simply refuses to respond)… or even place one (I tap the dial icon and nothing happens for a minute or more).
Oooh: just remembered one utility that will NOT work as well on the Android: 1Password. The Android version is still read-only - you have to enter passwords on another device, then sync to your Android using Dropbox. They’re working on a full version, but if you’re using that, this is a significant issue. Other password vault software probably works on Android.
Why would this be? Do the OS upgrades presume newer, faster hardware with more memory, as is often the case - I remember my iPhone 3GS becoming dog slow after “upgrading” to iOS 4? In which case, could you not just sit out on the upgrade?
Well, in my case, my lack of problems could be because I chose well when selecting phones. It’s an HTC G2, which is the sequel to the first ever Android phone, the G1. It’s the next best thing to a Nexus phone in that it’s a “Google” branded phone with no bloatware or redundant UI added by the manufacturer and extremely minimal bloatware (if you could even call it that) added by the carrier. It’s just plain vanilla Android as Goog intended.
If I were you, I’d seriously consider rooting your phone and flashing a custom ROM, which if you choose the right ROM, would effectively make your phone also have plain vanilla Android just like mine. Another possible option to consider is selling your phone to Amazon or any of the other number of companies that buy used phones. Just put the proceeds towards a Nexus phone with minimal bloatware, and as long as you take care of it physically, I can assure you that it should last you longer than your DroidX.
I use mSecure for that, and it works well enough without having to jump through those kind of hoops.
Each OS upgrade is necessarily tailored to, and presumably tested on, each and every model of phone before they are released to the wild. It’s just a matter of the extent to which they are able to test for every possible combination of functions that end-users use in the real world.
There are ways to refuse the upgrades, but a lot of phones make it all too easy to download and install the upgrades semi-automatically without being fully aware of the extent of the changes and potential problems. It’s just that at some point, the users necessarily have to take part in the final testing, for better or for worse.
I had the exact same problem with my Droid X. The problem was that there was no way to revert back to an early version of the system software. Plus, once the phone was crashy and slow, there was always the hope that the next upgrade would fix things.
Yep. I remember specifically that its performance slowed down dramatically on installation (not entirely voluntary) of one OS “upgrade” and it went downhill from there. I actually even had a replacement at one point (the screen went bad, and I had been paying for the extra warranty) and that was similarly boggy. It was actually better at first because I had nothing loaded on it, but as soon as I started loading the stuff I use all the time, it was molasses-in-January time.
Yeah - mSecure was an Amazon app of the day, and I actually got it - but at that point we already had all our stuff in 1Password so it wasn’t worth the switch (plus we’d have to purchase that for the iPhone). Also since we have the desktop version as well, it’s rarely an issue. Still, I don’t recommend 1Password if you’re just getting started, for this reason.
Waiting on my new phone right now - Fedex has had it since 9:00 yesterday morning but it was “not due to delivered” so they held onto it, the bestidges. It’s on a truck right now.
I’m on my second Android phone and very happily, too. I’ve never used or owned an iOS device, but based on my experience with Android and what I’ve been able to learn online and elsewhere, Android (obviously) is more open to user modification. With low-end Android devices this becomes indispensible, because only by rooting and flashing a leaner ROM can you get decent performance for anything other than phone calls. Moving up the scale this becomes less necessary. My wife and I both have the same model from the Samsung Galaxy S2 series and hers has been working fine with the stock ROM, unrooted. For reasons of my own I did root mine and flash a custom ROM, but it was for other reasons of my own and not merely to make the phone useable at all.
The only thing I don’t like about Android is that I can’t do Gigwalk with it.
I’d just like to say thank you very much to the people who’ve posted in here. I’ve learned quite a bit really quickly, I’d never heard of rooting the phone or cyanogen before.
I have a Galaxy S3 and still have my original galaxy S handset which I might practice on putting on a custom rom.
Personally, I went Android because I utterly detest iTunes. I want to be able to just drag and drop files from my PC onto the phone and have them work. I also have an Android tablet (Sony) which is great for what I want it for.
The only downside is that so many other things are designed to match with frigging apple products. iPod docks for example (try to get a decent one that works with an Android, you can’t unless you use bluetooth) and my car has a built in ipod connector.
The only apple product i own is the ipod I bought cheap from a pawn shop purely to use in the car. Once I loaded the music on it, it lives in the centre console connected to the sound system and I never look at it.
I’ve just defected from Android to WP8 and I really, really like it - I was getting very tired of the discordant look you get on Android when you have widgets from different sources on the same page - they all look reasonable individually, but together, it was always a mess.
The only thing I don’t quite like on WP8 is that the browser doesn’t reflow text to fit the screen, and the font size rendering is weird on some sites, but this annoyance is massively offset by the gains elsewhere - integration with skydrive, and the general look and feel of WP apps. The Facebook app for WP8 (actually supplied by MS) is delightfully not shite. The Android FB app always made me very stabby.
It’s an HTC G2, which is the sequel to the first ever Android phone, the G1. It’s the next best thing to a Nexus phone in that it’s a “Google” branded phone with no bloatware or redundant UI added by the manufacturer and extremely minimal bloatware (if you could even call it that) added by the carrier. It’s just plain vanilla Android as Goog intended.