aaron@traas.org

The home of Aaron Traas — man of faith, science, and very bad humor

I really, really like Android. A lot. I've been an Android guy since well before I got an Android phone. It just always lined up more with the way I thought an OS should work. I was always hopeful for WebOS, but it never felt quite finished to me, and HP bought it only to kill it a year later. In addition to my preference of the way Android works at a theoretical level, I'm also a heavy Google apps user, and that's kept me on Android as a primary platform.

I've felt, however, that I've never given iOS a fair, honest shake as a primary device. After a month with an iPhone 5 as a second phone (the first 2 weeks I used it as my primary), I can say that this is absolutely true; as a gadget nerd I really aught to have given it more of an effort. There's frankly a lot on the platform to love. And also plenty to hate.

Hardware

I was quite happy with the hardware of the Nexus 4—a solidly built, attractive device with a great screen and fast internals. It's completely destroyed by the iPhone 5 here. The screen, in particular, on the iPhone 5 is only about 10% better, but it's a huge 10%. The two areas where it's simply better is color calibration and uniformity of brightness. The latter is a bit harder to pull off on a larger phone, but there's no excuse whatsoever for the former. Using the iPhone 5 has made me so unhappy with my Nexus 4 that I'm planning on installing a custom kernel this weekend that allows me to adjust the color. Like, seriously, this could have been fixed in software!

The build quality is just brilliant, and because of the nerrowness of the phone, it fits in the hand far better. I'm not a fan of using the phone naked; though it's beautiful, the sharp edges dig into my hand a bit. It's also delightfully thin and light.

The battery life is a hair better in my use than the Nexus 4. I initially had some issues with it, but I tracked down an app that was grabbing location data continuously, and that was making the phone's daily lifespan into a useless range.

The camera, as expected, blows away the Nexus 4's crummy shooter, but I honestly don't care that much, because taking pictures from my phone isn't really my thing.

Though the hardware difference that makes my Nexus 4 the most jealous is the LTE radio. I'm on T-Mobile, and they've been rolling out their LTE network in NYC and the surrounding areas lately. The LTE download speeds haven't been that much faster than HSPA+ (the best I've found is around 25 Mbps, and I've found comparable HSPA+ speeds in those locations), but the real difference is the upload speeds and latency. All of my network operations feel much faster. In my town in Jersey, some of the spots where T-Mobile had spotty coverage and would previously drop down to Edge, I'm getting a decent LTE signal.

One little thing I now desperately desire on my Nexus 4 is the mute switch. It's so damn useful. I know Android has great software toggles for this sort of thing, but the additional affordances of having a hardware switch that can make my phone instantly meeting/church/theater friendly is fantastic. It's such a little thing that's really great. I never used the switch on the iPad, but I don't take an iPad everywhere with me.

The screen size is a bit small, particularly for web browsing and reading. I'm used to the monster 4.7" Android devices now, and the iPhone feels... cramped. I don't know how I'd survive with the smaller screen of all the previous iPhones. This isn't a dealbreaker for me at all, but I do prefer a larger screen.

The new "Lightning" connector is interesting. Apple changed the connector from the 11-year-old proprietary connector dating back to the original iPod to something that's maddeningly not micro-USB, which is the standard that every single phone manufacturer other than Apple uses. However, Lightning is the nicest interconnect I've ever used. The best part: it doesn't matter if you plug it in upside-down. That's freaking brilliant. It just snaps in very solidly. Every night before bed, I plug in my iPhone 5, and then fumble for 5 minutes in the dark trying to plug in my Nexus 4. I really can't wait for one of the wireless charging standards to become ubiquitous, so they can get cheap and we can use them everywhere, but until then, we're stuck with this situation.

Software

Though the hardware is really great, and beats the vast majority of Android phones neatly, the software is the more interesting difference. iOS is fundamentally and philosophically different than Android in its goals, and thus the surface-level similarities are really cosmetic. The preference for one or the other is polarizing. The real reason I wanted to use this as a primary phone for at least a couple weeks without jailbreaking (which I still haven't done at the time of writing) was to see for myself if my preference for Android was genuine, and not based on a superficial knowledge of what it is to own an iOS device.

The good stuff first - the OS is really, really polished. The median perfomance of the Nexus 4 is on just as responsive as iOS on the Nexus 4, but the outlying cases is where iOS shines. It never, ever seems to drop below 60 FPS, no matter what it's doing. That's phenomenal. Even though on the Nexus 4, I get 60 FPS 99.9% of the time, that additional 0.1% of time is really key to making the platform feel more solid and real. And I'm not one to talk about "magic" with software; I've done everything from basic web apps to debugging a SCSI tape IOCTL in the Linux kernel. It's all comprehensible to me, but the consistent, uniform performance is the closest thing to "magic" I've seen in years. It's simply quite amazing.

And, frankly, shame on Google for not having this fixed yet. Android is way, way smoother and faster than it was a few years ago, but it's still not good enough. I don't want to hear damn excuses about garbage collection or or the extra safety of bounds-checking in Dalvik or other nonsense. If you can't have your render thread deliver a consistent framerate for 2D compositing on first-party apps on a quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro, that's kinda sad in 2013. I mean, you've got more compute than a high-end desktop chip from like 5 years ago.

The polish of the OS also extends to the better iOS apps. Apple has been doing, more consistently and for longer, a better job at teaching developers to make apps that feel cohesive to the platform. Google put in a major new effort with Ice Cream Sandwich 18 months ago, and that's helped an awful lot, but they still haven't caught up. Tweetbot is just better enough than Tweetlanes to make me prefer it. Prompt blows ConnectBot out of the water. The iOS versions of Vine, Evernote, 1Password, etc. are better than their Android versions. And, frankly, this is the key reason some geeky power users, who I'd expect to prefer something super-customizable like Android, legitimately prefer iOS. It's nice to be able to drink from this well.

But certain classes of apps are more functional on Android: notably ones that sync large amounts of data in the background. Because of the limits of what iOS apps are allowed to do in the background, particularly when push notifications are recieved, they are made to feel slow and janky compared to their Android equivalents. This primarily effects RSS readers, mail clients, podcatchers, and similar apps. The lifecycle goes like this:

  1. Recieve push notification for, say, a new email recieved
  2. Tap on said notification to launch the app
  3. Wait for app to load
  4. Wait for app to sync with server and download new emails
  5. Tap on email to view.Whereas with Android, when the push is recieved from the server, the app is woken up, and immediately begins downloading the new content before the notification is presented to the server. That way, when the user taps on the notification, it brings them immediately to the appropriate email message or whatever. I know iOS 7 will likely mitigate some of this issue, but it doesn't do so for me right now.

This is exacerbated further in applications that want to sync a large quantity of data, like podcatchers. An app can only run in the background for 10 minutes at a time, so when you're syncing podcasts, which can be hundreds of megabytes each, you have to do it more or less manually, because they'll often time out otherwise. Whereas on my Android phone, the quite excellent Pocket Casts simply downloads my podcasts in the background at its leisure with no action on my part.

Related is the actual terribleness that is notification center, which Apple added in iOS 5. It was a huge, huge improvement over the previous system, but it's primitive compared to the notification tray in Android 1.0, let alone the truly excellent and interactive notifications in 4.2. The worst thing is the tiny little "x" button that I can never seem to tap—let alone tap twice—to dismiss a bucket of notifications.

I know this is a personal thing, but many, many touch targets, particularly on toolbars in the header or footer of the screen, are too small. I frequently fail to register taps, and in some case gestures. Also, there seems to be a bit of a lag between when I press the home button and it returns me to Springboard, and that drives me nuts. I wish Apple enabled the same gestures as on the iPad for going home and switching tasks. I also find the μk1 on web views to be way too high, but on list views, it's just right. The fact that I'm nit-picking about these sorts of details is likely and indication that I've really spent most of my time, historically, on Android, and have developed a preference for an Android feel, so take this with a grain of salt.

Back to Normal

After spending a few weeks forcing myself to use the iPhone 5 as my primary device, going back to normal is nice. I've noticed my usage patterns change from before. I default to Android for most tasks. I do use the iPhone for certain things, however. Most notably and consistently is the Camera -- the hardware and software on the iPhone 5 is just plain better, end of story. The second is Twitter, as Tweetbot is just better than anything available currently available for Android. The third, strangly enough, is a Google app: YouTube. The screen is a hair better, the speaker is louder, and is on the side, rather than the back. And then there's LTE. Most importantly, however, since I use my Nexus 4 for most things, I tend to go through battery faster on Android, and thus I have more battery available on the iPhone 5.

I'm glad I did this. It's nice to see how the other half lives. I really get, for the first time, why power-users like the platform. I actually appreciate Android more now as well, for what it does very well. Though it's not my platform of choice, it's an excellent platform, and a fantastic device. I also can't wait to try iOS 7.

  1. Coefficient of kinetic friction. A higher μk means greater friction force, which means that the object in motion will slow more quickly. See this article for more info (Wikipedia).

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