Moving from Android to iOS

I’m a cheapskate, because of this I’m stuck on Sprint which gives my wife an I a very cheap cell phone plan. The downside is we were stuck on Windows phones until just over a year ago, when Sprint said we could pay a fee to use an Android phone. Then a few months ago, the iPhone 4 and 4S were options.

So I had a top of the line Android device (Epic 4G) for almost a year until my toddler (I suspect) waterboarded my phone.

Sprint was willing to transition me to an iPhone 4S as an early upgrade.

I’ve had my iPhone for months and it’s been attached to me to a fault. There are two things I notice:

  1. I use it way more.
  2. I don’t give up and look for my laptop as much as I did with my Epic.

There are a few things Android has that trump iOS, but at some point might get resolved.

Sound and Vibration

This changes with each version of Android, but I felt like I could have 3 settings: Silent; Vibrate; Noise (+ Vibrate). iOS seems to have two, and I’ve more or less gotten used to it. The alarm in silent mode though is a bit, scary… I could do with a vibrate-only alarm.

Gmail

I feel like Google really dropped the ball on quality with the Gmail app. The complaints are numerous: single account only, not a lot of settings, common iOS gestures are broken.

I’ll wait til a third party, like Sparrow does it right.

Google Naviagtion/Maps/Latitude

Latitude as a platform for finding people in real-time is somewhat failing everywhere.

Navigation is nonexistant. The Maps app in iOS is Google powered, but it lacks the functionality and niceties of the Android app. I’m sure some third party (if not Apple) will rush in to fill the gap. Android navigation is great, in many cases you can ditch your car navigation and use Android’s, so long as you can get a fix on your location.

Open in…

Android also has a great feature of letting you open certain URLs in apps as opposed to the web browser. So I might click on a linkto a restaurant on yelp.com, but I’ll get prompted to open it using the Yelp app. Android clearly has a benefit here. Countless times I go to websites and see an ad for their iPhone app which I’ve already installed. I just want it all to work seemlessly.

no regrets…

I have no regrets though. These are small peaves compared to the slowness, and lack of polish I experienced regularly on Android. I’ll probably stick with iOS for the foreseeable future.