5 on Friday: Five Reasons I’m Glad to be Back on Android (And Five Things I Miss About iPhone)
Santa came early this year and delivered my husbands Galaxy S3 on Christmas Eve, giving me the luxury of switching from my busted iPhone to his old Galaxy Nexus before the post-Christmas rush. I’ve only had it a few days, but here are my initial thoughts on why I’m glad to be back on Android.
- It Just Works – I just have to put my email in here, and everything will sync up? I don’t have to login to every Google app I want to use? I don’t have to go to the web first to confirm I do in fact want to sync my calendars? Maybe this is unique to me, because I never left all the Google services when I went to iOS. But when I got my iPhone I had to go through a long process to get everything working correctly. Granted, it was a one time thing, but even after that it just didn’t work right (not all my calendars would show for example). The one login, everything connected (and working properly) was a nice change of pace.
- Widgets – I don’t have a ton of widgets, but the ones I do have make my life easier. Simple things, like being able to have the next week of my schedule on my home screen, are what I missed when I left Android.
- App Drawer – I hate cluttered desktops. Likewise, I hate cluttered home screens. So being able to have only what I need on my home screen just makes me calmer. Also, it’s really nice not having to dig around my list of apps to find what I need. I can just look in the drawer and find something easily because it’s *gasp* in alphabetical order.
- Notification Light – A simple glance tells me if I have something I need to look at. Not only that, but the lights are different colors which means I know if I can ignore something. Blue light? It’s Facebook, it can wait. White light? It’s from Talk and usually either my husband or my cousin, so I should probably look at it. I’m still getting back into the habit of looking for it, but it will mean less missed texts in the long run. Plus, less overall time on my phone because I don’t get stuck in the inevitable technology loop that happens when you turn on the screen.
- Customization – Want a moving wallpaper? No problem. Want to be able to just download ringtones from the web on a whim? Done. Want to set your phone ringer to automatically turn off/on at a certain hour? No issue. I was shocked when I couldn’t do these things the first time I was setting up my iPhone. I got used to not having them, but always missed them.
And a few things that I’ll miss from my iPhone…
- Camera – Oh man the camera on this thing is bad. Check out my Flickr for examples. I used to use instagram style filters for fun. Now I do it to try and compensate for the awful photo quality. The Galaxy S3 doesn’t seem to do much better.
- Sound Quality – To be fair, I’m not sure if it’s the phones fault or if Spotify just didn’t optimize the app like they did for iOS. But sometimes the music sounds really muddled. I tend to notice this the most in my husband’s truck which has an aftermarket stereo. So maybe it’s only on nicer sound equipment.
- Battery Life – I’m going to have to buy a portable battery pack. There’s just no way around it. This doesn’t seem to be an issue on the S3.
- Screen Resolution – After the super-sharp text on the iPhone 4S, the Nexus screen just doesn’t have as vivid a screen. Its not bad, just not great.
- Accessories – I have two nice iPod/iPhone docks. They’re still usable with an aux jack, but the plugin and listen/charge is gone.