Saying hello to iPhone; the sorry tale of an Android refugee

January 14, 2011

When the first Android handsets started to appear in the UK, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on one. The iPhone, with all its restrictions and Jobsian control-freakery just wasn’t for me. I wanted something much cooler, more open. I wanted something made by Google.

Having been an Android user for 10 months or so, I’ve decided to call it a day; quit; move on.

Here’s why:

As many carrier-provided Android users have found out, their handsets are hamstrung by a combination of carrier-provided ROM, woefully small internal memory and the inability to delete stuff you don’t want.

The first problem I had was with the apps, thoughtfully loaded on to the phone for me by my carrier, Orange.  Facebook, I concede, might be useful to one or two people, but not to me; in addition, there were demo versions of Monopoly and Uno. Seriously. Orange also thought it would be fun to to provide their own browser and own maps application, too. Quite what makes them think their branded apps would be better than the stock Android versions, is anyone’s guess. The thing is, I didn’t ask for, want or need any of these things, but because they’re burned into the ROM, I was unable to delete them. Imagine buying a PC with demo versions of software installed on it and you weren’t allowed to delete them. So much for open.

Although I could (and did) download alternative browsers, keyboards, SMS app from the Android Marketplace, I soon found I’d run out of space on my 4gb phone.  Of course, it’s not a 4gb phone, it’s actually a 148mb phone stuffed with bloatware I don’t need and can’t delete which happens to have a 4gb SD card installed in it. Even with the modest number of apps I’d installed, I was forever seeing the low-storage warning, clearing down temp files and generally having to babysit a phone!

Oh, and here’s a fun feature for a handset: when the internal storage does fall too low, it rejects SMS messages and for added hilarity, it doesn’t even display the phone number of the sender so you know who to get back to; it just refuses the message.

Then there was the Calendar app, which would frequently crash back to the home screen when I tried to scroll through my agenda  or do something out of the ordinary, like create a new appointment.

There were problems with GPS signal acquisition too, which, even outside, could take up to 15 minutes; 3g signal acquisition wasn’t much better and always seemed to be balanced on a knife-edge.  There were the random lock-ups, shutdowns and reboots. The camera app would helpfully Force Close when I hit the shutter button, and occasionally leave the LED flash lit up until I power-cycled the phone.

This was all before 2.2  had been released, so I was prepared to wait it out on the promise that Froyo provided the ability to move and install apps to the SD card, and offered all manner of stability and performance improvements.  The Orange-supplied version of Froyo did make the phone more stable – the shutdowns and reboots were much reduced (but not eliminated) – but the GPS and 3G problems persisted and it turns out not all many apps can be moved to the SD card so I still couldn’t move the preinstalled bloatware off the phone.

After further reading, I installed the Cyanogen Mod, which combined with App2SD, offered the ability to move any app to the SD card. The installation was remarkably straightforward and without a doubt, CM is vastly better than any ROM supplied by Orange. The phone was more stable still than the Orange Froyo and the screen much more responsive (pro tip: if you’ve bought an Android handset, then I’d recommend the first thing you do is wipe whatever your carrier has landed you with and install CM instead).

Good as CM is, though, it’s still over-encumbered with crap like Facebook, an FM radio and a default Twitter client, which wouldn’t be so bad, but because they’re deemed to be system files, still can’t be moved to the SD card. Once again, I was reduced to deleting the apps I wanted to run, while apps I don’t need are taking up valuable system space. Yet more further reading revealed that you can bake your own ROM, and remove the components you don’t want, but at that point, I thought, “Screw it; this is just too much work for a phone”. And I jumped into walled garden of the iPhone.

Sure, the notifications aren’t as good as Android; it’s not as customisable as Android, but all 16gb of storage is available for me to use how I want; there are no apps installed that I haven’t chose myself; there’s no lag on the camera; the calendar app actually lets me make appointments; calls are clearer; 3g signal appears to be stronger and the GPS works… indoors!

To me, the iPhone vs. Android argument isn’t about open vs. closed any more, it’s about what works and for me, the iPhone is what works.

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Playing iPlayer Content on Your iPad

September 20, 2010

Apple’s prohibition of Flash on their i-Devices is well-known and equally well documented. Using Safari on the iPad can be more than a little frustrating when you have vast swathes of  video and games on the internet consigned to the Schminternet with messages like this:

All may not be lost.

I’ve got an iPod dock hooked up via the Apple component cable to an amp in my lounge so that I can play video back through my surround speakers and on the screen hanging on the wall. Since the connector for the component cable fits the iPad as well, I can play video back from that device, too.

The other day, I was charging the iPad using the component cable, looked up a video on YouTube and as it played back on my big screen, I started wondering what else would work and my first port of call was BBC’s iPlayer. What I found is that while the site itself shows up in Safari as normal, the video portion plays quite happily on my big screen!

In the photo above, you can see I’ve got the iPad plugged in via the component cable, and an episode of Top Gear is on the screen…! Actually, that might have been far more effective if I’d put up a video clip instead.

Convinced this was nothing new, I Googled around but couldn’t find any “Hey, guess what?” posts describing the same behaviour, so perhaps I’ve stumbled into a minor victory that will allow content from other Flash-based sites to be watched via the iPad, and it’ll only cost you the price of Apple’s component cable!

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Google updates Buzz UI. A little.

June 18, 2010

I’m not a huge fan of Google Buzz – that’s not to say there isn’t a ton of interesting, amusing and useful content being shared which, like any social network, is down to the people you follow – it’s just that Buzz suffers from the same thing that blights many Google products – UI.

For an organisation that prides itself on the crisp, uncluttered design of it’s homepage, the rest of Google’s offerings look almost thrown together. Buzz is no exception; compared to Friendfeed or Amplify, Buzz looks raw and unstructured, and I find myself shying away from using it because it’s not easy to look at.

Today, I noticed a little bit of a change – multiple items shared by the same person used to be stacked, slighty askew, on top of each other like a deck of cards; now they’re simply listed underneath the most recent item in the batch:

It’s a small change, but anything that tidies the presentation up and makes the feed easier to scan is a step in the right direction.

Am I being overly critical?  Does Google have a long way to go in the “beautiful software” race, or does function beat form every time? Let me know in the comments!

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