Massive Damage

So after my last post, I ended up going for the iPhone 4. I think a few of my Android-loving friends are a little disappointed with me for “selling out” so to speak, but seeing how I’m already a Mac user, it seemed like a good fit. For today’s post, I thought I would give a rundown of the various ways that this phone is superior to my last one (the HTC Hero), and then I gave a couple of things that I miss about my old Android.

Things that I like better:

• Faster speed: Ever since its release, the HTC Hero was definitely a little challenged in the speed department. It wasn’t so bad that it was unusable - far from it, actually. However, every action had that strange laggy feeling to it, and while that feeling didn’t detract from the overall functionality of the device, it made the device a little less pleasant to use. After using the iPhone 4 for a few days, I think I would be very hard-pressed to go back to the Hero, and the speed factor is one of my two big reasons. Having a phone that is a speed demon is certainly a nice change of pace. While we’re talking about speed, the browser is one huge place where the iPhone 4 pretty much leaves the Hero in the dust. With the Hero, I tried to limit my browsing to mobile sites (i.e. sites with mobile interfaces as opposed to regular interfaces), but now I feel comfortable surfing wherever I please.
• Beautiful Screen: Everybody kept talking about the Retina Display, but it’s one of those things that I definitely had to see to believe, and now I’m a believer. This is the other feature that makes the prospect of returning to the Hero an impossibility.
• Much better camera: As sad it is may sound, I have actually never owned a digital camera in my life. Whenever I found myself in need of a camera, I usually borrowed one from a friend or family member. When I look at it from that perspective, the iPhone 4 is almost like two devices to me - it’s a new phone, and it’s also my first digital camera. While the Hero and the BlackBerry Pearl before it both had cameras, neither of them were good enough to use unless I was extremely desperate to take a picture in that particular moment. Based on the few test pictures I took with the iPhone 4, I can see myself using the camera feature of my phone much more often now.
• Apps and Games: I always thought that Android had a bad reputation from an application perspective. I got my Hero back in December of last year, and even back then, I felt like the OS had a pretty decent selection of apps. It was certainly inferior to the iPhone’s App Store (and it still is), but even in 2009, you could definitely live comfortably with your Android phone and the apps that were available. That said, the iPhone 4 speaks to my productivity obsession a little more clearly than my Hero did. I can now use Things to plan for my day, and Awesome Note to categorize various mental notes that I feel the need to jot down during the day. On Android, I definitely loved ColorNote quite a bit (and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to all Android users), but Awesome Note just has that level of polish that takes it the extra mile. The same can be said for many of the games as well (though I never played many games on the Hero, which brings me back to the first bullet point).

And here are a couple of the things that I miss:

• Harder to share links via Twitter: As somebody who likes to think of himself as a writer, I use Twitter as a repository for interesting articles that I may want to talk about in my blog posts. On the Hero, it was extremely easy to share links via Twitter, and it was universal across all applications. You just hit the menu button, went to “Share”, went to the Twitter application of your choosing, and you were done. With the iPhone 4, the process is a little more time-consuming (it often involves copying and pasting), and if you want to share an article that you stumble across in a news application, you just have to hope that particular application supports Twitter sharing. It undoubtedly feels like a step back. I know that Apple doesn’t like the idea of apps embedding functionality into other apps (they would rather every app be a closed system), but this is one place where it would help quite a bit.
• Widgets/Home Screen: Sometimes you never know what you have until it’s gone. While it’s easy enough to access your information without using a widget, it makes a lot more sense for your phone to have the most important information right in front of you from the moment you turn it on. Give me the information I need right away, and if there’s something else that I need, then I can begin traversing through a series of icons. Considering that Apple is one of the companies that popularized the concept of a widget (I said “one of the” because there is a long debate on this subject that I do not care to indulge), I was expecting them to show a little more initiative in this department.

So there you have it. Overall, I’m definitely loving this phone, and I can see it becoming a huge part of my overall workflow. That said, Android does have its share of advantages, and I think that at this stage in time, we can’t think of one OS as being superior to the other. They both have their own strengths, and regardless of which one you end up going for, you’re a winner.

So long as your phone has a decent processor inside.