Caffeine Coder

It’s been 18 months since I decided to jump on the Android bandwagon and bought myself a G1.  during the past 18 months the phone has served me very well indeed and has certainly changed the way I interact with people and the Internet.  I’ve started using a lot of the google tools, for obvious reasons, and for the most part they are proving extremely useful.  So the G1 and Android made a big impact.

So, now my contract has ended, what do I do?  Do I fall in line with a lot of the people I know and stick with Android because everyone hates Apple, and we all know they are evil money grabbing businessmen?  Nope!  I decided the next 18 months will be spent with an iPhone and then I can make a more educated decision as to which platform I prefer.

So far the experience has been good, not excellent and certainly not trouble free, but pretty good.

First impressions were of the build quality of the iPhone, it really does feel like quality manufacturing and it’s understated minimalist look works for me.  the screen on the phone is bigger than the G1 although it is standard size for most phones these days, if not a little smaller than some of the newer phones.  The touch surface responds brilliantly and i find only the very lightest of pressure is required for the gestures to take effect.  So first impressions of the device itself are very good indeed.

The OS is very polished, there’s plenty of  animation to add interest and it works well with smooth transitions.  there’s very little by way of customisation here though in comparison to the Android platform, i have found this less of a bind than I thought I would but still the Android platform is certainly more flexible as far as customisation goes.  That said, the iPhone OS does look good and once I got used to it i found it attractive and useful enough.

The lack of widgets hit me at first, having the weather to hand as well as my task-list and calendar on the screen as soon as the phone was unlocked was a real boon, with the iPhone, I’ve no choice but to open several apps to get the info I could get at a single glance before.  It’s not impossible to live with but it certainly is a step back.  i guess you could argue that the battery life is better and this could be down to fewer background tasks but it’s difficult to make that comparison based on two very different devices.

There certainly are plenty of apps available in the iPhone App store and having a windows based app available for browsing the store, purchasing the apps and then syncing them to your phone is pretty handy i have to admit.  App management is excellent and being able to add or remove apps from your phone whilst having all the apps you own in one place within iTunes, installed or not, is excellent as you don’t have to go hunting for the apps in the store.  you kinda get  this with Android but it is awkward and had to be done on the device.  I know few people who have taken a new device and use the same google details to know whether the new device can see and download previously purchased apps.  But I am sure that app management is far better in the iPhone store thanks to iTunes.

However, iTunes is not the saviour here by a long shot.  Backing up and syncing your phone is very straightforward and most useful.  Managing your music collection is far less useful and for me iTunes does get in the way far to often.  Despite very careful tagging and cataloguing of my music collection, iTunes pretty much ignored what I’d done and did it’s own thing, which most definitely was not what I wanted, or expected.

I have now managed to bully iTunes into reading most of the tag info I had painstakingly put  into all my music files, and here’s a tip for you: If iTunes is not using all the tag info you think it should be using, select all of your tracks in the iTunes library list view, right click and select ‘Get Info’.  You may get an initial dialog asking if you are sure you want to edit info for multiple items, OK this, now when the next dialog pops up DO NOT enter any information simply click OK to close the dialog.  iTunes will then go away and read every file you selected and magically loads in all the tag information it finds.  I did this today and now I have albums correctly formed and art in place where before iTunes ignored the album art and decided to split albums up.

So, my journey with my iPhone has only just begun and there are mixed feelings, I miss multi-tasking; I can’t listen to Last.fm and check my email on the phone anymore.  I miss the ability to get a huge hit of info off the phone in seconds; I now have to open several apps to get the same info I could see all at once on my screen before.
Application management is better, Apps seem to be more polished too, which will be the topic of another post I will write shortly.  The iPhone looks good, has a decent OS and seems very fast and stable so, overall I’m happy.

Hopefully apple will improve the OS and iTunes so that some of the negative points above go away, but one thing is certain, Android most certainly holds it’s own against the iPhone OS and the new handsets like the Nexus 1 and the HTC Desire are really going to help improve things.

Whatever your political views and preferences you will not struggle to find a powerful smart-phone and that’s a good thing.