I sit here at 00:28 at night, unable to sleep, thinking about what could make my running mind slow down. My final decision was to write about something to do with my life that has some relevance to technology. Then I realised something quite important had happened to me over the past month and a half or so, I’ve been using an iPhone 4, taking in the experience of iOS to it’s fullest. Previous to this I had decided I preferred Android based on my experiences with an iPod Touch before hand and using my friends’ iDevices of the present. I realised this was a poor basis on which to base the iOS platform on... a five year old iPod Touch.
About a month and a half ago on a freezing cold night in the middle of Sheffield city, walking down a road returning from a house party, I stopped to ring a taxi. As I stopped, I realised I had wandered from those I was going home with, turned to call them and my Nexus 4 was knocked from my hand by my girlfriend. I watched the incident in slow motion as my favourite phone I’d ever owned and used slowly fell to the ground inevitably going to be picked up with at least some serious and permanent external scratches. I watched as it landed, what I thought to be, on it’s back. However, to my dismay as I picked up the device, I could tell there was something wrong when I looked into the bottom left hand corner and there was a large chip of glass removed from the front. I prayed that this was the worst of the damage and that my phone would still be in usable shape. However, as I hit the wake/lock button and the phone took a second longer than usual to unlock, I knew things would never be the same. I attempted to unlock the screen only to realise that my phone no longer responded to my touch. I couldn’t unlock the phone, pull down the notification bar or anything. Annoyingly, I could see as my phone tried to ring my but I could not answer. Deep down I grew angry, but in my slightly tipsy and possibly ignorant state, I returned the phone to my pocket and concentrated on trying to get everybody home using someone else’s phone. When I returned home, I attempted to turn the phone off and on again, stupidly hoping that the old technique would somehow forge the glass back together with some sort of ancient magical furnace. However, upon awakening, the phone still did not respond. Sitting in my bed, holding my phone like I was holding a corpse, I told myself that if I turned it off and charged it and then turned it back on in the morning, it would be fixed despite the major external, and obviously partly internal damage, I had inflicted upon the screen.
A month on and I have been using an iPhone 4 running iOS7 for what feels like longer than a month. Now let me get the important details out of the way first. iOS7 was not built for the iPhone 4, therefore the phone does not run very fast and rather on the laggy side. This also means I am four years behind in terms of power and speed. I will purely be basing this analysis on the look, design and feel of iOS.
I will begin by stating what I admire about iPhones and was I dislike about iPhones. I have the admiration of what is really quite an intelligent, powerful and smooth platform. If you were to ask me why I would transfer to an iPhone, I would tell you purely to have a phone that felt like whatever you did on it, you’d get a moderate to brilliant experience on it. I believe many people would agree with me when I say this; it’s a phone that you can rest assure will be able to take brilliant pictures, will run applications smoothly, that will have relatively decent audio, that will back up your data securely, that will show your notifications promptly, efficiently and many other things. It’s a phone that I believe does everything well, but nothing superbly well (excluding possibly the camera in the iPhone 5S). Why I believe people buy iPhones is for two simple reason: all their friends have one and they want to be able to do what all their friends can do like iMessage etc; they are told that it is the simplest platform to learn by sellers.
Another positive with the iOS platform more is the incredible choice of applications. I’ve lost count of the number of developers I’ve tweeted requesting an iOS app to be brought over to the Google Play Store natively. A few example of some applications that I would miss will be: Day One, Heyday, Squawka, Pic Stitch and others. Yes, there may be replacements on the Android store that do an equivalent job, but the layout, detail or beautification of these applications makes me wish that the developers would consider bringing the same design ethics, details and ideas over to the Android platform.
I commend Apple for creating an incredible desirable phone in both the looks department and the popularity department. But if you look further into iOS and the comparison between iOS and Android, you begin to see why some people have converted. I dislike the fact that iOS is so strict. That is something that I can guarantee anyone who you speak to with a little knowledge about phones would say. It’s true though. The disappointment with iOS is that you can merely move your icons around. That to me, really is quite a boring concept. I miss being able to add widgets, resize widgets, have moving wallpapers, change the colour of my icons, try out a new launcher to make my phone feel brand new and so much more. These are things that begin to make you realise that iOS just doesn’t have the power or personality that Android does. If you picked up a random iPhone, you wouldn’t be able to tell it apart from another phone except maybe for a person wallpaper and icon layout. On Android you’d be able to tell if the person was a minimalist, loved widgets, loved to be able to see all their apps straight away, preferred art, preferred news, preferred large widgets or small widgets… all sorts of little things like this can be seen just by scrolling through someone’s home screens on Android.
The iPhone had been the same size for around 5 years with the iPhone to the iPhone 4s. Then the iPhone 5 came along with a 4” screen which still made it smaller than every flagship Android phone coming out at the time. Now the 4” screen might be a nice size to hold one-handed. But if that’s the only positive to having a screen that small then you can keep the smaller screens. I miss being able to read whole web pages; being able to show people pictures and them not having to lean in and squint their eyes about 5” from the screen to see it; being able to see movies and videos on Facebook and tell what’s going on; being able to pull the phone out of my pocket and not have to pull it right up to face to see a text or Snapchat. A larger screen may mean the phone is heavier, harder to hold in one hand or less comfortable in your pocket; but they are things you forget even existed once you made the swap; whereas the differences of a smaller screen make you miss the advantages of a big screen. Don’t get me wrong, I love being able to hold the phone in one hand and operate it that way, but I don’t love it enough for the large screen compromises.
The final factor I prefer with Android is the Google applications. Due to having been in the Android eco-system for around 4 years now, I’ve been rained on and truly drenched by the cloud of Google. I use Gmail, Google+, Chrome, Google Calendar, YouTube, Google Play account, Maps and so many more Google applications. Now don’t get me wrong, I can get my fix on iOS, but the applications are so much slower and feel so less well done than the Android equivalents. The Google applications just seem to all work on Android as they all synchronise across with each other on your one Google account. Another application that I missed using and having was Google Now. Now (see what I did there), I am not going to tell you a lie and say I rely on it like some people do; however, I do check the weather, ask it plenty of questions and especially use the ability to almost instantly search and pull up result on it. iOS does have a Google Search application that does a similar thing but it doesn’t feel as good at all an just doesn’t satisfy the needs I have of quickly searching the web.
In summary, I have enjoyed using an iPhone for the past month or so and it’s been an experienced that’s really helped me understand what people admire about the phone and what the appeal is to people. However, what i think sums up my final decision on whether I’ll be upgrading to an iPhone 5S or the latest and greatest Android device was when I realised I was bored of iOS already. I’ve used Android for over 4 years on 3 different phones and not once have I felt like I was using the same device and not once did I feel bored as I had the ability to alter the look, launcher, layout and many other things simply by dipping into the Google Play Store. With iOS, you can move the apps around, change the wallpaper and umm… that’s literally it. I’m looking forward to the larger screen, the Android design and the ability to alter my phone a lot when I upgrade in a couple of months time. However, I’ll miss iMessage, Day One and the design of some of the iOS applications a lot also. I won’t mind being in the iPhone prison for another month or so, but I’ll be glad to get back to my Google playground.
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