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So Android and iOS are the top smartphone OS’s, at least outside of the business realm. Plus I use both every day. So here is my list of what I don’t like about both… AKA, things that bug me on a daily basis…

1) iOS settings. I hate that iOS puts individual app settings in the main iOS settings app. For example, I changed my gmail password the other day, and then I fired up mail on my ipad, and it gave me a password error… but instead of just changing my settings right there in the mail app, I have to close it, and open settings.. and scroll to mail, and find my gmail account….

2) Uninstalling apps on Android. I like that iOS just lets you click hold and kill and app. Easy. Android, I have to go into market and then to downloads, and then uninstall.

3) I wish the Apple App Store showed “purchased” on apps that I have purchased. I bought Beejive IM on my iPod last year.. and I went to install it on my iPad.. and now there is an HD version as well.. is this the same app? Do I just need to get the iPod version? the app is $10, so not a mistake I want to make… its silly that AFTER you click install it tells you that you already bought it.

4) iOS does nothing with that HUGE amount of screen real estate on the iPad lock screen.

5) The Android SDK is still kind of lame. Sure, Java is nice to program in, but installing and configuring the SDK isn’t always easy… and for the life of me I still can’t get my windows 7 box to see my Moto Droid phone.

6) The iPhone SDK is easy to setup, and easy to use. But WHY are we stuck with Obj-C?? Its not much better than plain old C… meaning we have to deal with header files, and all that. Don’t get me wrong, C++ is still my fav all around utility language and its very powerful. But totally wrong for high level phone apps.

7) Why can’t you position icons anywhere in iOS? Android lets you move things where you want… why can;t I do that on my iWhatever?

Android needs something like iTunes. Syncing media or podcasting is so lame on Android. Also, iTunes lets you backup and restore your device, and lay out your icons, etc. This is great. DoubleTwist is a start, but its super slow and not full featured yet.

9) Podcasting on Android is lame. I have a lot of podcasts I listen to, and iTunes/iPod handles this so well. I have yet to find anything for Android to come close, so I always have my iPod/iPad around to listen to them. Google needs to develop something, or port Zune to Android or something.

10) iOS notifications are looking dated. I like how Android handles this much better.

These days many of us are getting a lot of music content via streaming. Pandora and the like are great for almost all situations. However, I also subscribe to Rhapsody for a couple of reasons:

- Sometimes I really want to listen to a specific song. Maybe I heard it on a commercial or from a movie or something. Or just in the mood for music from one particular artist. Pandora doesn’t give you this level of control. You could buy the song from iTunes or Amazon. But half the time I have songs I really like for a short period of time, and then sort of move on.

- There are still cases where you can’t stream. Even with near ubiquitous 3G, and lots of WiFi hot spots. On a plane for example, or at some ski areas here, there is no cell service. Or camping, backpacking, etc. Also, I don’t mind my iPod getting a bit beat up if im biking, or whatever. Or running down the batt with music. I’m much more careful of my phone, so that limits my use as my iPod only has WiFi.

So I have rhapsody as it solves both problems, sort of. I can listen to whatever I want on my computer or ipod or ipad, streaming. Or I can fill certain devices with offline downloads. So I have a little cheap MP3 player for that situation. Not the best solution.

Enter the new Rhapsody mobile apps. You can DOWNLOAD to your device now, over the air. No plug in syncing. Just select whatever paylist(s) you want and hit download. Boom, offline listening! This is so great. I can load up my iPad with whatever music I feel like that day and can listen on a flight or wherever without having to find WiFi.

The apps are free, and you just need a $10 a month subscription (for 1 device) or $15 a month (for 3 devices). Doing the math, if I bought 15 $1 songs each month, I would need about 40 months to buy just what I have on my iPad right now. Thats almost 4 years. I think its  pretty good deal.

The only bummer is the Android app doesn’t support this yet, just the iDevice apps.

This video posted via TechCrunch, kinda makes qwerty look archaic.  This technology is coming out for the Omnia II (which is a winmo phone) and is supposed to later come out for an unnamed android phone.  When it does, iPhone could have trouble.

[via http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/23/swype-iphone-leaked-video-android/]

Those of you with Android (and particularly Moto Droid) should really check out Handcent SMS. Since Android lets any app hook system events (like sms receive) you can simple turn off notifications in the built-in SMS app and use Handcent instead.

There are several very nice improvements over the default:

- Skins. You can use an iPhone skin to get that iChat sms feel.

- Popup notification. If you choose, you can have an iPhone like popup when you get an SMS. However, unlike the iPhone, the popup window lets you do a quick response back without even opening the SMS app.

- Voice to Text!!!! This is awesome. Jsut hit Menu -> Voice when in an sms thread and the standard Google Voice box pops up, just speak your message and bam, the text is put in a message for you. This is killer because its way faster than using and on-screen or physical keyboard. And when you are driving, much safer

- Widget that launches SMS on click, and displays unread msg number.

All this and the app is free!

I’ve had my Moto Droid since friday afternoon, so I thought it was about time to get some thoughts posted. Overall I love the phone, its by far the best Android device out there, and maybe the best smartphone of them all.

First, I’ll talk about the phone, and then (of course) the obligatory comparison to Apples phone.

I moved to Droid from T-Mobile’s MyTouch 3g, so I was already very familiar with Android and its pros and cons. Droid comes with Android 2.0, and there are a lot of great new features. The look and feel are a bit different, and things are smoother overall. A couple of highlights:

– Contacts now sync with Facebook, this was pretty cool. Any contact that it could find in my Facebook account would be linked, and their facebook photo is set as their contact photo. Also, anytime I do anything with a linked contact, like open an SMS thread, etc, their FB status is displayed by their pic.

– New contact pop-up short cuts. In you are looking at your contact list and click a contacts photo, a little slider pops up with shortcuts to FB, SMS, Email, etc.

– New “Corporate Calendar” that finally lets you sync your Exchange calendar to the device. This is so great, totally needed as well.

– You can now have MULTIPLE ActiveSync accounts in a unified inbox!

On to the hardware. Droid isn’t going to win any beauty contests, and if an iPhone was a Ferrari, this would be a Ford F-150. Functional and not ugly, but very boxy. This boxiness makes the phone look bigger than it is. In fact it’s almost exactly the size of an iphone, and only slightly longer than my MyTouch 3G. Its a heavy phone and feels very solid. Most of the phone is glass and metal, so that is nice. The gold accents I could do without, I think silver would have been better. But its not horrid.

The camera is very good, and the flash works well. Video recording is pretty amazing and the playback looks awesome.

That awesomeness can be directly attributed to the totally gorgeous screen. It really is jaw dropping. Everything from icons to text look smooth and perfectly rendered. Photos look great, and given the pixel count, viewing large webpages is much better than any other phone I’ve used.

Battery life seems to be pretty good as well. Not quite as good as the MyTouch, but better than the 3GS. I have Bluetooth and GPS on all the time, as well as syncing facebook, gmail, exchange. Today I sent 75+ sms messages, ~30min talk time, several emails, took a few pictures, and used the GoogleNav for about 30min. My batt lasted from 930am to just after midnight (and that was the 20% warning). So quite good. Nav uses a lot of batt as the screen is always on, GPS is continuous, and the app is constantly calculating your location and updating a map. I have a car adapter and I think I would always use that when navigating to keep the batt useage at bay.

So lets get to the comparison. Droid has 4 killer features that the iPhone (or Pre) can’t match – Verizon, Google Nav, high res screen, google voice input.

Lets face it, ATT’s network looks like a child with tinker toys built it compared to Verizon. I have consistent 3G coverage literally everywhere, inside, outside, driving, etc. Places that ATT always dropped calls I have no problems keeping a call up. 3G speeds are very fast and always reliable. I no longer live in fear of going from 5 bars to nothing on a random whim (see my previous ATT postings).

GoogleNav is pure awesome. Other nav companies should be very afraid. Directions are very accurate, the on screen display of the route is excellent, and the animations are good. The huge plus is that it links right into google maps, so you can get all sorts of other information along your route. And with traffic, you can know when to tell the system to re-route you. Oh, and every turn can be viewed in street view with the route overlaid. And its free, wow. Granted iPhone may get this as well, so it might not be a killer app for too long.

The screen is amazing. At almost 3 times the resolution, but about the same size as the iphone, it easily wins here. Apple needs to get a hi rez iphone goings soon.

Google voice input is very very handy. Click the icon and say anything, from “navigate to starbucks” or “how much does an african swallow weigh” and google will find it. Using the “navigate” keyword will cause the phone to start GoogleNav and route you to the local. It even worked perfectly with a street address, or something more vague like “Navigate to Old Chicago Restaurant”. Oh, and you can do voice activated dialing of course. The only thing I can think of that should be done is to add voice to text to email or sms text inputs so you could speak and then send.

Of course there are some problems too. IPhone still has the better on screen keyboard, although Droid’s is better than previous android phones.

The quality of the apps are no up to the same par as Apple (yet). I think given the number of new android phones coming to market this will change, but so far its just not as good.

The IM apps for Android aren’t quite as pretty as iPhone, there is still nothing asl slick as Bejive.

The other features of Android that I find better than iPhone are the same as before… so my previous postings still hold true.

So, I am very happy with this phone. Verizon is just so nice, and given the screen res and google nav, I can’t see how I could go to an iPhone every again. iPhone wins on music/itunes, and a more consistent (but simpler) OS flow. But Droid seems like a real phone to accomplish things – nav, lots of email accounts, great sms, etc. The iPhone feels like a game box with a “phone” built in. This is a huge step for Android, and Verizon.

So I got another iPhone 3GS about a week and a half ago, now that the jailbreak for 3.1 is out, and supposedly ATT has fixed their signal issues around Denver. I ported my number over from my current T-Mobile/Android phone and decided to give the phone a thorough trial.

First of all, the phone is about 1000% better jailbroken. You can actually do novel things like load apps not blessed my Apple and have a background image behind your app icons (wow!), along with nifty things like add a calendar, unread email list, etc, to the lock screen. I found that very useful. Also, there is a nice Cydia app that will display notification icons on the top bar for email, txt, etc. This was nice. Given that you can have your SMS and email icons on any page, I liked to be able to see if I had a message without having to unlock the phone and find the correct icon.

Next, the backgrounder app is awesome. I could do things like keep pandora running and use another app on my phone…. kinda like Android lets you do right out of the box.

Notifications are new to the 3.0 OS, and they are nice as well. Bejive IM is excellent, better than the built-in Android IM apps. Also, since there is no push Gmail (unless you use your 1 and only ActiveSync account), there is a push notification app that alerts you to a new mail. Gmail is not quite as good as Android, but thats not unexpected as Android is Google after all. But Exchange support is much better on iPhone.

So at this point, I was pretty happy with the phone, the apps, how things were set up, etc. But then ATT came in and killed it for me.

ATT claimed they added new towers all over the Denver area and added 850MHz G service as well. I did notice that the service was much better than previously when I have testing out iPhones. But there were some interesting issues…

1) Service degraded quickly inside. I would have full 3G in the parking lot of my gym and walk inside and go to no service within 10-15 feet of the door. I had no service in my parking garage (Verizon has half 3G signal and TMO has 3/4 bars of Edge). Also, in the elevator in my building I had no service, again VZ and TMO both had signal.

2) Data service was reliable, but voice was not. With little exceptions, if I had any bars, I could get data services, txts, web, IM, etc. 3G speeds seemed fast, web pages loaded quickly. But I could have full bars of 3G and drop a call multiple times. And when I did have a call that stayed up half the time myself or the other person couldn’t understand each other. I must have said “wait, what?” 50 time a day. I find it ridiculous that a service can’t keep calls up, after all its a PHONE.

There are several routes a drive almost daily between the office, home, gym, etc. One is a major freeway between Denver and Boulder, and the others are surface roads around town. This morning, I was on a work call and I dropped the call 3 times on the freeway, another time in the middle of Boulder, and a final time near my office. This was annoying at best when talking to a friend, stupid when trying to keep a work convo going, and downright insane when trying to talk to a service like your bank or any other place where you call in, get in a queue and press 8 different numbers to get to the right place… only to be disconnected and having to do it all over again.

And the prize for dealing with this? $120 a month plan fee…. 900 minutes, “A-List”, unlimited data and unlimited SMS. It is unfortunate that you have to go to the 900 min or more plans to get A-List. I dont need 900 minutes, ever, especially with Google Voice. Compare this to my TMO account, 300 minutes, unlimited data/SMS, MyFavs.. for $70 a month.

3) Battery life. Maybe jailbreaking and adding some not so official apps hurts you here.. but I found the batt life on the 3GS to be disappointing. Today I unplugged my phone and left for work at 8am. I had a 10minute phone call over BlueTooth on the way to the office, checked some emails a few times, sent 5-6 SMS, and had a few IM convos. Oh and I played Oregon Trail for about 10min during a boring phone conf. And my batt was down to 18% by 2:30.

I never had batt issues with Android, I could go at least all day and all evening with much more activity than that.

So, in the end, I’m back on Android. I really want to like the iPhone, but its impossible for me to deal with the issues ATT has, and the iffy battery life.

Anyone out there heard about the new Zune HD? You might hear about it a lot more soon. I wrote about this a while back when there was less info, just an announcement really. But now we have videos and reviews. I have to say it looks impressive so far. And finally something that LOOKS just as good as an Apple product too.

The screen looks great, and this has the new nvidia tegra chipset, so the graphics should be excellent.

Sure it plays music, has an HD radio tuner, video, and all that… but I secretly hope this is just the beginning of the Zune take over of the world. I’m serious. What if they added a UMTS modem? Instant cell phone…. And the Zune OS looks a whole heck of a lot better than the upcoming release of WinMobile…

Ok, and here is the other killer things for Zune (phone or otherwise). Apps. Lets look at programming on Apple vs Microsoft platforms. (For the sake of this exercise, I’m ignoring shell scripts or C++ command line app, etc). For GUI programming and GUI apps you have XCode vs .NET.. and then you have Java on both sides. But Java GUIs are worse than other of the other options, so we can ignore that too. I’ve coded on both sides and I have to say .NET is the easiest development system I’ve ever used, by far. VisualStudio is epic for debugging and development.

So.. Zune goes all app store on us… and you get to use .NET mobile to develop the apps. This would explode overnight. EVERYONE knows C# or VB… but to break into the Apple app store you have to figure out XCode’s development methodology and Obj-C. That sucks. No one uses Obj-C except Apple and I really just don’t like it.

This would be better than Android as well. I’m a big fan of Google and what they are doing with Android, but the SDK is still a bit rough, and the GUI design is no were near as good as what a Microsoft tool would bring.

And the HD has an nvidia chip set. What if we got some mobile version of DirectX? Think about the gaming potential of that too?

So that is my wild dream.. a Zune Phone with a .NET dev tool and an app store… Do it MS… DO IT.

It seems like there is starting to me an uprising in Steve Jobs land. Specifically against the ATT/Apple iPhone situation. More specifically the crazy, illogical way apps can be accepted or rejected, and the sort of closed mindedness that seems to be affecting developers and users. Here are a couple of interesting articles:

Techcrunch

Steve Frank

And now the FCC is asking questions about the Apple rejection of all Google Voice related app. Interesting.

All I know is I’m happy enough with my Android phone and the ability to have a pretty open platform. And I always have my iPod Touch if I really want to try out some of the cooler apps…

I got a Google Voice invite a few weeks ago, and since I’m also sporting an Android phone I thought this might be interesting.

In a nutshell, you get a Google phone number (I even got a local number) and you can configure the service to interact with all your other numbers – cell, home, work, etc. You can set which phone(s) ring in what order, and on Android installing Voice gives you to option to make a call from the handset from either your carrier’s number or your Google number. But here’s the issue, if you can’t port your main number, you have to go through the pain of changing your number, which is no fun at all. Google says you may be able to port over a number later on. For now, I’m not going to give out my Google number.

But here is the awesome part of Voice even if you don’t use it as a primary number – the voicemail is outstanding. I am now using it for my primary VM instead of T-Mobile. Here is how I set it up, and why its great:

1) I change my Android options to point my phone at my Google Voice number as my “voicemail” number instead of the T-Mobile default. This means that if I dont pick up my cell phone the call is sent to my GV number.

2). Set Google Voice to not forward to any numbers, and set it to go directly to voicemail when the Google number rings.

At this point if I don’t answer my cell, it forwards to google and straight to voicemail. So the caller can’t tell the different.

Now, GV has some great options to set for voice mail. It will transcribe your messages and txt or email them to you! Its not perfect, but over the few dozen messages I’d gotten so far, its close enough to know what the caller really said.

I setup GV to txt my cell when I get a VM. This is KILLER if you are in a meeting or a movie or a loud location. I can read my VM on my phone.

Second, the GV Android app will download the VM to my phone along with the transcript in the GV “inbox”. So later on I can go listen and/or read the message again.

Also, I can log into GV from any computer and get all my messages, send txts, even make calls, directly from the web interface.

Its not perfect yet, but so far its pretty amazing.

Good read here.

Apple has made some really odd choices with regard to apps and such. I don’t get it.

Latitude is kind of a cool option for maps. It’s most useful if you are out on the town and you can see where are your “peeps” are at. Well provided they are all on an Android device. The reason why Latitude is pointless on iPhone is that it can’t run in the background, so unless all your friends are walking around with their iPhones locked in map mode, you wont get any updates.

At least with Android I can run it in the background if I want/need to.