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.

- 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.

However, the last few weeks I have been trying to solve a technology problem and an coming to realize the iPad just might fit the bill. I switched companies a couple weeks ago and the IT setup is very different. My old company had an external WiFi network that was outside the corporate LAN, and streaming, video watching, etc, was fine. So, I took my laptop to my office and had access to Pandora, Rhapsody, Hulu, etc. My new company’s IT policy is much more strict and prohibits streaming via the company network and there is no public WiFi.

Like most people I need to be entertained while I write code, so I have been trying to come up with a better solution. Aside from streaming music, I listen to podcasts. So I have been using Pandora/Rhapsody on my Android and then have my iPod for podcasts and other media that I own. But this isn’t all that great… I dont like running music on my phone all day as it seriously hurts the battery, and I’m still using 2 devices.

Side note on why 2 devices – lets face it, iTunes is still king of media programs. The podcasting setup is great… and movie purchase/rental is nice as well. The Zune desktop app comes close, but Zune isn’t an option for my current situation as there is no 3G (yet). And Android podcasting is pretty basic.. with no good desktop app for syncing.

So, I went the netbook route and looked at 3G cards. ATT and VZ offer a 5GB/mo plan for $60, with hefty fees if you go over. Cricket offers a no contract “unlimited” plan for $40 a month. Unlimited in that you can go over 5GB, but they will throttle your bandwidth.

With a 2 year contract I can get a netbook from either ATT or VZ for $50-$200 depending on specs. This works out to be (60*24)+200 = $1640 for the two years. Cricket would be less per month, but you have to buy a netbook at full price, so its about a wash.

The problem is, 5GB wont last long spread over a month with lots of music and some vid use. Plus, the majority of netbooks I tried were just blah. Screens weren’t that nice, etc. There is a Sony with a high res screen that is very nice, but it is about $550 and isn’t carried by ATT or VZ. So that puts you at close to $2000 for a two year contract. Thats a lot just to play pandora…

Enter the iPad. I have all my music and podcasts on one device. I can rent movies, I can play silly games.. and use not so silly apps. The battery should be pretty good… and the web surfing experience will be way better than any phone… and I would bet better than the netbooks (except for the lack of Flash). Add to this the $30 a month true unlimited ATT data plan with *NO* contract! You literally can sign up and cancel service at any time from the iPad itself. No need to go to an ATT store even. This is really.

So, the base 3G model with two years of data comes to (30*24) + 630 = 1350. So not only are we cheaper than a normal netbook (and much cheaper than a good netbook) setup, we aren’t limited to 5GB. Plus, I can turn off the data any month that I dont need it, or want to save some cash.

The bottom line is, while I still think some things about iPad are stupid (no flash, no multitasking), it really does solve my current problem quite well and for less money.

Interesting that most people assumed ATT was bad in some big cities like NYC and SF, but over 26 cities, that really says something. Also note that “voice” was the lowest ranked item for ATT, and data was generally mid-range. This fits what I have seen when using ATT, the data is usually ok, but voice is pathetic, with major call drop issues.

Also note that Verizon ranks #1 for all categories, and was at or near the highest rank possible in most categories. I wonder how bad things would get for ATT if Verizon get an iPhone….

EDIT: see original article.

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.

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.

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…

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.

The bottom line is that the author things open source (or at least totally open app development) will overtake the iPhone in the end. Android is totally open source and there are little restrictions on the app store… and you can load apps without using the app store. The Pre has little restrictions on its app store as well. Nothing like what Apple does.

Plus, like I have said before, the fact that Android lets you do almost anything and access any part of the OS or hook any sort of even are huge. You want a new dialer app? Do it. Want to hook all your incoming SMS and do soemthing funky with them? Sure why not. The iPhone restricts all of this.

And of course multitasking is huge. And with better technology with batteries or display technology (shameless corporate plug: Qualcomm’s mirasol) there are so many possibilities for a true computing phone.

Here was the deal.. I had an iPod Touch that I was using at work and the gym and all that. It was great for listening to music, pandora, and the slingbox app is killer. I have wifi at work, and my gym as free wifi as well, so I was pretty much set. Oh and I bought the Myst game port because thats just awesome. And then I used my Android for calls and email and all.

Well I was thinking, the Touch cost me $220 and I could just get an iPhone 3GS for $199. The plans were about the same cost, and I figured I could sell my G1 on CraigsList and try to cover most of my contract break fee.

So its been about half a day with the new iPhone and I have to say I’m not completely happy. The apps are great, and I have my pandora and Myst and all that. But I think the big surprise for me is how much it feels like the iPhone is sub par on the messaging and communications aspects than Android. Obviously there is no comparison with the quality and variety of the apps on iPhone, but here are the reasons why I think Android wins for Email/IM/Texting.

1) Exchange. My office mail is exchange and Android does not have native support. However, for $25 there is a very nice app (Moxier Mail) that is active sync capable for push and what not. Its just about as pretty as the iPhone mail app too.

2) PUSH gmail. I didnt think about this much until I started not getting gmail on the iPhone as often as my laptop would notify me that a mail was ready. On Android Gmail notification is faster than having Gmail open on your laptop. On the iPhone the only option is polling, and the shortest interval is 15min. And then you have to worry about batt life if you are goign out and polling Gmail that often all day.

3) IM on Android is great. There is a native gChat app and a native IM app that supports AIM, Yahoo, and Windows Live. The iPhone has no native IM app but there are a few in the app store obviously. The real problem is that none of them can run in the background. There is a free app that will keep you connected when you shut down the app on the phone, and it will send you an email notification when you get a message. but here is the problem with that… I can only poll my gmail account every 15min, so that makes for a lousy IM conversation if I have to wait some amount of time between 0 and 15min to get the next msg. I could use my work address and then have the notification pushed to my phone, but then I’m sending tons of mail through my work address all the time. Abnd then when I open up the mail app I might have a bunch of random emails to delete from notifications. That doesnt sound great. Of course when the Apple Notification enabled IM apps are out things should get better as you get a push notify and can just go open the app. Although even in that case, you have to re-open the app, wait for it to launch, and then wait for it to connect and all that. On Android I dont even have to open the chat program to view the message. An icon appears in the notification area, and I can slide the notification tray open and read the message, and if I click it it opens the IM app and I could respond. I like this method a LOT better.

4) Gmail acts in interesting ways on iPhone. When I compose a new message and start typing a name, the phone doesn’t seem to be aware of my Gmail contacts, it does however give me options from my work Exchange account. This seems really weird. Why would I want to send a mail to a work contact from my non-work email account? Shouldnt the mail app know which account I’m composing from? We have about 15000 employees plus many more mailing lists, and each conference room in every office in the world has an email address. When I started typing my friends name, the suggestion window showed a list of conference rooms as the only suggestions. Android on the other hand is aware of my Gmail contacts and when I start typing “Ma” it suggests “Markis”. This is nice. Also, the iPhone mail app does not group Gmail into conversations like the Gmail web app (which is such a nice feature). The Android Gmail app does. My mail looks exactly the same on the web client or the phone app.

5) Widgets. These are new in Android 1.5. I only use a couple, but I found myself missing them quickly. Widgets are little apps that run directly on your home screen and can do things when clicked or just display info. For example on my main home screen I have a calendar widget that displays the next meeting I have upcoming, the time and the location. If I click the widget it launches the calendar. On another screen I have the google widget. It has a box where I can type a search and then a browser window will come up. And finally I have a weather widget. Its small (the size of 2 iPhone app icons in a row) and it just sits on my home screen and shows me the current conditions.

Also, I have widgets that enable/disable WiFi and Bluetooth. This is super nice. When I’m not at work or the gym or home I dont need WiFi enabled and looking for networks. I can click the widget and turn WiFi off. This is a several click procedure on the iPhone. Ditto for Bluetooth.

6) Also, generally the iPhone OS feels more “dead” than Android. In Android notifications pop up, I can move though programs and swtich between things. On the iPhone, I do one thing with one app… hit the home button to close and then go do something else. Android has this concept of application stacks. If I’m working in one app, and I open another for whatever reason, a message comes in or an email, when I hit the back button the top app screen slides off and I’m back at the last app I was working with.

And then on top of that, I don’t like how some apps have their settings located in the main settings app. For example, weather bug. If I go to settings and scroll down there are the options for configuring it. But I can’t get to the settings when I’m in the app. So if I want to change from F to C temperatures, I have to close the app, go find settings, scroll around, change stuff, go back to the home screen and then launch weather bug again. Urbanspoon, snaptell, and others do this as well. I find it odd.

So here is my great dilemma for the evening. What do I do? The iPhone is vastly superior in the areas of music, games, and nifty apps. But Android is superior in how it handles email, IM, and other communictions.

My thought right now is that I think I would prefer better communication on my phone, and would use the games and nifty apps more when I’m not driving or out running around town. So I;m coming back to the 2 device solution as the winner for me right now. I have the iPod touch at the office so I can listen to music, watch slingbox, etc etc when im in the lab, and then have my G1 for calls and email.

Obviously this isnt an idea solution, and I wish it could be fixed. Apple needs to revamp the look and feel of the iPhone soon or more people might catch on to how out of date it seems to feel compared to Android or Palm’s WebOS. For example, the way icons are arranged on the iPhone is limited. They are in a grid and you can just move them around, but they auto fill up and to the left… Android is also a grid style layout, but I can put any icon anywhere and have blank spaces wherever I want. AND I dont have to have all my app icons out on my home screens. There is a tray tab at the bottom that you can pull up to show all icons and all apps installed. I can drag any that I want to my home screens if I want faster access. This makes even more sense when you can actually have a background image that you see for more than the 3.5 seconds it takes to unlock the iPhone. The black background needs to go…

I actually like the Palm Pre way of doing things even more. You have a task bar along the bottom, and then can open a tray in an Android fashion to apps you dont have in the task bar. And you get a nice clean desktop… and if you have any apps open, they appear as cards that you can swipe between or close. This is one area Android needs to add – an easy way to kill apps, not having to wait for the garbage collection system to kill it off to recover resources. UPDATE: I got a demo Pre from a Sprint store today and used it for about 30min. While it is an impressive device and has a lot going for it, I still prefer Android for now. Mainly because of the lack of apps, but also, the version 1 software seems to be a bit slow. Even though the Pre has the same Cortex CPU as the new 3GS, the system hesitates when launching apps and that was annoying. Also, after 30 min of email, txt, and web surfing I can’t say I’m a big fan of the keyboard, its just a bit too cramped, and there is no option to use a soft keyboard. Although, given how small the device is an on screen keyboard may not work well at all. So, for now, in my book Android is still the winner.

Oh, and one point about the screens between the two devices. I think the iPhone has a slightly better screen, but it look more pixelated due to being the same resolution, but larger physically. Its hard to say if I have a preference. I guess the G1 looks a bit smoother, but the iPhone seems to be a bit brighter and just looks better for some reason (except the pixels).

Another thing about Android are the context menus. Hold your finger down over an item or icon or the background of the home screen and a menu will appear with options. This makes it easy to do quite a few thigns.. and I found myself missing them on the iPhone.

For example, in Android, if I click and hold on a mail item or IM convo or txt message thread, a menu pops up and I can delete the thread. On the iPhone I have to click “edit” and then click the little red icon thing next to the thread and then a delete button appears on the other side and then I click that.

Or, if I’m viewing a txt thread, on the iPhone I have to scroll all the way to the top of the convo to find the “call” button. On Android, I just click and hold any message in the thread from the other person and a menu pops up and I can click call.

If I want to change my background image on my home screen, I just click and hold on the background and a menu pops up with options… one of them is change background. On the iPhone I have to find the settings app icon and launch that then select background.

Right now I’m leaning towards going back to my 2 device solution tomorrow and just deal with the fact that the iPhone doesnt cut it in terms of notifications, IM and email, but it rocks for fun apps and media. And reactivate my G1 so I can have the goodness that is Android for communications.