Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Android Has a Month to Woo Me

Well my 3 year contract with Rogers came due on September 4th. I decided to have them park my number for a month while I put my iPhone away and decided to use my Android phone full time. Basically, Android has a month to woo me before I make a decision to get a fancy new Android phone or an iPhone 5.

Right now I'm using a Samsung Galaxy S running Android 2.1 and I totally threw it into the deep end right off the bat. My first day using the phone full time was on our trip from Sydney, NS back home to Ottawa, ON. The phone got used a lot to play games and look up info while we were waiting in lines and flying in planes. Sadly, on the drive home from the airport to the house the phone ran out of battery. This is a strike against the phone as this level of usage doesn't typically drain my iPhone battery down to zero.

Day two was a much more reasonable day of kicking around Ottawa but still by the end of the day the phone battery was drained. A few of my most frequently used applications on the iPhone are Twitter and Foursquare. On my Android phone Twitter crashes frequently so I switched to TweetDeck and Foursquare can never get a GPS location. So far things are not going as smoothly as I'd have like.

I'll continue to use the Android phone and see what I can do to improve it's performance and battery life. First up I'll see if I can get it upgraded to 2.3 but the Samsung software for this does not run on my Mac.
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2 comments:

  1. devgeeksSeptember 6, 2011 at 6:23 PM

    The way I feel is that Android would be awesome if you had never used an iPhone before and didn't know any better... but the experience is just missing something going from iOS to Android :(

    Also, was your iPhone an iPhone 4 or a 3GS? A Galaxy S running 2.1 would be a bit harsh after an iPhone 4 (or even a 3GS running iOS 4.x). I know my Android dev phone feels like a 3GS in speed, but it's still not as nice as my old 3GS running iOS 4.x (much less 5).

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  2. Simon MacDonaldSeptember 6, 2011 at 7:10 PM

    I was using my iPhone 3G for almost the full 3 years of the contract. Just as the summer was starting it got horribly sluggish with one of the newer OS updates. A friend of mine offered a loan of his old iPhone 4. Work was paying for his second iPhone 4.

    Right now the Galaxy S is being hampered by a number of apps that just crash. Intermittently the Google Talk services dies and locks up my phone. I'm going to disable it and see how things go.

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