My Humble Take on Android vs iPhone

[Update: Read follow up post written after buying a second Android phone]

I recently shifted from an iPhone 3G to Samsung Galaxy S. Sort of, because I actually gave away the Nokia E63 that my wife held in exchange for the Galaxy S, while my old iPhone 3G was taken up by her. I have used it for about 10 days now and done about same kind of things I used to do with my iPhone - so I believe this review is well-placed.

To start off with, one of the primary motivations to buy the Galaxy S was because of the Android appeal. Android is one of the most talked about OSes out there and purported to be the real competitor to iPhone OS4. Secondly Android was often whispered to solve some of the thorny issues in iPhone - push Gmail, support for multiple exchange accounts, ability to run widgets and stuff, radio and in general openness (Oh, the tyranny of iPhone app store!).

The secondary motivation was that it was cheaper. After trading in my Nokia E63 and signing up a new contract for 2 years, the Galaxy S was delivered without me paying a cent. To compare, the iPhone 4 would have costed me $110 on top of that. Nothing much, but still the allure of moving to a more open OS coupled with it being cheap was too much to let pass. So, the Galaxy S.

Now the actual review. (Green means positive, red means negative, if you did not guess it already):

Hardware:
[Compared is a brand new Samsung Galaxy S with 18 month old iPhone 3G.]

• The screen size is bigger and it doesn't lose out of clarity w.r.t iPhone 3G. For that bigger screen, it doesn't become any difficult to handle or keep in your pocket. In general, a plus.
• It is so much lighter than the iPhone 3G. After handling it for a few days, when I pick up the iPhone 3G, it feels like lifting a brick.
• The batteries can be replaced. One of my big gripes is that smart phones in general are a drain on batteries - they must be since they run so many radios and a powerful display - and hence the ability to change batteries is a must - for two reasons, one so that you can keep a spare battery fully charged up if you are a power user, and two to replace the battery a year later so that you can prolong the life of the phone itself (most phones degrade mostly on the battery front). On the other hand, the display on this phone consumes so much battery that it goes from 100%-4% within 12 hours with about 2 hours of actual usage. Turning off 3G doesn't help, as it did on iPhone, because the display is the real culprit here. More so, charging the phone from say 5% to 100% takes nothing less than 3-4 hours. iPhone 3G would do that in just over an hour.
• Galaxy S is so slim that I am often afraid that it will drop it or it will slip from my hands.
• For some strange reason (I am guessing that the electronics majors would throw some light here), the touch-screen becomes completely unusable when charging. The sensitivity is all thrown off and it assumes taps all the time, even when I didn't actually tap. In general, I disconnect it from the charger before using it.

Software:
[Compared is Android OS 2.1 to iOS 3.1.3. I don't care if Android fans respond to these arguments with Android 2.2 features because iOS 4.0 also has its own set of rather impressive victories.]

• Swype. It is the way forward on inputting words on a phone. Typing just feels so 2000ish after using swype.
• Gmail App is OK. I know, everybody seems to love the app, but I will give it passing marks at best. In general, it is good to have full web functionality, but iPhone always had that support through the browser while the native client covered 90% of my use cases. My main gripe is that the new mail alert disappears once I open the app, but not actually read the unread messages. On a busy day, I often open the app, see that the mail is not important and come back later, but with the alert gone, I am often deceived into believing I have nothing to read. The iPhone native mail client got it right - keep the number of unread messages always consistent with the actual unread messages inside, neatly updated every time you read something through the web browser (if you used IMAP/Exchange). On a minor note, usability hasn't been thought through - if you have a back button and you are in the inbox of one account, with other accounts also configured, what do you expect to happen when you click on back button? On iPhone it goes to the page listing all your accounts so you can go to one of the other accounts - intuitive, very intuitive. On Galaxy S, it exits the app itself. To go to one of the other accounts, click menu, then accounts and then you get list of accounts.
• Usability of browser. Imagine you have been clicking around links and now you want to close the browser. How do you do it? On the iPhone you clicked home and you are done. On Android, you click back (which closes other apps) and you go to the previous page. So, you need to track back your entire browsing history to close it. Or you click home, leaving the browser running in the background, then go to app manager and then mark it closed. This was a big bummer.
• Mutiple Calendar fail. One of the reasons I wanted Android was because of the full exchange support for multiple exchange accounts. Turns out they can't handle multiple calendar accounts, even if those calendars are all hosted on Gmail. This was again, a rather big bummer.
• Widget/Calendar usability. You would imagine that a widget holding weather and stock information which comes default packaged with the phone would show you the current weather and stock information, right? Wrong. The widget sits right there with the information from the day you last refreshed it. If you want to update it, you have to click refresh. Now, who the hell was smoking cheap pot when designing this feature? Also, what is it with Calendar not notifying me when a meeting or appointment is due? iPhone did it neatly with an alert, but Android seems to do nothing of the sort. There is a tiny little message on the top, but if you didn't open the phone, you wouldn't get to know.
• Contacts usability. I was using the iPhone to sync my contacts to Gmail. And on the web interface, I had filtered the contacts using groups such that only the most important and relevant would come on the phone (using "My Contacts"). In fact, in anticipation of buying an Android, I had spent hours organizing the groups to my best convenience - and guess what? The OS built by Google doesn't support the groups running on Google's gmail interface. In fact, the entire concept of groups is thrown off on Android's contacts app. If that wasn't bad enough, try updating an existing contact with a number from which you just received a call. On that interface alone, "search" is disabled. So, Android expects me to browse from 1000s (which is actually only 100s if the phone respected the groups that I created on Gmail) of contacts to update the contact. Absolute FAIL. It is so bad (and error prone) that I have stopped updating contacts using the phone and instead do it through the laptop when I get the chance.
• 3G/2G switching. You would think that you, as a techie, knowing that 3G meant "faster internet but more battery consuming" and 2G, aliased as GPRS, meant "slower internet but less battery consumption", were learned enough to switch between the two on the Android, right? Wrong. You also need to know that 2G is "GSM only" and 3G is "WCDMA" and that "GSM/WCDMA (auto)" means auto switching between the two. Unfortunately, I did not. So, I couldn't figure out how to switch off my 3G to save battery. And after clicking on the GSM only mode (because I thought my phone was GSM and not a CDMA one), I couldn't figure out why my phone wouldn't run 3G. It took some wikipediaing to figure out that WCDMA meant 3G. Big big FAIL.
• VoIP. For some strange reason, Skype is listed on Android market place, but only for phones sold on Verizon network in the US. Tried it on my phone's market app. Nothing turns up. Tried a few other methods. Then eventually tried installing it through back door entry (download APK, put it on dropbox and then install, as suggested by @jasonong), but it was a skype lite feature which wants me to pay for receiving calls on the phone while my Skype app is running. It is rather sad to read articles which talk about the dirty little secret of Android and realizing that it could all be true (and that I am contributing to it) and in the name of openness, we might be handing the power back to the very same companies who couldn't innovate a proper smart phone.
• Background Apps. It is good to have the feature. At least half the world has been singing a positive song about it - except that I can't seem to figure out why to use it? I was really happy with my iPhone usage and never felt the need to have background apps except for VoIP. Now that VoIP support isn't state-of-the-art (without skype), background apps looks like a superfluous feature. I am yet to use it. (In the meanwhile, I am seething that iPhone 4 has both background apps and state-of-the-art VoIP.)
• The whole marketplace tyranny issue. If Apple has been criticized from running a tightly controlled App Store, then Google should also be criticized for running a haphazard app store. There are apps for one provider but not for others (i.e. skype). There are also apps whose reviews will tell you how it works on one device and not other. The democrat in me (wanting an open marketplace) is losing left right and center to the user in me (one who wants the apps to just be available and work).

In summary, Galaxy S is reasonably good hardware, but with Android's usability, and the phone's usability in general, being average at best, specially if you are coming from the iPhone experience (even an old iPhone OS experience) you might feel disappointed. The "open" Android isn't as usable as the "closed" iPhone. And in general, the $110 you are bound to save is just not worth the money.

[Update: Read follow up post written after buying a second Android phone]