I just spent a week with a Galaxy Note II (borrowed) to see what it's like. I had also done the same with Nexus 4 and a Galaxy S3. I really wanted to "live" with one to really see how I would like them. You always get that feeling of "am I missing out on something? what if Android is so much better?". Only way to find out is to truly live with a device and see. So the SIM went out of my yellow Lumia 920 and went into the Galaxy Note II. Powered off my 920 and put it away for a week.
It was a very interesting experiment for me. Very. First, the good stuff:
- The battery life of the Galaxy Note II is great. Not a surprise given how big it is hence it has 3000mAh battery. But it was nice for sure to have that.
- The screen on the phone when watching video was *great*. Otherwise it was good.
- Nice to have access to more apps, but didn't really make or break the experience for me. I have all the apps I truly need on my 920 at this point.
- Swype keyboard was really nice once I got used to it! I see why people like it now.
Now the not so good and why I was extremely happy to go back to my 920.
Android is open. Very open. You can do anything you want with it and OEMs sure do. Thing is, they are so focused on gimmicks to sell phones, that the basic core functionality that everyone uses is subpar. Let me take a simple example that is *very* critical for me on a phone: Music. Music on android, in my opinion, is a horrible experience. For starters, *any* notification sound that plays (and there are a million of those - more on that later) it will play over your music completely. Android will mute the sound coming out of your music (not pause) to play the notification and then bring the music back. On bluetooth (in the car), it's worse. The music volume is lowered down and the notification sound is played THROUGH the phone! The physical phone speaker! Not the car! It is *so* irritating I have no words to stress how much. Music is a very immersive activity. Stop taking me out of it every time a notification plays!!! WP doesn't have that issue.
Then there's the fact that there is no central audio controller for the phone as far as I could tell. You listen to Pandora (our app is *way* better by the way)? cool... you can pause it from the notification center. Amazon? it puts a different looking controller in the notification center and can put one on the lockscreen as well (Pandora can't). If you happen to have a PIN code on your phone, the amazon lock screen widget will appear on top of it halfway as you're typing your PIN code... sigh... had to dismiss it to continue entering my PIN code. Apparently they didn't account for users having a PIN code. Music apps will for the most part successfully resume playing when get back in the car after a while. But I found Amazon MP3 player to be more reliable in that fashion than Pandora for instance. Pandora sometimes would just not play and I have to go run the app again. I guess Android killed it or something. Amazon seems to have done something to make that better.
See where I am going with that? Everything on Android has its own "experience". Even for apps that do the same kind of activity: playing music. They are different enough to be annoying. They work differently, behave differently under certain circumstances. But in the end, they are all the same class of apps: Music. A core functionality of the phone. Throw in podcast apps, audible, etc and the "experiences" are even more variable. Each controlled slightly differently, etc. On WP and iOS, there is an audio player infrastructure on the phone that you hook into, so it works the same for everything. You really miss that once you get used to it.
This paradigm, every app is an experience, is everywhere on Android. The back button works a bit differently for every app. WP has a bit of this issue, but I felt it more pronounced in Android. Maybe I am just not used to its flavor of back button quirkiness.
Notifications. Man... OK. Notification center is neat. I get it. But when you set up your phone, put some email accounts, facebook, twitter, etc. the phone will *not* shut the hell up all day. Beeps and birds chirping all freaking day long. LED blinking blue as well. That's the "default" experience that every non-techie gets. Now, remember the music experience with beeps? yeah. OK, how do I turn this stuff off? you go find every app and find out where inside it you can turn off the notifications... maybe there's a central place, but it wasn't obvious. I may find it, but most people probably won't. So the default experience is a very noisy phone.
Then there was something that truly made me unhappy. A bit of context though as to know why it did. Windows Desktop OS is not without its faults. Sure, it's popular and does a pretty good job doing what it does, but it does make you wish it was a bit different. Take for instance malware on Windows, that's annoying. Or apps that try to trick you by faking an Antivirus scan and having you download/install weird stuff. Or apps that when you install them they drop shortcuts all over your desktop to their "search" engines, etc. That stuff is annoying. But in Windows defense, it was created in a time different than today. It had a different set of challenges. Internet wasn't around. Security wasn't a big concern. Privacy wasn't, etc. It took *great* effort to bring it up to today's world without breaking the wealth of apps that already exist. With Windows 8, we are starting to see a break from the old world with Metro which means it can be designed from the ground up for today's set of challenges without worrying about background compat.
Android didn't have any of those challenges. There was no wealth of apps to force it from being designed for today's world. So here's the scenario that made me mad. I am playing with the settings. I find a way to change the fonts on the system. Very cool! It works *really* well. The new font takes over everywhere and allows some nice customization! It only had 3 or so fonts though but it had a button labeled "Get more fonts". Sweet! I tap it and it takes me to the store with lots of fonts to download! This is *awesome*!!! I download one and that's when things went really bad for me. After it installed, at some point when I ran it, it popped up some weird window that was faking an antivirus scan... wtf?? really? what is this? 1999? it came with all the cliches: the progress bar, the "we found stuff, download this to remove it", etc. oh man... to add insult to injury, the app added another shortcut to the home screen called "Search". It takes you to some funky, who knows what, search engine in the browser.
Why? Why does this need to happen? Sure, I am a technical user and I know enough to not fall for this crap. But this device is *not* sold ONLY to techies. In fact, millions upon millions are sold to very non-techie people. It wasn't even a convoluted way to get to that fonts app. It was directly off of the settings path :/ When this stuff happens in Windows, at least I can say it wasn't designed for that world and it was hard to change it properly without breaking everything. But android has no such excuse
It could have been designed to avoid crap like that from the start. Why wasn't it? I will never know.
Overall, I was extremely happy to go back to my Lumia 920. People tell you Android 4.1.x is lag free? yeah...compared to other androids. The instant you go back to WP, you feel how smooth it is. Android is smooth*ER* now, but it still has variable perf. Sometimes it just lags a bit for no reason, then it's gone. It's the variability in perf that makes it obvious. It probably would be fine if it had somewhat of a consistent perf even if it's not super great.
So yeah, I am very glad to have lived the experience. There is a lot to like about Android for sure. But for *ME* and *MY* usage and needs, it had more annoyances than good stuff. I didn't feel like there's something there that would make me want to keep using it. WP, again for me, is just a much more polished experience.
Which android device did I like best? Nexus 4 for sure. The pure android is way better than whatever Samsung is doing on their devices. Their software is just not that great and i feel it's probably why I see that lag every once a while. Nexus 4 didn't have the best hardware, but the experience was the best.
anyway...long post...I know... I am awake at night for some reason. Again, this is my own experience with my own needs and preferences. Other people will disagree because they have different needs.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram