An iPhone User's Trial Switch to Android

I have been intensely interested in trying out an Android phone ever since the Ice Cream Sandwich version of the operating system was released. It was at this point that Google started to hone in their user experience, a major iOS-ism that many reviews agreed was lacking from Android previously.

I'll pause here to state that this isn't bashing either mobile OS. This is nothing more than my experience, as a long (ish) time iPhone/iPad user, living with the Android operating system on a non-Google "flagship" phone. I also understand that my starting point for expectations was largely based on iOS, no matter how much I tried to avoid it. Consider this and understand that my stumbling outlined below isn't an anti-Android rant, rather it is simply a documentation of my hardships. I welcome any feedback on how I could avoid these types of issues.

I was presented with the unique opportunity to try out an LG Optimus G on the Sprint network here in the U.S., for free. This device is running Android ICS v4.1.2.

Key Features and Specs:

• Quad-Core 1.5GHz Snapdragon processor
• 4G LTE connectivity
• 13MP rear camera (AT&T version has 8MP)
• Dimensions: 5.15" (H) x 2.82" (W) x 0.33" (D)
• Weight: 5.19 oz.
• Screen: 4.7" 768x1280 IPS+
• Battery: 2100 mAh
• Capacity: 32GB

My Experience

My experience was a mixed bag. I hoped to come away from this experience genuinely struggling to say what my next phone I purchase will be. I planned on capitalizing on the inter-app data sharing, tweaks/customizations, and widgets that Android had to offer. Most of all, I wanted to dispel any notion that fragmentation is an issue with high end devices. I wasn't entirely successful.

Quick disclaimer: I should mention that any speed issues I (appropriately) attribute to the Sprint network, not the device. This phone was very fast and responsive and was always as fast as the given network connectivity would allow me to be. After suffering with AT&T in the early iPhone days I have practice at separating the phone experience from the carrier's shortcomings.

Powerful, Useful, and Generally Awesome Things

There are some features that were extremely welcome, Apple would be wise to take some cues.

• Snoozing reminders and calendar events. No brainer here, it can be implemented cleanly and makes multitasking on the device (and in life) much more powerful.
• Faster dictation, types as you talk. The dictation didn't seem to be any more accurate (though, maybe a bit), but the fact that it types out as you speak makes the experience smooth and fast, much faster than iOS.
• More useful status bar. I don't think Apple should adopt this, but there are certainly times it is handy. I'd pay money for an icon in the status bar to show me when I'm muted on a call though. Alas neither OS fills that need (unless Android can and I missed it?).
• Closing a tab in a browser that was opened from clicking a link in another app closes the browser and returns me to where I clicked the link. This is a great feature, but wouldn't be needed if they solved the problem like iOS and uses web views within that app with the link. 
• Share menu. Powerful, but cluttered. I liked sharing more easily to Google+, my social network of choice. For the average user this menu is filled with a TON of apps, scrolling through them wasn't terribly pleasant. Again, not something I'd suspect or want Apple to borrow.
• Browsing and installing apps from the web. You can do this with iTunes, but that requires iTunes.
• All of your calendars sync for Google Calendar. If you've got pro sports teams, they sync. In iOS, those calendars do not sync, but most do. Really iOS is just missing pro sports team calendar syncing as far as I can tell.
• Although the stock (LG, not the stock Android) keyboard was fantastically miserable, I remedied this by installing SwiftKey. Both the Flow and standard input with SwiftKey were fast and fluid. SwiftKey's autocorrect was better than iOS by quite a bit, and I like the iOS autocorrect for the most part.
• Clear all notifications in a single tap. Astonishing iOS doesn't have this.
• Kill all open apps in a tap. Again, astonishing that iOS doesn't have this.
• Quick and responsive operating system. It was very clear I was using a phone with great hardware specs.
• Good camera. I didn't do thorough camera testing, but in the handful of indoor shots with the Optimus G and my iPhone 5 the LG fared very well, often better than the iPhone.

Pressure Points

• My biggest complaint, hands down, is that headset controls don't work in a system wide fashion, or hardly at all for that matter. Per my understanding, you can buy headsets from a company, then use their music player app, and the headset works (play, pause, volume, issuing voice commands) within that particular app. This NEEDS to be a system wide thing. To pause music I have to press the lock button, enter a PIN, find the music app that's playing, open it, tap pause. Some offer play/pause functionality in the notification pull down, but that's not much better. Now consider how frustrating that is while walking the dog in the cold all bundled up with the phone tucked away. Not ok, I might have to seek therapy for how upsetting this is.
• Size... the phone was far too big. Single handed usage is entirely out of the question other than scrolling down a feed/website that is already open. Back button? Not going to happen. More on this later.
• Stock keyboard was terrible, so very terrible. (LG-ism, Android is not to blame here.)
• Non-fluid UI. Though improved, it is still far from iOS. Here's a nice breakdown of why. This wasn't as big of an issue as I thought it might be. It didn't feel like iOS, but it isn't iOS. Overall the system was very speedy and responsive, just not always fluid.
• When you're momentum scrolling, you tap to stop, right? Wrong. This selects whatever you tapped on to stop, very frustrating. You can work around this by tapping and dragging ever so slightly, but it is illogical to select whatever you tapped as you scrolled by at lightning speed.
• Error messaging isn't always informative. One error told me to update the profile, no indication of where or how this could be done. Not really a big deal 99% of the time though.
• Stock messaging/SMS app is unimpressive. Tap back once to hide the keyboard, tap back again to view all threads. This is frustrating. 3rd party SMS apps provide good work arounds, I used Chomp.
• Messages get marked as read when they shouldn't be (LG-ism). If the messaging app is open when the device is locked, unlocking the phone returns you to the home screen, this appears to be the same for any app (but I didn't test it in depth). This little nuance has the byproduct of marking any new SMS you got while the phone was locked as read when you unlock the device.
• Auto-brightness seemed more like front row tickets the backlight having a seizure. This was during indoor use in an office with overhead lighting, but I experienced this whether moving or not.
• Subtle visual indicators were something I didn't realize I was so accustom to. For instance, in the Gmail app I couldn't find the notification settings. When I learned I just had to tap my email address in settings, all was well, but it surprised me there was no visual indication that it was tappable. I found I was frequently tapping things that were labels and not tapping things that were tappable. I also missed the rubber band effect.
• Icon notification counts. The info is in the status bar, but those numbers are tiny. Not a big deal, but I missed them. 
• Gmail app crashed, a lot. Likely an LG-ism, but not okay.
• Full screen YouTube videos in the Chrome browser didn't trigger whatever the phone needs to understand it should leave the screen on. Let that sink in. On an Android device. With the Chrome browser. YouTube didn't work. If only a single company owned all of those....
• Notification settings aren't centralized. Some are in the OS settings, some in the apps. The stock apps weren't nearly as configurable as 3rd party, and in some cases not even as configurable as iOS.

Larger Screen Size - Good or Bad?

Not long ago I upgraded from the iPhone 4S to the iPhone 5, to this point that has been my large screen experience. I know, Galaxy Note owners are trying to catch a breath between laughs...

I'm an average sized guy. 5'11'. Hands aren't oddly large or oddly small. There was no question that I cannot use this phone entirely with one hand. I could sort of wiggle my hand and make it work at the expense of securely holding the device, but as I'm walking or on the go I use my devices one handed a ton. I also want to have a decent grip on the phone; I define a decent grip as the ability to invert my hand and overpower gravity's attempt to claim the device from my grip.

Most of the time I'd just bring in the second hand briefly to tap the back button or to click the URL bar up top, or to reach that "other" ~30% of the device that was otherwise off limits. It made me feel better about stretching to reach the back button in the top left of every iPhone 5 app, but made me realize it was doable. This 4.7" LG, for me, is just too big.

I expected to be frustrated with the extra size while it was in my pocket, but love it when I was using the device. I found the opposite. I had no qualm with the device size in my pocket, but when I was using it, I rarely found that I could do, see, or enjoy anything more with the extra screen real estate. The inability to one-hand the phone was too large of an issue for me to brush off, it was a real problem for me.

Here's an example of what I mean. Now I'm the first to admit that this example is sort of bias - the screen IS bigger despite the Gmail app on the LG (above) making poor use of the extra space as shown here. Watching a video is much bigger, and some content is just bigger, but not always. Not to mention seeing 8 tweets instead of 6 at once isn't a "feature" when I can only read one at a time.

Demonstration of my feeling that the screen size didn't really gain me anything.

Android-Only Features

There were things like inter-app data sharing, widgets, and customizability that are, at the core, against everything iOS is designed for. These are the things I expected to knock my socks off, to really show me the light that is the explosion of Android popularity, and to ultimately seal the deal that Android might just be for me.

Inter-app data sharing wasn't terribly useful. The best part was sharing to Google+, my social network of choice. I could see the same being true for any social network. Beyond that, there didn't seem to be anything iOS didn't offer, besides an extremely cluttered list of apps to chose from. In iOS, you can chose to process the file with any installed app that has alerted the OS that it can process said file type, so only the relevant apps are in the list. For Android, they're all there, all the time. What are some common use cases where this feature kicks some serious ass? I'm all ears!

Widgets were interesting. Weather was useful, though only a swipe closer to me than iOS has it. Email widgets were pretty helpful since the notifications show less of a preview of the message than iOS does. Twitter seemed to randomly update and show a couple of tweets from the semi-recent history randomly in your timeline. System usage is interesting, but more of a parlor trick. I found myself adding several, then removing most of them a few days later. I certainly haven't missed them since I've been back on iOS. Edit: I take this back, the antenna/feature toggles such as wifi and bluetooth were amazing, I can't believe iOS has these so buried in menus! What other widgets was I missing? What are the favorites?

Customizability was certainly available. It wasn't always straight forward, but I could change an awful lot of things. Had my corporate email not required a PIN (I later removed it for flexibility) the lock screen was capable of being more functional that most home screens, but what's the point of a lock screen at that point? The home screen could be anything, not just apps. Themes aren't of interest to me, or most anyone over 15. Changing default services was pretty cool, though I expected more of a system level way to do this. For instance, with messaging you just disable alerts for the system messaging app when using 3rd party, like Chomp. The Chomp app told me to do this, it wasn't automatic when I installed Chomp, nor was I even presented with the question if I'd like the system to do it for me.

I'm not calling these things duds. Quite the opposite, they gave me some very new and interesting toys to play with. The big difference is that I only found myself using them when I was playing, not when I was using my smartphone as a smartphone.

Google Play

I was a little bit surprised how daunting Google Play was at times. The names of apps and plugins are cryptic at times. Usually the app you're looking to download is straightforward, and at (or near) the top of the search results. However, there are a surprising number of search results that are named so similarly you second guess yourself about which to install. It gets better as you get used to it, but it is odd. Seeing a version of an app for certain phones, then a different version for other phones was something I didn't expect to see. I liked the explicit outline of the app's access to your phone, though the amount of access some apps unnecessarily had was troublesome.

Not Calling this Section Fragmentation

"Fragmentation" is over used, and usually when the term is mentioned, half the audience stops reading. So this section isn't called "Fragmentation".

I've spoken with users of true-Google devices about some of my pressure points, crashes, and things that bugged me about my Android experience. I was reassured on several of the frustrations that they weren't Android-isms, but were LG-isms. Point taken.

The iOS perspective here is that these LG-isms that greatly detract from the user experience simply shouldn't be allowed to exist. They're so fundamental and frustrating for anyone used to iOS stability (and trust me, I wasn't expecting iOS stability) these things are pain points. If the point of Android is to be open so nearly any hardware/software configuration is an option for customers, why is it that a flagship phone is allowed to exist with such a flawed user experience?

To me, this seems damning. Where does that put the non-flagship phones that account for the majority of Android activations? I'm almost scared to know.

My inner-nerd can't entirely agree with that position though. It wasn't Google that detracted from the experience, even if they enabled it. Blaming Google for LG's poor execution isn't fair, I just wish it weren't an issue to begin with.

What's Next?

I plan to root the device so that I can install Jelly Bean and attempt to get the most current and most pure-Google experience. I expect this will help with several of the software complaints I had, I hope it will anyway.

I welcome any input, too. Please leave comments about your switch or how you took advantage of Android awesomeness that just isn't possible on iOS. I'd love to hear about it!

Closing Thoughts

Andy Inhatko's recent piece on why he switched from iPhone to Android was inspiring, I suggest reading it. One huge difference from his experience is that this is my first hands-on (longer than 2 minutes) with the OS. To attempt to compare Android to iOS, where I'm extremely familiar, after anything less than a few months is probably painting myself as ignorant. What I hope to do here is document my initial experience and seek feedback on how to speed through the rest of the learning curve.

There's no getting around the fact that everyone uses their phone in their own unique way. These experiences are my own and, more than likely, these experiences only slightly overlap with your usage. Apple has chosen a one-size-fits-all approach where they (attempt to?) base their design and functionality on common ground. Android takes the opposite approach.

It is an interesting dichotomy, and I can't help but wonder how much (more than I'm aware) my current usage and expectations are biased due to the fact that I've been using iOS for so long and formed my habits on iOS, so that is how I expect a device to work. 

Living with the Nest 2.0 Thermostat

The Nest is a profound re-imagination of an otherwise stale and uninteresting technology - your home's thermostat. You might not be able to picture yourself getting excited about a thermostat, and for a perfectly good reason, but that's about to change. What you're about to see is a brilliant, intuitive, beautifully designed piece of hardware that makes your controlling your home's temperature fun, smart, and interesting - oh and there's an app! Here's their promo video:

Starting to see why this might be fun? Here's what I mean when I say it is beautifully designed.

Source: Nest.com

The learning thermostat.

I have had the Nest 2.0 for 2 weeks now, so I'm only getting started. This has without question been one of my favorite new toys. Nest 2.0 is pictured above and is 20% slimmer than 1.0. They both run the same 3.0 software and have similar feature sets, though the 2.0 is compatible with more systems. Nest has 4 sensors and connects to your home WiFi network to always be accessible via any computer or smartphone. The first week or so you'll want to program your Nest when you expect to see a change. You can set up a schedule and even still you may make manual changes here and there. You'll notice it starts to get smarter as you use it. 

Nest understands that your life isn't clockwork, your Monday schedule last week might not be your Monday schedule this week. Yet when an unexpected snow storm hits next Monday and you forgot to set the schedule to warm up right before you get home, you won't even need to use the app to do it because it is aware of the weather and will do it for you.

Talking with people who have had the first generation Nest for a year, they say they haven't touched or programmed their thermostat in months even as they transition between seasons, they are just always comfortable. One of those houses was even a more dynamic house with a few people living there and roommates moving in and out periodically, Nest figured it all out.

Nest is smart, eerily smart.

Nest knows the weather outside, it knows when you're home or away, and it knows what temperature keeps your family comfortable and when. It knows the difference between you being home yet asleep and you being away, though I haven't done extensive testing to "trick" it. It did figure out when we left for the weekend after only 1 week of ownership. A big perk for us is that it doesn't misunderstand your dog's motion as thinking you've gotten home. 

Like other smarter thermostats it will inform you when your filter needs to be changed too. Yet unlike many thermostats there is attention to detail and efficiency everywhere you look. As a great example, when you run your AC and your house reaches the desired temperature, it shuts off. What about all the cold air still in the system though? The Nest understands when your home is nearing the desired temperature and shuts off the AC but continues to pump the cool air. This can save you as much as 20%* of your AC run time, that is extraordinary!

*Source: Nest.com

Green.

Nest is designed to keep you comfortable, but also to keep you informed and help you make greener choices. This translates to money in your pocket and feeling good that you've done something good for the planet.

When you're setting your system (or it sets itself) to a temperature that requires less heating or cooling to achieve, you see a small green leaf on the display. It sounds tiny, but it is really powerful feedback. If you were leaving for the afternoon and lowered your heat to say 65 but noticed a leaf when you accidentally went past it to 63, wouldn't you leave it at 63? I have found that just a couple of degrees has made me "greener" nearly every single day.

From the app or web app you can monitor your usage to see when your system is running, what the resulting temperature is, and how that related to the weather outside that day. We just bought our house so we don't have previous years of data to compare bills to, but I know with our previous stagnant single temperature setup we are saving a significant amount of money with our new Nest without question.

The critics.

There are critics of the Nest that claim the Nest is no (or hardly) better than a standard programmable thermostat. Is Nest a programmable thermostat? Well yes, in the same way that a Bentley is a car. (Insert a joke about the cost here!) The Nest is much smarter than any other thermostat, it is much more accessible than most other thermostats (and even thermostats that have apps to control them pale in comparison with app quality and functionality), and frankly it is designed by folks who care. A thermostat doesn't have to be a hideous white brick on your wall.

Cost.

Naturally the biggest drawback here is cost. The Nest 2.0 costs $249 and can be purchased at Amazon.com**, Nest.com, or others. High end programmable thermostats are $150 to $200, and even a decent lower end one is going to cost you $80. The efficiency savings, the convenience of control on-the-go, the beautiful design, and the extremely powerful data it gives you about your system usage, all more than make up for that price.

**At the time of writing Amazon appears to be out of stock and claiming it is $289 and only available through 3rd party retailers, I know this isn't true since that's where I got mine.


I cannot recommend this product more highly. I love my Nest and it was worth every penny. Please feel free to ask questions in the comments. Since I've only had it a short time, I might have forgotten to elaborate on a particular subject, please feel free to let me know and I'll add to my review!