2013 Internet Trends

Is it meant to be ironic that the "authority" of internet trends is hosted on a site that reminds me of the AOL era?

2013 slides are out. There are over 100, but worth scanning through them. There are some solid numbers on how serious of a market China is. It shows the iPad growth outpacing the iPhone by 3x.

I think the biggest surprise in there is the focus on sharing sound clips. Video and photo I understand, digital voice/VoIP/video calling I understand, but uploading audio content to SoundCloud seems somewhat insignificant next to those. I must not be a part of that/those demographic(s), I'll have to take their word on it.

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. 

Choosing Sides in the iOS/Android Discussion... Don't

If you have read comments from a technology review or article in the last five years, or really just about any article, you'll see that most people think there is a war going on in tech - Apple vs. Google, iOS vs. Android, Closed vs. Open - call it what you want. There are people, myself included, who disagree.

Andy Ihnatko hit the nail on the head this week, several times in fact. He started on Tuesday when he published the first piece to his story 'Why I switched from iPhone to Android'. He continued on Wednesday when he published part two about customization and collaboration. To close, he cemented his place in tech journalism history (if you ask me) as intelligent and genuinely here for the technology with his conclusion published Thursday detailing the pros and the cons of the switch.

Andy, I want to thank you. I want to thank you as an iPhone owner, one who is very happy with my device. Your agnostic analysis of why Android became the right choice for you renewed my faith in technology journalism. It was a refreshing piece that focuses on how magnificent the technology of our time is and how it is the most exciting time in history to be alive (if you like tech that is).

For those who haven't read it, here's one of the several "disclaimers" (that are entirely necessary as demonstrated by the fact that even with them the comments went off into troll-land) that explain why both iOS and Android can be awesome and it isn't a black and white debate:

As I said at the very beginning, this isn’t the story of why Android is Way Totally So Much Better Than iOS. This is the story of this one dude who switched phones. Andy Ihnatko moving to Android isn’t a pivotal moment in the history of mobile computing. I just thought that a detailed piece of my observations, concerns, and experiences would be of interest to anybody who’s curious about Android. And given the revolutionary improvements in the platform over the past year, I thought it was timely.

When I assert the position that both mobile operating systems are incredible most responses I get are passive aggressive. "Well yeah, iOS is great for old people." or "Android is cool, but I just don't want to risk getting viruses." My favorite is when someone uses open or closed-ness as their argument for iOS or Android but isn't able to explain what open/closed means or how the respective OSes embody it. I'm not suggesting everyone needs to understand the intricacies of their mobile OS's philosophy; rather I'm highlighting how ridiculous the "war" has gotten and how entrenched so many people are in their opinions, often blindly.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion and not everyone will give credit to the "other" OS for one reason or another. Unfortunately, if your opinion is such that only one OS can "win", you are wrong (hint: italics are sarcasm font.) Like Andy said, it isn't Apple OR Google, it is Apple AND Google.

I won't rehash the platform agnostic, pro-awesome-tech, stance because it has been done already. I cannot recommend highly enough that you read Andy's work - part one, part two, and part three.

If you agree that both companies are awesome, this guide to making Gmail on your iPhone/iPad work how you want it to work might help.

A Great Gmail Guide

No need for an extensive write up, this site handles it. Here's a fantastic guide to understanding why Gmail is simply amazing, how to use it, how to make it work for you, etc.

http://gmail-miscellany.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/gmail-101.html

Harmony Between Your iPhone and Gmail, Google Cal, etc.

It seems like just about every single article says either Apple or Google has a great product for one reason or another. I emphasize the "or" because the topic seems to be getting as polarized as politics. I can't imagine my daily life without the stunning simplicity, convenience, and technological bliss that is the marriage of Apple and Google products. I wanted to put together this guide to help out friends, family, and anyone else who wants the same.

I know the post is long, but this is as exhaustive of a summary and guide as I've seen on the internet. I hope it helps to better your experience of iOS and Google products working in a wonderful harmony!

My Devices & Services

• iPhone 4S & iPad 2 (same setup for both is recommended)
• Gmail
• Google Calendar
• All contacts are in Gmail

Setup

Account Types on the iPhone

This isn't as simple as adding a Gmail type account to your iOS device, this is the primary reason that most people aren't enjoying this setup.

Add a new Exchange account by selecting Settings (app) > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Add Account...

Fill out your Email, Password, and add any description you like (mine is just "Gmail").

Press Next, there will be more to fill out. Note that your email address is your username @ your domain, so you should either leave the "Domain" blank and have your full email address as your username, or do what I do below. It shouldn't technically matter which way you chose.

Press Done.

Settings

Here are the rest of my settings for the account:

• Sync Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and Reminders. 
• Mail - This is a true sync (using the IMAP protocol), so if you delete on your iPhone you Archive it in Gmail. The exact contents of the Inbox on your phone will represent the Inbox on the server. This gets rid of the old-school concept of downloading a message off the server where the message is literally removed from the server (this technology was known as POP3). The question I get most often is how to actually delete an email - you must select Move To... then the Trash folder, just as you would move it to any other folder.
• Please note: You will need to enable IMAP access in your Gmail Settings, last I checked this is disabled be default. It is simple to do, please follow this guide.
• Contacts - Gmail keeps the golden master copy of my contacts list. I keep nothing local on the phone. This makes my life a breeze when I jump back to Gmail.com. I can also easily edit large groups of contacts on the web. iCloud has similar offerings, I just prefer Gmail so it'd be silly not to have my contacts in the same place. P.S. I suggest populating the contact's birthday, this way it'll show up on your calendar!
• Calendars - Calendars run my life. Anything I am doing or my wife is doing had better be in the calendar or I likely won't show up. I do as much event management on my phone as on the computer, it's nice to have it instantly sync both ways.
• Reminders - I'm a bit weird here. I LOVE reminders and use them constantly. I don't like Gmail's implementation of reminders (it isn't as nice of a user interface or as functionally laid out as iCloud), so even though I sync them, I actually strictly use iCloud for my reminders. 99% of the time I use my iPhone to manage Reminders, but on my work PC I also use iCloud.com. Of course the iPad has the same native app that the iPhone has, and Macs running OS X 10.8 or later (Mountain Lion) have the same Reminders app there as well.
• Oddly enough, you can create a new shared reminders list from the iCloud.com app or the Mac's native app, but you cannot create a new shared reminders list from an iOS device. You can edit and manage items on those shared lists though, so at most this is the slightest of "inconveniences" if you can even call it that.

Mail

• Mail Days to Sync - This is a tricky one for some. I suggest you personally subscribe to the "Inbox Zero" lifestyle where you don't keep email in your inbox. Tools like Gmail's labels and plugins like Boomerang just make it too easy and there's no reason to keep email around in the inbox. This doesn't mean getting rid of email, on the contrary I keep every single email that isn't junk or a daily mailer from LivingSocial or Groupon type sites. If you keep a relatively empty inbox I suggest syncing all mail in your Inbox. Consider a change in practice if you've never archived anything or have thousands of emails in your inbox.
• Mail Folders to Push - This setting selects which folders (Inbox is technically a folder) will by synced to the server. This means every email in that folder on the server will also be on your phone. I recommend only Inbox (default) for 99% of folks out there. However, some of you have advanced setups where you've got secondary accounts set up that automatically get labeled and archived (neat Gmail magic, if you don't know what I mean I've done a blog post that talks about it). For those power users you might want to push your other "Inboxes" as well.
• Keep in mind that even if you only check Inbox you can still see the entire folder hierarchy structure you have in place. You can also go into those folders and download their contents to view or manage emails. The difference is that those folders won't be actively synced and if you open them that will initiate a download of that folder's contents from the server at that time.

Note: These settings apply only to this particular account.

Note: The rest of the settings I'll cover apply to all accounts, not just your newly setup Gmail account. There are exceptions like Push/Pull, you can have a different account not setup for Pull. If you want additional details just ask in the comments and I'll get back to you usually within a few hours.

• Fetch New Data - Push. Push. Push. Enough said. If you want pull, set it up as a Gmail type account, I don't see any reason to do this for your iPhone. The "Gmail" account type for iOS doesn't support Push, this is why I suggest setting it up as an Exchange account. With that being said, what is Push and what is "Pull"?
• Push - Any folder you selected for "Mail Folders to Push" above will have emails "pushed" to your phone instantly when that email is received. Often I'll even see it come through on my phone a second or two before I see it in my inbox on gmail.com.
• Benefits (no cons if you ask me):
1. Emails show up instantly.
2. Your phone only gets email when there is new email to be grabbed. This saves battery life and network traffic.
• Pull - Every X minutes (this amount of time is adjustable) your phone will go and check the server for any new email (or changes to folder contents of any kind) for every folder you selected for "Mail Folders to Push" in the previous step. 
• Cons (no benefits if you ask me):
1. There is a delay between when you get an email and when your phone gets an email. This delay is the time between receiving the email and the next time your phone goes to check for emails. On the iPhone the minimum "Pull" time is 15 minutes, the maximum is just any time you open your Mail app. This means that new emails won't ever be delivered to your phone until you open the Mail app - I cannot imagine why someone would do this.
2. This uses more network traffic because whether or not you have a new email it has to go and check the server for emails.
3. This decreases battery life because it checks the server every X minutes 24/7.
• Show - This determines how many emails will be shown in a synced folder (i.e. Inbox). I show 200 emails (default) since I never get anywhere near that number in my Inbox anyway. If you've got a full inbox and see performance issues, consider lowering this. I have no idea if you'd ever see performance issues though. The max is 1,000. You can show more by tapping "Show More..." if you've hit this limit but the folder contains more items.
• Show To/CC Label - This will show or hide the To/CC icon that will appear on a message in a folder to indicate whether you are on the To or the CC of an email. It requires very little real estate on the screen and can be very handy if you're often on larger email threads (mostly a work account thing for me, but this setting applies to all email accounts on the phone).
• Ask Before Deleting - When you tap the trash icon, this will confirm by asking you if you're sure you want to delete the message. As we discussed, for an Exchange Gmail account (what we just setup) this actually means archive and not delete. I'm anal about handling and filing away email. Since deleting is just archiving, so this is total overkill, but I do it anyway.
• Load Remote Images - This option enables/disables emails downloading remote images from the server. Many coupon emails or emails from websites use HTML which is a simplified website right there in your email. Rather than attaching all those images, they host them on a remote server so that the email they send you is much smaller. Personally, I want my email to look as good and natural as possible. I am not worried about data quotas or anything, so I have this on. If you're traveling abroad or near your data quota for the month consider disabling it.
• Organize By Thread - This option allows your phone to group emails from a conversation together. It greatly cleans up your folders and is much more visually appealing. Enable this. Right now, I'll wait. You may as well use carrier pigeons if you disable this option. Ok, maybe I'm exaggerating to entertain myself; please let me know if and why you don't use this in the comments.

• Always BCC Myself - If enabled, this will BCC you on every email you send from your device. I do this for work where we don't use gmail and sent messages don't appear in line with other messages like Gmail shows. Most people shouldn't do this.
• Increase Quote Level - This will increase the quote level a forwarded email; you've seen all the bars on the left side of an email that's been forwarded 25 times? Yeah, that. If you forward a lot of emails, don't do this because it is really annoying to the rest of us. 'On' is default and I've just never changed it. I'm not a frequent forwarder.
• Signature - This is your email signature that will appear at the bottom of emails you compose. New in iOS 6 you can have multiple signatures, unique to an email account! Note that by default this will have "-Sent from my iPhone" (or iPad or iPod Touch) when you first get the device. This being the default signature is why you see it so often, it isn't people being smug, they just haven't changed it.
• Default Account - Select what default account you want for sending a new email. When you have work & personal email, be careful here. When replying to an email, it'll reply with whatever the original was sent to, so this only applies to new emails.

Contacts

• Sort Order - This is the order that the contacts are sorted in your phone, not the way the names are viewed/displayed. "Last, First" makes the most sense to me, but I have every contact in there with a full name. If you have contacts like "Mom" and "Dad" (yes, my parents and my wife are all in there with their full names, yes I have taken "heat" for that) you might want to change this.
• Display Order - This is the way contacts are displayed on your phone. "First,Last" is more natural, but may be counterintuitive since you may not sort that way.
• My Info - I highly recommend everyone has themselves in their contact book with every piece of information you're willing to share, there are some good reasons.
• Siri - Siri uses this to route you home or to work and to remember connections like who your spouse/parents/siblings is/are.
• Bump/Contact Sharing - When you meet someone new you can use Bump or a similar "business card" sharing app to send someone your info. When you control the info in the business card it is up to you to have your contact represented professionally in their phone. Maybe it is just me, but I have a great appreciation for a well organized, nicely filled out contact card with a high resolution contact photo in my phone.
• Default Account - This is the account where any new contact you create will go unless you specify otherwise. Like I said, I keep all my personal contacts in Gmail, so naturally that's my default.
• There has been confusion on how to create a contact in a certain group. To do this you need to go into your Address Book, then into the group you want to add a contact in, then press the + to add them. If you create them in the "All Contacts" area of the Address Book, they will be added to your default account.
• Import SIM Contacts - Essentially this will import contacts from your SIM card to your local contacts on your iPhone (only AT&T and T-Mobile have those in the US for 3G and earlier networks, LTE uses a SIM card now too). Older phones used to store contacts here so they could be brought with you as you went to a new phone. When you import them here, they'll be added to your iPhone local contacts, not to your default account - I am pretty sure (not 100%). I haven't had to deal with this, if you need help here please ask in the comments and I can do some poking around to see how to solve problems that you might have with it.

Calendars

• New Invitation Alerts - PAY ATTENTION TO THIS ONE! This is a hidden gem if you ask me. By default this is on, I dislike that. What this does is play the alert tone that otherwise plays to alert you of a calendar event that's about to start, but it plays when a person sends you an invite regardless of when the event is for. I don't want an alert at midnight when someone sends me a lunch invitation for a month from now. I don't like this being enabled by default, particularly because I work with folks overseas who send invites in the middle of my night quite frequently.
• Time Zone Support - This one is tricky, in general it is best to have it turned on and to be aware of how it works, but use this information to determine what is best for you.
• This will make sure calendar invitations are handled properly when you send them to or get them from a time zone other than your own. If you do this often, I suggest enabling it.
• If this is enabled, and if you're planning an event in a different time zone and have an event at 2PM in that time zone then you will need to add it to your calendar for whatever time that is in the time zone you're currently in. This can be counterintuitive at first, but ultimately makes sense. If this is something you do often and your calendar is primarily just for your events (not for meetings with others), then you might want to consider disabling this. Unfortunately you cannot have 1 setting for 1 account (i.e. Work) and a different setting for another account (i.e. Personal).
• Sync - This option selects how long into the past to sync changes to an event. It doesn't clear events from your calendar that are older than this amount of time, but if you change something older than this, the change will not be synced to the server (Google Calendar). Similarly if you change an event on the Google Calendar website it won't sync the change to your phone. I've found 1 month back is more than sufficient, I see no reason to change the default here.
• Default Calendar - Make sure you've got this set how you want it if you have work and personal stuff on here. You don't want to send your boss a meeting invite from your Gmail account! Every time you create an event you can choose which calendar to put it on, this option just determine what the default is. I suggest making it whichever calendar you schedule more appointments on from your phone.
• Siri - As far as I have noticed Siri will only schedule on your default calendar, but  I haven't tried making Siri schedule work meetings for me so that might not be accurate.
• Shared Calendar Alerts - If enabled, this will alert you when there is a change to a calendar event on a shared calendar. If you share a calendar with a spouse this could be handy to know if something like your evening plans are how an hour earlier and you need to leave work early. Similar to New Invitation Alerts though, this could be annoying if you share a calendar with someone who is in a different time zone or is making changes while you sleep (and you don't use the new iOS 6 feature Do Not Disturb, which I suggest you do).

Alright, that epic novel sums up just about every detail of making my favorite email service (Gmail) play nicely with one of the world's most popular brands of phones (iPhones, and any iOS device really). Thank you to Heather (my sister) for the suggested topic of this post. I wish I would have kept track of the frequency of her tech help request iMessages before this was posted so that I can compare to them afterward :).

I know this is a long post, but there are a lot of people out there who use Gmail on an iPhone and are putting up with nuances that they don't realize they have full control over. Please share this with those people, it really is true that you can find harmony with both Google and Apple products together!